Thin and Brittle Fingernails Relief… Naturally

/in /by

Are your hands reddish and your fingernails thin and brittle? The reason is lack of moisture. They’re commonly caused by repeated washing and drying of hands, overexposure to detergents, household cleaners, and nail polish removers. Compounding the problem is the imposed use of alcohol-based hand sanitizers everywhere.

COVID-19, which stands for “coronavirus disease 2019”, was introduced as the cause of the most acute respiratory infection crisis and outbreak. Public health guidelines recommended by the World Health Organization emphasized frequent and correct handwashing with standard hand sanitizers to prevent transmission and reduce the spread of the aforementioned pandemic disease. Based on these protocols and recommendations, the use of alcohol-based hand sanitizers has become very common in local supermarkets, shops, hotels, and around the world.

Handwashing with soap and water is the most recommended procedure, but due to lack of access in some situations, ethanol-containing hand sanitizers are used frequently as a substitute for handwashing.

In the recent crisis, the demand for hand-sanitizing solutions has dramatically skyrocketed; however, several cases of related risks are now being identified, such as:

  • Thin and brittle nails – also known as onychoschizia, a condition that causes horizontal splits within the nail plate.
  • Nail splitting – often seen together with onychorrhexis, a longitudinal splitting of the nail plate.

These two diseases together are called “brittle nail syndrome.”

  • Nail splitting may also be caused by nail cosmetics (hardeners, polish, polish removers, solvents), nail procedures, and occupational exposure to various chemicals (acids, cement, solvents, thioglycolates, salt, sugar).
  • Injury (trauma) may also play a role in the development of brittle nails.
  • Brittle nails may occur due to medical problems, including gland (endocrine system) diseases, tuberculosis, Sjögren’s syndrome, and malnutrition.

People with other skin diseases, such as lichen planus and psoriasis, as well as people taking oral medications made from vitamin A, may also develop nail splitting.

Reddish and dry hands, in this case due to the high volume of alcohol consumption, are a number of problems emerging which, if not controlled properly, could create other concerns for the general health of society. One of the problems with alcoholic products is the production of sanitizers with nonstandard formulas.

For example, it has been clear that methanol is used instead of ethanol in some products. While methanol is not a type of toxin, it metabolizes into formaldehyde and formic acid when absorbed into the human body. These end products are toxic and may cause metabolic acidosis, brain injury, blindness, cardiovascular instability, and death.

Thin and Brittle Fingernails Relief — Naturally

Guidelines

  • Reduce how often you wet and dry your nails.
  • Wear plastic or rubber gloves over thin cotton gloves while doing all housework, including food preparation.
  • Keep the nails trimmed short to reduce worsening of nail splitting.
  • Soak the nails in water two or three times a day for 10 minutes at a time to increase the water content (hydration) of the nails.
  • Apply moisturizers (emollients) such as Natural Mazcal Skin and natural jelly to improve nail hydration.
  • Nail-hardening agents containing formaldehyde may increase nail strength but should be used cautiously, as they can cause brittleness and nail damage.
  • Go natural—avoid alcohol-based sanitizers.
  • Limit manicures.
  • Get a paraffin wax bath.
  • Wear gloves.

Natural Remedies

There are natural remedies you can do at home using ingredients you already have in your kitchen cupboard. Harnessing the power of the nutrients found in natural foods and oils also means you can cut out the unnecessary chemicals and preservatives often added to commercial nail remedies and treatments.

  • Lemon juice helps brighten your nails and remove stains, and vitamin C promotes stronger growth.
  • Using a cotton pad, swipe lemon juice over each nail and dry. You could also use a slice of lemon directly on the nail. Do this twice a week, followed by a rich moisturizer.
  • Add a few drops of lemon juice to 2 tablespoons of olive oil and warm in a cup to create a nail mask that can be massaged into your nails and left for 15–20 minutes, or even overnight, for maximum benefit.
  • Coconut oil is very beneficial and can help strengthen your nails and soften your cuticles.
  • Apple cider vinegar has anti-fungal properties, which is excellent if you’re prone to nail infections. Try soaking your nails in diluted apple cider vinegar to prevent infections.
  • Garlic oil is rich in selenium, which promotes nail growth. You can cut a clove and rub your fingernails with a sliced piece of garlic, or if that is too pungent, make your own garlic oil to use as a nail mask.
  • Honey helps fight bacterial and fungal growth, keeping your nails and cuticles nourished and supple. Combine honey’s hydrating properties with those of lemon juice to create a honey and lemon nail mask by mixing two teaspoons of honey with a few drops of lemon juice, then massaging it into your nails for 15–20 minutes. Rinse off thoroughly.

