Clear for Life

Should you get some sunlight, or should you lather yourself with sunscreen and avoid the sun like a plaque? Which one is better for your skin.

One of my customers took a quiz at acne.org and one of the questions was about sunlight. The answer he got back shocked him.

“While the sun is important for the production of vitamin D, especially if you do not eat dairy products, excess sun exposure is actually skin damage. While the sun feels good, it may bite back with acne in the weeks following exposure.”

I agree with this completely. Unfortunately many people miss the point of this message. The operative word is excess sun exposure.

Sunlight is absolutely essential for good health. But that doesn’t mean more is better. It’s the same with exercise. You need enough sunlight - not too much, not too little.

Exposure to sunlight benefits your health in many ways. You get vitamin D from sunlight. It helps you to sleep better. It makes you energetic and happier. It can kill bacteria from your blood. Just to give you few examples.

Sunlight is the only viable source of vitamin D

Since the acne.org quizz mentioned vitamin D let’s talk about it briefly. Sunlight is the only practical source of vitamin D.

In Clear for Life I quoted a study where the researchers measured blood vitamin D levels from people after they’ve been on a tanning bed. They were exposed to amount of UV radiation that leads to very minor sunburn (your skin gets a bit red and is back to normal the next day). The researchers found that those people had blood vitamin D levels of equivalent of taking 25′000 IU of vitamin D.

To put that into a perspective a multivitamin supplement usually has 400 IU of vitamini D and vitamin D supplement has about 1000 IU. A glass of whole milk has less than 100 IU.

As you can see no other source of vitamin D even comes close to what you’ll get from sunlight.

This is a bit of a problem for people living in the Northern latitudes. During the winter months sun rays hit the northern part of the globe in such an angle that most of the UV rays bounce back to space. So in such latitudes your skin won’t make vitamin D from sunlight. You have to either use tanning beds or take vitamin D supplements.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Ever get the feeling that health is confusing?

Here’s a bit of antidote to the misinformation poisoning threatening your health (and skin).

Few days back I found this interesting article sitting in my inbox. I’ll post it here since I think it’ll help you in your efforts to cure acne. It’s written by Frederic Patenaude. Frederic is one of those guys that introduced me to raw foods and opened my eyes on what healthy and being healthy really means. I highly recommend Frederic’s products. After all, he’s the one who got me up to speed on health.

"5 False Assumptions About Natural Living (From the Mainstream)"

by Frederic Patenaude

It seems like every time you turn your head, you hear confusing and misleading information from every corner of the natural health movement. First, you have mainstream "experts" who rely on outdated and inaccurate data to advise us on the subject. And then there’s the raw food or natural health movement itself, within which most people seem to disagree on what constitutes the healthiest diet.

In this article, I will review 5 wrong assumptions about natural living, spread by conventional "experts." In the second part of this article, I will expose 5 false assumptions being spread by various raw-food advocates and naturopaths.

From the mainstream, we hear the following…

"You have to make sure you eat enough protein"

Without a doubt, the issue of "getting enough protein" is the number one concern of anyone switching to any kind of diet for any reason. Even though decades of vegetarian and vegan traditions and extensive research have proven that our actual protein requirements are fairly low and easy to meet - as long as we eat enough food - most people who will advise you about diet will likely make a much bigger deal about protein than it actually is.

Bodybuilders go beyond all extremes known to humankind by consuming upwards to 350 grams of protein per day, an amount that is completely off the charts and only possible through the consumption of refined protein powders.

At the same time, most people on the planet get by on less than 60 grams of protein a day, and many people in these cultures possess wiry and explosive strength that would put most gym goers to shame.

In the end, the evidence is still conclusive: as long as you eat enough calories to meet your needs, you will at the same time consume enough protein, even if all you eat are fruits and vegetables.

There is no reason to make protein more important than it actually is.

"You need to eat a balanced diet"

According to our nutritionists, a "balanced" meal is composed of carbohydrates, protein and fat in the right proportions.

A meal of bread (carbohydrate), with cheese (protein), and a salad containing a dressing of olive oil (fat) and a desert (carbohydrate) would be, in their opinion, a balanced meal.

That meal might be a digestive disaster for most people, but that aside, we don’t find any evidence that our bodies need to receive nutrition in such a manner.

If we look all around the world, we see different cultures that have enjoyed excellent health eating far from "balanced" meals. In China, rice with vegetables is a meal. In the Great North, the Eskimos have lived on almost nothing but meat. The Hunzas regularly ate meals composed of vegetables and some chapati bread.

If we look at wild animals, we also see that they do not eat "balanced" meals. A meal for an orangutan might consist of nothing more than rambutan (a tropical fruit) or durian (another tropical fruit).

There is absolutely no need to worry about eating a very simple diet where most of our meals are composed of a few foods only. As long as we eat a large variety of food from week to week, it doesn’t matter if our meals are not composed of "carbohydrates, protein and fat".

