Bust Your Guts

With  commercials on Activia yogurt with Jamie Lee Curtis' endorsement and billboards for Yokult popping up along major highways, the public is becoming more aware of the link between yogurt and healthy bowels. But what many people don't understand is why that link is important.

More than 70% of the body's seratonin is made in the gut. Seratonin is a brain neurotransmitter responsible for feeling calm and happy--if your gut is unhealthy, your thoughts won't be balanced. Also, more than 80% of your immune cells are made in the gut--so not only will your thoughts be hard to reel in, your health will suffer.

If you don't have the proper balance of beneficial bacteria in your bowels, also known as "probiotics", then when you are exposed to bad bacteria such as e.coli, strep or salmonella, you're more likely to succumb to the bad bacteria. When you replenish your good bacteria daily, your odds of becoming seriously ill from bad bacteria decrease.

So, take care of your guts! They're super important to your mental and physical health, and are often overlooked in whole body wellness. My kids like the GI Pro Balance sticks from Mannatech--while they've never had a pixie stick or a Fun Dip, they eat these little yogurt flavored slim sticks the same way. We just rip off the top and the kids pour it right into their mouths. I keep these and Mannabears in my purse for meltdowns--so much healthier than candy and just as effective for changing the kids' focus.

Hope you guys are enjoying this cool weather and replenishing that healthy gut flora!!!

Reduce Stress

Stress is terrible for you. It affects every aspect of your life, whether you realize it or not. It can take a normally happy, adjusted person and turn them into an angry, high-strung, twitchy excuse for a person. It can take a healthy person and give them a slew of medical issues (stress has been shown in medical studies to cause silent inflammation). Stress takes mothers who love their children and want nothing more than to gently guide them through life and turns them in to screaming harpies! (Don’t ask me how I know).

The first step in reducing stress is to identify your stressors. Is it an increased work load (whether you’re a stay at home mom or a CEO)? Could it be due to a health issue in yourself or a loved one? Sometimes it can be from one hundred little things in your day that you suppress and internalize. Whatever the case, identifying the cause is the first step. A doctor can’t fix a medical condition if he doesn't know what it is, can he? He might prescribe the wrong thing and complicate the disease or even hurt the patient. That’s why he must run tests to figure out what is causing the problem so he can be accurate in his treatment. Same thing with you–find the cause so you can treat the issue appropriately.

The second step is then to relieve the cause of the stress. If you’re internalizing your issues, then find a way to let them out. As cheesy as it sounds, journaling or meditation work better than anti-anxiety/depression medication.

If the cause of your stress is the adverse health of a loved one, obviously the condition is out of your control. Remember, you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control your reaction. If the condition is terminal, talk through the situation with that person and do everything you can to make yourself at peace with what is happening and how it affects you. If it is a treatable condition, learn more about treatment options, speak with your loved one and gather information so the condition stops being a “scary unknown” and becomes something you can understand and deal with.

If the stress is due to an increased work load, consider working from home full-time or going to part time at your current position and looking at residual income options. One of the common reasons for feeling over-worked is lack of delegation.

Remember that antioxidants are very effective in controlling the damage done in the body from oxidative stress. 

In order to banish stress effectively, you have to identify the cause and then treat it accordingly. As a bonus, it is always helpful to put positive, uplifting information into your brain daily. Some people listen to inspirational songs, motivational speeches, read the Bible, dance around to positive music or talk to an optimistic friend.

Whatever you do, don’t continue to do the things that got you into the stressful place. You have to change in order to change your life.

Are you stressed? Do you have more suggestions? Please leave us a comment below!

XFM!

XFM is the little moniker for Xtreme Food Makeover--something Mannatech is doing to educate people on what has happened to our food supply, what has happened to our vitamin industry and a real food technology solution to the issue.

Today I went to an Xtreme Food Makeover in Rowlett at the home of Marla Finley, one of the famed 2 Manna Sisters. We had an awesome time--My good friend Merissa came with me, and we helped Marla prep for the party. We chopped broccoli and cucumbers, prepared blueberries and strawberries, put out the Osolean and Glycoslim for making shakes while my two little princesses played in the backyard.

