You’re sound asleep or floating in that delicious half dreaming, half aware state of limbo. Suddenly you are jolted awake as a white-hot, searing pain rips through your calf. You scream. You cry. You try to stretch out your leg or you force yourself to stand up and limp around in circles until the pain subsides. Sanity returns as the muscle relaxes and you collapse back into bed. But what caused that muscle to twist itself into a knot?

To relieve a cramp right now, stretch the muscle. The muscle cramping needs to be elongated. A bit of unrefined sea salt under the tongue followed by eating a banana can keep them from coming back for the time being, but if you get muscle cramps regularly it’s time to put a stop to them with a holistic approach that addresses the cause.

Causes of Muscle Cramps

Dehydration, mineral deficiency, or muscle strain are common causes of a muscle spasm also known as a charley horse. Poor circulation, nerve compression, or an adverse reaction to a prescription medication may also be to blame.

How To Avoid Muscle Cramps

Too often we look at one symptom and try to resolve it with medications instead of looking at the body from a holistic viewpoint. If you move away from the conventional medical model and realize that there is one disease – cellular dysfunction with its many symptoms, you will change your approach to health. You can heal the individual cells through detox, exercise, and nutrition. In other words, give the body what it needs, remove the interfering toxins, and it will heal itself.

Dehydration

Your body needs plenty of pure, clean water each day. The rule of thumb is ½ ounce to 1 ounce per pound. If you weigh 150 lbs., that’s 75 to 150 ounces of water per day, roughly half a gallon to a gallon a day. If you weigh 200 lbs, that’s 12 .5 to 25 cups of water or ¾ gallon to a 1 ½ gallons a day. Hotter weather and more exercise puts you on the high end of the range, whereas cooler weather and a more sedentary lifestyle lowers your requirements.

Cranberry Lemonade Recipe from The One Gallon Challenge

• Glass gallon jar
• Safe, clean, spring water or distilled water
• 1 cup of unsweetened, organic cranberry juice, not from concentrate
• 3 organic fresh lemons
• A citrus juicer
• Liquid stevia
• Liquid cayenne

Fill the jar to about 85% capacity with spring water (or distilled water). Squeeze the lemons and pour the juice into the water. Add cranberry juice. Add stevia to taste and then add cayenne to taste. The amount of cayenne used is up to you, but the more the better.

Nutrition

You can easily increase nutrition through raw fruits and vegetables. Muscle spasms can be caused by low levels of magnesium, potassium, calcium, and sodium. If you eat a truly healthy diet consisting of 80% fresh, raw, organic produce, you will increase your overall health.

Foods rich in magnesium include pumpkin seeds, spinach, Swiss chard, sesame seeds, quinoa, cashews, black beans, cashews, sunflower seeds, and navy beans.

Foods rich in potassium include beet greens, Lima beans, Swiss chard, bok choy, sweet potato, potatoes, spinach, avocado, pinto beans, and lentils. Of course, bananas are a good source as well, but compare their 422.44 mg of potassium per serving to beet greens at 1,308.96 mg per serving. Greens really pack in nutrients.

Greens alkalinize the body and keep calcium levels up in the body as well. Collared greens, spinach, turnip greens, mustard greens, beet greens, and bok choy are all excellent sources of calcium. Try to eat a large salad every day with lots of greens, plenty of other colors, garlic, cilantro, ginger, and more.

Exercise

The body needs exercise to maintain muscle strength and limberness, bone density, lymphatic movement, and blood flow. All are vital for health. In order for the body to dispose of waste and toxins, blood and lymph must move through the tissues. Exercise and massage aid in circulation of blood and lymph.

Chiropractic and Massage

If muscle spasms are a regular occurrence, especially if you maintain a healthy diet and get good exercise, it’s a good idea to check in with your chiropractor, your masseuse, or both, to relieve any impinged nerves that may be contributing to the problem.

