A lot of us here at Swanson Vitamins have been begging for some organic coffee, mostly for selfish reasons. Like 99% of all offices across this great land, we’ve been choking down the Folgers “premium roast” blend day after day, year after year.
Sure, we could have pitched in, pooled our money and gone out to get some of the good stuff like Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, or my personal favorite, Caribou coffee. But, we didn’t. We sucked it up and poured “Folgers in your cup” and pretended it was a fresh vanilla latte. But no more! We just added Swanson Organic Coffee to our product line – a medium House Blend flavor and a dark French Roast (both ground).
"Ayurveda" has been the buzz word around here all month long. I haven't sat in a meeting since the beginning of 2009 and not heard the word at least once. Landing pages, new product emails, videos, you name it...they're all about ayurveda. The next time I go into the break room, I wouldn't be surprised to find the vending machines stocked with coconut milk, curry cashews and microwaveable dal. We're in the midst of debuting our new line of Swanson Ayurvedic supplements, which was developed in partnershhip with Komal Herbals, a big name in Ayurvedic health products. In fact, before the partnership, I used to buy PRAAS bars directly from their website. In my opinion, Komal is top of the line when it comes to ayurveda. (Learn more about ayurveda, our new line, and the partnership on our website.)
Since we've been talking about ayurveda so much, I can't help thinking about Courtney (not her real name, but it's a perfect pseudonym for her), who was a health-counseling client of mine during my internship at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Without any hestitation, I can say that ayurveda was a big part of her overall health success! I never go into these counseling sessions with the idea that an ayurvedic regimen is the answer for everybody. But by session #4 (the 12 Hours to Better Health program consists of 12 one-hour sessions), I could see a clear picture emerging. Evidence strongly suggested that Courtney was showing an imbalance in the Vata dosha. Right away she described trouble with constipation and frustrating headaches. She had been to a number of medical doctors, chiropractors, massage therapists, even acupuncturists, and none of them could pinpoint the cause of her headaches or relieve the pain. I began to notice slight anxiety in her voice as we chatted, and she confirmed that she didn't rest well at night. She revealed a pattern of often falling asleep after 1 in the morning, then dragging herself out of bed by 7:30 to be to her bank job by 8. That left her no time for herself--to wake up, to eat breakfast, and to get dressed without being rushed. Her diet consisted almost exclusively of cold and dry foods like cereal, popcorn, chips and other snack foods. She even had the lean physique of a balanced Vata type. Altogether, I counted 31 symptoms during our first three counseling sessions that indicated a Vata imbalance.
At first, I thought she was just nutritionally deficient, especially in magnesium. But when she completed an assessment to further pinpoint her dosha, I was convinced that she could experience improvement in her health simply by balancing the vata dosha. I sent her Deepak Chopra's "Perfect Health" book to help her understand the concept of ayurveda, and to my delight, she absolutely devoured it! I also drew up meal plans and created recipes for her that emphasized specific warm, creamy and cooked foods like oatmeal with cinnamon, sugar & warm milk, blueberry pancakes with maple syrup, sweet potato soup, asparagus & cheese omelet, and chicken lasagne. She could eat all the stuff that my kapha dosha craved, but couldn't have. I was jealous of her every time we discussed food!
Courtney was a model client. She did the homework and prepared the foods. I explained up front that I'm not a doctor so I can't "treat" her constipation and headaches. But I assured her that if she practiced lifestyle suggestions and made changes in her diet, her body would likely heal itself. After every session, she diligently did her assignments and made the necessary adjustments. And by the following session she would always notice improvements that only fueled her hunger for more! I recommended several supplements and products, including Kyoto Chlorella, Swanson Natural Sleep Formula, Swanson Coconut Oil and Swanson Coconut Flour (plus a few others). Self-massages and relaxing baths were introduced to her daily life. Much to both of our amazement, her health turned around by applying the ayurvedic principles we discussed. At a college reunion this fall, her friends asked her what the doctors diagnosed to be the cause of her headaches. She told them it wasn't the doctors who figured it out, and one of them interrupted to shriek, "don't tell me it was the 'spinach lady' you told us about!" Not long ago, Courtney sent me a present and in her card she wrote, "I can't even tell you what a positive impact you've made in my life. I've gotten excited about life again and come to better terms with who I am and what I'm capable of. You're so good at radiating encouragement and excitement." Clearly, ayurveda worked wonders for Courtney. So now the question is, what can ayurveda do for you? If you want to learn more about the 12 Hours to Better Health program, please contact me at Jani.Paschka@swansonhealth.com. And by all means, check out our line of Swanson Ayurvedic supplements today. Then you'll be talking about them, too!
Have you have ever started a detoxification regimen and actually finished it? The kind in which you don't eat real food for days and drink only distilled water mixed with fresh-squeezed lemons and maybe a little maple syrup? If you nodded your head "yes," please know that I am in awe of you! What you accomplished was superhuman, at least in my opinion. I've tried the aforementioned regimen, otherwise known as "The Master Cleanse," on more than one occasion, and my story has a different ending than yours. Oh, I begin the day with rousing optimism, envisioning a leaner, healthier me in just 3 to 7 days. The cheerleading lasts no more than four hours--tops, though. By 10:00 a.m. it has ebbed into "I'll stick with this torture if it's the last thing I do," as I imagine the pleasure of sipping a cup of aromatic coffee from Starbuck's. Murphy's Law guarantees a lunch invitation that day, but sheer stubbornness forces me to say "no," despite stabbing pangs of hunger. By mid-afternoon an ever increasing headache invades my body, severely sapping my motivation, and by 8:00 p.m. I'm so tired, owly and in pain that the iron will rusts out completely. I usually end up ripping into a loaf of bread and smearing it with butter--organic, of course--just before bed, feeling like a failure once again.
