Healthy Tips

Health food supplements are one of the hottest selling products in the market these days. Their total consumption values billions of dollars in the U.S. alone. Recent surveys show that more than half of the adults in the U.S. consume health food supplements in different forms, such as tablets, capsules, powders, soft gels, gel caps and liquids.

The increased consumption of health food supplements can be attributed to public awareness of health issues and improved standard of living in our society. Many studies have shown that there is a close correlation between health and nutrition. Insufficient supply of nutrients can weaken our body defense mechanism, causing medical problems from common ailments to more severe illnesses in the long term.

There are different types of health food supplements, including macronutrients (amino acids, proteins, essential fatty acids), micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), enzymes (digestive enzymes and antioxidant enzymes), probiotics (beneficial bacteria in the gut), and herbal supplements. These supplements have unique functions in our body. They are either essential for life and good health, modulate our immune system or help with liver detoxification, digestion, mental clarity, etc.

Many people argue that there is no need to consume health food supplements as long as you have a healthy lifestyle and eat a balanced diet. While this may be true, the fact is maintaining a healthy lifestyle and proper diet is difficult to achieve by many people.

Over the past few decades, the green revolution has changed the farming practices over the world. We use more chemical fertilizers, more pesticides to grow the food produce in order to increase harvest and shorten the growth period. As a result, soil nutrients and the population of beneficial soil bacteria are depleted rapidly, and the produce we grow today contain less micronutrient than before.

A stressful lifestyle, improper eating habits, imbalanced diet and increased exposure to chemicals such as environmental pollutants (air, water) and pesticides, drugs, hormones, heavy metals in foods also weaken our body gradually.

Although health food supplements can be beneficial to our health, consumers should still choose the products carefully. Currently, there is little regulation on the quality of health food supplements. Composition of some health food products may not match the label claims and the quality of raw materials and finished products is not guaranteed. Therefore, consumers should only buy from reputable health food manufacturers, read the labels carefully and read more related literatures.

Here are some general rules for buying health food supplements:

1) Supplements made from whole foods, natural sources are better than the synthetic ones. They are more bioactive, can be absorbed readily, and less likely to be contaminated by chemicals such as coal tars used in chemical synthesis.

2) Protein-bonded vitamins and minerals (vitamins and minerals in organic form, binding to amino acids) are more bioactive than the inorganic forms.

3) Buy supplements using safe extraction methods, such as cold pressed extraction or supercritical extraction. This can avoid the harmful residue from chemical extraction.

4) Herbal concentrate and extract are usually more effective than the raw herbs.

5) Organically grown or wild crafted herbs are less likely to be contaminated by heavy metals, pesticides and other chemicals.

6) Read the labels, do not consume more than the recommended dose.

7) Be careful when consuming certain herbal supplements, such as Ma Huang / ephedra, Kava Kava, comfrey, etc. Some studies have shown that these herbs may cause severe side effects to some people. Stop use if unusual signs appear after consumption.

Some health food supplements may interact with drugs, either by decreasing or increasing their effects. Consult your doctor if you are currently taking medications.

9) Pregnant and nursing women, people with specific medical conditions such consult the doctors when consuming health food supplements.

10) If in doubt, contact the supplement manufacturers or distributors for more information of their products.

11) Health food supplements are available in many places, such as grocery stores, health food stores, drug stores, pharmacies, supermarkets, department stores, online stores, etc. Be a smart consumer, compare the price and service before purchase.

To learn more about health food supplements, please visit http://vitaminstores.4reviews.net.

Look at the ingredients in most commercially advertised sport drinks and vitamin waters, and you will quickly see they are far from being health drinks. If you are trying to stick to a diet high in alkaline foods, then these drinks are even more detrimental to your health.

Here are a few things to avoid the next time you are shopping for health drinks, especially for those on an alkaline food diet.

· High Fructose Corn Syrup – This is concentrated sugar that contributes to weight gain and abnormal blood sugar levels, which can also lead to diabetes. Excess sugars have no place in health drinks, and you certainly won’t find processed sugar in any alkaline foods.

