It’s beach season again. Sunscreen is in every store, from drug store to supermarket, to seaside beach shop. Don’t forget your sunscreen! Right? We go to the beach and slather it on before we lay down to bake in the sun. SPF 15, maybe SPF 30, SPF 50 for our kids. Make sure you reapply every couple of hours. Easy?

Not so much.

The goal with using sunscreen is to protect us from cancer, but now it’s been said that some sunscreens, which contain Vitamin A might even accelerate cancer. Others, with high SPFs may not even be reliable. And we, as sun worshipers, place all our trust in the miracle lotion, and sit out in the blazing sun, just inviting in the cancer!

The truth is that the Food and Drug Administration is not monitoring these sunscreens tightly enough. So, what are we supposed to do?

Fruit and vegetables are our security blanket as a nation. We are told to eat such a large amount of fruit and vegetables per day. Loaded with vitamins and straight from mother nature. What else can you ask for?

The United States Department of Agriculture tells us that almost half of our food intake per day should be made up of fruits and vegetables (http://www.mypyramid.gov/pyramid/index.html).

But what all this hasn’t accounted for is the number of pesticides in our fruits and vegetables that could be not only killing the good effects of  the fruit and vegetables, but killing us as well.

We could be poisoning ourselves. And its important to know that washing or peeling fruit may remove some of the pesticides, but not all. So how else can we protect ourselves?

According to a recent article published in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/health/06obese.html?ref=health) the rise in the number of Caesarian Sections, untimely deaths and birth defects in newborns might be attributed to the fact that one in five American women are obese when they get pregnant.

According to that article babies that are born to obese women are three times as likely to die in the first month and the problems are not only with the babies. The problems are also with the mothers. Obese women have higher blood pressure, diabetes, and a host of other illnesses that come with being overweight that they are dying, too!

Hospitals are trying to cope by buying larger cots, longer tools, and offering counseling on weight loss, but what does this trend show?

Even though antidepressants are much more often prescribed today, and mostly to the baby boomer generation, the statistics show that the rate of suicide among those between 45-54 are still the highest. Why is that? Shouldn’t easier accessibility and more drugs be solving our problems.

Actually, instead, it proves the point exactly, that medication and magic pills don’t really solve everything.

Are you frustrated with beauty treatments because you spend a lot of money and still don’t look younger?  Do you still have sagging skin and wrinkles you cannot hide with makeup? Do you feel tired because of sleepless nights, insomnia and mood swings?

Do you think that getting a few tiny wrinkles around your eyes is not a bid deal.  What you do not know is: a few wrinkles may portend a big disaster in your life — aging with hormonal imbalance.

You wake up one day and you really look at yourself in the mirror. It didn’t happen overnight, but it sure feels like it did. You got old! Your wrinkles are prominent, your skin in sagging, you have bags under your eyes from lack of sleep, and you look tired and haggard. What caused this, and how did it happen to you? You are not ready to think of yourself as old, yet.

“Every wrinkle has a reason,” says Sergey Kalitenko, MD, an Anti Aging Holistic Physician, practicing in Great Neck, Nassau county, Long Island, as well as Brooklyn and Manhattan. “There are several reasons why wrinkles happen, and it’s important to know that they cannot all be treated the same way.  You need to know the reason for wrinkles to treat them appropriately.”

At Dr. Kalitenko’s offices in Great Neck, they use biofeedback and other tests to look into the root cause of your aging problems, and find the right ways to identify, diagnose, and treat them.

Appropriate history taking, physical exam and tests will show that your wrinkles came from either:

Did you know that 5,000 people a year die from tainted food? From everything from salmonella to e-coli, U.S. food is in danger because it goes unchecked at so many points. And foods that shouldn’t be causing us illnesses are being contaminated, leaving us a very small safety window.  Read more hear: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol5no5/mead.htm and http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs237/en/

While the FDA runs around trying to catch up with what is contaminated, and a food safety bill sits stalled in the senate since July, we are left with dangerous foods.

It is almost impossible to keep track of food recalls today. When we worried about mad-cow disease, the whole world seemed to stop and take notice, the tomato scare, a little bit less, the peanut-butter thing, ehhh, what could it really do? It’s how we as a society react to real threats. Unfortunately, media decides how we truly feel about something. Sure, if you look deeply into any subject you will know so much more, but most of us get our information from the evening news, or maybe a newspaper, possibly on our computers during lunch-hour, and if our reporters aren’t covering it, you aren’t hearing it.

Here’s a true story: several years ago, there was a summer when all you heard about was shark attacks. Do you remember? Everyday, there was a shark being spotted here, a person being attacked here. We were suddenly at risk of sharks. Then, all of the sudden, they disappeared. Truth was, that the year before, there were actually way more shark attacks than the year it was covered in the news, but you never would have known it. Here’s why. It was simply a boring summer. There were no elections, race riots, no stars being arrested. Media still has to fill an hour of TV time. They still need to get you to read their paper instead of someone else’s. And the way to do it is fear. Oh my gosh, I might be attacked by a shark. I should buy that paper and read how I can protect myself.

Often patients come into my office and tell me that it was just impossible for them to have sex with their partners anymore. It is either pain caused by vaginal dryness, that was making it so terrible, or  such severe back-pain, that they couldn’t stand it anymore.

Initially, they usually tell me, they put up with it for their mate’s sake. They do not want their partners to think that it was anything that their partners are doing. But eventually, they started avoiding intimacy, or coming up with excuses to not have it.  They tell their mates the truth and tried various positions, but eventually they get turned off at always being hurting their partners.  And they do not enjoy intimacy any more. Such patients are desperate.

Over the course of the last few decades the sun has basically become our enemy. It is the cause of skin cancer, wrinkles, problem after problem after problem. But is the sun really to blame for any of this. The sun’s always been there, but it’s really only caused a problem in the last few years. Why is it that it is so dangerous?

Truthfully, the sun is crucial to our survival. We need it to help our foods to grow, to give us light and to make us feel alive. The effects of vitamin D, produced in our body with sunlight help,  are never disputed and the amount of vitamin D we can get naturally is always better than taking it in supplement form. But, as we humans always do, we take a good thing and take it too far.