3 Favorite Dessert Recipes with Garden of Life Coconut Oil

Taking whole food supplements doesn’t have to be a matter of lining up dozens of pills on the bench in the morning like an army of intestinal soldiers. It can be a matter of tasting tarts and nibbling cake! Garden of Life does a great job of creating whole food supplemental products that can be incorporated into your daily diet in a myriad of different ways; Detoxifiber and Flax Seed are popular ones, but their Extra Virgin Coconut Oil is probably one of the least celebrated and most flexible whole food supplements in the range. Today we explore 3 sweet recipes that use Garden of Life Coconut Oil.

Coconut Cream Tart

Lord, save my keyboard from drool as I write this! The coconut cream tart recipe on Epicurious is delightful, and you can substitute the ½ stick of unsalted butter in the pastry with coconut oil. You can add a little extra to the coconut custard once it has been cooked, but while it is still warm if you like as well. It is a gorgeous recipe, but make sure you have plenty if friends to share it with … you won’t want to be eating too many slices yourself! It is calorie intensive, yet one of the healthier ways to eat dessert. It is also freezer-friendly, but must be thawed in the refrigerator rather than in the microwave.

Coconut Rice Pudding Parfaits with Mango and Pineapple

Another wonderful dessert recipe that can utilize Garden of Life's Extra Virgin Coconut Oil to delicious effect. It is incorporated into the macaroon crumble in place of the butter, so while the entire recipe is a little blander without the macaroon, the coconut oil rather than butter makes a big difference in the health stakes. It does take a while to make, but almost three quarters of reviewers will make the dish again.

Banana Cake with Coconut Frosting

Depending on your frosting recipe, you could just omit the regular butter and use Garden of Life Extra Virgin Coconut Oil instead. If you're a sugar-and-water kind of frosting cook, use the coconut oil in the cake itself, in place of ordinary butter. You'll get a lovely flavor parallel between the cake and the icing, though not overwhelming. Everybody has their own banana cake recipe, and while none tastes as good as grandma's,this one is a good starting point!

Arrrgggh! Herbal Supplements and Playtime for Stress Relief

Stress is a constant in most of our lives.Today we are looking at one simple whole food supplement product and one simple technique that can be an enormous boost in coping with stress in your life.

Playtime

In the lifestyle that many of us lead, work comes first, cleaning the house comes second, watching television comes third, looking after the kids or your partner comes fourth, meeting essential social engagements fifth, and so on … and play comes somewhere in the triple digits of the must-do list! However, play of an adult form is essential in combating stress and leading a balanced life.

"We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing"

This is true. The human brain is designed to play throughout life -- this is more visible in children, but adults need their play as well. What exactly is play, and why is it a critical companion for your herbal supplements on the journey to a happy, stress-free life?

The definition of play, at least play which is positive in therapeutic terms, is:

• An activity that is not done for any particular purpose other than pleasure and enjoyment
• An activity which takes you away from a sense of yourself
• An activity which takes you away from a sense of time

Think of the last time that half an hour raced by in the blink of an eye, or you forgot to eat for four hours because you were so absorbed in what you were doing. You were most likely playing! Even if you were doing nothing more than digging in the garden, reading a book, playing peek-a-boo with the kids, or coloring between the lines, you were playing.

Scheduling play time as therapeutic time

It can be difficult to use play as therapy for stress when you are busy out of your mind. But it is absolutely essential! One way to avoid being sucked into the black hole of work is to schedule classes in something you love. The financial commitment and the fixed time frame are usually great motivation. Alternatively, try to organize your life so that you can afford to follow your play whims wherever they take you sometimes - create enough financial leeway and time leeway that if you want to keep making sandcastles at the beach and get takeaway for tea instead of cooking, you can.

Holy Basil By New Chapter

This organic whole food supplement, New Chapter's Holy Basil, helps promote a healthy response to stress … that is, a short-lived and transient one! It also helps promote physical and mental endurance, and encourages your body to have a healthy response to inflammation.

