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Frequently Asked Questions Only your personal physician or other health professional you consult can best advise you on matters of your health based on your medical history, your family medical history, and your medication history. Q: How can eating vegetables help me manage my weight? Q: I’m wondering about why I should add a raw, soy protein powder to my diet? Q: Are your vendor’s supplements whole foods? Q: Are the food supplements you market organic? Q: How can eating vegetables help me manage my weight? A: Eating vegetables - low in fat and calories, high in fiber - helps control weight and provides us with extra energy. Being low in calories enables us to eat lots of vegetables without consuming excess. The high fiber content helps fill the stomach faster limiting the total amount of food consumed. The presence of many vitamins and other chemicals in vegetables supply the body with nutrients to boost energy production within muscle cells. This gives us the energy to become more active helping us to burn more calories each day. Vegetables are low in sodium which helps to reduce water gain. Sodium, present in virtually all processed foods, causes the body to hold water. It has been estimated that many people may hold up to 5 pounds of additional water due to high sodium intake. If we eat more vegetables our sodium intake naturally lowers. Q: I’m wondering about why I should add a raw, soy protein powder to my diet? A: Here is an article written by Jim Burke, former cancer researcher at the Mayo Clinic which gives excellent information on soy and the particular brand we market. Jim has degrees in biology, chemistry, physics and advanced training in the field of histology and cell development at the Mayo clinic. He has a 12-year background in the area of cancer research and has extensive knowledge about the research behind our vendor’s products. I honestly can tell you from a personal perspective, that I can’t even go a single day without taking soy at least once if not twice a day. My energy level, ability to concentrate and endurance when exercising are so much higher that it simply isn’t worth it for me to skip a day. I simply pay too big a price. I also have noticed that the results I see from my exercise are increased significantly in terms of lean muscle, recovery and endurance. I simply get far superior results. NOTE: Stress is the greatest factor in protein utilization in the body. Under stress the body’s demand for amino acids increases six times. Soy is so readily available to the body; it can help counter these changes. Other proteins just take too long to digest and do not supply an adequate amount of amino acids. So in most cases the body must attack the muscles to try and get the amino acids that are needed. Q: I’m wondering about the safety of artificial sweeteners like Splenda and whether diet sodas can cause weight gain? A: Okay, I started delving into the whole artificial sweetener controversy and all I can say is that it was a nightmare of conflicting information. As a consumer it becomes extremely challenging to sort fact from fiction. One of the things I gleaned from my reading was that there seems to be an element of economics running through it all. The industry of artificial sweeteners is definitely big business. I would suggest you do what I do and google Splenda. I found the link below particularly interesting. http://www.shirleys-wellness-cafe.com/nutraswt.htm#splenda Each one of us has to draw our own conclusions on this one. My own personal belief is that the closer to nature a food is, the better it is for you. I choose to use no foods with Splenda or other artificial sweeteners in them. My children eat nothing with artificial sweeteners in them. We have found that maple syrup, honey, sucanat and stevia are great alternatives. Click here to learn more about stevia. Of course, nothing is ever simple. There is even conflict surrounding stevia. Again, my personal conclusion is that I am more comfortable using stevia than artificial sweeteners. Here is a link to learn more about stevia. We like the liquid kind. My girls love to use it in their oatmeal to sweeten it. It can help people wean themselves off pop. Try a few drops of the flavored liquid stevia in some sparkling water. Check out this link for more info. http://www.steviasmart.com/stfln.html In reference to your question, does diet soda contribute to weight gain; click on this link for a very interesting article. Drink More Diet Soda, Gain More Weight? Overweight Risk Soars 41% With Each Daily Can of Diet Soft Drink Q: Are your vendor’s supplements whole foods? Here is a response from our vendor’s research department. A: While some companies label their products as "whole food supplements, " this has no legal definition , and has therefore been used quite loosely by marketers of dietary supplements . While it is the intention of some marketers to lead consumers to believe that nutritional products can be made by condensing or compressing whole foods into efficacious, nutritional tidbits, such a result is impossible. (1 Vitamin and Mineral Safety. Council for Responsible Nutrition. 1997. Pg. 5.) Consider that a supplement condensed or compressed from a whole food would contain little nutrient value, and would require taking an inordinately large number of servings or tablets to get even one serving with adequate nutritional value. Take spinach, for example. If we consider a reasonable serving size for spinach to be one cup of cooked spinach, the spinach in that serving would weigh approximately 180 grams. Dried and made into a powder, it would weigh about 30 grams. Since a normal-sized tablet holds about a half gram of powder, at best to get the equivalent of a cup of cooked spinach, you would need to consume a minimum of 60 tablets. When you think about it, anything not fresh off the plant, tree, or vine is less than natural because something must happen between the time raw ingredients are harvested and put into an end product that provides benefit for the consumer. So a good working definition of "natural" would be "as close to nature as possible with the least amount of processing needed to deliver claimed nutrients." We are committed to providing the purest and most bio-available nutrients derived from naturally occurring sources whenever possible. Our founder once said, "True, no one can improve upon nature’s nutrition, but we can improve upon the methods used by man to capture nature’s values." Accordingly, while our vendor seeks to use the finest natural sources for its formulations , we also recognize the beneficial advances in food technology that make available highly bio-potent nutrient sources where nature has not provided them. Perhaps a more important issue for consumers than going back and forth on the meaning of such terms a s "natural" and "whole foods," might be the scientific basis and actual nutritional value of food and nutritional supplements. We are proud that our vendor's products are based on sound science and bring benefits to our consumers. It is where our vendor distinguishes itself from competitors. When appropriate, they conduct clinical studies to ensure product safety and support efficacy. Their studies have been published in peer -reviewed scientific and medical journals, such as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The American Journal of Cardiology and others. These journals are available in public and medical libraries across the nation. Suffice it to say, our aim is to provide the best products of their kind, and we believe we do a good job of that . If you have evidence that a competitor does a better job, we’d be interested in seeing supporting data. Q: Are the food supplements you market organic? A: The vendor we work with has a standard which actually goes beyond organic. Organic farmers are not required to test their food for heavy metals and pesticides. They can’t control what pollutants are in the air and water. This often ends up in the plants even though the farmer is not directly applying chemicals. This vendor checks the root systems for contamination when determining which raw ingredients to accept or reject. They check for over 300 substances when determining purity. This goes far beyond the standard for organic.
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