A Powerful Combination for Healing Chronic Lyme Disease Pain, Fatigue, and Mental Fog

 By Greg Lee
Co-founder of the Two Frogs Healing Center

Did you play hide and go seek as a child?
The kids in our neighborhood would hide in the most unusual places. Some of the other kids hid so well that I could never find them.

Lyme disease plays hide and seek too.
And it hides in places where antibiotics could never find it.

And if you can't find it, how can you eliminate it from your body?

Chronic Lyme disease can be very difficult to eliminate from the body
Lyme disease is caused by a spiral shaped bacteria called, Borrelia burgdorferi.
Spiral shaped bacteria are also referred to as spirochetes. Just like the kids that you could never find during hide and go seek, the Lyme bacteria burrows in hard to get to places in your body. Some experts say it can go into your nervous system, your brain, and in your joints.

Lyme disease can be very painful
You get this disease when an infected deer tick bites you and transmits the bacteria into your blood stream. You may have flu like symptoms and a bulls eye rash when you contract this bacteria. The main symptoms are joint pain, fatigue, and mental fogginess. People who have this infection for years report a loss of coordination and motor function because of the damage to their brain. Standard treatment for this infection is to take antibiotics. However they can’t always eliminate these bacteria from your body.

Antibiotics have difficulty finding Lyme in these places
Your joints are very difficult places for antibiotics to reach because of a lack of blood vessels. Your also have a barrier which prevents chemicals in the blood from entering the brain.

If antibiotics kill only some of the bacteria, then some of them will just remain hidden until the coast is clear. When this happens, people feel better at first. A few weeks later their old symptoms come right back. Not only can these bugs hide, they are impervious to antibiotics when they are in different life stages.

Lyme bacteria are harder to eliminate in their different life stages
Some antibiotics are effective only when the bacteria are in the spirochete stage. Lyme bacteria have been found to create a protective covering called a biofilm that protects it from antibiotics. Only one antibiotic is believed to kill the bacteria in this form. In theory, the bacteria will remain protected under their biofilm until conditions are more favorable. Even if you are on antibiotics for years, you can have bacteria lying dormant in your body.

If antibiotics can’t eliminate Lyme disease from your system, what else can help you?

These herbs appear to eliminate the Lyme bug
Some Lyme patients combine antibiotics with Chinese herbal medicine. There is a powerful combination of Chinese herbs that reduces joint pain, fatigue, and mental fog. As symptoms improve, these herbs are believed to reduce the Lyme bacteria in your joints, muscles and nervous system. These herbs have proven effective in clinical experiments with people with chronic Lyme disease. These herbs increase your chance of clearing chronic Lyme disease versus taking antibiotics alone.

Chinese herbs go where antibiotics cannot
This set of herbs can enter places like joints and the brain where antibiotics have difficulty entering into. There are certain herbs that deliver anti-Lyme herbs into the nervous system and into hard to access joints. This combination is more effective the longer you take the formula.

Cure rates as high as 97% in clinical studies of similar infections
Recent clinical studies in China have shown a rate of curing a spirochete infection called leptospirosis with Chinese herbs as high as 97%. This infection is similar to the Lyme bacteria. The longer you take these herbs, the greater are your chances of ridding Lyme disease from your body.

The herbal regimen for eliminating Lyme disease is a minimum of eight weeks
In order to catch any bacteria that are in an invulnerable stage, patients are put on herbs every day for at least eight weeks. This is to overlap the Lyme bacteria lifecycle which is approximately six weeks. There are six herbs that are the base formula for the regimen:

Anti-Spirochete Mixture (This herbal formula is originally published in an article by Dr. Subhuti Dharmananda titled, "LYME DISEASE: Treatment with Chinese Herbs.)

• Smilax
• Ching-hao
• Forsythia
• Hu-chang
• Andrographis
• Lonicera stem

Patients are encouraged to take their herbs three times a day to maintain a high level of potency in their system. Additional western herbs like Cats Claw help to increase your rate of success. There are other treatments that help Lyme patients to recover.

