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After reading Cheeseslave’s post about magnesium, I knew we had to give magnesium oil a try. Between the seven of us under this roof, we have many symptoms that suggest magnesium deficiency:
Back pain (joint pain, pain in general)
Body odor
Cravings for chocolate (beyond the normal “yum”, the “give me chocolate or die” variety)
Exhaustion from exercise (a thirty minute walk requiring a full day of rest for recovery)
Insulin resistance
PMS (in a house full of girls, not good)
Tics
And at one point or another, many of us have suffered from:
Arthritis – Rheumatoid and Osteoarthritis
Auto immune disorders – all types
Cavities
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Depression
Gut disorders (food allergies)
Headaches (no, it isn’t normal for a kid to have to take aspirin on a regular basis)
High cholesterol, high triglycerides, high blood pressure
Hypoglycemia
Insomnia
Migraines and Cluster headaches
Obesity
Restless Legs Syndrome
Syndrome X (insulin resistance)
If it would just help my hubby sleep at night, that would be worth the investment even if it never touched the rest of our issues. We eat plenty of magnesium-rich foods in the form of leafy greens, but have stopped eating grains for the time being and have never eaten large quantities of sea vegetables. Also, the magnesium in magnesium-rich foods depends entirely on the health of the soil in which they are grown, something I can’t quantify, even when choosing the local small farm organically grown varieties I love.
We started out taking a calcium magnesium blend tablet in September of last year. I added a few drops of trace ionic minerals to my kombucha, both to supplement my diet and to “feed” the scoby, as I had done with my water kefir, but didn’t see any improvement at all with any of my issues. After reading this article, I realized I needed to be supplementing transdermally because gut issues will prevent absorption of magnesium taken internally.
The first experience was not awful, but also not entirely pleasant. I used one ounce of magnesium chloride flakes dissolved in one ounce of water, put it in a spray bottle and applied about ten pumps to my upper body. The itching and stinging reminded me very much of a niacin flush. My skin turned red, but both the stinging and the redness went away after about half an hour. Tests on my lower body went better, but less magnesium is absorbed from the lower body. I tried a bath, which didn’t sting at all, and a foot bath which was wonderful. My reading told me that the mucous membranes absorb the most, so I tried swishing some in my mouth. It didn’t sting or itch and didn’t cause any problems but the taste was truly awful. It took many rinses to get the metallic taste out of my mouth. I also put some magnesium oil* in my neti pot one morning. No stinging or itching at all! Nice!
The results were very pleasing. Even the first day my overall pain level dropped to a greater degree than taking NSAIDS. Within a week my emotions were smoothing out and I could take more of the ups and downs of life without overreacting. I wasn’t doing anything else during this time to help, as a matter of fact, life continued on its turbulent way. After a couple weeks I noticed I smelled different, and stopped using my homemade deodorant entirely.
At this point I started the whole family on magnesium supplementation. Everyone took to it well except my youngest who has the extremely sensitive skin and severe food allergies. I kept diluting the oil down 1:2, 1:3, 1:5, even at a 1:10 dilution it’s painfully strong for her. She will itch and sting, her skin turns red, but then it breaks out in a rash that lasts much longer than a half hour. She can take magnesium baths and foot baths, and I can rub it into her feet as long as I don’t go above the ankles and she washes it off after 20-30 minutes. I think if the rest of the family notices improvement they will be willing to put up with the stinging and itching for a short time each day rather than just the weekly foot baths we are doing now.
I also know that rotating locations of transdermal application are important because the receptors in skin don’t work as well after several applications at the same site. So, two days a week I swish mag oil in my mouth for as long as I can bear it (easier than oil pulling, in my book), two days a week I add mag oil to my neti pot, two days a week I spray the oil on my upper body about half an hour before my shower and the seventh day I participate in the “family foot bath.”
I’ll update here any additional improvements we experience, or any problems we run into.
I must remember to mention this all to my mother-in-law who suffers terribly from Reynaud’s syndrome. The lack of interest in the medical community for finding causes and solutions for this circulatory problem is truly shocking, but there are reports that magnesium supplementation can help.
*Note: Magnesium chloride dissolved in water is called magnesium oil even though it contains no oil. This is due to its slippery texture.
Look at the grass!
Pastured butter is an amazing food. Plain old, regular store bought butter is okay, but along with it comes all the baggage of mass-produced dairy: the inadequate diet of the animal, the inhumane living conditions, the illness and antibiotic use. If you are blessed enough to have a farmer locally who makes butter from his grassfed cows milk, you have a tremendous advantage.
I buy butter in large quantities when the grass is growing quickly. That May through September butter has more conjugated linoleic acid, more vitamin K2, a better Omega 3/6 ratio, more antioxidants and just crazy good flavor. It’s dark yellow to light orange in color, unlike grocery store butter which is so white it requires “natural or artificial coloring” to make it even a little yellow.
