Healthy Lifestyle Alternatives

Archive for November, 2010

Prior to this, are you aware that the sun is actually the main cause of 80% of the wrinkles that appear on your skin? If not, this is the best time to change perspectives. Since childhood, we have been taught that sun exposure is important in making our body stronger. It is true that UV rays can help in the production of Vitamin D.

However, the sun’s UV rays are stronger in this day and age. That being said, you are more susceptible to Photodamage. You only need 20 minutes of premeditated sun exposure for daily Vitamin D production. If you directly expose your skin to ultraviolet rays longer than that, you are thereby increasing your chances of acquiring more wrinkles and other skin problems.

The following are some of the common effects of excessive sun exposure:

1. Wrinkling of skin – UVA and UVB rays damage collagen fibers. As a result, collagen tends to age faster. Collagen is what creates structured appearance of the dermis. Without this, your skin will lose its original shape.

2. Age spots - The dermis tends to produce melanin as a way of counteracting UV damage. While youthful skin can still regulate melanin production, this becomes difficult to maintain as you get older. As a result, age spots and pigmentation problems appear.

3. Leathery texture of the dermis – You will eventually lose the core moisture-retaining properties of the dermis. This prompts the changes in dermis texture. Your skin will turn rough and leathery.

4. Yellow complexion – Darkening of skin tone will progress to worse conditions. Usually, people who are excessively exposed to the sun during their younger days might find themselves sporting yellow-colored skin when they get older.

5. Cancer – The sun also affects the cells of your integumentary system. Ultraviolet trays trigger the appearance of harmful free radicals. These are single electrons that follow a free pathway. They tend to snatch paired electrons, thereby damaging DNA and cells in the process.

You have to constantly fight the ever-present effects of radiation. It is not yet too late to reverse the damages you can already see on your skin.

The Doctors Tips

1: Birth control pills or hormone replacement can make you sun-sensitive, so never be stingy with the sunscreen.  Use ENHANCEMENTS Mineral Peptides SPF 20 for easy sunscreen re-application throughout the day.

2: Heat (even cooking over a hot stove), hormones, and sunlight can cause brown spots on your skin. Keep cool and reapply sunscreen every 2 hours when exposed to the sun. Remember, no sunscreen lasts all day.

3: The aging rays in the UVA spectrum are present from sun-up to sun-down, 365 days a year, rain or shine, and even penetrate window glass. Reapply REVERSE UVA/UVB SPF 15 Sunscreen or ENHANCEMENTS Mineral Peptides SPF 20 throughout the day, especially before driving home to prevent the left side of your face from becoming more sun damaged than the right.

4: Skin hit a plateau? UseENHANCEMENTS Micro-Dermabrasion Paste 1-2 times weekly on stubborn brown patches and to boost the REVERSE Regimen results.

5:  Always wear UVA/UVB sunscreen and do not sunbathe. A single day of unprotected sun exposure canvirtually undo months of treatment.

6:  Use the REVERSE Regimen until your skin is bright and even toned, usually 2-6 months, then transition to the ANTI-AGE Plus Regimen.

7:  Hydroquinone can stain fingernails so use ESSENTIALS Gauze to apply toner and wash hands after use.

8:  Use the REVERSE Regimen to treat the décolleté, neck, hands, and other parts of the body prone to showing signs of sun damage.

9:  TheREVERSERegimen is not recommended for pregnant or nursing women., no matter how cloudy it is.

A Healthy Lifestyle is only a few steps away.

By Danny Siegenthaler and Susan Siegenthaler

The following article provides some insight into why good skin care is important and suggests a simple skin care regime anyone can follow to help your skin perform at its best.

Our skin’s functions are too many to go through here in detail, however it protects our ‘insides’ from the external environment, acting both as a barrier and a filter between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ our bodies.

The skin helps in regulating our body’s temperature, like when we have a fever or we’re physically working hard, we tend to sweat, which is the body’s way to attempt to lower the temperature.

The skin also protects us from harmful substances entering our body, and it eliminates many toxins. This takes workload off our Liver and Kidneys to filter out by-products from our body’s metabolism. The skin also breathes!

These are just some of the important functions of our skin and as you can see, looking after your skin is vital, not just for your outer beauty, but for maintaining your inner health.

Now there is skin care and there is skin care… well, we all (hopefully) wash our body (skin) every day and we may even rub some body cream on and that is pretty much that. Women (most) go one step further when they make-up their face. Often using a cleanser and then a moisturiser before applying make-up. But is that really skin care?

I think not. I would consider it an attack on the skin rather than caring for it. You see, most of the products marketed to women are full of artificial colours, stabilisers, emulsifiers and other chemical, which are supposed to help in achieving a ‘beautiful complexion’.

Some products are advertising hormones, which are supposed to make your skin re-gain that youthful (no wrinkles) look – but more often than not these ‘hormones’ are artificial or synthetic and may well cause problems with the hormonal balance of the body. This is NOT Skin care – this is plain old manipulation and marketing.

Real skin care is much more than that and is more than just skin deep. Your skin is a living, breathing organ of your body. As such, just like every other organ in our body, it needs to be fed from the inside – it requires nutrients.

