The One Unchanging Rule of Health

Anne Dunev, PhD (Los Angeles Certified Nutritionist and Holistic Doctor)
If you are not in completely optimum health, no matter what the “illness,” symptom or condition is — from a zit on your face to stress or mood imbalances, weight issues or being tired, feeling your age, or even being diagnosed with a terminal illness —

1. IMPROVE YOUR NUTRITION

This is the one thing you can always do which is never ill-advised and will always improve the condition. No matter what the medical intervention is, improving your nutrition is the best “medicine” possible to give your body what it needs to repair.

Most people know more about the their favorite sports team or their favorite celebrity than they do about how their own body works.

The word “doctor” comes from the Latin “docere,” which means to teach. But how many doctors have the time or inclination to teach us what we need to know to keep our body healthy?

Did you know there are approximately 60 to 100 trillion cells in the adult body? Every hour approximately 1 billion cells must be replaced.

Start with increasing your protein. Your body needs at least half your body weight in grams of protein (weigh 140? That’s 70 grams of protein) and may need twice that amount under severe stress or need to heal. All muscle and tissue is formed out of amino acids from protein. Don’t forget seeds, nuts, legumes like lentils and dairy products, as well as meat, poultry and fish.

Eat only complex carbohydrates. This includes vegetables, from certain root veggies to leafy salads, some fruits, and whole grains (brown rice, barley and oats are better than wheat). You can’t afford the calories from “white” flour and sugar products, except as a rare treat. White flour and sugar require the body to use nutrients in order to metabolize them, so they rob the body, instead of enhancing it.

Eat at least two tablespoons of fat a day, but only unrefined oils. Unrefined, unprocessed vegetable oils “mobilize” saturated fats from meat and dairy products and help protect the arteries. Omega 3 oils and fish oils may be used, also. Try to use only organic milk and cheese products. Toxins store in fat tissue and have affinity for the fat in dairy foods.

Unrefined walnut, sesame, sunflower and avocado oils can add wonderful flavor to your salads and veggies.

Eat organic food whenever possible. Pesticides are neurotoxins. They attack the nervous system of insects. They also attack the nervous systems of humans. No one has calculated the amount of pesticides and petrochemicals that accumulate in the human body, but we do know that these chemicals are harmful. Your body deserves the very best — it is a reflection of you.

Starring: Your Body!!

Anne Dunev, PhD CN – Burbank CA Nutritionist and Holistic Doctor
Most people know more about the their favorite sports team or the latest celebrity news than they do about how their own body works.  The word “doctor” comes from the Latin “docere”, which means to teach. But how many doctors have the time or inclination to teach us what we need to know to keep our body healthy?

Here are some astounding facts about your body.

There are approximately 60 to 100 trillion cells in the adult body.

Every hour approximately 1 billion cells must be replaced.

Where do dead cells go? To the kidney, to be excreted.

A human body has 60,000 miles of blood vessels.

3 million red blood cells are made in the human body every second.

One million white blood cells are made every second.

The heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood through those vessels every day.

The average heart beats 100,000 times per day.

The average human heart will beat 3,000 million times in its lifetime and pump 48 million gallons of blood.

There are 100,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.

There is about 6 quarts of blood in the adult body. The blood circulates through the body three times every minute.

400 gallons of blood are pumped (and filtered) through the kidneys every day.

Each red blood cell lives an average of 120 days. The spleen is a recycling plant for red blood cells.

Laid out, all the blood vessels in the body would cover 60,000 miles.

The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet.

The human body is comprised of about 75% water.

The lining of the digestive system is shed every 3 days.

The average surface of the human intestine is 656 square feet.

The heart is the strongest muscle. There are 650 muscles in the body.

It takes 30 muscles to smile and 200 muscles to take one step.

The eye blinks over 10,000,000 a year.

Your skin weighs twice as much as your brain.

The skin is about 1/20 of an inch thick.

Every square inch of the skin contains about 19,000,000 skin cells.

