by Marc R. Rose
Resistance exercise involves working various muscles against resistance. You can use dumbbells, weight machines, rubber tubing, cans of food, other household items, or your own body weight to provide resistance. Push-ups, biceps curls, leg lifts, yoga exercises, and squatting are examples of resistance exercises.
As we age, our body composition changes. That means that we lose muscle and gain fat with passing years. The good news is that you can keep much of the muscle you had in your youth with resistance training. If you challenge your muscles to the point of fatigue two or three times a week, using dumbbells, rubber tubing, or the machines at the gym, you can convince your body that it needs to keep muscle that might otherwise break down from disuse. Those who maintain muscle strength as they age have fewer falls, thanks to greater strength and better balance.
Fat can be reduced by increasing muscle mass because muscle is a calorie-burner that consumes calories from food that might otherwise go directly to your fat cells. Even while you’re at rest that extra muscle you’ve built with resistance training is burning up calories just to maintain itself. Resistance training also helps to strengthen connective tissues like tendons and ligaments, making them less vulnerable to injury.
Stretching, also known as flexibility training, involves gentle holding and pushing into poses designed to lengthen muscle and connective tissue. It’s best to do these exercises when your body is warmed up, so that your muscles are more pliable.
Flexibility is an important part of fitness. If you don’t work to keep your joints supple, imbalances can occur in your body as a result of muscle and connective-tissue tightness. For example, chronic low back pain often occurs because of tightness in the hamstrings (the big muscles that run down the back of your thigh) that tips your pelvis under, changing the natural curved position of your lower spine. Your back wasn’t meant to be pulled this way.
Yoga, an ancient Asian form of exercise, incorporates flexibility training with breathing, meditation, and relaxation exercises. Taking time each day to meditate by focusing on your breathing, perhaps sitting against a wall or lying on your back, will do wonders for your well-being. Qi gong and Tai Chi are Asian movement systems that stretch the body in a series of gentle, graceful movements.
The Benefits of Exercise
With regular exercise your body gains many benefits:
Your heart gets stronger and can pump more blood with each beat. As a result, your heart has less work to do to nourish your body adequately. Your resting heart rate goes down after a month or so of regular exercise.
Circulation is improved, and that means better blood flow to your eyes.
Daily tasks that once tired you out aren’t as difficult anymore. You have a lot more energy and strength.
The quality of your sleep will improve dramatically as soon as you start to exercise regularly.
Weight-bearing aerobic exercise like walking, stair-climbing, or lifting weights keeps bones strong and resistant to osteoporosis.
Your immune system is fortified and can better fight infection when you stick with a workout program.
Breathing becomes deeper and more efficient.
Good (HDL) cholesterol gets a boost and blood triglycerides (fats) are reduced.
High blood pressure can be controlled with regular exercise.
Diabetics can reduce the amount of insulin they have to use.
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IN SHORT…
1. In order to gain substantial health benefits, add up thirty minutes of physical activity on most days of the week. Anything that gets you up and moving counts!
2. The health of your eyes is dependent on good circulation. The benefits of being more active include improved circulation throughout the body, better sleep, heightened mood, stronger immunity to infection, and more endurance.
3. High blood pressure, diabetes, and breathing problems all can be significantly improved with regular exercise.
4. Aerobic exercise, resistance training, flexibility, and stress reduction all should be addressed in an optimal exercise program.
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13
How to Avoid Vision-Destroying Toxins and Cleanse Your Body of Them
Living in civilization certainly has its advantages. We live in great comfort, in buildings that can be carefully climate-controlled, with plush carpeting, stain-resistant furniture, and attractive paneling. Eliminating bothersome pests is as easy as a visit from the exterminator. We can travel over long distances easily, in planes and cars as comfortable as our homes. We can go to the grocery store and buy processed foods that require minimal preparation, saving us significant time and energy. There’s no denying it, we’ve got it pretty good.
Our standard of living comes with a price, however. Our comfortable homes are likely also hazardous to our health because of toxic chemicals in carpets, furniture, and paneling. Air conditioning and heating ducts grow filthy and recirculate debris, molds, and fungus into your home. Those pesticides and herbicides designed to kill critters in your home and yard are toxic to you as well. Cars, planes, and factories pollute the air we breathe. Meats and cheeses cooked at very high temperatures produce carcinogens. Food additives and artificial sweeteners may make food preparation easier, but aren’t as harmless as we’ve been led to believe.
There is growing concern about the effects of environmental toxins on our health. The established mainstream medical community is encountering more and more patients who are most definitely sick, but for whom they can’t come up with a diagnosis. These unfortunate people get sent home with a list of prescription drugs to treat their headaches, fatigue, muscle aches, depression, irritable bowel, or rashes. Symptoms might be alleviated temporarily but return as soon as medication is stopped. Side effects from the medications complicate things further.
