The Natural Science of Health
If you or someone you know suffers from an inflammatory condition (such as arthritis), you will no doubt be aware of the frustration that comes from persistent symptoms, despite your efforts to find a solution.
NEW research in the field of inflammation resolution is revealing a unique group of compounds called specialised pro-resolving mediators (SPMs) creating a paradigm shift in the way inflammation is treated!
https://blog.metagenics.com.au/the-latest-game-changer-in-inflammation/
Nutrition helps to prevent fewer sick days due to diet-related diseases or deficiency symptoms.😇
Hippocrates knew: let food be thy medicine!🍎Eating a nutritious diet can help to keep us healthy and can resolve disease.
We also all know how important it is to not miss work or school and call in sick. As long periods of absence due to diet-related illnesses followed by rehabilitation can have a big impact on our working life and often become an unwelcome financial burden.💲
Being well starts with eating well.😛 Personalised nutrition is the key to our health and resilience.🤸♀️
Anyone who’s suffered from a nail fungus infection knows that antifungal treatments simply don’t work. Now there’s a new study that shows what many in the integrative medicine community have known for years – essential oils can stop nail fungus in its tracks, and for the long term.
The study, conducted by scientists from University of the Witwatersrand and Tshwane University of Technology in South Africa, was conducted to address a gap in formal clinical research into the use of essential oils in the treatment of fungal infections.
The study looked specifically at two kinds of parasitic fungi and how they reacted to different combinations of essential oils:
Sandalwood, in combination with a range of other essential oils clearly emerged as the oil most effective at inhibiting trichophyton mentagrophyte. Rose geranium and German chamomile also received honourable mentions.
Following are the essential oil combinations that produced the most significant results in the trichophyton mentagrophyte study :
The researchers were clearly impressed with the effectiveness of Sandalwood, saying,
“This highlights the Santalum (sandalwood) essential oils as a commendable option to use against the dermatophyte (pathogenic fungus) and further studies are recommended as this is a species that clearly demonstrates potential for further development into antifungal preparations.”
The study also found that, unlike many common antifungal treatments, some essential oils were able to permeate into the lower levels of the skin and thereby attack the fungal infection at its base. This ability to act far below the surface where the infections is most concentrated is vital to treating a fungal infection and ensuring it doesn’t return. The authors made special mention of the high permeation of tea tree essential oil in this regard.
The antibacterial action of essential oils were also mentioned by the authors as being an additional benefit to this kind of potential therapy: “…they are also able to inhibit bacterial pathogens, thereby potentially preventing secondary bacterial infections,” the authors said.
For those interested, the essential oil combinations that proved most effective in combating candida albicans were:
Detoxification is a natural metabolic process whereby the environmental and dietary toxins we are exposed to are changed into less harmful substances and subsequently excreted from the body. The Metagenics Clinical Detoxification Programs aim to address dietary and lifestyle factors to reduce the burden placed on your detoxification system, while simultaneously supporting the capacity of your key detox organs. The ultimate goal of a professional detoxification program is to provide you with a personalised protocol that is safe and effective and enables you to achieve the best possible health.
If YOU are looking for some great DETOX recipes to help you keep on track with your new Program THEN CHECK OUT LINK BELOW.
If you’re a typical Westerner in the 21st century, you probably feel lonely — occasionally, often or even most of the time. But, unlike with other afflictions, we’re not likely to confess our loneliness to others. However, loneliness hurts. Terribly. In the bestselling book, Lost Connections, hailed as a seminal book for our times, Johann Hari explains that acute loneliness makes your cortisol levels soar and cause as much stress as a punch from a stranger.
What is loneliness?
As well as painful, loneliness can be confusing, striking at unlikely times — such as when you’re around friends or family. That’s because feeling lonely and actual social isolation aren’t the same thing, explains Michelle Lim, a clinical psychologist of Swinburne University of Technology and scientific chair of the Australian Coalition to End Loneliness.
“We need to spend more time with each other, especially in the local neighbourhood. It’s about people running into each other. But, then, also we need to join more — book clubs, current affairs discussion groups, a community garden, choir, the local library.”
