Honey and Oil salve....dry skin

Okay, So I have gotten some emails about how to "make" this supposed honey oil lotion. Well, it isn't a fine science...sorry engineers:)

What I did:
For a one time use, put a small dab of "Really Raw Honey" on your finger tip. Drop 4 drops of almond oil (if for a face) or avocado oil(also okay for faces) or olive oil (better for hands and other dry areas) and rub between fingers until well combined. lightly massage into affected area and then spray or dab with some water.
It will be slightly sticky....it is just the nature of honey:) I recommend this for a night time treatment and leave it on overnight and you will be baby smooth in the morning.

In a small Jar: I mixed honey and oil together....and equal parts in a small baby food jar. This is good for moisturizing larger areas of the body. Then you dip in either a wooden stick to the mixture and stir it and then lift some out of the jar. Apple as necessary and follow the water instructions above.

Why a wooden stick? You don't need one, but it just helps from continually introducing the little things you are hosting on your hands into the mix.... it isn't necessary:)

I wouldn't store the mixture for more than a week! Make sure it stays covered.

If you are really struggling with dry skin, I highly, highly recommend placing a cool mist humidifier in the room where you sleep, it is an economic purchase! (you can get a bedroom size on for about $25 at Bed Bath and Beyond...and with your 20% off coupon it is even cheaper:) ) It does wonders for your skin and dry nasal cavities this time of year! You will be amazed at how much less oil or lotion you will go through!

Also consider adding more Omega-3's (which take about 1 month to see some improvement from)from an animal source to your diet....although in this climate...we all could use a little external help right now! But Dry skin in general is indicative of some sort of a nutritional deficiency!

Remember health is from the inside out...

Hope that helps!

Ode to Honey and Joy!

As many of you know, Noah has had problems with severe facial eczema due to his food allergies that went undetected for almost a year. After removing the offending foods, he was still having problems with really raw, red, irritated and fish scale checks. We tried oil after oil on them (including almond which is recommended for eczema suffers,) while the almond oil seemed to help minimally, he still looked like he had sore checks.

After doing some research, I am amazed to report, that honey has been our solution. "Honey, you say, have you lost your mind?" No, I haven't although I must admit I was skeptical too, but it really has helped reduce his red, irritated checks, and now they are baby bottom smooth.


The catch, you must use really raw honey. And when I say really raw honey, I mean the stuff looks like a stiff block, not the nice drizzlely kind.

Method: Mix a dap of honey and a dab of oil (olive, avocado, almond) together between fingers. Aple to the affected area with a light circular motion. Spray or dab with mineral or filtered water. Leave on the skin.

I am amazed at how well it works, not only on Noah's face, but my hands too!

Brand recommends: Really Raw Honey

If you need more suggestions or are looking for scrubs, masks, etc look here.
Hope this helps!

cod liver oil update

Since December there has been so much controversy of the use of Cod Liver Oil due to a recent study published by the Vitamin D council. I wanted to post the re-buttle article written to maybe help make some sense of all of this. You can read the article here.

If you don't want to read the whole thing, I will pretty much say, that the previous post, as far I can understand is still valid, it is the ratio of Vitamin A to vitamin D that is crucial for avoiding any type of Vitamin A toxicity.

A popular brand: Nordic Naturals was used in the Vitamin D Councils study, and this oil is flushed to remove portions of the naturally occurring Vit. D.

Please refer to the previous post for brand recommends.

De-framing Framingham

The Framingham study is a study about the risk factors associated with heart disease. Their primary goal is to establish a risk score for individuals, so that the medical community can "size up" their patients against the score and give them guidelines. Most of the risk factors include blood work-ups. Cholesterol is a public enemy number one based on their findings...
There are so many reasons why the recommends in this study are counter intuitive, but I also like to find research that backs up my instincts.

The British medical journal was the first to publish the findings, but they have now been picked up by numerous medical journals. A team of scientist decided to do their own "Framingham" study in Britain...

Their study finding showed that the men in the "lowest risk" category based on the Framingham score had the highest number of Heart disease...84% higher than what was predicted. The study found that all the results and scores from the Framingham study were completely overestimated.
The British, more or less found the opposite to be true...higher cholesterol....lower the heart attack...

