Missing in Action

Hello....

You probably thought what happened? I have been missing in action,

I have not been blogging for a while 'cos I have been working full time. I will have many things to share about working full time as an employee versus working for myself the past 15 years.

One thing I quickly realized is that time is no longer my own - I am contracted to be on the job from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM. My time is not as flexible as when I was my own boss.

Stay tune - I will be sharing my thoughts on work, health and wealth and what it takes to truly be an entrepreneur.

How To Eat For Your Best Skin Ever

From mindbodygreen >>>


How To Eat For Your Best Skin Ever

by Amelia Freer  |  February 16, 2016

Growing up, we were told to eat our greens, but this was only partly right. While green vegetables are a powerhouse of healthful properties, having the other colors in our diet is just as important.

Brightly colored foods contain naturally occurring phytochemicals, which are responsible for giving food its color — the fire-engine red of tomatoes; the deep purple hue of blueberries — and also play important roles in protecting our health and staving off chronic disease: mopping up inflammation, slowing down premature aging, supporting sight, protecting the brain, and assisting our immune system.

Yet for many of us, the color beige is the mainstay of our plates. Foods like cereal, pasta, rice, pastries, chicken and bread often dominate our meals. These foods, especially when processed or bleached, offer much lower levels and less variety of nutrients than we need to keep healthy.

I’m not saying don’t eat them, but I am saying aim for the rainbow when it comes to your daily food choices.

Research has shown that our diets should be predominantly plant-based, and so ensuring that we include plant foods in each meal is an important habit to embrace. Every cell in our body survives on the nutrients it is fed — plant foods are the richest sources of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and those color-giving phytonutrients, which form their own cool little health-defending gang.

When humans were predominantly hunter-gatherers we ate more than 800 different varieties of plant foods. These days, we have a very limited choice, especially when shopping in supermarkets.

But at farmers markets you’ll find the more unusual forms of our everyday foods, such as purple carrots, golden beets, yellow zucchini, orange tomatoes, and purple broccoli — there really is a wider variety out there to shake us out of our color comfort zone.

Many experts advise us to eat five portions of fruits and vegetables per day, but they don’t stipulate that they need to be in a natural, unprocessed form. And I believe that we really need much, much more. I encourage you to eat three portions of fruit per day, one per meal (a portion being a small handful), and two to three portions of vegetables at each meal, reaching as far and wide in color as possible.

As you go through your day, try to mentally tick off the different colors you are eating. And see where you could possibly add in an extra burst.

For example, a salad doesn’t have to be only lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and a dressing. Throw in some other dark leafy greens like spinach, broccoli, brightly colored peppers, red cabbage, carrots, beets, and creamy green avocado, too. If you’re making oatmeal for breakfast, toss in some fresh berries or make a smoothie with one fruit and three or four different vegetables. It’s easy once you start.

Read more from mindbodygreen >>>

Power Profile: David, Stacy and Colton Whited (2016 MAWC)

David: "...if you understood residual income, you would walk through a brick wall to get it!"

Stacy: " That is so true you know, David and I are living proof of how powerful residual income is. We started our business at the age of 23 in the midst of some really tough times. I've been sick with the pregnancy for months. I was a cosmetologist prior to that and David was going to school and working but when I got sick he had to take on a bunch of part-time jobs....."

Power Profile: Dritan Hodo (2016 MAWC)

Dritan was an immigrant with his parents from Albania. Like every immigrant, Dritan had
visions of becoming successful after college. Listen to his story.....

A Time for Change: Most Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck

From BeingJRRidinger.com >>

A Time for Change: Most Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck

JR Ridinger CEO of Market America

No matter what your situation is – everyone can benefit for owning an UnFranchise Business because when you build it right the residual income generated can have a monumental impact on your life! With a volatile stock market and a job market that’s left millions of people overworked and underpaid, it’s easy to see why most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. This fascinating article from MarketWatch really breaks down the issue and helps shed more light on the challenges facing many Americans today.

Anyone who’s ever been in a situation like this knows just how challenging it can be, with even the slightest unexpected expense presenting a huge setback for you and your family. Unfortunately, it seems like our government leaders often spend more time bickering along party lines than they do working together to forge lasting solutions that help empower and improve people’s lives – that’s why I feel so strongly that it’s up to us – the entrepreneurs, to help make a difference and provide people with opportunities that make living paycheck to paycheck a thing of the past.

With the UnFranchise Business and the Shopping Annuity, we are economic alchemists with the power to create our own economy where people power is multiplied and interconnected to translate directly into collective buying power! We are leading the parade and changing the game by giving the power back to the consumers – while helping entrepreneurs build a legacy of global success with residual income.

While many competitors have come and gone, the opportunities we offer are unlike any business in the world. If you know someone who’s tired of living paycheck to paycheck, do them a favor and introduce them to the UnFranchise Business – or better yet – buy them a ticket to World Conference! Being at this event next week is the perfect way to arm yourself with the information and tools you need to build a residual income powerhouse with the UnFranchise!

Be there with your team and you’ll quickly see why World Conference has the propensity to catapult your business to new heights in 2016!

Keep Growing!

