MCVitamins News

Your Nutritional Education Site

1. Adrenal Fatigue & What to Eat
2. The Science Behind Using Supplements for nerve damage
3. Health Myths and Legends – Are your vitamins doing you any good?
4. What are nutritional deficiencies and what do they do to your health?      

Adrenal Fatigue & What to Eat

Handling Fatigue; Helping your Adrenal Glands

Fatigue is one of the most common health complaints. 
  
Does this sound familiar? You find that they wake up tired, unable to think straight or get going without caffeine, you crave and eat high-carb foods and high carb snacks. Maybe you reach for energy drinks. You want to take a nap during the afternoon and then wind up staying up late because you’re too “awake” to sleep. The result, of course, is exhaustion. 
When you have daily stress from job or family and you add this type of stress, poor food, not sleeping, on a chronic basis, the tiny adrenal glands that moderate your stress response and balance the many other hormones in the body will suffer. Adrenal fatigue is what develops and your search for energy begins. 

As the adrenal glands become exhausted, you can end up with excess abdominal weight, decreased immunity, lack of coordination, irritability, poor sleep. Understanding this, you can prevent and reverse this exhaustion.  

What causes the exhaustion? 
  
The adrenals are the key. As the balancer of more than 50 hormones in the body, the adrenal glands have a big impact on your health. The adrenals are responsible for activating your “fight or flight” response. This response will shift energy away from digestion and towards action mode – your heart and skeletal muscles - by pumping adrenaline and cortisol into your bloodstream.
It is the cortisol that monitors your body’s other systems: protecting the body from stress by regulating blood pressure, normalizing blood sugar levels, helping to regulate the immune and inflammatory responses, and influencing mood, memory, and clarity of thought.   

Maybe this helps explain why, when your adrenal reserves are depleted, you might feel a little crazy, and your sleeping and eating habits suffer. The constant demand for stress hormones means the adrenals become depleted and ultimately exhausted. 
  
The adrenals also make numerous other hormones, including androgens and their precursors – testosterone and DHEA, and also estrogen and progesterone – which is why you adrenal glands come into play as women approach menopause. The body relies heavily upon the regulation of hormones at this time. When the ovaries stop producing estrogen, the adrenals are supposed to pick up the slack. But what if they are already exhausted. 

How do I help my adrenals? 
  
One of the best ways to start it to pay attention to the choices you make about food. Pay attention to what you eat, but when and how you eat. Small changes can really support better adrenal gland function and give you day long energy and a good night’s sleep. 

What food choices can make or break your adrenals? 
  
Stop reaching for food that provides quick energy – carbs (and sugar is a carb. Carbohydrates are actually long chains of sugar hooked together. Carbs break down to sugar in the body). At the end of the day as the body is entering a period of recovery, overeating and poor food choices can be easy to do.   
Good nutrition, well-timed meals and snacks, and sometimes a gluten-free diet can significantly relieve the strain on your adrenal glands.  

Timing your meals and snacks:

Never allow yourself to get too hungry. Low blood sugar by itself puts stress on your body and can tax your adrenals. Your body is in constant need of energy — even as you sleep. And the primary adrenal hormone cortisol serves as a moderator in making sure your blood sugar between meals, especially during the night, stays adequate. It does this by signaling to the liver to release its stored sugar, glycogen, when there isn’t food in the body. Long periods without food make the adrenals work harder as they must release more cortisol to keep your body functioning normally.   

So eating three nutritious meals and two to three snacks that are well timed throughout the day is one way to balance your blood sugar and lessen the adrenal burden. 
  
When you eat can also make a difference in supporting and restoring your adrenals. Cortisol has a natural cycle. Normally, it begins to rise around 6:00 AM and reaches its highest peak around 8:00 AM. Throughout the day cortisol gradually declines — with small upward bumps at meal times — in preparation for nighttime rest.

It’s ideal to work with this natural cycle to keep the tapering-off of levels as smooth as possible as the day progresses and to avoid dramatic ups and downs.

