I’ve touched on this subject in the past but it’s been brought to my attention again this morning in an email from Joseph Mercola’s website regarding his new hair care products (which touched on my funny bone cos he has none!). He’s talking about the potentially harmful ingredients that are found in most hair care products because he now has his own range of natural hair products. Mercola has a list of the ingredients in his shampoo and conditioner and they look pretty good except he’s done the same thing as the company in my last post – he’s listed ‘Surfactant derived from vegetable oil’ and ‘Surfactant derived from glucose’ in the shampoo ingredients. These are descriptions of ingredients that could be any number of things from my understanding – they are not the name of an ingredient! I’ve emailed Mercola.com and asked what the ingredients are. It’ll be interesting to see the response.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not knocking Mercola – I’ve been getting his emails for years and love them, but it’s a subject that I’m really interested in and I’m curious.

Anyway, my take on the whole subject is that for those of us who actually value our health and don’t want to use harmful products, then we’re obviously going to be on the lookout for safer choices. So, I also know that a lot of people are searching for natural hair products as well as natural products in general. But I want to pose the question ‘Is that what we’re really after?’.

My question is do we want ‘natural’ products? or do we want ’safe’ and ‘effective’ products? There is a difference.

As I already discussed in my previous post, ‘natural’ products might sound like they’re safe when we look at the ingredient list, but they may not be. The ingredients in these products may be contaminated before their use, or the names used may just be plain misleading. For example SLS has (in the past at least) been referred to on ingredient lists as ‘derived from coconut oil’. SLS apparently used to be commonly made from coconut (I think more is synthesised these days), but it in way no resembles coconut by the time it has gone through the processes to be made into SLS! I remember Amway using the ‘derived from coconut’ ingredient on their cleaning products many years ago. I wouldn’t know if they still do.

Then there are the many, many companies that just say their products are natural, when they blatantly list ingredients such as SLS and Proplylene Glycol as well as many other nasties on their labels, knowing full well that many (trusting, and uninformed) customers will buy them thinking they’re getting a safer product.

Companies such as Melaleuca Inc make out that their products are safer alternatives to other brands and that their products are environmentally friendly when they contain the same (potentially harmful)  ingredients that every product sitting on the supermarket shelf contains, but their customers and fooled into believing that they are using safe natural products.  I’m talking here about their personal care products – I don’t know about their cleaning products.

Melaleuca Inc – The Wellness Company – have many pages of documents on their website defending the ingredients in their products and attempting to convince the reader that there is no science behind the warnings about ingredients such as SLS and Propylene Glycol. It’s interesting that they feel the need to defend their use of these ingredients. I also note that after researching the ingredient lists of Melaleuca’s personal care products several times over the past 5 years or so, that they now seem to have done a very good job of removing all ingredient lists from the internet! I couldn’t find one. On their own website they have removed all Pdf documents that used to be there with product information including ingredients and on distributor sites after looking for while this morning there are no labels or ingredient lists to be found. They were there 12 months ago when I was looking!

Then there are the ‘Organic’ products. Some say they’re organic or put the word ‘Organic’ on the label to make out that they are organic when they are (obviously) not, and even those that are made from certified organic ingredients may still be contaminated with things that aren’t on the ingredient list! Something that I’ve just learned is that many commercial organic crops are sprayed with BT Insecticide. It’s apparently been used for a long time and is made from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria. Guess what? There are questions surrounding it’s safety! If you’re interested read more about it here.

Anyway, what gets my back up is companies that are doing their best to mislead customers. It is our right to take care of our health, to know what we are putting into and on our body, what we are feeding and using on our children and what we are putting into the environment.

Unfortunately there does not seem to be many honest and open companies out there. Companies that are happy to disclose their ingredient lists fully, and correctly with the correct ingredient names. Many use the excuse of ‘Proprietary Formula’ for not disclosing ingredients and they get away with it because there really is no regulation. The truth is that they can disclose the ingredient lists without disclosing their formulas so it is no excuse and there are almost no companies that go to the extent of making sure their ingredients are not contaminated with harmful ‘extras’ before using them!

