No wonder we get confused about what to eat, what NOT to eat, and how to choose wisely.  Case in point, LEMON.  2 articles posted one week apart illustrate this dilemma perfectly!

The Benefits of Drinking Warm Lemon Water In The Morning was written by Heidi Dellaire for Medium/Lifestyle, 20 January 2019.  She says, “Everyone should be doing it!” 

Drinking a warm glass of lemon water first thing in the morning is one of the easiest ways to improve your overall health. This must be done before you ingest any other liquid or food.

Just squeeze one half of a fresh, organic lemon into a glass of warm, pure water. The water cannot be overly hot or ice cold. From an Ayurvedic perspective, warm liquids and foods fire up the digestive system when they hit the tongue. Cold items stop digestion dead in its tracks. Therefore, make sure that the water is warm. It gets your digestive system ready to tackle any oncoming food and liquids.

Does drinking lemon water burn fat? Yes, it can. First of all, lemon water improves the overall process of digestion. Lemon juices are similar to, and mimic, the digestive fluids in your saliva and stomach. Lemon water also signals the liver to start producing bile, enhancing digestion even further. Lemon water can help ignite toxin-fighting within the body.

Lemon juice helps balance the pH levels in the stomach and can possibly reduce indigestion and stomach/digestive tract aches throughout the day. Once processed in the body, lemon juice is alkaline. The citric acid of the lemons does not produce acidity once it is completely metabolized by our digestive system. The citric acid alkalizes in the bloodstream and then balances the overall pH levels.

Read this article: The Benefits of Drinking Warm Lemon Water In The Morning

Lemon Water Is A Total Waste Of Time was reported by Gid M-K for Medium/Health, April 23, 2018.  He says, “If you want to improve your health, just drink water.”

The benefits claimed for this ‘simple wellness trick’ of drinking warm water with a bit of lemon juice are truly astonishing. Here is a short list from my 10 minutes of Googling: Aids digestion,Detoxifies body, Heals the body, Rejuvenates skin, Causes weight loss, Improves mood, Increases energy, Balances Ph in the body/Alkalizes body, Reduces inflammation, Adds acidity to culinary dishes, Prevents bacterial growth, Fights cancer, Improves colon health, Fights viruses, Prevents pain in joints … I could go on. The number of claimed benefits is truly astonishing — if this was all true, we could close down hospitals, fire the doctors, and just gulp liters of lemon water to live forever illness-free.

Of course, it is almost all nonsense. Lemon water does nothing for your health at all.

Your body has amazing systems in place to prevent you from having too much acidity or alkalinity. One of the things it does is get rid of the excess. Sometimes, that’s in your urine. So all these ‘health benefits’ are basically a misunderstanding of how pee works.

Cancer growth has nothing to do with the acidity, and bacteria and viruses are happy to grow in any place that you can too — if your cells could get alkaline enough to deter a bacteria, you’d be long dead.

There are also a lot of claims related to the antioxidants contained in lemons. a) there’s no evidence taking additional antioxidants can improve your health and b) you’re probably getting a bunch of them in your diet anyway. As for the other claims? There is certainly evidence that lemon water will make your food more acidic, but aside from that there’s no real science behind anything you’ll read.

Read this article:  Lemon Water Is A Total Waste Of Time

YOU CHOOSE! 

And now on to the Egg question … no, not which came first!  Are they good or bad for you?  Again, TWO articles within a week.

Zachary S. Clayton, author of a comprehensive review of research on egg consumption and heart health published in Nutrition in 2017, said in an interview that giving two eggs a day for 12 weeks to healthy people didn’t raise any of their cardiovascular risk factors and “actually decreased their triglyceride levels.”

But, Dr. Clayton, a postdoctoral fellow in nutrition at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said, “It’s important to distinguish between hypo-responders and hyper-responders to dietary cholesterol. If someone is a hyper-responder, eating two eggs a day would increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.”  This prompted him to suggest that before people start eating eggs, they should “get their blood work done; then after eating eggs for three or four weeks, get their blood work done again” to assess their personal response to dietary cholesterol. “If everything remains in a normal range, for them eggs are not a risk factor,” he said.

Meanwhile, consumers might take two other important issues into account. One is what other foods dominate their diet. Saturated fat, found in red meats and full-fat dairy foods, has a far more potent effect on blood levels of cholesterol and cardiovascular risk than does dietary cholesterol per se.

Also worth considering are the nutrition and health benefits afforded by eggs. Eggs are a readily available, inexpensive, easy-to-prepare and easy-to-digest food, making them important contributions to the diets of many elderly people as well as young children and adults on the run. When I’m traveling, boiled or scrambled eggs are often the most healthful, satisfying choices available. Despite their high cholesterol content, eggs have relatively little saturated fat.