-JR Ridinger

Human-gut-on-a-chip model offers hope for IBD sufferers

From Harvard Gagette

Human-gut-on-a-chip model offers hope for IBD sufferers

Wyss Institute replicates gut’s microenvironment in the lab, allowing researchers new access

By Kat J. McAlpine, Wyss Institute Communications | December 15, 2015

It’s estimated that as many as a million Americans suffer from inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, which cause mild to severe symptoms that at best can be managed and at worst lead to life-threatening complications.

While abnormal immune responses are largely responsible for these diseases, issues relating to gut microbiome, intestinal epithelial cells, immune components, and the gut’s rhythmic peristalsis motions can also contribute to and exacerbate symptoms. But until now, scientists have been hard pressed to develop new therapies for treating IBDs because they could not replicate the human gut microenvironment in the laboratory.

On Monday, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University announced that its team had created a model of human intestinal inflammation and bacterial overgrowth in a human-gut-on-a-chip. The team, co-led by Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber and core faculty member James Collins, leveraged the institute’s proprietary human-organs-on-chips technology to microengineer the model.

The advance, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), allows scientists to analyze for the first time how normal gut microbes and pathogenic bacteria contribute to immune responses, and to investigate IBD mechanisms in a controlled model that recapitulates human intestinal physiology.

“Chronic inflammation of the intestine is thought to be caused by abnormal interactions between gut microbes, intestinal epithelial cells, and the immune system, but so far it has been impossible to determine how each of these factors contributes to the development of intestinal bowel disease,” said Hyun Jung Kim, former Wyss Technology Development Fellow and first author of the study, speaking about the limitations of conventional in vitro and animal models of bacterial overgrowth and inflammation of the intestines.

The human-gut-on-a-chip technology, however, provides an ideal microenvironment for mimicking the natural conditions of the human intestines in a small-scale, controllable, in vitro platform. The human-gut-on-a-chip was first invented at the Wyss Institute in 2012. Made of a clear, flexible polymer about the size of a computer memory stick, the hollow-channeled microfluidic device simulates the physical structure, microenvironment, peristalsis-like waves and fluid flow of the human intestine.

Read more from Harvard Gagette >>>

5 Foods That Will Mess With Your Skin + What To Eat Instead

From mindbodygreen.com


5 Foods That Will Mess With Your Skin + What To Eat Instead


by Tata Harper  |  November 21, 2015


There’s no question that using high quality, natural skin care is only half of the solution to complexion concerns. The other half is what feeds your skin from the inside, which is, of course, your diet!

Every single thing you put in your mouth, chew up and swallow will make its way through your body and eventually, out onto your skin. That mug of herbal tea you drink every afternoon? You can thank it for playing a part in your dewey skin. The daily candy bar you snack on after lunch? Yup, that'll present on your face too, and probably not in the way you want.

And while there's no standard set of rules that will work for everyone, a good rule of thumb is to focus the majority of your diet on whole, nutrient-dense foods aka superfoods. Things like leafy greens, healthy fats and organic protein will benefit your complexion today and for the rest of your life. (Your insides will benefit too!)

But as much as we focus on what we should be eating for great skin, we sometimes overlook the things that aren't so great for us. If you want healthy, youthful skin, be good to your body and avoid these inflammatory foods.

1. Processed Sugar
According to the British Journal of Dermatology, excess sugar in your diet may contribute to the degradation of collagen and elastin, leading to loss of firmness and elasticity of the skin, which basically means it'll age your skin way faster than nature.

Additionally, spikes in blood sugar cause your insulin levels to spike, which leads to inflammation. In turn, inflammation can make skin conditions like acne and rosacea worse. Cut back on the sweet stuff and try to eliminate packaged foods with added sugar.

Swap: Rely on fruits and a small amount of honey to satisfy your sweet tooth. Personally, I love to snack on a tiny bit of dark chocolate when I’m having a sugar-craving; it satisfies that urge but isn’t too processed.

2. High Glycemic Foods
Processed foods like white bread, pasta, baked goods, cereal and even white rice are all considered high glycemic foods, which means they're high on the glycemic index — a number that indicates a food's effect on someone's blood sugar level. In other words, food that are "high glycemic" convert to sugar quickly in your body and cause spikes in blood sugar.

As discussed above, these spikes lead to inflammation, which attacks skin's collagen and elastin, leading to an acceleration of the skin’s aging process. The result is more fine lines, wrinkles and dullness.

Swap: Go for healthy natural carbohydrates and grains like sweet potatoes, brown rice and quinoa. These foods are much lower on the glycemic index, will keep you full for longer, and will actually improve your skin. For example, sweet potatoes are high in vitamin C, which produces collagen, helping to maintain your skin's elasticity.

3. Non-Organic Dairy
Some dermatologists suspect that all dairy contributes to acne, but there's not much scientific evidence that shows a direct link between dairy consumption and skin health. Either way, it's a good place to start if you're looking to experiment with how what you eat affects your skin.

And if you're not ready to make the switch to almond milk, at least change to organic dairy. Non-organic milk often contains added hormones, and since your body's naturally-produced hormones are already playing tricks on your skin, it's a no brainer that any additional hormones (from dairy or other sources) will also wreak havoc.

Swap: Organic dairy is a good place to start, but you can also go the nut-based route. Try DIY almond milk or if you're feeling really adventurous, you could try your hand at making your own raw cheeses.

4. Fried Foods


Read more from mindbodygreen.com >>

The 50 Most Desirable Employers in North America

                        From Yahoo.com