Cod liver Oil

So, with all the talk about vitamin D and winter months...I have been asked what brands of cod liver oil do I reccomend. Make sure any brand you buy has been screened for mercury, has been cold processed, and has not had the original vitamin component removed. Fish oils in general are in the media right now because of Omega benefits. Many manufacturers, however, are removing the naturally occuring vit A and D for concerns of toxicity, and then adding back in lower levels of said vitamins in their synthetic form.

Some brand reccomends:]

In Stores: Garden of Life, regular dose cod liver oil; Nordic Naturals Vitamin D Cod Liver Oil

Online/Mail Order:

• Dr. Ron's High Vitamin Old Fashioned Blue Ice Pure Cod Liver Oil, 1-877-472-8701, drrons.com
• Radiant Life, Premier High Vitamin Cod Liver Oil, (888) 593-8333, 4radiantlife.com
• Blue Ice, High Vitamin Cod Liver Oil, (402) 858-4818, greenpasture.org
• Wolf River Naturals, wolfrivernaturals.com

Additional label information if you are choosing a brand not on this list. Some brands of cod liver oil contain very little vitamin D compared to vitamin A. The ration of A to D in cod liver oil should be 10 to 1 or less. (In one popular brand, the ratio of A to D is almost 100 to 1.) Vitamin A and vitamin D work synergistically and without the vitamin D, the vitamin A could be toxic. (Don't buy Barleans...it has a 1000 to 1 ratio.)
Additional Information in Article Form

Flu Season

With the brink of flu season quickly approaching, the start of flu shots has begun. It seems I can't walk into a store or read a newspaper, that doesn't have some sort of promotion of this vaccine. I am not going to go into all the reasons and research that suggests that they are ineffective, if you want more about that, leave a comment and I will dedicate a post to it, but rather what you can do to prevent, shorten or lessen the symptoms of the flu naturally.

We will talk about 4 things in the post:

The new wonder vitamin. Vitamin D wins the vitamin spotlight this flu season. New research suggests that our vitamin D requirement, from the FDA, is guesstimated to be aprox. ten times lower than what our bodies really need. This new research also shows the important role that vitamin D plays in helping our immune systems fight off viruses (including the flu.)

We have known for a while now that Vitamin C is a wonderful immune booster too! The important thing to note about Vitamin C is that it is not a heat stable vitamin. By that I mean, once heated the activating power in the vitamin is killed. What does that mean for you? Put down the pasteurized OJ, and eat an organic orange straight up!

Garlic is a wonderful natural anti-fungal and bacterial agent as well. Garlic, just like vitamin C, needs to be consumed in its raw unheated state. Once it is heated, the antimicrobial agent is killed. So, hold your nose and chew some cloves. :)

Coconut oil. Natures miracle oil, Why? Coconut oil as well, has antimicrobial agents in it. Lauric acid is most commonly noted in the oil. This helps the brain and the immune system all at one time! Just think you are getting smarter and avoiding the flu all at one time! A recent study showed the patients who had pneumonia who were supplemented with Coconut oil recovered faster than those who just had antibiotic treatment.

Aluminum

Ode to Aluminum. The following is a follow up on chemicals in Vaccines. The information is taken from the Environmental Defense Fund. (they have scorecards for most chemicals)
Here is the gist of it:
Suspected - cardiovascular or blood toxicant, neurotoxicant, respiratory toxicant. Implicated as a cause of brain damage; suspected factor in Alzheimer's Disease, dementia, convulsions and comas. More hazardous than most chemicals in 2 out of 6 ranking systems. On at least 2 federal regulatory lists. (This element is not toxic when only in trace amounts, indeed at such levels is even beneficial to the body, however a trace amount is extremely minute - the level in vaccines is enormously higher, at around 0.5%)

The Curse of "Convenience"

You race in the door, your dinner is cold in the fridge, and everyone is hungry. What do we do? We take out the food, which has been stored in plastic containers, pop it in the microwave on high for several minutes and voila-la. Dinner is served. Seem a little strange? Maybe not, after all we live in a modern society and are used to such "conveniences." We seemed to have resolved ourselves to the point of convenience, and anything that falls into the convenient category must be perceived as a heaven sent gift. Why we think that way, anyone could fill in their own blank, but is that something to view as a gift or a curse?

Let us take a closer look at the little kitchen miracle the microwave. We all have one in our kitchen, we all use it, and we all wonder what on earth we would have done prior to such an amazing invention. Somewhere along the line our "sixth sense" was thrown out the window or trained to be turned off, especially when we think about the microwave. When they were first widely introduced, our grandmothers, were hesitant to use it, and just thought there was something wrong with the idea of food being placed in a magic box and coming out piping hot 30 seconds later. This magic box, can't be good for the food was the natural conclusion, and so they refrained from this "convenience" while their children and their grandchildren laughed at their "unwillingness to change." I have one question and one questions only: Now who is laughing at who?"

