Should you cut out wine this year or is red wine really healthy? (I am interviewed for an article in Vogue Scandinavia).

Well, sort of and sort of not.

We know that happiness adds to longevity, and that a glass of red wine can add to that sense of relaxation and ease the tension. And that's a fine reason to drink a glass with your dinner 3-4 x week. but don't drink it for the resveratrol though. And also: if a slice of double chocolate cake does it for you, then cake is just as good as a glass of vino. Life is too short to be miserable and only eat salad (and that is not healthy for you anyway!)- and happiness does add years to our life. So live your life and drink that glass with your dinner, if it makes you happy (but not everyday - yeah, I still had to kill the party like that). Read full article here: https://www.voguescandinavia.com/articles/we-investigate-if-red-wine-is-really-the-healthiest-tipple-in-the-bar-and-why-we-should-drink-like-those-in-blue-zones and feel free to share it.

Everything in life is about timing. We know this intuitively - we can have the right credentials, but if we present ourselves to a potential business opportunity at the wrong time, we lose out. We can meet “the right person” at “the wrong time” - and we miss out.

I’d say the most important thing in life is neither talent nor hard work, but mastering the art of timing.

This essentially means we can get away with working smarter rather than harder in life at whatever goal it is we want. This doesn’t mean lazy, it just means understanding how to roll with resistance and surf on the waves, rather than swim against them and end up utterly burnt out. Which is, inevitable what many A-type personalities do: they keep at it til they are completely beyond exhaustion. While hard work can be admirable, there is nothing admirable about working yourself through to the bone. Life is supposed to be fun and we want to thrive.

And if we want that, the single most important thing to learn is how everything in life revolves around timing.

This applies especially to our body - how it secretes digestive enzymes and hormones at certain times throughout the day. How eating too much too late can interfere with proper detoxification at night and deep sleep. These are proven today to be irrefutable facts according to modern science and its study in circadian rhythm. Ironically this advice has been around since ancient time according to Ayurvedic teachings.

I am interviewed for Vogue Scandinavia about facts and myths of hangover cures. Read full article here if you are a member of Vogue: https://www.voguescandinavia.com/articles/because-we-know-you-need-ithere-are-the-best-hangover-cures or if you are not a member you can read it in pdf here. Feel free to share it.

I’ve never been a fan of light products. It’s just counterintuitive to common sense: the body counts calories partly based on taste in combo with calorie density, and if we mess with food, that will very likely have an impact on our appetite-satiety switch, which is the worst thing ever to mess with, if we wish to have a healthy relationship with food, body and weight. It is true: we don’t have science to support that drinking artificial sweetened products can be tied to serious diseases. However, I think that is pretty much besides the point. Just because you don’t get cancer from one single life-style factor, it doesn’t make it harmless.

It is critical to understand that coffee should be consumed no more than 3-4 x weekly, in order to keep performance optimization in tact from caffeine. If we take in high amounts of caffeine daily, we deplete our adrenals and actually lower our baseline performance. In this case, coffee only serves to help us feel somewhat normal over time, rather than the over-performer we aim to be. So go check your coffee habits. Click on to get the studies.

Science cannot create life. Only life can create life. Obviously, there is a difference. Supplements food-based, isolated or synthetic, has detracted from the most important part of health and healing. The basics of proper diet, exercise, detoxification, structure, mental/emotional and spiritual health must all be in order for true healing to occur. No supplement will work on its own if these foundations are not in place. However, even when these foundations are in place, or if the situation is acute enough to necessitate a more immediate treatment response, supplement support may still be needed for a while. You may also want to take one or more food-based supplements to ensure you are getting an adequate array of nutrients in your diet. When these situations arise, it is recommend food-based supplements be your first choice. How to known whether or not a supplement good choice? For starters, make sure it has the following characteristics: it is as close as possible to its natural form. The utmost care has been taken in all phases of its production, from growing its ingredients, to manufacturing, testing for potency and quality control. Select from companies that have a long track record of providing high quality products that produce good clinical results. Most vitamins sold are not food. They are synthetically processed petroleum and/or hydrogenated sugar extracts, even if they say “natural” on the label.