There are 450 hairs in the average eyebrow.

Each human tooth has about 55 canals in it.

The surface of the human skin is 25 square feet.

There are 45 miles of nerves in the human skin.

You lose enough dead skin in your lifetime to fill 8 five pound flour bags. That is 600,000 cells of skin every hour!

The human nose can remember 50,000 different scents.

During a 24-hour period, the average human will breathe 23,040 times.

Adults lungs have over 600 million tiny air sacs called aveoli.

20% of the oxygen we breathe goes to the brain.

The air from a human sneeze can travel at speeds of 100 miles per hour or more.

In a lifetime, the average person produces about 25,000 quarts of saliva — enough to fill two swimming pools!

The small intestine is 22 feet long.

Stomach acid (hydrochloric acid) is strong enough to corrode steel, but the stomach protects itself by making a new mucosa lining every three to four days.

The liver performs 500 functions in the body, including detoxifying chemicals and otherr toxins that enter through the mouth or nose.

Pound for pound a human baby is as strong as an ox.

A pair of feet have 500,000 sweat glands and can produce more than a pint of sweat a day.

There are 54 bones in each hand and wrist.

The hardest substance in the human body is tooth enamel.

The femur (thigh bone) is the strongest and longest bone in the body, and the bone itself is harder than concrete, but the femur is hollow so that it is light enough to be lifted.

The average adolescent girl has approximately 34,000 egg follicles in the ovaries.

The smallest cell in the body is the sperm cell.

Each cell in the body has its own energy plant, called the mitochondria.

It is through the circulation of the blood that each cell receives nutrients to perform its job, and to remove waste products.

Now that you know more about the body, can you see why you need a lot of nutrition for fuel, maintenance, and repair? You are the mayor of an amazing biological city, and each cell looks to you to provide it with life-giving nutrients.

If your cells could vote, would you be re-elected?

Detox & Jump Start Weight Loss Program

Anne Dunev, PhD CN – Los Angeles Nutritionist and Naturopathic Practitioner
One of the biggest roadblocks to weight loss is toxic, congested organs like the liver and kidneys. Over-burdened by chemical additives, white flour and sugar, and environmental toxins, the organs cause the body to retain water and fat making you bloated, tired and immune to diets. Even when you cut back on food and calories, the body will just not let go.

A healthy body will lose weight. So the key to getting your body to let go is to give it all the nutrition it needs to shed those unwanted pounds.

Standard Process TM, the Gold Standard in Whole Food Nutritional supplementation, now offers a purification and weight management program. The program is a supervised month of herbs, whole food supplements, and fiber that will allow the body to let go of toxins, bloat and weight. Because of the infusion of super nutrition, and balanced blood sugar, this is a program you can stick to, and achieve lasting results.

Good-bye to cravings, water retention and toxic over-load and hello to a slimmer, healthier more energetic you. And when the inner organs are detoxed, the outer organ—the skin—is greatly benefited, also.

So, just in time for graduation, weddings and bikini weather, we offer the 1 month DETOX AND JUMP START WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM. First you will get a personalized health analysis to identify specific body problems. Then you will start the 4 week program. The price includes a complete kit of Detox and super nutrition products, plus weekly seminars with Dr. Anne Dunev to teach you more about the body, answer your questions and keep you motivated and winning. At the end of the 4 weeks you will get another personalized analysis to mark your progress and improvement. Only $250 for the full program.

You will be able to continue on a maintenance program for further weight loss and/or to address any specific health issues.

Do you want to spend the rest of the year dieting? Or do you want to kick start your body into a fat burning machine?

Spirit, Mind, Babes

Anne Dunev, PhD CN – Los Angeles Certified Nutritionist and Holistic Doctor
My own version of having it all means having: profound spirituality, intense wisdom—and still being a babe.

Or, as my friend Astrid says, “We’re still babin’”.

