Please note- this is a published press release by the Shaklee Corporation.  Karen Miner Hurd is an Independent Distributor and not an employee of the Shaklee Corporation.

Shaklee Partners With U.S. Ski Team and U.S. Snowboarding in Preparation for the 2010 Games in Vancouver

Last update: 7:09 p.m. EST Jan. 26, 2009

PLEASANTON, Calif., Jan 26, 2009 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Shaklee Corporation, the leading natural nutrition company in the United States, is the official nutrition supplier for the U.S. Ski Team and U.S. Snowboarding throughout their training for the 2010 Games in Vancouver, continuing a relationship that began in 1980. Founded in 1956, Shaklee has been supporting elite athletes for decades — more than 54 gold medals have been awarded to Shaklee-powered world-class athletes.

“We currently use these products to enhance the hydration status and energy requirements of our athletes’ demanding training schedules and busy lifestyles,” says Troy Flanagan, Director of Sport Science for the U.S. Ski and Snowboarding Association, the national governing body for the U.S. ski and snowboarding teams. “Shaklee nutritional supplements are the only choice for us and are proving to be critical to our preparation for the 2010 Games!”

Flanagan says Shaklee products are instrumental in allowing the teams to perform at a high level in very rigorous conditions.

“U.S. Ski Team athletes travel four to five months straight each year, flying to winter conditions in many different countries throughout the world. Shaklee’s NutriFeron(R) helps boost their immune systems* as they push through jet lag, drastic temperature changes, tough training, and the stress of competition,” he says.

The U.S. Ski Team and U.S. Snowboarding use a broad assortment of Shaklee supplements, including Vitalizer for overall health and wellness, NutriFeron and Defend & Resist Complex for immune support, Cinch(R) for healthy weight management, Shaklee Performance(R) for hydration and endurance, Physique(R) for post workout recovery, Joint Health Complex for healthy joints, Joint & Muscle Pain Cream for after those grueling workouts, and many others.*

Shaklee products are supported by over 90 Shaklee peer-reviewed scientific papers and are available only through Shaklee Distributors. “At the U.S. Ski and Snowboarding Association (USSA), we make sure that the supplements that our athletes competing in the 2010 Games are taking are extremely safe and reliable,” Flanagan says. “That’s why USSA athletes are only provided with Shaklee products, which are manufactured to the highest standards.”

Shaklee is proud to be the official nutritional sponsor of the U.S. Ski Team and U.S. Snowboarding, a relationship that began over 29 years ago and has since provided the nutritional fuel that helped support the teams in winning 10 medals in the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, and is currently helping to power the ski team and snowboarders in preparation for the 2010 Games in Vancouver.

About Shaklee Corporation

Founded 50-plus years ago, Shaklee is a leading provider of premium-quality natural nutrition products, personal care products, environmentally friendly household products, and state-of-the-art air and water treatment systems. In 2000 Shaklee became the first company in the world to be Climate Neutral(TM) certified to totally offset its CO2 emissions, resulting in a net-zero impact on the environment. With a robust product portfolio, including over 50 patents and patents pending worldwide, Shaklee has more than 750,000 Members and Distributors worldwide and operates in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, and China.

*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. SOURCE Shaklee Corporation

Are Liquid Vitamins Better than Vitamin Pills?

Absorbing nutrients from vitamins is an important issue.  If vitamins don’t get absorbed, you wasted your money.  When I started in the wellness industry 12 years ago, we spent a great deal of time on the absorption issue. Except for pharmaceuticals, the law doesn’t require tablets to dissolve  in order to be sold.  That means your vitamin tablet was not tested most of the time.

Liquid vitamins are popular because many people just don’t like swallowing pills. Chewable tablets don’t often taste good, and it can be  difficult to teach children how to swallow pills. (Some tips here).

Doing some searches for independent information on liquid vitamins was extremely difficult.  98% of the references were by distributors of liquid vitamins. ( The Shaklee Corporation does make a liquid vitamin called Liqui-lea.)  I did find a good article by Dan Ho.  Consumer’s Reports had a little info, but they tend to be negative on supplementation anyway, and do not distinguish between synthetic and natural supplements.