· Phosphoric Acid is just what it says it is – acid. It is often defined as, “A clear colorless liquid used in fertilizers, detergents, pharmaceuticals and food flavoring, irritating to the skin and eyes and moderately toxic if ingested.” When your diet is supposed to be 80% alkaline foods and only 20% acid forming foods for proper pH balance, this really puts you upside down quickly.

· Artificial Flavors – Some experts call them, “Excito-toxins!” When artificial flavorings are in health drinks, they begin to resemble soft drinks and candy. These artificial substances interfere with your pH balance and force you to consume more alkaline foods to neutralize the acid from the toxins in your blood.

· Artificial Sweeteners – These are so unnecessary in health drinks today. In addition to the acid forming properties of artificial sweeteners, nutritionists express concerns about their effects on the human body. Many consumers now believe that artificial sweeteners may play a factor in diseases of the brain, such as Alzheimer’s. That is one reason why corporations such as Pepsico and Coca Cola are beginning to market health drinks and other products containing Stevia, an all natural sweetener that is actually beneficial. You can learn more about Stevia Sweetener and discover alkaline foods for pH balance by taking the Alkaline Food Test at BestHealthFoodStore.net.

· Isolated Vitamins – When isolated, processed, heated, liquefied and bottled, vitamins and minerals break down before your body can use them. You need vitamins and minerals from whole foods, not from so called health drinks that are really bottled, heated, highly processed waters with colorful dyes and artifical ingredients.

Someone showed me a well-known sport drink the other day and I couldn’t believe the ingredients! This tropical mango flavored health drink didn’t mention mango anywhere in the ingredients, but let’s take a look at what it did list, along with some things to think about when choosing health drinks:

· Sucrose Syrup (this is sugar)

· High Fructose Corn Syrup (more sugar) – A total of 56 gms of sugar

· Phosphoric Acid (the opposite of alkaline foods)

· Glycerol ester of wood rosin (acid forming)

· Modified Food Starch (how was it modified?)

· Natural and Artificial Flavors (your guess is as good as mine)

· Yellow 6, Yellow 5 and Red 40 (artificial dyes)

Another bottle of this not so healthy drink says “Specially Formulated for Tiger Woods” with the same ingredients, but blue dye instead of yellow. I guess that secret blue stuff is what makes Tiger play so well. In fact, experts could argue that Tiger’s recent knee problems are because of too many acid forming foods and not enough alkaline foods in his diet. Many medical and health specialists now believe that an acid/alkaline imbalance can contribute to weak bones and damaged joints.

When shopping for a good health drink, here are some important considerations to keep in mind.

· Is it liquefied, pasteurized or otherwise heated in the bottling process? If so then the enzymes have been destroyed and the nutrients will not easily be absorbed by the body.

· Does it give you chlorophyll from plants to help your cells absorb more oxygen?

· Does it provide natural antioxidants to destroy free radicals? Natural antioxidants are essential for anti-aging.

· Is it made with whole food ingredients like real fruit or other alkaline foods?

Now, let’s take a different look at health drinks on the market today that are not advertised with flashy TV ads or filled with colorful dyes: Here are some of the characteristics of these truly healthy drinks:

· Not liquefied or bottled, but in powder form

· Processed at low temperatures

· Contain live enzymes from whole alkaline foods and chlorophyll from plants

· Complex structures of the whole food ingredients are fully intact

· Loaded with natural antioxidants to combat free radicals

If you buy your health drinks in a convenience store, a grocery store, or in the health food store at the mall, then you are falling short of a truly beneficial alkaline food diet. You will find far better choices online by Googling all natural health drinks.

There’s an Omega-3 travesty a-foot and if the American consumer doesn’t become aware of it very soon, they’ll unfortunately know first hand the day inflammation rears its ugly head – and according to Harvard, for 3 out of 4 Americans, it already has.

