Food and Water Quality

Farmers Rock

Liz James · April 6, 2020 ·

Happy Sunday friends! Did you eat today? 🍞🍎🌽🍗🍖🍏Yeah me too.
No matter the situation, God makes sure that we have all we need. It may not have been what you’re used to (ie: a post church dinner at some restaurant on plates you don’t have to wash for some of you), or your meal could have been exactly what it always is ….. a beautiful spread of home cooking, just with fewer friends and family around the table.
Regardless….. it’s food. And it was brought to you by God thru the caretakers we call our farmers👩‍🌾👨‍🌾. If you haven’t thought of farmers as essential workers, please consider adding them to your prayers. They work incredibly hard and long hours and usually get little to no recognition.
Young Living values quality farms too. If you’d like to know more about YL farming practices, please visit http://seedtoseal.com/en .

But these guys…. give a farmer a hug… especially the ones who do what they do with joy in their heart and a smile on their face! (You’re gonna enjoy this video… these guys love what they do!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYZPcUNyUaQ&feature=youtu.be
hugs and love~ liz

#farmerlove
#farmersrock
#ThanksYL
#gottasmile

Farmer Rock Anthem: Featuring How Farms Work, Farm Babe, MN Millennial Farmer, Welker Farms, Big Tractor Power, Farmhand Mike, OneLonleyFarmer, Cody the Cow …

Victory Gardens

Liz James · March 20, 2020 ·

Springtime is one of my most very favorite times of the year, for many reasons…. Not the least of which is the anticipation of getting my fingers deep into the earth in preparation for seed planting time.

Spring this year has been somewhat challenging. Lots of distractions, an incredibly wet February and March, and a spirit of unrest that seems to have enveloped our world.

And yet….

The leaves and flowers continue to unfurl from the safety of their buds as if to tell us that life will go on, despite the circumstances at hand.

It makes me want to talk to the old timers…. The ones who were around as kiddos and young adults during WWII. What did it feel like, to have such a great unknown? To know that a loved one could be taken from them because they said yes to following God and their country? With only snail mail letters to communicate in the interim?

I hope a bearer or two of these memories will comment because I have a strong love of history and would love to hear the stories of resilience on the home front……the peace they perhaps held that surpassed all understanding even when the world seemed anything but calm.

Perhaps this was another reason the people at home returned to gardening in 1942-43? Canned food and buying from grocery stores instead of self sufficiency was a relatively new concept to the world back then.
It had only been about 25 years since the first grocery store (A Piggly Wiggly if you remember those!) opened and self serve grocery shopping had quickly taken over supplying the USA with food.

25 years. One generation. Many had already lost sight of where nourishing food must come from.

1942….. Not 2020.

And then World War II happened…. and it didn’t last days….it lasted years. 😥

Ask one of the old timers about those times. Invariably, one of their strongest memories will be the rationing of foodstuffs. Food was in short supply for a variety of reasons:

🍅The processed and canned foods they had become accustomed to buying at Piggly Wiggly suddenly were reserved for shipping overseas to the soldiers who were fighting and to our Allies who were bearing the brunt of the war devastation.

🍅Transportation of fresh foods was limited because of gasoline and tire rationing (priorities were placed on getting those to soldiers and to the war effort)

🍅Many farmers in the USA were off fighting instead of growing food.

🍅Imported food, especially the likes of coffee and sugar, were limited in supply.

Rationing books were issued. (I have one that belonged to my grandmother.) Stamps inside the books were for certain food categories, and if you had already used your stamp for that product for the month, you were not eligible to buy it until the following month rolled around. It prevented hoarding and encouraged creative menu planning. ( Hmmm …. Seems like we could use that principle these days for basic things like toilet paper!)

Suddenly, the skill of gardening became an asset again…. Not reserved for someone living on a farm. By 1920 tho, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas for the first time in America’s history so this had to have been hard.

Real hard.😔

This situation was something they felt unprepared for, they had no land to make gardens. For others, it felt like they were being called home….. back to their roots…. and it was those whom the former leaned into and learned from….. And a beautiful thing began to sprout around the United States…..

Victory Gardens.

They began to sprout up across America and eventually across the world:

👩‍🌾People plowed up their beautiful front yards and lawns and began growing fruits and veggies.

👩‍🌾They pulled up their rose bushes and flowers and replaced them with edible foodstuffs.

👩‍🌾Pots and containers were used to grow gardens on back porches, patios, and stairways.

👩‍🌾Even public land was put to use….. San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park had one of the best public gardens in the country!

Neighbors helping neighbors. 👫

Sharing knowledge.

Sharing bounty.

Relying on God to supply no more or less than they needed.

Back to their roots.