There are 4 basic ingredients to feeding the inside: 
Good nutrition: keep it simple, fresh and unprocessed. That is the best nutritional advice I can give. The simpler the food, the less processing and the fresher your food is, the better it is for you. Fresh fruit and vegetables contain so many of the nutrients we need to maintain our health. Sure have the odd processed, high in fat meal when you’re enjoying a meal out or have to attend a Luncheon or what ever. But make sure you have more natural foods than not. Keep the diet varied – don’t eat the same old, same old… risk a newveggie – one you haven’t tried before – you might like it …

Adequate rest and relaxation: don’t work yourself to an early grave – it’s not worth it. Make sure you get the sleep you need. Did you know that a study in England showed that your IQ (intelligence) drops if you do not have 8 hours sleep per night?

Think about it, do you get more work done if you feel well rested? Can you concentrate better if you’re not tired? – I bet you can.

Well, why not invest some additional time into rest and relaxation so that you gain an increase in energy and concentration? I’m sure you will find you will get more work done in less time if you’ve had sufficient rest.

Sufficient water intake: that’s a biggie. Most people (irrespective of were they live) will utilise around 3 litres of water per day – hey, don’t believe me, all the medical texts say so. Our body simply needs water to function.

If you do not drink at least this amount, your body will either not function well (on some level) or it will take it from where ever it can. That is called dehydration. You know, dry lips, dry flaky skin, parched mouth, cracks on you tongue, premature wrinkles… the list goes on. So, drink up (water, mind you) or shrivel up – it’s up to you.

Fresh air and sunshine: well, what can I say. Taking a deep breath of air and tell me it doesn’t feel great… Well? Oxygen is the stuff of life. Fill your lungs with it. Here I could go into how most of us do not know how to breath properly, but I’ll save this for another article.

So what does all this have to do with skin care? 
Well, that is the point of putting quality products on your skin, when you do not give it the stuff of life from the inside? The cells that make up your skin need the right nutrients for proper development, growth and all that… You can help your skin by using good quality skin care products, but you have to support this from the inside as well. Only in that way can you expect to get good results from proper skin care.

So what’s proper skin care?

Well, for starters there are 3 basic steps.

1. Cleanse and Condition

2. Hydrate and Tone

3. Moisturise and Revive.

OK. Cleansing the skin seems obvious and I know, you do know how to use soap – wrong, this is one sure way to make your skin dry-out quicker. Most soaps remove the natural oils of the skin, change the natural pH levels and do nothing to remove the dead layers of skin, which can block your pores and lead to blackheads. And, oh no, not pimples! The skin produces oils and acids to help it function, to protect it from loss of excessive moisture, to form a barrier… etc. So please do not use soap or detergents unless it is necessary.

Using a loofah or a gentle ‘scrub’ will remove the dead skin cells and this in turn will promote better blood circulation and help your skin to breath.

The next step is to hydrate and tone the skin. Say what? 
Well, you’ve just removed the dead skin layers, rubbing the skin with a loofah and or a specially formulated cleanser, now it’s time to remove the residue, sooth the skin and prepare the skin for getting a good feed of nutrients from the moisturiser.

Preparation of the skin prior to putting on the moisturiser is not dissimilar to preparing a surface about to receive a new coat of paint. You wouldn’t just paint over a wall that hasn’t been cleaned and prepared for the new paint, would you? It would be a waist of time and money… well, good skin care is the same. You first get rid of the old layer of paint, than you give it a primer and finally the top-coat.

Ah, I already use a moisturiser… 
Great, at least that’s a step in the right direction. But, have you looked at the ingredients? Are they natural, or are there numbers and words you don’t recognise on the label? If so, then consider that your body absorbs these substances and if they are not useful, (preferably of a natural kind) then the body has to eliminate them – and that’s more work and not necessary.

In some cases, the body actually can’t eliminate these substances and has to store them. This is a potential problem and could cause health issues down the track. Pure essential oils, or herbal extracts are usually good ingredients to have in your skin care products.

So there you have it – the importance of good skin care. These steps, if you follow them, will help you to achieve the results you want and your body will thank you too.

About Authors:
Danny Siegenthaler is a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and together with his wife Susan, a medical herbalist and Aromatherapists, they have created Natural Skin Care Products by Wildcrafted Herbal Products to share their 40 years of combined expertise with you.

The key to great skin is great skincare. The key to great skincare is using products developed to address your personal skin concerns.

A Healthy Lifestyle is only a few steps away.

By Dr. Scott

Sugar Brain

You open a can of soda and pour that sugary drink into your mouth. The sugar travels down your throat and into your stomach; the sugar then has a very short trip from your stomach into your blood stream. As that sugar starts to move its way throughout your body, it eventually makes its way to your brain. You brain is happy with this shot of sugar you just gave it, because, while it only makes up only two percent of the body weight, your brain uses one-half of all the sugar energy in the body.1

But, is there such a thing as too much sugar for your brain? And that soda you just drank, it will cause your blood sugar to skyrocket and eventually drop; what happens to your brain then? And what about other sugar-brains questions: doesn’t sugar make you or your kids hyperactive, and doesn’t sugar change your mood?

