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Welcome to:

"My Health Corner!"

Our eZine will arrive monthly to keep you apprised of a featured health topic, what is happening at the clinic, exciting and controversial health topics in the news, recipes, and more.

We hope that you gain a piece of information that is new that can directly benefit your personal health goals or others that you may come into contact with.

February is here and it is the month of Love. Love and the expression of our love to the people we hold most dear to us. Relationships with others and relationships with ourselves. Self-love, meeting our own needs, taking care of ourselves so that we can better be of service to those that we love and who depend on us.

Love is often expressed in the form of sweets; sweet treats in their many forms are a delectable metaphor for the sweetness of life. For some of us those sweet treats actually represent love. And we use them to comfort us when we are alone or feeling lonely. In this way we abuse those sweet treats and use them to our disadvantage. Many times it is not our body at all that craves the sugar but our hearts. An insatiable urge that is not easily quieted. This is especially true with overeating at night.

If you find yourself looking longingly into the freezer for the ice cream just a little too often I ask that you propose the question, “what place in my life needs a little sweetness and how do I sweeten it? What is the dessert that my heart longs for and how can I fulfill that need?” Moving through February with this in mind, how can we come from that place of self-love and nourish our hearts with what they truly need?

Think about it, make a list, and act upon it.

With Much Respect,

Dr. Andrea Purcell, N.D.
Costa Mesa, CA 92627
Telephone (949) 722-6797

Your Immune Health Depends on You!

In our featured article this month there is a scientific discussion on Grandma’s old remedy of humidifying the air with a boiling teapot and how by increasing the moisture content of the air we can decrease our susceptibility to the influenza virus. The article goes on to say that the air is drier in the winter, which accounts for the rise in influenza viral infections. Dry air increases the life of the influenza virus, which allows it to be transmitted more easily.

Many in home heating systems use forced air. Forced air is incredibly drying and it is a good idea to use a humidifier or lubricate the membranes of your nasal passages with an oil-based salve before bed. I prefer Herbal Ed’s healing salve made by Herb Pharm.

Incidentally, this is also why many patients will become ill after a long airplane flight. Breathing the re-circulated dry air of all the passengers on the plane causes viruses to remain alive longer and be pushed through the circulatory vents aboard the aircraft thus having them literally blown into our mucus membranes of our nasal passages, throats, and lungs. One of the best things you can do to keep your immune system strong on flights longer than 3 hours is to stay hydrated. Drink a minimum of 1 liter of water before you even get on the plane and an additional 16 ounces while you are in the air and even more on longer trips. Drinking water hydrates your mucous membranes and prevents them from drying out and getting cracked. Keeping them moist prevents viruses from penetrating those barriers. The changes in altitude are dehydrating so it is important to make up for the lack of moisture by drinking.

Sugar, sugar is everywhere in our lives it is readily available for breakfast, at work, school, church, super bowl parties, and every holiday. It is used as an expression of love and reward by many. It contains absolutely no nutrition other than sugar itself. The bittersweet reality is that it is the most widely abused drug in our culture. Not only do we use it to substitute for the lack of sweetness in other areas of our lives but also it has a dramatic impact on our immune systems.

Eating sugar in any form lowers our immune function for up to six hours. The typical American is eating sugar periodically throughout the day. It is disguised in our cereal, coffee drinks and other beverages, peanut butter, salad dressings, and of course the sweet treats. This means that our immune systems are constantly being suppressed by sugar.

Let me ask you this, would you go stand out side in 30-degree weather in your underwear? I wouldn’t. You have no protection from the elements. This is exactly what you are doing to your immune system when you eat sugar. You are stripping your body of its defense mechanisms to combat infection.A low immune system cannot possible fight off an infectious organism coming your way. Combine this with dried out mucous membranes and we have a recipe for infection.

