Healthy Living Diet

A fat-soluble vitamin, Vitamin D is naturally present in very few foods, added to others and is usually made available as a dietary supplement. Many of us do not know its importance in healthy living. <.p>

Apart from the aforesaid, it is also produced endogenously when ultraviolet rays from sunlight strike the skin and trigger vitamin D synthesis. Vitamin D produced from sun exposure, food, and supplements is biologically inert and must therefor undergo two hydroxylations in the body for activation and effective. The first occurs in the liver which converts vitamin D to 25-hydroxyvitamin D, also known as calcidiol while the second occurs primarily in the kidney and forms the physiologically active 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D, also known as calcitriol.

What exactly does Vitamin D do in our body, you may ask. Essential for promoting calcium absorption in the gut and maintaining adequate serum calcium and phosphate concentrations, it is to enable normal mineralization of bone and prevent hypocalcemic tetany. It is also needed for bone growth and bone remodeling by osteoblasts and osteoclasts. Lacking in or without sufficient vitamin D, bones can become the target of many old-age related problems. Bones become thin, brittle, or misshapen while Vitamin D sufficiency prevents rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults. Together with calcium, vitamin D also helps protect older adults from osteoporosis.

Its other roles in human health include modulation of neuromuscular and immune function and reduction of inflammation. Many genes encoding proteins that regulate cell proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis are being modulated in part by vitamin D.

Lacking in Vitamin D has become the center of attention of many scientists today in finding the initial causes and development of cancer. Current scientific model seem to assume that a genetic mutation begins the genesis of a malignancy. Could this assumption be wrong and disputed? Could scientists at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California (UC) in San Diego unlock some other possibility?

In its online reporting in the current Annals of Epidemiology, a host of research suggests cancer develops when cells lose the ability to stick together in a healthy and normal way, and the key factor to this initial triggering of a malignancy could well be a lack of vitamin D. Researchers have documented that with enough vitamin D present, cells adhere to one another in tissue and act as normal, mature epithelial cells. However, should there be a deficiency of vitamin D, cells can lose this stick-to-each other quality as well as their identity as differentiated cells; resulting in their reversion to a dangerous stem cell-like state and become cancerous.

How is this possible? Vitamin D may halt the first stage of the cancer process by re-establishing intercellular junctions in malignancies having an intact vitamin D receptor. Vitamin D rich-diet and supplements (2,000 IU/day) tend to restore appropriate levels of vitamin D in the prevention of cancer development. Thus, the “cure” for cancer already exists.

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Ginseng roots has long been used to treat a variety of ailments for more than 2000 years from the medieval times in China to present day. Basing on its medicinal abilities, scientists have returned to discover more qualities with its berries.

An extract from the ginseng berry shows real promise in treating diabetes , according to reports from a research team from the University of Chicago’s Tang Center for Herbal Medicine Research. Done on mice but have not been clinically studied on humans, the research shows that the extract completely normalized blood glucose levels, improved sensitivity to insulin, lowered cholesterol levels, and decreased weight by reducing appetite and increasing activity levels in mice bred to develop diabetes.

As ginseng berry has a distinctive chemical profile and has not previously been used for therapy, the study focused instead on substances found in the ginseng berry which has very different concentrations of ginsenosides Re known possibly to be medically useful. Tests using ginsenoside Re alone found that it had all of the anti-diabetic but none of the obesity-fighting activities of the extract and this fantastic compound could serve as the basis for a whole new class of anti-diabetic medications for work is being done further to isolate other substances from the extract that contributed to the weight loss. Now with this discovery, the berry contains agents that have some effectiveness against diabetes, the ginseng fruit has enormous promise as a source of new drugs. How well it holds true to treat diabetes has to be determined.

Diabetes is the seventh leading killer in the U.S. Type 2 diabetes affects almost six percent of the U.S. population and 18.4 percent of those over 65. The cost of the disease is estimated at $105 billion each year. On the other hand, the economic cost of obesity in the U.S. was about $117 billion in 2000. As there is a pressing need for new and more effective drugs for both diabetes and obesity, the next step is to isolate the other substances in the extract, find out whether they also effect glucose regulation or weight gain, learn how they work and determine the safe and effective dose.

The power of ginseng, meanwhile remains. Happy living healthily.

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Green tea, with its popularity amongst many Asians, particularly Japanese for thousands of years, is an excellent beverage drink which everyone should not ignore its medicinal capability in the treatment of various diseases.

Being part of the evergreen shrub Camellia sinensis, it contain compounds known as polyphenols, a class of bioflavonoids which are found in all plants and believed to have anti-cancer, antioxidant, anti-bacterial, and anti-viral properties. Highly believed for its ability to guard against cancer by limiting the primary characteristic of cancer cell replication, it scavenges for free radicals which are the by-products from all the chemical reactions that occur in the body and which can damage the cells that have that capability to block the action of carcinogens (cancer-causing agents) and detoxify them.

However, many studies in the past had provided contradictory evidences on its protection capability against cancer. Reviews over time from 1980 to 2003, have varying results basically over controls used and thus many factors were included in the adjustments such as:-

• BMI and the dietary profile aside from the simultaneous tea usage and alcohol consumption, economic status,

• education as a surrogate for socioeconomic status,
• fruit and vegetable intake,
• fiber intake from all sources,
• fiber from fruit, vegetables and cereal separately considered,
• calcium, vitamin C, vitamin D and folic acid as well as total caloric intakes

This makes cross comparisons of studies difficult because different subsets were used.

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