“With loneliness you feel subjectively alone and disconnected from others. You might be also embedded in strong social structures like school and work and family but you still feel lonely because you can’t get that connection. Even if you do have friends, it doesn’t mean they also cater to your social needs.”
Social isolation, on the other hand, is the experience of having little contact with others. While some may thrive on it, she says too much social isolation is linked to a greater risk of subjective loneliness.
Feeling lonely is a normal thing, Lim says. “It’s a signal for us to do something. What’s not normal is when it persists and becomes distressing to the person, and they do nothing about it.”
In Lost Connections, Hari explains that the unease, anxiety and alertness we feel when we’re alone too long is an evolutionary mechanism to push us back into the group. “If you became separated from the group for a protracted time, it meant you were in terrible danger. You were vulnerable to predators; if you got sick nobody would be there to nurse you, and the rest of the tribe was more vulnerable without you, too. You would be right to feel terrible. It was an urgent signal from your body and brain to get back to the group any damn way you could.”
Who is lonely?
Certain situations make us more vulnerable to loneliness, such as being a single or new parent, migrant, jobless, widowed, separated, disabled or living alone). However, it’s pervasive among all demographics and generations. In a 2018 study by Lim for the Australian Psychological Society, one in four Australian adults were impacted by significant loneliness and one in five lacked a confidant. Almost 30 per cent felt they didn’t belong to a group of friends. Challenging the stereotypes, more young adults (62 per cent) sometimes lacked companionship.
Far from an individual flaw, loneliness is endemic in Western culture. It pervades our domestic lives, education systems and workplaces. Studiosity’s 2018 National Student Survey of 1000 Australian university students found that 51 per cent had considered quitting their degree due to the struggles of studying alone.
Professional and social isolation was also named the biggest negative by those working from home (in research by demographer Mark McCrindle) and was described as a key factor in burnout for those running small to medium-sized enterprises (in a 2016 article in the journal, Burnout Research).
How loneliness affects your health
Prolonged loneliness can literally kill you. When US researchers from Brigham Young University followed up more than 3 million study participants over seven years, they found those who’d reported subjective feelings of loneliness were 26 per cent more likely to be deceased than population samples of similar age, socioeconomic status and health.
While it’s popularly believed that social isolation is OK if you enjoy it, that’s not what the researchers found. Those who lived alone (but didn’t feel lonely) had a 32 per cent increased likelihood of death. Both subjective loneliness and social isolation were found to be as bad for your health as some of the strongest determinants of higher mortality, including obesity, smoking, sedentary lifestyles and drug abuse.
When you’re lonely your whole body is impacted, right down to the cellular level. Research links social disconnection to reduced immunity, slower healing, inflammation, elevated blood pressure, a greater risk of dementia and cognitive decline, insomnia, anxiety, depression, suicide and other health issues. Loneliness is even bad for the economy, with research suggesting it negatively affects individual productivity.
Why are we so disconnected?
Solving our loneliness problem requires understanding the huge societal forces pushing us apart.
Prominent Australian social researcher and author Hugh Mackay says Australia’s growing social fragmentation is the bitter trade-off in our freer, modern lifestyles and social, cultural, economic and technological changes. Key factors include the IT revolution, shrinking household sizes, relationship breakdown, falling birth rates, smaller family sizes, dual-income households and our increased mobility and busyness.
On average, we disrupt our connections every six years by moving house, Mackay says. Many of us no longer live near family members. Almost universal car ownership means declining footpath traffic in the neighbourhood. “We’re not having the same incidental encounters that traditionally have been a great source of assurance that this is where we’re recognised and belong,” he says. “The car is itself an isolating capsule.” And while we’ve become better global citizens and travellers, Mackay says this comes at the expense of our own local neighbourhoods.
Lim says a decrease in services for common places for people to interact, and longer travelling times to work, contribute to the issue. “We’re not working within our communities any more,” she says. And the time spent travelling to work means we’re less able to engage with our communities.
Genuine connection involves mutual, two-sided sharing and listening of what matters to each person. “It’s the feeling that we are being acknowledged, recognised, appreciated, taken seriously. Listening is the ultimate sign that we are taking another person seriously.”
