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Nowadays the healthy living trend has become ever more popular and is getting much more mainstream all the time. The days when people that choose pure products, such as natural soap, were thought to be hippies or weirdos are finally over. That’s something we can all be grateful for.

Today lots more people are understanding that lots of natural beauty products are much better than the items you find on most market shelves. The local grocery store offers fruits, nuts and greens for sale, and your grandmother would most likely tell you to use the same stuff on your body. And there are lots of great reasons for that.

Progressively more health experts and skin specialists around the world are recommending we switch to pure products. It is because chemical based bath and body goods can cause different skin issues and they are simply not nearly as health for you.

Here are just some of the advantages of choosing organic beauty products:

* Youthful Looking Skin – Pure products can often minimize facial lines and age spots better than chemical products that can do more harm than good to your skin when used for extended periods of time. Natural beauty products can do very well at fighting the signs of ageing therefore you end up with much younger looking skin even as you get slightly older.

* No Preservatives – Natural products containing nothing but natural ingredients such as organic fruit extracts and grains don’t use any nasty chemical preservatives that can be absorbed into your skin. They are cleaner and safer to use on your skin.

* Gorgeous Shine – Natural skin care products tend to be pure so they will naturally help your skin after a while. This will give you a gorgeous more radiant looking glow. Many typical products just mask surface imperfections and can make your skin look worse with long term use. But continual usage of pure products will lead to only younger looking, glowing skin that stays fresh and clear over time.

* Cost Effective – Many of these organic products can in fact be made at home with comparable simplicity. The ingredients are normally inexpensive because they are nothing more than various fruits, seeds, leaves, and other ingredients blended together. This ends up being fairly low-priced and ensures that you will know precisely what is in the items that you’re applying on your body.

* Good For The Environment – Regular skin care products are chemical based so they can harm the environment in a big way. The waste from creating them gets pumped, flushed and dumped into our beautiful planet. Also, green cleaning products such as natural cleaner and others don’t have that harmful waste so they are safer for your family and pets to be around.

Okay you’ve now learned a few more factors why applying natural skin care and beauty products is becoming so popular recently. It’s for your benefit and the benefit of the planet.

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So you think you eat a healthy diet, do you? Well, if you can place your hand on your heart and say in all honesty that you are at your correct weight and you are healthy, fit and feel good, then we can believe you. But… if you are overweight and not so fit or healthy, there might be some underlying cause. That cause is more often than not diet related. So let’s look at what you might need to be avoiding in your diet even if you think its okay to include it.

Soda is Bad for You

It is quite amazing how many people go to great lengths to ensure they eat lots of fresh, healthy food, then go ahead and wreck all their good work by pouring what amounts to fizzy poison down their throats to quench their thirst. If you thought that its okay to drink soda as long as you eat right, then you could be doing your health a disservice. There are some really compelling reasons why soda is bad for you, not least of all it will add several inches to your waistline even if what you are eating does not.

There are the two main varieties of soda from our viewpoint. One has copious amounts of refined sugars and the other uses artificial sweeteners. Dieters will be quick to point out that the sugar-laden variety are definite no-no’s when it comes to losing weight. But what they may not realize is that even the so-called diet sodas are just as bad, if not worse than their sugar toting counterparts.

It is common knowledge that sugar is just empty calories and the body will store them as fat if it can’t use them right away, which is often the case. Recent medical research has linked a high intake of refined sugar to cell damage leading to more rapid aging, as well as uncovering links to the formation of cancer cells.

So what about the artificially sweetened variety of soda?

The chief artificial sweetener of choice is aspartame, which is many times sweeter than refined sugar, cheaper to manufacture and therefore a cheap alternative that has the benefit if creating a low calorie drink for dieters. You might think that this is the solution, but you would be wrong. Very wrong. The first thing dieters need to know about aspartame is that it has been shown in studies to stimulate hunger and cravings for high calorie or high carb snacks. This can lead to snacking on things that will bust your carefully crafted diet when you are between meals.

