What about your skin? Here's a wonderful story of healing

Dear Pursuer of Better Health,

This story just came across my desk at a time of year when people often have difficulty with their skin. It demonstrates how dependent the skin, our largest organ, is on the well being of our other organs, the stomach, liver, lungs, gall bladder. They all work together and when everything is working well, the skin is beautiful.

SKIN TESTIMONY

When I was 13 years old, my face started breaking out. My sisters (6 of them) had peaches and cream complexions. My mom felt badly for me, so she started taking me to dermatologists. Within a 10 yr span, I went to 14 different doctors.

Each doctor had his own solution; and all of them included some type of antibiotic. I had salves (that burned), shots in my arm and cortisone shots in my face, dry ice therapy, sun lamp treatments, etc. Each time my skin would clear up, but then after stopping the treatments, my skin would break out again and get worse. My few pimples turned into acne and I was eventually referred to the head of dermatology at Johns Hopkins. There, they put me on 6 tetracycline tablets a day for 2 yrs. Can you imagine taking antibiotics for 2 yrs – and at such high levels? I moved to New York when I was 23 yrs. old. One day at my new job, my mom called to say she had made an appointment for me with the head of Columbia Hospital. I started crying and said that I was done. I couldn’t take the ups and downs, the disappointments anymore – I would rather have the acne!

When I got off the phone, Helen, one of the secretaries in the office heard me on the phone. She said, “I have something that will clear up your skin for good. It may take a year, but it will get to the root of the problem.” She was a beautiful woman – beautiful hair and skin, but she was always taking pills and I thought she must be sick!!!!! There was something so genuine and caring about what she said and how she said it that I was willing to give it a try.

She was very honest and said that my skin might get worse before it could get better because of all the medications I had taken. That it all had to come out so I could get better. And, that made sense to me. Well, the products she was talking about was Shaklee. I took ONLY 3 products – Energizing Soy Protein, Vita-Lea and Herb-Lax.

At first my skin did start breaking out – but at the same time a lot of other things started happening. I started sleeping better, my PMS symptoms went away, the skin around my eyes started looking healthier – no more circles, and I had more energy. I started experiencing a feeling of well being that I had NEVER experienced before. Well, true to Helen’s word, my skin was clear within 7 months. SHAKLEE DID IN 7 MONTHS WHAT 14 DOCTORS COULDN'T DO IN 10 YEARS!!! Barbara Mulin

This blog is more to inform than sell. If you go out there and find products equivalent to the ones mentioned manufactured by Shaklee, by all means, get the results attested to in the stories I bring to you. My intention is to provide information that is alternative to the traditional allopathic standard medical approach.

Be well, Betsy


Betsy Bell's Health4u
206 933 1889
www.HiHoWealth.com for the biz opportunity
www.TiredNoMore.com for the product
www.HiHoHealth.com to shop

Belly Fat and your health

Today is Thanksgiving. I am filled with gratitude for all the many people and things in my life and wish the same for you. The turkey is stuffed. The families are gathering. It is a wonderful day of quiet family celebration.

So why am I bringing up the uncomfortable subject of belly fat on a day of sanctioned gluttony? Ah, you chastise, leave us alone today of all days. I'm not suggesting to anyone that we begin the changes we need to make to rid ourselves of belly fat. But I'm sure you have noticed that some quite slim people do have this belly. The adolescent ratio of hip to waist has reversed itself and then some.

Who cares, you ask. I'm going to let the good Dr. Chaney help us understand why belly fat is bad.

First of all it is dangerous because of the inflammation that results. This fat is not inactive like the fat on our rear ends or upper arms. This fat is a busy mass of free radicals behaving like bowling balls rampaging through a china shop destroying every cell in its path. but that's just the beginning.

"What happens next is even worse!

"We start storing fat in our muscles, our liver and our pancreas.

"And you really don't want to store fat there.

"When we store fat in those tissues it leads directly to insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

"When we think of abdominal obesity the solution is pretty simple - weight loss and exercise.

"But, what do you do when you have fat organs?

"And, recent studies suggest that fat accumulation in heart muscle may play a role in heart failure and susceptibility to the kind of arrhythmia that can lead to sudden death following a heart attack.

"A recent review (Perez-Martinez et al., Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, 1801: 362-366, 2010) suggests that diets rich in omega-3 fatty acids may help.

