While processed food manufacturers may claim that margarine and other butter “alternatives” are healthy options for your diet, Donna Gates debunks these myths in “The 20 Health Benefits of Real Butter.” Gates’ article reveals the truth behind the margarine versus butter debate: butter is better.

For anyone familiar with the development of processed foods, you know that the additives and methods used in creating much of the food in grocery stores are toxic for our bodies. In the butter debate, though, so many of us believe that processed margarines are better for our diets because they are lower in fat and cholesterol. However, fat and cholesterol are not evil. In fact, they are vital to our existence. We just need to consume them in moderation. Eating margarine eliminates some of the healthy fats we need in our diets and replaces them with hydrogenated and processed polyunsaturated oils that create serious health risks.

From protecting against tooth decay to providing Vitamins E and K, Gates’ list of the 20 benefits of butter reveals that butter, in its natural state, is naturally good for us. While some cholesterol-free and fat-free food manufacturers want us to believe that eliminating fats and cholesterols from diets is good, the cholesterol in butter is vital to children’s brains and nervous system development.

It’s no secret that America has a serious obesity problem, and much of this issue can be attributed to our reliance on processed foods – even the foods that are fat-free. When the body is clouded with unnatural food additives and chemicals, the digestive system cannot function properly. Gates suggests that replacing that jar of margarine in the refrigerator with homemade raw and organic butter provides relief from some of these toxins.

Read all of Gates’ article HERE, and discover one of the keys to detoxifying your body on the way to better living.

About Company

A Santa Monica, California Hydrotherapy Colonics company, TransformYourHealth.net specializes in internal body cleansing, nutrition education and wellness promotion. As a Santa Monica Hydrotherapy Colonics specialist and Palos Verdes Hydrotherapy Colonics specialist, many California residents rely on TransformYourHealth.net for hydrotherapy products, resources and information. For more information and to browse a selection of high-quality natural products, please visit TransformYourHealth.net.

Think about your daily intake: a quick fast food breakfast in the morning, breathing in secondhand smoke on an afternoon walk and taking medicine for a headache when you return home in the evening. Throughout each day, we consume loads of preservatives and pollutants that our bodies are not meant to digest. While exercise and rest can help rid our bodies of some of these unnatural products, many toxins remain in our systems.

With these toxins clogging your digestive tract, you can experience a variety of uncomfortable symptoms. From constipation to extreme fatigue and depression, an unclean colon can lead to plenty of other personal health problems that make day-to-day living more challenging.

Juice cleansing is a natural way to help our bodies to feel fresher, brighter and better. Because of so many pollutants in your digestive tract, your colon may have trouble releasing all of the harmful material in your body’s system. While some forms of detoxification can be somewhat stressful and challenging on the body, juice cleansing is a painless way to ensure that your body is working well. When paired with a diet change, juice cleansing can also help spur a healthy weight loss.

Juice cleansing diets operate on different schedules. Shorter cleansings require three days of abstaining from food while drinking only juice, and more rigorous cleansings can last an entire month. The mixture helps flush the toxins from your system and breaks down any colon buildup.

While some people worry that juice cleansings can deprive your body of nutrients from food, fresh squeezed fruit and vegetable juices provide plenty of vitamins and minerals that keep your immune system strong. You can find recipes for juice cleansing on websites for natural healing practices. All of these recipes will involve fruits, vegetables and water, which help maintain an appropriate level of energy while keeping you hydrated.

After a proper juice cleansing, you can expect to feel a significant energy boost while feeling confident that your digestive system will work more efficiently. Depending on your workplace, stress level and a number of other factors, you may want to consider juice cleansings multiple times each year.

About Company

A Santa Monica, California Hydrotherapy Colonics company, TransformYourHealth.net specializes in internal body cleansing, nutrition education and wellness promotion. As a Santa Monica Hydrotherapy Colonics specialist and Palos Verdes Hydrotherapy Colonics specialist, many California residents rely on TransformYourHealth.net for hydrotherapy products, resources and information. For more information and to browse a selection of high-quality natural products, please visit TransformYourHealth.net.

Many of us see the organic aisle at our local grocery stores and wonder what exactly the “organic” tag means. Is it just a word that means paying a bit more in the checkout lane? Or does organic food actually justify a small price increase? And what does organic food taste like? The truth is that organic food is incredibly beneficial for our digestive systems and tastes just as good, if not better, than other foods that we buy and eat on a regular basis.

For so many grocery store shoppers, the produce aisle is the place for finding those extra sources of vitamins and minerals that we believe are the key to leading healthy lifestyles. While fruits and vegetables are essential to a well-balanced diet, many bananas, apples and other so-called “healthy” foods can be loaded with pesticides and toxins that preserve their longevity on the shelf.

