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torstai 13. lokakuuta 2016

What do Sugar, Trans Fat, and Vaccines Have in Common?

What do Sugar, Trans Fat, and Vaccines Have in Common?




Far too many are still swooned by false promises from people
with initials like "Dr." and "CEO" in front of their names. 
I grew up in the 1960s, inundated by commercials for margarines made from hydrogenated vegetable oils that “promised” those margarines would keep my cholesterol levels low and protect me from heart disease.
Yet in 2015, nearly 50 years later, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence of the harm they do, especially to the circulatory system and the heart, the Food and Drug Administration announced that artificial trans fats of the very sort that made up a good percentage of those margarines were no longer “generally recognized as safe,” and food manufacturers would have three years to remove these substances from their products altogether.

How did this happen? How could we get the science so wrong that it was
actually backward, and how did it take us 50 years to figure it out?
On September 12, 2016, The New York Times published a very illuminating
article by Anahad O’Connor entitled “How the Sugar Industry Shifted the
Blame to Fat
.” According to O’Connor,

The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.

The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease
, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.
They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA Internal Medicine paper. [emphases mine]

 As you may imagine from my past writings, I am not the least bit surprised that the sugar industry cynically and deliberately attempted to shape the science of nutrition and heart disease, nor even that their attempt to “derail the discussion about sugar” was so wildly successful for so long. What I do find shocking, however, is just how little money and how few people it took to completely divert the mainstream scientific understanding on the subject for more than 50 years, to the point where many conscientious cardiologists, as well as the American Heart Association, are still advocating low-fat/low-saturated-fat diets, while only recently acknowledging that sugar even plays a role. According to the article,

The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat. [emphasis mine]

A mere $50,000 in today’s dollars – not even a year’s salary for one
scientist?
That’s all it took to get
 three Harvard scientists to completely eschew
scientific integrity and deliberately promulgate incorrect ideas that not
only “derailed the discussion” on nutrition and heart disease, but were
also directly responsible for destroying the health of generations of
Americans?
 


Way to go, Sugar Association!
High five! Even Big Tobacco can’t compete with that kind of bang for the buck.
One of the major objections people have when I tell them that our current vaccine schedule is ruining the health of our children (just as supposedly “heart-healthy” foods ruined the health of adults) is that it can’t be true because, if it were true, it would require a conspiracy on an international scale of such size and complexity that it would defy credulity. I always agree a conspiracy such as they describe, where very many people (including your garden-variety pediatrician) all know the truth and collude to delude the public, would defy credulity.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “Three people may keep a secret if two of them are
dead.” But is that sort of conspiracy truly necessary to create the outcome we’re seeing where up is down, and unhealthy is healthy?
I’ve never thought so. In fact, I’ve been saying for a long time that it doesn’t
require some huge, complex conspiracy, involving everyone at a couple of
government agencies, six major manufacturers, pediatricians’ offices all over the world, mainstream media reporters, and research labs at major universities, to achieve an entrenched backward understanding of the health implications of a one-size-fits-all, shoot-‘em-up vaccine schedule. And this New York Times article is the proof.


All that’s required are the following four elements:

1) Some individuals (not very many as it turns out) who put profit
before people:
 As we can see in the Sugar Association documents, our sugar
execs and Harvard researchers fit the bill perfectly. These people consciously and deliberately set out to misinform the scientific
community, the medical community, and the general public because
it was in their monetary interest to do so.
 And, regrettably, such people
abound in a society (like ours) which regards profit as its highest good.

How hard is it to imagine that vaccine manufacturers could and would
(in a heartbeat) do the exact same thing for a business sector that currently
brings in about 
$40 billion a year and is expected to be a major source of growth?
For a prize that big wouldn’t they be willing to throw around millions if it got
them what they wanted? What if I told you that back in 1986, pharmaceutical
companies were threatening to get out of the vaccine business altogether?
They were getting walloped by the press and in courtrooms all over the
country
 because so many children’s lives were destroyed by DPT vaccines,
and they told the U.S. government they were done unless they were absolved
them of all monetary responsibility for harm caused by their products.