FDA Qualifying Health Claim for EPA and DHA

When the FDA issued a Health Qualifying Claim for “EPA and DHA” from fatty fish in 2004, “Omega-3” became big business. So big, food manufacturers freely began substituting “ALA” (alpha-linolenic acid) for EPA and DHA in bread, cookies, pasta to yogurt and now, a line of soybean-fed pork items that are “enriched with Omega-3 fatty acids.” The double-whammy contained in one ounce of those pork items is frightening with no end, supervision, or control in sight.

Is anyone home at the FDA?

Not only was ALA not part of the FDA Qualifying claim, science conclusively shows we convert Omega-3 ALA seed and plant oils into inflammatory Omega-6. And the end result? Consumers are being hoodwinked into purchasing these products while awareness of the health benefits from EPA and DHA are being compromised. How big of an issue is this? Read on and you’ll see why the word “travesty” applies.

Omega-3 ALA

Omega-3 ALA is plant and seed oils, soybean, corn, safflower, flaxseed, all polyunsaturates, and while they may be lumped together and referred to as “Omega-3 fatty acids” all they share in common with EPA and DHA is the classification “Omega-3 fatty acids.” There’s a far cry between any health benefits from ALA and those science has conclusively contributed to EPA and DHA.

An astonishing 94% of Omega-3 products line shelves today contain ALA while 6% contain minute amounts of algae or algal oil.

Omega-6s

Why is this so critical to the American consumer? Unless you’ve led a vegetarian lifestyle for years, rarely eat out, unknowingly you’ve been consuming an abundance of Omega-6s for decades hidden deceptively in packaged foods, snacks, cakes, dressings, as well as liberally used by restaurants and fast food chains. In other words, our bodies are so tipped in Omega-6s, we were in a state of perpetual inflammation before food manufacturers began adding more ALA to boast an Omega-3 label. How bad is this?

National Institutes of Health on Omega-6 Inflammation

Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, National institutes of Health, and world renowned Omega-3 researcher, and tireless crusader for American health, says:

“When you look at the percentages of Omega-6s to Omega-3s in the US diet, it’s about 90% of all the polyunsaturates in our tissues are Omega 6s and about 10% are Omega 3s. So you had a one-to-one balance to inflammation when we were evolving, and now it’s a 10-to-one balance in favor of inflammation because of the predominance in seed oils. Soybean oil is called the lubricant of the food industry, and it literally is.”

William Lands, retired biochemist with the National Institutes of Health, had this to say:

About 1960, when “soybean oil took over the U.S. food chain, it was like a tsunami. These two types of fatty acids have a biochemical yin-and-yang relationship. While omega-3s reduce our body’s inflammation response, Omega-6s encourage it. Each fatty acid is crucial. For example, if your inflammatory response is too weak, you won’t be able to fight infection properly. And in theory, the push and pull should create perfect balance. Instead, the excess of Omega-6s in our diets may have left us in a perpetual state of inflammation. That’s what’s really killing us – the balance of Omega 3s to 6s got out of whack.”

Center for Science in the Public Interest

And Bonnie Liebman, a nutritionist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says:

“It’s all very confusing. Consumers are in real danger of being misled. Even a careful label reader won’t learn, for instance that a carton of Breyers Smart DHA Omega-3 yogurt has less DHA than a teaspoon of salmon.”

Consider this. Hellmann’s Mayonnaise says “Naturally Rich In Omega-3” but remember, it’s just a name. What’s really in it? “Most mayonnaise is made with soybean oil which is a source of ALA. But that kind of Omega-3 fat, found most abundantly in flaxseed, has not been proven to convey the same health benefits as DHA plus EPA,” Liebman says.

Omega-6s and Inflammation

That Omega-6s create inflammation that leads to diet-related disease, poor heart health, arachidonic acid, to name but a few, is scientifically established. If this information is hard to grasp, look at our health statistics. We have unprecedented numbers of childhood obesity, juvenile diabetes and with each passing year, according to Harvard, those numbers rise dramatically. Did children suddenly become ravenous eaters?