Practitioners of naturopathic medicine have long maintained that toxins in the body can cause illness. The root, causes of degenerative diseases (such as rheumatoid arthritis) and cancers have been traced to the accumulation of these toxins beyond the body’s capacity for neutralizing them. We predict that as diagnoses of environmental illness, multiple chemical sensitivity, and multiple allergy become more common in the offices of medical doctors, a merging of the age-old art of cleansing the body of toxins with more mainstream treatments may be the only way for doctors trained in traditional medicine to help these patients. Environmental health is too crucial an issue for mainstream physicians to continue to ignore. Physicians and patients both will benefit as medical doctors learn more about the use of nutrition and herbal remedies for bolstering the body’s own detoxification systems.
Obviously it isn’t practical for you to try to avoid all potential toxins. We don’t want you to live in a hermetically sealed bubble. What you can do is maximize your body’s formidable defense systems and avoid major toxin loads whenever possible. Occasional cleansing of the body by fasting, sweating in a sauna, and herbal and nutritional therapies will benefit you a great deal by purging and neutralizing stored-up toxins.
Chelation therapy, which involves the infusion of a man-made protein known as ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) into your bloodstream in a doctor’s office, is a reliable way to clear your body of toxic heavy metals. It has been used successfully in treatment of artery disease and health problems caused by heavy metal toxicity. We know doctors who prescribe it to their patients with macular degeneration, and they report that it helps slow the progress of the disease and in some cases even improves vision.
The following are the major categories of toxic substances to be aware of and avoid whenever possible.
Chemical Toxins
Chemical toxins include pesticides, herbicides, formaldehyde (in insulation, plywood, and the polyurethane foam in pillows, cushions, and mattresses, and under rugs), oil vapors, household chemicals such as those used in cleaning supplies, tobacco smoke, ozone from electrical appliances, chlorinated/fluoridated water, polyesters, polyethylene plastics, food additives (preservatives, buffe
rs, stabilizers, colorings, and flavorings), and fillers used in the making of medicines. Injury by these man-made chemicals happens at the cellular level, as cells’ metabolic machinery is “gunked up” by the foreign substances. Chemical damage can lead to an increased free-radical load, which also causes damage to cells.
Keep Your Brain Free of Excitotoxins
What do MSG, short for monosodium glutamate, and aspartame, also known by its trade names NutraSweet and Equal, have in common? Both are food additives used to make processed foods more palatable to the taste buds of consumers. Both contain excitotoxins—natural amino acids that stimulate brain cells. In the body, levels of aspartic acid (one of the breakdown components of aspartame) and glutamine (a main ingredient of monosodium glutamate) are tightly regulated. A little bit of coffee will wake you up gently, but an entire pot will give you a serious case of the jitters. In the same way, the precise quantity and balance of excitotoxins normally found in the brain maintains brain function, while too much literally excites cells to death.
Soft drinks are the biggest source of aspartame consumption. Its most common side effects include headaches (by far the most common complaint), memory loss, foggy thinking, irritability, itching, ringing ears, and (believe it or not) weight gain. Aspartame also contains methanol, or wood alcohol. Methanol is a known retinal and optic nerve toxin. Vision problems and dry eyes are among the complaints the FDA often hears about aspartame. No less than 78 percent of the complaints to the Food and Drug Administration in 1996 were regarding this purportedly “harmless” alternative to sugar!
Monosodium glutamate (MSG), widely used to enhance flavor in processed foods such as soups, chips, cereals, baked goods, and frozen foods contains the excitotoxin glutamate. It has been estimated that 30 percent of the population is allergic to MSG. Scientists are looking at possible connections between MSG and migraine headaches, asthma attacks, and rheumatoid arthritis. MSG is found in countless processed foods under a wide variety of names (see Chapter 9). Please do your best to avoid MSG and aspartame.
Awash in a Sea of Hormones
Many petrochemicals (made from petroleum products) act as xenobiotics, or substances that actually mimic hormones in the body and interfere with the actions of our own hormones. Imagine standing at a locked door with a set of keys, all of which fit into the lock but only one of which opens the door. Think of the door as an important reaction in your body, and the body’s natural hormone as the key that will open it. Xenobiotics are like the keys that simply take up the lock without opening it. That means you can’t get into the room to do whatever you came there to do, and that’s the problem with xenobiotic chemicals: The reaction the natural hormone is designed to complete doesn’t happen if a fake version has taken its place. Some others, such as xenoestrogens, are many times more potent than the natural versions—in other words, they’re keys of the James Bond ilk that will blow the door out of its hinges when inserted into the keyhole.
The vast majority of xenobiotics come from pesticides and plastics. Some of the most potent are byproducts of manufacturing known as PCBs and dioxins. These are already widespread throughout the food chain and present in our fat cells. While they may not have immediate or dramatically negative effects on an adult, their effects on the unborn fetus, infants, and young children can be devastating.
Keeping Free Radicals in Line
Free radicals (also known as pro-oxidants) are produced constantly in your body as it goes about the business of maintaining itself. As long as your antioxidant defenses are up to the task, free radicals are squelched before they can do you harm. If too heavy a load of chemical toxins exists, free-radical production increases dramatically. These reactive molecules then can target the fats in your blood or cell structures and transform them into lipid peroxides, which can contribute to heart disease and other chronic diseases. Heavy metals (discussed in the next section) are especially problematic creators of free radicals. Free radicals also can alter proteins and DNA, setting the stage for cancer and possibly autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and irritable bowel syndrome.