What if I told you that Congress obliged and did remove financial liability with
the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and – shockingly – the defunct
vaccine industry was suddenly a gold mine.

In 1986, the average American kid got DPT, MMR, and polio vaccines, and
vaccine manufacturers were supposedly going broke from damages.
Today’s average kid gets hepatitis B, rotavirus, DTaP, Hib, pneumococcal, polio,
 influenza, MMR, varicella, hepatitis A, HPV, and meningococcal vaccines, with
many more anticipated, and the vaccine manufacturers are pulling money in
hand over fist, not paying a cent in damages, despite the fact that so many
more children are getting hurt.

2) True Believers who ignore the evidence in front of their faces.
Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how many people actually read, much
less critically, the review study these Harvard guys wrote and/or the studies
it was based on? I’d be willing to bet it was precious few. But many, many
heard the headlines and believed the study’s conclusions could be
taken at face value, even though they saw patients every day who defied its predictions.

From the perspective of the True Believer, these patients were either “lying,”
“deluded,” or “outliers” because “everybody knows” diets high in fat and saturated fat would clog your arteries and stop your heart. From reading way too many so-called science blogs in the last decade that do exactly the same thing these Harvard researchers did
– promote conclusions that are not supported by the scientific research and directly contradict the clinical data at hand – and noting that these conclusions go completely unquestioned by the vast majority of readers (who, ironically, tend to call themselves “skeptics”), who then turn around and ridicule anyone who actually doesquestion the conclusions,
I can attest that these people are everywhere.

And while being duped themselves, they are often utterly, if amusingly, convinced of their own intellectual superiority.
As a matter of fact, this phenomenon is so widely known and understood that it is enshrined in a fairy tale. In The Emperor’s New Clothes, a couple of con men convince an emperor to hire them to make him a fabulous new wardrobe. 


He does so only to be provided with . . . nothing. That “nothing” however is
talked up so well that all the lords and ladies of the land ignore the evidence
of their own eyes and convince themselves that their naked emperor is instead
sumptuously attired, until a child – their “intellectual inferior” – points out the
obvious, that the emperor is starkers. There are always truth-tellers in society.
When the “lords and ladies of the land” are ready to hear truth has much less to do with who is saying it or how it is said than how soon they exhaust their own ability to maintain cognitive dissonance and are finally ready to acknowledge what has been staring them in the face all along. For some, it happens early because they are less invested in the illusion. Others will stubbornly refuse to see The Matrix, continuing to invest all their energy in the illusion until it kills them.

3) People who have figured out at least some part of the truth, but keep quiet out of the need to preserve their incomes and/or their careers.

As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Is it really credible that all the lords and ladies of the land can convince themselves that the emperor is wearing the ultimate designer outfit, despite the fact that he is so obviously naked? Surely not. There are many concrete thinkers among us who just don’t have that much imagination. So why don’t even one or two of them speak out? Chances are good they have or desire status, power, and position that are directly dependent upon staying in the good graces of the emperor. Psychological tests have repeatedly shown that when even marginal status is on the line, many will fall in with the crowd, and even more will do so if the task is somewhat difficult or involves a judgment call.
The film The Big Short, about the mortgage-backed securities debacle that led (or should have led), to the demise of a number of “important” banking institutions, contains a few very clear examples of this phenomenon. In the first example, one of the main characters, Mark Baum played by Steve Carrell, becomes convinced that the mortgage-backed securities market is based on fraud: the mortgages that underlie the securities are defaulting in large numbers and yet, illogically, the securities’ ratings do not drop. He goes to see the woman at Moody’s Investor Service (a supposedly independent organization that rates the quality of investment vehicles) who is responsible for the rating he’s interested in and asks her how such a situation is possible. 
She defends her actions by saying that if she doesn’t give the banks what they want, they’ll just go across the street to Standard & Poor’s and get it there. 