The best way to drink coffee to avoid mold issues is to grind the beans and use them within a month and only use French press. However, if you are not up for that, then watch The Doctor’s discuss a couple useful tips for better coffee habits here:

“The washer plate of the Nespresso® compatible coffee machine had a reading of 4000 colony forming units (CFU)! Anything more than 75 CFU as stated in the official Health Act (Act 63, 1977) on Total Microbial Activity is unsatisfactory and any reading above 1000 CFU is unacceptable as it raises major health concerns. SWIFT states that it requires immediate attention. The washer plate was therefore nearly 54 times over the limit of the official Health Act recommendation. The Mould reading came to 10 CFU on the washer plate, which is not concerning, but it is still not nice to know that mould could end up in your coffee cup.”

However, simply cleaning your Nespresso machine with something as simple as vinegar 1-2 x weekly will solve this issue. Read the article here.

Click on to watch the replay of the webinar I did for ASmallWorld members right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDu6RD8UdRw&t=118s Feel free to share it.

Cancer cells grow in all of us at any given time. The difference between someone who gets sick from cancer and someone who doesn’t is their immune system’s ability to constantly kill new and growing cancer cells. That means the key to treating cancer lies both in symptomatically focusing on targeting and eliminating cancer cells that have managed to multiply out of control, but even more importantly in optimizing the immune system to effectively be able to suppress cancer cells on its own. A weak immune system causes a domino effect of disasters in the body, one of which can be cancer. Many factors influence our immune system and can block it from functioning optimally. When we have a blockage in the system i.e. heavy metal toxicity, virus or bacteria load, hormone imbalance, nutrient deficiencies, we have the perfect storm for cancer to use this opportunity to grow. Cancer is not just one disease, but many – and it is a symptom of an underlying cause that needs to be identified to prevent relapse.

When we want to improve our health, we oftentimes spend all our time focusing on one aspect of our health. And this aspect may not be the one which is causing the health imbalance. This is why “test don’t guess” becomes super important - we want to know our weaknesses and also what our body nutritionally needs (protein/fats/(carbs/vitamin/minerals etc.). If we don’t know the facts, then we might be missing the boat completely. It is super unscientific to guess what will make an impact on our health. Health is not simply “move more and eat more greens”. Everyone knows that, yet many of us who follow that basic recommendation, are not at all healthy. We struggle with abdominal fat, infertility issues, fragile bones, migraines, digestive upset whenever we are not eating bland diet foods and in worst case, we get cancer. The key here is to understand the many different factors today that affect health and pin-point which are relevant for our specific situation. We want to focus on our weakest link. Quite often that has nothing to do with eating glutenfree or skipping cake.

How do we navigate a toxic world and what is most important? Join Christina Santini, Human Nutrition and Biological Medicine practitioner to find out what it is our bodies actually need to detox from and how to do it.

ASMALLWORLD Members are invited to join an online webinar on "The Essential Role of Detoxification in Modern Life" with guest speaker Christina Santini as part of our ASMALLWORLD Webinars Series.

Tune in to this Zoom Webinar for ASmallWorld members on Tuesday, March 2nd at 20:00 CET (20:00 Zurich, 19:00 London, 14:00 New York).

To join live click here (membership required).

Just because something doesn’t cause cancer, doesn’t mean it’s harmless - that should be pretty obvious for all and sundry. Yet that is often the argument these days people use to promote the use of artificial sweeteners like aspartame. I am no fan of anything that mimics calorie intake yet tricks the brain by not containing calories. This is the baseline of how we learned as babies to count our calories naturally: sweet taste = energy intake. When we mess with this fine-tuned system, we risk messing with our appetite-hunger switch and spiralling into yo-yo diets. Click to read on about how aspartame is linked to accelerated aging.