Be Wary of Heavy Metals
Heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, nickel, and aluminum are much more plentiful in our environment than ever before. Daily exposure to trace amounts of these metals can add up to dangerous accumulation in the body. Did you know about these sources of heavy metals you encounter every day?
Lead: Water (leaches from lead pipes), some plastics, electric cable insulation, gasoline additives, insecticides, pigments in the paint that flakes off your walls and becomes dust that you breathe, newsprint, pottery glaze, and porcelain enamel.
Aluminum: Antacids, douches, antidiarrheal agents, physician-prescribed anti-ulcer remedies, buffered aspirins, processed food products such as cheeses, baking powder, cake mixes, and cookware.
Mercury: Mainly from dental fillings. There’s considerable support for the hypothesis that mercury amalgam fillings can cause Alzheimer’s disease. Some types of fish, especially swordfish, are contaminated with mercury. Grains and produce are grown from seeds often treated with mercury fungicide. This extremely toxic metal is also found in some fabric softeners, adhesives, and floor waxes, and it is a common contaminant in industrial areas.
The point is, you don’t have to work in a factory to have unsafe levels of heavy-metal buildup in your body. It’s around you every day.
Heavy metals do damage by interfering with enzyme systems and shutting down important antioxidant defenses. Free radicals then can run rampant, doing damage from the cell level to the DNA level. As you have read earlier, in Chapter 2 and throughout this book, free radicals are one of the leading causes of damage to the eyes.
Who’s Protecting Us from Toxins?
If these toxic substances are so dangerous, you ask, why are some of them so readily available? Why are they in our homes, in our offices and cars, in the very medications our doctors prescribe to make us well? Why is everyone saying that they are safe to use? One-quarter million new substances are introduced into the environment each year. It’s impossible to verify the safety of each one with thorough scientific studies. Even if that were possible, the testing of a single chemical doesn’t give us any idea of how it will interact with the thousands of other chemicals it would encounter in your body.
The majority of the tens of thousands of chemicals used in products you use in your home have not been studied. Their effects on your health are unknown. It takes a couple of generations of exposure to a chemical before we have a good grasp of its potential for harm. Some chemicals seem to do no damage until the babies of exposed parents are deformed or have poor reproductive or mental function. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tests new products and awards them the GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) label if their testing does not reveal cancer-causing or other harmful properties, but the procedures for testing aren’t thorough enough to catch all potential problems.
Plenty of drugs have been tested and labeled as GRAS, only to be recalled later, after causing enormous harm, again often to the children of exposed parents. Food additives such as benzoic acid, sulfites, nitrites, BHA, and BHT are GRAS, but their safety is being called into question years after their use began.
Don’t underestimate, either, the influence of economics. Chemical companies are huge and wealthy. Their main interest is in making money, and they pay scientists handsomely if they can prove that their latest cleaning solvent is as harmless as a bouquet of carnations. Any attempt by the government to regulate more strictly the manufacture and sale of toxic chemicals is met by great resistance from those with a vested interest in the chemical industry. When it comes down to election time, it’s nice to have those big boys on your side.
It’s beyond the scope of this book to go into detail on this very important topic, but if you’re interested in learning more, we’ve supplied you with a list of recommended readings in Appendix II. These books will describe in detail how these harmful materials have acc
umulated in the environment over the past century, and how to steer clear of toxic chemicals and heavy metals wherever possible, especially in your home.
Our emphasis as doctors, given the incontrovertible fact that you have had lifelong exposure to toxins, is on how to periodically cleanse your body so that the effects will not have a chance to accumulate. Your eye health, as well as the health of your entire body, will benefit from periodic cleansing. As you learned in Chapters 9 and 10, you must have healthy circulatory and digestive systems in order to have healthy eyes. Damage from environmental toxins affects all of the organ systems of the body, but the blood vessels and intestines are particularly vulnerable, putting your eyes at risk.
EDTA Chelation Therapy
EDTA is a protein component that when infused into the bloodstream one or two times a week for a total of twenty to thirty treatments can bring about remarkable cures from angina or leg pains due to blocked blood vessels. Norman E. Clarke, Sr., M.D., who administered chelation treatments during World War II for the treatment of heavy metal toxicity, discovered that men who had angina before the treatments no longer suffered from it following them. Since that time, the therapy has shown much promise as a way to flush arteries clean of atherosclerotic blockages.
The medical establishment has not accepted chelation as a safe, reliable treatment of artery disease. Considerable conflict has gone on between the American Medical Association (AMA) and the small but strong group of physicians who support the use of chelation therapy.
The American College for Advancement in Medicine, or ACAM, is the professional organization pushing for more large-scale studies on chelation. No large-scale studies have been published about EDTA chelation’s effectiveness in any of the major medical journals read by physicians. Much of the evidence that it works has come from those who have administered it and seen its almost miraculous effectiveness.