Because the average person doesn’t have a good understanding of the digestion process, it’s very easy to sell the idea of liquid vitamins.  Nutrients are absorbed in your small intestine, not in your stomach.  The purpose of your stomach is to begin the process of breaking down your food.  The rest of the breakdown happens in the small intestine. Your liver, gall bladder, pancreas all supply hormones, enzymes, etc to the small intestine, to complete the process.  There your body extracts the nutrients, makes other vitamins, assembles the protein chain, and it is absorbed through the tiny, finger-like villi.  There is a belief that liquids somehow break down in your stomach more easily. People think that liquid vitamins have somehow “saved a step” in the digestion process. Yet even water must be digested- ever experience water sloshing around in an empty stomach?

Vitamin manufacturers, many of whom do NOT do any clinical testing or third party verification of their products are looking for a competitive edge.  If they can play into popular myth that liquid vitamins are
more easily absorbed, without providing proof, then they do it.

Some vitamins are water soluble.  That means that any nutrient suspended in liquid – like vitamin C, will be completely worthless, because it will break down completely in the bottle before you swallow it. Did the manufacturer takes steps to ensure that the vitamins and minerals in the liquid supplement are stable?  That
they don’t interact in the bottle? What about molecular structure?  Your body requires that certain nutrients come in specific forms – despite what a marketer will tell you.

From Keith Anderson of the Shaklee Corporation:

“There are a few issues with liquid vitamins. Let us start by confirming that liquid vitamins have no absorption advantages over tableted or gel encapsulated supplements. And, yes, water soluble vitamins are unstable and lose potency very quickly in a liquid medium.

Once ingested, nutrients have to be separated from their carriers via the body’s natural chelation process and reunited with the appropriate enzymes and proteins within the body to be redistributed to where they are needed. The body doesn’t care if these nutrients come via liquid or tablet…the chelation
process is necessary with either form.

Another issue of major importance is that nutrients are absorbed through receptors present in various locations along the digestive tract. This is why the time release feature of the SMART delivery system utilized in Vitalizer is so important in maximizing nutrient absorption. Ideally, you do not want vitamins to all be released at the same time in one nutrient dump into the stomach, where certain nutrients are diminished by the acid environment”.

Bottom line- ask to see the clinical studies and third part verification of any brand that you are taking.  Ask for absorption and bioavailability studies.  Learn a little about how your body works yourself, and you will be well prepared in shopping for supplements.

• @DowntownWoman Corporate cultures must change. They seem stuck in old mindsets, and are pretty controlling. Glad I'm not in one now! in reply to DowntownWoman #
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Finally, a way to monetize infant boys.  And a new beauty treatment for moms.

People have been doing strange things since the dawn of time to avoid the effects of aging. Some of them have been pretty gross like using bird poop (specifically nightingale poop),  shark bile, snail gel, some just a waste of time and others like Botox (TM) and chemcial peels can be painful and risky. One of the rare side effects of Botox (TM)* is spontaneous death. (More on Botox (TM) risks)

But infant foreskin as an anti-aging ingredient?  Who is going to harvest THAT? Is it a way for dollar squeezed obstetricians to make some extra dough?  Do Rabbi’s, who also perform circumcisions, have an ethical issue with that? Do parents get compensated for the sale of placentas and foreskins?  You mean that there is NO other solution for younger looking skin?  Or is it just a patent rush?

Are moms going to start asking for their son’s foreskins for their scrapbooks?  Or just for her face?  Now that’s family bonding!

Apparently the fibroblast cells in the foreskin have the ability to build collagen.  Collagen is the support structure in your skin and breaks down with age.  Pollution, toxins, and lack of vitamin C increases the rate of the breakdown of collagen leading to faster aging.

C’mon!  As a Longevity Coach and someone who started fighting aging a long time ago, in the last century,
I’m obviously in favor of doing everything you can to stay younger.  Healthy aging, slower aging is a
side benefit of being healthy, not an end in and of itself.

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting here in shock.  The Beauty industry is bizarre. And who supports all this?  The men and women who will pay anything, do anything, just to avoid looking their age. What about ethics in anti-aging?  Reason?  Boundaries?  And here’s the kicker-these things are NOT more effective than plant based solutions!!  Shaklee’s Enfuselle product line has been clinically proven to reverse the aging process on skin by 10 years and slow future aging.  We don’t need bizarre, questionable or ridiculous measures to look and be younger.

Shaklee Corporation has done it without body parts, poop and snail goo.

We don’t need bizarre, questionable or ridiculous measures to look and be younger. By all means, fight aging.  Live healthy.  Look great. Live Longer. And call me for a real alternative to crap.

