(9/12/08)

(CBS)  We all know her best as the ditzy Chrissy Snow from "Three's Company," but Suzanne Somers is far more intelligent then the character she played so well.

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Suzanne Somers in January 2007  (Getty Images/Frazer Harrison)

Since the sitcom ended more than 25 years ago, she's written 17 books, has gotten a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and has sold more than 10 million thigh masters!

Her latest book is "Breakthrough: Eight Steps to Wellness," Somers shares just that -- eight things you can do to get and stay healthy, and live longer.

"Breakthrough medicine," she writes, "is about building up our bodies to the point that we

never suffer from illness in the first place."

On The Early Show Friday, Somers reflected to co-anchor Harry Smith that she was "was interviewing a brain scientist and ... I thought it is so funny: I used to be Chrissy Snow, and I'm interviewing a brain scientist! But that's the reality of my life now."

She's faced cancer and other "significant life trials," as Smith put it. What's her biggest takeaway from all that?

"Lessons. You know? We learn from our lessons and, also, you know, growing up a child an alcoholic, too, which I've written a lot of books about, that you can -- you know, when things happen to you, you can choose either to be a victim, 'Why me? Poor me. Why do bad things happen to me?' Or the other way is, 'Alright. I've been dealt this blow. How can I learn from this and how can I grow spiritually and emotionally?' And that's usually where I go."

Among the eight steps she details in "Breakthrough":

Get bioidentical hormone replacement

"Oh, gosh," Somers remarked. "You want to know about this. And I've got all the studies to back it up in the back (of the book). Harvard just came out with a report that says testosterone doesn't give you prostate cancer. You can take testosterone if you have prostate cancer if it's not active. And the big one is -- men with highest levels of testosterone live the longest and live the healthiest, so you put back what you lose in the aging process, which is what I've doing for 13 years."

Avoid chemicals and detoxify your body.

"It's the chemicals, and diet sodas. One diet soda so over-stimulates the neurons of the brain, it literally excites them to death in six-to-eight hours. That's one diet soda. ... Chemicals, if you wonder why there's such an epidemic of brain tumors, pancreatic cancer, cancer everywhere, people are sick, people are not well, it's the chemicals. It's the greatest environmental assault in the history of mankind right now."

Take nutrition seriously.

"Eat real food. If you can pick it, pluck it, milk it or shoot it, you can eat it!"

Avoid pharmaceuticals unless absolutely necessary.

People are over-taking pharmaceuticals. They're getting whacky. I mean, when did old people have to have a big tackle box full of pills and you hire somebody to keep them straight? If you notice the template of today's medicine, it's over-drug, over-drug, over-drug, and then they end up in a nursing home."

Supplement your diet with..."

"...The big three. I asked all of the doctors. I take a lot of vitamins and supplements. But the big three: fish oil. Fish oil protects you from cancer. Protects your heart. Antioxidants eat up the free radicals from all the chemicals. And "Co-Q10." For your heart.

Exercise regularly.

Get proper sleep.

For much more on these elements, click here.  (SEE BELOW #!)

To read an excerpt of "Breakthrough," click here. (See BELOW #2)

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#1 The following are SUMMARIES of points made in the book...

Eight Steps to Wellness

From Suzanne Somers' BREAKTHROUGH

Step 1: Get Bioidentical Hormone Replacement

· As we age, certain hormones diminish, creating an imbalance that can set off everything from

perimenopause to cancer, beginning as early as our thirties.

· These cutting-edge doctors explain that they can't even begin to take a patient through the next

seven steps to healthy longevity until their hormones are balanced.

· With many people, once their hormones are balanced, they no longer need sleep medications,

anti-inflammatories, and statin drugs like Lipitor. Cases of high cholesterol disappear.

· Too many people are "toughing it out" due to all the negative publicity surrounding hormone

replacement, which is always about synthetic hormones, like Premarin and Prempro, not

bioidentical hormones.

· Premarin and Prempro are made from pregnant mare's urine, and have been shown to increase

cancer and vascular risks. A horse has 34 different estrogens, not including estriol (the

component of estrogen that protects women from breast cancer), and none of these are

compatible with a human woman. Why is Wyeth Pharmaceuticals selling over $2 billion worth of

these dangerous drugs yearly to unsuspecting women?

