This combination product contains vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that help to strengthen bone, a living tissue that requires constant upkeep. Most important in the combination, is calcium, which ensures that bones stay healthy and strong. Also crucial is vitamin D, which helps the body absorb calcium from foods, and prevents calcium loss in the urine. The mineral magnesium is essential for assisting bone in creating new calcium crystals. Of course, these and other key nutrients (from vitamin K to trace minerals such as manganese, boron, and zinc) can be taken individually. But for greater ease, a bone-building formula combining them all can be very convenient.
Category: B
Blackberry
The prickly stemmed, flowering blackberry bushes that grow wild across parts of Europe and North America yield plump, blue-black berries for eating as well as for healing. Ancient Greeks called the plant “goutberry” because it was relied upon to lessen gout-related joint pain. Traveling salesmen of yore were known to tuck a flask of blackberry brandy into their bags to treat the loose stools that often occurred after eating unfamiliar foods. Today, blackberry is probably best known for this very use–as a soothing remedy for diarrhea.
Black Cohosh
Generations of American women have relied on the gnarled root of black cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa) to relieve various “female problems,” from PMS and menstrual cramps to menopausal symptoms. In the 1900s, this indigenous American wildflower, a member of the buttercup family, provided the main ingredient in a popular tonic for women. (The concoction–Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound–is still sold, but it no longer contains the herb.) Black cohosh has also been used to treat a variety of other complaints, including insect bites and eczema.
Biotin
Although biotin is one of the lesser-known B vitamins, it plays an essential role in a number of important body processes. Taking its name from the Greek word bios, meaning “life,” this nutrient assists the body in metabolizing protein, fats, and carbohydrates from food. It plays a special role in enabling the body to use blood sugar (glucose), a major source of energy for body fluids. Biotin also helps produce certain enzymes.
Bifidobacteria
Like its better-known bacterial cousin, acidophilus, the bifidobacteria group (also called ‘bifidus’) are considered a “probiotic.” One of the hundreds of beneficial bacteria that inhabit your body’s intestinal tract, bifidobacteria helps to fight off infection. Probiotics such as these are especially helpful in preventing the diarrhea that often results from antibiotic therapy. They ease other gastrointestinal conditions as well, including irritable bowel syndrome and flatulence. They also help to prevent vaginal and urinary tract infections, and counteract the overgrowth of the fungus Candida albicans.
Bilberry
Bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus) is a short, shrubby perennial plant that inhabits the woods and forest meadows of Europe, western Asia, and the Rocky Mountains of North America. As with many other plants that belong to the same plant family (Vaccinium), bilberry bears edible fruits similar to those found on the American blueberry bush. Cranberries and huckleberry belong to this plant family too.
Beta-Sitosterol
As one of several phytosterols (plant compounds with chemical structures similar to that of cholesterol), beta-sitosterol is commonly found in foods such as wheat germ, soybeans, and corn oil. Over the past few years, concentrated extracts of this particular phytosterol have been tested for lowering cholesterol and lessening such discomforts of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) as frequent and painful urination.
Beta-Carotene
Beta-carotene is probably the best known of the carotenoids, those red, orange, and yellow pigments that give color to many fruits and vegetables. The body converts beta-carotene into vitamin A, a nutrient first identified in the 1930s and now recognized as vital to the growth and development of the human body.
Bee Products
As worker bees conduct their daily business–maintaining their hive, providing for the queen bee, collecting pollen–they unwittingly produce substances that some enthusiasts consider valuable in healing. Health-food stores and nutrition shops often carry three of these products: propolis, royal jelly, and bee pollen.
Baking Soda
Baking soda, a naturally occurring chemical formally known as sodium bicarbonate or soda ash, can do much more than raise bread. Enterprising homemakers have long relied on the versatile white powder for everything from cleaning and deodorizing to soothing minor aches and pains. In fact, the medicinal and self-care uses for baking soda were recognized by the United States Pharmacopoeia (USP) more than 150 years ago.
