Plai for Pain Relief + Product Review

The Traditional Thai Herb Ball used in Thai massage contains a blend of herbs : plai, ginger, lemongrass, turmeric and cumin all wrapped in Thai cotton. When applied to the body with heat and pressure, the essential oils from these herbs are transfered to the skin which reduces muscular tension and increases blood circulation.


In recent times, the essential oil of Plai is being researched for its multiple benefits. Plai, of the ginger family, is extremely helpful to inflamed areas, be they joints and muscles or kidneys and lungs, to a degree that others do not reach.


On inflamed joints, undiluted Plai eases pain over 18 hours, which other oils cannot do, however skin sensitization is a possibility. On joints inflamed due to injury, Plai was best combined with oils such as black pepper, lemon or neroli, cedarwood and orange .


Our own Sports Injury Relief Synergy is a combination of Plai with Ginger, Marjoram, Bergamot and Orange Oils and provides substantial relief, especially to sports related injuries like a catch in back, neck and shoulder strain due to sudden activity, and any other musculo-skeletal pain. It is well liked by Soccer and Baseball coaches, especially those who aren't in regular training!





Plai is also used in post operative blend on knees ,shoulders and through the process of hip-replacement. It is also able to relieve arthritis pain and increase mobility





Some research has been done suggesting using Plai for asthma (exercise and allergy induced), with tarragon or rosemary and cypress, causes the attacks to diminish in intensity.even though aroma is a little overwhelming at first, even just smelling the blend causes the attack to reduce.

Exploring the Orchid, Product Review: Orchid Anti-aging Serum

Orchid Oil –The orchid flower, national flower of Thailand, has been used in Asia for centuries for its reparative and protective properties. Orchids are very well known for their emollient properties, antioxidant properties and reducing the appearance of fine lines.

Ideal for all skin types and rich in minerals, which exist naturally in the skin, such as zinc, calcium, magnesium, iron and copper empowers Holistic Healing Serums.

This super potent plant lipid, provides seeds the energy that they need to survive during the germination process.
It forms the active ingredient in Orchid Antiaging Serum with superb smoothing and clarifying properties. The different essential oils used in it help reduce wrinkles and folds, a great difference is seen along the jawline where sagging skin is easily seen.

Also a component of Tummy Tucker Xtra, and along with other ingredients, aids the speedy reduction of a sagging belly, pospartum by increasing collagen and elastin in that area and making the flabby skin to shrink inwards.

Orchid Extract, is clinically tested to be non-irritating and hypoallergenic and is gentle for use even for sensitive individuals.

Serums vs other treatment lotions

Nick Morante, Cosmetic Authority:

"Serums for the face and body are used to treat specific skin conditions such as acne, wrinkles, skin redness or other skin problems. These serums are much more potent than conventional treatment creams or lotions (for these problems). Creams and lotions for the most part contain less than 10 percent, sometimes only 0.1% of the active ingredients to treat each specific skin condition. The major difference is that serums contain up to 70 percent or more active ingredients.

There are serums that contain extremely high concentrations of Retinol (a vitamin A derivative), vitamin C derivatives, vitamin E derivatives as well as other powerful antioxidants used to treat wrinkles and aging skin, and also act as super free radical scavengers. Serums can also contain high levels of extracts such as licorice, ginseng, grape seed extracts as well as many others all known to have specific healing and treatment functions and activity on the skin, without being listed as OTC drug ingredients.

The cost to formulate serums over conventional treatment creams and lotions is extremely high owing to the high concentration of active ingredients. This is obviously reflected in the retail cost of the product. Some serums are being marketed by private companies such as Bobbi Brown, Neutrogena or Almay."

Our very own Holistic Serums, contain active ingredients anywhere between 50-100%, which is why they are extremely potent and fast acting. The highest percentage of actives- 100% lies in our new, revved up Active Stretchmark Reducer, a highly effective combination even for the oldest of stretchmarks.

Serums provide maximum benefit- in terms of turning back the clock on the aging process, reducing hairloss & activating growth- which is natural, dehydration of body tissues, darkening and some like Tummy Tucker to counteract effects on gravity!

And unlike the OTC lotions, our products contain no water! So we have no dilution of product. And these arent products you slather on, but use just a few precious drops for optimum treatment. They will work on the body to activate its own collagen content and heal it from the inside out!