Step 2: Avoid Chemicals and Detoxify Your Body

· Pesticides and plastics can abnormally increase your estrogen and cause estrogen dominance,

which can predispose women to cancer.

· Maintain a household free of chemicals, contaminants, and toxic cleaners. Substitute natural

cleaning products, such as distilled white vinegar, baking soda, Borax, lemon juice, citrus

cleaners, Castile soaps, and safe commercial products.

· Filtering your water is essential.

· Keeping your lymph system-the body's "vacuum cleaner"-moving and healthy is essential for

detoxifying the body; we have three times more lymph fluid in our bodies than blood. Correct diet,

infrared sauna, dry skin brushing, and jumping on a min trampoline all help keep the lymph's

flowing.

· Build your immune system. People deficient in vitamin C are more susceptible to environmental

pollutants, and exposure to toxins like lead or benzene will deplete your vitamin C stores. A

vitamin C drip, administered by your doctor, can help.

Step 3: Take Nutrition Seriously

· The typical Western diet, high in red meats, bad fats, food additives and carbohydrates is a

perfect cancer brew.

· Children start out handicapped in the womb; pregnant mothers drinking diet soda pass along

every chemical they consume-chemicals that have been proven to destroy brain cells.

· Good oils like olive, flax, and coconut oil, are used to create cell membranes. When the correct

materials are lacking, your body makes cell membranes out of whatever raw materials are

available, like margarine, vegetable shortening, breakfast cereals, and pastries. Cell membranes

built from these inappropriate fats and oils cause the membrane and the entire cell to malfunction.

A cell built from hydrogenated oil impairs the passage of oxygen into the cell and oxygen deficient

cells become cancerous.

Step 4: Create a Health G.I. Tract

· Without a healthy gut, you cannot have health. The gastrointestinal tract is the largest

component of your immune system.

· If you don't chew your food long enough to break it down, large clumps of food will be trying to

work their way through the maze of your gut, causing indigestion, acid reflux, gas, bloating, and

other uncomfortable symptoms and disease.

· When the GI tract deteriorates, you may experience more serious problems: allergies, cancer,

rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, lupus, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's disease, ulcerative

colitis, psoriasis, and eczema.

· Surprisingly, macular degeneration-the leading cause of central vision loss for those over 50 in

the U.S.-has its origins in the GI tract.

· Eat probiotics like acidophilus and bifidobacteria, take digestive enzymes, eat some raw food

daily, and consume optimum amounts of fiber and essential fatty acids.

Step 5: Avoid Pharmaceuticals Unless Absolutely Necessary

· Pharmaceuticals are a godsend for pain, infection, mental illness, and other conditions, but

whenever you can treat a problem or condition without pharmaceuticals, it is always the better,

safer way.

· Drugs don't heal, they "handle" the ailment, often causing dangerous side effects.

· Instead of Ambien for sleep problems, why not take melatonin, a natural over-the-counter

hormone intended for sleep and also an effective antioxidant made in our bodies until we reach

middle age.

· Statins (like Lipitor) inhibit the creation of cholesterol, but harm the cells' mitochondria, causing

problems both with brain cell development and energy. Instead of statins, why not take over-thecounter

niacin and/or nattokinase, a natural blood thinner?

· Bioidentical hormone replacement helps regulate your mood and can eliminate the need for

antidepressants. It also helps control cholesterol.

Step 6: Supplement Your Diet

· Our food supply is horribly depleted and largely deficient, contaminated by pesticides,

herbicides, cold storage, early picking, "beautifying" at supermarkets, nonorganic soils, acid rain,

and much more. To get all the proper nutrients we need to build healthy cells, it is vital we

supplement our already good diets.

· Every cell in the body requires good nutrition to replicate. Supplementation makes sense,

putting back into your body what is lost due to toxicity, stress, or normal aging.

· Resveratrol protects against disease, curcumin eliminates free radicals, pomegranate extracts

help protect against heart disease and prostate cancer, green tea extracts increase fat burning

and improve insulin sensitivity, and essential fatty acids such as fish oils strengthen cell

membranes.

Step 7: Exercise Regularly

· Even a brand new car, left in the garage for weeks, will sputter and choke from lack of use when

you go to start it up.

· Walking 40 minutes a day is miraculous for the frame.

· Free weights stimulate bone growth and give beautiful definition to our muscles.

· Chose something you know you will stick with.

