Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Did you know that spirulina can protect against radiation sickness and help prevent cancer? And that’s not all. Spirulina is a form of blue-green algae which is densely-packed with nutrients and well deserves its reputation as a powerful superfood and top detoxifier. It contains around a hundred nutrients, including vitamins, minerals, trace elements, essential fatty acids and phytochemicals. Spirulina has a very high protein content of 60-70 percent, with all eight essential amino acids. It is also a prebiotic which encourages beneficial bacteria to take up residence in our guts.
One of the things which makes spirulina extra-special is that the compound which gives it its blue-ish color, phycocyanin, mops up heavy metals, including radioactive heavy metals, so that they can be removed from the body. Studies from China, Belarus and the Ukraine show that spirulina protects against the effects of radiation, with one study showing that children given spirulina after the Chernobyl disaster had a 50 per cent reduction in urine radioactivity levels (Loseva & Dardynskaya, 1993). Even severely ill children were found to regain their health when given spirulina.
Most of us living in the modern world absorb some toxic heavy metals such as lead and mercury from the environment, so taking spirulina is a good way to detoxify and remove some of these damaging substances from our bodies.
Spirulina also has important anti-cancer properties, with several studies showing remarkable effects. For example, a study of tobacco chewers in India had their mouth lesions reversed when they took spirulina (Babu et al 1995), spirulina inhibited cancer cell proliferation in mice (Lisheng et al 1991) and it has been found to enhance natural killer cell activity against cancer cells (Akao et al, 2009). As spirulina is not known to cause any toxicity, it begs the question why this extraordinary substance is not used more often in orthodox cancer treatments.
Spirulina also has anti-viral and anti-bacterial properties, and in fact it has been found to inhibit replication of HIV (Ayehunie et al, 1998) as well as the herpes simplex virus (Hernandez-Corona et al 2002).
Make sure you get your spirulina from a clean, organic source, since its ability to bind to heavy metals means that it can be contaminated; poor quality brands may also be contaminated with other types of blue-green algae which can be toxic. The spirulina in Essentials is, of course, organic, pure and of the highest quality.
