Berkson’s Blogs

Messing with reproductive milestones is huge. It's really messing with mother nature. In a big bad way. So when little girls start developing breast buds at 6 months old like reported by reproductive endocrinologists in Puerto Rico, this is not good. Or when so many more young women go into peri-menopause earlier, which they now do 2 to 15 years earlier, this threatens the family lineage as well as the woman's personal health. But when a woman enters menopause earlier this is like an eclipse of the hormonal sun. Her whole health is under siege prematurely including her brain, bones, heart [...]

4 ways maple syrup may help antibiotics (or herbs, fermented foods, sprouts) do a better job killing “bad" bugs in your microbiome. 1. Maple syrup breaks down biofilm (communities of bacteria that cling to each other on a surface surrounding good bacteria and block something getting “in” to attack bad bacteria. 2. It breaks down the membrane around the bad bugs. 3. It neutralizes tiny pumps inside the bacteria that are normally used to push away the antibiotics. 4. The researchers also found that when maple syrup extract was given at the same time with the antibiotics, this duo was more [...]

It's Not The End Do not think that 40, 50 or 60 is the end. One patient cried to me that it was over for her at 54. She lived in different rooms from her husband who was a constant cheater but she felt too old to date, to try again. I stood up and shared my age, that I was on Match, that I had lost 7 1/2 organs, but was still trucking with canoeing, dance weekends and books. We hugged and cried. A month later she got her own apartment. Three months later she had a beau. Before I [...]

Swami Satchitananda had us really feel/experience the “family unit of the world” (unity ofman) by regarding all male elders as our fathers, really our own personal fathers; and all female elders as our true mothers, all kids as our own and all men near our age, our brothers, and women, our sisters. No competition or up-man-ship but a perspective of "all in it together,' a sense of one family moving through, living on, this world. He gave us so many exercises to “buff” the spiritual muscles of our souls; lift that barge, toke that higher perspective bale and put your spiritual [...]

What you put into your mouth, affects your brain health. A new study in this week’s JAMA Internal Medicine suggests that eating a Mediterranean-style diet (more veggies, olive oil, nuts, fish and less red meat) is good for your mind and your heart. This finding in JAMA is from a long-term clinical trial of various diets, and is the first ever to show brain-boosting benefits of one eating pattern compared to others. The study participants were part of a large Spanish trial known as PREDIMED (Prevención con Dieta Mediterránea) which stands for “prevention with Mediterranean diet”). The Mediterranean diet is plant-based. [...]

Doc Block and I discussed folic acid vs. folate on his radio show. I had flown to Florida to speak with the American College of Nutrition’s keynote, the world expert on the potential nasty side effects of the synthetic form of folate—folic acid— Dr. Joel Mason. He was kind and generous enough to speak to me personally at length about this. I shared his amazing research with Doc Block. Dr. Mason is hired by countries around the world who are “pondering” if by fortifying food with folic acid (synthetic form remember) as all are doing, is this a huge contributing factor [...]