I will give a summary here and then let you read the full text article that was in Nexus Magazine if you want all the gooey details. All the studies in the article are referenced and you can look them up yourself, they are real...not just scare stories.

Microwaves, what do they do?
They change your food on a molecular level and cause irreversible damage to it.
Why does that matter to you?
The change in the food in many cases causes versions of natural vitamins, proteins, and amino acids to convert into unrecconizable or even carcinogenic versions of them formally natural self. These means lower nutrition and lots of harmful effects.
(For example: A study published in the November 2003 issue of The Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture found that broccoli "zapped" in the microwave with a little water lost up to 97 percent of the beneficial antioxidant chemicals it contains. By comparison, steamed broccoli lost 11 percent or fewer of its antioxidants.)
So I lose a little nutrients, I'm not doing any long term damage...
Think again here too. Individual's blood after eating microwaved food is different from those who have consumed the same food cooked the old fashion way. How did it differ? The microwave eaters had:

• Increased cholesterol levels
• More leukocytes, or white blood cells, which can suggest poisoning
• Decreased numbers of red blood cells
• Production of radiolytic compounds (compounds unknown in nature)
• Decreased hemoglobin levels, which could indicate anemic tendencies

Oh, the curse of convenience.

Let's do the math a little more carefully next time.

US health care fails it's test yet again this yeat, with the highest infant mortality rate among all civilized/developed countries, and the most likely to die from a preventable disease. Then I read the article about the new weightloss study...here , and I wonder why we have health care problems. Keep in mind that the study was done in isreal, but our US paper wrote the article. They touted that of the three weightloss options given to patients over two years they produced similar results. Similar, being the key word here. So, you can imagine that I was rather surprised to see the results were:

After two years, dieters lost an average of 7.3 pounds (3.3 kg) on the low-fat regimen, 10 pounds (4.6 kg) on the Mediterranean diet and 12 pounds (5.5 kg) on a mostly vegetarian version of the low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, Israeli researchers reported on Wednesday.

Now, I don't know who used the word similar, but those numbers aren't similar in my mind. The Mediterranean group lost aprox. 40% more weight than the "low fat" group. I wouldn't consider that similar. If you were dieting for two years and lost 40% more weight would you consider that similar?

Juice: Not a health food!

As I was reading the health section of Rueters today, I found myself thinking, "no duh?" This is in reference to a new study that they just concluded on type 2 diabetes. They have concluded that the consumption of juice is linked to an increase in type 2 diabetes, while the consumption of whole fruit was linked to a decrease. This news, of course, came as a surprise to the nurse's group that was performing the study. The conclusion: since the juice is liquid, it is absorbed quicker into the blood stream that the actual fruit. Wow, what a statement.
I'm not trying to bash the individuals who performed the study. I think it is great that they found a correlation to juice and diabetes, simply for the reason that maybe, just maybe, they might be willing to consider that juice is not a substitute for fruit.
Now I know some of you might be thinking, "but what about 100% fruit juice?" Well, the sad truth, in many ways, it is no better for you than pop or soda or whatever else you want to call it. I'll pause and let this information settle in. How did I come to this conclusion.
Click play for a video, or read on.


I used to be a juice-a-holic, true confession. I drank countless glasses a day. I encountered some health problems and had to go off all sugar, including fruit sugar just for a short while, and then the truth search began. When you eat a piece of fruit, there is fiber, vitamins and minerals in the skin and flesh. If you were to squeeze the fruit to make juice, it wouldn't be clear, it would be, chuddy, but it would still have all of it's fiber, vitamins, and minerals intact. When you buy juice at the store, it is clear, pasturized, and then bottled. Why does this matter?
Clear=strained and clarified=no fiber. No fiber=quick absorption of sugar uptake=insulin overload.
Pasturized=heating to a min of 180 degrees at least once and usually four times. Why? this kills any and everything in it, and I mean everything. Many vitamins and minerals are heat sensitive. Once they are heated they are killed, like vitamin "C."
The end product: Sugar water with the essence of the fruit devoid of nutritional value.
Then why does the label say "100% vitamin C in every serving?" That is a wonderful question, and I will get to it in another post:)