Boosting Your Immune System During the Rainy Days
Think the flu shot is the only way to beat the cold and flu season? Think again. Even if you're in high-risk group, the vaccination will only protect you against a few strains of the flu, so it still leaves you vulnerable to the myriad of other viruses out there. Your best bet is to support your immune system by reducing stress and getting adequate rest and nutrition. And be prepared with some powerful natural remedies in case you do catch a cold or the flu.
Colds-also called upper respiratory tract infections, or URIs for short-are the No. 1 infectious illness around the world and affect about 5% of Filipinos at any given time. It's not unusual for an otherwise healthy adult to get between two and four URIs per year. And a typical toddler can have anywhere from six to 10, especially if he or she is in school or day care. Here in the Philippines, the flu season has started same time with the rainy season, when 4 million to 5 million people can afflicted each year.
Here's a primer: Colds tend to come on slowly, mostly affect the head and throat, and usually don't cause a high fever or other prominent systemic symptoms. It's rare for a cold to progress into anything worse than a scratchy throat, nasal congestion and a headache. In contrast, the flu strikes with a vengeance that can sometimes be devastating. It usually comes on quickly with a fever, diffuse muscle aches, intense fatigue and a severe cough. The flu is responsible for 1,000 to 2,500 deaths each year in the Philippines, usually as a consequence of pneumonia.
Viruses don't cause symptoms by themselves. As soon as our immune cells realize that the body is under attack, they are activated onto releasing an array of messenger proteins and alarm chemicals. These substances are responsible for what is called the inflammatory response, with increased mucous production, swollen respiratory membranes, elevated body temperature and achy muscles. Even though all this congestion and heat can make you feel miserable, it is simply a consequence if your body doing what it has been programmed to do: Repel a foreign invader.
If your symptoms are bad enough to warrant a visit to your medical doctor, you will probably be given some combination of a decongestant (for shrinking swollen nasal membranes), a cough suppressant, an antihistamine (for drying up mucus), and/or an anti-inflammatory drug for alleviating pain and reducing fever. These medications may bring short-term relief, but they can also cause drowsiness, dizziness, anxiety and elevated blood pressure.
Furthermore, since they work by attempting to suppress the inflammatory response, they can actually increase the time it takes to recover from the infection. For example, some laboratory studies have found that suppressing a fever with aspirin or similar drugs allows both cold and influenza viruses to reproduce at a faster rate and may prolong the time it takes to clear them from the body.
If you definitely have the flu, you might be given a prescription for one of the newer antiviral drugs, such as either oseltamivir. Research shows that, at best, these drugs can shorten the length of illness by one or two days, but unless they are started within the first 48 hours of the infection, the drugs are minimally effective. In addition, they are expensive costing at least P1,000 for a five-day supply.
The bottom line for all of these interventions is that none of them does anything to assist the immune system in its task of fighting off the virus, and many of them can make the situation worse in the long run. In contrast, there are a number of natural remedies and nutritional supplements that can help alleviate the symptoms and accelerate the healing process without causing negative side effects. We have found the following to be among the most effective.
Chicken soup
One thousand years have passed since the death of the famed Egyptian Jewish physician-philosopher Moses Maimonides, but his recommendation to eat chicken soup for relief of the common cold and asthmatic symptoms lives on. Perhaps Maimonides would be pleased to learn that several medical studies have confirmed the accuracy of his sage advice. Research done in 1978 at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Miami showed that hot chicken broth is more effective than plain hot water or other liquids at clearing up congestion and increasing airflow in the nasal passages and lungs.
Research conducted in the 1980s at the UCLA School of Medicine found that cooking chicken releases high amounts of the amino acid cysteine (which actively thins mucus), especially when it is combined with such spices as garlic and chili peppers. More recently, a study conducted in 2000 at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha found that chicken soup contains substances that mitigate the excessive inflammatory response produced by white blood cells without interfering with their ability to fight off viruses. All of this adds up to a tasty and nontoxic remedy.
LifePak balances immune support
Vitamins A, C, E, carotenoids, vitamin B6, and zinc help to bolster the immune system and give your body the nutrients to perform optimally. LifePak contains optimal levels of these nutrients to support the normal function of the immune system and keep the body healthy. LifePak has been formulated to provide the nutrients missing from diets that fail to include 5 to 7 servings of fruits and vegetables.
IgG Boost Colostrum Microfiltrate boost your immunity
The immune compounds of colostrums include special proteins and messenger molecules that work with the body's own immune system to promote optimal health and wellness. The immune supporting proteins found in colostrum provide supplemental help to the body's own production of antibodies and include immunoglobulins, lactoferrin, and bioactive enzymes that provide specific immunity in the gut. The messenger molecules of colostrums include cytokines that function as messengers between immune cells and other memory transfer factors that pass immune "memory" from one cell to another. Colostrum also contains important oligosaccharides, found in human breast milk and in the first milk of cows, which support the immune system.
One particularly active component of both human and bovine colostrums is immunoglobulin G or IgG. Providing front-line immune support in the gut, IgG sticks to invading microorganisms making them easier for the body to recognize and eliminate. IgG also neutralizes possibly injurious toxic waste products.
In the developed world, people who eat correctly and take care of their bodies usually have healthy immune systems. However, most individuals undergo periods when their immune resistance is challenged. Stress and occasional sleeplessness, exercise training and fatigue, or poor diet can diminish the body's production of immune-fighting proteins. Production can also decrease with age by as much as 10% per decade after age 50.
Our immune systems can be further challenged by international travel and commerce that increase our exposure to a global network of potentially harmful microorganisms. Recent clinical studies show that regular consumption of bovine colostrums may strengthen our immune system by providing supplemental quantities of immune proteins.
IgG BoostTM contains Pharmanex's proprietary Colostrum MFTTM, a high-quality, standardized extract of bovine colostrums that took twelve years and $50 million to develop. Derived using a patented microfiltration process, Colostrum MFTTM has an extract standardized to 50% IgG content, making Colostrum MFTTM many times more concentrated than other colostrums products on the market today. Each daily dose of IgG BoostTM delivers 500 times the IgG concentration of raw milk and provides critical supplemental immune support to your body's own antibodies. IgG BoostTM is purified from excess first milk of cows in the dairy industry and meets the strict Pharmanex 6S quality standards for safety and efficacy.
Boost your immune system now!
You can buy Pharmanex products from the following link: (Register as a customer or a distributor)
http://www.pharmanexusa.com/cgi-bin/pxweb/profile/en/registrationMain.jsp?spons_ID=PH3716571
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Maintaining Honesty and Integrity
For a leader, honesty and integrity are absolutely essential to survival. A lot of business people don't realize how closely they're being watched by their subordinates. Remember when you were a kid in grammar school, how you used to sit there staring at your teacher all day? By the end of the school year, you could do a perfect imitation of all your teacher's mannerisms. You were aware of the slightest nuances in your teacher's voice - all the little clues that distinguished levels of meaning that told you the difference between bluff and "now I mean business".
And you were able to do that after eight or nine months of observation. Suppose you had five or 10 years. Do you think there would have been anything about your teacher you didn't know?
Now fast forward and use that analogy as a manager. Do you think there's anything your people don't know about you right this minute? If you haven't been totally aboveboard and honest with them, do you really think you've gotten away with it? Not too likely. But if you've been led to believe that you've gotten away with it, there might be a good probability that people are afraid of you, and that's a problem in its own right.
But there is another side of this coin. In any organization, people want to believe in their leaders. If you give them reason to trust you, they're not going to go looking for reasons to think otherwise, and they'll be just as perceptive about your positive qualities as they are about the negative ones.
A situation that happened some years ago at a company in the Midwest illustrates this perfectly. The wife of a new employee experienced complications in the delivery of a baby. There was a medical bill of more than $10,000, and the health insurance company didn't want to cover it. The employee hadn't been on the payroll long enough, the pregnancy was a preexisting condition, etc, etc,.
In any case, the employee was desperate. He approached the company CEO and asked him to talk to the insurance people. The CEO agreed, and the next thing the employee knew, the bill was gone and the charges were rescinded.
Then he told some colleagues about the way the CEO had so readily used his influence with the insurance company, they just shook their heads and smiled. The CEO had paid the bill out of his own pocket, and everybody knew it, no matter how quietly it had been done.
Now an act of dishonesty can't be hidden either, and it will instantly undermine the authority of a leader. But an act of integrity and kindness like the example above is just as obvious to all concerned. When you're in a leadership position, you have the choice of how you will be seen, but you Will be seen one way or the other, make no mistake about it.
One of the most challenging areas of leadership is your family. Leadership of a family demands even higher standards of honesty and integrity, and the stakes are higher too. You can replace disgruntled employees and start over. You can even get a new job for yourself, if it comes to that. But your family can't be shuffled like a deck of cards. If you haven't noticed, kids are great moral philosophers, especially as they get into adolescence. They're determined to discover and expose any kind of hypocrisy, phoniness, or lack of integrity on the part of authority figures, and if we're parents, that means us. It's frightening how unforgiving kids can be about this, but it really isn't a conscious decision on their part; it's just a necessary phase of growing up.
They're testing everything, especially their parents.
As a person of integrity yourself, you'll find it easy to teach integrity to your kids, and they in turn will find it easy to accept you as a teacher. This is a great opportunity and also a supreme responsibility, because kids simply must be taught to tell the truth: to mean what they say and to say what they mean.
"Praise is one the world's most effective teaching and leadership tools. Criticism and blame, even if deserved, are counter productive unless all other approaches have failed."
Now for the other side of the equation, we all know people who have gotten ahead as a result of dishonest or unethical behavior. When you're a kid, you might naively think that never happens, but when you get older, you realize that it does. Then you think you've really wised up. But that's not the real end of it. When you get older, you see the long-term consequences of dishonest gain, and you realize that in the end it doesn't pay.
"Hope of dishonest gain is the beginning of loss". I don't think that old saying refers to loss of money. I think it actually means loss of self-respect. You can have all the material things in the world, but if you've lost respect for yourself, what do you really have? The only way to ever attain success and enjoy it is to achieve it honestly with pride in what you've done.
This isn't just a sermon, it's very practical advice. Not only can you take it to heart - you can take it to the bank.
And you were able to do that after eight or nine months of observation. Suppose you had five or 10 years. Do you think there would have been anything about your teacher you didn't know?
Now fast forward and use that analogy as a manager. Do you think there's anything your people don't know about you right this minute? If you haven't been totally aboveboard and honest with them, do you really think you've gotten away with it? Not too likely. But if you've been led to believe that you've gotten away with it, there might be a good probability that people are afraid of you, and that's a problem in its own right.
But there is another side of this coin. In any organization, people want to believe in their leaders. If you give them reason to trust you, they're not going to go looking for reasons to think otherwise, and they'll be just as perceptive about your positive qualities as they are about the negative ones.
A situation that happened some years ago at a company in the Midwest illustrates this perfectly. The wife of a new employee experienced complications in the delivery of a baby. There was a medical bill of more than $10,000, and the health insurance company didn't want to cover it. The employee hadn't been on the payroll long enough, the pregnancy was a preexisting condition, etc, etc,.
In any case, the employee was desperate. He approached the company CEO and asked him to talk to the insurance people. The CEO agreed, and the next thing the employee knew, the bill was gone and the charges were rescinded.
Then he told some colleagues about the way the CEO had so readily used his influence with the insurance company, they just shook their heads and smiled. The CEO had paid the bill out of his own pocket, and everybody knew it, no matter how quietly it had been done.
Now an act of dishonesty can't be hidden either, and it will instantly undermine the authority of a leader. But an act of integrity and kindness like the example above is just as obvious to all concerned. When you're in a leadership position, you have the choice of how you will be seen, but you Will be seen one way or the other, make no mistake about it.
One of the most challenging areas of leadership is your family. Leadership of a family demands even higher standards of honesty and integrity, and the stakes are higher too. You can replace disgruntled employees and start over. You can even get a new job for yourself, if it comes to that. But your family can't be shuffled like a deck of cards. If you haven't noticed, kids are great moral philosophers, especially as they get into adolescence. They're determined to discover and expose any kind of hypocrisy, phoniness, or lack of integrity on the part of authority figures, and if we're parents, that means us. It's frightening how unforgiving kids can be about this, but it really isn't a conscious decision on their part; it's just a necessary phase of growing up.
They're testing everything, especially their parents.
As a person of integrity yourself, you'll find it easy to teach integrity to your kids, and they in turn will find it easy to accept you as a teacher. This is a great opportunity and also a supreme responsibility, because kids simply must be taught to tell the truth: to mean what they say and to say what they mean.
"Praise is one the world's most effective teaching and leadership tools. Criticism and blame, even if deserved, are counter productive unless all other approaches have failed."
Now for the other side of the equation, we all know people who have gotten ahead as a result of dishonest or unethical behavior. When you're a kid, you might naively think that never happens, but when you get older, you realize that it does. Then you think you've really wised up. But that's not the real end of it. When you get older, you see the long-term consequences of dishonest gain, and you realize that in the end it doesn't pay.
"Hope of dishonest gain is the beginning of loss". I don't think that old saying refers to loss of money. I think it actually means loss of self-respect. You can have all the material things in the world, but if you've lost respect for yourself, what do you really have? The only way to ever attain success and enjoy it is to achieve it honestly with pride in what you've done.
This isn't just a sermon, it's very practical advice. Not only can you take it to heart - you can take it to the bank.
Saturday, September 10, 2005
What You Control
Here are three things that struck me this week and some points for you to think about on each.
One: Losers let it happen while winners make it happen. A lot of people just let life pass them by. They are bystanders. onlookers, if you will. They are not participants. "Well, I would like to do that someday." Well, why don't you? You can't just let it happen. You have to make it happen.
In fact, watching these dvd's won't change your life unless you take the ideas you learn and make it happen in your own life. ACTION brings rewards. For example, you may be compelled to start your own business, but until you take your $450 down to the business license department you won't have a business. Until you make that first call on a prospective client, it won't happen. Nobody is going to make it happen for you, except you.
So you are left with a question: Am I one of the people who stands by and lets life happen to me, or am I one who makes my life happen the way I want it to?
Two: Winners are busy doing the work within while they are doing without. There are a lot of people who go without. In fact, except for a few trust fund kids, everybody starts out with nothing. The difference between those who end up "with" as opposed to those who end up "without," is that while without, those who succeed are doing the internal mental work about how to end up "with!" Are you without right now? That's okay, just begin to do the important work of developing yourself, learning ideas and principles that will help you succeed, and taking actions that will change your life. In time, your life will catch up to the mental work you are doing now. This is the idea made famous in Napoleon Hill's book, Think and Grow Rich. Remember, it is THINK and Grow Rich, not SIT and Grow Rich.
Three: What do you control in your life? There are a lot of things we can't control: The weather, the national economy, another person's actions, etc. Successful people understand that there are tons of things that they DO control. Wisdom is knowing to let go of the things you can't control and to take responsibility over those things you can control.
What things can you control that will make a huge difference in your life? Try these on for size:
Your attitude
Your health
Your work ethic
Your relationships and associations
Your money habits
Your spiritual perspective
Your base of knowledge
So, take some time to let go of the things you spend too much time on that you just can't control. like worrying about the economy, and spend more time on things you can control, like your own personal income.
Focusing on what you can control will change your life.
One: Losers let it happen while winners make it happen. A lot of people just let life pass them by. They are bystanders. onlookers, if you will. They are not participants. "Well, I would like to do that someday." Well, why don't you? You can't just let it happen. You have to make it happen.
In fact, watching these dvd's won't change your life unless you take the ideas you learn and make it happen in your own life. ACTION brings rewards. For example, you may be compelled to start your own business, but until you take your $450 down to the business license department you won't have a business. Until you make that first call on a prospective client, it won't happen. Nobody is going to make it happen for you, except you.
So you are left with a question: Am I one of the people who stands by and lets life happen to me, or am I one who makes my life happen the way I want it to?
Two: Winners are busy doing the work within while they are doing without. There are a lot of people who go without. In fact, except for a few trust fund kids, everybody starts out with nothing. The difference between those who end up "with" as opposed to those who end up "without," is that while without, those who succeed are doing the internal mental work about how to end up "with!" Are you without right now? That's okay, just begin to do the important work of developing yourself, learning ideas and principles that will help you succeed, and taking actions that will change your life. In time, your life will catch up to the mental work you are doing now. This is the idea made famous in Napoleon Hill's book, Think and Grow Rich. Remember, it is THINK and Grow Rich, not SIT and Grow Rich.
Three: What do you control in your life? There are a lot of things we can't control: The weather, the national economy, another person's actions, etc. Successful people understand that there are tons of things that they DO control. Wisdom is knowing to let go of the things you can't control and to take responsibility over those things you can control.
What things can you control that will make a huge difference in your life? Try these on for size:
Your attitude
Your health
Your work ethic
Your relationships and associations
Your money habits
Your spiritual perspective
Your base of knowledge
So, take some time to let go of the things you spend too much time on that you just can't control. like worrying about the economy, and spend more time on things you can control, like your own personal income.
Focusing on what you can control will change your life.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)