Optimum Connections

This free weekly teleconference call will be focused on the animal product BioPreparation featuring guest Russell Louie of Optimum Choices, LLC. Russell is the premier distributor of the revolutionary BioPreparation and has the most experience using BioSuperfood/BioPreparation on dogs and cats in the country. He will explain how BioPreparation has helped animals with mast cell tumors, auto-immune disease, arthritis, hemangiosarcoma, chronic renal failure or chronic kidney disease in cats, hypo- and hyper-thyroid conditions, diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and much more. Even if your animal is still young and free of any symptoms, if you want to extend the life of your pet and avoid the expense of common degenerative diseases, you need to attend. E-mail Russell for the teleconference phone number and PIN to attend.

Canine Massage to benefit Golden Retriever Rescue of the Rockies

Margaret Auld-Louie of Optimum Choices will be offering canine massage sessions by donation at the annual Halloween party of the Golden Retriever Rescue of the Rockies on October 22, 11-2 at Rocky Mountain Agility in Arvada, Colorado.

Oil of the month

by Russell Louie

Click here to order on our Young Living World Essential Oils website. Click on Product Catalog, then pull down the menus Essential Oils/Singles A-M to find Lavender, or call us at (303) 271-1649 or (866) 305-2306 (toll-free).

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Lack of minerals leads to lack of health

by Margaret Auld-Louie

Mineral deficiencies in the diets of humans and animals can lead to many health problems including but not limited to heart disease, strokes, arthritis, depression, hyperactivity, fatigue, neurological irregularities, blood problems and immune system problems. Both humans and animals require at least 60 minerals for optimal health, according to Gary Price Todd, MD. There are 60 minerals found in human blood so biochemists agree that they all must have some significant function in the body, whether we know what it is or not. Scientists are still continuing to discover how our body uses various minerals. Some scientists believe that we need every substance found in the earth's crust but we don't have the proof yet of each element's role in health. Minerals are just as essential as vitamins to good health. They are used in every chemical reaction in the body and are essential components of molecules. For instance, iron is required to make hemoglobin, the molecule that carries oxygen in our blood. Minerals are often catalysts for other nutrients, meaning that the other nutrients won't do you much good without the mineral that works with them. For example, Vitamin E and selenium work best together. The following chart shows that scientists are still continuing to discover which trace elements our bodies need to function properly:

Health experts commonly state that if you eat a balanced diet, you don't need supplements, as your food will provide a range of nutrients. They add that you can take a multiple vitamin/mineral for "insurance", to make sure you are not missing anything. But if you look at the label of that supplement, you will probably only see the minerals listed in the chart above (plus the minerals needed in larger amounts like calcium and magnesium). Also, the supplement is not supplying the vitamins and minerals in the form nature intended, as part of a whole food. Instead, they have been extracted from food or synthesized in a laboratory. Some of the minerals may be in a form that is difficult to absorb or even toxic. (See our article on Whole Food Supplements to learn more).

What about the remainder of the 60 minerals found in our blood that are not in your multiple? Can your body do without them until scientists prove that they are necessary? Will your food supply them? Unfortunately, soils have become increasingly depleted of minerals over the last 100 years. So your food probably can't supply all the minerals you need for health (or that your pets need for their health). How did our soils become so depleted? Farming depletes soil over time if the minerals are not returned to the soil. The longer an area is farmed, the more depleted the soil becomes. Commercial fertilizers were introduced in the early 1900's but they often contain only nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Farmers generally never put back more than 8 minerals into the soil, as it would be too costly and is not needed to get vegetables to grow. Farmers are paid for the yield of their crop, not the nutrition levels. Even organic farms may be depleted in minerals, as organic manures and composts provide nitrogen and phosphorus but may be low in minerals. To remineralize soil requires spreading minerals on the soil, such as rock dust, not a common practice even with organic farmers.

