Children’s Health Articles

Health Chocolate- Fall 2010 Catalog

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

Healthy Chocolate

And Now For Something Completely Different: Chocolate That Heals

By Greg Webster

The chip in the rim of my Durango-Silverton souvenir coffee mug reminds me each morning of how well-loved that gift is. My 12 year-old daughter brought it to me from her life-changing trip to a natural-healing specialist in Colorado.

Lily struggles with Asperger syndrome, an autism-spectrum disorder whose biochemical cause seems to have evaded most medical practitioners except Dr. Shauna Young. Through a disciplined diet combined with targeted nutritional supplements, Dr. Young’s  ”Spectrum Balance Protocol” has helped Lily develop more age-appropriate behaviors and social skills.* We follow the diet more rigidly at some times than others, but during the “strict” times, it’s a challenge to keep a fun-loving 12 year-old on a regimen that excludes all processed foods and nearly every type of sweet treat enjoyed by most kids her age.

We attribute much of her success in staying on the diet to one particular, delectable and surprising supplement Dr. Young recommends to her patients of all ages.  Lily eats chocolate. That may sound strange to anyone marginally aware of health food do’s and don’ts, but the secret of why it works lies in a new-found version of an ancient food used in a time when chocolate was anything but junk.

It Wasn’t Always So

We think of chocolate as a decadent candy, but in the long history of cocoa consumption that is an anomaly. Thirty centuries ago, Mayans imbibed a spicy raw cocoa concoction of a mainstay of a high nutrition diet. It remained a health meal-in-a-cup for over 2500 years until Europeans decided they preferred mixing cocoa with sugar and milk rather than the cayenne and chili peppers that added an energetic kick to the ancient South American brew.

It became standard procedure to separate cocoa powder from cocoa butter (ditching), add chemicals to moderate the bitter taste, and boil the mixture to blend the added ingredients together. Americans did their part by introducing the first milk chocolate candy bar in the 1880′s. So now we think of chocolate primarily as a “sinful delight”.

There have been murmurings in the past ten years or so about the health benefits of dark chocolate, and the rumors are true-to a point. Cacao, from which cocoa is produced, is the ultimate antioxidant food.  It far outstrips blueberries, spinach, broccoli, red wine, or any other competitor that has been trumpeted as a great source of free-radical fighting antioxidants. And since eliminating free radicals is one of the best things you can do for your health and wellness, that means there’s a scientifically sound reason the early South Americans knew it was good for them.

Chocolate’s Dark Secret

Cocoa is likely the healthiest vegetable around. For example, 3 ounces of raw cocoa has the same antioxidant content and other nutrients as more than 6 pounds of tomatoes. It’s nature’s most complex superfood, with over 300 identifiable compounds, including most vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and “bliss chemicals” like dopamine and serotonin.

Cocoa is a natural anti-inflammatory, antihistamine, anti-viral, anti-bacterial, and anti-cancerous agent. And because an estimated 200 or more degenerative diseases start with inflammation, cocoa can help with a stunning variety of ailments.

Various studies have reported that dark cocoa consumption can provide the following benefits:

- Decrease cardiovascular disease by lowering cholesterol levels and stopping bad cholesterol from       oxidizing and sticking to vessel walls.

-  Prevent the formation of blood clots, which otherwise can lead to heart attacks and strokes

-  Increase the flexibility of blood vessels in order to lower blood pressure and decrease stress on the heart.

- Help the body better utilize sugars, curbing diabetes and decreasing complications suffered by diabetics

-  Reduce dental cavities and periodontal disease;

-  Improve memory and slow the onset of dementia

-  Improve skin quality

-  Decrease inflammation associated with arthritis, fibromyalgia, or other inflammation diseases

-  Alleviate depression

-  Help with weight loss by decreasing appetite

It’s the high antioxidant value of cocoa, and the corresponding ability to eliminate free radicals, that accounts for much of the benefit of chocolate. Free radicals are cellular terrorists-atoms with mission electrons that steal them from healthy atoms. This ongoing process is called oxidation and, just as rust eats into metal, free radicals eat into our cells and destroy the DNA. Free radical damage is linked to more than 100 conditions, ranging from heart disease and arthritis to dementia, diabetes, and even cancer.

