Articles by Trusted Advisors

Melatonin's Many Benefits

If I say melatonin, is jet lag the first thing that comes to your mind? Melatonin’s ability to reset your internal clock if you’ve just stepped off an international flight is legendary. But this sleeper of a hormone is integral for the health of every living thing—plants, amoebas, canaries, and hippopotami, as well as you and me. It wouldn’t make much sense if melatonin’s only role in your body was to help you deal with jet lag.

Get A Good Night’s Sleep — For Good

If you’ve been having trouble getting a good night’s sleep, you know what it’s like to be dead tired and wide awake. Sleep is like the night maintenance crew in a corporate building: it dumps the trash, makes repairs, and refreshes overworked organ systems so your body and mind can be at the top of their game the next day.

Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth

You and I know that refined sugar (sucrose) is bad for you on every level, and after finally weaning yourself off sugary sweets and snacks, the insulin surge that results from holiday indulgences can rekindle the old cravings you thought you’d beaten for good. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are strategies you can use in your holiday cooking to give you those genuine sweet treats without after-holiday sugar blues and regrets. One of those strategies is using sugar substitutes. Not artificial sweeteners with health issues of their own, but natural sweeteners that taste lovely and are actually rather good for you in moderation. The best ones provide real nutritional value: vitamins, minerals, even some fiber. To get the most benefit, though, you need to be able to choose the right sweetener for the use at hand.

More Than Just a Fleeting Memory

Memory loss is an insidious thing. Changes in your ability happen so slowly that you’re not even aware of them until some event triggers a realization. For me, that event has been playing card games with my boy. His young mind rarely forgets a card, while I often have a hard time remembering the card I just turned over. What a worrisome wake-up call.

Eliminate Osteoporosis - Balance Them Bones

Most people don’t think about it this way, but bones are living tissue. They are growing, renewing, reshaping, and mending themselves—or at least they should be. Osteoporosis occurs when something is wrong with that natural process in one of two ways—either through an acceleration of the natural loss of bone minerals (osteoclastic activity) or through a reduction in the deposition of new minerals for replacing and rebuilding bones (osteoblastic activity). These processes are regulated through a number of metabolic pathways, so as you’ll see below the solution to better bone health is seldom simply “more calcium.”