"You can’t sustain yourself on just raw foods"

Most nutritionists look at the raw food diet and claim that it’s "impossible" to sustain ourselves from only fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. Letting alone the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are doing just that and are still alive to tell about it, there is no scientific reason to believe that we can’t live on raw foods.

Nutritionists will claim that it would be "very difficult" to eat enough fruits and vegetables to consume enough calories.

The problem is that they are still stuck with the view of cooked nutrition and its "balanced view" and can’t think outside the box and realize that it is actually possible to consume enough fruits and vegetables and get the calories you need. It just is a lot of food!

The truth is, eating a raw food diet will mean that you’ll be consuming more fruits and vegetables in a day than some people may consume in a week or even in a month. But as you learn to eat this way, you’ll find that this "huge" amount of fruits and vegetables is actually the "right" amount.

"You should never expose your skin to the sun"

Although we know that too much sun isn’t good for us, the advice we get from dermatologists these days defy all reason. Apparently, we should never expose our skin to the sun unless we are fully protected by chemical lotions.

Did you forget the important fact that sunlight is essential to our well-being, and that regular sun exposure at safe periods of the day are actually beneficial to your health, even in 2006?

You need the sun. The question is just how much!

"If it’s natural it’s good for you"

The word "natural" has been abused more than any other term in the food industry. We now have "natural potato chips", "natural coffee" and "natural beer."

The fact that these foods come from a factory should make it obvious that they are definitely not natural, nor healthy.

The truth is, even if a food were natural, it wouldn’t automatically make it healthy. There are plenty of plants and mushrooms that grow in the wild that are not only "perfectly natural," but also deadly!

Let’s be clear: for a food to be healthy, it has to be a lot more than "natural."

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Frederic Patenaude, is the author of the best-selling e-book "The Raw Secrets". He is currently giving away free access to his private library of over 100 exclusive articles along with a subscription to his newsletter Pure Health & Nutrition. Visit http://www.fredericpatenaude.com while charter subscriptions last.

 

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Clear for Life - The Fun, Easy and Delicious Solution to Permanently Clear Skin.

Get a bit of sunshine to clear away those pimples.

Despite what dermatologists say, sun can help to cure acne. Just off the top of my head I can think of four ways sun exposure helps with acne.

• Sunshine eases stress and makes you feel better. I’m sure you’ve noticed you feel happier on a sunny day than on a rainy day. Sun exposure triggers the body to release serotonin. Serotonin is known as the feel good hormone. Feeling better is good for your health, and thus also good clear skin.
• Increases vitamin D production. You get most of your vitamin D from sunlight. It’s produced in the skin when exposed to sunlight. Vitamin D is one of the most important vitamins for overall good health.
• Sun helps you sleep better. In Wake Up To Clear Skin (comes free with Clear for Life, but the sales letter might not show it) I mentioned that sun exposure is one of the most important factors behind a good, healing sleep. If you don’t get enough sunlight your sleep suffers. Poor sleep almost ensures you won’t get clear. Because sleep is such an important factor in permanently clear skin I wrote the Wake Up To Clear Skin report that shows simple ways to sleep better and optimize your sleep time.
• Kills bacteria. Sunlight kills acne causing bacteria in the skin. Some people say that UV light penetrates the skin and even disinfects the blood and helps to take the stress off from the liver.

Of course it would be wrong to say sun cures acne. Sun exposure is one of the elements of health and indirectly affects acne. And sun is just one piece of the puzzle, but it’s a piece you must have in place.

A word of caution about sunlight. Though sun exposure is good I don’t recommend you burn your skin. That’s still bad, causes skin damage and possibly aggravates acne.

How much sun exposure you need depends on where you live and the color of your skin. 15 to 30 minutes should be enough for most people.

I mean unprotected sun exposure. Without sunscreens. Those things are full of cancer causing chemicals and can make your acne worse by irritating the skin. Those things block the beneficial effect of sunlight and cause vitamin D deficiency. Derms recommend them because they ‘protect’ you against skin cancer.

Hogwash, I say.

Sun cancer rates have went through the roof along with sunscreen usage. And vitamin D slashes skin cancer risk by 70%. It’s crazy to think you can reduce your cancer risk by blocking the nutrient that prevents cancer and applying cancer causing chemicals on your skin.

Medical lunacy at its best.

Yes, overexposure can damage your skin. But you have antioxidants to protect yourself against that. And when you follow the diet I recommend in Clear for Life you’ll get so much antioxidants it’s almost impossible to burn yourself.

So get some sunlight. It helps with your acne and makes you feel better. This cartoon my Mike Adams explains the true nature of sunscreen and what you should do with them. Mike also has a good article about the sunscreen-cancer link here: Sunscreen Causes Cancer!

Image courtesy of Naturalnews. Original source: The Sunscreen Myth (comic)