As everyone was arriving, the conversations branched off and Marla's warm kitchen was filled with laughs and smiles and exclamations over the food. She whipped up a healthy chocolate peanut butter shake with Nutriverus, a Pina Colada shake with Nutriverus and a "Purple Monster" smoothie (purple from the blueberries--of course this one was a hit with the kids!)

If you want to see some of the educational videos we watched, you can click here! :)

Here's some pics from the XFM:

Food Display 

Veggies with Nutriverus in the dip

My girls with healthy food all over their mouths!

Talking about nutrition at the table

Talking about how the world is changing

Delicious shakes!

This is what happens when your vitamins have nasty junk in them...they turn black when you bake them. Notice the pure vitamins didn't putrefy from the heat.

A Broken System

In America, it is recognized that our current diet and lifestyle choices (eating fast food, eating at restaurants, constant stimulation from advertisements and games and a metric ton of oxidative stress from working too much and not relaxing enough) are killing us.

Many popular doctors say all you need to do is supplement your diet, eat at home and take extra antioxidants and you'll be fine. 

Hold up. Let's address these one at a time, shall we?

Supplement Your Diet 

When you go to the doctor and he says "make sure you're getting a good multivitamin" he then tells you, usually, to go to the store and pick up a reputable brand, right? Well, there are a few problems with that. 95% of the supplements on the grocery store shelves are derived from coal tar and petroleum by-products. Most calcium supplements on the shelves have the calcium derived from limestone. I know that doesn't sound too terrible, so let me elaborate.

Most women know that when you start a higher level of calcium (like a calcium tablet or even chewable), you can become constipated, right? So the doctor tells you to pick up some magnesium citrate (a fancy word for a petroleum derivative that has been treated with citric acid to be more easily absorbed by your body). Well, that takes you from not being able to poop, to not being able to stop! And if we take a moment to appreciate the fact that 80% of your immune cells are made from your gut, you can begin to appreciate how vital intestinal health is to overall health. So when you're trying to add healthy things to your body by adding the above two minerals, you could actually be harming yourself.

Have you ever become constipated from spinach? No? How about almonds? Broccoli? Oh, celery? None of the above? These are natural, vegetable sources of calcium. Do you understand that it isn't the calcium causing the gut issues?

Which leads us to the next issue, the junk in our diet.

Eating at Home

This no longer means what it used to mean. A hundred years ago, eating at home meant eating food that you'd raised and slaughtered yourself, more than likely. If not, someone you knew did it for you. Local homesteads--a quaint term for a suburban farm--would raise some chickens and grow vegetables to give to the grocery store, to supplement if farmer's couldn't meet the demands in a humane manner.

All of that's been thrown out the window. Even chicken meat that you buy at your local health-conscious store that says "free range" has arsenic in it. Yes, arsenic--they add it to the chicken feed to plump up the chickens. They're supposed to remove it before the last feed, but you know, the extra pounds mean extra profits, who cares if anyone dies. How do I know? Someone I trust with my life got arsenic poisoning from *drum roll* chicken meat. And he was informed of how it got there by a highly ranked scientist at a nationally renowned laboratory.

And most people are familiar with the "Dirty Dozen"--the foods that have a higher than normal amount of pesticides that should be purchased organically (and still washed-- E. Coli isn't a pesticide and doesn't care if your strawberries are organic!)

My point being--fast food isn't food, but what we're getting at the grocery store isn't much better. It doesn't matter if you shop the perimeter, there's something really wrong with children getting cadmium toxicity from iceburg lettuce, adults and children becoming gluten and casein intolerant, the staggering amount of Americans with gut issues and the rising amount of anaphylactic allergies to fruits and vegetables (I had one of those myself to kiwis). 

So if we can't trust our fruits and veggies, how are we supposed to get our antioxidants?

Take Extra Antioxidants

And the last suggestion to combat common health issues is to take in extra antioxidants. Some antioxidants are vitamins, like Vitamin E or C. Some antioxidants are berries that are high in cyanins like blueberries, nutrients found in green tea, bioflavenoids in vegetable skins and other nutrients such as resveratol in red wine. 