8 Most Effective Foods and Whole Food Supplements for Bone Health

If you don’t like milk and fear the waistline effects of cheese, you have probably resigned yourself to the category of the elderly that will need a walker in their latter years. Lactose intolerant people often have trouble with getting the calcium they need to maintain good bone strength as well. But despite what the dairy industry wants you to believe, milk is not the only food that's good for the Skelly-t inside all of us. Today we check out 8 top foods as well as whole food supplements.

1. Yogurt

Even the non-milk drinkers among us often love yogurt. You can get as much calcium from a cup of yogurt as from an 8-oz serving of milk. Yogurt is one of the easiest products to find in lactose-free form as well, so there is no need to compromise between digestive health and bone health.

2. Bone Strength Take Care by New Chapter

Where many calcium supplements on the market currently use limestone as a key ingredient, the calcium here comes from plant sources in a whole food supplement format.

3. Sardines

They are great in a salad or on a sandwich, and all those tiny fish bones are an ultra-concentrated source of calcium. Why waste one of the most nutrient-dense parts of an animal?

4. Bok Choy

Also known as Chinese cabbage, it is well known that it has around 3 times the amount of calcium that spinach does. For most people, it is also infinitely more palatable! It is one of the natural sources of calcium that whole food supplements use.

5. Garden of Life Vitamin Code Grow Bone System

This organic whole food supplement comes in vegan form, and includes both raw calcium and growth factor S to aid in its absorption.

6. CalMag Bone Health by New Chapter

One of the simplest and least expensive ways to get your daily calcium, and also superior in so many ways to the inorganic calcium that is found throughout the health section of most supermarkets. Calcium and magnesium are included in a 1:1 ratio, along with 6 other trace elements that are needed for bone health.

7. Soy foods

They contain calcium as well as isoflavones -- they have an estrogen-like effect and help return your bones to a pre-menopausal state.

8. Stay away from salt

Okay, so this one is more of an anti-food than a food. But it is worth including, because a leading cause of calcium leaching from your bones and being carried away in urine is excessive salt intake. When you consider that eating a few serves of processed foods like commercial bread, cold meats and cheese can put you over the salt limit you can understand how osteoporosis has become so prevalent.

4 of the Best Weight Loss Supplements

Forget acai berry, forget the "one weird old tip", forget the grapefruit diet and forget the Atkins diet. You need a balanced diet which favors the nutrients your body needs for good health -- not what some other person's body needs. You need to exercise -- and you'll feel better when you do! And if you feel that it is all too hard, you need a helping hand. Organic whole food supplements can be an extremely useful part of a diet and exercise strategy for losing weight -- we look at 4 of the best products available.

Garden of Life Fuco Protein Bars - 12 bars, $30.48

Fucoxanthin is one of the biggest things in weight loss at the moment. It has a substantial amount of scientific research behind it, as well as promising (if not conclusive) results. Garden of Life's FucoProtein bars help stave off hunger for longer, and assist your body to burn fat at the same time. You get the full satisfaction of chewing, tasting and swallowing your food with this weight loss supplement!

Garden of Life FucoThin, 90 caps $34.97

This product works on the same principles as the FucoProtein bars, but is better for those who prefer to eat ordinary food, and simply enjoy the thermogenic benefits of fucoxanthin and pomegranate seed oil in a one-a-day formula. It is not a central nervous system stimulant like many weight loss supplements and will not cause jitters or sleeplessness.

New Chapter CinnamonForce, 120 softgel for $17.97

Cinnamon is said to help regulate your blood sugar as well as maintain a healthy blood lipid profile - and the less fat that is circulating in your blood, the lower your chance of having a heart attack or stroke. Cinnamon whole food supplements help convert glucose into energy - rather than be stored as fat.