These days we are bombarded with more free radicals than ever, thanks to environmental toxins in the air and water, cigarette smoke, pesticides, and processed food, to name some of the worst offenders, but foods risk in antioxidants are an effective weapon against this damage. Antioxidants provide electron mates for free radicals and normalize the chemical situation in the body.

The USDA uses the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) scale to measure the antioxidant capacity of different foods and it recommends a minimum of 3,000 ORAC daily. The average American diet, however, delivers only about 800 ORAC per day.

Studies have shown that the more the ORAC value you take in throughout the day, the healthier you will be. Dr. Richard Cutler, past Director of the Anti-Aging Research Department of the National Institute of Health in Washington, DC notes that “the amount of antioxidants that you maintain in your body is directly related to how long and how healthy you will live.”

Cocoa is nature’s highest-scoring ORAC food in its natural form. It delivers a variety of vital flavonoids (antioxidants) in a form that helps the body put them to good use.

To give an example of what just one of several important cocoa flavonoids do: The epicatechin has been shown to boost nitric oxide levels in the blood which, in turn, relaxes blood vessels, improving blood flow and reducing stress on the heart. To highlight its importance, Norman Hollenberg, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, says in Chemical and Industry, “We all agree that penicillin and anesthesia are enormously important. But epicatechin could potentially rid of four of the five most common disease in the Western world.” For more health information and testimonies about healthy chocolate, see www.PatentedChocolateResearch.org.

So What’s the Catch?

If the rumors about the health benefits of dark chocolate are true “to a point,” what is that point? It’s this: Most commercially produced dark chocolates are still cooked and then laden with less-than-healthy additives. As with any vegetable, the hotter and longer you cook them, the less nutrition-especially antioxidant value-is left. Roasting and sustained high temperatures (processes most large chocolate companies follow) notably decrease the beneficial amounts of flavonoids in cocoa. Heat-processing cooks out more than 80 percent of its antioxidants and nutrients. On top of that, some combination of wax, fat, fillers, and sugar are usually added. This is even true of most chocolate bars found in health food stores.

Chocolate products with the highest flavonoid content are those that use blanched, unfermented, sun-dried, non-roasted, and cold-pressed cocoa. In fact, cocoa that has undergone these processes boasts of 4 to 8 times the levels of antioxidants and nutrients than cocoa produced with standard processing. And there’s really only one source of truly good-tasting raw chocolate that delivers the full benefit of cocoa.

The MXI Corporation of Nevada created a patented cold-pressing process for making dark chocolate. Not only is the chocolate raw, it is enhanced, not with unhealthy fillers, but with acai berry(the second highest ORAC food on earth), blueberries, grapes, cinnamon, and cayenne pepper. Then it’s sweetened with low-glycemic raw cane crystals to take an edge off the natural bitterness of coca, and the process delivers chocolate that is naturally caffeine-free. Three one-ounce servings is roughly the nutritional equivalent of 1-1/2 pounds of spinach.

Because Beeyoutiful is committed to researching and delivering only the best available health supplements and because MXI network marketing system is the sole source for this truly healthful and delicious raw chocolate, Beeyoutiful offers the chocolate outside of its normal channels of website and catalog sales. Marketed in several forms under the brand name Xocai (“show-sigh”), it is available through Beeyoutiful’s MXI distributorship. You’ll find details in how to order in the accompanying sidebar.

So, yes, Lily eats chocolate on her diet. Dr. Young advocates the raw Xocai version as a fun and nutritionally supercharged supplement to her autism recovery protocol. But you don’t have to have an autism disorder to benefit. It’s a delicious and healthful addition to any diet.

