You’ve heard that the best defense is a good offense. This is especially true when it comes to your immune system. By practicing healthy lifestyle habits and reducing our exposure to infection (offense), we can better help protect against illness (defense) and that’s one way of looking at it when considering how to boost your immune system.

What determines if you get sick or not?
Louis Pasteur and Antoine Bechamp – physicians 150 years ago – were keenly aware of the same things you and I experience every year: during the cold and flu season, some people get sick and some people don’t. Pasteur spent his life looking for what makes sick people sick. Bechamp spent his career looking for what keeps healthy people healthy – and how we can be like them! They settled their argument with the discovery that illness visits people with poor habits much more frequently than those who care for their health.

It turns out that microbes prefer to wreak their havoc on people with compromised immune systems. Simple things can compromise our immune system, including:

* An imbalanced diet
* Alcohol and caffeine consumption
* An argument with someone you love

Just as Pasteur and Bechamp discovered more than a century ago, our health revolves around a healthy lifestyle more than the virulence of a microbe and that’s important to keep in mind when considering how to boost your immune system.

Help protect against illness
The phrase that describes our vulnerability or resistance to disease is “biological terrain.” The terrain or landscape of our health is made up of our genetics, our environment and, most importantly, our lifestyle. Vigorous application of the 10 Essentials yields the healthiest, most disease-resistant terrain. Skipping even one of these principles will change your terrain and leave you vulnerable to infection.

* A base of healthy nutrients
Establishing a base of healthy nutrients can provide us with a very resilient terrain. The more dense the base is, the more disease-resistant our terrain will be and that is just 1 way of how to boost your immune system. Taking a multiple vitamin and mineral supplement every day is an excellent start. Almost all physicians recommend an Omega-3 supplement as well. If your terrain is being remodeled by stress, you may need adaptogens to help you cope while remaining disease-resistant. Indeed, the long-term studies of adaptogens in Russia clearly demonstrated that these plants help you resist infections and speed healing.

* Vitamin C
Vitamin C is a favorite for protecting against and even treating virus infections and another consideration on how to boost your immune system. Russell Jaffe, MD, former director of the National Institutes of Health, recommends a loading dose of Vitamin C: one teaspoon of Vitamin C crystals every 15 minutes until you “flush.” By this, he means a complete bowel evacuation. After the flush, he recommends a daily serving of Vitamin C (for one month) that is equivalent to 75% of the amount it took you to flush. This should really improve your terrain!

* Echinacea
Echinacea is used in a similar way. Significant medical research from Germany suggests that an hourly dose of Echinacea will help reduce symptoms and may help shorten the duration of a virus infection. Taking a gram of Echinacea every hour for three days may even “abort” an infection that has already begun. Continue taking Echinacea three times daily for up to two weeks afterward to protect against a relapse.

Reduce your exposure
Here are some great recommendations for reducing your exposure to infection:

* Wash your hands
First, the largest contributor to infection is unwashed hands. Washing your hands with soap every few hours will reduce the chance for pathogens to gain access to your system. You should also make sure they are completely dry. Then, use the disposable towel to open the door out of the washroom. Many ugly microbes lurk on door handles – usually from people who have not properly washed and dried their hands.

* Clean surfaces
Next, disinfect surfaces that are shared by many people. For instance, public telephones bring you within kissing distance of hundreds or even thousands of people. Who knows what their hygiene habits were? In a typical day we may be exposed to germs from as many as 150 countries or more!

* Reduce stress
Reduce stress. Stress decreases the effectiveness of your immune system. Your immune system may begin to overreact or not react in time to stop an infection when you are under stress. The source of the stress really does not matter. For instance, job stress and an injury may seem like entirely different stresses to your mind but they are treated exactly the same way by your body.

Remember, building up your terrain and reducing your exposure are keys to a great offense… which will help improve your defense!

Take Control of Your Health

* Aggressively apply the 10 Essentials

* Take a “base” of nutrients:

o A multiple vitamin and mineral supplement
o An Omega-3 fatty acid supplement
o A stress-specific antioxidant supplement
o Vitamin C

* Reduce your exposure

o Wash your hands every few hours and dry thoroughly
o Disinfect common area surfaces

To find out more about TriVita’s products, go here or if you’d like to find out how you can earn an additional stream of income, call me on 856-264-7802.

Es Riggins
Independent TriVita Affiliate Member #13160615

Technorati Tags: echinacea, health, healthy nutrients, immune system, vitamin c

A professor of mine once told me that newly graduated doctors have 100 cures for every disease. Experienced doctors often use one remedy for 100 diseases. It seems that this is proving to be quite true with our old friend, Vitamin C.

The best Vitamin C
There are many types of Vitamin C. Some supplements contain diverse minerals while others contain related ingredients like bioflavonoids. There are good reasons for each of these additions. Yet, time has not proven the fancier forms to be superior to the natural, non-acidic form of Vitamin C (sodium-L-ascorbate).

The primary pathway for Vitamin C transport into the bloodstream is through the sodium transport channel. Now, sodium has a really bad reputation because many of us put too much salt (sodium chloride) on our food. But, the fruits and vegetables we eat are naturally very high in sodium. Our blood is naturally high in sodium. In fact, the sodium content of our blood is about 32 times greater than the potassium level in our blood. It is comparable to the sodium content in sea water.

Dr. Libby’s Vital C has the best profile for absorption of this important nutrient.

New uses for an old remedy
Three articles in medical literature recently caught my attention.

• Toxins
  The first one was a two-year-long discussion about the protective effects of Vitamin C against pesticides and other environmental toxins. This is important because we dump 2.5 million tons of pesticides into our biosphere every year (Environmental Medicine part 4, Dr. Walter Crinnon).