One of our biggest barriers to social connection is our busyness, Mackay says. “We have less time and less energy for just hanging out with each other. Trying to get a group of people to meet is now a major challenge. People in full-time work are working longer hours. That’s often connected to the use of information technology. Many people who are underemployed have a jigsaw life of trying to put together a series of part-time jobs to try and generate a sufficient income. That can mean people are busier, because they’re patching together.”
When McCrindle surveyed Australians in 2016 for their preferred night to stay in, he discovered a whopping 45 per cent preferred to spend every night of the week at home. Forty-two per cent who cancelled on a social invite did so to relax and recharge, TV-watching being the most common activity.
Social media has also redefined friendship, Mackay says. “Friendship as we traditionally understood it, with some actual intimacy, a lot of time spent together and a lot of empathy, is put at risk the more we substitute face-to-face time with screen time.” Hari views our obsession with social media as a symptom, not a cause, of our lost connections: “The web arrived offering them a kind of parody of what they were losing — Facebook friends in place of neighbours, video games in place of meaningful work, status updates in place of status in the world.”
Also forcing us apart is our growing individualism, competition and materialism. We’re encouraged to be independent and successful rather than interdependent and communal. Only you can help yourself is the mantra. “These ideas now run so deep in our culture that we even offer them as feel-good bromides to people who feel down — as if it will lift them up,” Hari writes in Lost Connections.
“We — without ever quite intending to — have become the first humans to ever dismantle our tribes. As a result, we have been left alone on a savanna we do not understand, puzzled by our own sadness.”
Building community
Fortunately, loneliness is gaining recognition as a significant public health issue by governments and community groups around the world. In early 2018, the world’s first Minister for Loneliness, Tracey Crouch, was appointed in the UK. Closer to home, in December 2018, Australia’s Andrew Giles, Labor Shadow Minister for Schools, co-sponsored a motion for a national policy response to the loneliness “crisis”. Addressing loneliness is now part of Labor’s platform, he says.
Mackay’s latest book, Australia Reimagined: Towards a More Compassionate, Less Anxious Society (Pan MacMillan, 2018), suggests the answer to rebuilding community lies in our very own neighbourhood. “The absolutely critical step is that we must decide that we need to spend more time with each other, especially in the local neighbourhood. It’s about people running into each other. But, then, also we need to join more – book clubs, current affairs discussion groups, a community garden, choir, the local library.”
It’s also vital to have a realistic understanding of community. In all true communities, including extended families, there are those we have less in common with or like less, Mackay says. “We’ve all got to, not just tolerate each other, but accept and respect each other’s right to be in this community. And our health, especially our mental health, will benefit if we generate something that works like a true community. That sort of diversity and learning to live with difference is an essential part of a healthy, rich community.”
Cultivating true connection
Merely being around people isn’t enough to cure loneliness. Genuine connection involves mutual, two-sided sharing and listening of what matters to each person. Mackay says, “It’s the feeling that we are being acknowledged, recognised, appreciated, taken seriously. Listening is the ultimate sign that we are taking another person seriously.”
Lim says there’s no “one size fits all” prescription for loneliness. “Consider, what works for you? Is it joining a group? Is it one-on-one? Is it doing a meaningful activity or volunteering?” Our social needs differ from person to person. For some, duration is important, for others quality or some other variable, she says.
While most of us yearn for and value close friendship, it requires time, energy and patience. You can make a friend on Facebook in one click, but in real life it takes 200 hours of time together to make a close friend, according to a 2018 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
Advice on friendship-making often focuses on cultivating better social skills. Though such suggestions seem logical, there’s no evidence-based relationship between specific social skills and loneliness, Lim says. While social skills can’t hurt, she says research suggests social confidence is more linked to social connectivity.
Loneliness may arise out of bigger systemic social shifts, but we can still drive change. “Many individuals make a group, they make a social structure, they make a community,” Lim says. “If people are changing their behaviours, then the community changes as well.”
Those of us with busy lives may need to prioritise social connection. This requires re-evaluating our lives and changing our behaviours. Here, meditation can help us live mindfully so we’re less likely to fall victim to the pressure and propaganda that drive us apart. With social interaction being natural and important to most humans, by watering the seeds of our communities we can grow the gardens of our lost tribes and find our way home to the hearth of togetherness.