The food, of course, was important, but so was the community idea of doing something for the common good, and the daily grounding… the resetting of emotions and release of nervous energy expelled just by getting dirt under their fingernails. In times like those, I am sure that gardening felt heavenly!

Anyone can do this…. Gardening.

All you need is Sunlight. Seeds. A container or two, or 12 (or a plot of land of any size). ….. And a desire to be part of the solution.

A time to heal.

A time to return to our roots.

If this post is calling to you, there are TONS of seed packets for sale at the feed stores. There are also half grown “teenager” plants if waiting is too much to bear.

Never gardened? Don’t let that stop you. You never know, you might pick up a new hobby you love while in this time of national time out.

The best growth comes during times of adversity…. Knowing that, our Great Nation should be due for a bountiful harvest. The Bible says it. This I know.

Garden on friends!

xoxo ~liz

#GodblesstheUSAandtheworld
#wecandothis
#strongerthanyouthinkyouare
#learnsomethingnew
#embraceyourdowntime
#youwillbeproudofyourfood
#springtime2020
#healthyfoodismedicine

Plenty of Ways to Avoid the Flu

Liz James · January 29, 2020 ·

spent all day yesterday working at the pharmacy, and I’m not going to lie…… I filled more antibiotics, antivirals, antinausea and (gallons!) of cough syrup than I have in a very long time. People are sick and the flu is kickin’ butt and taking names.

Surrounding that hectic day was the constant mention of the coronavirus in China that’s making the news everywhere you look.

Can we chat for a minute and put this into perspective? I bring the following information to the table not to minimize the current illness state of affairs, but to truly wonder at the power of the media……

😷The coronavirus (as of yesterday) has a current mortality rate of 2.3% of those 4520 affected.

😷 This year’s flu strain (the most recent stat I could find) has a current mortality rate of 0.049% of the estimated 9.7 million affected.

YET…. poor diet is killing people in the United States faster than both viruses combined. An estimated 11 Million people a year die in the USA as a result of a poor diet… that’s 1 in 5 people, people. THAT bothers me. A LOT.

Maybe people would pay more attention to healthy living if the media poured this type of information into us instead of the fear based stuff we’re getting.

And oh… by the way, there are plenty of ways to avoid both the flu and the coronavirus, and they 100% depend on a healthy diet especially containing natural and supplemental sources of the right kinds of magnesium, Vitamin D, C, & E, selenium, and iodine, an adequate pH in the body leaning towards a mild alkalinity, and keeping known toxins out of the body. All of these basic steps will actually go a long way towards healing what ails ya too 😘.

hugs and much love~ liz

#knowbetterdobettergetbetterstaywell
#stayawayfromthesugarespeciallywhenyouaresick
#Godgaveusallweneedifonlywedothethings
#fearmongeringreallybothersme
#ThanksYL

Don’t Feed the Dragon

Liz James · April 10, 2019 ·

Personal experience is often a driver of passion. If you’ve read my personal story (early on in my blog), you’ll already know that it included a very early diagnosis of endometriosis. I was diagnosed when I was a teen… way back in the ’80’s. Back then…. literally a generation ago, endometriosis wasn’t yet a common women’s health concern. It was still considered more of an anomaly…. enough so that it took some digging and even some traveling to doctors who knew how to both identify and treat it to the best of their ability at the time.

Wow! Things have certainly changed over the last 35+ years…. It is now estimated that approximately 11% of women have this chronic inflammatory disorder. It is also being held accountable for up to 1/3 of fertility disorders. There is much debate over “how” endometriosis comes to happen in a woman’s body, but there is no debate on the fact that its destructiveness is magnified by something called ‘estrogen dominance’.

While estrogen is a valuable and necessary hormone within our female bodies…. “back in the day”, our fore’mothers’ only had to concern themselves with the estrogen their own body produced and perhaps, to a much lesser extent, something called phytoestrogens (a small select group of plants that could add estrogen to what the body already had on board).

Roughly 70 years ago, a subset of synthetic chemicals began popping up in foods, personal care products, packaging (lining of cans and plastics), medications, household cleaners (and dryer sheets!), and…… heavens!!… even disposable menstrual products (Talk about feeding the beast!). For many years, there appeared to be little cause for alarm…. until unusual goings on began showing up in the wild world of amphibians…. and male frogs began turning into female frogs inexplicably in the wild. The first people to sit up and take notice were wildlife biologists. It was the canary in the coal mine revisited (Spoiler Alert: It didn’t end well for the canary in that scenario either).