I’m not a scientist – not by a long shot. I’ve done a lot of research into different ingredients and products over the past 8 years or more, and believe me when I say it can do your head in! I still look at products and ingredients because it’s an interest (obviously!) from time to time, but I now listen to those people who are experts in their fields. People like Dr Samuel Epstein – Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition and author of The Safe Shoppers Bible who really knows and understands the science and who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the safety of ingredients and products. I believe people like Dr Peter Dingle from Western Australia when he tells me the things to avoid to keep myself and my family safer – he knows what he’s talking about! If you ever get the chance to listen to him speak you’ll realise that he knows his stuff.

And I look and I listen. I listen to the results people are getting with their health and I look at my own and other peoples results. For example, I know for a fact that my hair and my scalp improved immeasurably when I stopped using shampoos with harmful ingredients. I went from having a scalp that was lumpy, itchy and flakey (it was baaaaaaad!) and hair that wouldn’t grow throughout my whole life, (even as a child) because it was always broken and split, to having hair that grows so fast and strong that sometimes it drives me nuts keeping it under control and to a much healthier scalp. That for me is enough proof that those supermarket shampoos contained ingredients that we causing at the very least, superficial problems and probably more. It’s common sense.

As promised here’s my article on my number two worst food that you really don’t want to put in your body (not if you want to be healthy that is), and if you currently are consuming this stuff, let me just say that if it were me, I’d stop – now.

Oils ain’t oils! Yep, you’ve been conned again by the large advertising budgets of (so called)  ‘food’ companies out to take your money with no regard for truth or your health.

Margarine is nasty stuff. It’s history goes something like this -

It’s been around for over one hundred years. It used to be white and tasted something like lard. Not very palatable. Eventually, margerine manufacturers won the right to colour the stuff (the dairy board tried to stop them in the US – shame they lost!) and so it was coloured, flavoured and made to look and taste like butter, although it has never really tasted like butter in my opinion!

The marketing campaign started and did a great job of convincing everyone, including the medical profession, that margarine was the superior product. Saturated fats were given the big thumbs down and good old butter that has been used since the beginning of time was driven into a corner – the corner of the fridge in the supermarket that is, behind the mountains of margarine!

However, although margarine consumption has gone up over the years heart disease hasn’t gone down. Neither has obesity. In fact chronic dis-ease in all it’s forms has gone up.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not only margarine that’s to blame. There’s a whole barrage of foods and food additives out there that are causing these problems along with other lifestyle factors, but margarine sure isn’t helping! To start with it’s made from cheap, nasty oils that are heat extracted using petrochemical solvents – tasty!

Then it’s hydrogenated, to make it solid generally creating trans fats which will give you heart disease as well as other health issues, before having colourings, flavourings and who knows what else added to it.

Our bodies don’t know what to do with it! It’s not a real food. I’d like to point out that this also includes the latest marketing brilliance, which include Rice Bran oil (also heat extracted using Hexane which is a petrochemical product) and the cholesterol lowering margarines – they’re the same deal!

REAL FOOD is the stuff that’s been eaten by us forever. Butter is a real food – the cells in our bodies know how to deal with it. When it comes to food, as I keep saying, it’s just common sense. Eat what we’ve always eaten – that doesn’t mean for last 50 or 100 years. It means for the last 1000 years or more!

The fats and oils that have been consumed forever are butter, ghee, coconut oil, olive oil, sesame oil, and palm oil. There are probably others that have been used throughout the ages also, but these ones have amazing health giving properties and are fairly easy to source. These fats are good for your body. Buy organic if possible and cold pressed oils always and your body will thank you for it.

Coconut oil in particular has amazing health benefits, including helping to regulate the thyroid gland – a fantastic and important benefit these days with all the chemicals we are exposed to that can alter our thyroid function and subtly (or not so subtly), but surely, impact our health. Virgin cold pressed coconut oil will help to keep your metabolism up to speed and so has the potential to help with weight control! Interesting huh?

I remember reading a story a while back that said that many years ago in the US, farmers decided to supplement feed given to stock with coconut oil as it was cheap and readily available at that time. Their livestock lost weight! That was not what they wanted, so they switched to grains to fatten them up.  Now that’s interesting. What are we told to eat most of in the ‘food pyramid’ – grains – and we have an obesity epidemic? hmmmmmm.

Here’s a great link about coconut oil http://www.coconutdiet.com/weight_loss.htm

Anyway, I say throw that tub of margarine in the bin today, along with the 2 litre plastic bottles of canola oil, sunflower oil or whichever varieties litter your pantry and get back to using fats that your body’s cells are familiar with and you’ll be on your way to better health. Guaranteed!

