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10 Natural Tips To Beat Chronic Stress Posted: 02 Mar 2015 01:07 PM PST "If you really knew what was happening to you when you are stressed, you would freak out. It's not pretty," I said during the 2013 Third Metric women's conference. I wasn't exaggerating. Chronic stress has become epidemic in our society, where faster seems better and we pack more obligations into our ever-expanding schedules. Research has confirmed the havoc stress can wreak, with one meta-analysis involving 300 studies finding that chronic stress could damage immunity. Another study found stressed-out women had significantly higher waist circumference compared to non-stressed women. Experts have connected stress with blood sugar and belly fat. Chronic stress raises insulin, driving relentless metabolic dysfunction that becomes weight gain, insulin resistance and ultimately diabetes. Insulin isn't the only hormone that becomes out of balance with stress. Your adrenal glands release hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that flood your system, raising your heart rate, increasing your blood pressure, making your blood more likely to clot, damaging your brain's memory center, increasing belly fat storage, and generally doing damage to your body. Want to reduce stress? Start with your diet. The right diet can do wonders to reduce stress's impact. When you eat whole, real foods, you restore balance to insulin, cortisol, and other hormones. Eliminating mind-robbing molecules like caffeine, alcohol, and refined sugars and eating regularly can help you avoid the short-term stress of starvation on your body. You maintain an even-keeled mindset throughout the day, even when things get hectic. You'll replace those foods with clean protein, healthy fats, leafy and cruciferous vegetables, berries and non-gluten grains. Food is information that controls your gene expression, hormones and metabolism. When you eat the right foods, you balance blood sugar, restore hormonal balance and reduce stress's damaging impact. Reconsidering Stress Stress is a thought, a perception of a threat, even if it isn't real. That's it. No more, no less. If that's true, then we have complete control over stress, because it's not something that happens to us but something that happens in us. Here's where it become interesting. Stressors can be real or perceived. You might imagine your spouse is angry with you. Whether or not they are, you raise stress levels. Real or imagined, when you perceive something as stressful, it creates the same response in the body. Fortunately, a wide variety of techniques and tools can help effectively manage stress. Among them, these 10 are most beneficial: 1. Address the underlying biological causes of stress. Find the biological causes of problems with the mind including mercury toxicity, magnesium and vitamin B12 deficiencies, and gluten allergies. Changing your body can change your mind. 2. Begin actively relaxing. Humans remain primed to always do something. Even when we're not working, our mind is on work. To engage the powerful forces of the mind on the body, you must do something relaxing. You can't just sit there watching television or drinking beer. Whether that means deep breathing or a simple leisurely walk, find active relaxation that works for you and do it. 3. Learn new skills. Try learning new skills such as yoga, biofeedback, and progressive muscle relaxation or take a hot bath, make love, get a massage, watch a sunset, or walk in the woods or on the beach. 4. Make movement your drug. Exercise is a powerful, well-studied way to burn off stress chemicals and heal the mind. Studies show exercise works better than or equal to pharmaceutical drugs for treating depression. Try interval training if you're short on time but want a powerful, intense workout. 5. Supplement. Take a multivitamin and nutrients to help balance the stress response, such as vitamin C; the B-complex vitamins, including B6 and B5 or pantothenic acid; zinc; and most important, magnesium, the relaxation mineral. 6. Reframe your point of view. Challenge your beliefs, attitudes, and responses to common situations and reframe your point of view to reduce stress. 7. Find a community. Consciously build your network of friends, family and community. They're your most powerful allies in achieving long-term health. 8. Take care of your vagus nerve by using deep breaths. Most of us hold our breath often or breathe swallow, anxious breaths. Deep, slow, full breaths have a profound affect on resetting the stress response, because the relaxation nerve (or vagus nerve) goes through your diaphragm and is activated with every deep breath. Take five deep breaths now. See how differently you feel? 9. Meditate. No matter how much or little time you have to commit, find a practice that works for you. 10. Sleep. Lack of sleep increases stress hormones. Get your eight hours no matter what. Take a nap if you missed sleep. Prioritize it, and if you feel like you're not getting high-quality shut-eye, find strategies to improve it. [via Mind Body Green]