The rise in health issues and obesity crosses all age groups but this rise in children is the most telling of all. What is the common denominator? It’s not the water supply – it’s our food supply that packs pounds leaving our bodies in a perpetual state of inflammation.

How critical to health is this misleading labeling of Omega-3 ALA? Let’s look at the conclusions of a 14 year study conducted by the National Cancer Institute about ALA:

“In this large prospective study, we found that ALA from non-animal sources and ALA from meat and dairy sources were associated or suggestively associated with an increased risk of advanced prostate cancer. This finding agrees with the finding of a single previous study that evaluated ALA intake by food source. EPA + DHA was suggestively related to a lower risk of advanced prostate cancer, which was mainly due to DHA and to a lesser extent to EPA.”

It is sad and disheartening that information from prestigious medical communities, globally, with study after study showing EPA and DHA are profoundly beneficial to a myriad of health issues from diet-related to cognitive, is becoming obscured and blinded by food manufacturers’ hype. With their long reach and deep pockets, the health of a nation is on the line.

And the result? The every-day, hard-working consumer overwhelmed with little time to do any personal in-depth research assumes all Omegas are created equal.

This travesty has been detailed in a thoroughly researched and investigative expose, “The Food Industry’s Greed: How Misleading Labeling of Omega-3 Foods Undermines American Health.” Learn how this began in 2004 with the FDA Health Qualifying claim, Omega-3 labeling violations by food manufacturers, complaints filed against the FDA that are being ignored, health warnings from prestigious medical communities, and what you can do to protect your health.

http://www.sea-based-health.com/omega-3-book.html

It may not always be easy to determine what items are really good for you by looking at nutrition fact labels, but online health food stores often have far more details available to consumers about products such as health drinks. This can help clear up some of the confusion for online health food store shoppers who want the highest quality nutrition. In typical retail supermarkets, items such as natural foods and health drinks may have only one natural ingredient, but still be labeled as “natural”.

Online health food stores are usually very thorough in describing the true nature of their products. They assure customers that things like preservatives, isolated vitamins, artificial dyes or sweeteners are not included in their health drinks. The owners of these smaller operations may even know their suppliers personally and visit the manufacturing facilities. This can give them additional certainty that the products are processed at low temperatures to maintain whole food structures of the truly natural ingredients. Unfortunately, some of the so-called health drinks and foods at typical stores are devoid of nutrients because of the packaging processes, but consumers are never made aware of this fact.

Here are examples of a few items you may find at an online health food store that appear the same as typical store bought items on the surface, but are vastly different in the way they are processed:

· Vitamins – At an online health food store it is more likely these are whole food vitamins, not isolated, which provides the body with more effective absorption of nutrients.

· Natural low carb foods – These are not fake-food substitutes, but real, all natural food formulas prepared with your total health in mind.

· Health drinks and herbal teas – These are not enhanced vitamin waters or colored sport drinks, but herbal beverages with whole food ingredients.

Often, these online health food store products provide more effective results with fewer empty calories and less wasted money.

Many of the natural foods and health drinks from an online health food store can contain ingredients from plants grown on small farms, without the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. This is vastly different from mass-produced products made with so-called “natural” ingredients that have been manufactured on giant factory farms with artificial fertilizers and dangerous pesticides. You would be surprised to know how many non-organic foods, and even some labeled as “natural”, have been grown that way. The USDA defines organic products as those produced by farmers practicing soil and water conservation. In addition, organic farmers must make use of renewable resources to protect the environment. This is the type of detailed information you are likely to find in health drinks at a reliable online health food store.

Some individuals avoid healthy lifestyles because they believe the cost is too great or that alternative choices will rob them of modern day conveniences. However, it’s important to realize now that modern technological advances can bring those conveniences to anyone with access to the Internet. Google or other search engines now provide an easy way to locate an “online health food store with all natural health drinks”.

Don’t be stuck under the false assumption that you can’t afford natural foods or health drinks without major sacrifices. It’s easier than ever to order health drinks from an online health food store and uncover more detailed information on what you are buying than you could ever find in a typical retail store.