These Serums are not regular use products, you only use them to treat the body for whatever imbalance it is in, and you can forget about it for weeks and months at a time- until there are signs again- but this time, you can use them as preventatives.

Being preservative and chemical free, they not only do not deposit toxins on your face and body, many actively help to detoxify or clear face and body.
No alcohol, no parabens, no nothing.. except natural ingredients- now beat that.

Processed Food & the Twinkie.

You are what you eat -- and what you don't eat.

Many of us dont quite hit the entire food pyramid, but watch what you are eating.

Even foods claimed to be 100 percent natural and all whole grain, sometimes arent when you look at the ingredients. A good rule of thumb is that the first ingredient should not be sugar, should not be high fructose corn syrup, and contain no artificial colors or dyes.

Many ingredients in processed food are made directly from petroleum products, including natural gas or crude oil, says Ettinger in "Twinkie, Deconstructed." While eight of the ingredients in Twinkies come from domestic corn, and three from soybeans, others are derived from sources as divergent as rocks, trees and petroleum products (the latter are used to make niacin and food coloring, among other food products).

Packed into this tiny cake are 39 ingredients. flour and eggs, are expected, but cellulose gum, calcium sulfate, and Polysorbate 60? Those ingredients are also used in Sheetrock, shampoo, laundry detergent, even rocket fuel, and at least five came from rocks

The raw materials come from all over; the Far East, Africa, India, Europe, the Middle East and the United States. "You're biting into the Twinkie industrial complex. You are really biting into a worldwide network. I call it the ‘Twinkie Nexus,'" explained food writer Steve Ettlinger.

The vitamins, artificial flavors and colorings come from petroleum. Phosphates from limestone make Twinkies light and airy. Only one preservative is used. "Sorbic acid ... is made from natural gas. That really blew my mind," Ettlinger said.

As for the best part of the Twinkie, the creamy middle, Ettinger says there's no cream in the cream at all. "It's mostly Crisco. It's mostly shortening," he explained.

The makers of Twinkies issued a statement saying, "Deconstructing the Twinkie is like trying to deconstruct the universe. We think the millions of people would agree that Twinkies just taste great."

Eating a Twinkie won't hurt you, but how we make and consume processed foods may come at a cost. "It is what it is. If you want healthy, if you want something good for you, eat your broccoli," Ettlinger said.

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In Michael Pollan’s newest book "In Defense of Food" makes interesting.
He gives the simplest rules to live by and they make the smartest sense.

Like, don’t buy anything with ingredients you can’t pronounce or that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize.

More and more people are advocating this- I hear it on the TV, read about it in magazines

I wish he could use more layman english, but the gist of it is that the value of whole foods has been sidelined by a lot of marketing jargon for processed foods.

Excerpt from the book

..common food animals rejiggered to fit nutritionist fashion, as animal scientists figured out how to breed leaner pigs and select for leaner beef. ..
In the years since then, egg producers figured out by feeding flaxseed to hens, they could elevate levels of omega-3 fatty acids in the yolks.

Aiming to do the same thing for pork and beef fat, the animal scientists are now at work genetically engineering omega-3 fatty acids into pigs and persuading cattle to lunch on flaxseed in the hope of introducing the blessed fish fat where it had never gone before: into hot dogs and hamburgers.

Pic: Avocado-mango salad with Passion fruit vinaigrette, epicurious.com

But whole foods are the exceptions. The typical whole food has much more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can't quite as readily change its nutritional stripes. (Though rest assured the genetic engineers are hard at work on the problem.)

To date, at least, they can't put oat bran in a banana or omega-3s in a peach. So depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might either be a high-fat food to be assiduously avoided (Old Think) or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). The fate and supermarket sales of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather while the processed foods simply get reformulated and differently supplemented.

That's why when the Atkins diet storm hit the food industry in 2003, bread and pasta got a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs; boosting the proteins) while poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the carbohydrate cold. (The low-carb indignities visited on bread and pasta, two formerly "traditional foods that everyone knows," would never have been possible had the imitation rule not been tossed out in 1973. Who would ever buy imitation spaghetti? But of course that is precisely what low-carb pasta is.)

