If you really want to take charge of your health, then learning more about ALCAT food sensitivity test is a very good idea. Did you know you can purchase food sensitivity tests over the counter today? Even if you don’t have a food allergy, let’s look at the difference.

Allergy vs. Sensitivity

An allergy is a reaction that triggers the release of antibodies that results in immediate symptom onset. A true food allergy causes an immune response that can affect multiple organs and in some cases, be severe or even life threatening. Food sensitivity symptoms are delayed and are typically limited to digestive problems, but they can lead to chronic inflammatory health issues.

Conditions – Symptoms

Symptoms such as migraines, aching joints, fatigue, gastrointestinal disorders, and others have been linked to food sensitivity and chronic inflammation. The Alcat Test is designed to assess sensitivities to over 450 food, chemical and environmental substances. These sensitivities are shown to be associated with both acute and chronic conditions.

• Gastrointestinal disorders, such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), indigestion, constipation, nausea, diarrhea, bloating, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s Disease.
• Metabolic disorders, such as obesity, Type II diabetes, inabilitiy to lose weight.
• Inflammatory conditions, such as eczema, psoriasis, arthritis or asthma, autoimmune disorders.
• Others, such as fatigue, headache, migraine, cognitive impairment.

So bottom-line even mild food sensitivities can lead to inflammation and chronic inflammation is the root cause of heart disease, obesity, diabetes 2, dementia, and Alzheimers and a host of other chronic illnesses. If you want to escape the trap, find out what’s causing the inflammation and stop taking new medications to mask the symptoms.

Clear Test Results

Utilizing Alcat Test results to create an individualized nutrition plan, based on your immune system, enables you to make food choices that are better suited for your health and well-being. With the Alcat Test many clinical symptoms associated with food and chemical sensitivities can be substantially improved or possibly prevented altogether.

Test results include:

• Easy to understand color-coded test report.
• Foods to avoid list.
• Comprehensive “Understanding your Alcat Test Results” guidebook.
• Personalized rotation plan.
• Practical shopping guide and restaurant card.

Knowing vs. Guessing

There is a new paradigm in health and medicine – personalization. Health can be improved and maintained by knowing how food plays a role in your body.

The Alcat Test enables you to take advantage of leading technology to create a personalized nutrition plan resulting in benefits that can be seen and felt.

The results from the Alcat Test can help determine which foods and other substances may trigger unwanted inflammation. The personalized nutrition plan based on your immune response can assist with food choices that are better for your health and well-being. When complying with the Alcat Test results, many clinical symptoms associated with food sensitivity may be substantially improved or possibly prevented altogether.

Review

There are a number of ALCAT tests for various purposes but I want to review two of those – the 200 and 357 foods panels – also called the “Platinum Plus” and “Comprehensive Wellness 3.”

The Platinum Plus product is the more compressive because it includes medicinal herbs and foods more often associated with a healthy diet. It also includes antibiotics and anti-inflammatory agents as medications or even for those who use dairy and are exposed to antibiotics via the food chain. The food panel for this product is much broader with 237 foods vs 150 – almost double the food list.

Following are the specific lists for each category.

The Comprehensive Wellness 3 includes the following food list along with the above-listed 20 molds and 30 food additives.

Conclusion and Pricing

Comprehensive Wellness 3 – $599

Platinum Plus – $819

Everything required including local blood draw and shipping is included so these prices are  “all-in” prices.

If you’re simply looking for a basic test and don’t have any specific symptoms then I recommend the Comprehensive Wellness 3. If you have specific symptoms and believe that you ingest or take things on the more advanced lists, then I would recommend the more comprehensive test.

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I like Amazon for these items. Price including shipping is usually best.

Everyone would like to be healthier. But we tend to think about our health as purely a physical challenge – exercise more, eat better, sleep better, etc. The pathways to health also includes some changes we don’t often think about.

