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Shari Lieberman, PhD, CNS, FACN, earned her doctorate in Clinical Nutrition and Exercise Physiology from The Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio, and her master’s degree in
Nutrition, Food Science and Dietetics from New York University. A Certified Nutrition Specialist, Dr. Lieberman is the best-selling author of Mineral Miracle and The Real Vitamin and Mineral Book
1. The Importance of Minerals to Your Health
3. The Science Behind SierraSil
4. Understanding the Health Benefits of SierraSil
Mineral Miracle - "Sheds light on the SierraSil mineral deposit and explains how it can relieve joint pain and inflammation naturally...The authors have gone to great effort to offer pertinent and oftern compelling information on an important topic."
It’s midnight. You try to fall sleep, but with every toss and turn, the jarring pain in your joints keeps you up. You take a deep breath, go into the bathroom, and grab a bottle of extra-strength aspirin from the medicine cabinet. After taking two (all the while wondering how removing a simple cap from a bottle can hurt so much), you climb back into bed and finally fall asleep. The next thing you know, the alarm rings. You stretch your arm over to shut it off, and as soon as you do, you feel a sharp pain in your shoulder. You get out of bed very slowly. As you stand, you begin to shift your weight and the pain seems to move from your shoulder to your back to your knees. You head for the bathroom once again—this time to take your prescribed anti-inflammatory medication. You tell yourself that you’ll be fine in thirty minutes or so. But will you?
For millions of Americans, this scenario repeats itself day after day. We have become a nation that is dependent upon drugs. What’s most disturbing is that these treatments don’t eliminate the cause of our pain. They merely mask the problem by temporarily alleviating the discomfort. And the more drugs we take, the more we rely on them to get us through each day and night.
Fortunately, there is a healthy alternative to this approach—one that not only helps you experience safe and significant joint pain relief from arthritis and other inflammatory conditions, but also addresses the cause. This new natural supplement is called SierraSil. It is a unique mineral complex that supports the cessation of or noticeably reduces chronic inflammation, which medical researchers now know is one of the primary causes of arthritis and other degenerative illnesses. In the chapters that follow, you will learn about this new natural supplement that is a true gift of the earth. We call it the “mineral miracle.”
What constitutes a miracle? If you woke up each day with pain that disrupted your sleep, interfered with your daily routine, increased fatigue, and prevented you from enjoying your favorite activities, you might consider anything that stopped that pain a miracle—whether a pharmaceutical drug or a natural product. Of course, as you will soon see, in the case of drugs, with their inherent array of often-serious side effects, your “prescription miracle” might turn out to be a nightmare.
As health practitioners who emphasize an integrative approach to health care, we combine the best of both conventional and alternative medicine. As researchers who are devoted to learning all we can about safe, natural, and effective nutritional supplements, we are always on the lookout for products and therapies that provide maximum benefit with minimum risk. When we find them, we become excited and eager to share them with our patients and colleagues. It is why we are so grateful to be able to share the SierraSil discovery with you.
If you are reading this book, there’s a good chance you are one of the millions of Americans who are turning to natural solutions to address your health concerns. Once part of a small minority, you and others like you now belong to an ever-growing population of health-conscious consumers. According to the latest surveys, more than two-thirds of all Americans now use some form of alternative medicine, with nutritional and herbal therapies being the most popular.
Due to the continued growth and popularity of the natural heath products industry—a trend that began in the 1960s and mushroomed by the early 1990s—it is not uncommon for advertising hype and false claims to be made about so-called “miracle products.” That is why we both devote so much of our time investigating such claims and “separating the wheat from the chaff,” so that you, the consumer, can be aware of what works and what doesn’t. To this end, we both continue to stay abreast of the latest developments in this field, attending and presenting at medical conferences all around the world. We rarely, however, find a product that works as powerfully and effectively as the one we introduce in this book. But before discussing what you will be learning about SierraSil in the chapters that follow, let’s examine some of the factors that are causing more and more Americans to turn to natural health products as a solution for their healthcare needs.
THE LIMITATIONS OF CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE
Most proponents of conventional medicine tend to rely too heavily on prescription drugs. According to a report released by the United States Department of Health and Human Services on December 2, 2004, Americans spent $1.6 trillion dollars on health care in 2002, the most recent year for which that data is available. Just how big is that number? In that year alone, we spent three times the amount allocated to rebuild the city of New Orleans and other areas of the Gulf Coast destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. Ouch! It gets worse. Health experts estimate that in the very near future, that figure will rise to $2 trillion, which means that more than $5,000 is spent per year for every person in the United States.
During that same year, the deaths caused by heart attack, cancer, and stroke—the nation’s three biggest killers—decreased only a miniscule 1 to 3 percent (in spite of lipid-lowering drugs, cancer therapies, and other leading prescription drugs). While any decrease in the death rates of these illnesses is commendable, clearly there is room for vast improvement in the way conventional medicine treats these diseases.
Compounding the problem of conventional medicine’s resistance to nondrug treatment options is the prohibitive cost of malpractice insurance premiums, an aging population, and the rise of many chronic and degenerative diseases and conditions. Our colleague Dr. Andrew Weil, clinical professor of internal medicine, as well as founder and director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona’s Health Sciences Center in Tucson, states that approximately 85 percent of the health problems we face as a nation are of a chronic, degenerative nature. Every day, more than one-third of all Americans endure such health conditions as allergy, arthritis, asthma, back pain, chronic fatigue, depression, diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, headaches, high blood pressure, obesity, and osteoporosis.