Step 8: Get Proper Sleep

· Cortisol is a major hormone and if it is high, sleep is impossible. It is our stress hormone and in

today's world, our job pressures, financial concerns, multitasking, and high-pressured lifestyles

trigger cortisol all the time.

· Cortisol is highly sensitive to light. You must sleep in complete darkness. Even the smallest light

can raise your cortisol levels, interfering with your sleep, because cortisol regards light as

meaning that it is still time to be active.

· It is essential to go to bed two to three hours before midnight so your body can do its healing

work. The National Institutes of Health conclude that six hours of prolactin production in the dark

is the minimum necessary to maintain immune function like T-cell and beneficial killer-cell

production. You can't get six hours of prolactin secretion on six hours of sleep a night because it

takes at least three and a half hours of melatonin secretion before the pituitary hormone prolactin

is released.

· There are ways to retrain your body to sleep. From sunset on, dim the lights in your house or

light candles to lower cortisol.

· Taking melatonin supplementation can be helpful; you can also wear a non-drug sleep patch

created with nanotechnology that puts nothing into your system; it reflects the infrared light

conducted by our bodies and triggers our cells to create what is needed·

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#2 WHAT IS BREAKTHROUGHMEDICINE?

IN THE OLD DAYS, a doctor would be able to have lengthy office sessions with a

patient when he or she came in for a checkup or to complain of pain or illness. The

doctor could spend time with the patient and really listen to what he or she was

saying. They could work together to make a determination on how to proceed.A

prescription pad was reserved for extreme illness, with doctors trying to find other

ways to make a patient feel better. Rest, proper nutrition, and fluids were

frequently the best remedy.

That doesn’t happen much anymore. Doctors have only a few minutes to spend

with each patient, and it is easier and faster to write a prescription for something

that will alleviate the complaints. Next patient, please!

As I said in the introduction, our prescription-mad medical culture actually

contributes to our feeling unwell. We never really get better; we just mask our

symptoms. We don’t follow a commonsense approach to medicine, because taking

a pill is easier. But we are not feeling better, and we are frustrated with the

downward spiral of our health.

Recognizing that many of us feel we have hit the wall with conventional

medicine, antiaging is the likely outcropping to move medicine forward. At present

its numbers are small but growing steadily. Breakthrough medicine treats people

and patients like individuals who have their own special needs. It brilliantly brings

together the personal one-onone commitment we got from the medical community

decades ago coupled with the cutting-edge technology of today.

Technology, so far, has been a double-edged sword for us. We are an aging

society because we now have access to technology so sophisticated that the normal

life span has been extended. In other words, technology today will not allow us to

die. This is great news except for the sad fact that the health of most people has

deteriorated to the point that quality of life no longer exists. As a result, many

people are passing their last years suffering with various forms and stages of

disability, uncomfortably waiting it out until the final curtain; that is, if their brain

is still firing well enough to realize that they are alive.

Antiaging medicine and the forward-thinking Western doctors who have

embraced it are able to use technology to help us not only prolong our lives but

also have good quality of life. They have rejected the idea of the inevitability of

disability and debilitating disease and have decided to band together and take

matters into their own hands using natural methods as well as cutting-edge science.

The goal of antiaging medicine is to increase the life span as well as improve

overall health. It emphasizes early detection of illness, preventive strategies, and

lifestyle changes. This requires improving the diet, reducing stress, detoxifying the

body, boosting the immune system, healing the GI tract, correcting hormonal

imbalances, improving cardiovascular function, and rebuilding brainpower.

Change is never easy; as with all passages, most of us enter it kicking and

screaming. We are comfortable with our pharmaceutical drugs. We are used to

taking a pill for every ailment. We are used to side effects; for instance, a woman

takes an antibiotic for a yeast infection, which then requires another antibiotic for

the new strain of infection that has compromised the gut flora, so she takes yet

another medication to rectify this new problem, and so on.

In its way, antiaging medicine has put the brakes on this crazy hamster wheel

and said, “Slow down, it’s not working; let’s find another way.” Let’s reintroduce

common sense and the “art of medicine.” Let’s take advantage of intravenous

treatments, chelation, detoxification, nanotechnology. In other words, let’s first try

to improve health without chemical interference. Let’s reserve pharmaceuticals for

their original intention, which would be extreme medical intervention as in acute

illness, infection, mental illness, and pain; then pharmaceuticals are the miracles

they are meant to be . . . the last card in the practitioner’s back pocket.

