Donnie Yance is an internationally known master herbalist and nutritionist. He is the author of the book, "Herbal Medicine, Healing and Cancer" and "Adaptogens in Medical Herbalism"
Wherever I go this summer, it seems that people are slathering or spraying sunscreen onto themselves and their children. Whether or not you want to use sunscreen, you essentially have no choice – aerosol sprays disperse and pollute the air, and sunscreens and sun blocks wash off in pools or lakes, contaminating the water. (Despite what labels proclaim, there is no such thing as “waterproof sunscreen.”)
Few dietary topics create as much controversy as the issue of milk. Billboards, commercials, and magazine ads (featuring celebrities with milk moustaches) encourage us to drink more milk via the influential “Got Milk?” campaign, launched by the dairy industry in 1993. Even our government promotes the heavy consumption of milk—the latest federal nutritional guidelines recommend the equivalent of 3 glasses of milk daily, either fat-free or 1% fat.
Unfortunately, the recommendations for dairy are channeled to us through the perspective of the dairy industry, and are based more on marketing schemes than on scientific research. If you didn’t already know, the dairy lobby is a powerful force, and drives the government’s recommendations.
To enhance my work as a clinician, I spend an average of two hours every day researching and compiling data in the fields of health, nutrition, botanical medicine, dietary supplements, and conventional medicine. This includes evaluating studies on innovative pharmaceutical drug therapies, particularly in the realm of oncology.
From time to time, I’ll be sharing a few of the week’s highlights with you. I hope you will find these interesting, and perhaps the information will be beneficial for you or someone you know.
I thoroughly enjoy mushrooms—in fact, I actually crave them. It’s likely that this craving can be traced to my Italian culinary heritage—we often add mushrooms to pizza and pasta dishes, but we find them equally delicious in soups, stir-fries, and salads. In addition to the common white button mushroom, we also search for maitake, morel, oyster, portobello, shiitake, and any other unique varieties that appear at our local farmer’s market or natural foods store.
The recent detailed U. S. national report on cancer (released every two years) revealed that despite the billions of dollars poured into cancer research and innovative treatments, current approaches are not delivering on their promise of a cure. In fact, progress against the disease is excruciatingly slow, and much of the decline in cancer deaths in the U. S. is the result of decreases in smoking, not cutting-edge technological treatments.
After 25 years of research and working with thousands of people with cancer, I am convinced that the search for a “magic bullet” that will cure or eradicate cancer is misguided. As long as we continue to focus primarily on eradicating cancer, we are missing the bigger picture—the terrain in which cancer evolves.
Vitamin and mineral supplements can be found almost everywhere these days—grocery and convenience stores, big box discount stores, and drugstores commonly carry a plethora of supplements, and online retailers offer thousands of choices of every supplement imaginable. The supplement industry is enormous—it’s estimated that one of every three American adults uses nutritional supplements on a regular basis.