New Chapter Supercritical Diet and Energy, 60 tabs $17.97

This combination of herbal supplements has all the biggies -- thermogenics, adaptogens, phytoglycemics, antioxidants and cell protectives. This whole food supplement helps ensure your body burns fat rather than storing it.

Weight-Loss Blunders

Weight loss sounds simple on the surface -- eat fewer calories, burn more calories through exercise. And when you follow this rule in moderation, you are almost guaranteed to lose weight … it's pure mathematics. However, the abundance of information we are exposed to complicates the issue enormously! Can you really eat foods that will only burn your belly fat and save your precious breast fat?! What of my metabolism? Should I exercise hard twice a week or mildly five times? Many diets sacrifice the vitamins that herbal supplements can provide along with calories. There are a lot of myths and misunderstandings concerning weight loss -- today we are looking at some of the biggies.

1. Crash diets

Crash diets do not work! Ever. Full stop. Just like you won’t find a herbal supplement that magically burns all your fat away with no additional effort, crash diets are a dearly held Western myth. Eating so few calories trains your body not to burn what it gets as quickly -- your metabolism slows down. If you resume eating normally, you stack on the pounds ultra-quick.

2. Not eating breakfast

It isn't only the potential for unhealthy mid-morning snacking that is at work sabotaging your diet here -- it is that all-important metabolism.Herbal supplements can do great things for your diet -- but don’t go too far and confuse protein shakes with breakfast!

3. Overeating snacks

It's easy to forget about the dinner leftovers you finished from other's plates, the couple of bites of a rich dessert, the M&Ms that are in your top drawer at work. But your body doesn’t forget -- it stores them all as fat.

4. Only eating meals

Of course, snacking is good for you in one way -- it acts like herbal supplements can to increase your metabolism and natural fat burning potential. Just make sure you eat mindfully -- keep a mental tally of what you eat, and where it falls on the empty calories/healthy calories continuum.

5. Low-fat and low-sugar products

Low-fat products are often extremely high in sugar or salt. Low-sugar products are often extremely high in fat and salt. There aren’t really many healthy alternatives within the selection of processed foods in our supermarkets. Besides, the lower guilt factor often inspires overeating.

6. Forgetting drink calories

Water has no calories in it. By contrast, fruit juice, milk, take-out coffees, soda and alcohol can factor enormously in your calorie equation. Take your herbal supplements for weight loss with a tall glass of hydrogen and oxygen … water!

Have you OD'd … On Vitamins?

People often assume that when it comes to vitamin and mineral supplements, you can’t have too much of a good thing. This is an unfortunate mentality, and patently untrue. You can actually overdose on vitamins just as you can with prescription drugs, and be suffering the consequences for quite a while. Children especially are quite prone to vitamin overdose - the fat-soluble vitamins such as A, D, E and K are common culprits and some children have actually died from vitamin overdose. Today we are looking at the dangers of common multivitamins, and how whole food supplements help counteract them.

Vitamin A overdose

This can occur as a result of eating too much liver, as well as taking single vitamin A supplements for too long a period of time. Effects include liver problems, hair loss, skin discoloration, birth defects in pregnant women, precursors to osteoporosis and loss of muscular coordination.

Vitamin D overdose

We hear about the benefits of vitamin D all the time -- but only in conservative amounts. Vitamin D is fat soluble and therefore remains in the body over a long period of time. It can cause dehydration, vomiting, lack of appetite, constipation, fatigue and irritability in overdose.

Vitamin E

Again, this vitamin is fat soluble. If you consistently have too much vitamin E in your diet, you are at risk for excessive bleeding and also for heart failure in the long term.

Whole food supplements -- one solution

If you switch to whole food supplements rather than single concentrated supplements, you won’t need to take as many vitamin pills to get the same effect. The reason that scientists always say that it is better to get your vitamins and minerals from food, rather than a pill, is that over 25,000 micronutrients have been discovered in food, that act to increase the absorption and efficacy of the vitamins they exist with. Whole food supplements put all this together in a natural form with far less potential for side effects than exists in single supplements.