Scientists slowly began sitting up and taking notice as endocrine disruption expanded from wildlife to humans. 170+ of these chemicals are now known as “Xenoestrogens”, and they are the harbingers of hormone imbalance in both men and women. They mimic the function of natural estrogen, thus creating biological hormonal mayhem the likes of which include PMS, heavy periods, PCOS, breast cancer, fibroids, ‘man boobs’, etc….. and endometriosis. Estrogen dominance is of epidemic proportions in developed, ‘advanced’, industrialized countries: Too much of a good thing, can be…well, too much.
All that factory farm raised meat and dairy tainted with growth hormones? yep
(go local, and find your hormone free, grass fed, humanely raised animals… ie: support your local farmer and rancher)

Pesticide containing food products? yep
(eat organic whenever possible)

Tap water? yep
(drink filtered water!)

Shampoos, lotions, soaps, toothpaste, cosmetics… other personal care products containing ingredients like parabens and phenoxyethanol chemical compounds widely used with abandon by the cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies? yep
(please… for the love of your children and yourself… use natural products!)

Heating plastics or plastic wrap in the microwave, or simply storing food in soft plastic or plastic wrap? Or use bottled water or canned food that incorporates BPA into the packaging process? yep yep yep!
(use glass or stainless whenever possible. aside from the obvious landfill issues, plastic contains phthalates, a pretty nasty one on the ‘no no’ list)

See the verbiage ‘artificial color or flavor’ on a favorite packaged food ingredient list? Back away from the item. Seriously.
(Approximately 31 substances may be added to processed foods for the purpose of artificially sweetening, preserving, coloring, or enhancing texture and/or flavor and are guilty offenders)

Dryer Sheets? Totally loaded. Obscenely so.
(wool dryer balls…. message me, I’ll score you some, teach you how to make them simply, or use 1/2 cup of baking soda in your rinse cycle!)

Ahhhhh! Veering back on the bunny trail we started on. Endometriosis. I suspect you are starting to get my drift here. No wonder it’s become a common problem, right?

Endometriosis is very estrogen dependent… it doesn’t grow and thrive in an estrogen poor environment. Conversely, it can spread like bunnies on fertility drugs when exposed to bountiful amounts of estrogen regardless of the source. Common western medicine more often than not will use chemical means to suppress naturally occurring estrogen in our bodies to slow the dragon’s path. Rarely do they sit down and talk to the woman (or girl child) about the ramifications of xenoestrogen’s effects on their body and how to minimize exposure to them.

While endometriosis (or something like it) was identified in the late 1800’s, it was a rare creature…. not unlike dragons. In fact, the incidence of endometriosis in less developed countries today is significantly less than in those countries where plastic water bottle toting, microwaved plastic wrapped food noshing, dryer sheet using people live. People like myself… whom, as a kiddo and young adult did the same thing… before I knew better.

Endometriosis is technically not an autoimmune disease, but having it creates a hospitable environment for autoimmune disorders to set up housekeeping alongside it. Chronic inflammation within the body will do that. Misery loves company.

Friends, please don’t wait until something goes wrong to clean up your life. Truly. Life is too short, and it’s so much easier to minimize risk factors than it is to mediate and do damage control.

Life is short! Keep it clean ;)!

Love and hugs, Liz

Guilty or Innocent? Weighing in on Cholesterol

Liz James · March 4, 2019 ·

Cholesterol has been heavy on my heart for the last month… haha! No pun intended there… my cholesterol is actually fine….. but I tend to root for the the misunderstood and the underdog when given a choice. (That’s probably why our farm tends to be a haven for rescue dogs and cats…. but I digress!)

Did you know that approximately 80% of people with acute cornary syndrome….(ie: reduced blood flow to the heart… often leading to heart attack) have NORMAL cholesterol values? What’s up with that?

Cholesterol is one of those underdogs. Bless its sticky little heart….. it’s given a bad rap more so than nearly any other body produced compound. What would we do without cholesterol? That’s a good question…. I’m not entirely sure any of us would be around to discuss it if we lacked it in our bodies! It is a major component of cell membranes and is a necessary building block for hormones, fat soluble vitamin D, and bile salts (aiding in the digestion of fats and fat soluble nutrients). Cholesterol is also extremely important to the function of our nervous system. Without it, we’d be bumbling malfunctioning idiots….especially considering that our brains are roughly comprised of 50% cholesterol. So why all the hate?

Our bodies are efficient producers of cholesterol…. producing about 80% of what is in our bodies (the other 20% comes from dietary sources). Cholesterol should not be confused with Triglycerides (perhaps the real bad boys), or the obscure thug that likes to hang on to its buddy LDL….. lipoprotein(a).