To do this, it helps to get the majority of your food in earlier in the day, and to eat an early dinner (by 5:00 or 6:00 PM). If it is difficult to eat early, at least try to make your evening meal the lightest one of the day. This will prevent a surge of cortisol from ramping up your night-time metabolic rate and disrupting your ability to fall or stay asleep. The “night-eating” habit is due to the appetite-stimulating effects of residual cortisol, and unfortunately, it only further disturbs our hormones.  

 
Keep in mind that cortisol will also rise a bit with exercise. Lighter activities, such as a walk after dinner or a bit of gentle stretching before, will not alter this natural tapering-off process. But to work in concert with your body’s natural cortisol cycle, more intense exercise is best planned for the morning.   
Not hungry in the morning? 
  
You’ve been told that breakfast is important, but you don’t feel hungry in the morning. Morning hunger can be dampened by the appetite-dulling effects of coricotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH) which begins to enter the blood stream first thing in the morning. Decreased liver function due to adrenal fatigue or a heavy toxic burden can also dampen morning hunger.   

So even if you don’t feel hungry, having a nutritious breakfast within an hour of rising – with protein – will provide not only energetic benefits to your metabolism but the coritisol levels will last throughout the day. Here are some other simple ways to gently support your body’s natural cortisol cycle: Eat breakfast by 8:00 AM or within an hour of getting up (earlier is better), to restore blood sugar levels after using glycogen stores at night. 

Try to eat lunch between 11:00 AM and 12:00 noon. Your morning meal can be used up quickly. 

Eat a nutritious snack between 2:00 and 3:00 PM to get you through the natural dip in cortisol around 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. 

Make an effort to eat dinner around 5:00 or 6:00 PM, and make this your lightest meal of the day. 

By timing your meals you can prevent dramatic dips in blood sugar, which will minimize cortisol output and will free up you adrenals to perform their function and give you sustained energy throughout the day. Life becomes more enjoyable when we have the energy we need. 
  
What to eat? 

We also need to think about what you eat. Most people with adrenal problems, will reach for foods that give them an instant burst of energy — foods like cookies, cakes, doughnuts, white bread or pasta. These foods contain refined sugar and flour, they are high in carbs (which is really just long chains of sugar molecules) that break down and allow a great surge of energy, but generally the surge is followed by an even greater dip in energy, causing you to feel worse.
Another problem with high-carb foods like these is that they often contain gluten, a protein that is found in many grains (including wheat, rye and barley, and oats) and frequently used as a food additive, too. Many people with adrenal fatigue are sensitive to gluten. For this reason, a gluten-free diet should be tried. Often people will report feeling much better when they get the gluten out of their diets. 
  
You might drink more coffee or soda throughout the day to stay awake. You may think it’s not affecting your sleep patterns, but research has linked higher caffeine intake to classic “night owl” behavior. (See our article on the caffeine). Caffeine can pick you up in the short term, but it can also over-stimulate the adrenals, which only compounds fatigue as it wears off.   
Eating meals and snacks that are made of fresh whole foods, preferably organic or locally grown, without colors, dyes, chemicals, preservatives or added hormones are best to strive for. Including some protein in all your meals and snacks (especially in the morning) will have a stabilizing effect on your blood sugar, which in turn can help you overcome caffeine and sugar cravings.) 
  
What else can you do? 

Read our article on Adrenal Exhaustion

The Science Behind Using Supplements for nerve damage.

There are many reasons for nerve damage - too much sugar in the blood, chemotherapy, some cholesterol drugs, injuries, etc. etc. etc.   The damage to the nerve cells create some common side effects of burning, numbness, tingling, sharp pains and cramps, etc. etc.     You can read about it here www.mcvitamins.com/neuropathy.htm

Not matter the cause of the nerve damage, the symptoms are similar and the supplements needed by the body to build healthy nerves.   But, where is the original science that supports this.   We could tell you success after success, but thought you might like to see the original clinical trials that came up with this.

In order to show this, I'm referring you to a website on the internet that publishes the trials done in the research.

I've given you the titles, but also the exact terms you need to put into the search bar on the website so you can view the original work done.  

Go to:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez

Findings:  Nerve Regeneration with Methylcobalamine

Search under:  Ultra-high dose methylcobalamin promotes nerve regeneration in experimental acrylamide neuropathy.

