What Really Works: The Insider’s Guide to Complementary Health

which can alleviate nausea and help treat morning sickness; eat dairy products and fish for B

which boosts energy and improves memory and concentration. Dark, leafy green vegetables are rich in folic acid, which can slow down ageing and help prevent heart problems.

Banishing Fatigue: Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) is an antioxidant vitamin-like substance needed to produce energy in every single cell in the body. Frequently taken by athletes to increase stamina, it bolsters the immune system and revitalises the body by boosting circulation, increasing the oxygenation of tissues and strengthening muscles. Food sources include tuna, spinach, sardines, peanuts, mackerel, sesame seeds and legumes, but it is highly perishable and easily destroyed by cooking, storing and processing, so eat as many of these foods raw – say in the form of Japanese sushi – as you can. Magnesium also plays a crucial role in the production of energy – eat fish, seafood, green leafy vegetables, whole grains, nuts, lemons, figs, apples, apricots, bananas and brown rice.

Boosting Immunity: High cholesterol levels can prevent white blood cells from getting to infected sites and from multiplying, so keep the saturated fat content of your diet down and watch out for hidden fats in processed foods and meats. Disease-fighting white blood cells are also slower to mobilise after alcohol consumption, so cut back on drinking. Vitamin A promotes thymus health, which in turn supports the immune system, so eat lots of yellow fruits and vegetables,organic dairy products and oily fish. Vitamin C is also a potent immune booster: eat citrus fruits, broccoli, kale, peas, tomatoes, orange juice, kiwi fruits, guava and papaya. Shiitake and Reishi mushrooms are also used as immune enhancers in Asian food.

Balancing Hormones: Hormones serve as the body’s messengers. They are secreted into the bloodstream by different organs, and different hormones have specific jobs. Even minor fluctuations in hormone levels can have a dramatic impact on the body. Thanks to the use of synthetic hormones in medicine and xeno-oestrogens in the environment and food production, our hormones have never been under greater threat. Phytochemicals, derived from natural plant substances such as soya, help rebalance hormones that have gone haywire. They act as adaptogens, preventing, for example, too much oestrogen from locking on to receptor sites in the body, and, conversely, boosting levels when they fall lower than normal. Foods containing these substances include soya, citrus fruits, vegetables, cereals, onions, garlic, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower.

Boosting Brainpower: Folic acid is crucial for proper brain function, yet surveys show it is one of the nutrients most deficient in our diets. Food sources include spinach, asparagus, turnip, greens, root vegetables, brewer’s yeast and brussels sprouts. Vitamin B

improves memory and concentration. Cheese, eggs, fish, clams and dairy products are all good sources. The amino acid Lysine will also boost brain power. Eat fish, soya products, cheese, yeast and lima beans when you need to be sharp and alert.

Aiding Digestion: Magnesium is crucial for proper bowel function, but is the second most common mineral deficiency in both sexes. Good natural sources include seafood, whole grains, dark leafy green vegetables and nuts. Add fibre-rich ground psyllium seeds to your food; avoid mucus-forming dairy products and keep caffeine down to a minimum.

Elimination is as important as digestion; the best way to flush toxins from the body is to drink a cup of warm water and lemon juice every morning and to fast one day a week. The herb Pau d’arco will also help restore the pH balance of the colon and promote healing. It tastes very planty but has excellent detoxifying properties, so make it an acquired taste. Bananas also help repopulate the good bacteria in the gut, which aid digestion – so make lots of banana smoothies.

Revitalising Your Skin: Intestinal health is crucial for glowing skin, so follow all the above to help regulate the bowels and keep the colon healthy. The skin is not just the body’s protective wrapping – it’s your largest organ too. Vitamin A is important for it’s maintenance, so eat lots of those yellow fruits and vegetables which are rich in carotenoids. Zinc, which is plentiful in oysters, pumpkin seeds, herring, eggs, crabmeat, turkey and seafood, will also help. Eat broccoli, tofu, green leafy vegetables and organic dairy produce too.

Revving Up Your Sex Life: Most people are surprised to learn that nutrition plays any role at all in sexual function and performance, but the sex hormones are controlled by the glands of the endocrine system, all of which can themselves be specifically nourished by certain nutrients. The B vitamins, for example, enter the cells of the thyroid gland to act as energisers and increase the hormonal flow. One way to boost the hormones responsible for libido is to mix 2 tablespoons of Brewer’s yeast with 2 tablespoons of wheat germ in a glass of organic vegetable juice. Drink this with your evening meal and the nutrients will be assimilated by bedtime.

The pituitary gland controls the sex hormones, and needs vitamin E and zinc, as well as the B vitamins, to function at optimum levels. Eat the same foods as above for zinc, and peanuts, almonds, pecans and brazil nuts for vitamin E.

