As the years begin to take their toll, many of us become resigned to watching our minds and bodies begin to fail. But it doesn’t have to be that way. None of us is immortal, but there are still plenty of ways we can take care of ourselves and keep functioning well into old age.

Over time, we begin to stop producing the crucial hormones and chemicals that keep everything in perfect balance, while toxins build up in our systems. Our bodies, tough as they are, begin to deteriorate – bones become creaky, thinking becomes foggy and skin loses its elasticity. However, by keeping ourselves in good working condition, we can delay the onset of many of these signs of aging and supplement what we can no longer produce on our own. We’re not talking about drastic measures like HRT here – just simple ways to maintain your health throughout the years.

The first is exercise, which might seem like a no-brainer – we all know that staying active is good for us. It becomes even more important as the twilight years approach; as the saying goes, “use it or lose it”. As well as keeping your bones and muscles in good condition, it ensures that oxygen levels in your blood remain high so that every part of you gets the energy it needs. Exercise keeps stress and anxiety levels low and can help to stave off age-related illnesses like Parkinson’s, as well as relieving the insomnia that many of us encounter later in life. It doesn’t have to be strenuous – as long as it gets you off the couch.We recommend supplementing this with an oxygenating product like OxyLift, which provides not just oxygen and a detoxifying effect but also essential trace minerals, enzymes,and amino acids.

However, our CEO Mark Lester’ssingle favourite anti-aging product is actually NADH, also known as Co-Enzyme 1. It has a multitude of applications including heart health, immune health, and boosting memory, and the Finchley Clinic sells the only authentic sublingual NADH on the market, directly from the developer.And you could do worse than a daily dose of good old Vitamin C. It’s not just for preventing coughs and colds – it actually has strong anti-aging effects.

Diet goes hand-in-hand with exercise as a basic way to keep the system functioning. Your nutritional needs change as you age, in particular your need for more vitamins, antioxidants and fatty acids. You’re also less able to process things like sugar, alcohol and unnatural toxins after several decades, and you might find that a binge hits you harder the next day than it used to. Listen to your body when it tells you that you’re not as young as you were, and treat it gently.

Your diet and activity levels are personal, and you don’t need to share them with anyone besides your doctor. But no matter how private you are, your habits will still show up for all to see – on your face. Skin is the proverbial coal-mine canary when it comes to your health, since it’s one of the body’s major ways to get rid of toxins as well as the barrier between your body and the outside world. If you are dehydrated, deficient in something vital or catching too many UV rays, your first clue could be your fine lines, wrinkles, under-eye bags and blemishes.

While some of these are useful indicators of health, they can also be depressing reminders of mortality, and it’s just as important for us to feel good about our outward appearances at 60 as it is at 16. Your best defence is a good moisturising lotion, to replenish the loss of oil and moisture that causes our skin to become dry and saggy as we age. We recommend MSM Cream Light, a lotion that includes aloe vera, nut oils and vitamin E as well as dimethyl sulfone (MSM), a sulphur compound that helps to keep your soft tissues flexible at the cellular level. To keep skin oxygenated, we love Aquaspirit, an easy-to-useanti-agingliquidthat you can use as a pick-me-up whenever you like. Lastly, don’t underestimate the importance of sunscreen! Long-term sun protection is often the most important key to maintaining youthful skin.

Plenty of people stay hale and strong well into their 90s and beyond, so there’s no reason to give up on your health when grey hairs begin to appear. In fact, if you’ve been neglecting your body up until now, there’s no time like the present to turn things around!

Here’s a quick exercise for you: how much sugar have you eaten today? Perhaps you only counted a teaspoonful in your morning cup of tea, but have another think. The bacon sandwich you had for breakfast? Chances are there was sugar in that commercially-produced “healthy” wholemeal bread, and you copped an extra whack if you slathered it in HP sauce at 3.5g of sugar per serving. Salad and an energy drink for lunch? One can of Red Bull contains a ridiculous 27g of sugar;if you had dressing on your salad, you may have bumped the sugar still higher. Got peckish around 4 o’clock and had a cereal bar? Whoops – they can contain up to 18g of combined natural and added sugars. Adds up fast, doesn’t it?

To put that into perspective, current WHO guidelines recommend limiting your daily intake of added sugar to38g (nine teaspoons) for men and 25g (six teaspoons) for women: that means that just that one can of Red Bull either puts you over the limit or pushes you close to it. Not to mention that that recommendation is a maximum: you’d be better served by staying well below it!