We’ve made a series of brief videos about our experience. Check out YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=styo8tiaXcc (“Autism Recover Story Part 1″) and www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDjPeynOmio&feature=related (Autism Recovery Story Part 2)

Greg Webster is a free-lance writer, homeschool father of eight, the co-founder of New Vantage Books custom publishing company, and bronze executive with MXI Corporation. But he is best known as husband of Nancy Webster whose health and nutrition articles appear in every issue of Beeyoutiful’s catalog.

Side Bar Ordering Information:

Making Chocolate the Order of the Day

One of the questions often asked, a bit cynically, of network marketers is: “Are you trying to sell me the business or your product?” In the case of Beeyoutiful and Xocai (“show-sigh”) Chocolate, the answer is emphatically: “We are selling the product,” There is a business component, for sure, that some people use to offset the cost of buying and using the chocolate and that some develop into an ongoing home business, but buying Xocai through Beeyoutiful means, first and foremost, buying healthy-really, really healthy-chocolate. While MXI Corporation offers nearly a dozen different formulations of Xocai, the five that Beeyoutiful recommends are:

-          Power Squares

-          Nuggets

-          Xobiotics (with probiotics added to the chocolate)

-          Omega Squares (includes Omega-3 fatty acids)

-          Activ liquid chocolate

Each packaged in amounts that provide the recommended intake for one person for one month. To find out about pricing and ordering, call Beeyoutiful’s customer service at 1-800-556-0967. [For product and ordering information, go to www.BeeyoutifulChocolate.com]


Posted in Children's Health, Fall 2010 Catalog, Healthy Living, Immune System, Intestinal Health, Men's Health, Women's Health | No Comments »

Land of Milk and Honey, Part I

Monday, June 8th, 2009

By Rebekah Joy Anast

When God described to the children of Israel the perfect land he was going to give them as an inheritance, he did so by saying,”And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3:8)

My great-grandparents enjoyed cornbread in homemade buttermilk as their evening meal almost every day of their life. They rounded out their breakfast with biscuits, butter, and honey. In spite of the hard labor and lack of modern miracle drugs, my great-grandfather lived to be 99. He scandalized the family when he was 96 because he wanted to marry his housekeeper (Great-Grandma had died 3 years earlier). He either had amazing genes or was eating right.

Fermented milk products like yogurt, kefir, and buttermilk are said to be the significant contributing factor of longevity in countries like Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. Even today in Bulgaria, many live to be over 100 years of age!

It is important to know that more than 60% of fatal diseases in the USA are related to the gastrointestinal tract (GI). A steady diet of naturally fermented dairy products protects the GI from the diseases that have become the by-products of the American diet. Conversely, homogenization of dairy products is linked to an impressive range of diseases: from autism, to irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue, and heart disease. Homogenization is the process in which the cream particles in milk are broken down and separated so that they will not rise to the top or lump together in the milk. The problem lies in the fact that the fat particles are broken down to be so tiny and “sharp” that they can now penetrate through the walls of your intestines and into your bloodstream. This results in the laceration of your arteries, cholesterol build-up, and poor circulation. Milk can be your best friend or your worst enemy.

In ancient times in Middle Eastern countries, dairy products were usually derived from goats. Fermented goat milk in the form of yogurt or kefir is the single, most powerful food therapy for the GI tract.

Here is an amazing story from Tissue Cleansing Through Bowel Management by Bernard Jensen, D.C. PhD, Nutritionist:

“John Harvey Kellogg preformed and amazing experiment demonstrating this fact. He immersed a one-pound piece of raw meat, slightly tainted, in buttermilk. The milk was changed at regular intervals. The meat remained perfectly free of decomposition for some 20 years!!! This demonstrates the efficiency of an acid medium for inhibiting decay-producing putrefactive bacteria. Soured milk is also called turned, fermented, curdled and clabbered milk. The Bulgarians call it yogurt; the Turks call it Kefir; and the Russians call it matzone.”

This is what fermented milk can do for your stomach: inhibit putrefactive bacteria! Now with modern techniques, the important bacteria can be freeze dried, encapsulated, and delivered directly to the GI in high strength doses. Nothing against yogurt, but in many cases, I prefer to take my “ferment” in capsule form as Tummy Tuneup.