Biofeedback
Biofeedback is a mind-body technique in which a practitioner uses a special monitoring machine to teach people how to control bodily functions, such as heart rate, blood pressure, skin temperature, and muscle tension, in order to improve their health and well-being.
Bach Flower Therapy
Bach flower remedies use extracts from the flowering parts of plants to counteract emotional states that are thought to contribute to physical illness. The flower remedies were developed in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Dr. Edward Bach (pronounced “botch”), an English physician and homeopath. Bach strongly believed that emotions–such as fear, uncertainty, oversensitivity, jealousy, despondency, and anger–predisposed his patients to certain diseases.
High Blood Pressure
We doctors know it’s difficult to get our patients enthused about taking blood pressure medicines. Our plea that “this will help you to prevent problems in the future” doesn’t compel most people just struggling to make it through the day. And of course, it’s hard to convince someone to take medicines that often have unpleasant side effects to control a condition that has no noticeable symptoms. A lot of doctors acknowledge that high blood pressure is probably overtreated. Mild-to-moderate pressure levels (140/90 to 160/100 mm Hg) can usually be reversed by lifestyle changes alone. Levels consistently above these numbers do require medical treatment. However, despite the American Heart Association’s statement that blood pressure medicine is a lifetime commitment, if successful lifestyle changes create a new and healthier you, there’s no reason why (with your doctor’s help) you can’t begin to trim down your morning load of prescription pills–maybe even to none.
Fibrocystic Breast Changes
By the time they’ve reached their mid-forties or so, almost half of all women develop some degree of a condition called fibrocystic breast syndrome (FBS) in which their breast tissue becomes either more dense (“fibrous”) or it contains fluid-filled cysts, which can be tender or “lumpy.” In addition, because these cysts are under hormonal control, they often change size during a woman’s cycle and become exquisitely tender and painful during the week or so before her menstrual flow begins.
Burns
Are you reading this while everyone’s dinner is getting cold, your finger painfully throbbing because you reached for the wrong pan? Or is your child screaming because she didn’t know how hot a toasted marshmallow could get? First, plunge the finger into cold water.
Bioidentical Hormones
If you’re miserable from menopause symptoms, give serious thought to hormone replacement therapy (HRT). You may not realize it, but a diabetic using insulin is using hormone replacement therapy, with the hormone is insulin. Taking Synthroid for an underactive thyroid is hormone replacement, too. Is there a problem with replacing your sex hormones, estrogen and progesterone, when you’re suffering because their levels have gone into the free-fall of menopause?
Bronchitis
Most people have had a brush with bronchitis–an inflammation of the bronchi or the breathing tubes–at some time in their lives. And 7 million people, virtually all of them smokers, experience the symptoms of bronchitis every single day for years. Bronchitis comes in two versions. Acute bronchitis occurs when an infection, usually a virus or bacteria, inflames the bronchial tubes. It produces a raw, hacking, painful cough that can sometimes be relieved with self-care measures but often requires antibiotics.
Breast Thermogram
Click here for the Health Tip link. We’ve had so many inquiries from women about breast thermograms during the past year that we decided to do some homework before offering it to our patients. The test’s complete name is “digital infrared thermal imaging,” or DITI. For the test, your breasts are photographed with an infrared […]
Your Bones Need More Than Calcium
Click here for the Health Tip link. Most people know that calcium supplements are recommended for healthy bones. If you’re really up on the latest data, you’re also adding a good dose of vitamin D3 and magnesium to the mix. However, bones are living tissue and require many other nutrients as well to maintain a […]
Your Brain: Is Low Thyroid a Factor?
We continue this month with our series on why your brain might not be functioning the way you feel it should.
Hypothyroidism, or an underfunctioning thyroid gland (commonly called low thyroid), is often overlooked by doctors as a cause of poor memory. It’s neglected because many physicians rely solely on a not-very-good blood test to confirm or reject a diagnosis of low thyroid.