Good digestion starts with chewing your food well for an efficient thorough food breakdown in your stomach and small intestine where most nutrients are absorbed. If you experience gas, constipation, diarrhea, bloating, can’t eat much at one time, food seems to sit in your stomach too long, you have a poorly formed stool, or you have any other digestive complaints, you need to improve your digestive vigor. Ironically, women who take a lot of antacids to combat their symptoms of poor digestion are actually interfering with their ability to convert phytoestrogens and lignans from plants and make them more hormonally viable.

We recommend plant digestive enzymes for any woman who wants to enhance her digestion. Taking two to three plant digestive enzymes capsules at the beginning of your meals will help your system to fully break down, digest, and absorb the valuable nutrients in your food. They will aid in easing your digestive challenges and will improve your functioning. ***My words, I know from experience digestive enzymes work very well, however, you do have to be faithful in using them to get relief from your symptoms.

Here is a fundamental idea that is rarely brought up for the midlife woman. The relative health of your intestines determines whether you make beneficial active substances from your food or whether you make toxins. The health and balance of your intestinal flora is very important. We naturally have many hundreds of different species of intestinal microbes that live in harmony in our intestines. We absolutely need them for our health, as they are responsible for such important tasks as helping make antibodies, utilizing certain vitamins, and even rendering carcinogens harmless. I order to maintain a healthy population of these organisms, we need to do what a farmer does-nourish the “soil” of our intestines.

If we have poor intestinal health, we can cause an imbalance of our intestinal inhabitants, and pathogenic bacteria can proliferate and then compromise our health. One way they can do this is by converting estrogens destines for elimination into a reabsorb ably form, at which point they can put you at higher risk for estrogen-sensitive cancers.

Ladies, this is why it’s so important to cleanse and nourish your colon. I personally choose to do a gentle colon cleanse every 6-12 months which I believe has helped me tremendously. I also have found that it’s really important to use a good fiber every day and have been told by Dr. Gordon Pedersen, a leading alternative doctor, that even if someone is moving their bowels every day should still be using a good fiber to help pull the toxins and stored estrogens out of the bowel.

-Vickie

Food Best Kept To A Minimum During Premenopause

Caffeine
Drinking coffee leaches calcium from your bones and can be very stressful to your system. Many women experience increased frequency and intensity of hot flashes when they drink coffee. Although it has some caffeine, choose green tea instead. Green tea has a mildly stimulating effect without giving you the jitters, and provides potent phytochemical and antioxidant protections. Black tea is also preferable, as it has phytosterole benefits. Also, choose herbal teas whenever possible. If you do drink coffee, try organic coffee, which is less acidic and has a superior taste.

Refined Sugar

Sugars are not inherently bad. We need them to live, which should be welcome news to women who think they can’t live without them but refined sugars contain empty calories and create an acidic internal environment, which, like coffee, leaches minerals from your bones. The refining of any food removes valuable nutrients and turns a health-promoting food into a disease-promoting food.

Women at high risk for osteoporosis should particularly avoid foods with refined sugars. There is also evidence that the disregulation of a woman’s blood sugar levels from eating too much refined sugar can contribute to hot flashes.

But there are many healthy ways to sweeten your life. We recommend raw honey (real and organic), real maple syrup, brown rice syrup, organic molasses, or Sucanat. Sucanat (natural sugar cane) is a whole sugarcane product that is totally unrefined and only minimally processed, meaning that the nutrients are left in and the food value remains. It is an excellent substitute for refined sugar in your drinks and in baking.

Table Salt (Someone else posted about this earlier)
Like sugar, you don’t need to completely eliminate salt from your diet to eat healthy, but table salt is highly refined and contains unhealthy anti-caking agents, sugars, and flowing agents. Even most sea salts sold in health food stores have been refined and do not have their original healthful benefits. We recommend the product Celtic Sea Salt, which not only tastes great as a condiment and in your cooking, but also contains eighty-four minerals and trace elements. Its mineral content and balance are very similar to your own blood’s mineral salt composition.