The second example happens when Baum takes the story to a journalist he respects who absolutely understands what he has been told and the gravity of it, but refuses to print it because he’s taken a long time to cultivate his industry sources and he doesn’t want to piss them off. After all, his wife is going to have a baby and he needs to keep his job. He asks, “What am I supposed to do? Write a piece called ‘We’re all fucked?’” As it turned out, when the housing bubble collapsed shortly thereafter, demolishing the savings and financial holdings of many, many people with it, that would have been entirely appropriate.

4) People at government agencies willing to put industry interests before the interests of the public. This element is necessary to allow for true message control, but is also inevitable in the absence of strict and enforced conflict-of-interest rules. After all, government agencies are populated with people, most of whom when left to their own devices will fall into one of the previous three categories. In our Sugar Association example, we find that one of the Harvard scientists, D. Mark Hegsted, went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where in 1977 he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines. Awesome, huh? Talk about message control! As far as the article indicates, he wasn’t even being paid by the Sugar Association anymore, but he could hardly admit that his own work was fraudulent, could he?
In The Big Short, we get a similar glimpse of how conflicts of interest at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the watchdog agency that is supposed to be watching out for taxpayers’ interests, kept the agency from protecting consumers. One of Baum’s crew talks to his cousin, who works at the SEC, while at a conference in Vegas. The cousin confesses they aren’t doing much investigation at all since their budget was cut and she is in Vegas on her own dime to float her resume with a few investment banks. When her cousin is shocked by the conflict of interest inherent in such actions, she tells him there are no rules against it and it happens all the time. How could an SEC investigation of Goldman Sachs have any sort of integrity, if the person performing the investigation is free to seek a job with Goldman Sachs? Answer: it can’t. When it comes to vaccines, similar conflicts of interest are rampant at the CDC. Just a couple of examples: Julie Gerberding, head of the CDC when it recommended three doses of Gardasil for all teenaged girls and when it performed the studies that originally “exonerated” vaccines, especially the MMR, in the development of autism, went on to head the vaccine division of Merck, the maker of the MMR and Gardasil (where she made a heck of a lot more than $50,000). 
Dr. Paul Offit, the developer of a rotavirus vaccine, sat on a committee where he voted to recommend his own vaccine be added to the infant schedule. He too made a heck of a lot more than $50,000.

Corruption at the CDC is so widespread that it isn’t hard to find incontrovertible evidence (verified by Freedom of Information Act requests) that they are playing fast and loose with science. The Verstraeten study, that supposedly gets mercury off the hook in the etiology of autism, actually did the exact opposite before the data was massaged four separate times to make a strong dose-dependent relationship go away. Nearly three years ago, a senior scientist at the CDC, Dr. William Thompson, called Dr. Brian Hooker, an autism dad and advocate, and told him that he’d been tortured by guilt for nearly a decade because there were a number of irregularities with an MMR study published in 2004.
Thompson told Hooker exactly which data to request to prove those irregularities (i.e., research fraud of the same sort perpetrated by the Harvard researchers who’d been paid by the Sugar Association), data that Thompson’s co-authors literally threw away. According to Thompson, the CDC had compromised its own research on the subject for over a decade, and it had gotten to the point where Congress should just take the data and give it to an independent organization to analyze because the CDC can’t be trusted. In addition, many of the studies they paid for on vaccines and autism were coordinated by Poul Thorsen, a Danish researcher who is now wanted by the U.S. government for fraud.
You might think that the CDC might be concerned about a researcher who had evidently had no scruples about defrauding the government to the tune of over a million dollars, but not only does the CDC (and U.S. government) have so little concern about the actions of a man who would commit such fraud that they never called any of his studies into question, the man is still happily publishing scientific research in Denmark, apparently completely unconcerned about the possibility of extradition to stand trial.
Like so many other long-term injustices, I’m delighted that this evidence of the collusion between the sugar industry and Harvard researchers that has clouded the science of nutrition for so long is finally seeing the light of day. But it would have been so much better for the general public if this information had been in the mainstream media, 20, 30, or even 50 years ago, wouldn’t it?

