Everyone enjoys a wonderful summer glow, you feel great and look amazing too, however did you know there are actually health benefits to getting adequate sun exposure on your skin? For years, we have heard about the hazards associated with UV light and how it causes skin cancer and all the warnings you have heard are true; however in moderation a few minutes in the sun each day will provide the best source of Vitamin D!

The problem I found is that I am a bit of a cave dweller in the summer time and it is simply difficult to get an adequate amount of sun, which means my source of Vitamin D is very limited. I found I could take a supplement but in order to be safe it would require having blood drawn and lab work done to be sure, I was getting the right amount.

A better way altogether is to get the benefits of the sun from an indoor tanning bed. Recently a close friend of mine could not stop raving about her experience with tanning at the local gym. I have to admit I was a bit jealous when I seen her golden tan in the depths of a cold mid west winter! With much excitement I decided to head down to the gym for what I thought would be safe tanning beds. Until I realized that, too many people use these indoor tanning services everyday and they are scantily clad if dressed at all!

Dejectedly I returned home because there simply was no guarantee that the gym was keeping the beds sanitized. Who wants to have a fabulous tan, great vitamin D levels and a skin infection? Not me I assure you!

Thankfully, I came across the answer to the safe tanning bed one day. The New Vitality Tanning bed from Mercola was a bed I could set up in my own home and use at my convenience. Not only could I be sure of the cleanliness of my indoor tanning bed I discovered that all tanning beds are not created equal.

New Vitality offers a safe tanning bed with some bonuses. Bonus number one of course is the fact that the unit will plug into nearly any outlet in your home. Many home indoor tanning beds have to have special outlets. Perhaps the best thing about my tanning bed is the fact that I get three types of light therapy in one simple tanning session.

1- UVA rays are what you get from the sun’s rays that stimulate Vitamin D production in the body, the New Vitality indoor tanning bed provides these artificially.

2- Infrared or radiant heat can reach deeper within the body to produce cell regeneration, protein synthesis and raise your white cell count! Infrared technology has been used for many years to heal minor aches, pains and stimulate blood flow.

3- Finally, this safe tanning bed offers something that only beds at the top of the food chain offer, red light. This third type of light stimulates cells to produce collagen, elastin and enzymes that support the skin. The result of all this in one handy package? I have a nice glow, feel healthy and no longer suffer from minor aches and pains!

If you are like me and many other people in the world, you have likely considered a natural body cleanser. Everywhere you turn on the internet someone is advising or selling the latest colon cleansing products. While it is a great idea to cleanse the system on a regular basis, which product should you use?

Gentle Body Cleanse: Why?

Maybe you have never heard of colon cleansing and are wondering why a person would need to do so. Well for me it was problems with feeling fatigued, sluggish and just ill all the time. I had no energy, blemished skin and could not lose weight to save my life! That is when a friend told me about colon cleanses products. She looked and felt so much better that I was amazed and decided to check into it myself.

You see over time the body can build up toxins in the colon. Every day you come into contact with pollutants from car exhaust, plant pesticides and/ or industrial waste. These toxins are filtered in your system and many are eliminated through your waste, however not all are disposed of. At any given time, you carry around several pounds of fecal matter in your colon.

Home Remedies

You will probably find a ton of home remedy type cleansers out there, but none of them will give you a gentle body cleanse. Instead, you will likely spend hours in your bathroom wondering why you ever decided to drink such an awful mixture of chemicals! These drinks and mixtures often incorporate ingredients like cayenne pepper or harsh chemical laxatives.

Now if the whole idea is to remove harmful chemicals from your body by doing a colon cleanse, then why would you want to use something that put chemicals back inside? You wouldn’t, or at least I wouldn’t!

Colonics

Another popular way to clean the colon is through the use of colonics. In short, this is an enema, and not very comfortable I might add! Some women who had children 30 years ago or so may understand what I am talking about. It involves the use of sterile solution an enema bag and a hose! Not only do you need to stay very near your bathroom the entire procedure is just uncomfortable.

A Better Way

By ruling out all of the above methods as either disruptive, harsh or uncomfortable I was left trying to figure out how I could get the results my friend had without calling in to work or completely sitting out on life for a few days. That is when I came across Mercola Gentle Body Cleanse products.

This was the perfect choice from me as there was no disruption to my daily life, the products were all natural and they offered a follow up maintenance plan. Mercola offers a natural three-step process that will cleanse your bowel and keep it that way! No running to the bathroom because of harsh chemical laxatives, I can use it and still hold down my day job and best of all it is all natural. I feel better, look better and am actually beginning to lose weight.

Whether we like it or not we are all going to age, many times the first organ to show aging is the skin. That is probably why the skin care industry is a 50 billion dollar per year enterprise, and when you are talking about dealing with fine lines and wrinkles you only have a couple of choices, skin care products or cosmetic procedures.

Face Lifts

One popular way to reduce the appearance of fine line and wrinkles that I considered was a face-lift. A close friend of mine had hers done and she looked amazing afterwards! With a few visits to her cosmetic surgeon, my friend had lifted years from her appearance. I was excited, finally a way to look younger and feel good about myself. There only was tiny problem, the cost! It can cost anywhere from $6,000 to $12,000! Needless to say without robbing the kid’s college fund this just was not an option.

Skin Care Products

Next came the search to find healthy skin care products, with healthy being the key word. You see finding natural anti aging products may sound easy enough but unbelievably many of these products contain harmful chemicals. Unfortunately, too many cosmetic skin creams contain materials that are harmful to your health.

