Natural News for Women

Dear Readers

Welcome to this December issue of Natural News.  We are well and truly into the winter now and it is so important at this time of year to protect ourselves from colds and flu.  Last month I covered the benefits of a good night’s sleep and regular exercise and this month you’ll learn how your morning shower, deep breathing and fresh air can boost your immunity.  It is important that we do all we can to help ourselves because we are exposed to bacteria and viruses every day and it is only the strength of our immune system that stops us being constantly ill. 

 

It was Louis Pasteur who discovered the antibiotic properties of penicillin. In the early stages of his research, he said, `In order to for you to have a disease you have to have germs’. This encouraged the conventional approach to ‘germs’ and illness. Scientists were determined to find the ‘germs’ responsible, and to get rid of them. But somewhere along the line, these scientists lost sight of the fact that our bodies can do this for themselves. If our bodies are strong and healthy, with our immune systems functioning at optimum level, we are much less likely to become ill, and when we do succumb, we heal that much more quickly. The emphasis clearly needs to be on keeping the body strong, rather than finding shortcuts to health.

 

Exposure to bacteria will not necessarily cause an infection. There has to be a weakness present in order for this to happen. In other words, it is the body’s ability to fight its own battle that governs whether or not we succumb to illness.

 

Years after making his original statement, Louis Pasteur backtracked, saying: ‘In a state of health, animals are shut off from the invasion of germs …The microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything’.  If the terrain (your body) is healthy, disease cannot take hold. Interestingly, Louis Pasteur’s work is considered to be a turning point in the treatment of disease, but his final message has been largely ignored. Conventional medicine isn’t preventative. Nutritional medicine is.  And that is what you are aiming to achieve.

 

Kind regards

 

Marilyn Glenville

 

Dear Readers

I have been working in the field of nutrition for around thirty years and as well as being concerned about what we eat, I have also been concerned about what we put on our skin and what our skin is exposed to on a daily basis.

Did you know that the average woman uses 12 toiletries every day and applies more than 175 chemical compounds to her body in the process?

We are surrounded with chemicals that we use every day on our skin and hair, in our homes and work places, yet nobody knows the potentially harmful chemical cocktail effect these chemicals might have when combined together over a period of time.  

Current research continues to show that many everyday cosmetics and toiletries for example, contain chemicals that can be carcinogenic or harmful to your body. You do not want to be polluting your body by putting potentially toxic chemicals directly onto your skin. Your skin is one of the most absorbent and porous materials in the world, and will absorb into your body anything you put on it.  That is why nicotine and HRT patches work so well through the skin. 

Also this becomes even more important when we think of babies and children and the effect these chemicals might have on them.

I have always chosen natural toiletries and household products for my family and sometimes it has been really hard work finding the right products and checking all the labels.  With so much confusion nowadays as to what is really a ‘natural’ product I have decided to source some of the best products available and grade them depending on whether they are certified organic, contain 100% natural ingredients and for some products like hair dye that they are the most natural they can be and still be effective.  You will find these Natural Living Products on www.naturalhealthpractice.com.  If you know of any really good natural products you think would be useful for other women to know about then do let me know.

Kind regards

Marilyn Glenville

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Dear Readers

You probably read recently that a man was rejected as a bone marrow donor because his BMI (Body Mass Index) was too high as it put him into the obese category.  This was a man who was very fit and athletic and it was obvious that the weight was made up of muscle.  It is so sad that the BMI is still being used for categorising people into being overweight.  The Army has given up using the BMI as they were getting very fit rugby playing men applying who would actually have been obese according to the BMI criteria but were in fact very muscular with very little body fat.

The importance of where fat is distributed on the body is also crucial and that is why I wrote the Fat around the Middle book.  Further research in this area and published in the American Journal of Epidemiology only recently has highlighted again the relationship between waist circumference and risk of death.  In this study, they looked at 250,000 men and women over 9 years.  Within the group of people they looked at those whose BMI was classed as healthy and then within that group looked at the difference between those with a larger waist (more than 88cm (34.7ins)) for women and 102cm (40.2ins) for men).

So for those with a healthy weight according to the BMI, those women with the higher waist circumference had a 22% increased risk of death and the men with the larger waists had a 23% increased risk of death.

This message is so important, if you have extra fat around the middle of your body, it needs to be reduced.  Not only will your clothes fit better and you will be happier with how you look but the change in body shape will have an enormous impact on your health, now and in the future reducing your risk of cancer (especially breast cancer), heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure, diabetes and Alzheimer’s. 

Kind regards

Marilyn Glenville

To read the rest of this article and for more information on ‘Natural News for Women’ please click here