Center For Balanced Health

10/31/2025

We're excited to share that Dr. Keith Berkowitz's. interview for the Blood Sugar Roller Coaster Summit goes live today!

This free event brings together 45+ experts diving into the real reasons behind cravings, mood swings, fatigue, and blood sugar chaos — and how to finally feel balanced again.

Join me free here: https://quitsugarsummit.com/blood-sugar-summit?a_aid=68f7df26644ca

Don’t miss it — this conversation could truly change the way you think about energy, metabolism, and your relationship with food.

10/30/2025

🍩 Tried cutting sugar, keto, carb-counting… but the cravings still come back?
I’ll be speaking at the Blood Sugar Roller Coaster Summit Oct 27 – Nov 2), where we’ll uncover why it’s not about willpower — it’s about reactive hypoglycemia.

Join me (free to attend): https://quitsugarsummit.com/2025_blood_sugar_rollercoaster_summit

10/24/2025

Fruits and veggies are packed with nutrients that are good for you. Eating foods rich in beta carotene, flavonoids, folate, lutein, vitamin C, and vitamin K help keep your brain healthy. Here are the best fruits and vegetables for brain health:

Berries. Strawberries and blueberries have lots of flavonoids, which help improve memory.

Green, leafy vegetables. Broccoli, collards, kale and spinach are good sources of beta carotene, folate, lutein, and vitamin K. Research suggests these foods may help slow cognitive decline.

Oranges. When it comes to getting enough vitamin C, one medium-sized navel orange can help you meet your daily recommended amount. Vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant that helps fight off the free radicals that can damage brain cells, which helps prevent mental decline.

Bell peppers, kiwis, and tomatoes. These foods also contain high levels of vitamin C, which helps prevent brain cell damage.

10/22/2025

Every time you trigger your stress response, your adrenal glands pump out the stress hormone cortisol. If cortisol levels remain high—as they do when you don’t get enough sleep, keep yourself awake during the day by consuming lots of caffeine, or generally feel edgy and jittery—your entire metabolism becomes imbalanced, suppressing thyroid function, raising blood sugar and blood pressure, weakening muscles and bones, and triggering the body to store more abdominal fat.

10/20/2025

Obesity can be a complex and multi-factorial condition. Treatment must be targeted to the underlying causes such as excess insulin production, an undiagnosed under active thyroid, a hormonal imbalance, yeast overgrowth, the use of prescription medications and heavy metal toxicity. Each of these causes can make it make impossible to lose weight even with strict calorie reduction or excessive time spent exercising. Unlike many health care professionals, we believe that lack of success is not your fault. We can help you.

10/18/2025

Sleep and physical health are closely connected, so it’s not surprising that sleep affects blood sugar levels.

Every night—regardless of whether you sleep—your blood sugar levels increase as a part of the natural human circadian rhythm cycle. Blood sugar levels also increase during sleep. Blood sugar fluctuations that occur overnight and during sleep are normal and not a cause for concern for most healthy people.

Sleep also plays an important role in maintaining healthy blood sugar levels. Over the past few decades, the overall average number of hours slept each night has apparently decreased. This decrease in sleep may have contributed to the increase in obesity and diabetes3 that occurred over the same stretch of time. Obesity and diabetes are affected by blood sugar levels, while one’s blood sugar also impacts obesity and diabetes. As a result, blood sugar could be one of the factors involved in weight loss and sleep.

10/15/2025

I’m honored to be speaking at the Blood Sugar Roller Coaster Summit (Oct 27 – Nov 2)!

If you’ve ever felt shaky, foggy, or wiped out after eating, you might be dealing with reactive hypoglycemia — and you deserve answers.

👉 Join me free online: https://quitsugarsummit.com/2025_blood_sugar_summit

10/11/2025

Reactive hypoglycemia (postprandial hypoglycemia) refers to low blood sugar that occurs after a meal — usually within four hours after eating. This is different from low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) that occurs while fasting.
If you use insulin or other blood sugar lowering medications to treat diabetes, hypoglycemia after eating may mean that your medication dose needs to be adjusted.

