We each have a mighty force of trillions of tiny microorganisms—helpful bacteria and other microbes—living on our skin, in our digestive system, and in tissues throughout the body, that is constantly on guard to defend us against potentially invasive infectious disease-causing pathogens like viruses, yeasts, parasites and harmful bacteria. Discounted for many years by the medical establishment, scientists are now beginning to discover how much we depend on these “good bugs.” Not only do they synthesize vitamins and amino acids and help us to digest and absorb our food, they are also an indispensable part of our immune system. Before a pathogen—bacterial, viral, or fungal—can get into your bloodstream, where it can replicate and become increasingly virulent, it must first get past the formidable fortress created by your skin and mucus membranes. The skin isn’t just a physical barrier; it is an immune system organ, where immune cells and good bugs work together to conquer pot…

This month, it’s all about toxins. According to our founder, Raymond Francis, there is only one disease, malfunctioning cells, and only two reasons cells malfunction: either they don’t have the right materials to work with (deficiency) or they’re being disrupted with the wrong materials (toxins) that interfere with normal cell function.The barrage of manmade toxic chemicals we encounter today is unprecedented, and it’s taking a huge toll on our health.Though it’s still possible to be healthy for life, it takes knowledge and effort—avoiding as many toxins as you can, and using strategies to detoxify your body from those you can’t avoid.We’ve talked about detoxifying your home with air and water filters and recommended detoxing with frequent infrared saunas.But with all the fuss about environmental toxins, you might be surprised to learn that the most potent source of toxins for almost everyone today is digesting and metabolizing food!In making energy from food, the body produces loads o…

The road to health is paved with good intestines. – Unknown Living a long and healthy life depends on good digestion and a strong immune system. Both of these rely on helpful bacteria living in our intestines.  But various factors in modern life, including poor diet, toxins, stress, various medications and especially antibiotics, have diminished our good bug population. As a result, people living today are more vulnerable to infectious disease than ever before. While modern medicine seeks frantically for more and better vaccines and antibiotics to combat infectious disease epidemics, at Beyond Health we take a different approach: We combine the healthy lifestyle described in any of Raymond Francis’s books, a basic supplement program, and probiotics in food and supplements to rebuild and maintain strong immune systems capable of withstanding pathogenic assaults. Probiotics are special microbes that maintain and restore the body’s beneficial bacteria. All traditional soc…

Ask most veterinarians if your pet needs a multivitamin supplement, and you’re apt to get the standard response:  a “balanced diet” should be sufficient, and extra vitamins and minerals may even be harmful. It’s what they’re taught in veterinary school.  Pet food companies play a major role in what veterinary students learn, and these companies would like us to believe that they’re providing an adequate diet for today’s pets, and that anything you might do, from feeding table scraps to giving them un-prescribed supplements is endangering your pet’s health. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Although some are better than others, commercial pet foods are not adequate to support the health of your cat or dog. Like other processed foods, they’re nutritionally deficient and contain toxins. Vitamins and minerals are added in minimal amounts and in cheap forms that are ineffective at best and detrimental to health at worst. An optimal pet diet would be fresh, organic…

There are some taxes you have to pay, or risk going to jail! But others you can avoid, like the tax on your health every time you take an impure, poorly formulated supplement contaminated with solvent residues, artificial colors, and flavors, allergens and/or other potentially harmful chemicals. When shopping for supplements, people often don’t take this tax into account. If they did, they’d realize that the cheapest brands are usually the worst bargains. Not only do these brands provide little or no benefit, they tax your body with toxins that interfere with healthy body chemistry, often doing more harm than good. You may pay good money for something that detracts from rather than adding to your health. Supplement ingredients come in a wide range of purities. The purer the ingredient, the safer and more effective it will be. Although purer ingredients are almost always considerably more expensive, at Beyond Health we use only the purest ingredients available so you get maximum…

Your body is harboring a couple of potential saboteurs! The words saboteur and sabotage come from French mill workers who would throw their wooden shoes, called sabots, into the machinery at work to make it break down or halt as a form of protest. The two potential saboteurs threatening to break down your body are inflammation and oxidation. Both are body processes that are helpful under normal circumstances, but if they get out of control, watch out!  If they’re allowed to develop into chronic inflammation and oxidative stress, they become health saboteurs of the first order and play a major role in every chronic disease, in problems with energy, and in the aging process itself. Unfortunately, almost everyone today is being damaged by these saboteurs. This is how it happens. Inflammation is the body’s response to injury, irritation or infection.  Cutting your finger, for example, will initiate an inflammatory process that enlarges blood vessels (the reason…