Detoxifying heavy metals and other toxins helps relieve fatigue
Many Lyme patients have been shown to have high levels of mercury and other metals and toxins. By eliminating these toxins along with treatment, you see a decrease in their fatigue and mental fogginess. Detoxification foot baths are very effective for removing these toxins. This also strengthens your immune system. Other treatments like acupuncture help too.

Joint pain and swelling get addressed with acupuncture
Acupuncture helps to decrease the pain and swelling in your joints. Many Lyme patients also have significant improvements in their range of motion. Other side effects of Lyme disease also get better. 

Treatment helps you to sleep better
Many Lyme patients suffer from insomnia due to pain and the infection disrupting their sleep patterns. As their infection is reduced, these patients naturally sleep better as their pain and fatigue decreases. Also, they feel healthier and happier when their body is not fighting against a disease it is struggling to kill. Changes in your diet can provide relief, too.

Eliminating dairy, wheat, and sugar starves the Lyme bacteria
These bacteria feed off of the nutrients in your system especially sugars in your blood stream. If you reduce or eliminate foods that raise your blood sugars like sweets, dairy, and carbohydrates, then the Lyme bugs have less to feed off of. You need a powerful strategy which works against the many defenses of these bacteria.

In order to find the hidden Lyme bugs, you need a comprehensive approach
Adding Chinese herbs, acupuncture, and detoxification to your Lyme treatment program greatly enhances the success of curing your infection for good. Modifying your diet helps to provide less food in your blood for these bugs. Just like someone who knows where all the hiding places are, Chinese herbs can help to eliminate those stubborn Lyme bacteria from your system.

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The Dangers of Soy

 

 By Eeka King (BA.H.ScAcu)

Many people believe they are doing a good thing for their health when they turn to Soy over Cow’s milk or as a protein option in a vegetarian/vegan diet. What you may not be aware of is that choosing to consume Soy may slowly be killing you. You may think…it's just a bean from a plant, right? So how bad could it really be? If you take the time to look into the actual science, then the answer is devastating. Thousands of studies link soy to malnutrition, digestive distress, immune system breakdown, thyroid dysfunction, cognitive decline, reproductive disorders and infertility- even cancer and heart disease.

Soy in very small and occasional doses it is not going to do you too much damage, but once you start ingesting an excessive amount of it, soy's evil side manifests. And it’s easy to overdose on soy and not even realise it. The more processed foods you’ve got in your pantry, the more soy you are eating. “Soy is a cheap source of protein for many packaged and processed foods, so if you are eating protein bars, cereals, bottled dressings, mayonnaise, vegan meat substitutes, and fast foods, you are probably consuming soy,” says Vance. You’d be surprised by how many different forms that it can come in — you'll be able to identify it on a label as soy oil, soy protein isolates, soy protein, soy lecithin, and textured vegetable protein (TVP), among others.

There is a widespread misconception that soy was consumed for many years by Asian cultures and because they are considered among the ‘most healthy’ race of people, if we consume soy now, we should all be fine. While this is true, there is a glaring difference between how ancient Asia prepared soy and how we do today. That key difference: fermenting the soy.

Un-fermented soybeans, what we mainly eat today, contain large quantities of natural toxins or “anti-nutrients”. Some of the most important to avoid are potent enzyme inhibitors that block the action of trypsin and other enzymes needed for protein digestion. These inhibitors are tightly folded proteins that do not deactivate during the cooking process. Without being deactivated, they have the ability to produce serious gastric distress, reduce protein digestion and chronic deficiencies in amino acid uptake. Several tests were done on animals that showed diets high in trypsin inhibitors cause enlargement and pathological conditions of the pancreas, including cancer.