Functional Foods

Back to that laboratory at the UK’s Institute of Food Research, where one of the most exciting projects being pioneered is the development of prebiotics. Many people have now heard of probiotics – foods or supplements which replenish levels of good bacteria in the gut – but prebiotics are an even more clever and natural concept. They take the biochemical process a stage back from probiotics.

What prebiotics do is work to rebuild the remaining levels of good bacteria by feeding them up to make them strong and dominant again. (See Fructo-oligosaccharides, known as FOS, page 100). As with probiotics, which are now common in yoghurts and other health drinks, prebiotics can easily be incorporated into everyday foods such as biscuits and breakfast cereals.

But among the more ingenious ideas currently being researched by Professor of Microbiology Glenn Gibson and his team is that of a ‘designer’ prebiotic which is combined with free-floating receptor chemicals that attract and then bind the toxic and possible cancer-causing bacteria strains. This would stop them from binding to the gut wall and, instead, flush them swiftly out of the colon before they can cause any serious or irreversible damage.

Professor Gibson, who co-built the first artificial colon in the UK, says:

It takes, on average, 70 hours for residual foodstuffs to pass through the colon where several hundred different species of bacteria are present. One important development and our real challenge now is that of synbiotics – where prebiotics and probiotics are combined in the same supplement.

Air (#ulink_8146cd3d-97aa-51d0-bee7-bc57c580842e)

Deprive the body of oxygen and, within minutes, you will die. Without the breath, there is no life.

If you weren’t breathing you’d be dead. Right? Of course. So why do you need to read anything about how to breathe? A newborn baby can do it without a self-help manual, so why devote an entire chapter of a book to something that should be so instinctive?

The reason is that somewhere between that first gasp of oxygen into our tiny infant lungs, growing up and becoming adults who barely have time to catch their breath between one task and the next, most of us have forgotten how to breathe properly.

During an average day, you will take 12 breaths a minute. That adds up to 17,280 breaths each and every day of your life. In a healthy person, the diagphragm is responsible for up to 70% of respiration, leaving the rest to the chest and other respiratory muscles. That means, if I ask you to take a deep breath and you puff out your chest, you are not breathing as nature intended, using the full and generous capacity of your lungs which, if spread over a flat surface, would cover an area roughly the size of a tennis court.

One theory which tries to explain the growing number of degenerative diseases people suffer in the West is that many of them are caused by insufficient oxygen reaching the body’s tissues and organs. In recent years, cosmetic and alternative therapies based on oxygen-therapies have mushroomed.

If you stop, right now, and simply become aware of your own breathing you will see how just by paying attention to something you normally do subconsciously, it automatically changes. Once you start to concentrate on your breath, it will probably slow down, which is what happens in deep relaxation and meditation. You may have a strong urge to sigh and release a build-up of tension that you have now only just become aware of, even though it has been there throughout the time you have been reading this.

Let go of this deep sigh but keep your mouth closed so that the air escapes down through the nose. Lots of people teach breathing techniques where you breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. In yoga, which is where I re-learned how to breathe properly, we never let air in or out through the mouth but always rely on the nose, which has special filters or microvillae (minute hairs) to filter out pollutants and prevent the worst of them from getting into the lungs. It also means the air must travel further to reach the lungs and so gives it the chance to warm up to body temperature and humidity en route.

The fact is, we pay scant regard to our pattern of breathing throughout our normal daily activities, and it is only when someone brings it to our attention that we realise many of us ‘shallow breathe’ our way through life most of the time. Try to take that deeper breath and the chances are your shoulders will rise, you will puff out your chest and draw the air from somewhere in the region of the back of your throat.

This is because you are only using the upper regions of the lungs. What you should be doing is breathing in from the diaphragm. Unless you are a musician, you probably won’t know where this is, let alone how to use it, and because of this you will probably be using less than a third of your entire lung capacity.

Learning how to breathe properly again not only helps calm and quieten the mind but has also been shown to strengthen the immune system and improve the cardiovascular supply so that more oxygen is delivered around the body. People who run regularly, and so breathe deeply, also suffer all the usual age-related complaints at a much slower rate than non-runners.

Healthy lungs use only 3% of the body’s total energy. Diseased lungs will suck up more than a third of your energy reserves. Thankfully, learning to breathe properly is both enjoyable, since it is so soothing, and easy. As well as nourishing all our body’s tissues and fuelling it’s different systems, air keeps the mind sharp. The brain uses three times more oxygen than other organs, so if you are feeling sluggish, get breathing.

How to Breathe

A true breath starts by expanding the muscles of the diaphragm down and out. Then pushes them up and in again. This enables the lungs to expand to their full capacity, allows air to rush into them and helps it to be vigorously expelled. Breathing this way, even for a short while, is very re-energising.