  The discussion of Vitamin C and pesticides was published in 2007 and 2008 in the journal Toxicology and Industrial Health. It clearly shows the protective effect of large amounts of Vitamin C against common environmental toxins.

• Cholesterol
  The second article appeared in the February 2008 edition of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry. It demonstrated another benefit of Vitamin C in people with elevated cholesterol. You see, Vitamin C in the liver binds excess cholesterol and drains it through the bile ducts into the intestines. Fiber in the intestines soaks up the cholesterol and carries it out of the body. If our diet does not have enough fiber to eliminate the cholesterol we will likely reabsorb it. In fact, most of the cholesterol in our bloodstream has been excreted and reabsorbed numerous times.

  Vitamin C binds cholesterol and takes it out of the liver. Vitamin C also helps protect the lining of blood vessels – making them like Teflon to sticky LDL cholesterol. Instead of damaging the blood vessels, oxidized LDL slides off the walls of your arteries and is carried back to the liver by HDL cholesterol.

• Blood pressure
  The third article came from the October 2008 Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypertension. It clearly showed how large reservoirs of Vitamin C can help reduce high blood pressure. Antioxidants (especially Vitamin C) may reduce poisons in the tissues called aldehydes – think of the poison formaldehyde as a good example. Poisons drive up blood pressure; Vitamin C helps drive down poisons and can result in blood pressure reduction.

Conclusion
Health is built one habit at a time. The more we learn and live the 10 Essentials for Health and Wellness, the healthier we become. Essential #4 tells us to eat nutritiously – including the proper use of supplements. Science is firmly behind using nutrients and nurturing to improve the quality of our lives.

And find out about Nopalea that detoxifies your body and helps to reduce inflammation as well as many other health benefits.

Technorati Tags: Nopalea, TriVita, Vitamin and mineral supplements, vitamin c, Wellness

In March 2008, a report on CNN gave us the disturbing news that drinking water in many communities was contaminated with an array of prescription medications. This concerns us at TriVita because we recognize that drinking pure water is an Essential of health. In light of this disturbing report, how are we to protect ourselves and nurture our Wellness? Where can we find safe water?

Source of the problem
How did our water supply become contaminated? One way this can happen is by people flushing unused prescriptions down the toilet. These drugs end up in wastewater treatment plants, where they may percolate down into the water table over time. However, unused drugs are a minor source of watershed contamination. A major source of contamination comes from the medications people actually take.

Medications must be metabolized by the liver and other detoxification organs in order to be used by the patient. These drugs are then excreted through the urine. They are then available to percolate down into the water supply which may have an impact on our health. Common drugs that are detected in our water include antibiotics, birth control hormones and antidepressants.

Protecting ourselves – and getting clean water
There are many opinions about just how hazardous these drugs are to our health. Certainly, the amounts are very, very small compared to prescription strength medications. Just as certain, humans were never meant to drink drug-contaminated water. We need pure water for nutrient transport and detoxification. How we get that pure, clean water is surprisingly simple.

• Insulation
  Our digestive system is remarkably sensitive to contamination. It is a barrier that protects us from toxins when it is functioning properly. We can insulate ourselves from medications in the water supply by increasing the efficiency of our digestion. Eating foods and using supplements containing special short-chain fibers will increase the ability of our system to “barrier protect” us from water contaminants. A major problem with short-chain fiber is that it is found in foods with a bitter taste – chicory and Jerusalem artichokes are good examples. The solution to this problem is found in supplements such as Digestive Complex.Another special protective supplement is Non-Acidic Vitamin C Crystals. Even a small amount, such as a teaspoon in a quart of water, will increase protection from waterborne toxins. Other foods and supplements that reduce stress and improve digestion will also help insulate us from toxins.
• Isolation
  Isolation from drugs in the water is a bit more difficult. Tap water is a problem and bottled water is no solution (it is usually taken from municipal tap-water sources anyway). Bottled water taken from sources specified as pristine and uncontaminated are a good alternative; be wary and use common sense in selecting these products.

  One effective way of removing medications from the water is by using inexpensive carbon block or carbon granular filters. More expensive reverse osmosis and distillation units are less effective at removing drugs, though they are certainly more effective at removing other contaminants.

We need water to live, to deliver nutrients to our cells, and to detoxify our bodies. A tragedy of our times is that our water supply is contaminated with medical waste in the form of prescription drugs. Insulating ourselves with nutrients should be our primary concern. Isolating ourselves from water contamination is also very important.

With nutrients and nurturing we can often reduce the need for medications. And reducing the need for drugs in our bodies is the first step toward reducing the drugs in our water!

Take Control of Your Health

• Deep breathing may reduce the need for:
  • Anxiety medications
  • Blood pressure medications
• Peaceful sleep may reduce the need for:
  • Antibiotics
  • Antiviral medications
• Eating nutritiously may reduce the need for:
  • Lipid control medications
  • Digestion control medications
  • Many other medications
• Activity for 30 minutes daily may reduce the need for:
  • Antidepressants
  • Blood sugar control medications
  • Many other medications
• Use Digestive Complex as a source of protective fiber
• Use antioxidants, such as Adaptogen 10 Plus and NutraFruits
• Add Vitamin C Crystals to your bottled water

If you’re interested in finding more about TriVita’s products that can help you on your Wellness journey or you’d like to find out how you can earn an additional stream of income, call me on 856-264-7802. And ask me about our new product, Nopalea, that is proven to reduce inflammation.

Es Riggins
Independent TriVita Affiliate Member #13160615

Technorati Tags: nutrafruits, toxins, TriVita, vitamin c, water