Here are some of the challenges:

Aging is Normal

Thinking that all of the symptoms we have such as aching joints, headaches, brain fog, aches and pains, indigestion, lack of energy, high blood sugar, sinus pressure, soar throat, and a thousand more symptoms are all part of the “aging process.”

But they aren’t. They’re part of the process by which your body deals with things you’re eating and drinking that aren’t good for it. And they’re part of the build up of toxins that shouldn’t be in your body but take a concerned effort to remove. The body has a remarkable ability to heal itself and most of what we believe is the “normal aging process” is just not that at all.

Accepting that everyone is a normal part of aging is one of the greatest lies and greatest barriers to taking action to make ourselves healthier.

Doctors Know Best

So you you go to see your doctor with a minor complaint and he does some blood tests and says, “I want to put you on ….XXXX” where XXXX is a prescription for some kind of wonder drug statin or the like. Next you visit him a quarter later and he says, “I’m not happy with the way your tests are going so I’m going to add XXXX.”

Pretty soon it’s five years later and now you have all kinds of symptoms – you’re diabetic and obese, and your feet hurt and you’re taking 15 medications.

Doctors aren’t educated to find the root cause of your illness, they are taught, and paid to diagnose and prescribe. You get caught in that cycle and you’re going to get worse and worse until you die young – much younger than you should because your body was designed to last 200 years.

Packaged Food is Real Food

You’re been processed by the media for so long that you don’t know the difference between something in a package and something that grows in the ground. You think they’re the same and they’re not.

Processing temperatures form toxins in food – bread, crackers, chips, packaged mixes, and the list is endless.

Ingredients on cans and packages contain things you can’t pronounce and don’t know its purpose. Their primary purpose is to make things last longer, to preserve, to color, to make it stiffer or softer, or thicker or thinner, and to promote longer shelf life.

When a package says, “Organic” or the brand says, “Organics” you trust that and don’t question who raised it, what they used as fertilizer, whether they sprayed it and with what. Manufactures are finding ways daily to fool you and take advantage of what you believe about food labelled organic or natural or fresh.

As long as you don’t know the difference between real food and everything else, you’re going to be fighting uphill to become as healthy as you were built to be.

It’s Too Late

Thinking you’re too old and it’s too late to do anything comes from thinking that your life expectancy should be a number – like 85 – “I’ll be lucky if I live until I’m 85…” and not thinking, “Hey, this body was built to withstand 200 – why am I feeling so bad half-way through?”

People who dramatically change their lifestyles are having dramatic and life-changing results. It’s never too late to start doing things right – you just have to understand that the body is a tremendous healing machine and if you can suddenly and dramatically change your lifestyle then amazing things can happen.

I met a lady who is 58 and was on an insulin pump and taking 15 medications daily. She was obese and could hardly move around her house. The doctors gave her six months. She went to a seminar and made some dramatic changes in her lifestyles and within 6 months she was getting significantly better and within 12 months she was off all but one medication including insulin.

Today she is one of the most alive and vibrant personalities I’ve met. Nobody would guess that her recent past was so different. She shows the surprising loose skin on her arms to emphasize the magnitude of the change.

Illnesses are Irreversible

Our doctors do a lot to help us adopt this belief. They believe this and we look up to them so it’s not hard to understand why we begin to believe it as well. But this is a very damaging belief because it’s not based on fact.

Hundreds of studies and thousands of clinical results show that everything – heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimers, obesity, multiple sclerosis, ADHD, and many more illnesses considered by doctors to be irreversible – are in fact reversible. They can be cured when you find and remove the root cause. They cannot be cured by covering over the symptoms with drugs. We have plenty of evidence for that as well.

But the belief that these illnesses are incurable keeps us from even looking for the root cause. That is significant because it means that our health could greatly benefit from changing our belief in this area.

Summary

As is always the case, how we think about something, how we believe, is the most influential factor in our ability to make progress. Why halt the progress then when it comes to our health and longevity?

