Sunday, October 11, 2009

Glycosylation = Improved Cell Communication

“Everything man needs to sustain health can be found in nature.
It is the job of science to find them”
Paracelsus

Nutrients derived from food (or good quality supplements) are the raw materials that cells use to fight disease and to recover. Cell-to- cell communication can be enhanced by the addition of glyconutrients to your diet. The body is designed to restore, repair, protect and defend itself when it has the right tools.

Cells communicate to understand and satisfy their needs for: nutrition, cleansing, support, identification and regulation. But how do they do this? Proteins within the cell have specific biological sugar molecules attached to them. The ‘words’ used to communicate are formed when these sugar (glyco meaning sugar) molecules attach to protein stems and become glycoproteins. They penetrate the cell wall and contain the messages expressing the cell’s needs. Glycoproteins facilitate communication inside and outside the cell thus enabling cell-to-cell communication. This cell communication can easily break down when glyconutrients are in short supply.

The bottom line? Glyconutrients help support your body, allowing your cells to send and translate messages to each other enabling them to communicate clearly and operate efficiently.

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Saturday, October 10, 2009

The Unmasking of Glyconutrients - Where to start??

The best place I guess is to discuss what is happening today within our environment – specifically to our food and subsequently our nutrition. No matter what the labels say on our food, studies point to the fact that there has been an overall decrease in the nutritional quality of much of the food we eat. Toxins and pollutants are a constant challenge. Much of the food we eat is picked before it is ripe: processed and pasteurised and shipped long distances to market. So while you may be eating the recommended 5-9 serves of fruits and vegetables per day (and many people are not), the nutrients may be inadequate and quantity can’t always make up for quality. Therefore we need to look at supplementation to overcome the imbalance in our modern diets.

In 1996, Harpers Biochemistry (a medical textbook) published the body’s need for and use of 8 specific sugar molecules called glyconutrients. The research also reported that of the 8 glyconutrients only 2 are prevalent in our modern diets. It showed that these glyconutrients are necessary for proper cell communication. Of course the body prefers to get these nutrients directly from food however research has also shown that in a typical diet today we are only getting 2 of these glyconutrients: glucose from table sugar and galactose from milk products. The body then has to divert its available resources to manufacture the other 6 glyconutrients - resources which could be far better utilised in maintaining overall health, protection and repair functions.

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