Fermented dairy products are the most basic and natural form of probiotics. Probiotics are available encapsulated or powdered. I think of probiotics as being the opposite of antibiotics. Antibiotics kill all the bacteria in your GI tract – the good and the bad. Probiotics replenish your GI tract with good bacteria.

This year, when our whole family got a 7-day stomach flu, I sprinkled powdered Tummy Tuneup probiotics on their food at each meal. It is tasteless, but more effective than eating kefir or yogurt (and does not come from milk sources – it is completely hypoallergenic). The effects of the flu were completely negated.

I recently heard form tow different mothers who suffered from severe morning sickness; they claimed that taking Tummy Tuneup alleviated their nausea. A few others said that Tummy Tuneup sprinkled in their baby’s milk bottle, or just on the breast before nursing, cleared up colic and tummy aches.

Dozens of others have taken Tummy Tuneup probiotics along with Yeast Assassin supplement to restore complete GI health by getting rid of Candida/Yeast infections they had struggled with for years.

Come to the free Merryheartmedicine.com forum to find recipes for fermented milk products, and information on all health-related subjects.


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Xylitol- Summer 2007 Catalog

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

by Nancy Brillaut

From the time we are young children, we are taught to brush our teeth, planting the seeds for good dental hygiene. Good brushing and flossing and restricted sugar consumption can reduce the occurrence of cavities, yet they still remain common. A National Institute of Health survey shows nearly 20% of children, ages 2-4, have already experienced cavities; more than 67% of adults aged 35-44 have lost at least one permanent tooth due to dental cavities, and 25% of people 65-74 have lost all of their natural teeth! Here’s what is going on.

Tooth decay is a bacterial disease. The bacterium, streptococcus mutans (S. mutans), is one of many millions of bacteria living in our mouths. Most of these bacteria are harmless, some even beneficial. However, S. mutans is the culprit causing tooth decay by feeding on sugars in our mouth. Simple carbohydrates are fermented by S. mutans into lactic acid. Lactic acid increases acidity in the mouth, initiating the process of dissolving tooth enamel, also referred to as de-mineralization. This is a simplistic explanation of tooth decay; however, this article is not meant to be a chemistry lesson, but rather an introduction to a wonderful sugar substitute called Xylitol.

What is Xylitol you ask? Xylitol is a natural sugar, sometimes called wood sugar or birch sugar. It can be extracted from birch wood, raspberries, plums and other fruits, corn, seed hulls, and nutshells. Xylitol is a 5-carbon structure and, unlike the 6-carbon structure of sucrose, is not a substance on which bacteria can grow. In fact, Xylitol may inhibit S. mutans and other bacterial enzymes and actually interfere with the metabolism of other sugars found in the mouth.

So, what does all this chemistry babble mean to us in terms of our dental hygiene and general health? Xylitol is actually a “tooth-friendly” sugar substitute. Xylitol not only discourages tooth decay, but may actively help repair small cavities. Recent research suggests Xylitol attracts and then starves harmful bacteria, allowing remineralization of damaged teeth. Xylitol is not a sugar, so there is no sugar rush, or crash. Twenty-five years of scientific research, mostly on children, has shown that regular use of Xylitol over a period of time reduces the incidence of cavities. There are many studies, the majority conducted in “developing” countries like Belize, Hungary, and Costa Rica, where routine dental care is limited at best, and the results are consistent; the incidence of dental cavities is reduced by large percentages, in some cases as much as 75%. Most research tested gums and candies (mints) containing Xylitol, since the delivery systems that produced the best anti-cavity results were those permitting direct contact with the teeth for the longest time.

Xylitol is also available in toothpastes, mouthwashes, chewable supplements and breath sprays. How much should we use? Studies show using 4-12 grams per day is most effective. If a piece of gum contains 1 gram, chew a minimum of four pieces per day. Given the safety of this product, this is one case where “more is better.” Remarkably, it appears that regular use of Xylitol for a period of time (2 years in the study of children in Belize), provides lasting protection against cavities. These children were examined five years later and the Xylitol group had an average of only 1.5 new cavities, compared to 4 new cavities in the control group.