No, I’m not going to be advocating cannabalism – I can’t advise you on whether eating a vegan is a good idea or not. How to eat vegetarian is about knowing the pitfalls and how to navigate them.

But a lot of people go into eating vegetarian without too much idea of what the pitfalls are of trying to derive all the vitamins and minerals you need from foods that are healthy, yes, but lack some of the most fundamental and important nutrients your body needs.

If you’re a vegan, you’re less likely to have high blood pressure, cholesterol, heart disease, or type 2 diabetes. That’s the good news. But being a vegan also has its risks…

You could end up vitamin deficient most notably for Calcium, B12, Protein, Iron, Vitamin D, Omega-3, and Vitamin A. These are the nutrients that exist in nature but not as often or in the quantities you may need.

For Calcium, unless you can eat cheese, your best vegetable source may be almonds or almond butter. Supplements are then of course more attractive on a daily basis.

For B12 your best source is nutritional yeast but supplements are often easier and more attractive.

For protein, raw seeds and nuts are your best source. If you can eat cheese then that has a higher protein density than most nuts.

For Vitamin D, UV-exposed Portobello mushrooms have 10X the density of whole milk fortified with vitamin D.

For Omega-3, plant sources aren’t very dense – like flaxseed oil and flaxseeds, walnuts, and chia seeds are less than a quarter of the density of Omega 3 eggs, yogurt, cheese, milk, etc. You’re really looking for alpha-linolenic acid short chain Omega-3 fatty acid. But you also need long chain fatty acids like DHA and EPA and those are even more rare in nature with the exception of algae.

For Vitamin A, this is where the greens and colored vegetables really help you out. The more raw the better because cooking reduces the effectiveness of the vitamin. Everything form Kale, Spinach, Collard Greens, Carrots are good sources.

Being a vegetarian is not as easy as it sounds. The media is full of stories about people who eventually developed health problems and returned to meat. Managing a vegan diet is even trickier. Unless you can read and study and take course on preparing food to manage the nutrients deficiencies in these diets, you’ll find your health declining over time for lack of the above micro-nutrients.

Motivations often determine what’s possible for each person. For instance, if the motivation is to show compassion for animals then nutritional deficiencies are place up against a moral dilemma. If recovering from health problems is the motivation, then finding a diet that actually does improve health over time was the imperative to start with.

Many people are suffering from diets that primarily source carbohydrates for energy. Carbs turn to sugar and glucose is converted to energy. But that’s not how the human body was designed. Cows don’t eat corn, and humans were never built to eat carbohydrates. The environment that God placed us into didn’t have carbohydrates in abundance – except for maybe an apple.

We were placed on the plains by design with lots of game and no farming – no grains, no fruit except very seasonal, and surrounded by greens. The human body was designed to use fat for nutrition and energy. Our body converts good fats (if you think, that’s all there was back when we roamed the plains) to energy and that energy works find for our brain and our organs while sugar/glucose does not.

So at the very least a vegetarian should be making plenty of room for oils such as olive oil, flaxseed oil, and coconut oil.

You might say, if I give up both what’s left to eat? Plenty.

If you have the mildest sensitivity to grains then you might find you’re also intolerant to dairy.

Here an article that covers this subject well from Dr. Osborne. Read Here.

Your symptoms for grains including gluten might be very mild – slight difficulties digesting foods eaten with bread or grains, slight gas or bloating, some heartburn or indigestion. It might be so mild you ignore it or take some enzymes. Slight damage to the intentional walls and slight permeability often leak just enough of the gluten molecules into the blood stream to cause a very mild sensitivity at first, and then each year it gets a little worse until you can’t ignore it.

Meanwhile, even if you aren’t sensitive to dairy, you need to know what’s in modern milk that wasn’t just 20 years ago including hormones, antibiotics, toxins, and GMOs.

Read the article and look at some of the resources that will help you educate yourself on this important topic.

Lately there have been a lot more articles presenting cures for not only arthritis but many other chronic diseases. It’s hard to ignore articles like this one. READ ARTICLE.

