Yonder Willow Wellness

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Milk might not be the best thing to drink to deal with osteoporosis.

My wife found this yesterday in one of her nutrition textbooks, Dietary Guidelines, from the Global College of Natural Medicine, 2010

Regrettably, the more dairy one consumes, the weaker bones can become.  It has to do with acidity and alkalinity.  When placed together they neutralize.  The calcium in milk is alkaline while the protein is acidic.  The problem is that there is more acid in the milk than alkaline calcium.  This causes the body to leach more calcium from the bones to combat the acids coming in.  So, unfortunately, those consuming dairy to combat osteoporosis are actually causing the opposite to occur.

Everyone knows that milk is an excellent source of calcium. As far as I know, calcium is the only reason that people drink milk.  It also turns out that milk doesn’t contain enough of the other minerals that the body needs to be able to absorb the calcium even if it was available to us.

I guess that the calcium fortified orange juice I saw at the grocery store is also pointless because orange juice is very acidic.

The best place to get calcium naturally is vegetables. That actually goes for just about any mineral because vegetables are alkaline. Here’s a good list of veggies and their calcium content.

If you want a calcium supplement that contains the necessary minerals to actually use the calcium for something other than making kidney stones, try this one.

If you want something the drink, try water.

Wayne Woodworth
Cow milk is specially formulated for baby cows anyway

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Osteoporosis has become a serious problem. It used to be considered a disease that only elderly women developed, but not anymore.  It is becoming a problem for younger people, both men and women. A large part of the rise in osteoporosis is the increasing amount of acidic foods and drinks that people are taking in. As a society, we eat too much fast food and processed food and drink too many soft drinks. We don’t realize how acidic some of our food and drinks are.

Why should you care about acidity when it comes to osteoporosis? Because calcium, what makes your bones hard, is also what your body uses to balance out the pH, or acid level, in your body. If you take in a lot of acid foods then your body will pull calcium out of the bones to deal with it. Over time, that will lead to loss of bone mass and osteoporosis.

So, how do you fix the problem?  Most people already know about taking calcium to strengthen their bones. The problem with just taking calcium is that the body needs other nutrients to help use it properly. When you take large amounts of calcium without the required nutrients to help the body use it, the calcium gets flushed out of  the body through the kidneys, causing an increased risk of kidney stones. I’ll talk about the nutrients that help in a moment.

There are chemicals in some foods that prevent the body from absorbing calcium like it should. Sodium increases the amount of calcium lost through urine. Sulfate produced from burning excess protein for energy also causes calcium to be lost through the urine. The oxalate found naturally in some foods binds with calcium, preventing it from being absorbed. The phosphorous in cola and a lot of processed foods can interfere with calcium absorption. Insoluble fiber also reduces calcium absorption.  Finally, caffeine can increase urinary excretion leading to more calcium being lost.

Fortunately, there are also chemicals that aid the absorption of calcium. Vitamin D is essential for the body to absorb calcium. Vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin K, magnesium, and boron also assist the body in absorbing calcium.

As you can see, fixing bone mass problems and osteoporosis takes more than just increasing the amount of calcium that you take in. Nikken has a new calcium supplement called CalDenx that contains vitamin D, magnesium, and boron in addition to the calcium. Nikken also has another supplement, OsteoDenx, that does not contain calcium but aids in the absorption of the calcium that you get from your diet, other calcium supplements, or CalDenx.

Wayne Woodworth
Consumer of Nutritional Supplements

PS: The info about what substances inhibit and support the absorption of calcium came from an excellent article at www.emedicinehealth.com

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You probably hear almost daily that another one of your friends or co-workers is sick. The media is still pumping up the swine flu even though some medical authorities have said that it has already peaked and has not been the event that it was predicted to be. Personally, I’m tired of hearing about it.

I don’t believe that most people need to get sick, especially not with things like a cold or the flu. None of my immediate family has been sick in over a year, and it isn’t because we live in isolation. I have small kids who go to school every day and are around other sick kids, so they have been “exposed” to whatever is out there, as have my wife and I.

So why don’t we get sick? We do just a few things different than other people. The biggest is that we drink a lot of alkaline water instead of carbonated beverages or coffee.  Other things that we do include taking a good green barley grass supplement, a mushroom based immunity supplement, and make sure that our indoor air is filtered. My kids like taking these supplements too.

Naturally, I can’t guarantee that you will have the same results as we have. It is sure worth giving it a try. Find out more about the water filtration that we use and the  nutritional supplements that we take.

Wayne Woodworth
Nikken Wellness Consultant

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How is your immune system doing for you?  Right now I am watching to a video from David Wolfe, who is considered to be one of the leading authorities on nutrition,  about how important it is to take care of the immune system.  He spent a good part of the video talking about a specific class of herbs that are very important to boost the immune system.  These herbs are the medicinal mushrooms.  He said that these are the mushrooms that grow on fallen trees.  What they do is work to concentrate certain minerals that the trees have absorbed throughout their lifetime, which can exceed 100 years.

He mentioned 5 specific mushrooms to look for.  Reishi, Maitake, Shiitake, Agaricus, and Coriolus to look for when looking to boost your immunity.

David Wolfe also mentioned how they also contain a lot of protein and can affect other systems like the nervous system and brain function as well as the blood and heart.  Very cool stuff.

If you would like to see the video, go to http://www.longevitynowprogram.com/news/immunity/.

I take a mushroom supplement that has 4 of the mushrooms David talks about plus 10 more for a total of 14 medicinal mushrooms.  Click here for the Immunity supplement.

Wayne Woodworth
I am immune

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I’m with a network marketing company that, among other things, sells a nutritional juice product.  I received an email this morning from my upline that made me think about artificial additives in our food.  Someone had asked the Distributor Relations department of our MLM company if they could share the difference between our juice product, Ciaga, with the juice product from a competitor.  It turns out that the competitor’s juice, which contains a lot of Vitamin C, also contains Sodium Benzoate as a preservative.  It turns out that sodium benzoate can interact with vitamin C and form Benzene, an organic solvent that is known to cause cancer and liver damage.

My point here is not to bash the other company and their product, which is why I have not named them, but to point out that we need to be very careful when buying food to really think about added chemicals and how they may react with each other and the food they are added to.  I strongly encourage you to look at organic and all-natural versions of food.  They may be more expensive in the short term but can save you a lot in the long-term.

By the way, Ciaga is  100% natural.  97% juice and 3% fruit solids with no artificial preservatives and no added water or sugar.

Wayne Woodworth
Only the good stuff please

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