Stretch Properly

Lightly stretch after your muscles are warm, and take care not to injure yourself as you build up flexibility. Incorporate Dynamic stretching with your workouts. Dynamic stretching means your body is still continuously moving while you elongate, or stretch, the muscles, like with stiff-legged deadlifts and high kicks. Use static, slow-and-hold stretching to grow and maintain your flexibility after your workout when your muscles are hot, not before when the muscles are cold. Doing static stretches at the end of a workout will help reduce muscle soreness the next day and allow your muscles to heal faster due to the increase in blood flow to the muscles.

Supplementation

Shillington’s Total Nutrition Formula and Sunwarrior’s Liquid Light  are excellent for daily supplementation. It’s best not to take potassium or magnesium by themselves unless recommended by a doctor who has verified a deficiency. There are many good liquid multi-mineral formulas on the market (and a lot of bad ones), but not many great whole-food supplements like Shillington’s formula (you can also get the recipe here).

Conclusion

When you embrace a healthy lifestyle and reject processed foods, replacing them with whole healthy foods and an alkaline diet (which is very easy to do with whole foods), and you drink plenty of clean water, exercise, and get good rest, healing begins. Muscle spasms, along with other aches and pains or symptoms attributed to age or other circumstance, simply disappear. If you get cramps in your feet, look into  hypothyroidism.

Recommended Reading:

• Hypertension – How To Lower Your Blood Pressure Quickly and Naturally
• Understand Hypothyroidism – Prevention and Natural Remedies
• Joint Pain – What Causes it? How to Stop it Naturally

Recommended Supplements:

• Shillington’s Total Nutrition Formula
• Sunwarrior’s Liquid Light
• Liquid Magnesium – 8oz • Drs Advantage
• Shillington’s Body Balance+
• Magnesium Complex Liquid

Sources:

• Charley horse – Medline Plus
• Water and Your Diet: Staying Slim and Regular With H2O – Web M.D.
• Magnesium – The World’s Healthiest Foods
• Potassium – The World’s Healthiest Foods
• Calcium – The World’s Healthiest Foods

(NaturalNews – S. D. Wells) Most milk does a body BAD, not good, but it’s the biggest lies that are more likely to be believed, and there are myths that refuse to die. So, in the name of good health, let’s try to rid ourselves of them now.

Food that is cooked dead is useless

Did you know that pasteurized milk is dead milk? The nutrients are lost, burned up at high heat, between 145°F and 160°F for about 30 seconds. Yep, that milk’s dead. Did you know that calcium alone does not build bones or bone density? Let’s start this off with those infamous words, pasteurized and homogenized. Homogenized and pasteurized are bad, bad words. Were you taught differently growing up? Did the school books brainwash you? Did the commercials say just the opposite, that milk helps build strong bones? Is your “dead” milk polluted with inflammatory carcinogens, medications, hormones, antibiotics, pus, pathogens, bacteria, viruses and artery-clogging animal fat?

Milk, cigarettes, diet soda and margarine for America!

The United States is in the midst of a public health epidemic due to poor diet. While much of the focus has been on obvious culprits such as sugary soft drinks and fast food, dairy foods often get a pass. The dairy industry, propped up by government, has convinced us of the health benefits of milk and other dairy products. But the context of how people consume dairy matters. …

[P]atterns of consumption [have shifted] away from plain milk toward dairy products laden with sugar, fat, and salt. …

Nearly half of the milk supply goes to make about 9 billion pounds of cheese and 1.5 billion gallons of frozen desserts–two-thirds of which is ice cream;

11 percent of all sugar goes into the production of dairy products.
(http://www.eatdrinkpolitics.com)

A few years ago, David Wolfe, nutritionist, best-selling author and world traveler, speaking via Natural News, said it best:

Okay, well the nations that consume the most calcium, the United States, Canada and the Scandinavian countries, have the worst osteoporosis and that’s because our theory of mineralization or our theory of nutrition is incorrect. The general theory is that a hundred years ago they started looking at people’s bones. They found out that, “oh my god; these bones are made out of calcium”. When people don’t have enough bone density the thought is, “oh they just have to eat more calcium because that’s what builds bones”. Calcium does not build bones and that is one of the biggest misconceptions ever and it actually goes to the real core of our problems with science. …

What increases bone density? Well, it turns out it’s two other minerals and that is silicon and magnesium.
(http://www.naturalnews.com)

Pasteurized milk – this is NOT good

The goal with pasteurization is to kill potentially bad bacteria, but at what cost? It kills all the beneficial bacteria and damages the minerals and vitamins. Plus, pasteurization denatures the proteins. This milk gets heated over 160°F for half a minute to “sterilize” what you’ll probably have trouble digesting. Even “low-temp” pasteurization stops at around 145°F, still killing most of the beneficial enzymes.