A handful of lucky whole foods have recently gotten the "good nutrient" marketing treatment: The antioxidants in the pomegranate (a fruit formerly more trouble to eat than it was worth) now protect against cancer and erectile dysfunction, apparently, and the omega-3 fatty acids in the (formerly just fattening) walnut ward off heart disease. A whole subcategory of nutritional science — funded by industry and, according to one recent analysis,* remarkably reliable in its ability to find a health benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned to study — has sprung up to give a nutritionist sheen (and FDA-approved health claim) to all sorts of foods, including some not ordinarily thought of as healthy.

The Mars Corporation recently endowed a chair in chocolate science at the University of California at Davis, where research on the antioxidant properties of cacao is making breakthroughs, so it shouldn't be long before we see chocolate bars bearing FDA-approved health claims. (When we do, nutritionism will surely have entered its baroque phase.) Fortunately for everyone playing this game, scientists can find an antioxidant in just about any plant-based food they choose to study.

Yet as a general rule it's a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound "whole-grain goodness" to the rafters. Watch out for those health claims.

Green Market Bags! Baby bottles ..

What Makes This Product Sustainable

Reisenthel Market Baskets are another tool to help you cut down on disposable plastic & paper bags (especially at the farmer's market). They are also a smart alternative to cardboard boxes. Well made and designed to last, using Market Baskets can help eliminate hundreds of disposable bags over a lifetime. Reisenthel's philosophy is based on creating products that enhance quality of living while being respectful to the environment. All Reisenthel products are made from recyclable materials of the highest quality. Bottom line, they look amazing and you'll want to use them - making it easy to say no plastic and paper bags.

Stainless Steel Baby sippy cups,

Shopping bags, Totes and more cool green bags here http://www.reusablebags.com/

Organic Fabrics - for those into sewing

Hemp Fabrics and more sustainable fabrics.

This place is great for anyone into sewing, quilting, knitting with banana yarn! and more .

A whole line of organic cotton, wool knits and blends.

Great Makeup tips

Great indepth info on
How to choose, apply foundation, lipstick, etc.

Tips on making your own face masks, homemade remedies and so much more.

Acai berry natural sorbets

Check out the cool Acai icecreams here..

Made with Acai berry, the superfood chockful with antioxidants to live for..
Recipes too..

Often touted as the hot new superfood, açaí (pronounced ah-sigh-ee) is a delicious fruit harvested from palm trees in the Amazon. The boldly flavored berry tastes sort of like chocolate-covered cherries, and its health benefits are just as enticing. The pulp is packed with antioxidants — more than you get from blueberries, pomegranates, or red grapes — plus lots of fiber, amino acids, and heart-healthy fatty acids.


According to Dr. Nicholas Perricone, who calls açaí one of the top 10 superfoods, the antioxidants in this "energy fruit" help combat premature aging, while the "almost perfect essential amino acid complex" aids in muscle regeneration and the healthy fats help digestion.

Plant Roots and brains?

2 back-back interesting articles about research that has found that roots act like brains, about slime that changed its growth pattern to grow towards food.

Which in an oblique way opens the mind to the possibility of holistic theory, viz., that whole extracts of plants carry intelligent information to the whole human which is why they are capable of treating the body's imbalances.

Excerpted:
“The tip of the root (of plants) acts like the brain of one of the lower animals,” Darwin said.
Roots that act like brains? Does this mean plants have memory? Collect data, store it, interpret it, and then act on it, in constantly changing, dynamic situations? This sounds so perilously close to words and phrases associated with humans, such as “thinking,” “intelligence,” and “decision making,” that science shied away from anything that suggested plant life could be sentient.

In modern times, molecular biologists focused on DNA as the single template from which all life was fashioned and maintained.

However, with their mapping of the human genome as we entered the 21st Century, they discovered that humans carry only about 25,000 protein-coding genes. This was startling, because the simple nematode worm has about 19,000 such genes — and the human body is immeasurably more complex than a worm’s. So, why didn’t humans have a lot more protein-coding genes — genes that instruct proteins what to do?

To find answers, molecular biologists had to revise their notions of the genetic code. They knew that a huge number of genes in the human genome — making up more than 98 per cent of the genome — don’t code protein. These, they had previously dismissed as evolutionary leftovers, or junk DNA.

In an enormous turnaround, they began looking at these non-coding genes more closely and discovered they were not junk after all. They had an extremely important function.