Where to connect
Written by Linda Moon ,June 5, 2019
Imagine for a moment you need an important item delivered. Would you:
You’d choose the reliable option, right?
When it comes to supplements, minerals also come with their own delivery driver, which is the compound, or carrier, they’re bound to. Together, the mineral and its courier are referred to as the chemical form of the mineral supplement. Like the courier above, depending on what form you chose, this will influence how well these minerals are delivered to your cells.
There are two main groups of ‘couriers’ minerals can be bound to:
When clearly labelled, a supplement formula will tell you which ‘courier’ a mineral is bound to. There are three minerals in the image above we can use as examples:
When clearly labelled, a supplement formula will tell you which ‘courier’ a mineral is bound to.
Regardless of what form your mineral supplement takes, once you ingest it, its next step is to be absorbed through the wall of your digestive tract. In order to do this, the mineral first has to break away from the carrier it is bound to. Using our delivery analogy, this is equivalent to a courier dropping a package off at your front door, ready for you to collect and bring inside.
It is here the different quality of minerals carriers can start to become an issue, as they aren’t all efficient or reliable at this task. For instance, the salt forms of carriers are more likely to drop off or deliver, their mineral before they reach the proper destination. This leads to unbound minerals present with your digestive tract, which can go on to cause undesirable side effects such as nausea or diarrhoea.
This is where glycine bound minerals, known as bisglycinate forms, go above and beyond, as glycine is one of the most useful, reliable and beneficial forms of minerals couriers on the market.
As mentioned above, bisglycinate refers to a carrier made up of two small glycine amino acids. As the body is designed to efficiently absorb protein, minerals bound to bisglycinate are absorbed fully intact through protein channels within the gut; offering a direct delivery service. Conversely, free minerals pass through mineral channels, often having to compete with each other to be absorbed. Therefore, being attached to these two glycine’s means a minerals absorption is not impacted by other minerals, ensuring that the dose you take will be delivered for use by your body. Being couriered by these glycine amino acids also protects minerals from compounds in foods that can bind to and affect their absorption, such as fiber.[1]
But wait, there’s more! Beyond enhanced mineral absorption, glycine also holds potent medicinal properties – its very own version of service with a smile. Research tells us that glycine helps to relax tight muscles, calm the activity of your brain and nervous system, and lower your core body temperature to assist with sleep onset. At a dose of 3 grams/d, glycine is able to:
All in all, glycine is a highly reliable courier but delivers on more than just minerals. As an added bonus, its therapeutic effects are further maximised when combined with minerals that also support muscle relaxation and sleep, such as magnesium.
its therapeutic effects are further maximised when combined with minerals that also support muscle relaxation and sleep, such as magnesium.
So if you’re searching for a magnesium supplement to support you with sleep, stress and energy, look for one that contains magnesium bisglycinate, and you’ll be sourcing the supplements that’ll deliver!
https://blog.metagenics.com.au/glycine-signs-seals-and-delivers/
Spotted in Silicon Valley last week at the 21st Annual Top 10 Tech Trends debate—an event facilitated by Forbes magazine and attended by some of the brightest minds and innovators. FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE = TREND #1. Agree, agree, agree! It’s a tremendous pleasure to see your life’s work take center stage at a prestigious gathering. Many thanks to the attendee who snapped and shared the photo.
#functionalmedicine #fxmed #personalizedlifestylemedicine #healthcaretransformation #bigboldhealth #forbes #techtrends
Low energy, tiredness, constipation, weight gain and fatigue can affect all aspects of life and are also symptoms associated with a thyroid issues.😞😖
A Natural Healthcare Practitioner is best placed to determine the underlying factors that are interfering with your thyroid function and recommend a tailored treatment plan so that you can regain your zest for life!
Speak with me today to help you improve your thyroid function and achieve long term wellness.🍃😇🍃
A Monash University sleep study is looking for first-time mums with bubs aged 4-12 months to help try and improve THEIR OWN sleep and wellbeing. The study uses evidence-based, non-pharmaceutical treatments over a 10-week period. Mums can do the study from anywhere in Australia, from the comfort of their own home, and will receive a $50 voucher to say thanks at the end. If you think you might be interested in participating or know someone who might be interested, please get them to access this link for more information!
http://tinyurl.com/thepossumproject