For: Methylcobalamine and Diabetic Neuropathy

Search under:  Clinical usefulness of intrathecal injection of methylcobalamin in patients with diabetic neuropathy.

For: Benfotiamine Slowing and Blocking Diabetic Complication and Retinopathy

Search under:  Benfotiamine blocks three major pathways of hyperglycemic damage and prevents experimental diabetic retinopathy.

For: Benfotiamine and Improvement in Nerve Conduction Velocity

Search under:  A benfotiamine-vitamin B combination in treatment of diabetic polyneuropathy.

Health Myths and Legends – Are your vitamins doing you any good?  

There are many myths and misconceptions that have been floating around for years and years.   People unknowingly spread this false information because they’ve heard others saying the same thing.   They have heard it in commercials and in other advertisements. It really get confusing because sometimes the so-called authorities are the ones spreading these untruths.   McVitamins is issuing a health issue “Health Myths and Legends” to help you understand.

Let’s clean up the myths.  

Myth #1 – Synthetic Vitamins will make you healthy

In an effort to protect themselves and their families from frightening and serious health problems, people are changing their diets and are taking herbs and supplements.  Why do they need vitamin supplements?  Due to the depletion and demineralization of topsoil, the contaminations of produce from pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, the over processing, enriching and preservation – foods just don’t have the same nutritional value they once had.  To get the same amount of iron that was available to Popeye in one can of spinach, today he would have to consume 65 cans.    An orange that once contained 50 mg of natural Vitamin C complex in 1950, now contains 5 mg.

We’ve all have gotten used to reading literature proclaiming the benefits of vitamins, deciding what is wrong with us and heading to the health food store to buy what we’ve decided we need   We often end up buying all kinds of supplements - but are we any healthier?   People are still fatigued, still overweight, still fighting the cholesterol battle, etc. etc. etc.

The body runs on vitamins, minerals, nutrients and oxygen just like your car runs on gas, water and oxygen.  But what happens if you put the wrong gas, or worse some other liquid, into your car?  Not only will it not work, it may damage the engine.  The same thing can happen when you put the wrong vitamins in your body.

We can get healthier if we understand what most vitamins today really are – they’re synthetic.  Let’s talk about synthetic vitamins

What are synthetic vitamins made of?   Let’s define some words:

Natural:  These are vitamins not tapered with and are the way they are in nature, not tapered with in any way that might change their molecular structure or biochemical actions.   This can also be called whole food supplements.

Crystalline – these are vitamins originally from food but treated with heat, caustic, high-powered solvents (such a s benzene or toluene) chemicals, and distillations to reduce them to a specific vitamin.

Synthetic – These are vitamins made in a laboratory that are chemically reconstructed versions of the crystalline vitamins from other known sources. Thiamine mononitrate (a synthetic vitamin labeled as B1), is made from coal.  It’s not “organic” just because it has carbon in its molecular structure.

One of the most perilous deceptions is the passing off of these phony, synthetic vitamins and saying that the body does not know the difference.   In the long run, we will compound our health problems by taking them.

Keep in mind that synthetic vitamins are not the vitamin available in foods, but synthesized (made in a laboratory) fractions (parts) of a vitamin complex, The analogy here is essentially the same as an automobile salesman handing you a wheel from a car and telling you the wheel is an automobile. 

In an example we look at vitamin C.  You can buy “vitamin C” that is called
”Ascorbic Acid”.  Ascorbic acid is only one small part of the vitamin C complex.  Vitamin C has enzymes, co-enzymes, antioxidants, trace elements, activators, and other unknown factors that enable the vitamin to go into the biochemical operation.  

In turn, the human physiology cannot properly utilize these synthetic fractions in the way that natural complexes work in the body and are essential to tissue repair and the sustenance of life.   

When a person starts taking a fraction of a vitamin – and has sufficient reserves in his body of all the other components of the vitamin to recombine and process, the person may experience some improvement for a time.  However when those reserves are drained, the vitamin will no longer benefit the person.  Thus, a person may feel an increase in energy for a short period of time, but if taken for an extended period of time, the effects will reverse.

When vitamins were first discovered, they were discovered in foods.  When foods were studied a lot was learned.  Studies that show that vitamins work use a food source nutrient.  In studies showing that vitamins don’t work, a synthetic was always used. 