A key to the mystery lay in the nature of complexity. There was no doubt protein-coding DNA was capable of creating complexity. It could issue instructions for creating the legions of proteins that, in the case of humans, make up half their dry weight. But regulating the process was another matter. Without regulation, the results would be mostly chaotic.

In addition, as the complexity of organisms increased, the amount of regulation that was needed increased exponentially. (To become technical, it increased as a quadratic function, which means it increased by the square of the number of genes in the organism.)

Regulation, it turns out, is the job of RNA (ribonucleic acid), located in the nucleus of cells along with DNA. It’s from the so-called junk DNA that RNA gets regulatory instructions.

This revelation opened the intellectual floodgates, and put to rest the notion that life was ruled by a robotic DNA ritually coding proteins, much like a machine stamping out widgets.

Once regulation became a new focus, it raised the question: How does internal regulation adapt to constantly changing external conditions? Or, in the case of plants, how do they respond to changes in their surroundings?

There are 15 to 20 things that plants monitor — including weather conditions, light, calcium and aluminum availability, locations of other plants, electrical fields, chemical signals, smells, and waves of all kinds. In addition, they have remarkable capacities for communication. For instance, when infected by pathogens, they can release airborne volatiles, warning neighbouring plants to beef up their immune systems.

Seven years ago, however, a simple experiment demonstrated that a plant can identify the shortest route to food in a maze, prompting researchers to conclude that, “This remarkable process of cellular (analysis) implies that cellular materials can show a primitive intelligence.”

The plant was one of the lower fungi, a slime mould, which is a thin organism that spreads across cool, shady, moist places. There are 550 different species of this type of mould in a variety of colours, some of them spectacularly beautiful. The experiment, led by Toshiyuki Nakagaki at the Bio-Mimetic Control Research Centre in Nagoya, Japan, is reported in Nature, 2000, 407:470.

Initially, the slime occupied all the paths in the maze, but within eight hours, it had identified the shortest path to the food, and had withdrawn from all other paths. Thus, said the researchers, it had “maximize(d) its foraging efficiency, and therefore its chances of survival.”

Coconut Oil

COCONUT OIL

What is it?
Derived from coconuts, this saturated fat is usually sold in solid form and melts on the skin. It can be used in cooking and baking. Always buy virgin organic coconut oil, not processed, cheaper oils - which may lose benefits through processing.

It is supposedly the only Medium Density Lipid and is a healthy cooking oil, even at high temperatures. Does not break down into trans-fats and does not go rancid like all other oils.


What are the supposed benefits?
John Appleton, a coconut-oil distributor from Takapuna, says this former delinquent is back in favour with some scientists who say it is one of nature's richest sources of medium chain triglycerides (MCTs).
"MCTs are burned for energy instead of being stored as fat, so taking coconut oil can contribute to a weight management programme.

Said to increase thyroid function and metabolic rate to aid in weight loss.

"Virgin coconut oil also contains acids found in human breast milk (Lauric Acid) which are known to have anti-viral, anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties."

These properties of coconut oil have been linked to lowering bad cholesterol levels, to have an anti-ageing effect on the skin and be good for the hair.

Some studies have shown coconut oil to be beneficial in cases of colonic and breast cancer.

What's the best way to take it?
Many people take a couple of tablespoons a day straight from the jar. Or you can blend it into smoothies or porridge.

What's the medical opinion?
"We thought it was bad for us but it's a good plant fat, like nuts and avocado, and it's fantastic for helping people lose weight."

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Pic above links to recipe of fragrant coconut rice, but not the south Indian variety I make, with Chicken curry has all my American friends salivating, sweat-pouring and wanting more.

In India, specifically Kerala, where 80% of crop is coconuts, Coconut oil is used in cooking, and making delicacies, for skin and hair. Natives have generally smooth skin, long, thick and dark hair and there are very low obese people. Kerala also has the highest literacy rate of 96% in India.

Elephant poo paper!! Natural & Green

I cant believe this! well, you can't get more natural than this..

There is a company selling Paper made from elephant poo!
with added fibers from banana trees & pineapples so the paper will be thicker & stronger.



Hand made paper stationery which is completely recyclable.
Any takers from the green supporters

Part of the proceeds go to Elephant conservation projects. And items ship from Texas.