The un-fermented consumption of soy creates an environment in the body that is unable to properly digest and break the protein in soy. This means the soy can become toxic within the body and create a series of adverse challenges. The Asian cultures consuming soy in the past knew that soy needed to first be fermented and so they did not consume it unless it was (Martino, 2013)

Another one of the primary reasons it would be wise for you to avoid soy is that more than 90% of soybeans grown in the US are genetically modified (GM). Since the introduction of genetically engineered foods in 1996, we've had an upsurge in low birth weight babies, infertility, and other problems in the States, and animal studies have shown devastating effects from genetically engineered soy including allergies, sterility, birth defects, and offspring death rates up to five times higher than normal. Soybean crops are also heavily sprayed with chemical herbicides, such glyphosate which a French team of researchers have found to be carcinogenic.

Here is a list of 10 dangers (compiled by the Western A. Price foundation) that comes with consuming un-fermented soy;

Soy Dangers Summarized 

1. High levels of phytic acid in soy reduce assimilation of calcium, magnesium, copper, iron and zinc. Phytic acid in soy is not neutralized by ordinary preparation methods such as soaking, sprouting and long, slow cooking. High phytate diets have caused growth problems in children.
2. Trypsin inhibitors in soy interfere with protein digestion and may cause pancreatic disorders. In test animals soy containing trypsin inhibitors caused stunted growth.
3. Soy phytoestrogens disrupt endocrine function and have the potential to cause infertility and to promote breast cancer in adult women.
4. Soy phytoestrogens are potent antithyroid agents that cause hypothyroidism and may cause thyroid cancer.
5. In infants, consumption of soy formula has been linked to autoimmune thyroid disease.
6. Vitamin B12 analogs in soy are not absorbed and actually increase the body’s requirement for B12
Soy foods increase the body’s requirement for vitamin D.
7. Fragile proteins are denatured during high temperature processing to make soy protein isolate and textured vegetable protein.
8. Processing of soy protein results in the formation of toxic lysinoalanine and highly carcinogenic nitrosamines.
9. Free glutamic acid or MSG, a potent neurotoxin, is formed during soy food processing and additional amounts are added to many soy foods.
10. Soy foods contain high levels of aluminum which is toxic to the nervous system and the kidneys.

Some facts on Soy Infant Formula: Birth Control Pills for Babies

Babies fed soy-based formula have 13,000 to 22,000 times more oestrogen compounds in their blood than babies fed milk-based formula. Infants exclusively fed soy formula receive the estrogenic equivalent of at least four birth control pills per day.
Male infants undergo a testosterone surge during the first few months of life, when testosterone levels may be as high as those of an adult male. During this period, baby boys are programmed to express male characteristics after puberty, not only in the development of their sexual organs and other masculinity traits, but also in setting patterns in the brain characteristic of male behaviour.
In animals, studies indicate that phytoestrogens in soy are powerful endocrine disrupters. Soy infant feeding, which floods the bloodstream with female hormones that inhibit testosterone, cannot be ignored as a possible cause of disrupted development patterns in boys, including learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder.
Male children exposed to DES, a synthetic oestrogen, had testes smaller than normal on maturation and infant marmoset monkeys fed soy isoflavones had a reduction in testosterone levels up to 70 % compared to milk-fed controls.
Almost 15% of white girls and 50% of African-Americans girls show signs of puberty, such as breast development and pubic hair, before the age of eight. Some girls are showing sexual development before the age of three. Premature development of girls has been linked to the use of soy formula and exposure to environmental oestrogen-mimickers such as PCBs and DDE.
Intake of phytoestrogens even at moderate levels during pregnancy can have adverse affects on the developing foetus and the timing of puberty later in life.

So what Soy products are good for you?

The only soy with health benefits is organic soy that has been properly fermented, and these are the only soy products I ever recommend consuming.

After a long fermentation process, the phytate and "anti-nutrient" levels of soybeans are reduced, and their beneficial properties become available to your digestive system.

The primary fermented soy products that can be consumed moderately are:

* Tempeh- a fermented soybean cake with a firm texture and nutty, mushroom-like flavour.

* Miso- a fermented soybean paste with a salty, buttery texture (commonly used in miso soup).

