February is heart health month, but we believe heart care is a daily
necessity all year long. What better way to help keep your heart pumping
than to get outside and stay active with a new pair of snowshoes!

We are giving away 2 pairs of snowshoes!

How to enter?

At www.naturesfare.com/blog nature’s fare posts many educational blog articles and health tips to help keep you informed and prepared to make important decisions about your health.

• Step #1: Using the links below, answer the 5 heart health questions

• Step #2: Submit your response by March 9th to media@naturesfare.com

• Step #3: The winners will be announced on March 12th.

Contest Questions: (click the links or visit www.naturesfare.com/blog to search the title)

1.Plaque buildup is a condition called_______________ or coronary artery disease. (BLOG23/02/2011: Love your Heart! Facts and tips about cholesterol)

2.The active ingredient in ___________________ is a compound called 3nB, acting as a diuretic and vasodilator. It reduces blood volume and increases arterial diameter, decreasing the pressure
on the walls of the arteries. (BLOG23/02/2011: Love your Heart! Facts and tips about cholesterol)

3. What are the 3 steps that can be taken to lessen the side effects of statin drugs?
1)
2)
3)
(BLOG 19/10/2011: Heartache from mainstream heart care)

4. List 3 of the 6 tips to keep in mind when lowering cholesterol?
1)
2)
3)
(BLOG 19/10/2011: Heartache from mainstream heart care)

5. Heart disease is not just a disease of excess, it’s primarily a disease of deficiencies. The risk is greatest if you have dangerously inadequate levels of protective nutrients like the __, __ and _ vitamins, ______ acid, _________, essential fatty acids and important ___________.
(BLOG 01/02/2012: The real cause of heart disease, and what to do about it)

Prize is to be accepted as awarded and cannot be exchanged or returned. Submission deadline is March 9, 2012. Winner will be announced on March 12, 2012. Customer must be able to pick up their prize at one of our 6 locations, prize will not be shipped. Nature’s Fare will be posting all winning submissions and names on their website and social media sites so please specify if you wish your entry to be anonymous in our marketing. ank you and good luck.

Visualization is courtesy of TheVisualMD.com

Rather than feeling gloomy, my focus has been on getting the individual to take charge of their own wellness. This can be a considerable challenge, since we are each unique in our bodies but also unique in our pattern of bad habits and poor lifestyle choices. More than 40% of American adults make a resolution to live a better life each year, and fewer than half keep their promise to themselves for longer than 6 months. Conditioning is hard to break, but the key is that the power to break a habit belongs to the same person who made it – the turnaround amounts to giving up unconscious behavior and adopting conscious new patterns.

Once your mind begins to pay attention, your brain can build new neural pathways to reinforce what you learn. Much is made of the brain’s ability to change and adapt – the general term is neuroplasticity – but I think science has been slow to catch up with wise experience. It has always been true that applying awareness in any form, through such things as resolve, discipline, good intentions, and mindfulness, has the power to create change. The practical dilemma is how to use your strengths and motivation to help yourself remain committed to wellness as a lifetime pattern.

Step 1: Set Goals by Baselining Your Health

The first step in taking control of your well-being is to set goals, and a sensible way to do this is to “baseline” your health. Gather some basic facts that realistically inform you about your body: weight, height, family history, exercise habits, general diet, and a self-assessment of your stress levels at work and in your home life.

Some experts would add medical measures that only a doctor can fully determine, such as blood pressure, cholesterol and other lipids levels, and bone density. My difficulty with these tests is that they encourage worry. Being in an anxious state is a bad motivator for most people. It can motivate you for as long as you remember to be afraid, but after that, people tend to give in to impulses, make erratic choices, and increase their own stress levels. With that in mind, I go against the grain of standard medical advice, at least partially, by saying that heeding these medical markers should come second, after you have already set yourself on a good wellness program for at least six months. Give consciousness a chance before you undermine it with potential anxiety.

How do you actually set your goals? Start thinking about the big picture. Changing poor lifestyle habits is rarely easy, especially if they comfort you, as smoking or overeating do for many people. You need a strong vision of what you want to achieve in order to succeed. I’d say the strongest vision comes from knowing about a simple trend: the latest research shows that more and more disorders, including most cancers, are preventable through a good wellness program. The benefits are increasing with every new study.

Step 2: Set Priorities

Making lists of your hot spots and your sweet spots will help you to set your personal priorities. The hot spots are weaknesses, the sweet spots strengths that crop up during an ordinary day. You can’t attack every bad pattern all at once; it’s good to achieve a series of small victories at first.

