SIMPLEST TIP EVER: WHY YOU SHOULD DRINK WARM WATER & LEMON
One of the easiest health tips you’ll ever hear to radically boost your health

5.4.12 | Ashley Pitman
THE WAY YOU START each day is incredibly important. Whether you’re a mom, a coach, a writer, a small business owner or a yoga teacher, what you do first thing in the morning matters.

According to Ayurvedic philosophy, choices that you make regarding your daily routine either build up resistance to disease or tear it down. Ayurveda invites us to get a jump-start on the day by focusing on morning rituals that work to align the body with nature’s rhythms, balance the doshas and foster self-esteem alongside self-discipline.

Your mind may say you have to check emails, take the dog out, get the kids out the door, that you can’t be late for work or that you just don’t have enough time to cultivate your own morning rituals. But if you can only make time for one ritual that will improve your health, let it be this: start the day out with a mug of warm water and the juice of half a lemon.It’s so simple and the benefits are just too good to ignore. Warm water with lemon:

1. Boosts your immune system: Lemons are high in Vitamin C and potassium. Vitamin C is great for fighting colds and potassium stimulates brain and nerve function and helps control blood pressure.

2. Balances pH: Lemons are an incredibly alkaline food, believe it or not. Yes, they are acidic on their own, but inside our bodies they’re alkaline (the citric acid does not create acidity in the body once metabolized). As you wellness warriors know, an alkaline body is really the key to good health.

3. Helps with weight loss: Lemons are high in pectin fiber, which helps fight hunger cravings. It also has been shown that people who maintain a more alkaline diet lose weight faster. And my experience is that when I start the day off right, it’s easier to make the best choices for myself the rest of the day.

4. Aids digestion: The warm water serves to stimulate the gastrointestinal tract and peristalsis – the waves of muscle contractions within the intestinal walls that keep things moving. Lemons and limes are also high in minerals and vitamins and help loosen ama, or toxins, in the digestive tract.

5. Acts as a gentle, natural diuretic: Lemon juice helps flush out unwanted materials because lemons increase the rate of urination in the body. Toxins are, therefore, released at a faster rate which helps keep your urinary tract healthy.

6. Clears skin: The vitamin C helps decrease wrinkles and blemishes. Lemon water purges toxins from the blood which helps keep skin clear as well.

7. Hyrdates the lymph system: This cup of goodness helps start the day on a hydrated note, which helps prevent dehydration (obviously) and adrenal fatigue. When your body is dehydrated, or deeply dehydrated (adrenal fatigue), it can’t perform all of it’s proper functions, which leads to toxic buildup, stress, constipation and the list goes on. Your adrenals happen to be two small glands that sit on top of your kidneys and along with your thyroid, they create energy. They also secrete important hormones, including aldosterone. Aldosterone is a hormone secreted by your adrenals that regulates water levels and the concentration of minerals, like sodium, in your body, helping you stay hydrated. Your adrenals are also responsible for regulating your stress response. So, the bottom line is that you really don’t want to mess with a deep state of dehydration!

Adopting just this one practice of drinking a cup of warm water with lemon in the morning for a month can radically alter your experience of the day. Don’t be surprised if you begin to view mornings in a new light.

Like I said, the recipe is really simple – a cup of warm (not hot) water and the juice from half a lemon.

In the comments below, tell me which one of these benefits is going to get you to try this morning ritual. Or, if you’re already a lemon water junkie, what specific benefits have you noticed?

Remember, real change comes from taking action.

Thanks for reading!











about 11 hours ago

FDA quietly increases allowed radiation doses of meats for human consumption
Friday, December 07, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/038255_radiation_meats_FDA.html#ixzz2EMqNiqBW

NaturalNews) Rather than actually take the time to address the root causes of meat and poultry contamination, which more often than not are a direct result of outrageously unsanitary factory farming practices

(http://www.naturalnews.com/025716_antibiotic_animals_antibiotics.html), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has instead decided to simply up the doses of radiation that industrial food producers are allowed to blast on their filthy, contaminated meat products.

In the first new rule recently published in the Federal Register, the FDA specifies that "unrefrigerated uncooked meat" can now be irradiated right alongside refrigerated, frozen and cooked meat. And in the second new rule, the FDA increases the amount of ionizing radiation that can be applied to poultry products such as chicken by 50 percent, bumping the dosage up to 4.5 kilograys (kGy) of radiation from the previous 3.0 kGy.

You can view the two published rules here:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2012-11-30/pdf/2012-28967.pdf

These two rules, which were enacted quietly and without any media fanfare (big surprise), come more than a decade after the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) first petitioned the FDA for their passage back in 1999. And in the years that followed, numerous consumer advocacy and food safety groups decried the proposals, warning that irradiation is dangerous.

But the FDA ignored all the comments made by these groups, which included reputable names like Public Citizen and the Center for Food Safety (CFS), and continued forward with its irradiation agenda. According to Food Safety News (FSN), the FDA actually went so far as to belittle the merit of the input given by these groups, referring to them as "general" comments that did "not contain any substantive information that could be used in a safety evaluation of irradiated poultry."

FDA ignores science showing dangers of irradiation, claims there are no safety issues

This careless dismissal by the FDA is completely bogus, of course, as the CFS and many other groups have repeatedly offered valid scientific evidence showing that irradiating food denatures its quality, nutritional value, and safety. The production of "unique radiolytic products," for instance, which include various mutagens, or radioactive substances, is one major negative byproduct of irradiation that is both proven and undeniable. (http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/campaign/food-irradiation/)

And yet the FDA does not seem to care much about the facts as they concern the safety (or lack thereof) of irradiation, as the rogue agency has been on a crusade for the past several years to irradiate virtually everything that Americans eat. Meat, fruit, spices, breads, you name it -- if the grocery store sells it, then the FDA wants to nuke it for your "safety." (http://www.naturalnews.com/023945.html)

And in the rare case that an irradiated food actually bears a proper irradiation label -- the FDA, after all, has established incredibly lax rules that allow most irradiated foods to be sold to consumers without labels -- the flowery emblem, known as a radura, that has been created for food irradiation is unlikely to have much of an impact anyway, as it was deliberately designed to appear pleasant and insinuate that a product is "natural." You can view the ridiculous irradiation radura here so you know what to look out for: http://www.naturalnews.com/023945.html

If you wish to truly avoid irradiated foods; however, the best way to do this is to purchase only organic or locally-grown and verified foods. You can also learn more about the history of irradiation and how to spot potentially unlabeled irradiated foods by visiting the following two links:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/Irrad/LabelingStatus.cfm and
http://www.organicconsumers.org/irradlink.cfm

Sources for this article include:

http://www.foodsafetynews.com

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/038255_radiation_meats_FDA.html#ixzz2EMqoK8Mz