* Natto- fermented soybeans with a sticky texture and strong, cheese-like flavour.

* Soy sauce- traditionally made by fermenting soybeans, salt and enzymes. Be wary because many varieties on the market today are made artificially using a chemical process, so please check!

Please note that tofu is NOT on the list. Tofu is not fermented. Also BONSOY milk is the only soya milk made from fermented soybeans, however, I am not sure if I can recommend it as it was recoiled some years back due to excessive iodine levels (due to an ingredient- kombu) that caused thyroid problems in hundreds of people. It may be fine now? One big nature providing clue, which makes it very clear to me that soy, is not really meant for humans to eat, is the fact that soybeans are horrid on the palate. No normal person could eat them. That’s why all soymilks on the market are loaded with fillers, oils and other ingredients so you can get it down!

References

Daniel (2012) The whole soy story: the dark side of America’s favourite health food

Western A Price foundation- http://www.westonaprice.org/soy-alert/not-so-soy-healthy-for-the-heart

Dr Joseph Mercola- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/soy-health_b_1822466.html

Martino, 2013- http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/02/21/confused-about-soy-soy-dangers-summarized/

Organic Farmshare-Why Everybody Needs to Own a Local Organic Farm

Current conventional farming methods employ a host of practices and synthetic chemicals to produce our food at the cost of destroying the very source of that food: our soil and waterways. The impacts on our health from the long-term consumption of nutritionally depleted, chemically grown and processed food are also becoming increasingly evident.

Our soils are being propped up with fertilisers produced from fossil fuels. The food that is grown in these depleted and chemically laden soils comes nowhere near to providing the nutrients that we need for health, reproduction and longevity.

A massive 60% of our food costs goes directly into distribution and handling. In other words, $60 out of every $100 you spend on food goes on getting that food from the farm to your plate.

Organic Farm Share is a local food system that utilises regenerative and integrated farming practices, which return necessary nutrients back into the soil. This is achieved through organic farming, polyculture planting, the use of beneficial bacteria, animal integration, and localised compost systems.

Through Organic Farm Share’s unique and localised distribution system, food-miles and packaging are significantly reduced. Your food is brought directly to you from the farm ensuring fresher healthier food, a substantial financial saving, and regeneration of the environment.

Our farm is situated in Northern NSW 14km south of the Queensland border. Our organic farm will service owner-members in the Byron Bay, Gold Coast and Brisbane areas with our unique organic food delivery system.

Organic Farm Share blends a unique form of enterprise with the values of a co-operative. Taking back the control of our food supply and establishing regional food security can only be truly achieved through participation, or more specifically, ownership. If we own the business that owns the land where our food comes from, we are directly connected to our food supply, and many of the existing barriers to establishing a successful local food system are eliminated.

Participation and its benefits

We currently (1 August 2011) have 148 owner-members and as membership is limited we will close the first stage of our offer on 20 October this year.

Organic Farm Share, the first of its kind, is a publicly owned farm project with
the aim of ensuring food security for our community, the regeneration of land,
and positive financial returns to our owner-members.

Whilst there are numerous environmental, health and social benefits to
participating in Organic Farm Share there are also a number of personal ones.

By joining Organic Farm Share, you gain :

·         pride in ownership of a regenerative enterprise

·         partnership in an enterprise that contributes to the local economy and employment

·         a place you can visit, stay and enjoy with your family and other owners

·         a share that can appreciate in value

·         the convenience of buying your groceries from one place (one stop shopping)

·         a 5% - 7% rebate of all purchases annually & profit share

·         supply of a comprehensive variety of organic food at the best prices.

Where to from here

If you would like to know more, come along to one of our Kitchen Table
Talks. A list of them can be found on our website at :

www.organicfarmshare.com/whats-happening.html

If you have any questions please feel free to contact us in any of the following ways :

Telephone : 07 5630 3891 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting            07 5630 3891      end_of_the_skype_highlighting Email : hello@organicfarmshare.com