The skin is the single largest organ and it is quite porous which means that anything you place on your skin has direct access to your blood stream. Petroleum, paraffin, toluene, and dioxane are just a few of the harmful substances you will find in several popular skin care products.

Healthy Skin Products

All of this led me to really dig deep to find healthy skin care products. What I found was natural anti aging skin care products that are made of products that you could actually eat if you needed to! What better thing to put on your skin then something you could ingest? If something could be food for the body, it is only natural that it would be good for your skin.

The Mercola line offers you natural products made completely of organic ingredients. Organic products must meet strict USDA guidelines to be certified organic and this process is long and involved, but it ensures that you are getting products free from pesticides and other materials that may be harmful to your health.

Included in the ingredients for Mercola’s products are lavender oil, sweet orange oil, calendula and calming chamomile. When I discovered these products I was overjoyed, finally here were natural anti aging skin care products that are actually good for the body! The only question that remained was do these healthy skin products actually work?

What I discovered was healthy youthful skin that is supple and soft to the touch. No longer do I struggle with dry or blemished skin and I can feel good that the products I am putting on my skin are not going to cause cancer or some other horrid disease later in life!

Are you interested in a good healthy diet? Do you watch what you eat and take extra care with everything you put into your body? What about the cookware you use? Did you know that your cookware could be adding toxins into your diet? You have probably heard a little about the dangers of Teflon, when Teflon reaches a certain temperature it begins to break down and release toxins into your food. The pots and pans that have been supper convenient for all of these years is not a healthy cookware choice!

In several lab tests the effects of Teflon on lab rats has shown serious changes in organs such as brain, liver, and heart, pituitary problems in female rats and tumors in various organs. Even plant workers who are exposed to the synthetic chemical used in the production of Teflon may have been put at higher risk for prostate cancer. Moreover, if you have thrown away the Teflon in favor of stainless steel or aluminum you are not out of the woods just yet.

When I first heard the news about cookware, I was in shock. How can a person provide good healthy cooking for their family when the very cookware used can add toxins to your food?

Traditional Cookware

Thanks to recent testing, we now know that even a prized cast iron skillet can leach harmful levels of iron into your fried chicken. Aluminum, chrome, nickel, cobalt and iron can leach out of different types of cookware and contaminate your food, and while iron, can be good for you if you take it in supplement form it is not so good when it enters your food from your skillet! Where on earth can you find healthy cookware? What to Do?

When you have come to a place as I did and discovered that your cookware could actually be adding toxins to your diet, the logical next question is what can you do about it or where can I find healthy cookware?

One possible answer to the issue is to use a specially coated cast iron. Ceramic coated cast iron has a lovely non-stick surface and due to the extra coating is provides safe and healthy cooking alternatives for your family. The only problem is, if you have ever lifted a cast iron pan you know you are liable to get a hernia! This stuff is heavy and cumbersome! The good news is I have found the answer to prayer in the Mercola Ceramic healthy cookware. Instead of Teflon, aluminum or cast iron these pots and pans are created from ceramic material and contain a ceramic glaze, which makes them non-stick.

Boy was I excited when I found this cookware! Healthy cookware meant healthy cooking and I could relax knowing I was doing all I could to protect my family. As a bonus I discovered that these pans and pots have a radiant effect on the food you are preparing, it cooks on the outside and inside at the same time! This means a significant reduction in cooking time, which also saves energy. Best of all the cookware did not absorb the flavors from my favorite spaghetti sauce recipe and redistribute it to my scrambled eggs the next morning! This is a great set of pans that I am thrilled to use on a daily basis.

Most people in the world today are aware of the fact that the air we breathe is polluted to some extent whether we live near large industrial plants or in the back woods. What I failed to realize was that air pollution was worse in the place I felt the safest, my own home! You see there came a point in time when I became a stay at home mom, and at that point, in my life another interesting thing happened, I got sick a lot more often.

Initially I chalked it up to picking up strange bugs from the kids; you know how they can quickly spread a cold or the flu! However as time wore on and I continued to feel sluggish, and even developed some allergies.

Off to the family physician I went believing like many people do that I just wasn’t as young as I used to be. Well, I was in for a surprise my doctor informed me about sick building syndrome and indoor air pollution. The air in the house could be making me sick and tired despite my best efforts of keeping a clean and dust free home!

Sick building syndrome is actually an acute problem, but it does exist. About 30% of the remodeled and new structures worldwide have this problem due to inadequate ventilation or air circulation. To put it in simple term the buildings are so air tight that bacteria and allergens just continually circulate causing health problems.

On a Mission

You had better believe I went into super cleaning mode when I got home and began a search for a healthy air purifier. There are several brands and models of air purifier on the market today and they all operate a bit differently. One of the most repeated phrases is probably HEPA filtration.

A HEPA healthy air purifier is likely one of the best types on the market. These clean air purifier’s work by forcing air through a tightly woven filter. The holes in a HEPA filter are so small in fact that any particle.03 microns or larger will be trapped by them. However, the problem is these filters must be changed very often and one air purifier will not clean a very large area. This will mean purchasing many HEPA healthy air purifiers for your home.

I liked the idea of the HEPA filter system but when I discovered how ineffective they are with large areas it was apparent that this clean air purifier was not for me and mine. I looked and even tried several different purifiers before coming upon Mercola Way Healthy Air Purifier.

This healthy air purifier combined many of the technologies of other clean air purifiers and then attacked the weaknesses. What the company had in the end was a filter that could clean up to 750 square foot area! No more dust, mold, mites or allergens in my home! Utilizing many of the natural process the earth uses to purify our atmosphere the Mercola Way Healthy air purifier will leave your air clean and allergen free so you can get back to the business of living and breathing easier!