The interesting thing to me is that the health information (if not the corruption angle) has been available to the public for quite a while. There have been real scientists doing real work all along, but only a small number of people were paying any attention at all, and they were labeled “quacks” by mainstream medicine because they challenged what “everybody knows.” I went to a doctor 29 years ago who put me on a low-sugar/low-carb hypoglycemia diet to lower my cholesterol (280 at the start). I was told it was fine to keep eating butter and egg yolks. I thought she was crazy, but I followed that advice for a month. My cholesterol dropped like a hot rock. I was shocked.
Anyone know someone whose cholesterol dropped like that with a low-saturated-fat diet? Yeah, didn’t think so. And don’t even get me started on all the weight my friends gained while on low-fat diets.

Guess what happened to that doctor? Her license to practice medicine was revoked.

Clearly, she, and anyone else paying attention to the evidence right in front of their faces (the emperor’s “free willy,” so to speak), could figure out the truth long before those clinging to the imaginary ideal of “scientific consensus.” Turns out it doesn’t require super brains to see the truth. It just requires curiosity, honesty, and bravery, three things that are not all that common unfortunately. This stuff isn’t true because the New York Times finally took notice and gave its stamp of approval. It was true all along, and good, curious, honest, and brave people lost their careers fighting for that truth and the right to help people get well.

If you’re thinking oh, thank God that’s over, think again. Industry forces are still labeling conscientious physicians and researchers who are brave enough to counter their lies with the truth, who want to help you get and stay well, as “quacks.” When Vioxx, a popular Merck painkiller, was killing a ridiculous number of the people who took it, what did Merck do? They attacked the doctors who raised questions as to its safety. Of course, the doctors were right, and Merck ended up paying over $6 billion in fines and settlements. But Merck made over $11 billion on Vioxx before it was withdrawn from the market, making the $6 billion a mere hand slap for the unethical behavior that cost the lives of many. And right now in California, we are seeing a popular physician, Dr. Robert Sears, who is an acknowledged expert on the subject of vaccines (he literally wrote the book), being investigated for writing a medical exemption for one of his patients. Despite the fact that he actually vaccinates kids every day, he represents enough of a threat that vaccine manufacturers would dearly love to get his medical license revoked.
Vaccines are by no means the only area where we can see the same sort of disconnect between reality and what we’re told by mainstream information sources. There are reputable scientists telling us that glyphosate, GMOs, fluoride, ultrasounds, aluminum, C-sections and even Tylenol present unacknowledged health hazards that officials and other scientists deny with the bureaucratic equivalent of “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” while at the same time ignoring the fact that people are getting sicker by virtually every standard, even as they obsessively follow official recommendations.
As my 10-year-old son said this morning, “The truth tends to come out, no matter how many dollar bills you throw on top of it.” (I was impressed with his profundity, but he was pretty sure he’d read it somewhere. If anyone knows where it came from, let me know.) The real question is when will the truth come out? Will it take another 50 years? I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m pretty sure my heart can’t take hearing about many more children who received nine vaccines in a day and either went to the hospital that night with their brains on fire or were found dead in their cribs the next morning. And how many people in the last 50 years had their lives cut short or their health trashed because they took the bogus messaging about saturated fats and sugar to heart – literally? Do we really have to wait another 50 years before we see the folly of what we’re doing now and stop it? Or can we use the example that’s right in front of our noses to finally get enough people talking about the many naked emperors in our midst?
It will take the bravery of a great many people to “take this sinking boat and point it home,” but the more of us there are, the less brave each of us has to be. And, unlike Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, we may not still have time.
Think about it.

Ask yourself who you are listening to when it comes to your health or that of your children? And, more importantly, who are they listening to? Do they truly have your best interests at heart, or do they owe their allegiance to some random corporation that stands to make a killing from your pain and suffering? Are you being told that all is well, even as you and yours get sicker and sicker?

