Nutritious Bytes
A Multi-Faceted Approach to Measuring Health & Wellness
Many individuals are walking around with an illusion of health. Some of these people don't feel all that well but because they get a "clean bill of health" at their yearly physical, they conclude they must really be healthy. The truth is that a conventional medical evaluation is well-suited to pick up some but not all advanced physical breakdown and certainly not earlier-stage, more subtle dysfunction.
Glycation: The Single Most Important Factor in Degenerative Disease and Aging and Chances Are You Haven't Heard of It
There are more than 7000 published papers on the subject of glycation. Glycation is the process of interaction of sugars with proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids, giving rise to damaged tissue. Crust formation as bread bakes is also the result of glycation. You may like crust on your bread but you don't want crust forming in your body! When sugar binds and alters a protein, the resulting sugar-damaged molecule is called an Advanced Glycation Endproduct (AGE). It turns out that AGE is an appropriate acronym, as these altered biomolecules do indeed play a major role in biological aging.
The Mind-Body Continuum
As crazy as it may sound, many cases of depression stem from an unhealthy state in the gastrointestinal tract. When you think of depression what organ do you think of? Probably the brain, right? The brain is important when it comes to depression but the brain does not function in a vacuum. The old song goes something like: "The knee bone's connected to the shin bone. The shin bone's connected to the ankle bone. The ankle bone's..." The brain is connected to the "gut".