A lowered immune system sets us up for all types of chronic infections: yeast, throat, respiratory, sinusitis, head, nose, ear, and the flu. Sugar is not your friend, I don’t care if you were led to believe that it was but now you know the facts. I know it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth just like when you were a kid and you saw the tin of Hershey’s coca powder in the cabinet and you got yourself a big spoon of it and then you took a big lick and your taste buds went into shock because it was disgustingly bitter. After the shock you couldn’t believe they had the nerve to call it Hershey’s. But here’s the point, now you know and it has been brought to your conscious mind, you will not go about your life from this point on unconsciously eating sugar.

The beautiful thing about nature is that it has provided many natural substances to assist us in re-building our immune systems. Not only that but there are so many virus fighting herbs found in nature that it is the best way to fight a viral infection including the flu.

Some of my favorites for adults are high dose Vitamin C 3,000-6,000mg/day, andrographis, olive leaf extract, licorice, zinc, high dose vitamin A in 25,000iu short term, homeopathic oscillococcinum, Anti-viral herb combinations like Gaia brand respiratory defense. And of course my immune soup recipe:

2 quarts vegetable broth in soup pot
1 onion chopped and put in soup pot
7 cloves of garlic crushed and put in soup pot
1-inch pieces of ginger sliced and put in soup pot.
Bring to boil and simmer for 40 minutes.
Strain out the vegetable chunks and drink warm/hot broth throughout day like a tea.

So be healthy, eat well, and drink your soup!

Grandma's moistening kettle may have held off flu
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer – Mon Feb 9, 2009.

Grandma may have been right about keeping a teakettle warming on the stove in winter to moisten the air. Studies of seasonal influenza have long found indications that flu spreads better in dry air. Now, new research being published Tuesday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, indicates that the key is the absolute humidity — which measures the amount of water present in the air, regardless of temperature — not the more commonly reported relative humidity.
Relative humidity varies depending on air temperature; absolute humidity doesn't.

"The correlations were surprisingly strong. When absolute humidity is low, influenza virus survival is prolonged and transmission rates go up," said Jeffrey Shaman, an Oregon State University atmospheric scientist who specializes in ties between climate and disease transmission.

The correlation with flu and low humidity is important because in cold winter weather, when flu is most common, even a high relative humidity reading may indicate little actual moisture in the air, and the less moisture there is, the happier the flu virus seems to be.

Shaman and co-author Melvin Kohn, an epidemiologist with the Oregon Department of Health Services, reanalyzed data from a study published in 2007 in the journal PLoS Pathogens by researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. That report found there were more flu cases when it was colder and drier.

The Oregon researchers said relative humidity could only explain about 12 percent of the variability of influenza virus transmission and 36 percent of virus survival in the 2007 study. So why is relative humidity misleading?

The answer is that more moisture can be present in warm air than in cold. Some people like to say warm air can hold more moisture than cold air. While that's not scientifically correct, it is a convenient way to think about it.

What that means is warm air at 30 percent relative humidity and cold air at 60 percent relative humidity may actually have the same amount of water in the air.

So, while the cold air sounds moist, it might be pretty dry — just what the flu likes.

Absolute humidity is expressed in weight of water, grams or pounds, in a volume of air, such as a cubic meter or yard. The higher the reading the wetter. The wetter, the worse for flu virus. "In some areas of the country, a typical summer day can have four times as much water vapor as a typical winter day — a difference that exists both indoors and outdoors," Shaman said. "Consequently, outbreaks of influenza typically occur in winter when low absolute humidity conditions strongly favor influenza survival and transmission."

Have a healthy recipe you would like to share?

We are collecting recipes to assist our patients with cooking ideas. Please help improve the kitchen experience for others.

Please email to office@portaltohealing.com

(This lecture will be recorded and posted on our website soon to follow the above date)

Send us your comments, feedback or questions! We'd love to hear from you.

Dr. Andrea Purcell, N.D.
1770 Orange Avenue
Costa Mesa, CA 92627
Telephone (949) 722-6797
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Please feel free to forward this eZine to everyone you know! They'll be glad you did!

Dr. Andrea Purcell, N.D.
www.PortalToHealing.com