Then ask yourself, isn’t it time you joined the revolution?

http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/what-do-sugar-trans-fat-and-vaccines-have-common?page=2


Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of GreenMedInfo or its staff.

tiistai 14. kesäkuuta 2016

Milk Thistle Benefits: Detox the Liver & Boost Glutathione - Maarianohdake, maksan hyvinvointi ja puhdistaminen


Milk Thistle Benefits: Detox the Liver & Boost Glutathione


Milk thistle, a natural herb that has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, is commonly used to detoxify the body, especially the liver. 
Milk thistle (which has the scientific name Silybum marianum) is a weed that grows mostly in California (although it can be grown in many parts of the world with a warm climate) that’s commonly turned into extract or supplement form in order to reap its cell regenerating milk thistle benefits.
As an herb that’s considered a “hepatic, galactogogue, demulcent and cholagogue,” milk thistle is able to promote healthy digestive function by helping with enzyme formation, increasing bile production, decreasing inflammation and soothing the mucous membranes throughout the body.

How Milk Thistle Benefits Work


Milk thistle has actually been used for over 2,000 years. The plant is native to the Mediterranean region and a member of the Asteraceae plant family, which also includes other plants like sunflowers and daisies. The Greek physician and botanist Dioscorides was the first to describe milk thistle’s healing properties back in the year 40 A.D.
Milk thistle benefits work by drawing toxins out of the body that can cause a range of symptoms and diseases — including cancer development, high cholesteroldiabetes, kidney stones, gall bladder disorders, negative effects of chemotherapy, alcohol use, skin damage and much more. (1)
As an antioxidant, milk thistle is equally powerful to other important nutrients like vitamin E or vitamin C, which help fight free radical damage and slow the aging process that can lead to disease development. It specifically contains high levels of lipophilic extracts from the seeds of the plant, which act as bioflavanoid antioxidants that increase immunity and slow down oxidative stress. (2)
While it has many different benefits, milk thistle is most well-known for being a natural liver supporter and detoxifier. The liver constantly works hard to help defend us from toxins that are common in our everyday life, acting like a filter and removing harmful substances from the body.
Milk thistle is shown to decrease, or even reverse, damage to the liver that’s been caused by prescription medications, antibiotics, pollution, heavy metals and so on.
The seeds and leaves of the milk thistle plant can be consumed either in pill, powder, tincture, extract or tea form. The seeds can actually be eaten completely raw too, but usually people prefer to take a milk thistle extract or supplement in order to consume a higher dose and see bigger results.
Milk thistle gets its name from the milky-white liquid that runs off of the plant’s leaves when they’re crushed. The actual leaves of the plant also have a spotted white pattern that makes them look as if they’ve been dunked in milk.

Top 7 Milk Thistle Benefits
 
 
1. Liver Detoxification &

Health


As a liver support and liver aid, milk thistle is a powerful detoxifier. It helps rebuild liver cells while removing toxins from the body that are processed through the liver. Milk thistle is effective at naturally reversing the harmful effects of alcohol consumption, pesticides in our food supply, heavy metals in our water supply, pollution in the air that we breathe in and even poisons!
The liver is actually our largest internal organ and is responsible for performing a number of essential detoxifying functions. The condition of our blood throughout our whole body is mostly reliant on the health of our liver. As a “blood purifier,” the liver needs to actively clean the blood each and every day in order to support nearly every system within our body.
The liver helps remove harmful substances from our blood, aids in hormone production, detoxifies the body, releases glucose into the bloodstream in order to give our body steady energy and releases bile into our small intestine so fat can be absorbed from foods. You can see why poor liver function can create so many problems!
Milk thistle has been approved as a therapeutic treatment for various liver diseases, including fatty liver syndrome, damage from alcoholism, jaundice, psoriasis, hepatitis and others. (3)  

