Pucker up for lemon juice.

Among numerous other health benefits, the acidic nature of #lemon juice blunts blood sugar spikes and helps control the release of energy after a meal. Also:
• Lemon juice is an excellent source of vitamin C—a cup of #lemonjuice, just 15 calories’ worth, packs almost 50 percent of your daily value.
• One #study in the journal Public #Health #Nutrition found that low vitamin C increased the likelihood of developing abdominal fat by 131 percent.
• Another study of more than 20,000 people showed that people who ate the most #vitamin C-rich foods were three times less likely to develop #arthritis than those who ate the least.
• Vitamin C helps prevent #cholesterol from sticking to cell walls, and lemon’s flavonoids attack free radicals and protect against cancer.
#DrKeithBerkowitz

Light or Dark Olive Oil ?

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The problem isn't animal fat alone

Countries that consume diets rich in saturated fat tend to suffer very little heart disease, whereas countries that consume diets rich in hydrogenated trans fats suffer high rates of heart disease. Population studies show that people who eat small amounts of trans fats, white flour, or sugar do not have heart attacks. Common sense should tell us that the problem isn’t animal fat alone. It’s trans fats, sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and refined carbohydrates.

The Benefits of going Flour-Free

White and wheat flours are refined products that offer very little in terms of vitamins, nutrients, and/or minerals. They are complex carbohydrates and therefore are made up of simple glucose units and thereby can increase in your blood glucose level. An elevated blood glucose level stimulates the pancreas to secrete insulin. An elevated insulin level is the underlying factor in many health problems, including obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, and cancer. The key to preventing these health conditions is keeping blood glucose levels stable and insulin levels low.

Metabolic Burnout

Your adrenals or pancreas or both can’t keep overproducing hormones, so they eventually hit a zero balance (or are in the red). Your adrenals may run out of funds first, then your pancreas. When the adrenals don’t secrete enough cortisol, you feel tired. When the pancreas doesn’t make enough insulin, you have official diabetes, although you’ve been developing it for years. Other parts of the body start to break down during this stage. Yeast will more easily colonize the digestive tract and the thyroid begins to break down.

Metabolic Resistance

High cortisol levels cause fat to be deposited in your abdomen, and insulin and cortisol rise and stay elevated. In the case of insulin, your muscle cells now don’t recognize its signal. Once your cells stop responding to insulin (called insulin resistance), your pancreas must produce 10 times as much of the hormone to shuttle sugar into cells, Your brain doesn’t recognize increases in insulin either, so it never responds by turning off your appetite. As a result, blood glucose is even more erratic than during metabolic overdrive, alternating from very high highs to very low lows, and you’re constantly hungry. High insulin levels tend to lower levels of other important hormones too, which can erode health in many additional ways.
Your sleep is probably starting to become erratic. You may feel okay when you are at work and under stress, but you crash when you get home or go on vacation. Elevated levels of cortisol during the overspending stage have now taken a toll on various bodily tissues, slowing metabolism through a loss of muscle mass, impairing digestion, and weakening immunity.

Metabolic Overdrive

When you’re stressed, you’re in overdrive. When you toss back a triple-shot espresso, you’re in overdrive. When you exercise beyond your body’s capabilities, you’re in overdrive. Overdrive is how you speed up the metabolism. This confuses a lot of people, because if they are struggling with excess weight, they assume that they want to speed up their metabolism. This isn’t always the case. 

Staying in overdrive too often can outstrip your metabolic resources. Stress and lack of sleep, for example, cause the adrenal glands to overproduce the stress hormone cortisol and keep levels elevated. When cortisol increases, so does your blood glucose, to provide your muscles with fuel should you need to run fast. The problem is that your muscle cells don’t need the glucose when you are responding to emotional stress or lack of sleep, so the hormone insulin increases to shuttle the excess glucose into your fat cells - usually the ones in your abdomen. In an overspent state, insulin does this too efficiently. Too much insulin causes blood glucose to drop too quickly. You crave the one thing that can quickly raise blood glucose: sugar. If you turn to sugar and fat - as most people under stress do - glucose rises, insulin rises, glucose falls. You’re hungry again. 

Overdrive can also result from eating a lot of sugar, HFCS and refined foods. In this case, blood sugar rapidly rises and falls, and so does insulin. To compensate for the volatility of rapid rises and falls in sugar and hormones, the metabolism runs fast. In fact many of my patients who have hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) are fairly slender. It’s not until the progress to “metabolic resistance stage” that they start to gain weight. 

As overdrive progresses, the problem magnifies. When insulin levels remain high too long and too often, your brain and muscle cells eventually stop responding. Rather than soaking up blood sugar, muscle cells ignore rises in insulin. Your body starts conserving calories, and you see the results in your gut. Your abdomen grows. Even when you cut calories or portions, you can’t seem to get rid of the spare tire or love handles. Meet metabolic resistance, also known as Syndrome X and metabolic syndrome; it puts you at risk for and can also lead to diabetes or polycystic ovarian syndrome, a condition in which women develop high levels of male hormones, cysts in their ovaries, and, frequently, infertility.