Furthermore, eggs are an excellent source of important nutrients. For 72 calories in a single large egg, you get more than six grams of protein, nearly five grams of mostly unsaturated fat, almost no carbohydrates and only 71 grams of sodium. Eggs are good sources of phosphorus, potassium, vitamins A and D, and various B vitamins, and are especially high in lutein and zeaxanthin, which help protect against age-related macular degeneration. Egg yolks are also the most concentrated dietary source of choline, an essential nutrient critical to brain development and a healthy nervous system.

Read more: Should You Be Eating Eggs?

And then there’s I Eat 3 Eggs Daily by Gene Lim on Medium/Health, 15 April 2019. 

A recent observational study published by JAMA has given eggs a bit of a beating.  The study was a pooled analysis of data from 6 different studies and it involved 30,000 participants over 17 years. The researchers found that for each additional 300 milligrams a day of cholesterol in the diet, there was a 17% increased risk of cardiovascular disease and an 18% increased risk of premature death from any cause.

While those numbers do sound scary and convincing, it turns out that there are a lot of gaps in information and assumptions when we take a closer look at the study. But the almost 30,000 participants were a result of combining 6 studies where the information was collected in different manners. As if that was not confounding enough: this study was also based on dietary self-report — what participants recall having eaten over a period of weeks. I’m not sure about you, but I can’t even remember what I had for dinner yesterday. Researchers also only assessed this once, and assumed the number didn’t change in an average of 17 years of follow-up.

Observational studies which have looked at egg consumption specifically (rather than at overall dietary cholesterol in the case of the JAMA study) have not found it to be associated with any form of cardiovascular disease. if you are an otherwise healthy individual, as long as you don’t exceed 6 eggs a day, an extra egg in addition to your usual has not been shown by the current available scientific literature to be harmful to your coronary health. 

Read more: I Eat 3 Eggs Daily

Let’s talk deodorant!  Why would I write about deodorants on a blog about and for folks with diabetes?  

In a 2016 study in the PEERJ by Julie Horvath, head of the genomics and microbiology research laboratory at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, researchers from several prestigious North Carolina universities sought to answer the question: how does human behavior influence our microbes?  Specifically, researchers focused on the way deodorants and antiperspirants affect the bacteria and microorganisms within the armpit.  Because bacteria tend to congregate in the gut, oral cavity, and on the skin – studying the impact of deodorants and antiperspirants on the microbial ecosystem of the skin is an excellent starting point for determining just how much we’re altering our microbes with the products we use.

When people talk about natural deodorant, they’re usually referring to underarm odor protection made without parabens or aluminum. Parabens are synthetic compounds commonly used as preservatives. They are also a known endocrine disruptor, meaning they interfere with hormones, and some people worry that too much exposure to these compounds could interfere with reproductive health. The aluminum chlorohydrate used in most antiperspirants works by combining with the water in sweat to temporary plug sweat ducts. Underarm sweat gets its unique bouquet from bacteria that breaks down secretions in the sweat glands; stop the sweating, and the smell stops, too.

Some people worry that absorbing those compounds topically can increase risk for cancer, especially breast cancer. “The fact is that aluminum ions are very small and can penetrate deep into the skin, and they are known as potential oncogenic, potential mutagenic, potential carcinogenic at high concentrations,” says Dr. Chris Callewaert, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of California at San Diego. He is currently researching the idea of transplanting microbiomes in armpits to address extreme odor problems. There’s also some research to suggest that antiperspirants may interfere with healthy bacterial makeup. “One thing we found in our research,” says Callewaert, “is that antiperspirants have a huge effect on the underarm microbiome and can actually lead to more of the malodorous bacteria in the end.”

So what works? 

• Some people layer talc, baking soda, and cornstarch-free powder over natural deodorant (seems like a lot of effort on a daily basis and any of these ingredients can cause irritation).
• Crystal deodorant (www.thecrystal.com) is often composed almost entirely of potassium alum, mineral salts and herbs, which has larger molecules than aluminum — so it doesn’t penetrate the skin to block sweat ducts — and has antimicrobial properties.
• Lavanila’s (www.lavanila.com) deodorant, which is made with “beta glucan technology” – sugars found in the walls of oats and barley that “breaks down sweat molecules.”
• Lume, which was created by a gynecologist, works by disrupting the way bacteria breaks down sweat gland secretions, according to the website (https://lumedeodorant.com)
  
• Charcoal-activated deodorants by companies such as Schmidt’s (https://schmidts.com) or PiperWai (www.piperwai.com) which I first learned about on Shark Tank and have been using happily for several years.
  

Read more: How to Find a Natural Deodorant That Works

And some links to blogs on favorite natural deodorants:

• Sweat Clean, Live Dirty — My Top Three Favorite Natural Deodorants
• The 12 Best Natural Deodorants To Keep You Stink-Free All Day

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