Regular use will help you achieve brighter nails, soft cuticles, and stronger nails over time.

#BrittleNails
#NailHealth
#NaturalRemedies
#MoisturizingCare
#CoconutOil
#LemonJuice
#AppleCiderVinegar
#GarlicOil
#HoneyMask
#CuticleCare
#HealthyHands
#MazcalRemedies
#NaturalHealing
#HerbalWellness

Longevity Strategy, Naturally (Part 1 of 3)

/in /by

Longevity means a long duration of individual life. But there is a big difference between a long duration in a vibrant, active body compared to a body sitting in a wheelchair drooling all day long.

There is a host of environmental and lifestyle factors that are constantly preying on the youth of every cell of your body. It is the inescapable reality of aging:

  • High alcohol consumption decreases the body’s antioxidant activity and, at the same time, increases cell-damaging free radicals.
  • Being overweight leads to a state of increased cell-damaging oxidative stress.
  • Excess Omega-6 fatty acid intake accelerates aging and increases inflammation.
  • Lack of sleep significantly shortens the length of DNA telomeres, your cellular timekeepers.
  • Highly processed carbohydrates and sugar intake promote the formation of AGEs (Advanced Glycation End-products). These mutated proteins significantly accelerate cellular aging.
  • Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) infiltrating our diet are linked to poor immune function and accelerated aging.
  • Overeating produces age-accelerating free radicals.

Many over-the-counter and prescription medications have been linked to accelerated aging, pain, and organ damage.

  • Poor nutrition leads to a lack of antioxidants and essential vitamins and minerals that fight the aging process.
  • Pesticides, herbicides, pollution, and other environmental toxins all increase skin aging and damage your DNA.
  • Mood-related issues like anger, stress, and fear that trigger the age-accelerating hormone cortisol into overdrive have been linked to as much as a decade of accelerated aging.
  • Too much or too little exercise — both the highly active and sedentary populations — have similar age-related biomarkers due to too little or too much exercise.
  • UV rays damage the DNA of skin cells, leading to thinning skin, sun spots, wrinkles, exaggerated expression lines, pervasive dryness, redness, itching, and even skin cancer.

Nature intended aging to be a gradual, graceful process full of vitality and longevity. Current lifestyles accelerate aging beyond belief, and showing physical signs of age is the number one fear of adults over 36 years old.

There IS Something You Can Do About It!

The answer is longevity capsules — a blend of age-defying “super nutrients” formula. A formula so powerful that it slows the aging process and:

  • Combats external “photo-aging,” improves skin tone, elasticity, and minimizes wrinkles
  • Increases the hormones responsible for skin brightness that gives your youthful glow
  • Increases feelings of well-being
  • Reduces the belly-fat-producing, age-accelerating hormone cortisol
  • Rolls back years of degenerative cellular aging
  • Reduces melanin (the molecule responsible for dark spots)
  • Reduces sleeplessness and improves sleep quality
  • Blocks and slows the degradation of the most important aging biomarker ever discovered — the length of your telomeres

Longevity capsules work by providing anti-aging, cell-rejuvenating benefits in just two small doses, taken twice daily with your meals.

There Are Three Root Causes of Why We Age

1. Degradation of Your Cellular Timekeepers

Known as telomeres, these are the protective caps at the end of each strand of cellular DNA that controls aging. Telomeres are so critically important to aging that some within the scientific community are calling them your “eternal youth genes.”

Every day, the cells in your body divide as many as 2 trillion times. Old cells die, and the body replaces them. While these new cells are duplicates, like a photocopied image, they are slightly less perfect than the original. As your telomeres degrade and shorten, your body ages more rapidly.

As aging accelerates, you live what is ultimately a lower and lower quality of life each year until eventually your telomeres “expire,” and the inevitable happens — you die.

You can boost the health of your telomeres and keep them from degrading and shortening with longevity capsules. You can slow and even reverse the aging process and add many high-quality, vibrant, and productive years to your life!

Using longevity capsules means that your cells stay young and vibrant even when your chronological age goes up. We’ve all seen 50-year-old men or women who don’t look a day over 40 and other 50-year-olds who could easily pass for 65. As the old adage goes, your age is just a number — the prime importance is your cellular age, or how old your young (and youthful) body feels, functions, looks, and performs.

