by Valerie Brooks
One of the latest trends to hit health conscious foodies is designer nutrition bars and cereals. Although supermarkets have a plethora of sports bars on the shelves, there are companies that will allow you to custom order specific ingredients designed for your particular taste, diet, and lifestyle. You basically “design” your own foods and have them shipped to you. The idea of customizing foods, called nutrigenomics, is gaining a lot of press, and it can get highly scientific when it boils down to determining which foods are best for your particular DNA. But on a simpler scale, the following companies are offering products with common ingredients to choose from, but specific enough to suit individual needs.
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by Valerie Brooks
One of the most beneficial technological advances for healthy diet seekers is the availability of online support groups. If going to live meetings doesn’t fit your lifestyle, you can have a virtual meeting online. You can also find a wealth of support systems for a host of unhealthy habits. Here are some good choices:

Wellsphere

This comprehensive wellness site offers online support groups for nearly every condition or lifestyle imaginable. Whether veganism is your thing, or you have fibromyalgia, diabetes, weight loss struggles, or just want to live a greener existence, Wellsphere has a spot for you. You can lurk through any of the “community” pages and read postings from health experts on a bevy of topics, or look through the “WellPages,” which will connect you to a variety of resources, such as blogs, discussions, news pieces, videos, and other notable and respected health sites. See wellsphere.com.
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by Valerie Brooks

What’s New in Diet Supplements

A number of natural (and not so natural) supplements are gaining press in the new technology arena for weight loss. Most diet supplements fall into one or more of these categories: appetite suppressants, metabolism enhancers, fat burners, colon/liver cleansers, diuretics (water weight loss) and kidney cleansers. And remember, if a diet product is considered a “supplement,” then it’s designed to add to, enhance, or otherwise facilitate a primary diet and exercise program…in other words, to supplement it. Supplements are not meant to be the only component of your weight loss program, but additions to it.

Here is a listing of the more popular weight loss supplements to take note of:
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by Valerie Brooks
Today’s mom-to-be has some very cool health options. Some of the trendiest include prenatal yoga, water aerobics for an easier delivery, going green for a healthier mom and baby, saving baby’s cord blood for possible life-saving use, and indulging in prenatal massages.

Prenatal Yoga

Less than ten years ago, it was a rarity to find a studio that offered prenatal yoga. Now, it’s hard to find one that doesn’t. In many ways, yoga is the perfect workout for prospective moms, and its popularity is growing. One of the reasons is the concentration of breath during yoga, which ensures a healthy dose of oxygen for mom and baby, while training mom to control her breath, which will be a godsend during labor. The meditative and relaxing aspects of yoga are obviously healthful benefits as well. The asanas chosen specifically for pregnancy concentrate on easing body aches associated with pregnancy, and stretching the muscles that will be most beneficial to the birthing process. Prenatal yoga classes will also show students which poses to avoid during pregnancy.
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by Valerie Brooks
A holistic trend is permeating the diet world, and this is a good thing. Rather than focusing on fad diets that may work temporarily, or narrowing in on one specific method, such as low-carb or low-fat, diet trendsetters are taking a broader approach. They’re taking the whole person into consideration and offering a wider array of healthy choices, lifestyle options, and support communities to help people educate would-be dieters, and assist them in making permanent changes that lead to healthy weight loss. As technology expands and perfected products hit the shelves, waist bands shrink.

Most diet programs are trying to get you to eat well, eat less, and incorporate a sensible exercise routine into your lifestyle. The exact recipe for these things is what makes each diet program unique. But overall, the trend is to include all of these components in an effort to treat the “whole” person.

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by Valerie Brooks
Green tea is no longer confined to the beverage arena. Its myriad medicinal and curative effects include acting as an immunity booster, offering anti-cancer properties, improving insulin sensitivity, assisting with balancing cholesterol levels, and slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. To reap the most benefit from this wonder leaf, a host of products now contain green tea. While its ingestible form is usually seen in powder (great for mixing into beverages) or extract, which may come in liquid or pill form, now you can wear it, eat it, or even brush your teeth with it.
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by Valerie Brooks
The role of sugar in the American diet is a timeless topic, and we’ve come a long way from the days where pure white cane sugar was the staple sweetener. Today’s options are broader and include a wider variety of healthy sweetening alternatives. A trend that continues to maintain its popularity is one where consumers are noticing a particular product’s glycemic index. Another is to purchase foods that use a natural and more healthful sweetener. And yet another is to choose those same sweeteners for home cooking.
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Recently, chocolate has been getting a lot of attention not only as a yummy snack food, but also for its benefits to our mental and physical (not to mention sexual) well being. It seems that the special bean the god Quetzalcoatl gave to the Aztecs more than 800 years ago is rather magical indeed.