This women experienced miraculous pain reduction, as well as full range of motion in hands, legs, and shoulders from taking Turmeric.

And nothing against Turmeric – my experience is that it’s a super anti-inflammatory and has very few side affects if any.

But this article is about people selling you vitamin and herbals supplements and doing so very effectively while you never notice that you haven’t gotten to the root cause of your illness. Yes, arthritis as well as many other debilitating diseases are curable if you determine the root cause of the inflammation that’s causing them.

Turmeric will reduce inflammation – that a fact. But will it uncover the reason for the inflammation in the first place? Probably not. So just as the lady in this article found, if you stop taking Turmeric, within a couple of weeks your symptoms will come back.

That’s because there is something else causing your inflammation and the Turmeric is simply fighting it, covering it up, or otherwise masking the problem. NO PAIN? I’M CURED!

Inflammation can be caused by a lot of different factors including environmental – the air we breath and the water we drink, the foods we eat, and even the amount of stress and lack of sleep we experience. Many doctors and scientists call these “lifestyle” causes and it’s true that we do have some choice over some of that.

But why do we stop when the pain goes away? Why don’t we keep going to find out what is really causing the pain and swelling then cure that cause? Perhaps part of the problem is that our healthcare system doesn’t want to find root causes – it too expensive and the system doesn’t have time or the tools to look for root causes of illness. Perhaps doctors have just been trained improperly to diagnose and prescribe. Perhaps we’re lazy and can’t afford to keep up the search. Perhaps we don’t believe that chronic diseases like arthritis are curable.

Functional Medicine is a new discipline centered around finding the root causes and eliminating those. So if you come to a functional medicine practitioner with arthritis, he or she will do some testing and extensive analysis to see if you’re allergic to anything, see if perhaps your environment has toxins you don’t know about, and see if your body can provide any clues as to what is causing the problem at a root cause level.

Just as important, a Functional Medicine Practitioner has to convince you that whatever you have – even Cancer or Diabetes – is curable and can be reduced or eliminated altogether. It’s sometimes harder for someone to allow themselves to have hope and face the potential disappointment but which is more painful – a life with arthritis or a month of disappointment because you kept looking for a cause?

Time to learn more about the choices you’re making – and rethink your food sources. If you suffer from even mild indigestion, sinus congestion, occasional headaches, muscles pains or even more severe symptoms, you need to recognize what Roundup or Glyphosate and GMO products are contributing to your health long before the build up becomes too much for your body to handle and you wake up with something a lot more serious. The key phrase here is – WAKE UP! Roundup and GMOs would be doing your health serious harm and dismantle it brick by brick so slowly that you’ve hardly even noticed or you think it’s aging. It’s not.

GMOs or Genetically Modified Organisms were developed to be resistive to chemicals like Roundup or Glyphosate. Glyphosate is a broad spectrum chelator and as such it is also a broad spectrum antibiotic. GMO seeds have been engineered to resist the effects of Glyphosate – GMO plants don’t chelate as quickly while regular plants that are not resistant will die quickly when exposed to Glyphosate. And Glyphosate gets into the groundwater, into our rivers, and shows up on almost any blood test run on anyone including infants – whether living close to a farm or not.

GMOs are found in crops like corn – about 80% of US corn crops are GMO. The same for Soy and all kinds of grains.

GMO and Your Gut

What happens when this GMO grains including corn or soy products find their way into your gut? There is a good chance you have a mild to moderate sensitivity or even allergy to GMO products – you will notice it associated with corn or grain, flour, bread products, etc.

When products or foods interfere with your gut you don’t digest your foods very well and you don’t get the vitamins you should from what you eat.

GMOs can also affect your gut/blood barrier and help develop “leaky gut syndrome” which allows molecules of partially digested foods to penetrate into your blood stream causing additional allergies to foods. Maybe at first you were a little sensitive to some foods but then over time it gets worse.