Unpacking Cholesterol: The cholesterol in our vascular system is a mixed bag of good and bad. HDL (the good guys) has the job of bouncer…. and it escorts out the shadier gang members, LDL, from our bloodstream. LDL comes in a variety of sizes…. and the smaller sizes (subunits 3 & 4) are really bad news. The bigger ones (subunits 1 &2) are fluffier and are actually pretty helpful. Because they (subunits 3&4) are small, they can easily work their way into the lining of our arteries where the bouncer (HDL) can’t reach them. In a whopping 20% of the population (1 in 5) there is something called Lipoprotein(a) that makes LDL ‘extra sticky’….. if you carry this genetic characteristic, it is best to know about it early on in life, as it dramatically increases your risk for clogged arteries and blood clots leading to strokes and heart attacks. It is a serious health risk, and frankly…. should be tested for at least once in everyone’s life.
While managing total cholesterol with careful eating habits (avoid processed and ‘fast’ foods) is important, …. the real culprits we should be monitoring are inflammation, triglycerides, and lipoprotein(a).

Triglycerides are produced predominately by the liver. When we eat, the body stores any excess calories as triglycerides in our fat cells. It is particularly fond of doing this with carbs. Later…. between meals…. hormones will signal a need for more energy, and those triglycerides will be released. Herein lies the rub tho….. if you eat more than you exert energy, triglycerides begin building up and you end up with hypertriglyceridemia (HTG), and THAT my friends, is cause for alarm. Even if someone has verified genetic HTG, management can be achieved with responsible ownership of the vessel you reside in:

Daily physical activity
Conscious consuming of healthy fats… avoiding processed foods and other sources of “bad fats”
no smoking
Optimizing body weight
Limit processed sugar intake to no more than the equivalent of 6 teaspoons of sugar per day. (The average North American consumes about 200gms or 48 teaspoons of processed sugar in their diet daily)
Work towards optimal triglyceride lab values of <100 and a triglyceride to HDL ratio of 1:1 to 2:1.

Lipoprotein(a) is no joke. 73 million people in the USA are estimated to be living with this ‘sticky’ situation. It is extremely dangerous because the molecule itself is so small, sticky, and it difficult to manage. What makes it even more dangerous is this: most insurance companies refuse to pay for the test that determines if you have it….. and many doctors don’t even mention the test to patients because insurance doesn’t pay. I have not been able to wrap my brain around the logic of NOT paying for a potentially life saving test…. but there you have it. It’s just one more reason to take charge of your own health and ask for the test and pay for it out of pocket, ESPECIALLY if you have family history of heart disease. Nothing….. no vacation, no daily coffee, no new phone…. should be more valuable to you than knowing this information about yourself. Once you know, you have the power to act…. and that can change the trajectory of your life. If you do carry this genetic trait, you will want to have your children tested. They need to learn healthy habits early in life. It’s never too young to become a CEO of oneself!

IF you have inherited lipoprotein(a), you’ll want to pay very close attention to what you CAN do, because it’s time to take your health seriously. Some people do not get a warning, and find themselves diagnosed at the same time their mortality is realized. Lp(a) requires close attention and monitoring. Tools to help in management include:

Daily baby aspirin
High quality Omega3 fish oil…. lots of it… has been found to lower Lp(a)LDL by approximately 10%. (Poor quality Omega 3’s become oxidized and can actually do more damage than taking nothing at all. Know your supplement company…not just their name, but how they do business. This is especially important with Omega 3’s.) Omegagize3 from Young Living!
High doses of Niacin (1-3 gms/day) … the flushing kind (ex: Slo-Niacin)… have been found to lower Lp(a)LDL by up to 30%
Maintain a fasting blood glucose of <100
Vitamin C @ 3000mg/day
L-lysine, L-proline & L-carnitine in high doses (L-carnitine helps make lp(a) less sticky)
Test for and maintain hs-CRP (high sensitivity c reactive protein) at <1. This measures inflammation in the body and high levels are a risk factor for heart attack.
Control blood pressure ideally at 120/70.
Consistent exercise
Abstain from smoking
Get (regularly) an Advanced Lipid Panel every 6 months w/ the following goals:

LDL< 60
Triglycerides < 60
LDL particle # < 700

I realize this has been kind of a heavy post. I’m sorry about that. It’s a heavy topic tho. Most people (even healthcare professionals) don’t have a clear understanding of exactly what causes the real problems in our vascular system. Hopefully, you can see that cholesterol itself is not the real monster….. it’s actually pretty awesome stuff. Too much of a good thing is bad tho…. no matter what it is. Although I only barely touched on inflammation in this post, it’s HUGELY important to this topic too. Sticky Lp(a)LDL is especially fond of a chronically inflamed vascular system.

It is my hope and blessing that this helps someone better manage their own health, and to prompt personal responsibility one’s own health. I am not a doctor. Information here is for recommendation purposes only, and not intended to substitute for specific medical advice. Please do use this information as a starting point for your own research, and use as discussion points with your personal healthcare provider.

Love and hugs, Liz