But it gets worse. Aspartame is made up of three main components, none of which are good foryou. About 10% of aspartame is methanol, better known as wood alcohol that is a poison. It is the substance that was responsible for killing or blinding skid-row alcoholics. Methanol becomes unstable at temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit to form free methanol that is easily absorbed by the body. Free methanol breaks down in the body to form formic acid and formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is a neurotoxin and is carcinogenic, causes retinal damage, interferes with DNA replication and causes birth defects. You can read more about the “dangers of Aspartame” by Googling that term, or visiting http://aspartame.mercola.com/.

What about the fizz itself?

The carbonated water that characterizes soda is also detrimental to health in a number of ways, especially dental health. Excessive amounts of the carbonic acid in soda can corrode the enamel protection of teeth, which will gradually dissolve them overtime. This damage cannot be reversed. There have been scares about bone density loss and stomach excessive lining wear, but these have been debunked by more recent studies. however, if you suffer from a gastric ulcer, your doctor will probably recommend that you do not drink soda as this can inflame it.

Still want that cold, refreshing can of soda?

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In my last post The Health of Our Meat, I took the meat industry by the horns and spoke a few home truths! Well, now its the turn of the dairy industry, as if you aren’t still reeling from all this stunning knowledge!

Most of us in the West have grown up on cow’s milk and its derivatives such as yoghurt, cream, butter and cheese, but is it as good for you as the so-called experts keep telling us? Well, not to deflate you any more after learning that meat and vegetables are not up to scratch, but there are one or two thing you need to know about cow’s milk and what use it is in our daily diet. After reading this, you might change your own views on the need to even continue consuming dairy produce in adulthood.

First out of the gate is the well documented fact that we humans, as adults actually can’t metabolize cow’s milk and the lactose it contains very well. In fact many of us are actually lactose intolerant, meaning those people can’t metabolize it at all and when they consume it, they suffer with quite debilitating symptoms.

But we hear from the industry that promotes it that it is necessary to enrich our diet with much needed calcium.

The fact that we need calcium for strong healthy teeth and bones is true, but we don’t get it from cow’s milk, because we can’t metabolize it very well, remember? The truth is that we derive most of our calcium from green leafy vegetables. We can metabolize them perfectly well and get all the nutrients we need easily, because that’s the way our bodies are designed to work.

It gets worse. If you’re squeamish, look away now…

The cows that provide the milk are pumped full of steroids, growth hormones and antibiotics, as you will have gleaned from my last post. Well, those nasties find their way into the cow’s milk, and are not destroyed during the pasteurization process. So we get to consume these hormones and antibiotics which of course reduce the effectiveness of our own natural immune system’s defenses.

So there are just a few reasons not to consume dairy products, or at least cut down on them drastically. A glimmer of hope lies in the organic food industry as organically reared dairy cows are not fed all these antibiotics and hormones, but access to organic dairy produce is still not as widespread as it could be, but it is improving.

Remember, one billion Chinese have practically no dairy produce in their diets and they’re pretty healthy despite its absence!

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The last post here, The Health of Our Crops, looked at the crop farming industry and how organic farming can turn things around with regards our health and wellness. So here, I’ll look at the benefits of eating organically produced meat and poultry.

First, let’s look at what we already know about intensively farmed livestock. Knowing exactly what is in your food can make a big difference to your overall health. Cows and pigs, which are herbivores, are fed with protein rich feed that can also contain ground up flesh and bones of dead farmyard animals. If this isn’t bad enough, they are also regularly fed a diet rich in growth hormones and antibiotics which make the animals reach maturity much faster than they would naturally.

These force-grown animals see little of the beautiful fields that we associate with grazing animals. They spend nearly all of their miserable and thankfully short lives in small pens where their movements are restricted to prevent them from harming themselves and others. For this read to avoid damaging the supermarket shrink wrapped and neatly packaged meat they will become. Poultry are kept in tiny cages for similar reasons and are also fed steroids, growth hormones and a cocktail of antibiotics to prevent the infections that would surely wipe out so many birds kept in such close quarters.