Some people take in extra antioxidants by juicing--which is great, if you are using food you grew yourself and harvested organically, and if it is mostly vegetables. Most people can't stand the taste, so they just juice fruit, which gives them an enormous amount of fructose (fruit sugar) without any fiber to balance it in the body. Then they get fat. And angry. This isn't to say juicing is a bad idea, just that most people don't do it in a healthy manner.

Another way people take in antioxidants is from an antioxidant drink. There are several brand names out in the marketplace that boast having a very high antioxidant level. If you check the label, you'll find either that it is mostly sugar, contains very unhealthy ingredients or is made up of mostly synthetics (for example, d-alpha tocopherol, which we've discussed previously, is not Vitamin E). 

What Can You Do About It?

I don't know about you, but when I found out about all of this stuff, I despaired  I thought, "man, no matter what I give my family, it's going to hurt them. Supplements are bad, the food is bad, the air quality sucks, there's poisonous stuff in the water--maybe I should give up on trying to keep us healthy. Maybe the best we can do is pray not to get heart disease or cancer."

Well, that's a crappy attitude. There is something you can do. Mannatech has developed a line of products that are plant based and hydroponically grown--meaning they control the nutrients the plants receive,  the air quality where they're being grown and the processing to ensure the maximum amount of nutrients in each supplement, which is then proven to be effective in their state of the art analytic chemistry lab. That's good nutrition that won't harm when it's supposed to help heal.

There is a new product out now called Nutriverus. It's the culmination of 18 years of research and over $2 million in research and development. And now, it's less than $60 USD. Not only that, but there's a way to get it for free (e-mail me and I'll hook you up).

NOT ONLY CAN YOU GET IT FOR FREE, but for every auto-order, a months supply of this nutrient-rich, plant-based, real food technology solution is sent to a child in critical condition from malnourishment.

So, you save yourself.

You save your family.

You save the economy.

You save malnourished children in critical condition.

You save money.

What in the world do you have to lose?

Shocking Truths

Did you know that 95% of over-the-counter vitamins are petroleum by-products, or made with coal tar?

Did you know that research in 1941 by Dr. Agnes Morgan showed animals fed synthetic vitamins died more quickly of degenerative diseases or had toxic reactions to the synthetics as opposed to vitamins consumed in a whole foods diet (University of California study).

Did you know that there are iron shavings in cereal? And baby formula?

Does this sound like maybe we're being asked by companies to pay for something that's killing us?

You can see more about what's happening in the modern diet here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uBGXBLyt8A

And, if watching this makes you angry at the lies we've been fed and sad at what we've been consuming and feeding to our families, you can do something about it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO-jNJj_Caw&feature=player_embedded

And here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB__rZ8ZvVg&feature=player_embedded

Imagine giving your body what it needs, nutrition from whole food sources. And while you're doing that, you're sending nutritional supplements to a child in critical condition.

How cool is that?

How Do You Know?

How do you know if you're healthy? It seems like a funny question to ask, but there's a surprising amount of confusion regarding what "being healthy" really means. Let's define being healthy, and if you find you're way off, let's talk about some solutions. 

"Health" is defined by Merriam-Webster as "The condition of being sound in body, mind or spirit; especially being free from physical disease or pain." I really like that bit at the end, because most often that is how we measure whether or not we consider ourselves healthy. Do I have a disease? Do I hurt? Nope? Alright I'm good! 

We fail to take into account the first part of the definition: The condition of being sound in body, mind or spirit. Some questions to ask yourself regarding health in those three areas are:

Body:
-Do I have any medical conditions that I'm ignoring? (Toe fungus, reoccurring pain, ongoing bowel issues like constipation or diarrhea, rashes that come and go, allergies)
-Do I feed myself well? (Limiting packaged foods, reducing sugar intake, eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, not overeating, avoiding stress eating, consuming plenty of protein)
-Am I supplementing effectively? (plant-based supplements, avoiding synthetics, taking in an adequate amount of vitamins, minerals and extra antioxidants)

Mind:
-Am I in control of my thoughts? (not letting thoughts run wild, feeling organized in thinking patterns, being able to switch subjects mentally and then switch back)
-Do I "feed" my brain every day? (read the Bible daily, read success books, listen to motivational and inspirational messages)
-Are my emotions under control? (controlling feelings of anger, able to not have outbursts, able to control sadness, able to stop crying, have the ability to get out of a mood once you get into it)