Some farmers use pesticides to prevent insects from destroying crops and large produce companies want to use preservatives that help fruits and vegetables look appealing for a longer period of time. While these pesticides and preservatives can be helpful for selling fruits and vegetables, they can carry toxins that are damaging to our health. Our bodies are not meant to eat spray pesticides and additional chemicals that are standard on so many farms.

Eating organic means avoiding these pesticides and preservatives that can be so harmful. Farmers grow organic foods without the assistance of pesticides or drugs, keeping these types of food in their most natural state. Our bodies digest organic foods with ease because they lack the chemicals of so many cans, bags and containers of other foods that line the grocery store.

Organic goes much further than the produce aisle, too. Eating organic meat can be very beneficial for our digestive systems, too. Organic meat comes from animals that are typically raised on healthy diets without the aid of growth hormones or steroids.

On your next grocery store trip, be sure to look for those “organic” and “all-natural” tags. They might be the most important step toward your healthy diet.

About Company

A Santa Monica, California Hydrotherapy Colonics company, TransformYourHealth.net specializes in internal body cleansing, nutrition education and wellness promotion. As a Santa Monica Hydrotherapy Colonics specialist and Palos Verdes Hydrotherapy Colonics specialist, many California residents rely on TransformYourHealth.net for hydrotherapy products, resources and information. For more information and to browse a selection of high-quality natural products, please visit TransformYourHealth.net.

A great clip explaining the link between exercise and mental health.

Video exploring mental health and treatments to depression by exercise.

Interesting article on the popular health craze: eating only raw foods. While popular consensus is that raw food diets can aid detoxification, there is no comprehensive scientific evidence to support the adoption of a fullscale, permanent switch to raw food…The article below can be found by following the link provided and makes for some interesting reading!!!! The raw food diet contains fewer trans fats and saturated fat than the typical Western diet. It is also low in sodium and high in potassium, magnesium, folate, fiber and health-promoting plant chemicals called phytochemicals. These properties are associated with a reduced risk of diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. For example, a study published in the Journal of Nutrition found that consumption of a raw food diet lowered plasma total cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations. http://altmedicine.about.com/od/popularhealthdiets/a/Raw_Food.htm

Taken from the Body Ecology site (Donna Gates)

Please consider these three questions carefully:

1. Do you often feel you lack the energy you should have?

2. Do you experience gas, bloating and/or feeling tired after eating?

3. Do you have trouble digesting some vegetables, dairy or meats?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you may very likely be lacking in the enzymes needed for proper digestion. Enzyme deficiency is very common but also more dangerous than most people realize, because improper digestion can lower your immunity ad harm your health.

The Body Ecology system of health and healing focuses on improving digestion; one of our most important recommendations to do so is to take digestive enzymes.

Why You Need Enzymes

Stress, antibiotics and other drugs, or a diet high in processed foods can diminish the enzymes in your stomach necessary for proper digestion. Even improper food combining – for example, eating starches and proteins in the same meal — can dampen your natural “digestive fire.”

Over time, improper digestion harms your inner ecosystem and your immunity. A healthy inner ecosystem is made up of the friendly microflora (good bacteria) that reside in our intestines and keep us healthy and strong.

When you eat, you could be breaking food down, but not digesting it. Improper digestion can lead to food remaining in the digestive tract longer than it should. When this happens, it starts to ferment in your body, producing sugars that feed yeast and other pathogens. This causes further damage to your digestion and lowers your immunity, along with keeping your body from absorbing all the nutrients in your food.

The origins of butter go back thousands of years to when our ancestors first started domesticating animals. In fact, the first written reference to butter was found on a 4500- year old limestone tablet illustrating how butter was made.¹

In India, ghee (clarified butter) has been used as a staple food, and as a symbol of purity, worthy of offering to the gods in religious ceremonies for more than 3000 years.²

The Bible has references to butter as the product of milk from the cow, and of Abraham setting butter and milk from a calf before three angels who appeared to him on the plains of Mamre.³

For millennia, people around the globe have prized butter for its health benefits.

So how did butter become a villain in the quest for good health?

At the turn of our century, heart disease in America was rare. By 1960, it was our number one killer. Yet during the same time period, butter consumption had decreased – from eighteen pounds per person per year, to four.⁴

A researcher named Ancel Keys was the first to propose that saturated fat and cholesterol in the diet were to blame for coronary heart disease (CAD).

Numerous subsequent studies costing hundreds of millions of dollars, have failed to conclusively back up this claim.⁵

Yet the notion that a healthy diet is one with minimal fat, particularly saturated fat, has persisted. While Americans drastically reduced their intake of natural animal fats like butter and meat, the processed food industry, particularly the low-fat food industry, proliferated.

When the baby boomers were children, concerned mothers began to replace butter with margarine. The margarine manufacturers told them it was the healthier alternative and mothers believed them. In those days no one asked, “where is the science to prove it? I want to know before I give this man-made, plastized stuff to my children. After all we humans have been eating butter for thousands of years?”.

