Nightshades belong to the Solanaceae family which includes over 2,000 species. They also include some of the most popular foods consumed today; such as tomatoes, potatoes, all types of peppers, and eggplant. Although not truly nightshades, blueberries, huckleberries, goji berries and ashwagandha all share the same alkaloids which may have inflammation-inducing properties. The Solanaceae family contains cholinesterase inhibiting glycoalkaloids and steroid alkaloids including, among others, solanine in potato and eggplant, tomatine in tomato, nicotine in tobacco, and capsaicin in garden peppers. The glycoalkaloids in potatoes are known to contribute to Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and negatively affect intestinal permeability. According to Dr. Marvin Childers, "When these inhibitors accumulate in the body, alone or with other cholinesterase inhibitors such as caffeine or food impurities containing systemic cholinesterase inhibiting pesticides, the result may be a paralytic-like muscle spasm, aches, pains, tenderness, inflammation, and stiff body movements." These symptoms may dissipate in a few hours or days if ingestion is stopped, based on the sensitivity of the individual, the amount of nightshades consumed on a regular basis and their level of inflammation. However for some heavy consumers of nightshades the process of inflammation and pain reduction can take up to 3 months. After reading the symptoms associated with nightshade consumption, it is easy to understand why one of the major problems attributed to nightshade is arthritis. Arthritis is also the most common disability in the U.S. Statistics from a 2007-2009 study show that doctor diagnosed arthritis affects 49.9 million people in the United States alone . Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis affecting more than 20 million people. More than 2 million people are affected by rheumatoid arthritis, the most disabling and painful form of arthritis. Arthritis has no boundaries to gender, race or age, it affects young and old alike. In fact it may be surprising to some that an estimated 294,000 children (age 18 and under), have some form of arthritis. In 2003 the medical cost of arthritis alone was approximately 128 billion annually.

Crohn's Disease Is a Terrain Problem, Not a Single-Cause Problem Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) affects millions of people worldwide, and its epidemiology has shifted dramatically since it first emerged in the Western world roughly a century ago, with the global burden now rising fastest in newly industrialized regions. Genes have not changed that fast. Environment has. The modern consensus model of IBD pathogenesis involves four interlocking layers: 1. Genetic susceptibility. More than 200 IBD risk loci, many involving innate immune sensing of bacteria (NOD2, ATG16L1, IL23R). 2. A disrupted intestinal barrier. Increased permeability frequently precedes clinical disease rather than following it. 3. Microbial dysbiosis. Loss of butyrate producers, expansion of pro-inflammatory Proteobacteria. 4. An immune system that cannot switch the inflammatory response back off. Notice what sits at the center of layers two, three, and four: microbes. And notice that the model does not require the triggering microbe to still be present when the disease becomes clinically obvious. This is a critical point, and it is where most conventional thinking about “infectious causes” goes wrong. A pathogen can light a fire and then leave the building. In 2023, Dinetz and Saleeby published a case report in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine titled “Borrelia Burgdorferi, a Root Cause of Inflammatory Bowel Disease.” A 14-year-old boy carrying an established diagnosis of Crohn's disease was found to have underlying Lyme disease. The authors treated the infection using an integrative approach, and the patient achieved complete clinical remission. On repeat serology two months into remission, B. burgdorferi p30 IgG antibodies had declined. The gastrointestinal manifestations of tick-borne disease are documented in mainstream infectious disease literature. Zaidi and Singer reviewed GI and hepatic presentations of tick-borne illness in Clinical Infectious Diseases, concluding that abdominal signs and symptoms may provide important early diagnostic clues and urging clinicians in endemic areas to maintain a high index of suspicion.