Spirit:
-Do I know why I'm here? (If you don't, you should work on that. Proverbs 29:18 Amplified: Where there is no vision [no redemptive revelation of God], the people perish; but he who keeps the law [of God, which includes that of man]—blessed (happy, fortunate, and enviable) is he.)
-Do I know where to go for answers to a serious dilemma? (having a fellowship of people to support you, help with thoughts of suicide or murder, help with an addiction, someone to lean on and guide you when you're lost)

If you've got these bases covered, you're well on your way to health. Why on your way? Why not instantly healthy? Because in life you are always developing, improving and maturing. I like the expression, "When you're green, you're growing; when you're ripe, you're rotten." It refers to when you're learning something new, you're continuing to grow into something great. But if you harden your heart and decide there's no room for improvement, well, then you're rotting, you're done. 

If you have any health questions you want to talk about, or if you want to take a free health survey to find the right supplementation for your health, leave a comment below or send us an e-mail!

Team Kratos
mannateamkratos@gmail.com

Vitamin C: Plants VS Synthetics

As the weather (finally!) cools off here in Texas, a lot of folks are coming down with the sniffles. I know when that used to happen, everyone would say, "Oh, you gotta take your Vitamin C!"

Now, studies have been done showing that isolated vitamins (such as the weird tasting white tablets at the store) do not have as positive effect on the body as a whole vitamin (like from fruits and veggies). This is partially due to where they extract the vitamins and minerals from--for example, many minerals in modern supplements are derived from rocks and petroleum products. In the case of drug store vitamins, the problem is that the vitamin is isolated as a chemical, and doesn't have the necessary co-factors to be used properly.

Let me give you an example--obviously we'll be working with Vitamin C today! A vitamin, as defined in 1956 by Dr. Royal Lee in Applied Trophology is "a working process consisting of the nutrient, enzymes, co-enzymes, antioxidants and trace mineral activators." That's a fancy way of saying when you look at the back of a bottle and it says "Ascorbic Acid" by itself, that's exactly what it is--and that is NOT vitamin C! Vitamin C is actually a blend of trace mineral co-factors, ascorbinogen, bioflaveniods, tyrosinase and other factors.

All of that fancy talk just to say: what you get at the grocery store is a well planned lie. It is a tiny fraction of what you should be getting. It is like someone baking a delicious pecan pie (bear with me here) out of brown sugar, flour, eggs and so on. They put the pie on the table. They pick up a fork. They scoop up ONE pecan from the top of the pie, put it on your plate, wink and say "There's your pecan pie!"

Would you agree with them? Or would you say, "heck no, that's not pecan pie! Where's the rest of it?" That's what your body says when you flood it with a fake, isolated acid, wink at your cold and say "there's some vitamin C!"

It's not. If you eat a strawberry, there's vitamin C. If you drink some rose hip tea, there's vitamin C. And it's intact, with all of its molecular structure that God designed to work as a whole in your body. No matter how you dice it, plant-based nutrients are superior to synthetic isolates.

Let's look at some historical examples. Most of us are familiar with scurvy, right?

Treatment by fresh food, particularly citrus fruit, was periodically implemented, as it had been since antiquity, but the ultimate cause of scurvy was not known until 1932, and treatment was inconsistent, with many ineffective treatments used into the 20th century. It was a Scottish surgeon in the Royal Navy, James Lind who first proved it could be treated with citrus fruit in experiments he described in his 1753 book, A Treatise of the Scurvy,^[1] though his advice was not implemented by the Royal Navy for several decades. (From Wikipedia)

In 1842 the medical journal The Cincinatti Lancet published that potatoes treated scuvy just as well as citrus fruit.   In later scientific studies, potatoes are shown to have less than 20mg of ascorbic acid! Do you know what most doctors recommend to prevent a cold? 2,000mg of ascorbic acid! So why do potatoes work when ascorbic acid by itself doesn't? Because ascorbic acid doesn't have the necessary components of Vitamin C to make it effective. 

I hope this little toe-dip into the world of vitamins and why plant-based nutrition is superior to a synthetic isolated aspect of a vitamin. 

Want more information like this? Leave me a comment below! :)

Lizi