Environmental toxins are overwhelming our immune and detoxification systems to make us the most allergy prone people in world history.  Simply drinking a glass of tap water can bombard your body with chemicals that have been linked to allergies and asthma. Allergist Elina Jerschow, MD, and colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have linked chlorine-related chemicals known as dichlorophenols, which are found in tap water and in pesticides, with both allergies and asthma. These researchers found that people with the highest levels of dichlorophenols were 80% more likely to have a food allergy and 61% more likely to have both a food allergy and an environmental allergy (like pollen).  Subsequent research found a similar association between asthma and high levels of dichlorophenols in the urine. While more studies are needed to prove the chemicals cause either allergies or asthma, population studies have shown that there is a similar rise in bo…

Pneumonia is an infection in the air sacs of the lungs. For anyone with a weakened immune system, it can be life-threatening.  This would include very young children, people with compromised immunity, and those older than 65 whose immune systems are in decline. For the elderly, pneumonia is the leading cause of death due to infectious disease. But here’s some great news for those on the far side of middle age.  A 2015 study found supplementing with vitamin E may give you the same resistance to pneumonia enjoyed by youngsters! As we age, our immune systems not only become less responsive, they make more mistakes. This overall decline is called “immunosenescence,” and it occurs in older animals as well as in older humans. The study compared young with old mice infected with the most common cause of pneumonia, the bacteria S. pneumoniae.  In both, immune cells were rushed to the lungs to address the infection. But in the older mice, this response was “overly exube…

Quercetin is a plant compound found in fruits & vegetables, especially apples, onions, and tea. It makes so many different contributions to good health that at Beyond Health we consider it a foundational supplement that everyone should take. It’s hard to think of a body system or chronic disease that quercetin will not help. Quercetin is especially useful if you’re trying to recover your health or just don’t feel as youthful & energetic as you’d like. Quercetin also helps fight the battle of the bulge!  If you’re overweight, it not only can help you lose excess weight, it can also minimize some of the damage done by excess body fat. Healthy body fat and harmful body fat Having some fat is healthy, but when too much body fat accumulates, its composition changes, and it becomes a harmful source of chronic inflammation. This inflammation does two things. First, it damages the metabolism of the fat cells, which makes them resist being broken down as energy.  So,…

Quercetin (pronounced kwer՚-sa-tin) is one of Mother Nature’s most wonderful nutrients. Found naturally in many colorful fruits and vegetables, quercetin supports healthy cell function, providing myriad benefits to the body. Beyond Health considers quercetin foundational in building optimal health, and together with recommending a diet high in fruits and vegetables, we carry two quercetin products: Quercetin Pro and Cell Repair Formula.  Quercetin Pro is for maintaining health, while Cell Repair Formula is a more concentrated form for those who seek to restore compromised health or just want the extra support. Quercetin works synergistically with vitamin C to build collagen, the basic protein building block for constructing body tissues from the skin to bones, and may even prevent and reverse bone loss.  Both are powerful antioxidants that regenerate each other. As anti-inflammatories, studies show this dynamic duo is especially good at alleviating pain, acting as an ant…

How many people that you know get frequent colds? Have allergies? Candida fungal infections? Or cancer, or any one of a number of immune or autoimmune illnesses?  If you’ve read Raymond Francis’ books, you may recall that people living in healthy traditional cultures regularly lived into their hundreds without getting a single cold or flu, let alone cancer. But weak immunity is common these days, and how could it be otherwise?  When people stayed in one place, their immune systems adapted to local pathogens.  Now we travel all over the globe, exposing ourselves to exotic pathogens and carrying these infectious agents to yet other locations. Though our lives are made richer by exposures to other cultures, our immune systems are continually bombarded with novel viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites from all around the world. Meanwhile, most of us have taken antibiotics, which permanently weaken our immunity.  About 80% of the immune system resides in the int…

More than 80% of the US population has too much sugar in their blood. Although only about 10% of these have outright diabetes, all are being harmed by a process called glycation, in which body proteins get “sugar-coated,” damaging blood vessels, nerves, the brain, the eyes, and even DNA, and releasing harmful chemicals causing oxidation and inflammation. This is why diabetics have so many “diabetic complications,” like heart disease, kidney disease, neuropathies, and liver disorders. To a lesser extent, high blood sugar contributes to these same problems in non-diabetics. How can you tell if you’re among this 80%? By getting your fasting blood sugar measured—it should be 75-85 mg/dL. But even with good blood sugar levels after fasting, you may be having unhealthy blood sugar spikes after meals. These too can be measured and should be less than 120 mg/dL one hour after eating. Blood-sugar problems tend to increase with age (while about 9% of the US population has diabetes, more t…