To get some idea of how depleted our soils are, Dr. David Thomas conducted research on the change in mineral content of foods in the United Kingdom and published the following chart showing the depletion that has occurred:

This depletion is occurring worldwide, as is shown by the following chart presented to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 by the US Senate:

Can your lack of minerals be solved by taking one of the colloidal mineral solutions that have become so popular in the holistic health world? The Weston A. Price Foundation states that there is no evidence that they are absorbed any better than true solutions of mineral salts or minerals in chelated form. Furthermore, they state that "these products may contain an abundance of minerals that can be toxic in large amounts, such as silver and aluminum." They also state that chelated minerals can be dangerous if they work as advertised, being absorbed directly rather than broken down in the gut. In that case, they "bypass the body's exquisitely designed system for taking in just what it needs and may cause serious imbalances." Another option is to use concentrates of minerals such as ConcenTrace from the Great Salt Lake. However, even though the minerals are dissolved and naturally occur in the lake, the amounts could be toxic. So mineral solutions like this should only be used under the care of a health care practitioner who can determine the amount your body needs, without overdosing on it.

The safest way to get the minerals that our bodies and our pets' bodies need for optimal health is to drink mineral rich water and eat superfoods and other natural substances high in minerals. These include seaweed, unprocessed sea salt, algae and bone broth. Primitive societies also sometimes ate small amounts of mud or clay to obtain minerals, which provided the additional benefit of absorbing toxins in the gut.

Optimum Choices offers algae products for people and animals that provide a whole food solution for obtaining the minerals essential for health. These algae naturally contain over 92 colloidal essential and natural minerals and trace elements including calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, sodium, chloride, potassium, sulfur iron, iodine, copper, manganese, zinc, cobalt, molybdenum, selenium, chromium, tin, vanadium, fluorine, silicon, nickel, etc. For more information, go to our BioSuperfood or BioPreparation pages.

We also suggest replacing your iodized table salt with a whole, unprocessed salt such as Celtic Sea Salt®, RealSalt® or Himalayan crystal salt. These salts have not been refined and therefore contain all the trace elements that naturally occur with salt in the ocean. Our bodies need salt to function properly, especially the adrenal glands, but the regular table salt found in supermarkets is no more healthy for your body than white sugar or white flour. Whole salts can be found now in many health food stores as well as on the Internet.

Another superfood that is high in minerals is the Ningxia wolfberry (or Goji berry). This fruit is grown on the high plateaus in China that are fed by glacial streams from the Himalayas. The richest soils in minerals are those that are located where glaciers were or that are fed by glacial water. If you doubt the importance of minerals to health, consider that there are 400% more centenarians (people age 100+) living in the Ningxia province than the rest of China. To learn more about this super antioxidant fruit and the products available from it, click here.

To learn more about soil mineral depletion and health, see these websites:

www.westonaprice.org/basicnutrition/mineralprimer.html
www.organicgarden.org.uk/min_dep_report.pdf
http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/marsh211.htm
http://www.mindfully.org/Food/Organic-Crops-Superior-WorthingtonJul99.htm
http://www.positivehealth.com/permit/Articles/Nutrition/marsh69.htm
http://www.i-c-m.org.uk/journal/2003/jun/may06.htm 

Book of the month

Nutrition & Physical Degeneration

by Weston A. Price

ISBN 0-87983-816-7

Click picture to order from Radiant Life

review by Margaret Auld-Louie

This book was published in 1939 but the information in it is just as vital and unheeded today as when it came out. In my opinion, this is the most important book on nutrition published in the last hundred years. Unfortunately, it is also a little-known book. Weston Price was a dentist in Cleveland, Ohio who was curious about the connection between diet and dental caries (cavities). This curiosity led him to travel around the world studying primitive societies that were still eating their traditional foods. His studies took him all over the globe during the 1920's and 1930's where he studied Swiss, Gaelics, Eskimos, North American Indians, Polynesians, Melanesians, Africans, Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maori, Malay Micronesians, Ancients Peruvians, Isolated Peruvian Indians, High Andes Indians and Amazon Jungle Indians. He was fortunate to live in a "window of time" when it became possible to make these extensive travels, yet there were still numerous primitive groups that were not yet eating modern foods. The amount of research he conducted was monumental--I can't imagine someone doing it even today, when travel is so much easier.