For most people with reactive hypoglycemia, the actual cause isn't clear. But, the symptoms of this condition may relate to what food was eaten or variations in the timing of the food moving through the digestive system.

Other possible causes of reactive hypoglycemia include alcohol, certain surgical procedures (gastric bypass or surgery for an ulcer), inherited metabolic disorders and some tumors.

Generally, a medical evaluation is done to learn if symptoms are caused by low blood sugar and if so, whether symptoms get better when blood sugar returns to normal. Additional testing may need to be done if you have more-serious symptoms.

10/06/2025

In this new lecture, Dr. Mobeen Syed sits down with Dr. Keith Berkowitz to explore mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) and hyper-histamine states in patients with Long COVID and post-vaccine syndrome (PVS).

Listen into this conversation now:

In this discussion we sit down with Dr. Keith Berkowitz to discuss mast cell activation syndrome, and hyper-histamine states in long COVID and vaccine injury...

10/02/2025

Improving your gut health is a mainstream concept now. But before you drop money on probiotics or time on elimination diets, it’s important to know whether you have a problem with your microbiome in the first place.

There are obvious signs that your balance of these strains is off. These include:

Bloating
If you’re bloating two hours or more after eating, it could suggest that harmful bacteria are fermenting the food in the intestines and producing gases and by-products that cause bloat.

Constipation
If you are struggling to use the bathroom, it might suggest that your gut microbiome has an overgrowth of potentially harmful bacteria. Those more harmful bacteria produce chemicals in the gut that can slow down stool motility. The slower the transit, the more water is taken out of the stool, leaving the stool hard to pass.

Diarrhea
There are a number of potential causes of diarrhea and gut bacteria can be one of them. Interestingly, this can be down to how the gut produces serotonin.

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter produced in the gut by intestinal cells and can be regulated by the gut microbiome. The hormone can speed up the muscular movements within the digestive tract to move contents through quicker and excrete them from the body.

Studies show that those with diarrhea have higher circulating levels of serotonin than those with constipation, supporting the belief that an imbalance of gut bacteria changes levels of the hormone production.

09/30/2025

Here’s a quick dining tip to keep from over eating and ensure you eat healthy. If you start your meal with a salad or eat your vegetables first, you will feel full sooner and ensure that you get valuable vegetable nutrients.

Vegetables are loaded with prebiotic fiber, vitamins, minerals, and many antioxidants, some of which have potent biological effects.

Studies show that people who consume a lot of vegetables live longer and have a lower risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and other illnesses.

09/25/2025

Fiber is one of the main reasons whole plant foods are good for you.

Growing evidence shows that adequate fiber intake may benefit your digestion and reduce your risk of chronic disease.

Many of these benefits are mediated by your gut microbiota — the millions of bacteria that live in your digestive system.

However, not all fiber is created equal. Different types have different health effects.
This article explains the evidence-based health benefits of fiber.

What is Fiber?
Put simply, dietary fiber is a non-digestible carbohydrate found in foods.

It’s split into two broad categories based on its water solubility:

1) Soluble fiber: dissolves in water and can be metabolized by the “good” bacteria in the gut

2) Insoluble fiber: does not dissolve in water

Perhaps a more helpful way to categorize fiber is as fermentable versus non-fermentable, which refers to whether friendly gut bacteria can use it or not.

It’s important to keep in mind that there are many different types of fiber. Some of them have important health benefits, while others are mostly useless. The quality of the fiber also matters. For example, avocado is an excellent source of quality fiber.

There is also a lot of overlap between soluble and insoluble fibers. Some insoluble fibers can be digested by the good bacteria in the intestine, and most foods contain both soluble and insoluble fibers.

Health authorities recommend that men and women eat 38 and 25 grams of fiber per day, respectively. Be careful with products that use added fibers and are still high in sugar and/or other healthy products.