Fake Olive Oil: What You Need To Know Posted: 02 Mar 2015 10:45 AM PST You'd have to live in a cave to not have heard about the health benefits of olive oil. It's a monounsaturated fat that is a major component of the Mediterranean diet and is believed to be a factor why people in that area of the world are some of the healthiest and long-lived. Olive oil has been used medicinally for over 5,000 years. Its health benefits are legendary. It has been found to boost the immune system, increase bone density, prevent cancer, strokes, and heart disease, lower blood pressure, and reduce your risk of diabetes. And if that isn't enough, it seems that olive oil can improve memory and increase overall cognitive function. A large study on 6,000 women over the age of 65 found that women who consumed the highest amount of monounsaturated fats, which can be found in olive oil, had better patterns of cognitive scores over time.1 But now it looks like the olive oil you trusted to provide you with health benefits might be a fake! Is nothing sacred anymore? My first thoughts were how do you make fake olive oil? Who is doing this? Why are they doing it? Olive Oil Is Big Business Working backwards, it's pretty easy to guess the "why". There is money to be made in olive oil forgery. The US alone spends 1.5 billion dollars a year on olive oil. It might not seem worth the effort to make fake oil, but in one Italian bust alone, authorities broke up a criminal gang sitting on $8 million worth of fake oil. The "who" might be surprising. Throughout Europe there are large scale facilities that pump this stuff out. According to the book Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, illicit manufacturers slap an Italian flag and the name of an imaginary producer on the label and dump this stuff on the US market, where consumers are easy pickings. But consumers in the US aren't the only victims. Studies done in Australia and New Zealand found that half of their Mediterranean imports were fake, too. Anywhere olive oil is in demand is a possible target. How do you fake olive oil? Olive oil can be diluted with poor quality oils or sometimes there is no real olive oil at all. Cheap and unhealthy soy or canola oils are colored with industrial chlorophyll and flavored with artificial flavorings. Yum. Extra Virgin Oil Frauds The term "virgin" when applied to olive oil doesn't mean quality. There are four levels of virgin olive oil. The lowest grade of virgin olive oil is not fit for human consumption and designated for "other" uses, like making soap. The top of the line olive oil is extra virgin. This means it's cold-pressed so the temperature during processing hasn't exceed 86 degrees Fahrenheit.2 It's also supposed to meet high standards of acidity and taste. Independent tests at the University of California found that 69% of all store-bought extra virgin olive oils in the US are probably fake.3 This study reported that the following brands failed to meet extra virgin olive oil standards: Bertolli Carapelli Colavita Filippo Berio Mazzola Mezzetta Newman's Own Safeway Star Whole Foods Seeing brands that pride themselves on being healthy and natural like Newman's Own and Whole Foods is very disappointing. However, it's very likely that the fault goes back to the supplier. Apparently, the olive oil mafia has become so adept at their forgeries that even many olive oil "experts" can't tell real from fake based on taste alone. But in my book, that is still no excuse. Companies are responsible for doing their own due diligence! Finding the Real Thing... You naturally want to get what you pay for. If you are paying more for extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) and you care about your health, you don't want to be buying diluted, adulterated junk. Not only will fake oil lack health benefits, it could actually do you harm. Six hundred people died and 25,000 more were hospitalized by bad oil in Spain.4 While that was highly unusual, I think you get the point. A test you can try on any olive oil you currently have is to stick it in the fridge and see if it solidifies. If it doesn't, you definitely don't have olive oil. If it does this means you may have olive oil. Turning solid will tell you that you have a mostly a monounsaturated oil, but it won't rule out whether it's sunflower, safflower, or canola oils have been added. It won't reveal if your olive oil has been tainted with chemicals, flavorings, or colorings either. The same University of California study listed the following brands as having met their standards for being true extra virgin olive oil. Corto Olive California Olive Ranch Kirkland Organic Lucero (Ascolano) McEvoy Ranch Organic Pompeian In their September 2012 issue, Consumer Reports published results of their taste test of 138 bottles of extra virgin olive oil from 23 manufacturers. The olive oil was sourced from a variety of countries including the US, Argentina, Greece, Chile, and Italy. Their general finding was that those produced in California surpassed those from Italy. The two highest scoring olive oils, McEvoy Ranch and Trader Joe's California Estate, were both from California.5 It's a sad testament to the quality of our food supply when a natural product with a 5,000 year history has been tainted for profit. We can all do our part to stamp out food fraud by voting with our wallets. By buying locally and supporting boutique producers we can send the message that we care about the quality of our food and help to make food fraud less profitable Editor's Note: Eat Local Grown recently contacted by the maker's of Pompeian Olive Oil who informed us that their brand " is not only the first branded olive oils to carry the North American Olive Oil Association (NAOOA) seal, but since 2012, Pompeian Extra Virgin Olive Oil is the first extra virgin olive oil to attain the USDA Quality Monitored Seal." Please consider this when making purchase decisions. [via Eat Local Grown]

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