Of course, by now most of us are aware of the sugar content of sweet drinks, confectionery and so on.What we need to look out for is the hidden added sugar in foods we think are healthy. Processed food labelled with things like “low-fat”, “high-fibre” and “whole grain” encourages us to think we’re making good food choices, but we often miss the secret buried in the nutritional information: extra sugar, under a variety of unfamiliar names, added to make this “healthy” food just as tempting to our sugar-junkie tastebuds.

You might not think your sugar intake is particularly important if you’re not actively trying to lose weight or manage a health condition like diabetes. However, research has shown that excessive sugar can have serious health repercussions beyond the well-known issues of obesity and insulin resistance. We know that yeast, or candida, feeds on sugar; a diet high in sugar encourages the growth of candida in your gut, crowding out beneficial bacteria and affecting not just gut function, but mental function too. Studies have found links between sugar and a loss of cognitive ability: in a 2012 study at UCLA, rats that were given fructose syrup in their drinking water found it much more difficult to remember their way out of a maze than the sugar-free control rats. Their brain cells were slower to signal to each other and they showed far less brain activity – after just six weeks of consuming more sugar than they should.

Quitting sugar can be as difficult an undertaking as quitting smoking; sometimes harder, since we’re bombarded with ads and smells from all sides. Sugar is absolutely an addictive substance: it sparks opioid receptors in your brain, making you feel good and crave more.Your gut bacteria also adjusts over time to fit your diet, so when you change it, your body will protest. You can ease the transition with natural sugar-free sweeteners like Xylitol: a corn-free sweetener that can actually have anti-candida effects.

Some people prefer to cut out sweeteners completely and get their tastebuds acclimatised to the natural flavours of whole foods. It’s true that making the switch from processed to whole, organic food is one of the best things you can do for your health. Things will taste bland at first, but plenty of people who make this change report that after a few weeks of avoiding added sugar, they find they can no longer tolerate the saccharine taste of the treats they used to love – and appreciate the natural sweetness of a piece of fruit so much more. In the meantime, you can try kicking your cravings with Nutrisorb Chromium, which helps you to control your blood sugar, cholesterol, weight and mental state. It’s a big help toanyone working towards a healthier lifestyle.We also recommend Sucroguard for help with balancing your blood sugar while you adjust your diet.

We’ll end this with the happy news that other tricks to break your sugar habit include exercise, black coffee and weirdly enough, sour flavours. Why is that so great? Because sour fermented vegetables like sauerkraut are also excellent sources of probiotics! How’s that for a two-for-one deal?

Reference:

‘Metabolic syndrome’ in the brain: deficiency in omega-3 fatty acid exacerbates dysfunctions in insulin receptor signalling and cognition. J Physiol. 2012 May 1;590(Pt 10):2485-99.

Click here to see the new and remaining items in our Autumn Sale – Up to 75% off!

Now, my amazing Thyroid and Candida article (I would say that admittedly, since I am writing it)

In the seminal article “Conquerig Candida”, Sherridan L. Stock stated his opinion / observation that 90% of candida victims have low thyroid function, and many thyroid deficiency symptoms, are also typical candida overgrowth symptoms. Candida in fact binds thyroxine (the main thyroid hormone) and thus renders it ineffective. So there is the obvious connection between candida and thyroid problems.

The thyroid is a small but very critical gland found roughly in the centre of the throat. It has a number of functions, the most important of which is that it is responsible for regulating metabolism and energy levels in the body. 

Poor thyroid function is known as hypothyroidism is an extremely common condition. (The opposite condition, hyperthyroidism, is much rarer, and a separate subject altogether). Apart from potentially causing the most well known symptoms of fatigue, weight gain, (though 40% of hypothyroid subjects are underweight), constipation, hair loss, and sensitivity to the cold, it ensures that almost every system in the body is at a low ebb.

A more complete list of possible thyroid deficiency symptoms:

More common in females than males, the list of possible symptoms include (but are not limited to) weight gain, heat and / or cold intolerance, headaches and migraines, dry skin, dry hair, brittle hair, lifeless hair, lacklustre hair, coarse hair, slow growing hair, hair loss, loss of curl, premature greyness, excessive hair fall (especially in Autumn), sparse eyebrows (especially outer third), low motivation and ambition, irritability, anxiety and panic attacks, depression, fluid retention, decreased memory and concentration, unhealthy nails, brittle nails, low sex drive, insomnia, hives, asthma, allergies, slow healing, acne, or carpal tunnel syndrome, female problems (fibroids, ovarian cysts, endometriosis, PMS, cramps, dysmenorrhea, amenorrhea, spontaneous abortion, cyclic seizures, dry vagina and infertility), weight problems (usually high, sometimes low), gallbladder disease (six times higher in women with excess estrogen or on birth control pills or E RT), low blood sugar, attention deficit disorder (ADD), adrenal exhaustion from excess secretion of adrenaline, and osteoporosis (from excess estrogen leading to excess adrenaline and then to excess cortisol). Intestinal symptoms include poor appetite; irritable bowel syndrome, dysphagia; poor digestion (low acid and pancreatic enzymes, decreased gall bladder motility); nutrient malabsorption; gas and wind; colic; decreased peristalsis; constipation; pancreatitis (from hypothermia). In his superb book “The Great Thyroid Scandal”, Dr Barry Durrant-Peatfield claims about about one third of all cases of depression are simply undiagnosed thyroid problems or adrenal gland problems which are causing thyroid problems, as well as a huge proportion of chronic fatigue cases. 