Chocolate, or more specifically the Cacao fruit, first appears in historical records in Egypt in the 16th century BC. Little is know of its use in Egyptian culture, but we know that the Mayan culture used it and called it xocoatl, from which we get its current name. The Aztecs and Mayans believed that their ancestors brought the Cacao seeds from paradise. This fruit bestowed wisdom and power upon all who ate it or, in most cases…drank it. It’s suspected that the Cacao tree originated in the Amazon region.

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by Valerie Brooks
Bacteria received a really bad rap until probiotics became all the rage. Now we know that there are good bacteria and bad. Probiotics, of course, are the good guys—those live microorganisms that live in the gut and balance the flora, which, health professionals are now learning, may be doing a world of good for us. So much so that nowadays, there are probiotic supplements galore. There’s also a great deal of emphasis on pro-probiotic foods. Some health professionals believe that many diseases begin with a reaction to what’s going on in the gut, so the popularity of probiotic continues to expand daily, gaining the interest of those with serious illnesses and those looking to ward them off.
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The Story on Gluten

Remember when it was all the craze to eliminate wheat from your diet because of a known wheat allergy? Well, now you’ll notice that it’s since been narrowed down to gluten, an ingredient found in wheat. Now that we know that gluten is really the culprit, it is no longer just wheat that must be avoided for those with an intolerance, but all food products that contain gluten.

So, what’s the problem with this plant protein called gluten? For some people, there’s no problem at all. For others, it can wreak havoc on the body if the immune system recognizes it as a harmful substance. If it does, the small intestine will react negatively, causing inflammation, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. This condition is called celiac disease and is actually considered an autoimmune disorder because the body sees it as an enemy of the digestive track and therefore, rejects it.
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by Valerie Brooks

Appetite Suppressants

Suppressing the appetite has seem to become an American obsession. Just consider how many ads a day you see for something that promises to help you lose weight by kicking your hunger. The natural health community is an equal participant but offering healthier choices than the traditional synthetically made pill. Here’s the latest buzz on how to keep your weight in check through foods, herbs, and lifestyle choices.
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by Valerie Brooks
America’s favorite vitamin just can’t seem to stay out of the limelight. The medical community and health experts just keep on boasting of its benefits. Most people’s first reaction to Vitamin C is that it’s a supplement to be taken to prevent or treat a cold. But its history actually has its roots in the treatment of scurvy, a serious disease that plagued sailors in the 1590s who didn’t have access to fruits and vegetables at sea because they were perishable. They started to notice that when they ate citrus fruits, their condition improved. It was then discovered that ascorbic acid (literally meaning “no scurvy”) was the specific nutrient that turned the disease around. That’s when its healing properties were first noticed. Since then, it has been in Linus Pauling’s microscopes as a possible cure for cancer and many other things. We may still only be scratching the surface of this vitamin’s true potential.
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The World’s Oldest Fruit

Considered the world’s oldest fruit, the pomegranate is a long way from extinction. In fact, it’s making a major comeback as one of our healthiest and most versatile foods…and considered by many to be one of the Earth’s healthiest things. First, the delightful red juice of this timeless fruit is one of our best sources of antioxidants and many of the new anti-oxidant “red drinks” coming onto the market include pomegranate in their formulations. You can also find pomegranate juice with nothing but…pomegranate juice in it. One great source is POM juice.
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The idea of cleansing and detoxifying the body has been around for thousands of years. References to colon cleanses appear in the Old Testament, the Vedas, and other spiritual texts and are part of just about every culture on the planet. Given that the digestive system and colon are two of the main entry and exit routes of the body — most cleansing systems focus on these areas. Plus, it’s now well known that years of poor eating habits can cause toxins and other matter to build up in the colon and intestines. So that’s where detox is primarily focused.

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The Return of Hemp

If you think that hemp plantations are just making excuses for growing marijuana, you couldn’t be farther from the truth. Although a relative of the marijuana plant, the hemp plant that used for nutritional products, paper and cloth fiber has almost no THC, the compound that makes the other plant a favorite smoke-able pastime for many. No, the hemp plant is poorly understood and vastly under-utilized, given its amazing qualities. It suffered from a negative PR campaign back in the days of George Washington, who was, in fact, a hemp farmer. According to history, the cotton growers ran the hemp farmers into the ground to put cotton on the top of the heap, as it were. As a result, our founding father died poor and the world suffered the loss of the hemp industry. But natural health and green living enthusiasts have gotten behind some of the more exciting products that come from hemp. And with more and more companies jumping on the trend…we’re benefiting from lower prices and more variety in the products available to us.

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The coffee business is just too lucrative to let a thing like “increased awareness on health” take a bite out of it. So coffee makers have turned their resources to making healthier beans and enriching the coffee experience at the same time. The trend toward health-enhancing coffees is on the rise. Here are some of the early entries…
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