I’ve been researching and subsequently experimenting with  iodine over the past few weeks. It all started with me searching for any hints on what might be causing pain in the saliva glands when one first starts to eat (something I’ve had in the past, and my hubby still has), and I stumbled upon an article on iodine and that was it – I was off! That’s what happens with me I find, start off looking at one thing then something else makes sense and takes my interest and I’m away on a completely different info trip. It keeps things interesting and those around me guessing! I actually know these days that the info that I need doesn’t come to me by accident and my intuitions are worth following – so I follow them! but that’s another story.

What I realised once I started hunting down more info on iodine and studying it all, was that I (along with much of the population) was very likely iodine deficient. The thing is, as with everything, this deficiency is going to effect me a little more or a little less than the person next to me as we are different and have different genes and requirements for a particular nutrient. I think from what I’ve read, and looking back that I’ve probably been iodine deficient all of my life – growing up we only ever ate fish very occasionally and definitely no sea vegetables! We were very Scottish! Mince and tatties kind of people. Scones and jam, rice puddin – that sort of thing was our fare.

Anyway, a few years ago (after I was back on the cigarettes), I started to suspect that my thyroid was underperforming. I went off to the doc, and asked for some blood tests, but he would only do the TSH test as the others were too expensive or something. The test came back normal, and so as far as he was concerned, all was well. The only thing that showed up in the battery of blood tests that I requested was that I was quite anemic.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later, once we’d moved back to New Zealand, that I started to do some research on the thyroid again, along with the use of nature identical hormones such as progesterone and dhea as I was depressed, gaining weight, was cold all the time, my cycle was horrendous and I was just not right.

I learned that coconut oil helps to balance thyroid problems and so started using it, and was in fact taking it in fairly large amounts for a while along with supplements aimed at thyroid problems. I also started using progesterone cream and dhea under the guidance of a clinic in Tauranga. The hormones helped to start with, but eventually started causing problems as it was impossible to get the dose right so I gave up on them and went back to using a larger dose of a cream containing wild yam and chaste tree which I still use, with much better results. Gradually my body temperature came up a bit (never over about 36.3 tho) and I started to feel a bit better and stopped taking my temperature.

What I didn’t realise at the time tho, was that around this time I also changed my supplements that I was taking to a much better brand, and one of those contained iodine! Gradually over 12 months or so, I started to lose some weight, my muscles were working better and that was when I started running – for the first time in my life I felt like I could actually run! Even as a child, running always felt really hard! My muscles in my legs just didn’t respond.

Then, (as I know realise) when we moved back to Australia, I stopped taking the supplement with the iodine in it! Because I didn’t know about the iodine. I hadn’t looked into it at all and so didn’t give it a thought. I knew that something had changed but didn’t know what! I was still taking other great supplements from our company, but not that one! Not the one with the iodine.

Our first years back in OZ, 2008, was extremely stressful as not only did we change countries again, then three months later move to different state and buy a business, but we bought a dud business and found ourselves losing money hand over fist, in large amounts and although we worked hard and improved the business, it wasn’t quick enough and we closed it at the end of 2008 and moved back to Queensland.

All this stress takes a toll on our bodies, and I believe that because I wasn’t taking the iodine my thyroid was slowing down again. For the few months prior to starting back on it, I felt like I was sinking into a hole. I was becoming more and more depressed, crying every day, not wanting to get out of bed and no energy. Exercise was an absolute mission.

This all changed pretty quickly once I started taking the iodine and getting back into the coconut oil! We had still been using the oil for cooking some of the time, but I’m back to spreading my toast with it and putting it in to smoothies etc. It’s delicious (always buy organic if possible,  cold pressed virgin oil).

I’m currently taking about 4 times the RDI of iodine per day. Half in the morning and half at night with only good effects at this point. I figure that once my body temperature is normal and is staying that way, I’ll try dropping the dose and see if the benefits stay – other wise I’m happy to keep taking as much of the stuff as I need to to feel normal.

Tomorrow, I’ll share some of what I’ve learned about iodine and the massive role it plays in our bodies and of course the implications of not enough. I’ve just shared with you how much difference it’s made to me in just a few weeks. Get some and try it for yourself.