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Confused about essential fatty acids (EFA’s)? It’s pretty hard not to be because much of the information out there is inaccurate, incomplete or wrapped around an advertisement for a particular product. Here are the basics together with answers to some of the more common questions we’ve been asked.

Why do we need essential fatty acids? (more…)

When people come into the store and ask, “What’s good for energy?” 101 possibilities come to mind.  There are so many herbs and superfoods, high-potency vitamins and state-of-the-art supplements to choose from.  Well, I love all that stuff, I really do.  But before you move on to the ginsengs and Coenzyme Q10s of the world, take care of the basics.  And nothing is more basic than protein. (more…)

In the early 1930’s a dentist named Weston Price traveled to Switzerland to disprove a theory. At the time, most people believed that tooth decay and other dental problems had nothing to do with diet, but rather, with “race mixing.” The theory was, if your mom was Spanish and your dad was Irish, you’re teeth would come out funny. Price, on the other hand, believed it had everything to do with nutrition. (more…)

Food packaging these days can look like a sky full of stars, each star an insignia, each insignia displaying an attribute that’s (ostensibly) important to us.  But what do they all mean?

Organic:

Most of us have a rough idea what organic means: grown without synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers, on land that has been clean for at least three years. No sewage sludge as fertilizer, no genetically modified organisms (GMOs: see below). Food must not be irradiated. For animal products, no anti-biotics or synthetic hormones, and the animals must be fed organic feed containing no animal by-products. (A recent amendment to national organic standards allows animals to be fed non-organic feed if it costs less than half of organic feed). (more…)

For bumps, bruises, burns, bites, sprains, broken bones, and getting trampled by an elephant.

Heat or Ice?

At least once a summer I jam a finger playing basketball. Within minutes, the finger turns a sickly purple-red and swells up to twice its normal size, and then I can’t move it for a week.

Or at least that’s what used to happen before I took icing so seriously. Now I rush for ice the instant I get hurt, and it makes all the difference in the world. Within a day or two, I get my full range of motion back. It doesn’t swell up nearly as much, and it heals a lot faster. (more…)

Treatment Target #5: Oxidation:

Chemotherapy and radiation kill cancer cells; the problem is, they also kill the healthy cells of the body. Antioxidants protect the healthy cells of the body from chemo and radiation; the problem is, they may also protect the cancer cells… As you can imagine, then, using antioxidants alongside conventional therapies is controversial. (more…)

Cancer is the taboo topic in health food stores. Sure, we’re always eager to talk about prevention, but when it comes to treatment, we shy away from concrete statements. We do this because, while many of us have considerable knowledge about the herbs and vitamins in question, we rarely have an in-depth understanding of the 101 different kinds of cancer, or the finer points of chemotherapy drugs. We’re reluctant to share what we know because we are all too aware of the limitations of that knowledge, and of what is ultimately at stake. (more…)

Ever since we hosted Mary Bove’s talk about the thyroid in January, people have been coming in saying how sorry they were to have missed it — and do we have something like lecture notes from the talk?  Unfortunately, we don’t.

Although I can’t cram into two pages what Mary Bove covered in an hour-and-a-half, this should be a start. If you want to learn more, check out the chapter on “Hypothyroidism” in The Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine, by Murray and Pizzorno; and Ryan Drum’s extraordinary article on the internet at http://www.partnereartheducationcenter.com/thyroid1.html. We’ll have a couple of paper copies of this at the store as well. (more…)