Many people incorrectly assume they get adequate nutrients from the food they eat. Unfortunately, in todays world it is virtually impossible to get the necessary nutrients to sustain a healthy body and mind by just eating modern foods and drinking liquids.
This means that everyone must look at choosing the right food they eat, organic if possible, and supplementing their diets with multivitamins and minerals to assist in the journey to optimum nutrition.

In an ideal world this would be adequate, but very few people realize that modern lifestyles and current eating habits introduce anti-nutrients into our bodies that deplete nutrition. Modern food is devitalized by man made chemicals, pesticides, contaminants and food processing. These nutrient busters prevent nutrients from being absorbed or used by the body and in some cases promote their excretion. Many modern day diseases and deaths are not only caused by a deficiency of nutrients but also because of an excess of nutrient busters.

Most cancers, for example, are associated with an excess of anti-nutrients, like chemicals and free radicals resulting from smoking.

Unfortunately our lifestyles dictate the extent to which we are exposed to these nutrient busters. It is essential for us to reduce the exposure to anti-nutrients by assessing our lifestyles and the environment we live in, so we can fully understand how to manage this gigantic onslaught of nutrient busters and change our lifestyles accordingly.

How big is the problem ?
There are more than 3,000 man made food chemicals and over 20,000 pesticides registered in the US. American agriculture is reported as using 2.2 billion pounds of pesticides annually, that are used on more than 900,000 farms. The UK is reported as using 250,000 tons of food chemicals a year and 400 million litres of pesticides and herbicides sprayed on to food crops, pastures and surrounding areas. In addition billions of cigarettes and alcoholic drinks are consumed in the UK, not to mention the millions of antibiotics, pharmaceutical drugs, recreational and street drugs taken, and the industrial pollution of more than 50,000 chemicals pumped into the air every day.

Its no wonder we have health problems.

In his article The Amazing Human Being, Richard Penfounde starts by saying,

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that:

smoke tobacco
consume processed foods
drink coffee and tea copiously
eat fried foods continuously
drink cow’s milk throughout our lives
add sugar to our foods and liquids
add salt to our foods and liquids
continue to eat when we are not feeling well
consume social and medicinal drugs

We are the results of the products that we put in our mouths and often those that we do not put in our mouths. Our bodies are eventually shaped and our skin conditioned by these processes over a period of time. Every disease takes time to develop, often 20 or more years. Disease in our body varies from mild to moderate to serious and the progression is often so slow that it is not recognised at the time that it is happening.

The major Lifestyle nutrient busters

As optimum nutrition is the key to a healthy body and mind, we must be aware of how each of our lifestyles expose us to anti-nutrients and subsequent diseases and death.
The main problem is that these nutrient busters build up in the body, slowly over time eventually resulting in one or other serious disease. So before its too late, we must prevent this from happening by having regular check ups and appropriate tests. Richard recommends that it is very important to start a regimented optimum nutrition programme as soon as possible to start combating the nutrition busters onslaught.
You may also, depending on your specific circumstances, look at other appropriate tests like the hair-mineral analysis, food-tolerance tests, vitamin blood tests, the functional homocysteine test and a cholesterol test to establish your risk and to see if you have any specific disease symptom or nutrient deficiency.

For each of us to do a proper analysis of our lifestyles, we must however understand what these nutrient busters are, and make the necessary lifestyle changes to minimize or eliminate them.

Nutrient deficiency and depletion
There are many different nutrient busters that have negative affects on our bodies which can contribute to disease and death. Each contribute in a different way to the depletion of the nutrients we require to achieve and maintain optimum health.

Together with these anti-nutrient activities we must also understand that even refined foods that do not have man-made chemical additives or anti-nutrients, often contribute to nutrient deficiency as they do not have sufficient quantities of nutrients to sustain the body and mind. It is estimated that half of most peoples diets consist of these refined foods which means that the other half of their diets have to make up the full nutrient requirement. This isnt always possible or the case, for most people.

The result of all of this is that it is essential to be aware of these conditions and to eat according to our individual nutrient requirements, but more importantly to change our lifestyles to avoid nutrient busters where possible, and then to supplement the nutrients through our diets and an appropriate optimum nutrition supplement programme containing multivitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, essential fats, phytochemicals and amino acids.

This is the only way to achieve optimum health.

So lets look at the major nutrient busters.
Lifestyle, taking into account the effect of the following:
o Living in a city or near an industrial area
o Eating fast foods regularly
o Smoking cigarettes
o Drinking alcohol
o Taking recreational or street drugs
o Taking birth control pills
o Taking antibiotics regularly
o Limited or no regular exercise
o Limited sleep
o Highly stressful lifestyle
The environment we live in, taking into account the effect of the following:
o Traffic pollution, time spent in heavy traffic
o Industrial air and water pollution
o Drinking water contamination
o Pesticide and herbicide utilization and distribution
o Living or working in a smoking environment
The food we eat, taking into account the effect of the following:
o Man made food chemicals, additives, preservatives and food colouring agents
o Genetically modified foods
o Consumption of fast foods, fried foods and fatty foods
o Food processing using heat
o Food browned or burnt using heat
o Fruit and vegetables contaminated by pesticides and herbicides
o Foods wrapped in PVC plastic film
o The consumption of tea, coffee, sugar, salt and alcohol
o Household drinking water from taps
The drugs we take taking into account the effect of the following:
o Pharmaceutical drugs and antibiotics
o Recreational and street drugs
o Birth control pills
The exposure to nutrient busters depends on your specific lifestyle and therefore defines the activities you need to take to minimize or eliminate the exposure, to assist in achieving optimum nutrition.