Your immune system is located in your gut. When you send foreign materials or unrecognizable things into your gut, you risk affecting your immune system. This is also where most of the hormones are produced that are used by your brain.

Glyphosate and Your Gut

As if the GMOs weren’t enough, the same foods are likely to bring this killer into your gut where it acts as a broad-spectrum antibiotic and kills all your good bacteria leaving you with bad bacteria as dominate and lots of bad things happening – more inflammation, more pain, more brain fog and deterioration, and more of what we generally cal aging.

What To Do

Do more reading and research and learn more about Glyphosate, Roundup, and GMOs. Find out which foods you eat probably have those in them.

Find alternatives to what you eat now – not only organic but GMO-free will also help you stay away from these slow killers.

Consider how you could go completely grain-free. Even as a test it would help you evaluate just how many symptoms you have from something you know is not good for you.

If you can go to a small local farmer, just ask them what they spray if anything and where they get seeds. They know what you want and generally won’t lie about how they raise food. They don’t have to be certified to be organic – it’s too expensive for small local farmers to do that anyway but if you look at where they raise your food, there’s a good chance you’re find what you want either there or at a local Farmer’s market where they only sell small local farm product.

Plenty of people have believed for a long time that the body will heal itself and mostly they have received the scorn and ridicule of the other 99% of us. You only have to look around – if someone gets diagnosed with cancel and ignore the advice, they generally die. I mean what other evidence do you need? There was never much scientific evidence that the body heals itself naturally.

But now there is a growing number of peer-reviewed studies that fly in the face of this belief.

And I’ll give just two brief illustrations.

It appears that your body was designed to generate its own vitamin D. Vitamin D is so important to natural health that your standard blood tests almost always include an assessment of your vitamin D levels.

Well your body was designed to produce its own vitamin D. All you need is sunlight. The layers of the skin include a cholesterol-like substance that is capable of converting the sunlight to vitamin D. Because we spend so much time indoors and insist on being clothed most of the time, our civilized ways deprive us of most of our vitamin D production and we end up having to supplement to keep our supply up.

But other process in our bodies – one that produces COQ10, an enzyme that activates many good gene sequences and results in reducing inflammation naturally – also uses direct sunlight. It seems when we eat lots of green leafy vegetables, our body digests that, derives chlorophyl, and circulates that through our bloods stream. The ultra-violet rays travel right through out clothes and our skin too, and activate that chlorophyl just like it does with plants and produces the COQ10 that we needs.

As more and more scientific studies are produced, I think we’re going to find that almost everything the body needs was magically designed into us long ago by someone a lot smarter than we are.

How much do you really know about the messages you read on food labels? I thought i knew a lot and only got 7 out of 12 correct.

Take the quiz here.

Conventional medical treatment for high blood pressure (hypertension) is typically based on prescribing medications.  There are a number of different types of medications, but the most commonly used types are diuretics (water pills), and ACE inhibitors. There is no place in traditional medical practice to lower blood pressure naturally.

Blood Pressure Medications induce vitamin and mineral deficiencies…these deficiencies can cause high blood pressure.

The problem with this approach is that it does not address the actually root cause of the elevation in blood pressure.  Additionally, long term use of blood pressure medications induce deficiencies of zinc, B-Vitamins, CoQ10, calcium, magnesium, and potassium.  Long term presence of these deficiencies can actually cause high blood pressure.  Therefore it can be said that the long term medical treatment for high blood pressure actually promotes elevated blood pressure!

Read the entire article here.

Is there a relationship between root canals and cancer? What about other chronic diseases?

Turns out it may take 20-30 years before we begin to realize the pervasive effects of this silent source of seriously bad toxins.

It seems that when you seal of a tooth completely, the underlying structure can still support the growth of anaerobic bacteria that can produce toxins worse than anything we can pick up on our own.

What this video by Dr. Mercola and decide whether you should be taking action on your root canals before it’s too late.