Am I influenced by a society that worships youth and rock hard bodies?  Undoubtedly.  Will I go to a some lengths to keep my looks?  Given.  Do I want a face that is stretched so ironed free of all my life experience? Naaaa. Then it wouldn’t quite match the dimples in my thighs!

When I was in my 30’s I visited Sardinia few times in the summer months. This is a paradise of emerald seas and craggy coasts, visited by some of the most beautiful yachts in the world. The Cala di Volpe Hotel sponsored summer concerts with top recording artists that were international gatherings of the wealthy and beautiful. Of all nationalities present, I was struck by how wonderful the older Italian women looked. None were x-ray skinny, like the New York ladies that lunch.  Many of them were probably grandmothers, but they looked beautiful and sexy. They were groomed, without looking like they were trying too hard, they had lush figures that spoke of a confident sensuality, and, most of all, they looked like they were having fun. I vowed then that I would emulate those Italian cousins of Sophia Loren.

As a natural health practitioner, I am very lucky to be in a field that recognizes the spirit, mind, body connection. To me, this is what makes us who we are as humans.  It also explains our great contradictions. But more on that subject in coming blogs.  All I want to do here is establish my particular slant on the journey of life and discovery of truth. Because that is really all this is about—finding out one’s own truth.

So, what works for me is the balance between function and beauty. It works in art, and it works in the healing arts, as well. I have tried to approach being a practitioner as an artist. Because that is what works for me.  Just as music and art are deeply grounded in math, health is dependent on harmony and vibration.

So, to be “babin’” at any age is not just clutching at youth, but an assertion and recognition that sensuality and passion are an innate part of a life; no matter the age.  In the U.S. the word sensuality too often means sexuality, as we are somewhat infantile in our pursuits, thanks in no small part to the overkill of the Madison Avenue maxim that sex sells.  Europeans have a better understanding that sensuality is not limited to the sex organs, but involves all the organs of perception.

So, to me, health food is not just brown rice and steamed vegetables.  Fine French cuisine, which involves whole foods, often sourced freshly from farm and woods, is health food. Hence the low incidence of heart disease among the French, despite all real butter that is the basis of the cuisine.  Isn’t it odd that the more Americans become obsessed with fat, the fatter they become?  Here is a classic example of the wrong-headedness of worshipping quantity in the U.S., over quality.

The French may love their food. But the Italians love each other.  So dining becomes a family affair, prepared and enjoyed as an accompaniment to sharing and conversation.

Americans are accompanied by their televisions, car radios and I-Pods, while they eat food flavored with synthetic chemicals, slammed into their brains by a giant serving of MSG to ensure the maximum kick to the neurons.  What a ride. Straight into the nursing home where they can be served bland food consisting mainly of starch and be drugged into zombie Ville so they are no trouble to the staff while they wait for the Winged Charriot.

This is the “New” Establishment that waits for the baby-boomers, and we need a new social revolution against it. Not to get political, but there is a war still going on, that is all about profit and greed, only the geography has changed.  The taxpayers are footing the bill, and the corporations and lending institutions are reaping the benefits.

But there is another war going on. That is a war for our minds and hearts. It is being waged via our bodies, because the “crap” most of us are eating in America is making us fat, dumb and miserable (usually diagnosed as “depression” and treated with mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs).  Get the connection?  We are being poisoned by chemicals and pseudo-food. Even the unprocessed food we eat, the fruits, vegetables, meats and dairy products, are devoid of nutrition, and laden with chemicals and hormones to artificially plump up the produce and live-stock. All of this makes the body sick, which burdens us mentally. We are diagnosed as mental patients, given psychotropic drugs that have side-effects that make us worse—or even worse, not care. Because a lot of the drugs numb us so we are flat-lining. And if you don’t care anymore, if the passion is gone, what is the point?

So, it is not about being a “babe” for the sake of youth. It’s about standing up and saying I won’t go down that path, I won’t become a part of the Matrix, I am going to find my own truth, and it ain’t what the government and corporations and media are handing out. So, being a “babe” is really a revolutionary act!!