Flu Prevention: Building Immune Resilience the Smart Way Preventing seasonal flu isn’t about relying on a single strategy—it’s about supporting immune resilience consistently, especially during winter months when infections are more common. While vaccines remain one public-health tool, Beyond Health has always emphasized that strong immunity begins with nutritional sufficiency, metabolic health, and lifestyle foundations. A Note on Vaccine Safety Discussions Concerns about vaccine safety have historically emerged when unexpected adverse events appear after widespread use. For example, following the 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccination campaigns, safety monitoring agencies in several countries—including Swedish Medical Products Agency and public-health authorities in Finland—investigated reports of narcolepsy occurring after vaccination with a specific adjuvanted vaccine. Key context: Investigations focused on specific formulations, not all flu vaccines The…

Chances are you’ve never even heard of the most critical molecule in your body: glutathione.  Identified back in 1888, it wasn’t until the mid 20 th century that scientists began to realize the full significance of this simple protein, made by most of our cells out of the amino acids cysteine, glutamic acid and glycine. However, more than 100,000 studies have now shown that glutathione is the most important molecule you need to optimize your health and prevent disease. The more glutathione you have in your body, the healthier you are and the longer you’re going to live. Virtually every chronic disease is characterized by glutathione depletion.  Young, energetic, healthy people have tons of it, while the hospitalized elderly have the least. Among glutathione’s critical roles in the body are:  1) Master Antioxidant in our body’s antioxidant system; 2) Chief detoxifier; 3) Regulator of cell synthesis, growth, maintenance and function; 4) Responsible…

Thousands of studies on vitamin supplements have demonstrated their value in preventing and reversing disease. Yet, with half the adult population now taking supplements, supplement-bashing has never been more popular, and multivitamins have been taking a direct hit. Liz Szabo’s “Older Americans are ‘Hooked’ on Vitamins ,” in the New York Times, is a case in point. Ms.Szabo states that scientists have proved multivitamin supplements are useless and even dangerous. She notes with dismay that although there is a trend in other segments of the population away from taking multis, older folk remain stubbornly loyal to them, despite this overwhelming evidence. Readers’ comments in response to this article reveal a conversation as polarized and vitriolic as our current political discourse, with the same sense that those on opposing sides live in two different realities. In one reality, supplements (as part of a healthy lifestyle) are helping people recover from se…

Fish oil can help you live a long life and, even better, a long and HEALTHY life.  Based on their analysis of 23 different studies involving more than a million participants, Chinese researchers recently concluded that Omega-3 fatty acids (such as are found in fish oil) reduced the risk of all-cause mortality by 7% for every 200 mg per day consumed.  But what is a long life worth if it’s not healthy?  The good news is that fish oil increases longevity because it makes us healthier.  Not only has fish oil been shown to help prevent all kinds of disease including cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders like diabetes, neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, autoimmune disease, kidney and pancreas disorders, periodontal disease and cancer, it helps keep our telomeres long! What are telomeres?  Telomeres are caps at the ends of chromosomes found in each cell. Like the tips on the ends of shoestrings, they keep DNA strands toget…

Humans evolved to spend our days hunting and gathering in the great outdoors, getting plenty of exercise, excitement, camaraderie, fresh air and sun. Those were the good old days when the best things in life were free, including a flood of summer sunlight that created as much vitamin D as it penetrated our bare skin as we would need all year round.  But we moved further and further from the equator, where sunlight is most abundant, and began spending more and more of our lives indoors. We adopted a less healthy diet with fewer and fewer fresh fruits and vegetables with their antioxidants that protected us from potential damage by the sun, and medical authorities began recommending sun avoidance and sunscreens, the weakest of which (PF8) block 95% of the sun’s vitamin-D producing UVB rays. (See here on using the sun intelligently to still get free vitamin D.) Vitamin D deficiency is now so widespread that alternative doctors say virtually every new pa…

Humans Evolved With the Sun Human biology was shaped by sunlight. Skin pigmentation across populations reflects an evolutionary balance: Environment Skin Tone Biological Advantage Tropical regions Darker Protection from UV damage Higher latitudes Lighter More efficient vitamin D production This adaptation allowed humans to maintain adequate vitamin D levels while minimizing ultraviolet damage. But modern lifestyles have changed that balance dramatically. Today most people: Spend the majority of time indoors Wear full-coverage clothing Use sunscreen constantly Work under artificial lighting As a result, vitamin D insufficiency is now widespread worldwide. Why Vitamin D Matters Vitamin D is not just a vitamin. It functions as a hormone-like regulator that influences: Calcium metabolism Bone health Immune signaling Cell growth regulation Inflammatory balance Vitamin D receptors exist in nearly every tissue in the body, which explains why deficiency ha…