2. Helps Protect Against Cancer



Milk thistle seeds are a high source of the antioxidant flavonoid called silymarin. Silymarin is associated with decreasing the risk for cancer development by boosting the immune system, fighting DNA damage and reversing cancerous tumor growth.
In 2007, after reviewing numerous studies involving milk thistle therapeutic treatments, researchers at the University of Minnesota found that:
There is strong preclinical evidence for silymarin’s hepatoprotective and anticarcinogenic effects, including inhibition of cancer cell growth in human prostate, skin, breast, and cervical cells.” (4)
About 50 percent to 70 percent of the silymarin molecules present within milk thistle are the type called silybin. This antioxidant stimulates protein synthesis and changes the outside layer of healthy cells, keeping them protected from damage and mutation. It inhibits toxins from dwelling in the body; helps with cell renewal; and counteracts the harmful effects of pollutants, chemicals and heavy metals that can cause “free radical damage.”
Silymarin acts as a cancer protector because it’s “a toxin blockade agent” and inhibits binding of toxins to the cell membrane receptors, according to researchers at the University Magna Graecia Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine. (5)
 
3. Can Help Lower High Cholesterol


The U.S. National Library of Medicine anti-inflammatory, stopping 
inflammation, which is one of the main causes of heart disease
. Milk thistle benefits heart health and helps lower high cholesterol levels by lowering inflammation, cleaning the blood and preventing oxidative stress damage within the arteries.
considers milk thistle to be a powerful
Although more formal research is still needed, preliminary studies show that when syilymarin milk thistle extract is used in combination with other traditional treatment methods, total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL or “bad”) cholesterol and triglycerides levels all improve compared to levels before taking milk thistle. (6)
Something important to keep in mind, however, is that existing studies on possible heart benefits of milk thistle have only been done involving people with diabetes, who tend to have high cholesterol levels. So at this time it’s unclear if milk thistle has the same effects in other people and if it will be used to naturally lower cholesterol levels in the future.


4. May Help Control or Prevent Diabetes
According to National Institute of Health, there’s some compelling research showing that taking silymarin, the main chemical found in milk thistle, along with conventional treatments can help control symptoms of diabetes by helping with glycemic control. The valuable effect of antioxidants found in milk thistle has been reported in experimental and clinical studies to help decrease blood sugar levels in insulin-resistant patients.
One 2006 study conducted by the Department of Pharmacology at the Institute of Medicinal Plants found that when diabetic patients were given silymarin extract over four weeks, their fasting blood glucose and insulin levels improved significantly compared to patients receiving a placebo. (7)
This is likely true because the liver is partly responsible for regulating hormones, including the release of insulin into the bloodstream. Insulin is responsible for managing blood glucose (sugar) levels in the blood, which is especially important for those with diabetes.

5. Helps Prevent Gallstones

The liver is a major digestive organ, helping process nutrients and toxins that enter our body through foods, water and air. Because the liver and other digestive organs — like the gallbladder, pancreas, intestines and kidneys — work closely together to improve liver health so much, milk thistle is also able to help prevent gallstones and kidney stones.
 
6. Boosts Skin Health 
  Milk thistle benefits help support the endocrine and gastrointestinal systems by aiding in the production of bile and enzymes, on top of helping clean the blood. Milk thistle can help purify the body of metabolic waste, thereby regulating the function of the gallbladder, in addition to the kidneys and spleen.
Studies show that phytochemicals, like those found in silymarin of milk thistle, are effective at inhibiting UV light-induced oxidative stress on the skin. Milk thistle is considered to be a potent inhibitor of UV-induced oxidative stress that can cause skin diseases like skin cancer. Research also suggests that applying silymarin found in milk thistle to the skin reduces skin damage caused by radiation treatment in patients who have had treatments for cancer. (8)

7. Has Anti-Aging Effects
In 2008, when researchers from the Department of Dermatology at the University of Alabama Birmingham compared the effects of strong UV light exposure on the skin of mice, mice who received milk thistle extract showed much less damage on the skin than the mice who did not receive milk thistle.