Most of the honey on American grocery shelves is laundered, adulterated, or stripped of the compounds that made honey a medicine for ten thousand years. Here's what happened to it, and how to find the real thing. You go to the grocery store and buy honey. The label says honey. The bottle looks like honey. Tastes like “honey.” And yet… There is a reasonable chance it is not honey at all. You see, manipulation of honey, or simply put, fraud, in American grocery shelves has been a constant throughout our history. Most of what sits on the shelf today has been ultra-filtered to remove the one biological fingerprint that would prove where it actually came from. The federal government ran a sting operation on this starting in 2001, and it wasn’t until 2013 that people and companies were charged. The fraud is well-documented, and almost nobody outside the honey industry knows about it. Even today, such honey fraud exists. It’s quite a shame because real raw honey tastes great, is good for you, and was even used by civilizations across time and geographic space for medicinal properties. Here is what happened, what it means for what you have been eating, and how to find the real thing… In 2011, Food Safety News commissioned an investigation that tested 60 containers of honey purchased from major US retailers (supermarkets, big-box stores, drugstores, and smaller outlets) for pollen content. Pollen is the only reliable way to trace honey back to its country of origin. A field called melissopalynology maps pollen grains back to the flowers the bees visited, and from those flowers back to a specific region. Of the 60 samples tested, 76% had been ultra-filtered. The pollen was gone, so they couldn’t trace the honey. The FDA has stated, in writing, that ultra-filtered honey is not honey and should not be labeled as such. However, the FDA does not routinely check retail honey for pollen content. The industry's public defense is that American consumers prefer clear honey over cloudy.

These are the Five Mitochondrial Strategies: 1. Be Deficient in Nothing Your mitochondria need every nutrient, and the slightest inadequacy in any link compromises the whole chain. 2. Keep Time With Nature Spending time in nature is good for you. But keeping time with its days and seasons is a rule to live by. 3. Manage Your Energy Budget Don’t just count calories. Your brain is counting supply, demand, investments, and emergencies. Count with it. 4. Exercise Everything What you demand of yourself, you develop: muscle, mind, and heart. 5. Your Own Body Has the Final Say The outcome that matters is how you feel and function, not what the studies found in everyone else, and not what the numbers try to estimate about you. Never skip strategies. This is not a menu to pick and choose from. These are a set of strategies that need to be implemented together. You will not be at zero on any of them, so not having your nutrition optimized is not a reason to wait to start exercising. But if you carry one forward for too long without keeping up with the others, their interdependencies will sooner or later come back to bite.

A food package carries no bioengineered disclosure. Does that mean no genetic engineering went into the food? No. USDA’s bioengineered food disclosure standard leaves entire categories of genetically engineered foods and ingredients outside mandatory disclosure. Easing restrictions on natural substances with credible histories of safe use makes sense. Yet natural products face persistent calls for tighter regulation, alongside efforts to suppress truthful information about their benefits. Meanwhile, novel technologies that fundamentally alter our food are riding a wave of deregulation—even as their implications demand rigorous scrutiny and full transparency. These priorities are backwards. A Narrow Definition, Wide Exclusions Under the current rule, foods generally require disclosure when: 1) they contain genetic material modified through laboratory recombinant-DNA techniques, 2) the modification could not otherwise arise through conventional breeding or nature, and 3) the modified material is detectable. There are a host of exclusions: - Restaurants and food service: meals can contain engineered ingredients without this disclosure. - Very small manufacturers: businesses with annual receipts below $2.5 million are exempt. - Accidental presence: up to 5% of each ingredient may be bioengineered if its presence is “inadvertent” or technically unavoidable. - Animal feed: meat, milk, and eggs do not require disclosure solely because animals ate engineered feed. - Refined ingredients: oils, sugars, and other ingredients can avoid disclosure when modified genetic material is undetectable. - Processing aids: qualifying incidental additives present at insignificant levels with no final technical or functional effect are excluded. - Certain meat, poultry, and egg products generally fall outside coverage when those ingredients predominate, including after water, broth, or stock. - Many alcoholic beverages: products subject to federal alcohol labeling law fall outside this standard.