Homogenized milk – this is NOT good

Around the turn of the 20th century, homogenization became the “industry standard,” because people liked not having to shake up all the fat globules for consistency. This process rearranges the fat and protein molecules, which ALTERS how they act in the human body. Then you have “fortified” milk with vitamins A and D added back in so that the general population feels better about drinking milk past infancy.

The calcium myth – why millions of Americans are “doing it” wrong

The US is the most dairy-consuming nation in the world, yet we have the highest rate of osteoporosis. No animal on Earth drinks milk past infancy or from another animal, except humans.

Don’t get “white-washed” by the Dairy Industry! Get your calcium from organic leafy greens and raw nuts and seeds. Find organic silicon and magnesium and stay informed. (http://drbenkim.com)

Sources for this article include:
http://drbenkim.com
http://www.naturalnews.com
http://labs.naturalnews.com
http://ajcn.nutrition.org [PDF]
http://draxe.com
http://www.nomeatathlete.com
http://science.naturalnews.com

Bonus – How to Eat Raw Eggs Safely

For decades, the need for Calcium and Magnesium for growing and maintaining a healthy body has been well established. Absorbing these nutrients isn’t so easy. Most mineral supplements come from inorganic matter that is not bioavailable. In fact, taking a calcium or a calcium magnesium supplement will often do you more harm than good.

The fact is that most supplements on the market are toxic. It doesn’t matter how many milligrams of calcium a supplement has if it causes kidney stones. And while supplementing your diet with calcium can rid the body of many common health ailments, taking the wrong kind of calcium overtaxes the body and can actually cause arthritis and many other degenerative diseases. The only inorganic Cal-Mag formula to date that I know of that benefits the human body comes from this lemon-egg recipe. All the rest are junk.

Lemon Egg Recipe – the best organic calcium supplementation

1. Carefully place whole, clean, uncooked, uncracked, organic eggs in a clean wide-mouth jar or glass container. How many eggs is up to you, but the lemon juice needs to cover the eggs.
2. Cover the eggs with freshly squeezed organic lemon juice (concentrated lemon juice is pasteurized and should never be used as a substitute).
3. Cover the jar loosely and place it in the refrigerator. A few times during the day, gently – very gently – agitate the liquid in the jar. As the Calcium from the shells is leached by the lemon juice, bubbles will appear around the eggs.
4. Approximately 44 to 48 hours later, when the bubbling has stopped, carefully remove the eggs from the jar, being sure not to break the egg membranes. Replace the lid tightly on the jar containing the liquid and shake the mixture. You now have “Lemon Egg”. I love to drink it straight or mix 2oz in my smoothies. It can also be used for recipes calling for lemon juice as well. If there is no more than twice as much lemon juice per egg volume I take a tablespoon to two of the lemon mixture and up to six if I don’t eat enough vegetables.

One whole medium sized eggshell yields about 750 – 800 mgs of elemental calcium plus other microelements, including but not limited to magnesium, boron, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, sulphur, silicon, zinc,  (27 elements in total). The composition of an eggshell is very similar to that of our bones and teeth.

Calcium-magnesium is not the only homemade supplement you can make. Check out our Homemade Vitamin C article.

How to Eat Raw Eggs Safely

If you’re looking for a way to eat raw eggs safely, without the risk of salmonella, this recipe can double as egg safety protocol! The lemon juice kills the salmonella leaving you with just the egg itself (like in the picture). Great for smoothies and any other recipe that calls for raw eggs.