As Dr. Weil further points out, conventional medicine, for all of its technical advances and arsenal of pharmaceutical drugs, has no answer for chronic disease. At best, it can offer only temporary relief of symptoms through medication, but it fails to address the underlying causes of such conditions. As a result, people who rely on prescription drugs for relief of chronic pain and suffering must take them indefinitely. Not only can doing so be very expensive, but pain-relieving drugs also carry risks of potentially harmful side effects, even death.
Neither of us is opposed to the sensible use of pharmaceutical drugs, and we won’t hesitate to recommend them to our patients if we think they can make a positive difference. However, we both recognize that they are increasingly overused, often without providing the promised results. Most disturbing, in many cases, they result in very serious consequences. Consider the following grim statistic: According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), one of the most highly regarded publications in the field of conventional medicine, each and every year in this country, pharmaceutical drugs, when properly prescribed, cause the deaths of over 100,000 people, and adverse side effects to millions of others.
NATURAL HEALTH PRODUCTS—A SAFER ALTERNATIVE
While it is true that natural products are not without risk, growing scientific evidence clearly shows that overall they are often far safer than many prescription drugs in a similar category, and they are capable of producing equal or superior results. Although recently, the FDA has raised the alarm on nutritional and herbal health products—a result of the 153 deaths allegedly linked to the herb ephedra—the fact remains that when taken as directed, nutritional supplements are significantly safer than the majority of drugs you and I can purchase over the counter, including aspirin.
Some health experts maintain that you can get all of the nutrition you need from the foods you eat. We respectfully but firmly disagree with this belief for a number of reasons. For starters, as our society’s obesity epidemic makes clear, many of us don’t make wise food choices. Instead, we rely on unhealthy fast-food meals that are devoid of nutrients.
But even those of us who are committed to eating healthy, and who place a premium on buying and eating organic foods whenever possible, are still at risk of being nutritionally deficient if we rely on diet alone. The reason is that our foods—even those raised organically—no longer contain the same abundance of vitamins, minerals, and other essential elements that were contained in the foods of our ancestors. This erosion of essential food-based nutrients is due primarily to the demineralization of crop soils as a result of commercial farming methods.
And then there are the environmental toxins and pollutants we are exposed to daily. Toxins such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrocarbons, and second-hand smoke have been linked to a wide variety of health conditions, as well as premature aging and mental decline. Nutritional supplements can play a vital role in counteracting the effects of these toxins.
From our perspective, eating wisely and supplementing your diet with essential nutrients daily is a safe, effective, and inexpensive means of lessening your risk of disease. It’s no secret that the vast majority of our holistically inclined professional colleagues agree with us. What is not so well known is that the Journal of the American Medical Association does also. In 2002, JAMA published an article by Harvard researchers recommending that “all adults take one multivitamin daily.” This recommendation was based on a review of thirty years of scientific articles that explored the relationship between nutrients and chronic illness.
Just as telling, a recent survey of dieticians—who, as a class of healthcare providers, perpetuate the belief that all of the nutrients we need are available through a balanced diet—found that nearly 60 percent regularly use nutritional supplements. No doubt they are aware of studies showing how the majority of Americans are deficient in a number of vital nutrients. Some health experts estimate that as many as 80 percent of the US population falls into this category.
Of course, nutritional supplements alone are no panacea for poor health and disease, and they certainly cannot take the place of a healthy well-balanced diet; but the improvements we have seen them make in countless patients are nothing short of remarkable. These enrichments are supported by a growing body of clinical and laboratory results that meet the criteria for scientific peer review publication.
But this doesn’t mean you should take nutritional supplements indiscriminately. Nor should you believe the purported benefits of a particular supplement just because its manufacturer or supplier touts them. In the course of reading this book, you will learn how to supplement wisely; discover which vitamins, minerals, and other co-nutrients are essential for good health; and learn the optimal dosage range for each. In addition, you will be introduced to the exciting nutritional product we referred to earlier—the unique mineral compound called SierraSil, which can make a dramatic difference in the way you feel.
WHAT THIS BOOK WILL TEACH YOU
In the chapters that follow, you will learn all about the SierraSil mineral complex. In an effort to present a clear, accurate, and comprehensive picture of this amazing natural supplement, we have included pertinent, interesting, often compelling information that covers such topics as:
✓The unique role minerals play in your health, how and why they are so vitally important, and which ones you need on a daily basis.
✓The story of SierraSil’s discovery.
✓The unique blend of minerals in the deposit from which SierraSil is derived.
✓The scientific clinical studies that have shown SierraSil to be a safe and effective natural aid for significantly reducing the pain of osteoarthritis and other inflammatory conditions.
✓How SierraSil is able to support the cessation and prevention of cartilage loss—a condition associated with aging and chronic degenerative diseases.
✓How SierraSil’s unique chemical makeup has been clinically shown to suppress the genetic factors that trigger harmful inflammation.
In addition, we reveal the eye-opening marketing role of pharmaceutical drug companies when bringing out new products, and compare them with the role of natural product manufacturers. We discuss the serious side effects resulting from the most common pharmaceutical pain relievers, from aspirin to COX-2 inhibitors. And we provide a proven multifaceted health regimen that you and your loved ones can follow to safely and effectively protect yourself against disease.
If you or someone you know is suffering from chronic joint pain, and you are searching for a solution that can safely stop that pain, not just mask it, the information contained in this book is for you. If you are one of the millions of informed readers who recognize the importance of disease prevention, this book is also for you. Are you ready to learn all about this “mineral miracle” and put it to work? Turn the page and read on.