Additionally, the body actually has to recognize what you are putting into your body as food.   Like the finicky cat, that looks at some new food offered it and says “what is that?”  You’re body does the same thing.  It doesn’t recognize the synthetic vitamins and often just sends it right back out of the body.

A synthetic vitamin fraction can only be utilized for a drug or pharmacological effect.   The effect of a drug is palliative - meaning a making or covering over of symptoms - it isn't curative.  The disease process remains unchanged or progressively gets worse for lack of proper attention.  

What is needed is vitamins that come from whole food, which comes along with all the co-factors present when you eat a food. 

Tissue and cell repair, or replacement, require the following to restore the approximately 24 billion cells that break down each day in the human body.   

·        A constant, uninterrupted nerve impulse supply

·        A constant, uninterrupted blood supply

·        All of the VITAMINS in a natural, complex form.

·        All of the minerals in an organic form in most instances

·        All of the trace elements essential to metabolism

·        All of the enzymes, coenzymes, and apoenzymes

·        All of the 22 or more amino acids from protein hydrolysis

·        A discontinuance of organic or inorganic poisons either inhaled or ingested in bad air, bad food and/or bad water.

This doesn’t happen using fractionated vitamins.

What is a natural vitamin or supplement?   It is a whole food supplement, made from food, not made in the laboratory.

For more information about the right type of vitamins go to http:www.mcvitamins.com 

What are nutritional deficiencies and what do they do to your health?    

A deficiency is basically a nutrient that your body does not have enough of to function properly.  

What if you forgot to put enough oil in you car?   Despite the fact that it was getting the air, gas, functioning spark plugs and good combustion, the car wouldn’t work properly.  Sure the piston would go up and down and the car would move forward – just like normal.  But soon the engine might run a little hot.  Down in the engine different things might start happening.  The rings around the piston that stopped oil from getting up into the combustion area might be giving way.  The normal straight camshaft might start to bend a little.   The engine just won’t work right. Perhaps the car will need a small repair, or maybe a major overhaul – or ignored the engine will just seize up and “die”. 

It’s the same with your body – except that you can’t just buy another engine and repairs made to a damaged body might not put things back together again.

Let’s look at some of the many varied things that can happen when you don’t put the needed nutrients into the body, and wind up with a deficiency.

Gingivitis is created when plague (sticky deposits of bacteria, mucus and food particles) adheres to the teeth, hardens and irritates the gum. The accumulation causes the gums to become infected and swollen. As the gums swell, pockets form between the gums and the teeth and act as a trap for more plague.  Irritated gums bleed and eventually start to recede.

This irritation can be fought by introducing Vitamin C, which fights the formation of plaque.  Now gingivitis, untreated, can progress to periodontal disease, which means loose teeth and false teeth.   Seems like it would be easier just to get enough C.   C would have fought the formation of plaque to begin with.

Does that sound too easy?  Remember in the fast food lifestyle that we live in, we need a Vitamin C to fight the many problems in that lifestyle – processed foods, polluted air, etc.  You need enough so that your gums get enough.  

Vitamin B12 comes from meat, eggs, fish and milk, but not everyone eats these and they do not eat enough to fight the depletion that happens from day to day living.   Alcohol, coffee, tobacco to name a few can also deplete the body of vitamin B12.

What happens when you have a deficiency of Vitamin B12?  It can bring about nerve degeneration.  Vitamin B12 supports the sheathing that protects nerve cells. Damage to the nerve sheathing can produce numbness, tingling and the pain. It’s called neuropathy.  Neuropathy can be a side effect of cancer treatments, certain medications, toxins, diabetes, and many other things.    And the funny part about it is that all reasons one can get neuropathy could have been prevented in the first place with the proper nutrients.   

We have all heard the problems from someone smoking, but even if you smoke, you can still take vitamins to compensate for the depletion of vitamins that it causes. 

There are a lot of problems that deficiency causes.  One of the reasons for the website is to help you understand those deficiencies and allow you to fix nutritional deficiencies and build good health. 

Remember when you build good health, disease tends to fade away.

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To Your Health

MCVitamins
www.mcvitamins.com 

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