Hot spots: List the times you feel unhappy or most agitated—fighting a futile battle to get a good night’s sleep, perhaps, or recriminating yourself for ordering dessert when you were already full. Identify with clear sights your biggest challenges, such as getting to bed on time, reducing food portions, resisting sweets, choosing the couch over the treadmill, and so on. Doing this will help your mission take shape and direction.

Sweet spots: List the things that give you joy and satisfaction, for instance, spending time with your family or enjoying a favorite hobby. Recapture in your mind what it feels like to resist ordering dessert or to spend half an hour walking outdoors. Appreciating the sweet spots in your life is a source of strength as you embark on your habit-changing mission.

Step 3: Identify Harmful Patterns

To change your negative habits, you have to know what they are. Some bad habits, like smoking and excessive drinking, are obvious, but others may be less so. Sitting all day is damaging to your health, even if you get half an hour of exercise or more before or after work. Depriving yourself of eight hours’ sleep for even a short period is also hard on the body in ways that sleep researchers are just beginning to fully recognize.

Forming a new habit takes repetition and focus, and if your attention is elsewhere you may have a harder time adjusting to new behaviors. For that reason, some experts advise against planning big changes if you are going through a particularly stressful period. I think that reasoning is wrong. Although it’s true that you are likely to have more setbacks at such times, it’s just as true that people change as a result of meeting challenges and crises: “Aha” moments occur quite often when somebody hits bottom.

Visualizing your desired outcome is a useful tool in your journey. “Seeing” yourself as you wish to be has helped smokers quit, obese people lose weight, and sports champions achieve their goals. In order to change the printout of the body, you must learn to rewrite the software of the mind. This truism is reinforced by brain scans that show a decrease in certain higher functions (making good decisions, following reason over impulse, resisting temptation) when a person falls into a pattern of giving in to a wide range of lower impulses, such as fear, anger, or simply physical hunger. You need to implement a healing regimen that encourages and rewards your good choices if you want brain pathways to follow suit.

Step 4: Make Steady Changes

Even though you are working on the big picture, for psychological reasons a series of small victories is desirable. In essence, you are training your brain to succeed. Most of us, having been defeated by old conditioning, take the course of least resistance, not realizing that we are training our brains into pathways that rob us of free will over time.

So begin with a victory you can define and which means something to you. Skip red meat for a week. Take the stairs, not the elevator. If you’re very out of shape, walk 10 minutes every day and gradually build up your time. Put down your fork halfway through your meal, take a few deep breaths, and ask yourself if you’re still hungry. If you work at a desk, make it a rule to always stand or pace when you’re on the phone. Over time, what seem like baby steps produce new physiological changes in every cell of the body. Trillions of cells are eavesdropping on your every thought and action. Instead of pretending that your body doesn’t know what you’re doing, make yourself the gift of delivering good news to your cells.

In my view, the most important victories occur in awareness, however. If you tend to procrastinate, be aware of the reasons you do it. We get comfortable in our warm, fuzzy old routines, and making changes, even small ones, feels threatening psychologically, as if even a positive change is a risk. Predict when you will procrastinate and invent a strategy to outmaneuver your future self. For example, if you know you’ll be tempted to hit the snooze button instead of getting up for an early morning jog, put your exercise clothes across the room from your bed—with your alarm clock on top.

Step 5: Reinforce Good Decisions

Sometimes brain research underlines the obvious, but it is a breakthrough to observe MRI scans and see for yourself that good decisions “light up the brain in ways that are different from bad decisions. In the larger scheme, when you undertake a wellness program, you will be faced every day with the choice to stay the course or abandon your mission. How does your brain make choices, then?

Executive control, which means choosing a thought or action to meet an internal goal, is managed by the brain’s prefrontal cortex. The orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala play roles in regulating decision-making based on the memory of feelings. Regions of the midbrain in which the neurotransmitter dopamine is predominant also influence decision-making. Some of the choices that trigger dopamine’s release: eating sweet foods, taking drugs, having sex.

We may overindulge in chocolate cake because we tend to value the short-term outcome we know (deliciousness) over the long-term outcome we have never experienced (weight loss and increased energy from better nutrition). One way to break that cycle is to reward ourselves in a different way. Instead of eating cake, we can go play a game or listen to music.