It should be noted, we do not recommend the consumption of factory farmed eggs under any circumstances, raw or cooked. Salmonella is not an issue in healthy eggs produced by healthy, trulycage-freee, organic chickens.

Alternatively, instead of discarding shells after cooking eggs, as long as the shells weren’t cooked (no boiled egg shells for this), you can put those in lemon juice as well (thank you AeRhee Lee at Healing Foods to Go).

Recommended Supplements:

• Total Nutrition Formula

Further Reading:

• Bullet Proof Your Immune System
• Total Nutrition – Make your own Homemade Multivitamin and Mineral Formula
• Homemade Vitamin C

Calcium is the most abundant mineral in the body. Though it seems like everyone is supplementing their diet with some form of calcium, most people are deficient. Your body can’t process calcium if you don’t have enough magnesium and you can’t absorb calcium without ample stores of vitamin D. You need vitamin K to regulate your blood calcium. And if you don’t have enough calcium, you won’t be able to process zinc. If you don’t have enough zinc, you won’t be able to process vitamin A.

Too much calcium can reduce the effectiveness of vitamin A and magnesium, and can cause anxiety (while too little causes depression). Also, people taking too much (and the especially wrong kind) of calcium are calcifying their soft tissue. And if your diet is acidic, your body is going to pull minerals (especially calcium) from wherever it can get it (teeth, bones, organs, etc.) to keep your blood at its proper, slightly alkaline pH (read more about this in Acid vs. Alkalinity).

To make the issue more confusing, most of the calcium supplements on the market are not digestible. Some of them are downright toxic; they can cause kidney stones or a host of other problems. Got milk? Well, throw it out. You and your family don’t need to be drinking that toxic soup of antibiotics, pesticides, and bovine growth hormones. Even if you buy organic milk, it’s a dead pasteurized food. Besides, although milk does contain calcium, even the Harvard School of Public Health questions whether it’s the best source. 

That’s just calcium.  We could go on and on with every other vitamin, mineral, or other essential nutrient in similar fashion.  

Vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, and most of our other nutrients are all about balance. Growing strong and healthy bones is not as simple as taking a calcium pill. Let’s take a look at other vitamins and minerals to see what some of their roles are. 

Minerals are found in rocks and soil. Plants get their minerals from the soil in which they are grown. If you grow the same vegetable in the ground year after year, the ground becomes deficient in the particular minerals that vegetable needs for development. Consequently the vegetable becomes deficient and so do the creatures that depend on it for nutrition. Through crop rotation, we replenish the soil. This is why crop rotation is so important.

Vitamins and minerals are necessary to sustain life and must be obtained from food because they are either not made in the body at all, or are not made in sufficient quantities.

Even if you only eat organic, remember big business has joined the industry and is now growing organic foods, using mono-cropping methods (without crop rotation). The organic label does not guarantee that produce was grown in nutrient rich soil. GMOs are invading organic fields and contaminating organic seed stores and the FDA has just authorized irradiating lettuce and spinach (regardless of whether or not it is organic). 

While it was previously stated that we should consume five to nine servings of raw fruits and vegetables per day, the National Academy of Science now states that we should double that amount due the decreased nutrient content of our food. But compared to 50 years ago, many foods don’t have 50% of their former nutrition; they have 10% or less. In addition, toxins so easily accumulated in our modern society, require us to consume even more nutrients for optimum health. Obviously it can be very difficult to get enough vitamins and minerals from the foods we eat, and though that is exactly how we should get our vitamins, supplementation has become a necessity for optimum health.

That said, don’t ever fool yourself into believing vitamin supplementation is a substitute for a healthy diet. Your body needs a diet filled with the healthiest foods available. Vitamins alone have no energy value. They can’t be assimilated without food. Choose whole food vitamins, not synthetic chemical reproductions (there are very few exceptions to this rule in the world of supplementation), and eat plenty of raw, fresh, organic fruits and vegetables. Other than growing our own organic food, this is the best we can do. 
Through crop rotation, we replenish the soil.