Richard Penfounde

Natural Health Advisor

www.naturallyhealthylifestyles.com

Herbal nutrition supplements are those supplements that you take alongside your regular diet in order to supplement your intake of the various vitamins and other things that we don’t always get enough of in our diet. This has a vast range of health benefits and is also very good for athletes who are looking to improve their performance without using unnatural substances. However herbal nutrition supplements also have another benefit – they make you look good. The people we think are attractive in this world are the ones who are healthy. Those are the people who look as though they’d provide good genetic material for children, and who look as though they could protect us and have the resources to provide for us and look after themselves. They also look ‘clean’ and that’s always a good thing. But how can natural health supplements have this remarkable effect? And which ones in particular can make you look more attractive?
Here we’ll look at a few and how they work.

Fat Blockers: Fat blockers prevent fat from being stored as fat cells. When we don’t utilise the carbs or the fat in our body for instant energy they get converted to fat cells and placed under the skin making us look less defined and more ‘chubby’ in appearance. This is where fat blockers come in and work by preventing this process from occurring providing a healthy way to lose weight when coupled with a low fat diet.

Protein: Protein shakes such as soy protein enable us to tone up and build muscle. These provide the ‘amino acids’ that our body utilises to perform a range of repairs around the body and if you don’t have the right amino acids to hand in your body when those repairs take place then your muscle will not grow after a workout. A muscular frame is something that is highly desirable especially for men and at the same time simply having lots of muscle mass can provide a healthy way to lose weight as your body burns fat in order to sustain your new muscle.

Vitamins and Minerals: Many health supplements include vitamins and minerals and these have a range of benefits. Of course they will help to keep your healthy and strengthen your immune system, but at the same time they are also useful for the body to improve your skin, nails, teeth and hair. Without getting the right minerals and vitamins your skin and nails will look damaged and your hair thin. Vitamin E also further enables the body to heal scars and cuts and make your skin look smoother as a result.

Omega 3: Omega 3 fatty acid is also found in many herbal nutrition supplements and is useful for many things. The oil will further help to give your skin buoyancy and ensure your hair shines. However another benefit is that it is an antioxidant meaning that it can eliminate the free radicals in your body which causes damage to the cells and can contribute to the physical effects of ageing on the skin.

Urine testing has been used since ancient times for the detection of abnormalities. Early medical practitioners would pour urine on the ground and observe it to determine whether or not it would attract insects. If insects were attracted
to the urine, it indicated it was sweet, which we know in modern times to be a symptom of diabetes. In the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, it was common practice for physicians to actually taste their patient’s urine.

Fortunately, today’s clinicians no longer have to become quite so intimate with their patients body fluids and can rely on sophisticated analytical
techniques to uncover the wealth of information found in a simple urine sample.

Each of us has a unique physiological makeup. That is why it is very important to use vitamin supplements based on your body’s needs and biochemistry. The strategy of those low-cost one-size-fits-all vitamin supplements provide either too little of what you do need or too much of what you don’t.

Urine testing allows you to know which vitamin supplements to target specific areas of deficiency to help your body achieve an ideal nutritional and chemical balance.

For instance, urine sampling is an excellent method of evaluating:
– Hydration status
– Acid/Base balance
– Blood sugar regulation
– Existence of certain cancers
– Existence of pregnancy and complications of pregnancy
– Liver diseases
– Infections
– Functional nutritional status

While science limits us from testing for every conceivable illness, we can determine if certain nutritional deficiencies exist through urine testing. Urine testing really tells you what’s going on in your body, and what you need to know if these nutrients are getting into your cells and how your cells are using them. One of the best ways to do that is to look at the end products of your metabolism in your urine. These individual tests called ” Priva Test ” utilize a urine sample which you provide through an in-home test kit

Two main purposes exist for urinalysis:

1. The first is to diagnosis actual damage or disease to the physical kidney itself. In this instance, substances normally found in urine will be increased or decreased. This reflects alterations in the filtration system of the kidney due to disease. This
is the basis for the standard urinalysis screen.

2. The second is to detect disturbances such as endocrine or metabolic abnormalities. In this instance, the kidneys function normally but excrete abnormal amounts of metabolic end products, indicating alterations in metabolic pathways. This second function is the application that is used in the PrivaTest.

The three areas evaluated in the Priva Test are major areas of concern for any person living in our industrialized society. The three compounds measured in your urine at the laboratory give you vital information about:

– Your body’s ability to detoxify toxic substances.
– Your body’s ability to balance the production of an important regulatory compound influencing immune, nervous, and vascular system function.
– Your body’s ability to handle challenges to its antioxidant systems.

Each one of these areas can be manipulated favorably by personalized nutritional supplementation.