Imagine my excitement when I saw a photo of a woman soaking in a tub with the caption "A 30-minute sole (so-LAY) bath has the cleansing effect of a three-day fast" from page 168 of the book Water & Salt: The Essence of Life. If you're like me and can't endure more than 12 hours of a fast, you'll have to buy this book by Dr. Barbara Hendel! It's full of fascinating information about the health benefits of Himalayan Crystal Salt on the human body. Yet another post and I'm about to mention again the guru-of-gurus--David Wolfe. (Well, no one can accuse me of being fickle.) David Wolfe oozes good health. His skin is brighter and clearer than I thought possible without airbrushing. He's a walking testimonial to whatever he's doing. So, the fact that he likes Himalayan Crystal Salt, too, citing Dr. Hendel and the book I just mentioned on his own website, sealed this regimen as reliable, from my vantage point, anyway. Her book details how to prepare the sole bath and why it works, but I'll outline the abbreviated version in 7 super-simple steps:
1. Pour two pounds of Himalayan Crystal Salt, either the granulated version or the large crystal stones, into an empty, plugged bathtub
2. Cover them with warm water
3. Let the salt dissolve in the water for half an hour
4. Fill the tub with warm water no hotter than 98.6 degrees F
5. Immerse yourself in the water and relax for 30 minutes. Ahhh...
6. Dry off. Do not put lotion or any other topical preparation on the skin immediately following the bath
7. Relax for at least another 30 minutes or go to bed
Does it work? Ask anyone who's tried it, like our email customer care agent Crystal, and you'll most definitely get an impassioned nod of the head. Crystal said it not only works, but you'll be very tired after the bath. Aside from the relaxing aspect of it, minerals in the salt pull toxins from the body through osmosis into the bath water, and the process takes a lot out of the body--quite literally. Her advice? Do not skip step #7. Try the sole bath on a Friday night and rest the entire weekend, if possible, to regain strength.
I'm still in awe of anyone who makes it through "The Master Cleanse." But unless their skin looks like David Wolfe's, I won't ever be tempted to try it again. Not when I can go to bed at night feeling detoxified and successful.
How many of you have had an itch so bad that you could barely stand it? I'm not talking about the "seven-year itch" or "itching" to go on vacation, or those kinds of metaphorical feelings. I mean a real itch that you scratch to the point of injury. The kind that tortures you all the more so as you try to alleviate it with light and gentle strokes of your fingernails. The kind of itch that incessantly drives you to find any object with a sharp edge—the blade of a scissors, the flip-top of a soda can, the edge of your driver's license—to avenge its assault on you, often tearing the skin and swelling the surrounding area of your body in the process. For a brief moment, you believe you're on your way to insanity.
I began to regularly experience this kind of itch years ago as a young woman just out of school and beginning a career in the financial world. Five years prior to that, a well-intentioned dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline (an oral antibiotic) to rid my cheeks and forehead of the acne that dotted it during my late teen years. My skin immediately cleared up, and I am grateful to him for that. But those same antibiotics, which he approved for five years straight, would negatively impact my life to this day. I know this, because on that day in the brokerage firm when the tops of my feet began to drive me crazy, I made an appointment with an allergist to find out why I couldn't get rid of this persistent itch. He's the one who broke the news to me that my dermatologist had forever altered my immune system with antibiotics. I was now overly sensitive to many things that entered my body, the mast cells firing off histamine at practically anything that moved just like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in that final scene of the movie before they were killed by the Bolivian army. The news was I would have to take antihistamines from then on. OK. I could do that. As the years progressed, however, even the antihistamines began to fail me. After reading Dr. William Crook's book, The Yeast Connection, in the mid 1980s, I realized that the antibiotics had allowed yeast to overrun my body, and I had a condition known as candidiasis. Now I was starting to hate my dermatologist and, by association, the entire medical profession.
Since then, I've tried to rid my body of the yeast with all kinds of stuff, from acidophilus to caprylic acid to pao d'arco tea. They do help a bit, but until I conquer my love for sugar, which the yeast feeds on, I'll never completely solve the problem. I am more than excited about a new product that we just introduced called High Potency Australian Fresh Olive Leaf Complex in the Swanson Ultra line, however. It's a liquid formula—a thick extract from olive leaves mixed with glycerin and nothing else. Olive leaf extract has an impressive history of combatting the kind of pathogens that have claimed my intestinal tract, boosting the immune system at the same time. I was anxious to try it, but was more than taken aback by the strong taste of it. Yeah, no doubt it kicks butt in the gut (hey, there's a headline), but I wasn't sure how I was going to get it to the battlefield in my body. I tried chasing it with tomato juice, and I have to say, this does make it a lot easier to take. But the inspiration for this post was my discovery of an entirely different way to use it.
I was getting ready to leave for work one morning when the tops of my feet broke out in the familiar and maddening itch. I could barely stand it. I don't really know what possessed me to do this, but I grabbed the olive leaf extract, poured about a teaspoon of it on a paper towel, and spread it across the tops of my feet. Wow! I could hardly believe it. Instant relief. The olive leaf extract went right to work on the culprit. Was this just a coincidence? Maybe the skin was simply dry and the glycerin soothed it. Not a chance. I've used it on numerous occasions since then on other parts of my body, too, and it works every single time. This stuff is great! I hate it when marketers use the word "miracle" to describe a new product. It just sounds so hokey. But in contrast with the scourge I've put up with for the last 25 years, I view this olive extract as a bona fide miracle. Which makes me a feel a little bit like Moses himself.
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