Ok, if this is staring to sound like an animal rights tirade, I apologize. It’s just the plain old truth. And no one likes to hear that, do they!

Well guess what their organically raised cousins get. Yep, they get to roam around the farmyard and graze in those fields, at least having a life before being shipped off to the abattoir. They also are not pumped full of hormones and antibiotics as they lead a more healthy lifestyle.

Now which meat would you rather take home from the supermarket and feed to your family? The cheaper stuff that still contains residues of all those hormones and antibiotics, knowing how those animals were treated before their miserable existences were snuffed out? Or the more expensive organic stuff that is just meat?

Not only that, but which do you imagine might be the more healthy choice for your family’s diet?

Oh yeah, no contest! In my next post I’ll ruffle a few more feathers with a look at how healthy the dairy industry is.

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The last post, Healthy Despite It All, took a swipe at what is wrong with the farming industry and the food that is produced for our tables. It also looked at solutions that are available in organic farming practices. So in this post, let’s carry this subject further here.

With better soil to grow in and far fewer chemicals to leech into their flesh, organically grown vegetables herald in an era where slowly but surely, farmers are realizing that they can return to traditional farming methods whilst still employing modern technology to make it all easier.

Transforming previously intensively farmed land back to organic methods takes time and several years may need to pass before it can certified organic. This is because chemicals that used to be sprayed on the crops and were therefore dissolved into the soil have to dissipate either with rainfall or being naturally broken down by the re-introduction of organic matter and good bacteria and fauna. But in the interim, the farmer can still work the soil and gradually produce better and healthier crops year upon year.

Organically grown fruit and vegetables not only contain more nutrients than their starved intensively grown cousins, but they also taste better as there is no chemical residue to taint the flavor. That makes them better for us and our general health. Of course, the agriculture industry are swift to counter any claims that their produce does contain any chemical residues, but come on, we are intelligent human beings and we know what our own common sense tells us. We know that organic food is far healthier for us and our families, there can be no argument about that!

But there is also organically farmed meat and poultry to consider in this healthy equation, and it is that which I’ll be looking at in my next post.

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In this post, I’d like to talk about how we can stay healthy despite it all. By that I mean how we as a race manage to remain healthy even though we are fed on a diet of food that is mass produced, full of potentially harmful artificial additives and deficient in many of the essential vitamins and minerals that we need.

The mineral and nutrient deficiency in the vast majority of food that we buy is a serious problem that the enlightened amongst us can do quite a lot about. First thing that needs to happen is for more people to stand up and tell the food industry that this is just not good enough. Unfortunately, the food industry as a whole is extremely powerful and has a veritable army of PR people who are very good at swaying public opinion away from the important issues. They have managed to force the US Congress to U turn on several additive bans and health issues over the decades, such is their reach and power of persuasion.

You have to see past this.

A minor revolution that is going to be good for the general health of people is already happening in the farming industry with smaller, breakaway farmers returning to traditional farming methods and turning their backs on the lethal cocktails of chemical fertilizers, pesticides etc that intensive farming methods employ. They are, instead, turning to organic farming methods that drastically cut the need for the vast majority of these chemicals. They are once again treating the soil with the respect it deserves and being repaid with healthier crops that are regaining their nutrient levels.

This is extremely good news for you and your family’s health.

It means that you can buy organically grown fruit and vegetables that are virtually free of chemicals (the UK Soil Association allows a maximum of 6 chemical pest control substances to be used on crops that can then be labeled “organic”). This will help us to stay healthy from the inside out.

By using natural organic matter to enrich the soil (instead of chemical fertilizer) the friendly bugs along with the worms return to play their part in the overall scheme of things. Together, this produces healthier crops that taste better, leading to healthy eating and a better chance of enjoying better overall health.

The downside is they cost more, but what price are you going to place on your children’s health? I reckon its a price well worth paying.

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