Vitamin K2 is not something we hear about in the media, unlike vitamins B, C and D, but it is extremely important because it allows other vitamins to be absorbed and properly used in the body. There’s a certain synergy at work in nutrients. You may have heard that you should include a food high in vitamin C when you serve food high in iron because the C allows better uptake of the iron. Or that Calcium and Magnesium should be taken together because the Magnesium encourages Calcium uptake. Vitamin K2 works that way for vitamins A and D, two essential vitamins that support the immune system, brain, heart and bone health.
We love the flavor of pasture butter, but storing it was a challenge. Once the freezer is full, what to do? Make ghee!
Being basically lazy, I use the oven method of clarifying the butter. In other words, I put it in a pan in a 350° oven and come back in 2 hours. All the milk proteins either rise to the top to be skimmed off or sink to the bottom where they don’t budge as the oil is poured off. I carefully skim the top and pour the oil through cheesecloth into clean, warm and dry canning jars.
Ghee, or butter oil, is the fat of the butter without any of the milk proteins that can make it go bad. Ghee is shelf stable for up to a year, so your May to September butter can last through the winter! In the picture above you see my good, grassfed ghee next to storebought ghee. You can see the grass!
What to do with ghee? It’s a good saute oil because it has a high smoke point. The dairy allergic can use carefully prepared ghee because the milk proteins are filtered out. One of the really cool things I do with my ghee is to dropper it into capsules (not as hard as it sounds) to take with our fermented cod liver oil. The difference in price between the butter oil and cod liver oil blend and just the cod liver oil makes it worthwhile, and means I can order more CLO for what I would have paid for fewer capsules. Taking butter oil with CLO is essential in my book, you can ready why here.
Ghee has definitely become a ranking member of my “Six Fat Friends” club!
This post is part of Fight Back Friday, hosted by Food Renegade.
Kate learns exactly what is IN those cookies
I picked up an iPhone app to help me figure out some of the ingredients on food labels. It’s called “Don’t Eat That” and is $1.99 in the iTunes Store. It has made Gizmodo‘s This Week’s Best iPhone Apps list, a list I like to browse for helpful apps. You’ll find it in the iTunes Store in the Healthcare and Fitness section. The app is currently running version 1.3 and updates are frequent, but there is lots of room for expansion and improvement here.
You’ll have to forgive my total lameness at being unable to post screenshots—some of me is in 2010, but some of me lags several decades behind. There are good screenshots at the iTunes Store.
What I love:
- The alphabetical listing is very thorough and the information contained in the descriptions is unbiased but extensive.
- You can choose to view ingredients by their names as listed on labels, or in lists of ingredients that may aggravate allergies and asthma, are particularly harmful to children, are banned somewhere in the world and where the ban is in effect, and ingredients that are known carcinogens.
- Foods containing Genetically Modified Organisms can also be searched in their own section.
What I’d change:
- I’d love to have a section where I can add my own notes to each item for our own food reactions and issues. Rose, for example, is allergic to almonds and I would love to be able to tap once to flag each ingredient listed that contains almond extractives.
- I’d also like ingredients to come up when the bar code on the product is scanned. Then, each ingredient should be “clickable” for reference without having to scroll down the list.
How I use it:
- There are an awful lot of ingredients that are floating around in my brain with sticky notes attached: “This is also known as MSG”, “Do I really want this in my body?”, “Wait, is this something that’ll make a migraine flare up?” and sometimes it’s hard to keep it all straight. This little app takes the sticky notes out of my brain (freeing up those brain cells for much more important information, such as how to spell Kyrgyzstan) and putting them into what I often refer to as my “offsite brain.”
- When the kids are tempted by some treat that this friend or that aunt eats all the time (“and they haven’t grown three heads yet, Mom…”) we will sit down with the ingredient label and this app. Once they decipher that this ingredient comes from petroleum and that ingredient is another name for a substance that kills their brain cells, they rarely ask for that food again. “Okay, how about an apple, then?”
- And, of course, as a purely educational tool in the supermarket, I’ll sit a child down to research ingredients for things we just don’t want in the house at all. Overhearing our discussion, a woman once stopped mid-stride in the store aisle and asked me if I knew much about GMOs. I was thrilled to have information at my fingertips about the food on the shelves.
What a marvelous time we live in! Yes, food labels are a nightmare to decipher, but then along comes just the right tool to crack that lock. No more eating unspellable seventeen-syllabled-foodlike-substances for us!
As is true of all my posts, I do not accept compensation for my reviews. No one has approached me and requested this review, and I did not receive a “reviewer copy” of the program.
This post is part of Prevention, Not Prescriptions and Real Food Wednesday.
GMO CORN by illuminating9_11, on Flickr
From a recent news article:
Health Canada is proposing an unorthodox way of combatting a food ingredient suspected in some cancers: It wants to let manufacturers put small amounts of a cancer-fighting drug into potato chips and similar foods to curb production of the harmful chemical.