As a result, since the early 1970′s, Americans’ average saturated fat intake has dropped considerably, while rates of obesity, diabetes, and consequently, heart disease, have surged.

Reducing healthy sources of dietary fat has contributed to a serious decline in our well-being, and those of us that speak out against the anti-fat establishment are still largely ignored .

Is Margarine Better than Butter?

No! This is a tragic myth. Butter is a completely natural food essential to your health – especially when you eat organic. Also, please make the extra effort to obtain high-quality organic, raw butter.

Margarines, on the other hand, are a processed food, created chemically from refined polyunsaturated oils. The process used to make these normally liquid oils into spread-able form is called hydrogenation.

Margarine and similar hydrogenated or processed polyunsaturated oils are potentially more detrimental to your health than any saturated fat.⁷ For more information on why you should avoid all processed oils read Why the Processing of Consumable Oils Has Devastated America’s Health.

Include Real Butter as part of Your Body Ecology Lifestyle

As many of you already know, I am a strong proponent of including a variety of healthy oils and fats into your diet. Together they work as a team to supply your body with essential fatty acids for longevity, hormone balance, heart health, sharp vision, glowing moist skin and energy. The wonderful variety of oils and fats certainly includes organic, preferably raw butter. Cultured raw butter is even better.

And why would I be so insistent that you eat butter? Take a look at the long list of the benefits you receive when you include it in your diet:⁸

1. Butter is rich in the most easily absorbable form of Vitamin A necessary for thyroid and adrenal health.
2. Contains lauric acid, important in treating fungal infections and candida.
3. Contains lecithin, essential for cholesterol metabolism.
4. Contains anti-oxidants that protect against free radical damage.
5. Has anti-oxidants that protect against weakening arteries.
6. Is a great source of Vitamins E and K.
7. Is a very rich source of the vital mineral selenium.
8. Saturated fats in butter have strong anti-tumor and anti-cancer properties.
9. Butter contains conjugated linoleic acid, which is a potent anti-cancer agent, muscle builder, and immunity booster
10. Vitamin D found in butter is essential to absorption of calcium.
11. Protects against tooth decay.
12. Is your only source of an anti-stiffness factor, which protects against calcification of the joints.
13. Anti-stiffness factor in butter also prevents hardening of the arteries, cataracts, and calcification of the pineal gland.
14. Is a source of Activator X, which helps your body absorb minerals.
15. Is a source of iodine in highly absorbable form.
16. May promote fertility in women.⁹
17. Is a source of quick energy, and is not stored in our bodies adipose tissue.
18. Cholesterol found in butterfat is essential to children’s brain and nervous system development.
19. Contains Arachidonic Acid (AA) which plays a role in brain function and is a vital component of cell membranes.
20. Protects against gastrointestinal infections in the very young or the elderly.

Raw, Organic Butter is the Best

Believe me this is only a partial list. If a woman is pregnant, hopes to become pregnant or is nursing her baby, I think it should even become a law for her to eat butter for her baby’s developing brain, bones and teeth.

The best butter you can eat is raw, organic butter because pasteurization destroys nutrients. Unfortunately, the sale of raw butter is prohibited in most of our 50 states.

You can, however, make your own healthy butter, and it is easier than you think. Look into our Body Ecology Culture Starter, which you simply add to organic cream. After letting this mixture sit at room temperature for 24 hours, chill it, beat it with a whisk, and voila! You’ll have healthy, probiotic butter that is delicious!

Cultured butter is full of health sustaining good bacteria like lactobacillus planterum, and lactococcus lactis. These microflora are essential for a healthy inner ecosystem.

Sources of Healthy Butter

If you don’t want to culture your own butter, I recommend butter from grass-fed animals only. A good source is U.S. Wellness Meats.

I also recommend Activator X and Vitamin rich butter oil, made by Green Pastures.

Heart Healthy-the Body Ecology Way

Completely eliminating butter and other healthy animal source fats is NOT the Body Ecology way. It is not how our ancestors thrived, and not what nature intended.

How much should you eat each day? Like sea salt, your own body will tell you how much to eat. If you crave it, eat it, your body needs it. If the quality is excellent you can feel confident it will be good for you and you’ll soon see the benefits yourself. If you are following the Body Ecology Food Combining Principle and eating as we recommend (adding at least one source of fermented food or drink to your diet) you will see your body reach its idea weight. The raw butter will help you develop beautiful muscles.

The Body Ecology program is gaining recognition for being a premier way of healing candida and other immune dysfunctions. And what’s more, it’s a heart-healthy, super-slimming, anti-aging way of life, which is crucial to your health as a whole.

By Donna Gates

URL: http://bodyecology.com/07/07/05/benefits_of_real_butter.php