Diagnosis.

Conventional diagnsis normally comes from blood tests. But according to experts such as Dr Barry Durrant-Peatfield, blood tests are notoriously poor at picking up hypothyroidism, and it is recommended that the Barnes Temperature Test be used wherever there is a possible thyroid concern. You can ‘google’ this test for yourself separately after reading this newsletter. Dr Durrant-Peatfield is also a fan of differential diagnosis (diagnosis based on signs and symptoms) where all roads seem to point in the same direction, regardless of the outcome of testing. We cannot ‘recommend’ or advise against this ourselves as this would be practising medicine without a licence. But the law does allow us to mention that this is what some health care professionals do.

Treatment

Conventional treatment involves giving patients the hormone thyroxine, which is an effective but not terribly natural approach, which does not restore thyroid function.

Kelp Formula for thyroid maintenance

Right now, we have an amazing deal on our core botanical product for thyroid health – Kelp Formula. This is a a polyherbal product containing 7 herbs that help maintain thyroid functuion. (Under EU law we cannot use terms such as “heal or improve” as these would be illegal health claims, but we know that it’s a great product).

Our suppliers last batch was accidentally formulated with one herb within the formula with a short expiry date (02/16) meaning that legally the entire product has to be be given the expiry date of 02/16. Result: they are selling them to us at half price, when it wasnt an especially expensive product to begin with.At the time of writing we have around 25 bottles in stock but we can get quite a lot more if our stocks do run out – probably enough for whatever demand we get after this newsletter.

Usual price £13.99
Current price £6.99 – while stocks last

And as always there are volume discount on more than one bottle, and reward points on every sale, making it an even better deal. This is a unique and probably one-off opportunity to give your thyroid a hand incredibly inexpensively until stocks run out.

How good is the product?

Obviously there is no product on the planet that works for all the people, all of the time. But we’ve been selling it for a long time, and although it’s never been a top seller for us, we think its an excellant product. We have to be careful here, as we almost everything we want to say boarders potentially being construed as an illegal health claim, but we have had what doctors call ‘anecdotal’ reports of significant improvements in energy, vitality, weight loss, improved sense of general well-being and all typical symptoms associated with a possible thyroid concern within anything from around 2-12 weeks (sorry to annoy you, but people do not all respond at the same speed).

Can it ever be harmful?

Not to the best of our knowledge (or experience) based on the label dosage. However theoretically it could be if you are unlucky enough to be allergic to one of the ingredients, which could theoretically occur with any ingredient in any food or food supplement if you happen to be allergic to that ingredient / herb / nutrient / substance etc.  Also, please see the legal note below.

What else can help?

Kelp Formula works very nicely all by itself. But in fairness, the results can often be further improved by combining it with Thyroid Suppot Formula or TH207. These products supply the core nutrients that the body needs for ideal thyroid function, whilst Kelp Formula provides what we believe are the most beneficial herbs legally available. There is more detailed information, full list of ingredients etc on Kelp Formula on the main product page.

Other things that might help

• Treat your candida
• Support your adrenals

(These subjects have been covered in previous newsletters in the past, and will be again in the future).

Legal note:

As far as we are aware, these products can be used alongside conventional medications – at least we have never had any bad reports from any customers who have done this – and there have been quite a few. But do not stop or reduce any conventional medications such as thyroxine or any other thyroid medicines if you are already being treated medically for low thyroid without discussion and the approval of your doctor. Also, do not take these products if you have an over active thyroid (which is a much rarer condition) without discussion and the approval of your doctor. Do not take these (or for that matter any other) products if there is any doubt for any other reason whether you should take them without discussion with your doctor. We are able to give naturopathic and nutritional advice, but we are not allowed legally to give medical advice, and you need to consult with your doctor for this.

Well, that’s it for now but remember we alsio have up to 75% off a number of products in our ongoing Autumn Sale!

Mark G. Lester
Company Director