Spending time in the natural world can normalize our inner “body clock” also known as our circadian rhythm. Attuned to environmental cues like sunlight, temperature, and seasonal changes, our circadian rhythm regulates many physiological processes, including when to sleep and when to eat. Artificial light and electronic devices like computers and televisions give our bodies false cues that have nothing to do with the natural order of things and disrupt our circadian rhythm, which a growing body of research has linked to many mental and physical health problems. Sleep issues are an obvious casualty, as is false hunger leading to overweight and obesity. Circadian rhythm disruption has also been implicated in high blood pressure and heart disease, cognitive dysfunction, neurological problems like Parkinson’s disease, asthma, autoimmune illness, and mental health issues like depression, seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and bipolar disorder. A recent University of Colorado study w…

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…

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…

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…

Our multi has a brand-new gold label.  Although the formula’s the same, we wanted a label befitting this multi’s value.  Worth its weight in gold for its remarkable benefits to the human body, the Beyond Health Multivitamin also sets a “Gold Standard” for what a multivitamin/mineral should be. Yes, it costs more than the multivitamins you get at the drugstore! But in order to do you any good, you need to get nutrients into your body’s cells , and you’d have to take 40-50 tablets of your average multi to get the same amount of useable nutrients into your cells that you’d get from one of our multi tabs!  Ponder that for a minute. For the nutrients, your body actually gets and uses, the Beyond Health Multi is the least expensive multi on the market! And in fact, you’re getting even more, because our multi has a lot of special ingredients you won’t find in other brands—ingredients that: Increase cellular energy.  This helps your…

While the world’s attention is riveted by COVID-19, pervasive magnesium deficiency has been an ongoing health crisis for at least sixty years, causing death, disease, and reduced quality of life. Magnesium plays many important roles in heart health, and a deficiency of this important mineral is a major risk factor for having a sudden, fatal heart attack! As one of the body’s most significant anti-inflammatory compounds, magnesium also helps to prevent the chronic diseases that plague our time, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other “co-morbidities” that increase chances of being hospitalized with and dying from COVID-19. In fact, virtually every known illness can be associated with magnesium deficiency.  Magnesium plays many essential roles in the immune system. It contributes significantly to anti-viral immunity, and has other properties that may make it especially useful for COVID-19. Meanwhile, low magnesium levels can seri…

Insulin resistance has become a major problem in our overweight, sedentary, stressed out, sleep-deprived, refined sugar-eating society, and is a probable co-morbid complication in COVID-19. What is insulin resistance, and how does it lead to diabetes?  Excessive sugar in the blood is a dangerous, inflammatory situation.  It is the hormone insulin’s job to keep blood sugar levels from getting too high by escorting sugar into the cells where it can be either burned to make energy or stored.  However when cells are constantly asked to take on excessive amounts of sugar they become “insulin resistant.”    The body responds by making more insulin, forcing more sugar into the unwilling cells. But over time, the cells become increasingly resistant. Eventually sugar builds up to unhealthy levels, a condition called pre-diabetes.   According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1/3 of our population has prediabetes. …

It was an apocalyptic experience to wake up on the morning of September 9th in San Francisco, California, to a darkened sky with an eerie orange glow. And it became stranger still when by mid-afternoon the sky hadn’t changed, as if the day had never begun.  This was a San Franciscan’s eye view of the effects of the worst fire season the West Coast has experienced ever. The air was darkened for two days by a blanket of smoke that stretched all along the coast and more than 1,000 miles west over the Pacific Ocean as wildfires raged from Washington down to Southern California.  Even those who haven’t been in the direct path of the fires leading to loss of property and life have experienced some of the worst air pollution in the world, comparable, according to a study done in Berkeley, to smoking 25 cigarettes a day.  And it didn’t help to know that the consequent lung irritation and inflammation made us more prone to lung infections, like COVID-19. What c…

Last year in an article on vaping we concluded that although it might be a slight improvement over cigarette smoking, vaping was far from safe. Since then thousands of vapers have become ill with a serious disease called Evali (e-cigarette or vaping-associated lung injury), and a recent study found that vaping greatly increases the risk of contracting COVID-19.   All the more reason to “just say no” to vaping.   A New York Times article gave a harrowing description of 20-year-old Janan Moein’s experience of Evali. After vaping regularly with a cannabis-laced brand for 6 months, Mr. Moein found himself hospitalized with a collapsed lung and in a medically-induced coma. Diagnosed with Evali, he was given a 5% chance of survival. He lost nearly 50 pounds in 2 weeks and now recalls, “My lips were blue. They had to tape my eyes shut. I was hallucinating the entire time that the nurses were trying to kill me, that the walls were made of human skin.  It was a…

Recently we’ve been writing about an antioxidant plant flavonoid called quercetin as an essential component of an immune defense arsenal.  But there are many other reasons to include quercetin, which has been used for centuries as a component of healing herbs like St. John’s Wort and Ginkgo Biloba, in your supplement program, whether you want to get well or just stay well. Quercetin is a potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory, and it stimulates the body to produce a wide range of additional antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and detoxifying chemicals. Quercetin has demonstrated anti-diabetic, antiviral, and antibacterial properties.  It supports cardiovascular, urinary, and nervous system health, and has been shown to protect against stress, cataracts, osteoporosis, and heavy metal toxicity.   Quercetin helps shed excess weight, it increases and sustains a high level of energy and endurance, maximizes physical and mental performance, and helps to redu…