Another study indicated that regular intake of Xylitol by mom while baby is in the womb, provides lifelong protection for baby. New clinical evidence appears regularly about this safe sugar substitute. Other benefits include prevention of childhood ear infections, lower risk of Type II Diabetes due to the slower absorption of this sugar into the blood, and reduction of subsequent insulin response. A Finnish study has shown improved bone density.

Apparently Xylitol is here to stay. Children who begin chewing Xylitol gum about a year before their permanent teeth erupt may avoid a lifetime of painful visits to the dentist. In fact, one dentist was reported as saying that regular use of Xylitol in the American diet, could put dentists out of business. Time to change our diets people!

Nancy Brillault is a clinically certified herbalist, certified aromatherapist and practicing wellness consultant in Santa Fe, New Mexico.


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The New Super Hero for Your Kids- Winter 07-08 Catalog

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

By Nancy Webster

Siren-like wailing rose and fell from the kitchen table. Then, shaking uncontrollably, my husband collapsed on the floor in front of the sink.

For the past ten years, the scene of my then five-year-old daughter choking down our family food supplement while my husband laughed himself into oblivion has been one of our favorite home videos. Every time we watch, memories of gagging on green slime overcome us. But what a different scene the camera would capture nowadays.

“Andrew, close the refrigerator! We’re not through with dinner yet.”

We routinely call our current five-year-old son back to the table until it’s time to take vitamins. You’d think he was pulling ice cream out of the freezer for dessert, but what he wants is the chilled Beeyoutiful SuperKids vitamins our children take after dinner.

It’s the orange, sweet flavor they love, reminiscent of that yummy, chewable baby aspirin my husband and I remember taking as children. The sweetness comes from xylitol rather than sugar (see the Beeyoutiful summer ’07 catalog to review the cavity-prevention merits of xylitol). And the orange taste comes from real orange juice. Our children think of it as a dessert supplement! But I think it’s simply the best bunch of kid’s vitamins ever devised.

The Elusive Nutrition Dream
Ever since high school I’ve read about ways to improve health. The problem is, time and again, Real Life gets in the way of a perfect diet.

Before children, my husband and I lived in Los Angeles where ambitious “gardening” would have been to grow a tomato plant in a pot on the front steps of our apartment. A cross-country move gave us more outdoor space, but our subdivision yard in Atlanta still yielded only enough room for a small organic garden. I augmented our home-grown produce by hauling our growing crop of babies to the local farmer’s market every week. We had more money for groceries, but since I spent most of my time nursing babies and chasing tricycles around the neighborhood instead of soaking and prepping healthy foods, the perfect diet still remained out of reach.

But now that we live on a farm all the challenges are gone—not! Life-long city slickers don’t become country folk overnight. We often can’t find where our free-range chickens ranged to do their laying. For the frustratingly brief time our cow was giving milk, she boasted interminable mastitis. The one time we actually achieved a sizable garden, it was so successful we couldn’t put up the food fast enough and much of the produce rotted on the ground. And fresh, wholesome meat? My daughter’s sheep became pets—and you can’t eat your pets! Honey? My son’s bees either swarmed or died after just one good season of production. The challenge of converting to country living is exacerbated by my homeschooling of eight children (several with special needs) and helping my husband with his business. So even here, the perfect diet eludes us.

Unfortunately, finding the right supplements to help isn’t easy. Many sold on the cheap are made from synthetic combinations that fool your body into thinking it’s got the real thing. What’s worse, many inexpensive vitamins are chock full (so to speak) of artificial colors, flavors, and sweeteners, and some are stuffed with fillers like wheat gluten or yeast that can trigger allergies.

Even some of the good health enhancers are not without problems. Our kids complain about the stifling odors of essential oils, and if you take five or six different specific-purpose vitamins, opening and closing the containers can seem like the job that never ends. Juicing is a superb way to complement meals, but the mega-amounts of produce and the hours required to juice for a large family each week make regular juicing prohibitive.