"Fat accumulation in the liver precedes and predicts type 2 diabetes independently of obesity and even of fat distribution - but omega-3 fatty acids appear to help.

"Animal studies show that omega-3 fatty acids prevent fat accumulation in the liver, and a human clinical study showed that 2g/day of omega-3 fatty acids gave a complete regression of fatty liver symptoms in 33% of patients.

"I could go on, but you get the point. Diets rich in omega-3 fatty acids help prevent fat build-up in our organs and that decreases the risk of several major diseases.

"I'm not suggesting that you eat whatever you want and rely on omega-3 fatty acids to overcome all of the health consequences of obesity.

"But this does give us one more reason to make sure that our diets contain plenty of omega-3 fatty acids."

To Your Health!
Dr. Stephen G Chaney


Dr. Stephen Chaney
Shaklee Master Coordinator
http://www.socialmarketingconnection.com
888.860.2075

P.S. The "Heart Health" CD that my son and I recently recorded is now available for order at:

www.socialmarketingconnection.com

Betsy Bell's Health4U
206 933 1889
www.HiHoHealth.com

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

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Plants really do work better than drugs and here's why

I follow Dr. Weil's tweets and today clicked his link http://weil.ws/b0XBub to an article about the complex nature of plants and their medicinal effect on humans as compared to the "active ingredient" scientists are so quick to extract, synthetically reproduce, patent and market through our doctors and television ads. Our human evolution is part of the whole ecosystem and natural plants evolved along with us. When we eat the whole plant, our bodies choose the plant's particular property for our use. As Dr. Shaklee was fond of saying, eat a range of raw and lighted cooked foods, add supplements as needed and our cells will self-select what they need for health.

The example Dr. Weil gives is the cocoa leaf which both stimulates bowel action if one is constipated and calms diarrhea depending on which elements of the leaf were taken up by the ailing body. We westerners know cocoa as producing cocaine. The indigenous in South American use it for much more. When my family was traveling in Peru years ago, Ruth who was 8 at the time, was nausated from altitude sickness high in the Andes. Our guide searched the rocky slopes for yerba mate plant and had her chew a little to regain her equilibrium.

Enjoy the article. The take away is whole food supplements may be able to balance your body so you can avoid having to take drugs for all sorts of physical problems. Check out www.HiHoHealth.com for the best source of whole food supplements in North America.

In good health, Betsy

Betsy Bell's Health4U
206 933 1889

Victory for the Breast Cancer Fund Safe Cosmetics Campaign

You may remember my efforts to promote the advocacy work of the Breast Cancer fund a few years ago when many of you supported my climb up Mt. Shasta to raise money for that group's work. You helped me raise a huge sum of money for the Climb Against the Odds. The Breast Cancer Fund's mission is to educate consumers about cancer causing agents and the products that contain them. Their mission is also to help pass laws that prohibit manufacturers from including their cancer causing chemicals to exist in products we buy. Not everything our stylist sells us is healthy and harmless. They may not be aware of these hazards.

Let me share a wonderful victory from their faithful efforts. You know the Brazilian Blowout hair products? Well, read this report: http://californiawatch.org/watchblog/attorney-general-targets-brazilian-blowout-over-chemical-6586. If you were one of the many friends who gave money to support my climb, thank you for helping make this victory possible.

Now, pass the word along and encourage your hair stylist to stop promoting this product, for the sake of our children and our own health.

In good health, Betsy


Betsy Bell's Health4U
206 933 1889
www.HiHoWealth.com for the biz opportunity
www.TiredNoMore.com for the product
www.HiHoHealth.com to shop

Food for thought: Apples

Thanks to my friend and colleague, Kate McCoy, awesome massage therapist and horticulturalist for this up coming series on the great benefits of eating food. I mean real food, not canned, frozen, bottled or processed. Just straight food.

If you’re looking for a tasty snack, you should know that apples are in a league of their own as far as fiber content goes. They have a soluble fiber called “pectin”, and are also really high in insoluble fiber. Both kinds of fiber are absolutely essential for the health of your intestines and colon.

For a great scientific article about the health benefits of apples, just click here.

