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How Your Body Works

What Can Cause Seizures?

Handled My Dog’s Epileptic Fits

“My Bassett male, Dopey, has always suffered from frequent epileptic fits and I was reluctant to put him on the permanent medication that the vet recommended. I spoke to a representative from Helping Hands and he said that magnesium could help. It didn’t help that the dogs insist on drinking the pool water and apparently the chlorine content knocks the calcium and magnesium out.

Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS)

RLS (RESTLESS LEG SYNDROME), SLEEP: “I have suffered from severe restless leg syndrome (RLS) since I was a teen. As I aged, the condition only worsened. While I found some relief from prescription drugs, the relief was temporary and prescription drugs have their fair share of side effects. Moreover, I had concerns about the extended use of the medications (anti-Parkinsonian agents) used to control my RLS.

How Your Muscles and Heart Work

Most people know that they need calcium to build healthy bones and teeth, but did you know that calcium contracts your muscles while magnesium relaxes them?

Think of a heartbeat. The heart must contract then relax to perform its function of pumping blood through your body. If you’re deficient in one or the other, it can cause a malfunction. Too little calcium and your muscles (and heart) can’t contract and too little magnesium and your muscles (and heart) can’t relax. All the muscles and organs in your body work this way. Like a car needs engine oil for smooth function, your nervous system needs calcium and magnesium for smooth function.

The Importance of Calcium For Teeth and Bone

The outer parts of your body that you can see are a reflection of what is going on inside under your skin. If your teeth and gums are less than optimum, you can relate that back to what’s going on inside your body and use that as a clue to your dietary shortcomings or excesses. Use it a signpost to good health and you can work out a lot of your own nutritional solutions. You are, after all, the boss of your body and know it better than anyone else. The data below gives you clues to deficiencies. Enjoy it.

What Causes the Monthly Monster?

Approximately ten days prior to menstruation, when your ovaries are least active, your blood calcium drops steadily and progressively. This can result in premenstrual tension, nervousness, headaches, insomnia, and mental depression.

What Have Sunburn, Canker Sores & Herpes Breakouts Got in Common?

The answer is a deficiency of tissue calcium. Here’s how it works.

There is some relatively unknown data about sunburn that I’d like to share with you in the hope that it will help if you or anyone you know who gets a tad too much of it – the sun, I mean.

The ultraviolet rays from the sun convert skin oil to vitamin D. Too much of it is referred to as hypervitaminosis D. What happens is that vitamin D’s opposing partner, vitamin F (another name for polyunsaturated fatty acids or essential fatty acids), is low in comparison to the amount of vitamin D.

Vitamin D’s job is to get calcium from your stomach and pull it into your blood stream and vitamin F’s job is to take it from your blood stream into your tissues. If you’re low on vitamin F, not only will the vitamin D pull calcium from your stomach, but it will also pull the calcium from your tissues back into your blood stream. It’s the F that gets it into and keeps it in the tissues!

So, should you get too much vitamin D and be deficient in F, your blood calcium level will increase while the tissue calcium levels will decrease. That is the reason that people who are in the sun a lot get thick skin. They don’t get enough vitamin F, which creates calcium deficiencies in their tissues. Hives – those big welts you get around the tender parts of your body from being in the sun too much – are a sign of tissue calcium deficiency.

Sunstroke is also a sign of low tissue calcium levels. Sunstroke is due to high blood calcium levels with low tissue calcium levels.

Excess vitamin D from extreme exposure to the sun is known to cause cancer. You may have read articles that recommend you stay out of the sun and that sunshine is hazardous to your health. Well, it’s only dangerous to people who are vitamin F deficient. Vitamin D is essential to good health and the sun is a great way to get it as long as you ensure you have enough vitamin F to balance it up.

Symptoms of low vitamin F levels include itching of the skin, the canker sores some people get inside their mouths or herpes breakouts in the genital area.

So, any time you have an itchy skin, get canker sores in your mouth or breakouts below the belt, hives or sunburn, you need vitamin F and calcium. Make sure your children have enough so they don’t suffer from their time in the sun.

Besides this, please ensure you get enough minerals, including salt and potassium to prevent dehydration and – I’m not talking about the junk stuff like what is purported to be electrolytes – as well as adequate water.

Help Your Heart

SUCCESS: “I am a 74-year old retired university professor living at the Makaha Valley Plantation on Oahu, State of Hawaii. I taught Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). My degrees are from Harvard (B.A. cum laude ’58) and Yale (M.A. ’63, and Ph.D. ’65.)

» Read more on “Help Your Heart”

How To Relax – Naturally

(See below for special Anti-Stress Deals)

Are you, like millions of others, chronically tense or anxious?

Do you suffer from a dry mouth or feel like you’re suffocating? Is your stomach constantly in a knot or having spasms? Or, do you get chronic muscle cramps? Here, let me give you some data that might explain these phenomena.

Your nervous system is a communication network that controls and co-ordinates most body activities. In addition, the nervous system works unnoticed to regulate a multitude of internal activities, such as modulating body temperature or altering heart rate, in order to maintain homeostasis – the state of balance and stability that exists in a healthy body regardless of changes in the external and internal environments of a person.

The nervous system consists of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. Your parasympathetic nervous system keeps you calm and helps slow your mind and your body down whilst your sympathetic nervous system keeps you going, going, going.

This is important because when you’re supposed to be on the go – working, exercising, in action – you need your sympathetic nervous system to be firing away and providing you with energy but, when you’re supposed to relax, unwind, eat calmly, sleep peacefully, your parasympathetic nervous system needs to take over.

In other words, a balanced nervous system will allow you to have plenty of energy when you’re supposed to but also allow you to be calm and peaceful when you’re supposed to be relaxed.

To function properly, your parasympathetic nervous system needs the alkaline minerals to create the calmness and peace whilst your sympathetic nervous system requires the acid minerals to give that energy when you need it for your work or play. But the keyword here is BALANCE. You need both the alkaline AND acid minerals but they must be in balance so you don’t exclude one or the other unless you’re already getting too much of one from the foods you eat.

The main alkaline minerals include, amongst others, calcium, magnesium and potassium while the predominant acid mineral is phosphorus.

Phosphorus mainly comes from your grains (breads, pastas, crackers, processed foods, pies, cakes, etc) – your typical American diet – while calcium, magnesium and potassium mainly come from your greens – of which most people don’t get enough.

The important thing to know is that you need to eat more green vegetables and fewer grains.

You can also supplement with a good quality calcium and magnesium supplement like Instant CalMag-C (see below) as well as try taking two to three teaspoons of a good quality apple cider vinegar such as Braggs in some water with raw organic honey to get some good quality potassium into your body. This is quite a tasty drink if done right and goes a long way to providing you with the potassium your body needs. It’s available online at Paul Bragg’s site. I don’t have any connections with his organization other than being a consumer of their apple cider vinegar myself.

It is simple to reduce the tension and anxiety and have a calm and peaceful night’s sleep by eating more greens and taking good quality calcium and magnesium supplement.

Why Is Calcium So Important As To Have Its Own Regulating Gland? And What Of Magnesium?

Calcium is the only mineral to have its own regulating gland, the parathyroid glands (they’re the glands near the thyroid but have nothing to do with the thyroid)! Calcium’s main functions are:

What Are Hormones And What Do They Do?

The Endocrine System

Every living being has an endocrine system that consists of a number of glands: the hypothalamus, pituitary, pineal, thyroid, parathyroid, thymus, adrenals, pancreas and gonads. Endocrine means to secrete within.