The easiest exercise program ever
prevents aging and disease

Last week, I showed you what the Centers for Disease Control considers a great exercise program. This agency wants you to walk briskly (three miles per hour or faster, but not race-walking), do water aerobics, bicycle slower than 10 miles per hour, play doubles tennis, do ballroom dancing, or general gardening. And they want you to do this for at least an hour a day, seven days a week.

Now I'm a bicycle rider and a tennis player. And I can tell you that riding at a speed less than 10 miles per hour is the equivalent of doing just enough to prevent falling off. 

Common drug destroys your brain and causes diabetes

In the January 2005 Second Opinion, I warned that the coming statin scandal would dwarf Vioxx. Vioxx, if you remember, became a huge scandal after its users began dying from heart disease. Now the statin scandal is beginning to come to light.

We already know that statins cause muscle weakness and chronic heart failure (the heart is a muscle). But I’ve repeatedly mentioned that your brain could be a much bigger victim to statins. That’s because the brain needs cholesterol for good health. It needs so much, in fact, that it makes its own. Statins don’t just inhibit cholesterol production in your liver. They also inhibit cholesterol production in your brain. When I connected the dots, I knew the real trouble with statins was coming. It’s now here!

Can vitamin D slow macular degeneration and Alzheimer’s?

I’ve taken some heat in recent years for saying that just about everyone needs to take at least 5,000 IU of vitamin D every day. But almost everyone has a vitamin D deficiency. And the RDA of 600 IU isn’t enough to correct the deficiency. And this is important. People who are deficient have more health problems than those who aren’t. These problems include immunity issues, heart and memory problems, and cancer. But a new study says a deficiency also causes eye disease.

In this study, researchers gave mice vitamin D to middle-aged mice for 6 weeks. The vitamin lowered the toxic beta amyloid in their eyes and blood vessels.