To your good health, Betsy

Betsy Bell's Health4u
206 933 1889
www.HiHoWealth.com for the biz opportunity
www.TiredNoMore.com for the product
www.HiHoHealth.com to shop

Help for you or your friend who's running a marathon

October 24, 2010 (from NPR )

About 200,000 Americans will run marathons this year, and by some estimates about 4 out of 10 of them will bonk. That's runner-speak for "hitting the wall," which is what happens when a long-distance runner runs out of gas, metabolically speaking.

Hitting The Wall

Ben Rapoport hit the wall while running the New York City Marathon five years ago. Here's how he describes it: "Somewhere in the Bronx, I started to feel like I couldn't keep up the pace," he says. "It was awful. I couldn't make my legs run any faster. And when I tried, it was very painful."

Rapoport is getting a Ph.D. in electrical engineering this year at MIT. He also happens to be a Harvard medical student who plans to be a brain surgeon. You might say he's pretty driven. So he decided to apply his brain to the problem of hitting the wall. It's all about carbohydrates, he says.

What Happens

"When an athlete hits the wall, [he or she is] essentially running out of carbohydrates in the leg muscles and in the liver," Rapoport says. "So when you bring the carbohydrate fuel tank to empty, the body is forced then to metabolize fat rather than carbohydrates."

Fat is a much less efficient fuel than carbohydrate. It takes more oxygen to burn. So an athlete needs to pump more oxygen to the muscles to keep going. As a result, the athlete needs to slow down dramatically.

There are all sorts of recipes to avoid running out of carbohydrates. They involve "carbo-loading" — eating a lot of rice and pasta and other carbs before the race. There are also protocols for how to time these carbo pigouts to maximize the amount of carbohydrate that gets stored just where it's needed: in the legs.

How To Avoid The Wall

But Rapoport is a precise guy. He wanted to quantify just how many carbo calories a particular runner is capable of storing, and how much he or she would need to run a marathon at a particular pace.

Running Endurance Calculator

Use Ben Rapoport's mathematical formula to calculate your own endurance potential and how much carbo-loading you should do before a race. His formula occupies eight pages in a scientific paper just published in a journal called Public Library of Science (PLoS) Computational Biology.

Understanding Rapoport's formula requires an advanced degree. But in principle it's pretty straightforward — and accessible to any runner interested in finding the answers to two questions:

1. How can I avoid hitting the wall?

2. How fast a marathon could I potentially run?

To illustrate how Rapoport's formula works, I recruited a young marathoner, Erin Wyner. She met Rapoport and me at an MIT gym. Wyner, 29, says she just completed her eighth marathon with a time of 3:08:06. "That's an excellent time!" Rapoport says. "Have you ever hit the wall?"

"I have crashed and burned and hit the wall in my first marathon," she replies. "It was a mindless struggle, a death march to the end." (You have to take such statements from dedicated marathoners with a grain of salt. In fact, she finished that race with the enviable time of 3:35. But to her that was a disaster.)

How The Formula Works

First, Rapoport has to determine Wyner's maximal oxygen uptake. The technical term is VO2-max. There are fancy methods for determining a person's VO2-max, but Rapoport says a good-enough estimate can be derived from clocking an individual's heart rate at rest and while exercising. Wyner's resting pulse is 63 beats per minute. After she runs on a treadmill for a few minutes, Rapaport measures it again — 120 bpm running at 6.1 miles per hour.

Next he asks her weight — 100 pounds. Knowing her weight allows him to estimate how many carbs her liver and leg muscles can store.

Rapoport plugs all of the numbers into his computer and comes up with an answer that impresses Wyner. "It seems that you're capable at full carbohydrate loading of running a 2:44 marathon," he says.

"Wow!" she responds. "I'm surprised! I may never live up to it, but it's very intriguing. It's out there for me!"

To run her best time — and avoid bonking — Rapoport tells Wyner she'll need to stoke up before the race with 1,900 calories worth of carbs. And of course, she'll need a lot more training, not to mention that hard-to-quantify quality called grit.

Rapoport's formula isn't just for elite athletes, he says. Any long-distance runner can use it. "And," he says, "you'd better believe I'm plugging my numbers into that formula to know how many calories of carbohydrates to load before the race."

The race he's talking about is the New York City Marathon on Nov. 7 — the one he plans to run in 2:50.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON HEALTHY CARBS & PRODUCTS BASED ON RESEARCH THAT HAS SUPPORTED OLYMPIANS FOR YEARS: