A recent article in the New York Times featured a young woman who had been prescribed 10 different psychiatric drugs by the time she graduated from high school. She’s one of the millions of U.S. children who are now taking one or more drugs to manage an array of mental disorders.In 4th grade, Renae Smith found herself struggling in school and was given Focalin, a prescription drug for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Still on her ADHD meds, she reported severe depression and anxiety as a freshman in high school and was prescribed the antidepressant Prozac. When the effects of Prozac dissipated over time, she was given an additional antidepressant, Effexor. Subsequent drugs were prescribed to stabilize mood, and more to dull the side effects of existing prescriptions. By the time she graduated from high school, she was taking 5 different mood-altering drugs and had been prescribed ten different psychiatric drugs in her young lifeThe Centers for Diseas…

One way to prepare your child for a satisfying and successful life is by helping them take on increasing levels of age-appropriate responsibility for taking care of themselves and contributing to the household.According to Janet Lehman, MSW, who specializes in child behavior issues, all children want and need to be given tasks and chores. Successfully completing valuable work feeds a child’s sense of mastery and self-esteem, especially if they’re praised for doing it well—or sometimes for doing it at all! Taking on increasingly more demanding tasks prepares them to become competent and self-confident adults. Lehman suggests explaining to your child that the family is a team, and that everyone in the family has an important role to play in the team’s success. The adults bring in the money to support the family and also do most of the work to create and maintain a home. As children, their job is to go to school and do their homework and to help take care of their h…

How much vitamin C do you need?The government’s Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA)—90 milligrams (mg) of vitamin C per day for adult men and 75 mg per day for adult women—is enough to prevent scurvy, a potentially fatal disease in which the body literally falls apart due to vitamin C deficiency. (Vitamin C is needed for making collagen, an essential component of the connective tissue that holds the body together.)But vitamin C does a great many more things in our bodies than help us make collagen. In fact, it probably does more to keep you well and vital than any other molecule you can put into your body. Vitamin C is essential to: detoxificationrepair of injuryimmune functionour ability to handle stresshealthy hormone activityhealthy neurotransmitter functionenergy productioniron utilizationnitrous oxide functions (which help with energy and also with healthy blood pressure)healthy bone formation, andoptimal brain functionAnd to top it all off,…

Would you like to be smarter? Of course, you would! Who wouldn’t want to be able to bring laser-like attention to the task at hand, assess all the elements in a situation quickly, analyze how they interrelate, and remain wholeheartedly engaged and absorbed until any problem is solved creatively and effectively?Well, vitamin C supplementation can help with that, especially if you’re at all deficient — and most of us are!Recently, Korean scientists assembled a group of 241 healthy, young (ages 20-39) adults to see if their serum vitamin C levels correlated with their “mental vitality.” Indeed, it did. So the researchers went a step further. About half of these young Korean men and women had “inadequate” levels of the vitamin, which the researchers defined as being less than 0.88 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). Fifty of these vitamin C-insufficient subjects were invited to participate in a four-week experiment. Half of them took 500 mg of vitamin C twice a day, fo…

According to Tylenol manufacturer Johnson & Johnson, acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, is used by 50 million Americans each week to treat pain, fever, and the aches and pains associated with cold and flu. It’s become as common as aspirin.And like aspirin, this over-the-counter drug is assumed to be quite safe. In fact, it gained its reputation as being safer than aspirin and the other non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs) because it was, as a famous actress told us in a TV ad, “gentle on the stomach.” Translation: it doesn’t cause gastrointestinal bleeding, while NSAIDs do. Then why would neurologist and pain management specialist Aric Hausknecht, M.D., call it “by far the most dangerous drug ever made?”Perhaps because, although when used in low doses its side effects are generally mild, it is notoriously over-dosed when used to address pain. According to the National Institutes of Health, acetaminophen overdose poisons the liver and leads…

Preventing osteoporosis in old age should begin early. We build up our bone stores in childhood and as young adults, reaching peak bone mass in our thirties. From this peak, we begin gradually losing bone.Bones undergo a continual process called “remodeling” in which old bone is dismantled, and new bone is built to take its place. The adult human skeleton is renewed every 10 years by overhauling tiny patches of bone at a time. First, bone cells called osteoclasts chip away at old bone (often referred to as “bone resorption”); then bone cells called osteoblasts build fresh new bone. Somewhere in our thirties, we start losing more bone than we build, so the more bone we’ve amassed in our youth with good nutrition and weight-bearing exercise, the better our chances will be of maintaining strong bones for life. But, because bones are constantly being replaced, we can, in the words of President Joe Biden, “Build Back Better” at any time. Many factors influence both the qu…

If you plan to live to a ripe old age, you’ll want your bones to be good for the long haul.Unfortunately, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation, about half our population over the age of fifty is “cruisin’ for a bruisin’”—a bone fracture due to either osteoporosis, a disease in which bones become thin, weak and prone to fracture, or “low bone density,” a condition in which bones have become thin, weak and prone to fracture to a somewhat lesser degree. There are some risk factors for osteoporosis that you can’t do anything about—age, gender (a woman’s risk of developing osteoporosis is four times greater than a man’s), genetics, being thin and small boned, and either Asian or blond and fair-skinned—but you can still maintain healthy bones for a life with the right care. Last week we talked about bone health supplementation and getting the “complete team” of nutrients needed with Beyond Health’s Bone Mineral Formula along with a good multi and individuali…

The biggest misconception about osteoporosis is that it can be prevented simply by getting enough calcium in the diet or through supplements. At Beyond Health we often get questions about “what’s the best calcium for building good bones?” On the other hand, many people tell us they’ve heard that supplemental calcium can be dangerous (we’ll get to that later).But first, while we’re glad that more and more women (and men!) of all ages are taking proactive steps to build bones that will last a lifetime, building healthy bone is a little more complicated than just getting enough calcium. Calcium plays many vital roles in our bodies—in energy production, nerve transmission, muscle contraction, blood clotting and more—but it is certainly most well known as the major component of bone (it makes up about 65% of our bones). But like the star player on a football team, calcium can’t “win the game” by itself. It needs a complete team of vitamins and minerals backing it up.For examp…

This year we’re focusing on energy—which of course comes from eating food. But overeating—eating more than we need to meet biological demand—can weigh us down, literally, with energy stored as fat.Our nation is obsessed with food and weight. We love to eat, eat a lot of the wrong things, and eat more than we need, so we’re constantly looking for ways to lose weight. Food psychologist Marc David reports that nearly 50% of little girls in the U.S. ages 3-6(!) are already concerned about their weight and report that they are on a diet, while about 1/3 of American adults are on a diet at any given time.Did nature make a mistake in giving us an appetite that drives us to overeat?Dr. Doug Lisle, PhD, co-author of The Pleasure Trap, has an answer for this. Our primitive ancestors and their appetites were perfectly adapted to their environment. Three instincts gave them an evolutionary advantage: 1) the drive to experience pleasure; 2) the drive to avoid pain; and 3) the drive to be efficien…

Sometimes the sensation creeps up on your or comes on suddenly: You have no energy to do anything. Work feels like a slog. You put off household chores like washing dishes or taking out the trash. In between, you settle for takeout because it requires minimal effort. Day after day, the sensation persists, and rather than attribute it to lifestyle habits, you conclude that you have a lack of willpower. According to psychologist Caterina Lino, "Overall, self-control appears to be a better predictor of academic achievement than intelligence. It is also a stronger determinant of effective leadership than charisma, and more important for marital satisfaction than empathy." Willpower and Your Brain Do you believe you lack willpower? The reality is, you probably have more than you know. The truth is, everyone has two parts in their brain that are often in conflict. There is an older, "primitive brain" governed by the pleasure principle; it wants what it wants right now. Another part…

When we think about what fuels our health, we focus on vitamins, minerals and fiber and the foods plus supplements that help us meet recommended daily amounts. Yet, particularly when it comes to children's health, we tend to bypass essential fatty acids.In writing recently about our newly formulated Kids Mega Multi, we said we believed all children should be on a good multi and also a source of essential fatty acids (EFAs).Both adults and children are apt to be low in EFAs, especially two EFAs commonly found in seafood, EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), which are crucial to children's neurological and cognitive development. DHA, which makes up 30-60% of the retina, is also absolutely necessary for normal eye development.Shockingly, a 2021 government survey on the diets of U.S. children between the ages of 1 and 6 found that 98% were deficient in DHA. Although EPA was not measured directly in this survey, as a close relative to DHA, it can be presumed EPA was l…

If you're like most parents, you want to give your child everything they need to thrive - to succeed in their endeavors and to create rewarding and joyful lives. You want to provide them with nourishment - emotional, spiritual and physical - and protect them from harm. Physical nourishment starts with a good diet. Many studies show that good nutrition helps children feel better about themselves, adjust more easily to varied social situations and excel in school. Yet, government surveys continue to find our children are deficient in important nutrients, and that such deficiencies have serious repercussions on their mental, emotional and physical well-being and development.Conscientious parents may provide their children with a good diet containing plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables and other whole foods, but getting these notoriously picky eaters to consume all the vitamins and minerals they need is another story! Which may explain why about one-third of American children are now tak…

Good habits are essential in being able to live the lives we desire. Still, we tend to approach willpower not as something we can build up and strengthen but, instead, as an innate characteristic that we either have or don't. We further perceive bad habits as reflective of our lack of willpower. But, as many know, it's not so easy to break bad habits or to start new ones, like regular exercise or a daily meditation practice. Too often, attempts to change habits fail. Repeated failures can create the unintended pattern of failing, which leads to losing hope and believing we're incapable of change. So, the first consideration in changing habits is to establish the habit of success! How can you get started? Treat Willpower Like a Muscle The will is like a muscle that needs training to be strengthened. Imagine if you began weightlifting by trying to press 200 pounds! You would certainly fail. But most people set self-improvement goals that are similarly much too…

"What you repeatedly do (i.e. what you spend time thinking about and doing each day) ultimately forms the person you are, the things you believe and the personality that you portray." - James Clear, author of the New York Times bestselling book Atomic Habits You find yourself falling into certain patterns day in and day out. These are your habits, whether you realize them or not. Some support you toward your goals, while others, it seems, get you bogged down in less-beneficial behaviors. Our habits define us, but what exactly are habits? Defining "Habit" A habit is formed when we perform a certain behavior repeatedly over time because it rewards us in some way. This continual repetition literally etches neural pathways in our brains, so that eventually we respond to a given trigger automatically and mostly unconsciously with that behavior. For example, triggered by a feeling of thirst, we seek out water or some other beverage to drink. Triggered by entering a dark room, we swi…

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Will Durant, summarizing what Aristotle had to say on the subject of habits What does it mean to develop good habits? What does it mean - and what are the effects of - having a "bad" habit? Let's start with a more personal perspective: It was decades ago, an unseasonably hot spring day in a high school chemistry class. Along with my fellow students, I was already having trouble concentrating on the droning voice of our dour teacher, Mr. Barkley, when a loud motorcycle came roaring to a stop right outside our window. Eager for distraction, we rushed to the open window and saw a cyclist dressed from head to toe in black leather. He'd stopped to pick up, of all people, a nun in full traditional garb. As she hopped on the back of the motorcycle, and it sped away, we students were amazed and delighted to hear Mr. Barkley sigh and remark in his usual dry monotone, "I guess it's all right as l…

Have you tried to establish a regular meditation practice, but found it difficult to sustain over time? Join the club! Or better yet, join a group! Support systems, from classes to a workout partner, have long been a strategy to help people stick with an exercise routine and ultimately begin a new habit. Incorporating meditation into your daily life isn't any different. New habits take practice, dedication and establishing a pattern, and encouragement in varying degrees helps get you there. In both scenarios, one thing that may be getting in your way is a lack of social support. Although you can read about all the great things meditation can do for your health, energy and emotional equilibrium, and even experience benefits when you try it, if the people around you are totally uninterested in meditation, it's easy to get discouraged and begin thinking it's not worth the effort.Most Buddhists belong to religious communities called sanghas. Like any other religious community, the sangha p…

Whether through burnout or emerging as cardiovascular or other health issues, chronic stress takes a toll on the body. Recently, we've been focusing on the importance of balancing activity with rest and relaxation for sustaining maximum energy and efficiency. R&R is also essential for combating the negative effects of stress. Today we'll be giving you a "quick fix" through a breathing exercise to help you shift quickly from stress mode to "rest and relax" mode. The Relationship Between Stress and the Nervous System As you may remember, central to the topic of stress versus rest is the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the part of our nervous system that controls involuntary actions like breathing, digestion, the heartbeat, etc. The ANS has two complementary halves, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which control stress and relaxation in our bodies. The SNS responds to challenge or threat with the classic "fight o…

You never feel like you have enough time. Your day seems like it just doesn't have enough hours, or you're too tired to tackle everything on your list. However, rather than attempt to speed up your pace or try another time management technique, consider addressing your sleep - specifically if and how much restorative sleep you're getting in each night. What Is Restorative Sleep?To operate at top energy and efficiency, getting a good night's sleep - seven to nine hours of "restorative sleep" that leaves you waking up feeling rested and refreshed - is essential.The body is self-healing, self-repairing and self-detoxifying - but only if it gets enough rest and sleep, because all this healing, repairing and detoxifying work is done when the body is at rest.To put it straightforwardly, when you wake up feeling alert, rested and ready to start your day, you've had a night of restorative sleep. Restorative sleep applies to the period lasting from deep sleep and rapid eye movement (REM), durin…