Body Balance by Life Force Australia

the gift of health from the sea

Nutrition

Here’s a fun yet information packed video about foods you can eat every day to help boost your immune system.

The stresses of our daily lives, lack of sleep, the inevitability of aging, and poor food choices all take their tolls on our ability to ward off sickness and disease.

Foods such as sauerkraut, yoghurt and miso contain pro-biotics, while foods such as strawberries, honey, garlic and onions contain pre-biotics.  These “biotic” foods help prevent and destroy bacteria which can weaken your immune system.

While the film short (below) is based on the US, friends “in the know” in Australia tell me this is not so far from the truth for Australians too.

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No-one has accused vegetables of being pretty, and one of the least attractive looking is seaweed.  Yet seaweed nutrition is one of the best natural sources of life-giving vitamins and minerals available.

Seaweed (or the politically correct “sea vegetables”) has a huge advantage over land vegetables.  Our oceans are constantly being renewed with nutrients from land and renewed with minerals.  They range in colour from red to green, brown and black. Our land, however, is constantly being depleted of essential nutrients.

Minerals are elements or compounds formed by the earth, and are a necessary nutrients for the health and wellbeing of your body.  As our land gets more and more overworked by agriculture, the natural renewing of the land is often pushed aside in favour of chemical fertilisers. The end result is an ever-decreasing resource of minerals in the soil and then our food.

The nutrition you can get from seaweed is can be as high as 20 times the mineral content from land vegetables.

Apart from vitamins and minerals, seaweed nutrition is high in protein, amino acids, omega-3 fatty acids, and dietary fibre.  All of these combined promote a healthy body and may prevent or even treat a variety of diseases.

Seaweed nutrition overview

IodinePromotes healthy thyroid function.  This gland helps your body maintain and regulate weight.
Vitamin A familyHelps with growing healthy skin tissues, creating new cells, healthy eyes, aids digestion and boosts the immune system
Vitamin B complexHelps combat fatigue and stress, helps reduce or eliminate constipation, tender gums, skin disorders, cracks at the corner of the mouth, anemia, and heart health.
Vitamin EA powerful antioxidant and anti aging nutrient
Vitamin KEssential in formation of healthy blood and bones
CalciumEssential for strong bones and assist with nervous system
MagnesiumPrimarily helps with your body’s metabolism, helping cells convert energy and use other vitamins and minerals effectively.
Omega 3- Fatty acidsPromotes youthful and healthy skin and tissue.  Great for heart, blood and brain health.  Strengthens the immune system, helps reduce inflammation and may be useful in the prevention of some cancers.

Seaweed nutrition compared to other common foods

seaweed nutrition table

Modern medicine is only beginning to study and understand the benefits of many of Mother Nature’s remarkable gifts from the sea.

What we know so far about the nutrients in seaweed is that it can be used to help treat:

  • Arthritis
  • Constipation
  • Nervous disorders
  • Rheumatism
  • Colds
  • Skin irritations
  • Cancer (seaweed contains a form of fibre that can help bind carcinogens)
  • Radiation exposure
  • Herpes (probably because seaweed helps strengthen your immune system)

If eating seaweed everyday isn’t what you live for, we invite you to contact us about how a tasty drink can give you all of these benefits and more. It tastes great, is made to be taken daily and even comes with a 45-day money-back guarantee!

Note – Seaweed is a good source of overall nutrition for your body.  But too much of a good thing is not “gooder”.  Large amounts of some vitamins or minerals can cause health problems and counteract your intention of healthy well-being.

Is there a difference between synthetic nutritional supplements and natural ones – apart from price?  For that matter, do we really need to supplement our nutrition at all?

Nutrition is the science of providing the materials necessary to support the life of the body through food. Many common health problems can be prevented or reduced with healthy nutrition. Nutritional supplements are helpful when food nutrition is inadequate.

Why do we need nutritional supplements?

Our bodies are marvellous chemical factories.  They perform an incredibly complex web of chemical reactions every moment of every day. Medical science is only beginning to understand the body’s beauty and complexity.

Yet today’s processed food, over-worked agricultural land, and high-fat diets do not allow the body to absorb the right balance of nutrition from food alone.

Nutritional supplements are no longer an option, they’re a necessity.

Is there a difference between natural and synthetic nutritional supplements?

The body absorbs the nutrients in food as part of the digestion process, mostly in the small intestine.

Many nature-purists claim natural substances can be absorbed better by the body than synthetic.  Yet clinical studies have shown there is little or no difference in absorption rate.

But – that’s not the whole story.

The real difference is what happens after the nutrients are absorbed.

Each chemical reaction in our body leads to another.  A complex chain of many reactions happens each time we take a mouthful of food. But if that substance is synthetic, the natural chain of events breaks down somewhere along the line.  The natural sequence of creating new healthy cells is disrupted.  And the full benefit of the nutritional supplement you intended is lost.

Problems with most nutritional supplements:

Marketers have led us to believe a one-a-day vitamin tablet alone will “do the job”. What they want us to ignore is….

  • Our bodies evolved to consume whole-food, using the natural balance of vitamins and minerals working in synergy.
  • Pills are hard to digest.  Pills are largely manufactured as a compressed powder.  Often that compression is so strong that the pill doesn’t break down in the digestion process and passes straight through.
  • Synthetic substances do not behave in our bodies the same way natural ones do.  As a result, your body tends to simply flush away much of the ingredients in the synthetic nutrition supplement.
  • Studies are now uncovering harmful consequences of consuming some synthetic vitamins.

Whole-food broad-spectrum is best.

Every person is bio-chemically unique. Individual nutritional imbalances and weaknesses vary.  For a nutritional supplement to be effective it must be broad spectrum.    This is almost impossible to achieve by manufactured, synthetic products.  Instead, it is best to use a natural whole-food, “the way nature intended”.

Natural broad-spectrum nutritional supplements provide your body with a wide range of vitamins and minerals in balance with each other.  This enables your body to use what is most needed at the time.

Remember, no nutritional supplement can fix poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle.  A healthy diet, regular exercise and a good nutritional supplement together provide the best foundation for a long and healthy life.

We acknowledge synthetic vitamins can serve a role where natural vitamins and minerals are not readily available.  But the big vitamins companies are about their own financial rewards, not in making up for deficiencies in our diets.

There is a growing body of evidence showing the artificial daily vitamin supplements may actually cause more harm than good.