The new breakthrough doctors have pooled together their great mind-power to

use nature’s tools to find creative ways to stay healthy without risking debilitating

side effects.

What makes us age? What makes us sick? Aging brings about loss of function,

loss of organ reserve. A number of factors contribute to the deterioration of the

body—nutritional deficiencies are at the top of the list. We patients still have not

connected the dots relative to good diet, that the food we eat is responsible for

building us up or taking us down. It is truly that simple.

Imbalances of hormones accelerate aging; toxins and poor-quality food

accelerate the aging process at a cellular level. Yet through this new approach to

medicine we are able to reverse and correct these imbalances before having to

resort to pharmaceuticals. These stressors combine to produce changes in the cell’s

membranes; simple measures such as changing from omega-6 oils (safflower,

sunflower, corn, soybean, cottonseed, perilla, walnut, and others) to omega-3 oils

(flax, fish oil supplementation, and others) can drastically improve the elasticity of

each cell membrane to allow for hydration and oxygen to flow in and out freely.

Cells that are hydrated and oxygenated work optimally and reverse the aging

process to create a smooth-functioning, healthy body.

As human beings we are “cells reproducing.” In order to live long and healthy,

this process must continue. On the other hand, cell dysfunction eventually

culminates in disease as the body deteriorates. A simple step, like changing the oils

you consume, can positively impact the health of your cells; there is no drug that

can do that.

Antiaging takes free radicals seriously, knowing that free radicals damage cells,

which causes the body’s organs and systems to lose function capacity. Excess acid

in the system increases free radicals, and 80 percent of chronically ill adults in the

U.S. have too much acid in their tissues, which makes them prone to chronic

degenerative diseases such as heart disease, stroke, and arthritis. Free radicals are a

major contributor to all cancers, and a major factor in loss of collagen resulting in

tissues that are old and withered. Free radicals damage the cell membrane, which

interferes with the ability of each cell to send and receive messages from other cells

and to absorb the necessary nutrients while eliminating waste products. Freeradical

damage is most pronounced in oxygen-rich organs (eyes, brain, liver, heart,

lungs, kidneys, and blood) and has been implicated in the following diseases:

kidney disease, diabetes, pancreatitis, liver damage, inflammation of the GI tract,

lung disease, eye diseases (macular degeneration, cataracts), nervous system

disorders (Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, MS), diseases affecting red blood cells

(sickle-cell anemia, pernicious anemia), iron overload, autoimmune diseases

(rheumatoid arthritis, lupus), and most infections (tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS).

Clearly the need to understand the creation of free radicals and then to take the

necessary steps to eliminate them is essential for our systems to be healthy.

Chemicals and toxins, plus stress and poor diet continually help create more and

more free radicals, which is why antiaging medicine understands and focuses on

the absolute necessity of neutralizing free radicals by utilizing antioxidants through

the food you consume, intravenous treatments, and supplementation.

It’s a new world. If we continue doing things the same old way—eating

chemical-laden foods, using chemical toxins in our homes and offices— it will

seriously affect the quality and length of our lives, and most likely will be the

trigger for one or more of the previously mentioned diseases.

The public is responding. Growing numbers of people are turning to alternative

antiaging medicine to address their needs. This new breakthrough medicine

recognizes the wisdom and effectiveness of this approach to health, which blends

mind, science, and experience. In 1993, a study published in the New England

Journal of Medicine found that over a third of those surveyed chose alternative

medicine over traditional conventional medicine because people have grown weary

of the medical establishment’s continued emphasis on diagnostic testing and

treatment with drugs without focusing on them as the patient.

Here’s the good news: It’s not an either/or scenario. It’s important to recognize

that practitioners of alternative medicine are not opposed to conventional medical

practices and do not hesitate to resort to them when appropriate, especially when

dealing with patients who have life-threatening, acute illnesses. Antiaging medicine

aims to stay a step or two ahead of sickness and disease; it also works at toxic

avoidance and detoxification, knowing that toxins create malfunctioning cells and

cell death is the gradual end to us as a species. It’s that serious. I am a great

admirer of antiaging medicine . . . it appeals to my common sense. Drugs will

never heal; they abate. Restorative treatment as practiced in antiaging medicine

approaches the body with true healing in mind.

www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/12/health/healthy_living/main4443918.shtml