Dr. Natasha Turner
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Yes, You Can Have Your Chocolate, Red Wine and Coffee....in Moderation, of Course
Advice, Health, Healthy Eating, Eat This
Natasha Turner, N.D. is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor. She is the founder of the Clear Medicine wellness boutique and author of the bestselling book The Hormone Diet. Each week in her column for That's Fit.ca, Dr. Turner advises readers on how to remedy common health issues as well as improve their overall health.
The verdict is in; the latest research shows our favourite treats, in moderation, can be good for us!
Dark Chocolate: A one-inch square per day
A research team from the University of Helsinki, Finland, asked pregnant women to rate their stress levels and document their chocolate consumption. Guess what they found? Six months after birth, the mothers rated their infants' behaviour in various categories including fear, soothability, smiling and laughter. The babies born to women who had eaten chocolate daily during pregnancy smiled and laughed more and were more active. Even the babies of stressed women who had regularly consumed chocolate during pregnancy showed less fear of new situations than babies of stressed moms-to-be who abstained. Awesome news for new moms and chocoholics!
Vitamins 101: Which Ones to Take and What to Avoid
Natasha Turner, N.D. is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor. She is the founder of the Clear Medicine wellness boutique and author of the bestselling book The Hormone Diet. Each week in her column for That's Fit.ca, Dr. Turner advises readers on how to remedy common health issues as well as improve their overall health.
Wondering if you should be taking daily vitamins? These days, there is overwhelming clinical evidence to show that vitamin deficiencies are associated with disease processes and the overall condition of our health. Vitamin, mineral, antioxidant and other essential micronutrient deficiencies suppress the function of the immune system and contribute to degenerative processes like arthritis, cancer, cardiovascular disease, accelerated aging or diabetes. With statistics showing 65 percent of Canadians take vitamins daily, word that supplements are health-promoting is definitely is getting out.Determining Your Nutrient Status
There is often a big difference between the dose of a product you are taking, the amount present in your blood stream and most importantly, the level ultimately present within your cells. The nutrients within your cells are those involved with metabolism, healthy immunity, reproduction, detoxification, cellular regeneration and growth as well as many other body processes.
Turn Your Beauty Sleep Into a Weight Loss Tactic
Advice, Happiness, Health, Hormone Diet
Natasha Turner, N.D. is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor. She is the founder of the Clear Medicine wellness boutique and author of the bestselling book The Hormone Diet. Each week in her column for That's Fit.ca, Dr. Turner advises readers on how to remedy common health issues as well as improve their overall health.A good rest has always been called beauty sleep-but how about a lean body sleep? New research shows that individuals who are not sleep-deprived have an increased capacity to lose weight and keep it off.
Sleep reduces stress hormones, important for fat loss. Sufficient rest and recuperation effectively reduces our stress hormone, cortisol. When we are sleep-deprived, cortisol levels rise. Cortisol controls our appetite, often making us feel hungry even when we have eaten enough. It also raises blood sugar and insulin levels and results in increased fat deposition around the abdomen. To further complicate the situation, high cortisol can negatively affect our sleep patterns, making it difficult to fall or stay asleep when we finally do go to bed. This increase in stress hormones also has detrimental effects on other aspects of our endocrine system, like thyroid gland function which governs our metabolism.
11 Ways to Curb Your Sweet Cravings, Naturally
Advice, Healthy Eating, Hormone Diet
Natasha Turner, N.D. is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor. She is the founder of the Clear Medicine wellness boutique and author of the bestselling book The Hormone Diet. Each week in her column for That's Fit.ca, Dr. Turner advises readers on how to remedy common health issues as well as improve their overall health.
Many people suffer cravings for sweets – it can occur late at night, during a mid-day slump, or just before your menstrual cycle. The causes of these cravings can vary widely but among them are hormonal imbalances, especially low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) or low serotonin levels, as well as poor eating habits or unbalanced nutrition. Here are a few of my standby tips to help keep you on your diet plan while satisfying your urge to splurge.To curb your cravings:
- Go for frozen fruit (berries only). Have a ¼ cup of these. It's hard to eat too many and, because they are frozen, you have to eat slower.
- Drink herbal teas. Those with fruit flavours tend to be more satisfying.
- Glutamine: Open up a 500mg capsule under the tongue to beat your cravings.
Female Hair Loss is Tramautic: Diet Tips and Vitamins That Can Help
Happiness, Health, Hormone Diet
Natasha Turner, N.D. is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor. She is the founder of the Clear Medicine wellness boutique and author of the bestselling book The Hormone Diet. Each week in her column for That's Fit.ca, Dr. Turner advises readers on how to remedy common health issues as well as improve their overall health.
Losing your hair, especially as a female, is traumatic. For reasons of vanity, obviously, but then also because it's something that you feel you have absolutely no control over. This problem affects millions of women leading to depression, anxiety, a loss of self-esteem and withdrawal from friends, family and daily activities. Losing your hair can mean losing your vitality and lust for life-it's never something that should be taken lightly by your health care provider. Any sudden hair loss should be taken seriously. Some physicians might say: "It's because you're getting older" or "It's because of your hormones," but if you think you're losing hair, your physician had better listen, because most likely, you are. The most important issue for the successful treatment of hair loss is to determine the cause, of which there are many. Even the pattern of hair loss can help to establish the root source. For example, women may lose hair from the crown of the head-similar to male pattern baldness-with an elevation of testosterone levels whereas nutritional deficiencies may cause generalized hair loss over the whole head. Let's look at a few of the possible causes and some options for proper treatment and assessment.
Middle-Age Weight Gain: Six Natural Ways to Fight It
Advice, Happiness, Health, Hormone Diet
Natasha Turner, N.D. is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor. She is the founder of the Clear Medicine wellness boutique and author of the bestselling book The Hormone Diet. Each week in her column for That's Fit.ca, Dr. Turner advises readers on how to remedy common health issues as well as improve their overall health.
