What if I told you that there is a single ingredient that, when left out of our diet, can decrease not only the risk of insulin resistance and diabetes, but also diseases and conditions such as

• Dental plaque, cavities and gum disease
• Gastrointestinal diseases such as ulcerative colitis, Crone’s disease and gas/bloating.
• Brain fog
• Energy “crashes”
• Inflammatory disorders such arthritis and “old age achiness”
• Heart disease and high cholesterol
• Alzheimer’s disease
• Cancer

Sounds like a no-brainer, right?! Well, it’s not that easy, because that single ingredient is the ubiquitous SUGAR, and if you’re a sugar-holic (like me…) who’s ever tried to eliminate the sweet stuff from your diet (like me…), you understand how addictive it is! To make matters worse, sugar has several aliases we need to keep an eye on, so get in the habit of reading those labels. Basically, we’re looking at processed foods that are sweet (duh…), but also the drinks, snacks and other foods that we don’t realize pack a punch like flavored popcorn, diet drinks (no sugar, but the chemical sweeteners do a real number on our biochemistry!), breads and pastries, chips and crackers, hot sauce (really? why?!), canned foods, seasoning packets, salad dressing, condiments, granola and trail mixes, fruit rolls, flavored coffee creamers and so much more! You can pretty much bank on the fact that if the food is located on the inside shelves of a typical grocery store, it’ll contain some sort of added sugar.

Get ready for a giggle at my expense on this one, folks! I promise, there’s a health lesson in it.

We all have that friend who has food allergies or preferences which makes ordering straight from a menu an outright impossibility. No croutons, extra tomato, an apple pie a la mode, but with strawberry instead of vanilla ice cream – you know the drill. As a compounding pharmacist, I see this on a different scale when patients have allergies to “inactive” ingredients in standard manufactured medications that can cause serious reactions. However, I never really considered myself to be one of “those” people. Sure, I have some seasonal allergies and perfume and cigarette smoke will give me a wicked headache, but I’ve never experienced serious food or filler allergies. Until recently.

My personal “ah-ha” moment came to me in the early summer of 2012 after I had given up all breads, pasta and other non-essential carbs during my annual January detox in an effort to improve my general health. I wasn’t having horrible reactions, I just found these foods were making me feel bloated and gassy and I had finally gotten to the point where I really just didn’t care for them. So here we are, in early summer and my boys and I were ginning around town running errands in the Texas heat when at about 4:00, they both called out from underneath the blaring music of their latest CD purchase, “hey mom, we’re starving”! Realizing that I hadn’t fed my teenagers in the past hour (sheesh!), we ran into a nearby burger joint to grab a quick bite. While ordering our food, we giggled about how we hadn’t eaten fast-food burgers in a long time and were having trouble navigating the dizzying menu choices. Pondering my food choices, I told myself “It’s just one burger, what could go wrong?” Well, we were about to find out.

If you've been suffering from brain fog, the inability to lose weight no matter how hard you try, a loss of vital energy, or if you've noticed that the outer third of your eyebrows are thinning, you might want to take a look at your thyroid function.

Facts about Thyroid Health

1. More than 27 million Americans have some sort of thyroid disease. About 13 million have no idea they suffer from a thyroid imbalance.
2. One out of 8 women will develop thyroid disease in her lifetime.
3. EVERY single cell in your body has receptors for thyroid hormones. EVERY major system in your body is directly affected by these hormones: your brain, GI tract, heart, gall bladder, liver, temperature regulation, oxygen usage and the metabolism of bone, red blood cells, lipids, cholesterol, and proteins.
4. Stress is a major factor that adversely affects the thyroid.
5. Many thyroid abnormalities are seen during times of fluctuating reproductive hormones such as pregnancy and perimenopause.

Join Pharmacist Lark Scarbrough-Swofford as she discusses the complexities of thyroid dysfunction and what we can do to improve our thyroid health naturally. This is our most popular seminar, and we look forward to covering this information with you.