The short answer to these all these questions is: we don’t know. Scientific studies on the effects of sugar on the brain are sparse at best and most medical professionals and organizations will say that sugar has nothing to do with mood or hyperactivity. If you are surprised by that stance, you are not alone.

Most parents have witnessed firsthand the effect of sugar on little kid’s brains. Most adults will tell you that they have experienced a sort of mentalfog from eating too much sugar, not to mention the sugar high and the sugar crash. But none of these experiences mean anything to researchers who report that there are no such things as sugar highs or lows or that hyperactivity could be caused by too much sugar.

But just because there isn’t much research on how sugar and foods that act like sugar and how they affect mental function, doesn’t mean there isn’t any. This article will piece together the bits of information out there on sugar and brain function to get a better understanding of what sugar is doing to our brains. As usual, I will be including not only sugar, but foods that act like sugar in the discussion.

Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor

Let’s start with a brain chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF is the key to understanding what happens when sugar hits our brain.

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor is responsible for the development of new brain tissue. If you didn’t have this ch

emical in your brain, your brain wouldn’t develop properly and you would die very soon after birth. The key to BDNF is to understand what it does: it helps to create new neurons (nerve tissue), and, therefore new memories.

You want as much BDNF around as possible if you want to learn, grow, and have normal brain functioning.

Research has shown that high sugar diets (along with high fat diets and lack of essential fatty acids) decrease a BDNF. In fact, the relationship between BDNF and sugar gets even more interesting: low amounts of BDNF actually leads to insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome and even diabetes. This means that high sugar in the blood leads to low BDNF, and then low BDNF leads to a worsening of blood sugar control, which leads to high blood sugar, which leads to worse blood sugar control… and the cycle continues.

In an interesting study on rats, it was discovered that the animals that had the best ability to learn spatial and memory tasks also had the highest amount of BDNF. It took only two months on a hig

h sugar and high fat diet to significantly reduce BDNF in the brains of the experimental animals and for the reduction to have an effect on the animal’s ability to perform spatial and memory tasks.

Low BDNF is no small thing as it has also been associated with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, Huntington’s disease, Rett syndrome, and schizophrenia.

But there is much more to the sugar-brain story than BDNF, let’s take a look.

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is one of the best places to start when discussing how sugar affects our brains. There are quite a few clinical studies that link the consumption of grains (foods that act like sugar) with schizophrenia. It has long been thought that people who are schizophrenic may have a problem with the protein found in many grains (gluten) and there is a strong association between schizophrenia and Celiac disease.

Interestingly, there is also a close association with poor blood sugar control (metabolic syndrome) and the severity of schizophrenia:

It appears that the same dietary factors which are associated with the metabolic syndrome, including high saturated fat, high glycemic load, and low omega-3 (PUFA), may also be detrimental to the symptoms of schizophrenia.

These researcher show that once again, a diet low in essential fatty acids (omega-3) and high in fat and sugar will decrease BDNF and it makes me wonder if sugar and foods that act like sugar may be the “smoking gun” in schizophrenia.

Depression and Anxiety

As a hint that how we live and what we eat have some effect on our moods, it has long been known that coronary heart disease and diabetes all are common in people with depression. This means that the same dietary conditions that create heart disease and diabetes also can lead to depression. Interesting…

Sugar consumption in population studies have been shown to have a close link with major depression. Researchers suggest that the sugar and brain association may be due to the oxidative stress that sugar can cause or the change in beta-endorphins (brain chemicals that make us feel good) that comes about because of sugar use.

Anxiety, too, has been closely linked with sugar use in a number of studies.

Children

Perhaps the biggest questions arise when discussing children, mood, behavior and sugar. While any parent would tell you that sugar can dramatically change the behavior of a child, the medical community is silent. There have been a few studies that show an association between high blood sugars and problem behaviors, but these studies have mostly been performed in children who already have blood sugar problems (such as diabetes). More studies need to be done and need to be done in children with normal blood sugar.

Autism is an interesting exception to the lack of research. A review by the prestigious Cochrane review admitted that many of the studies linking foods that act like sugar (grains) and gluten to autism have been of poor quality, but they do point to one study that does show a relationship between a gluten-free diet and improvement in the symptoms of autism. While far from conclusive, these studies open the possibility of a solution for the growing epidemic of autism.

Brain Plan

Okay, let’s say you actually want to take care of your brain. What is the best way to go?

Avoid grains and sugars: Read my book Sugarettes or take the 30 Sugar Free Days Challenge, and get yourself off sugar and foods that act like sugar.

Exercise: It has been shown that exercise is great for your brain, and it increases BDNF.

Supplement: Your brain thrives on vitamins, especially the B vitamins and make sure you are taking some form of omega 3 oils (fish oils).

We can take care of our brains much better than we do and knowing that the foods that we put into our mouths can dramatically how we think, how we feel and act, and which diseases we get means that your brain and how well it functions is in your hands. You have a choice and what you eat and drink can make dramatic differences in how you think, feel and behave.

A Healthy Lifestyle is only a few steps away.