Because milk thistle’s antioxidants help prevent free radical damage throughout the body and remove pollutants and waste from the blood and digestive tract, it can actually slow the aging process. This is true on both the surface of your skin and also within your organs.
Milk thistle benefits can also reduce your risk for some of the most common and serious disorders that develop in adults as they age, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, kidney and liver damage, aged skin, and vision-related problems.
Milk thistle’s protective qualities of the skin make it great for reducing visible signs of aging, so consuming milk thistle can be an easy way to prevent skin cancer and skin damage, such as dark spots, wrinkles, lines and discoloration. (9) The same antioxidant properties make it useful for maintaining the health of your eyes, joints and muscles.


Milk Thistle and Glutathione
Silymarin, the active ingredient in milk thistle, is an antioxidant that can protect against depletion of glutathione, which is a “master antioxidant” that’s extremely useful at helping prevent disease formation. Glutathione is found naturally in the human body, as well as in some plants, mushrooms, fungus and algae.
Its biggest role is to help fight oxidative stress that leads to such diseases as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and neurodegenerative diseases.  It can help prevent damage to important cellular components caused by reactive oxygen species, such as free radicals.
One of the biggest milk thistle benefits is that it preserves glutathione. The modern American diet, pollution, toxins, medications, stress, trauma, aging, infections and radiation all work to deplete liver capabilities and also glutathione in the body. Milk thistle helps increase glutathione levels by improving liver detox functions. Milk thistle strengthens the liver cell walls, buffering them from invading toxins, and supports liver regeneration and glutathione formation.

Recommended Dosage of Milk Thistle

Because milk thistle is categorized as a supplement, rather than a drug, it’s not subject to the same oversight and quality control from the FDA that standard drugs are. The amount of active ingredients can vary widely depending on the different preparation methods used and the brand. Currently, there are several different compounds available on the market, all recommending different doses.
Dosing hasn’t been nationally standardized yet at this time, but most people do best consuming between 20-300 milligrams daily.
Supplement form:
  •  As a way to detoxify the body temporarily, the recommended daily intake of milk thistle is 150 milligrams, taken one to three times daily. This is a somewhat high dose that can act as a natural liver “detox.”
  • For ongoing use and liver support, take 50 to 150 milligrams daily.
Look for a high-quality product that’s between 50–150 milligrams of pure milk thistle extract per capsule so you can adjust the amount you are taking depending on your needs. And make sure to look for a company that sells highly potent extract labeled at least 80 percent pure milk thistle extract.

Tea form:
You can also try benefiting from milk thistle by consuming it in tea form. Many companies like Alvita, Traditional Medicinals and Celebration Herbals make milk thistle tea by steeping the leaves and seeds from the plant.
You can also grow your own milk thistle and make homemade tea if you’re up for harvesting the plants. Each small plant head contains about 190 seeds that can be used in various ways. If you purchase or grow a milk thistle plant, cut off the entire head and hand the plant upside down for about one week to draw out the seeds.
You can then crush the seeds and seep them along with the leaves to make tea, eat them raw or dry then into powder form. Keep the seeds and leaves in the freezer to make them last longer and retain their powerful nutrients.

Milk Thistle Side Effects

Milk thistle is considered safe and well-tolerated, with very few cases of side effects ever reported. The most common side effects aren’t serious and include gastrointestinal upset, such as a mild laxative effect. When taken within the recommended dose range, milk thistle is thought to be effective and mostly free of allergic reactions and interactions. (10)
One thing to note is that in certain situations, antioxidants like those found in milk thistle have been shown to possibly interfere with the efficacy of some cancer chemotherapy drugs by protecting cancer cells from cell death. This means that understanding appropriate doses and examining blood concentrations is important before milk thistle could be used as a true anti-cancer therapy.


REPOSTED from:
http://draxe.com/milk-thistle-benefits/

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