When some food is heated at temperatures over 120°F, a chemical process takes place which creates acrylamide. While there is some good evidence that acrylamide is carcinogenic, testing provides a required dose 900 times greater than what would be an average consumption.
The drug being considered for addition to food is Asparaginase. It is a chemotherapy agent, currently being used to treat leukemia and mast cell tumors. On the surface, this might seem like a good idea: treat the food so you don’t have to treat the cancer later. But is it?
Asparaginase’s main side effects are allergic reaction, pancreatitis and clotting problems which can lead to stroke. It can also change the way your body synthesises proteins. Let’s talk about a couple of these very briefly:
Allergic reactions to foods are already on a sharp rise. Emergency room visits for food allergic reactions are up and more children (especially) are suffering more frequent and more severe reactions.
Pancreatitis is inflammation of the pancreas, the organ which malfunctions in diabetes. Diabetics are warned to immediately seek medical help if they experience symptoms similar to pancreatitis because it can be life-threatening for them. Diabetes is on the rise, which means more people would need to be monitored much more closely for pancreatitis. All statin drugs carry pancreatitis as a side effect, and the population is being prescribed statins at an ever-increasing rate.
Of course, the food and medical industries are in favor of the addition, not so much for health’s sake to be sure, as for profit:
Manufacturers “fully support” the move suggested by Health Canada, Derek Nighbor of Food and Consumer Products of Canada said in a statement provided by the industry group yesterday.
Manufactures create products that make money. If a new procedure is going to cost them money, they are normally unanimous in their rejection of it. Full support indicates to me that these food manufacturers have found a way to make it pay.
“It’s been a big, big problem,” Prof. Yaylayan said. “Not so much in the public eye, but behind doors, the companies keep having meetings, having scientific symposia and seminars.”
Clearly they’ve been thinking long and hard about it. We should, too.
By far the wisest statement in the article was:
The “downstream effects” of using asparaginase to counter the chemical should be studied carefully, advised Dr. Mucci.
I would agree heartily with Dr. Mucci.
The idea that we should be drugging our food sends a chill up my spine. I can sigh, roll my eyes and write blog posts about “nutritionism” and the mistaken theory that by adding a little science we can improve upon the foods put here for our enjoyment and health. But if Big Pharma and Big Food ever marry, their children will be frightening aberrations capable of sickening and killing many more than they help.
Let’s not rush headlong into yet another trip down the “cure is worse than the disease” onramp to disaster.
This post is part of Prevention Not Prescriptions.
Here’s a blast from the past! My daughter has battled hand eczema for several years now. Although we are winning the war, there are still skirmishes where her hands crack, peel and bleed. Since the original post, we have added a daily dose of kombucha to her diet. Without further ado, this week’s entry into the Prevention Not Prescriptions blog carnival:
Perhaps it would be a good time to put down in writing what I hope to gain by adopting this foodstyle. My youngest daughter has multiple food allergies, including milk protein, almonds, rice, oats, soy, and some other item we can’t quite identify. Her allergies express themselves in the most vicious, angry eczema I’ve ever seen across her legs, stomach and especially neck. She also has several environmental allergies, mainly molds and mites, but nothing like my oldest girl who has violent skin reactions to the chemicals used in cleaning products. Hubby is overweight with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, sleep apnea, rheumatoid arthritis and sinus problems, and allergies to mushrooms, beef and most notably, corn. I am also overweight but am blessed with low BP and cholesterol. I have osteoarthritis resulting from failed knee surgeries numbering in the double digits and rheumatoid arthritis which onset at the ripe old age of 8. My only allergies are to shellfish, although those are expressed by instant and life-threatening swelling of the face, tongue and throat. I have been experiencing acid reflux of constantly increasing frequency, duration and intensity and am probably borderline bipolar. Any improvement to these health conditions would be an amazing blessing, especially since we are without health insurance right now.
How I found the Nourishing Traditions cookbook was by way of another book I was reading called “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” by Weston A. Price. My youngest boy has “porous enamel” on his teeth and is plagued with multiple and constant cavities. I was reading an article that this Price guy found a nutritional basis (beyond brush, floss, fluoride and restricting sugar) to healthy teeth and that piqued my interest. After all, my son, before age 15, had more than 20 cavities and two root canals. I confess his nutrition is not what it should be, not by a long shot. He seems to have a problem tasting things, and seeks out familiar foods that are high in sugar and very low in nutrients. He can’t stand the sight of food in the morning and relies on the public school lunch program midday. That’s why it is so vitally important I feed him at least one meal of exceptional quality per day. I was doing okay, pushing meats, veggies and low-sugar foods, but became very excited at the prospect of foods that could help his body begin to repair itself.
So, there you have it. A beginning laundry list of why I seek to actively participate in improving my family’s health. The thought of my sweet hubby having a cardiac event (like his father did at his age) or me experiencing cancer (like my mother did at my age) or my children not becoming all it is possible for them to become is unacceptable to me.
The Dark Side of Fat Loss