*Botox is a trademarked name of the Allergan Corporation.
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Karen Miner Hurd was the former Public Relations/Advertising Director of Salon Enterprises, Inc.  As a makeup artist for amateur theater she enjoyed making people look old. As a Longevity Coach she helps people look and feel younger.  Karen is the author of “Dangerous Image: Are Your Cosmetics Killing You?”.

Is anybody talking about this?

Health care is one of the primary issues in the 2008 presidential election.  The more the stock market goes haywire, the more people are frightened and want the government to step in.

According to the National Coalition on Health Care there are over 47 million Americans who are uninsured. Some of that is by choice – people who opted-out of their employer’s program because of the cost. Many of those are in the middle class. As insurance costs rise, employers cut back.  The cry for Uncle Sam to do something grows louder.

I’m not convinced that the government is the answer to anything. Why are we talking about the government spending MORE tax dollars on health care for disease management, instead of talking about the importance of individual responsibility for managing their own health?

Let’s take a look at some facts.  In October 2007, Nutrition Journal published a Landmark Study co-authored by the School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, CA and the Shaklee Corporation, that showed a marked reduction of major disease risk by those who used Shaklee supplements.  The Dietary Supplement Information Bureau (DSIB) has published other studies with similar results. Nutritionists, holistic health practitioners and even some traditionally trained (allopathic) health care professionals,  have been saying for YEARS that our disease rates are a result of our choices.

Here are just a few:

• Approximately 70% of all cancer is preventable.  It doesn’t “just happen”.
• High blood pressure can be managed naturally
• Heart attack and heart disease is 100% diet and lifestyle related
• Type 2 diabetes is a result of lifestyle and diet, genetics plays a very small role
• Alzheimer’s can be prevented with diet, lifestyle and supplementation
• Allergies can be managed with supplementation and lifestyle changes
• ADD and ADHD can often be managed without drugs
• Asthma is often a function of environment, e.g toxic chemicals in the home, and thus can be managed with lifestyle changes.
• Depression and anxiety can be managed naturally in a many cases
• Diseases brought on by obesity can be avoided completely by diet and lifestyle changes
• Osteoporosis is a function of childhood nutrition, calcium intake and exercise.  It is preventable.
• Many physicians consider stress a major factor in all diseases
• Obesity is considered a disease and is completely preventable

What about diseases brought on by smoking, drug use and excessive alcohol use and multiple sex partners? Should those of us that don’t do those things pay for the choices of those who do?  Those are all optional behaviors!

Our family has chosen to invest about $1,000 dollars a month in our supplementation, fitness and food choices to prevent disease, improve the quality of our health, and extend our lives.   My family is highly allergic I have 35 recognized allergies, each of my children have over 20.  Yet none of us are on any maintenance drugs for our allergies and several of us have few symptoms.  We achieved this through our choice of supplements, using non-toxic cleaners, water and air purification.  When we started our wellness lifestyle each of us had a minimum of 3 maintenance prescriptions for our allergies and related conditions.  Our health care costs and prescription drug use have been radically reduced.

As a wellness educator and longevity coach, I have seen first hand, people drastically reduce their prescription drug use or eliminate it all together with natural approaches improving their quality of life, and eliminating many of their former medical costs. It can be done.

Of course there are those things that do require medical intervention, accidents and injuries, and other circumstances beyond our control.  There are people who, despite their best efforts still become chronically ill. I am not talking about the exceptions. There should be some form of medical insurance that is affordable as well, insurance.   But to talk about health care reform, without making the conversation central to individual choices in their lifestyle is absurd.

Is there any candidate running for office out there that has the guts and the integrity to say that many health care issues are not the government’s job, but the job of individuals?

Some resources for you:

National Coalition for Health Care: www.nchc.org
Human Events -  www.humanevents.com – search for related articles “Health Care Reform”
Fight Chronic Disease.org – www.fightchronicdisease.org/
Committee for Economic Development – www.ced.org
Supplementation and healthcare costs: www.supplementinfo.org
Landmark Dietary Supplement Study – www.landmarkstudy.com

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About the Author: Karen Miner Hurd is a certified Wellness Educator.  Her focus includes Longevity Coaching- helping people extend their lives with simple practical steps. She is passionate about the potential people have to control their health futures.  Karen offers individualized coaching and wellness profiles. She has partnered with the Shaklee Corporation for over 12 years  as an Independent Distributor.  Karen can be reached by email: karen@gohealthygo.com.  Follow her on Twitter.com/karenminerhurd, on Pownce as Longevity Coach.  Join her community on Facebook – http://profile.to/karenminerhurd.