5 Little Supplements with Big Immune Benefits

We've been obsessed with immunity lately -- we're ensconced in the height of the flu season and with the holiday season in full swing, there's a lot of germ-sharing going on! All that can add up to trouble, if you don't ensure that you give your immune system the best chance to fight off all those infections lurking like a hunter behind a tree. We've looked at natural immune-boosting techniques like getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, cutting out sugar and generally eating well. Let's look at the whole food supplements that can help boost your immune system, along with all that good work you’re doing yourself.

New Chapter Probiotic Immunity Immune Support -- $17.97

This product contains ten live probiotics, delivered in a whole food supplement media. The ingredients are freeze-dried - one of the most effective ways of preserving benefits and extending shelf life. Elderberry, spinach and oregano are some of the ingredients.

New Chapter Host Defense -- $48.97

This 15-mushroom blend has been extremely popular -- most likely because of scientific studies showing that it increases killer T cell activity in test subjects by up to 300%. It comes in simple vegan capsules with freeze dried ingredients in whole food form.

New Chapter Immunity Take Care -- $23.97

New Chapter has a special focus on immune-boosting herbal supplements … in case you couldn't tell! These are fast dissolving lozenges rather than capsules, so the immune boosting factors are in your bloodstream within minutes, rather than hours. If you've just had a snotty child cough in your face (common scenario at my house!), you'll appreciate this aspect! They have a pleasant blueberry flavor.

Garden of Life RM-10 Ultra -- $37.77

This is a broad-spectrum immune support formula, and should be taken regularly as a preventive as well as general health-booster. It contains tonic mushrooms, betaine, vitamin B12, folic acid,methionine, L-theanine and others.

New Chapter C-Food Complex -- $32.97

No, not "seafood" -- C-Food! Vitamin C has many immune benefits (Captain Cook used sauerkraut as a source of it on long voyages, due to the scarcity of fresh food), and is most effective delivered in this whole food supplement form.

Immunity -- What is it Good For?

We hear plenty about immunity boosters, protecting your immunity, and the benefits of a strong immune system. But if you don’t really care about the occasionally cold or flu, what does your immunity really matter to you? There is a wealth of immunity support herbal supplements -- today we are looking at what they do in your body and why people take them.

What is immunity?

Immunity is the natural ability of your body to fight infection and disease. The immune system recognizes a pathogen as foreign, and then creates an antibody specifically to fight it. In the lag time, sometimes you get ill. If you have a well-honed immune response, you will be sick less often and for shorter durations. Some diseases we cannot develop an immunity to naturally -- viruses, for example, constantly mutate so our bodies don’t have a memory of how to fight them.

Types of immunity

You can acquire immunity both naturally and artificially. Artificial means of acquiring immunity refer to vaccination or direct antibody transfer; if you naturally acquire immunity it means that your body has fought a particular infection or pathogen before and retains a memory of how to fight it again. You cannot acquire immunity through a herbal supplement; you would need either a vaccination or passive natural immunization to become immune to something specific. However, herbal supplements can support the complex web of bodily systems that make up the immune system if your diet is inadequate.

Boosting your immune system

Therefore, boosting your immune system involves taking whole food supplements or herbs that help boost the numbers of certain types of cells in the body -- or at least, provide the chemical bases to ensure that your natural immune system has all it needs to make numbers of immune cells up to its genetically predetermined limit. The types of cells that are involved in immune function are types of leukocytes, specifically :

• Killer T cells
• Helper T cells
• B cells

How should I boost my immune system?

You should eat a balanced, varied diet including plenty of fruit and veges; get a full 8 hours of sleep per night (although the optimal timing for that will differ from person to person); drink plenty of water; eliminate processed foods and refined sugar as far as possible; and of course, take an immune boosting herbal supplement like Immunity Take Care.