Okay, that’s a bit of a generalization, and it depends to a certain extent what your diet mainly consists of. I have always thought, it was completely missing the boat, both when it comes to our health and common-sense, when people started developing these theories of anti-nutrients in plant-foods. I.e. thinking that a low thyroid issue was due to eating too much broccoli. No one eats that amount of broccoli - it’s just plain unrealistic. And now we finally have the science to stop talking about this nonsense. Yet on the flipside: anti-nutrients do become an issue these days, because we are seeing the rise of so many ridiculous extreme diets i.e. the rise of raw vegan green detox fad type of extremist diets. It is entirely possible to eat so monotone and restrictive, that you are actually eating too much of a select type of anti-nutrient group, resulting in health issues in the long run. Click on to read the study debunking the theory of anti-nutrients.

“Decreased Diabetes type 2 risk at high intake of high- but not of low-fat dairy products suggests that dairy fat partly could have contributed to previously observed protective associations between dairy intake and diabetes type 2”

Read the full study here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25832335/

And keep in mind that what shows up as the most allergenic compounds when we doo food allergy testing are casein and lactose - both very low in butter and cream, hence the reason small amounts of these full-fat items carry health benefits to them, especially as they contain butyric acid which is key for healthy gut flora.

“Findings from our systematic literature review and meta-analysis of RCTs fail to support the efficacy of low-fat diet interventions over higher fat diet interventions of similar intensity for significant long-term clinically meaningful weight control. Previous trials comparing low-fat diet interventions with “usual diet” or minimal intensity control groups have mislead perceptions of the efficacy of reductions in fat intake as a strategy for long-term weight loss. In fact, comparisons of similar intervention intensity conclude that dietary interventions lower in total fat intake lead to significantly less weight loss compared with higher fat, low-carbohydrate diets. Health and nutrition guidelines should cease recommending low-fat diets for weight loss given the clear lack of long-term efficacy over other similar intensity dietary interventions. Additional research is needed to identify optimal intervention strategies for long-term weight loss and weight maintenance, including the need to look beyond variations in macronutrient composition.”

Read the full study here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4667723/ and remember that all this seemingly confusing back and forth research basically taps into our need for both fat, protein and carbs - too much or too little of anything is never a good thing in the long run.

In 2018 I was a keynote speaker at The Cancer Conference Copenhagen amongst some of Denmark’s most famous doctors incl. Claus Hancke and Carsten Vagn-Hansen. I presented the topic “Treating the cause vs. the symptoms” which you can watch in addition to the video with the panel discussion afterwards, where I answered questions from 4:33 minutes in and onwards. Both videos are in Danish only.

Y’all have probably already seen the movie making its rounds on Netflix: Game Changer. Now this is not going to be an in-depth analysis of everything that’s wrong or right with this movie with scientific references to back it up. Because here’s the deal: you can find scientific studies on almost anything to back up your agenda. The problem with the majority of science today is it is deliberately designed to make for a specific outcome due to vested interests (one of the movie producers of Game Changer sells pea protein for a living, just saying). So the solution is to use your brain and consider whether things make sense. Logical reasoning is something we don’t use very much anymore, to the point where we will almost believe anything if the sentence “science” follows. There is a huge difference between whether the “so-called science” is done on men, women, old, young, athletes, overweight, underweight, someone with a history of addiction or just your plain old average sedentary Joe. These segments do not share the same biochemical blueprint nor do they metabolize foods the same way and their requirements to perform optimally for their life is very different.

When we look at brittle bones, it almost never has to do with lack of dietary calcium, yet that is what people are told, when they go for a bone scan (Dexa scan). You cannot scan people’s bones and tell from an image that their bones are weak because they lack dietary calcium.

One of the largest studies to date on the keto diet and breast cancer recently came out and showed clearly: NO you should not forego fruit, potatoes, legumes, and whole grains in order to load up on fat and more fat on the current keto-craze, if you want to have the best survival rate when it comes to breast cancer. Now why might that be?