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.

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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.

Dr. Mercola posted an an amazing and informative article on mammograms last month. I feel it’s important for all of you read it and know you that women have alternatives to the traditional mammograms.

Are Mammograms a Good Idea?

Aside from breast self-exams, the other mainstay in the U.S. medical system is the mammogram. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends women get a mammogram every year or two after age 40.

But I strongly disagree.

The benefits of mammograms are highly controversial, while the risks are well established. Back in 2001, around the time that U.S. health officials widened the use of mammograms to included women over 40 (previously it was only women over 50), a Danish study published in The Lancet revealed some startling data.

The study concluded that previous research showing a benefit was flawed and that widespread mammogram screening is unjustified.

Specifically, the Danish researchers argued that earlier studies in Europe and North America were improperly randomized and that they used a faulty definition of breast cancer survival.

Meanwhile, the technology carries a first-time false positive rate of up to 6 percent. False positives can lead to expensive repeat screenings and can sometimes result in unnecessary invasive procedures including biopsies and surgeries.

Just thinking you may have breast cancer, when you really do not, focuses your mind on fear and disease, and is actually enough to trigger an illness in your body. So a false positive on a mammogram, or an unnecessary biopsy, can really be damaging.

Not to mention that women have unnecessarily undergone mastectomies, radiation and chemotherapy after receiving false positives on a mammogram.

An Amazing Deception

That mammograms are still recommended at all speaks volumes about the state of modern medicine.

Decades ago in 1974, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) was warned by professor Malcolm C. Pike at the University of Southern California School of Medicine that a number of specialists had concluded “giving a women under age 50 a mammogram on a routine basis is close to unethical.”

Why?

Well for starters mammograms expose your body to radiation that can be 1,000 times greater than that from a chest x-ray, which poses risks of cancer. Mammography also compresses your breasts tightly, and often painfully, which could lead to a lethal spread of cancerous cells, should they exist.

“The premenopausal breast is highly sensitive to radiation, each 1 rad exposure increasing breast cancer risk by about 1 percent, with a cumulative 10 percent increased risk for each breast over a decade’s screening,” points out Dr. Samuel Epstein, one of the top cancer experts.

Dr. Epstein, M.D., professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, and chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition, has been speaking out about the risks of mammography since at least 1992. As for how these misguided mammography guidelines came about, Epstein says:

Not surprisingly, as often happens when anyone dares speak out against those in power, both the American Cancer Society and NCI called Dr. Epstein’s findings “unethical and invalid.”

But this didn’t stop others from speaking out as well.

• In July 1995, The Lancet again wrote about mammograms, saying “The benefit is marginal, the harm caused is substantial, and the costs incurred are enormous …”

• Dr. Charles B. Simone, a former clinical associate in immunology and pharmacology at the National Cancer Institute, said, “Mammograms increase the risk for developing breast cancer and raise the risk of spreading or metastasizing an existing growth.”

• “The high sensitivity of the breast, especially in young women, to radiation-induced cancer was known by 1970. Nevertheless, the establishment then screened some 300,000 women with Xray dosages so high as to increase breast cancer risk by up to 20 percent in women aged 40 to 50 who were mammogramed annually,” wrote Dr. Epstein.

Safe Screening Methods do Exist: The Benefits of Thermography

But you’re not likely to hear about them from your general practitioner.

“ … The establishment ignores safe and effective alternatives to mammography, particularly trans illumination with infrared scanning,” Dr. Epstein points out.

Most physicians continue to recommend mammograms for fear of being sued by a woman who develops breast cancer after which he did not advise her to get one. But I encourage you to think for yourself and consider safer, more effective alternatives to mammograms.

The option for breast screening that I most highly recommend is called thermography.

Thermographic breast screening is brilliantly simple. It measures the radiation of infrared heat from your body and translates this information into anatomical images. Your normal blood circulation is under the control of your autonomic nervous system, which governs your body functions.

Thermography uses no mechanical pressure or ionizing radiation, and can detect signs of breast cancer years earlier than either mammography or a physical exam.

Mammography cannot detect a tumor until after it has been growing for years and reaches a certain size. Thermography is able to detect the possibility of breast cancer much earlier, because it can image the early stages of angiogenesis (the formation of a direct supply of blood to cancer cells, which is a necessary step before they can grow into tumors of size).

Is there a right way to check your breasts for early signs of cancer? Many women remain confused as experts now say there is no evidence that rigorous monthly “self-examination” — widely recommended in the United States — reduces breast cancer deaths. Plus, it can lead to unnecessary biopsies.

Two large studies looking at a total of more than 388,000 women found that death rates from breast cancer were the same among women who rigorously self-examined as those who did not, while there were almost twice the number of biopsy operations in the self-examination group.

According to some experts, the best way for a woman to check her breasts is not to follow a strict examination routine, but to get to know what is normal, and feel them regularly for signs of any changes.