Alcohol
Despite the numerous health benefits cited for moderate alcohol consumption, particularly red wine, women at midlife should stay on a low-moderate side of alcohol consumption, as alcohol can aggravate hormonal imbalance symptoms. Women who have more than two drinks a day increase their risk of osteoporosis. Hard liquor should be avoided altogether. Try to limit yourself to a glass of wine or beer on occasion (organic products are available). Red wine is preferable to white, as studies have shown that the phytosterol components of grape skin, which is removed from the white wine, help to lower cholesterol, raise HDL (“good cholesterol”) levels, and reduce the risk of heart disease. Actually, further studies have shown that you can get similar health benefits from just drinking unfermented grape (not white) juice.

Diet sodas and soft drinks
When it comes to your bones (and, for that matter, your overall health), diet sodas and soft drinks have a high phosphorus content, which is a real threat to their integrity. High phosphorus intake creates internal imbalance and causes minerals to be leached from your bones. The synthetic sweeteners in diet sodas and in other products should be avoided as well, as they pose their own health risks.

Chocolate and cocoa
These are wonderful comfort foods that need to be limited to the status of a treat. Because they contain refined sugars (and fats and additives), these foods have been known to increase hot flashes. There are excellent organic chocolates and cocoas available made with real ingredients, not synthetic additives, and sweetened with Sucanat.

Can you go for more than a day without eating sugar in some form? Do you drink soft drinks or milkshakes, eat Danish pastry, fruit yogurt (a 6 oz. carton has 7 teaspoons of sugar or honey), donuts, bagels,cakes, cookies, most bran muffins or many other sugary items. Can you go without any other foods that contain words ending in "ose" such as sucrose and fructose, or contain corn syrup, corn sweetener, honey, barley malt, maple syrup, sugar cane solids, or rice syrup? Do you pig out on a carton of ice cream or a bag of cookies? If you find that sugar is part of your diet every day, you may have a problem.

The average person eats 153 pounds of sugar a year. That is equivalent to over 1/2 cup of sugar a day. The teenage boy eats twice that much. So you say, "Who cares?" What is wrong with sugar? Scientific evidence in many medical journals shows that sugar can ruin your health. Do you have any of the following symptoms? Do you fall asleep after meals, have allergies, gas, bloating, extended stomach after meals, joint pains, headaches, chronic fatigue, constipation, diarrhea, over weight, skin problems, high blood pressure or other symptoms? These all can be signs of a sugar problem.

We have evolved from early man having mechanisms to digest foods. We do not have the digestive mechanisms to digest the glut of sugar that we are eating on a daily basis.

Recently, information has emerged as to what happens to the minerals in the body when sugar and other abusive foods are eaten. For example, every time we eat just as little as two teaspoons of sugar, our blood chemistry can change, and we can throw ourselves out of homeostasis, the wonderful electrochemical balance needed for health and life itself.

Doctors and clinicians do not usually test the total blood chemistry of a person before and after ingesting sugar, but if they did, they would find that the minerals increase or decrease, and change relationship with each other. In the usual case the calcium increases and the phosphorus decreases (the ratio of calcium to phosphorous increases too much) and there is toxic calcium in the body because minerals only work in relation to each other. A mineral can become toxic to the body when there is an excess of that mineral in the body. Toxic calcium can cause plaque on the teeth, kidney stones, arthritis, cataracts, bone spurs, and hardening of the arteries. These are effects of an increase in a particular mineral ratio.

When minerals decrease, they can be reduced to such an extent that our enzymes are unable to function well, as each enzyme is dependent upon a mineral to function. As a result we do not digest our food completely, and some of this undigested food can get directly into the blood stream and is treated as a foreign substance. This by-product of incomplete digestion, causes the immune system to come into action.

108 Ways Sugar Can Ruin Your Health