Few forms of Western exercise attach any importance at all to how you breathe, but in yoga the breath and a rhythmic pattern of breathing is so important that a whole discipline is devoted to it: Pranayama. Prana means life and yama means it’s cessation.

The average volume of air you take in with a single breath is about 328 cubic centimetres. This can vary, of course, depending on your size, sex, posture, emotional and physical state and your environment. What the pranayama yogi teachers believe is that by re-learning how to breathe, you can increase this volume to 1640 cubic centimetres – a five-fold rise.

The lung tissues grow less elastic with age, but deep yogic breathing can reverse this deterioration and boost the body’s overall metabolism. It is so effective that there are now specialised Pranic healers who do nothing but teach the value of proper breathing to cleanse and strengthen the physical and spiritual body. The yogis believe that prana is a special, almost spiritual force which circulates with the oxygen and which travels through the body via a series of complex energy channels called the nadis. These are similar, in pattern, to our physical nerves and blood vessels but are governed by the chakras (see Chapter 10).

Yogic Breathing

In yoga, practitioners say that where the breath is, you’ll find the mind. What they mean is that if you can begin to control the breath, you can also begin to marshall the mind and free it from the stresses and strains of everyday life and it’s demands.

One of my favourite breathing exercises comes from the Sivananda discipline, one of the yoga schools which treat prana – the breath of life – with as much, if not more respect as the asanas or positions which are also practised to tone the body, cleanse the mind and massage the internal organs.

One of the simplest of these is called Anuloma Viloma, or alternate nostril breathing. It is very calming and helps rebalance energy throughout the body. There is no substitute here for experience, so try it and see how quickly you begin to feel back in tune with your body and, even better, re-energised.

Prepare by sitting comfortably on the floor. Try and keep the spine straight and, if you can sit in the lotus, half-lotus or cross-legged position, then do so. The important thing is to feel comfortable (sit on a chair if you like) so you can concentrate on the breathing instead of worrying, say, about that pain in your knee.

You must be careful how you seal off the right-hand nostril to start this breathing exercise. The yogis believe that different parts of the nostrils link subtly but directly with the chakras or energy centres in the body, and that clamping the nostril without regard for this can have an adverse effect.

Use the thumb and third finger of one hand to seal the nostril gently and remind yourself, before you start, there is no need for any force to be used. Now try it yourself.

To begin, gently seal the right-hand nostril with your thumb and breathe in through the left-hand nostril to a slow count of four. Hold the breath in the lungs while you switch to close the left-hand nostril with the third finger of your right hand, then release the air to a slow and controlled count of eight. Keep the left-hand nostril closed and breathe in through the right-hand side to a slow count of four. Hold the breath again as you switch nostrils and seal the right-hand side while you slowly release the air to a count of eight. If you cannot keep the breath controlled for a count of eight, cut back to four or six counts and build back up to eight. The breath control and quality are more important than the number you can count to.

To begin with, try and build up to 10 rounds of this breathing practice. You will feel the benefits immediately. As well as calming your mind and clearing blockages, both energetic and physical, this breathing exercise seems to reassure the body that everything is functioning as it should be.

Deep Breathing

In their excellent book Breathe Free (see Bibliography), the herbalist and nutritionist (respectively) Daniel Gagnon and Amadea Morningstar say that even the simplest forms of deep breathing help to ventilate the lungs and stimulate lymphatic drainage to speed up healing.

There are methods, particularly the Russian technique devised by Professor Konstantin Buteyko, which recommend the opposite. He argues that the root cause of some 200 conditions, especially asthma, is hyperventilation, where we take in too much air and breathe out too much carbon dioxide. It is true that some asthmatics who have embarked on the Buteyko programme have reported relief through shallow breathing exercises but as a non-sufferer and a keen student of yoga I am happier myself to practise techniques that have been tried and tested for thousands of years. Each day, whatever I am doing, I make a point of trying to remember to take three or four deep breaths every hour as recommended by Gagnon and Morningstar.

Dolphin Breathing

I used to swim every weekday morning before going on to my desk at the Sunday Times where I edited the Lifestyle health and fitness section of the popular Style magazine. Before too long, I twigged that whenever I was under particular stress, the nature of my swimming would change. I would forget about lengths or laps and find myself concentrating, instead, solely on the breath. It was as if I found a great release of tension by moving my swimming body in a rhythm with my breath. It might not look pretty to anyone dawdling about at the side of the pool, but what I found was that I gained even more relaxation, almost meditative benefits when I exaggerated this breathing pattern and spouted air, at the surface of the water, like a dolphin.

Imagine my surprise then when I stumbled across confirmation that there is no better way to release tension and relieve stress than breathing like a dolphin in water. In his book Animal-Speak, the animal expert and shamanic healer, Ted Andrews, confirms what I had discovered by accident, that breathing like a dolphin can bring great benefits. In a description of the power of dolphin medicine, he says the breath holds the key.