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? (more…)

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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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. (more…)

Depression is a very serious subject and by no means does any doctor, functional, holistic or alternative, downplay the seriousness of what depression can cause. The symptoms of depression are vast, from physical to mental to emotional. The effects are devastating on it’s victims, families, careers, children and futures. Suicide is the most awful ending to depression, but it is not the most common at all.

Most people live with depression. Some seek counseling, while others just suffer through the symptoms. Many learn to live with the symptoms until life is only a shell of what it used to be. But this is not how to handle depression. Even treatment, with a psychiatrist and medication, may not always help the ways that one may expect.

Some of the basic signs of depression include: (more…)

We all know how we get when we don’t have enough sleep. We are cranky and we look terrible. Often, we are too tired to perform our normal daily tasks. But those are just the things we notice right away. Dig deeper and see how having an unhealthy sleep pattern can affect your brain much more severely than you may think. Take for example our ability to make quick and smart decisions, or to solve problems. All of those examples are hindered on even just one night of bad sleep. Imagine how a person with insomnia must feel.

Every doctor will stress the importance of good sleeping habits, but a doctor, practicing functional medicine, will get to the root of the problem, find out what it causing your bad sleep, and help you solve it. There could be many reasons why you are not sleeping well. Everything from stress, to what you eat can easily affect your sleep. (more…)

Crestor, a brand name medication, a statin to be exact, is now being touted by the Food and Drug Administration as a wonder-drug and the government agency has deemed it is safe even for healthy people to keep cholesterol down.

Do you see something wrong with this? Let us take a look.
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The outlook for 2010 is bleak. Homes will continue to be foreclosed, jobs will be lost, and less money will be flowing as compared to years past. Also inevitable: we will get another year older. Bad news, right?

Not really!

Though we may not be able to control the outside elements that affect our lives and the world around us, we can do something to make sure than in the survival of the fittest, we are, indeed, the fittest we can be.
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