When my years-long search finally led me to SuperKids from Beeyoutiful, my biggest problems were solved. These liquid multivitamins contain all the ingredients you want in a single supplement, plus generous extras, all derived from real food substances.

A Radically Good Supplement
Free radicals. You’ve likely heard much about how they affect our health—and for good reason. Free radicals are damaged, lonely cell molecules missing an electron mate because of too much oxygen. This misalignment is caused by things like poor diet and chemical pollution. These free agents go crazy in body cells until they can steal an electron from some unsuspecting stable molecule. The theft, of course, then makes the once stable molecule lonely and crazy, too. This chain reaction damages cells and compromises the overall health of your body.

I first learned about these bad guys when our daughter with Down syndrome was seven months old. At the time she had “failure to thrive,” so under the supervision of a specialist, we began what is called targeted nutritional intervention—giving her selected vitamin supplements as antioxidants to counter the negative effects of too much cellular oxygen. (People with Down syndrome are especially susceptible to free radical damage because of their extra chromosome.) Within a month of starting the vitamin plan, Grace began growing noticeably. She gained alertness and motor skills by the day. We followed the regimen for more than three years, and today, at age eleven, she is extremely healthy and high functioning.

SuperKids is perfectly equipped for free radical warfare. Although a human body can produce some antioxidants for itself, it must have the input of foods containing antioxidants like vitamins C and E, bioflavanoids, and carotenes to successfully wage a serious health-building war. These vitamins stop the free radical chain reaction by providing an electron to stabilize the molecules. Since few of us maintain a perfect diet, our bodies need these reinforcements.

Neutralizing free radicals provides long-term benefits such as decreased tumor rates, heart attack prevention, and increased longevity. The exciting benefits arise because antioxidants affect metabolic processes that bring about changes we can feel and see in our physical health (better joint movement, improved skin conditions, faster healing), our emotional health (better ability to cope with stress), and our psychological state (increased alertness).  It’s not just old people who need this assistance!

The list of antioxidant ingredients in SuperKids is phenomenal. Lycopene, for example, is extracted from ripe tomatoes, and it exhibits the highest overall antioxidant activity of any carotenoid. Lycopene is especially known for reducing cancers—a protection needed even for children these days.

The aloe vera juice in SuperKids treats bugs and internal boo-boos largely by smoothing out the digestion, thereby maximizing the bioavailability of the included vitamins and minerals.  Your children will enjoy happier and more regular trips to the bathroom, thanks to aloe’s helpful work in the colon. Meanwhile, the manganese, zinc, selenium, and other colloidal minerals plus the Vitamin D in SuperKids enhance your children’s absorption of calcium. This helps bone growth which takes place the fastest between ages four and 12. Healthy bones are much better at surviving bike wrecks and falls from tree houses.

Some moms say their children are more active after taking SuperKids. I suspect this is because these children are experiencing cell improvements, and the moms may be seeing for the first time what their children are like when their little bodies are in prime working order.

There’s not a food out there that could provide so many health benefits to my children for the twenty-cents-per-serving cost of SuperKids. Knowing how wonderful Beeyoutiful’s SuperMom vitamins have been for me (I’m coping much better with Real Life now, even as the old-lady hormones rage. And SuperMom vitamins reversed the extreme hair loss of my 16 year-old-daughter!), I am thrilled to have SuperKids formulated especially for my little ones—and for my niece, whose idea of vegetables is French fries!

Beeyoutiful vitamins are now a family affair, and I enjoy more peace of mind knowing that gaps in the family diet have been adequately and easily filled. But I must admit there’s not as much to laugh about in our more recent videos of vitamin taking. Which reminds me: we still need to submit that slime-eating scene to Funniest Home Videos. It just might be a winner.

Beeyoutiful Products Mentioned in This Article:


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Posted in Children's Health, Nutrition, Winter '07-'08 Catalog | No Comments »