In every society he studied, he found that when the natives ate their traditional foods, they had virtually no cavities and broad dental arches with straight teeth. Additionally, they were free of degenerative diseases as well as many infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. When these societies started making contact with modern societies and switched to eating what he called the "displacing foods of modern commerce" (or what we would call the "Standard American Diet" or SAD), including white flour, white sugar, canned foods, white rice and vegetable oils, their health declined drastically. The most amazing thing to me was that he proved that crooked, crowded teeth are caused by diet, not genetics. We have all been taught that people have crooked teeth today and require orthodontists because of "changed genetics" leading to smaller mouths over time. Dr. Price proved this is not so with his extensively documented studies of primitive societies. He found that with children in the same family, from the same parents, the children born when the parents were on the traditional diet had broad dental arches with straight, perfect teeth and plenty of room for all their teeth. When the family changed to a modern diet, the subsequent children had narrow faces with small, crowded dental arches that could not accommodate all their teeth, leading to extremely crooked teeth when the permanent teeth came in. (The reason for this is that their body did not have the raw materials or nutrients necessary to build a broad jaw and face during their growth). In addition, these later children were far more likely to have birth defects, their health was much poorer and they were prone to diseases such as tuberculosis.

In all these societies, he found that people on a traditional diet had a minimum of cavities, even if their teeth were filthy and never cleaned. Once the societies switched to modern foods, dental cavities became rampant and the pain from abscessed teeth caused much suffering (because these societies had modern foods but not modern dentists yet). Dr. Price very systematically studied these societies, looking in mouths of each person and counting cavities, as well as photographing faces and dental arches. If nothing else convinces you of the truth of his findings, his photos will when you see how the primitives on traditional foods exhibit broad faces and dental arches with perfect teeth vs. the photos of primitives on modern foods showing narrow faces with horribly crooked teeth and rampant tooth decay.

Dr. Price studied the diets of these societies extensively and collected samples of foods that he analyzed in his laboratories to find out what they contained. Their diets varied greatly depending on what was available locally but the food was always very nutrient dense and high in minerals. It contained a much higher level of nutrients, especially vitamins A and D, than foods in modern diets. Despite all the talk today about the importance of fruits and vegetables in promoting health and preventing cancer, these were not the most important foods that Dr. Price found to be promoting the health of primitive societies. In fact, some societies ate few vegetables due to lack of availability (such as Eskimos living in the far north). Instead, it was the foods providing the fat soluble vitamins (such as A and D) that conferred the immune boosting, body building and reproductive benefits. Societies that ate a lot of seafood were especially healthy. Peruvian Indians would hike from the high mountains down to the sea to get fish eggs so they could "have healthy babies", instinctively realizing the super nutrition they provided. The Swiss, who were isolated from the ocean, got their fat soluble vitamins from dairy products, especially butter produced when the cows were grazing on rapidly growing grass. The organs of animals were also a rich source of nutrients for many primitive societies.

The health implications of his work extend far beyond the effects of diet on cavities and crooked teeth. The poor nutrition that leads to a small mouth and narrow face also causes a host of other health problems, including reduced immunity, a narrow pelvis in women (making childbirth more difficult) and difficulty reproducing. Dr. Price found that when women were on inadequate diets, their reproductive capacity was reduced over time leading to miscarriages as well as each subsequent child being in poorer health and having narrower faces. Reading that helped me realize why I have many of the chronic health problems I deal with, having been not only the third child in my family but coming after 4 miscarriages (indicating my mother's reduced reproductive capacity, due to inadequate diet). My dental arches are so narrow that I had to have 4 permanent teeth removed before my braces were installed. We are so used to modern people having narrow faces that it has become the standard of beauty today. If you look at most of today's female movie stars, especially the younger women, they have narrow faces and pointed chins. The primitive women on traditional diets in Dr. Price's photos have broad faces and jaws (which can then accommodate all their teeth).

Dr. Price's work is unheeded and unknown by most health professionals but is starting to become better known thanks to the efforts of the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, who keep his book in print, and the Weston A. Price Foundation, who educate people on proper nutrition based on his findings. We have featured books in the past by Sally Fallon, President of the Weston A. Price Foundation, but if you want to go to the source and read the amazing findings and travels of Dr. Price in his own words, get Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.

Contact us

Click here to give your pet the fountain of youth today!

E-mail

General Information: Russell@OptimumChoices.com
Webmaster: Webmaster@OptimumChoices.com
Newsletter Editor, Margaret Auld-Louie: Editor@OptimumChoices.com

Telephone

303-271-1649
866-305-2306 (toll-free)
Normal office hours are 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM Mountain Time (U.S.). If you would like a return call outside those hours, please specify what days and times are best.

Location (call first for appointment)

416 Plateau Pky
Golden, CO 80403-1533
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