The changes in a woman's body between the ages of 35 and 55 could be referred to as the "midlife expansion." It is a time when weight gain occurs more easily, fat accumulates around the waist and stomach rather than on the hips or thighs and maintaining weight or body shape becomes extra difficult. This change in body shape occurs primarily because of the alternations in hormone balance in addition to the normal effects of aging. There is a natural tendency to lose muscle every year after the age of 30 without a focused effort to maintain it. But, weight gain does not have to be inevitable!
Causes of Middle Age Weight Gain
For most women, shifts in weight begin before menopause (peri-menopause) when an average woman gains approximately one pound a year leading up to menopause. Many women believe that the changing levels of estrogen are the main cause of weight gain, but other factors are also at play:
Six ways to avoid middle age fat after the jump
Six ways to avoid middle age fat after the jump
Best and Healthiest Fruits For Your Diet
Advice, Health, Healthy Eating, Hormone Diet
Natasha Turner, N.D. is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor. She is the founder of the Clear Medicine wellness boutique and author of the bestselling book The Hormone Diet. Each week in her column for That's Fit.ca, Dr. Turner advises readers on how to remedy common health issues as well as improve their overall health.
I love eating fruit throughout the year, especially a nice fresh selection out of the cooler -- so much so that having the recommended 2 to 3 servings of fruit per day is easy. We can thank Mother Nature for creating fruits in so many incredibly vibrant colours and tasty flavours, but with so many choices available, sometimes browsing the produce section of your grocery store can leave you guessing about the best ones to pick. Knowing what you want and need from fruits nutritionally can make it easy to make the right choices for your diet.Best Low-Carb and Weight-Loss Options
During the Atkins Diet craze, when stats showed an amazing 1 in 10 adults were watching their carb intake, fruit consumption dropped because natural fruit sugars were considered taboo to any carbohydrate-restricted diet. This is a shame because so many valuable nutrients and antioxidants, as well as sources of water and fiber, are lost when avoiding fruit. Fruit deprivation is unnecessary because there are viable low-glycemic fruit choices that have minimal to no effect on insulin and blood sugars. For the carb-conscious eater, berries, cherries and grapefruit are your best choices and when you are selecting fruit, always choose those that are not quite ripe as they have less naturally occurring sugar.
Is a Low-Carb Diet Slowing You Down? 7 Tips for Healthy Bowels
Health, Healthy Eating, Hormone Diet
Natasha Turner, N.D. is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor. She is the founder of the Clear Medicine wellness boutique and author of the bestselling book The Hormone Diet. Each week in her column for That's Fit.ca, Dr. Turner advises readers on how to remedy common health issues as well as improve their overall health.
Carbohydrate restriction is a proven way to stimulate weight loss; removing foods like bread, pasta, cereals, rice, muffins and other grain products from your diet for a period of time assists with "retraining" and improving your body's response to insulin, the ultimate key to any effective weight loss plan.Keeping insulin levels low is the rationale behind being carb conscious (I prefer this over "low-carb") and the reason I recommend the Glyci-Med way of eating in my book, The Hormone Diet. But this lifestyle can have drawbacks. Some people feel a slight decrease in energy or in mood when they limit carbs, and because these foods are a source of fibre, removing them often causes a nasty case of constipation.
Why is constipation so bad?
Try Magnesium to Beat Fatigue, Anxiety and Chocolate Cravings
Natasha Turner, N.D. is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor. She is the founder of the Clear Medicine wellness boutique and author of the bestselling book The Hormone Diet. Each week in her column for That's Fit.ca, Dr. Turner advises readers on how to remedy common health issues as well as improve their overall health.
It's that time of day again or maybe that time of the month, when your craving for chocolate arises and nothing else will do. But with your New Year's resolution fresh in the works - what can you do about it? Although cocoa (a main component in chocolate) is touted as healthy because of its antioxidant properties, most of us experience guilt or frustration when we give in to our cravings for rich, delicious chocolate.The good news is that your solution may be as simple as adding a daily magnesium supplement, which has no calories at all. But, don't forget to pay attention to your cravings! They are a good sign that your body needs magnesium since chocolate is, in fact, one of the richest dietary sources of magnesium.
Studies have found, and my clinical experience has confirmed, that chocolate cravings and PMS symptoms improve with daily magnesium supplements. But that's not all this mineral can help you with ... keep reading to discover the many benefits of magnesium.
Chronic Stress Causes Damage: 5 Ways to Protect Your Brain
Advice, Happiness, Health, Hormone Diet
Natasha Turner, N.D. is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor. She is the founder of the Clear Medicine wellness boutique and author of the bestselling book The Hormone Diet. Each week in her column for That's Fit.ca, Dr. Turner advises readers on how to remedy common health issues as well as improve their overall health.Most of us are all too familiar with the feeling of being stressed -- your heart races, your breathing becomes rapid and shallow, your blood pressure rises and your hands become cold or clammy as blood flow is directed to your limbs to prepare for escape. However, most of the time there is no escape, as we sit in front of our computers or trapped in traffic!
This is our initial response to stress, otherwise known as an adrenalin rush or sympathetic nervous system response. The parasympathetic nervous system response, or relaxation response, is just the opposite; your breathing slows and deepens, your muscles relax, your blood pressure lowers, your pulse rate slows and blood flow is directed to the organs of digestion and elimination. If you always feel tense or anxious, your body will remain in a constant state of heightened arousal. As new studies have found, chronic stress, particularly psychological stress, is most detrimental to our health.
Effects of Chronic Stress after the jump...
Effects of Chronic Stress after the jump...