How long does it take to form a new habit? An average of 66 days, according to a 2009 study from University College, London. Repetition and giving yourself time to adjust are the main factors in forming a new behavior pattern.

http://www.deepakchopra.com/blog/view/362/a_personal_mission:_define_your_wellness_

An article found in the Organic & Non GMO Report details projections made by Jeremy Rifkin, founder and president of The Foundation on Economic Trends and noted critic of biotechnology, predicting that without the regulation of genetically engineered crops the organic industry will suffer serious contamination. According to Rifkin, biotechnology has created two separate scientific paths.

The hard path manipulates nature with recombinant DNA technologies, while the soft path uses genomics to gain a higher understanding of genes. Rifkin believes that the soft path will lead to better stewardship for sustainable agriculture, while following the hard path will result in the death of the organic industry and environmentally responsible farming.

Unlike Organic Inc., the group consisting of Whole Foods, Stonyfield and Organic Valley, Rifkin does not believe that coexistence can be achieved between biotech and organic farming.  Currently there is no requirement for GMO products to be labeled in natural or conventional foods. The only certainty is that organic products will be free of GMOs, as organic compliance strictly prohibits GMO presence in any certified organic products.

Nature’s Fare is fundamentally against genetically engineered substances and their impact on the sovereignty of individual farmers and the negative side effects they impose on the environment. Whenever possible, Nature’s Fare’s purchasing department sources organic alternatives to everyday products. All produce at Nature’s Fare stores is 100% certified organic and has not been contaminated by conventional items in either the shipping or the stocking process. Nature’s Fare believes very strongly in maintaining the integrity of the organic industry and continues to take steps to ensure its survival.

Learn to Prevent Cancer, Come to the Fraser Valley’s Cancer Prevention Forum:

Saturday, March 31^st 2012, 9:30-5:30,

Garden Park Tower, 2825 Clearbrook Road, Abbotsford.

Speakers: Jackie Harvey, Christine Awram, Dr. Balcaen ND, Susan Agostino,
Suede Hills Organic Farm. Tina Palmer, Dr. Serenity Aberdour ND,  Susan Fiedler and Marinella Nicolosi.

Exhibitors and Door Prizes; proceeds to “Inspire Health, Integrated Cancer Care”.

Advance tickets save $2 www.healthbrights.com $10 at the door.

For more info contact Anne:  healthbrights@gmail.com 604-832-4289

Join us for a day of learning how to Prevent Cancer:

Cancer Prevention Forum

March 31st, 2012, 9:30 – 5:30

2825 Clearbrook Road

Garden Park Tower

Abbotsford, BC

http://healthbrights.com/tickets.htm

Sally and Wilfrid Mennell, the organic farmers who discovered Ambrosia. They live in Cawston, BC.

Ambrosia’s Made in BC story

New apple varieties are typically developed at agriculture research centers by scientists using traditional breeding methods.  Not so the amazing Ambrosia.  It was discovered as a chance seedling in the Mennell’s organic orchard in the Similkameen Valley of British Columbia.  In the early 1990’s, Sally and Wilfrid Mennell found a rogue seedling in their newly replanted orchard, and, instead of pulling it out as most farmers would have done, they let the seedling grow. Their natural curiousity and closely held philosophy of working in harmony with nature compelled them to nurture the sapling which bore fruit a few years later.  And what a fruit it was:  a beautiful bi-coloured apple — pinky-red over a creamy background — juicy and sweet, with a hint of honey, and a resonating crunch.  Wilfrid aptly named it “Ambrosia” – Food of the Gods!

Believed to be an offspring of Red and Golden Delicious parents, the Ambrosia was propagated and patented as a new variety by Sally and Wilfrid.  The new apple variety was first produced

by organic growers and sold into the organic marketplace.  The response was overwhelming – consumers loved this new apple created by Mother Nature.

Today, Ambrosias are grown in BC and in other apple growing regions throughout the world by organic and conventional producers.  Ambrosia apples are particularly cherished by the organic growers of the Similkameen Valley, home of the Mother Tree.

Choose BC Organic Ambrosias and support producers who minimize their environmental footprint, and build healthy soil and healthy plants, following rigorous government approved organic production standards.  Organic orchardists use biological controls to fight pests, composted manures to nurture the soil, and a lot of hard work to control weeds.

Organic Ambrosias are available from late October through to March and April.  Ambrosia is a low acid apple that is slow to brown when sliced, and is ideal for snacks, salads and desserts.

Learn more about Organic Ambrosias at  www.organicambrosiaapple.ca