The primary enzyme responsible for keeping telomeres strong, healthy, and long is called telomerase. The ingredients in longevity capsules work together to supercharge your telomerase production and keep you healthy, youthful, and full of life!

#LongevityStrategy
#AntiAging
#CellularHealth
#Telomeres
#HealthyLiving
#NaturalWellness
#YouthfulGlow
#StressReduction
#InflammationControl
#HolisticNutrition
#HealthyAging
#SuperNutrients
#TelomeraseActivation
#MazcalRemedies

Origins of the Tomato and the Potato

/in , , /by

The tomato is native to South America and was cultivated from there to North America before the discovery of the continent in 1492, now known as America. The Aztec language was used by traders bringing goods from South America to what is now the U.S. In Mexico, the word tomatl simply means “swollen fruit.” Like many other words ending in -atl, from the Nahuatl (Aztec) language, it means “water.” The word “tomato” comes from tomatl or tomohuac, which means “fat.” So, tomato means “fat water.”

Since the Spanish had difficulty pronouncing the -atl ending in many Aztec words, they called it “tomato.” The tomato, along with other essential crops, was cultivated by the Incas, Mayans, and Aztecs. These included:

  • Maize (corn)
  • Beans
  • Squash
  • Chilies and sweet potatoes

Whether grown individually or together, these crops have a long history in the Americas. The development of this agricultural knowledge took place over 5,000–6,500 years, and squash was domesticated between 8,000–10,000 years ago. While the tomato is considered a vegetable due to its many culinary uses, it is, in fact, a fruit belonging to the potato, pepper, and eggplant family.

Tomatoes Are an Excellent Fruit

Tomatoes are an excellent fruit for a quick, nutritious, and healthy snack — also an ideal ingredient for creative recipes.

The tomato, potato, maize, chilies, beans, and squash were introduced to Spain and the rest of Europe at the beginning of the 16th century.

Tomatoes first arrived at the court of Queen Isabella in Madrid, and later were traded in Seville, one of the main centers of international trade, predominantly with Italy and France. It was in 1544 that the Italian herbalist Matthioli introduced his knowledge of the tomato to Italy (“pomodoro”). Tomatoes were even given aphrodisiac properties in France, where they were called “pomme d’amour” — “love apple.”

The first known published Neapolitan recipe for “Spanish-style tomato sauce” dates back to 1692.

The Spread of the Potato

The potato was cultivated between 8000 and 5000 BC in a region that includes southern Peru and Bolivia. From there, it spread throughout the Americas and was widely cultivated by the Aztecs and Mayans in Mexico. The Spanish took it to Europe, and it has since become a staple food across much of the world.

The Tomato’s Global Popularity

The tomato became — and remains — one of the most popular foods in the modern world, due to its versatility and its ability to combine well with:

  • Cheese
  • Eggs
  • Fish
  • Meat
  • Vegetables
  • A wide variety of aromatic herbs

Tomatoes are highly nutritious and low in calories. They contain large amounts of vitamin C and folic acid and are the most critical food source of a red pigment called lycopene, which has antioxidant properties and may help reduce the risk of prostate and other cancers.

Some important health facts about tomatoes:

  • High lycopene levels in the blood are associated with a lower rate of several cancers, especially prostate cancer.
  • Blood plasma absorbs lycopene better from cooked tomato products than from raw tomatoes.
  • Similarly, lycopene from heat-processed tomato juice is more bioavailable than that from raw juice.

The Three Sisters

The Aztecs learned from the Toltecs and Olmecs how to cultivate efficient mixed crops, producing nutritious vegetables through what is now known as companion planting — the Three Sisters agricultural method:

  • Maize (Zea mays)
  • Beans (Phaseolus sp.)
  • Squash (Cucurbita pepo)

These three crops were planted close together. Maize and beans were often planted in mounds formed by hilling soil around the base each year. The system worked synergistically:

  • The cornstalk served as a trellis for the beans to climb.
  • The beans replenished nitrogen in the soil.
  • The broad leaves of the squash shaded the ground, helping retain moisture and prevent weeds.

I have often wondered what people around the world ate before the Spanish introduced the Aztec crops of tomato, potato, corn, and squash to Europe and beyond. I smile when the Irish think the potato is from Ireland or when Italians think the tomato is from Italy!

Dementia Relief, Naturally

/in /by

Dementia is a canopy term for a collection of symptoms caused by disorders that affect the brain, including devastating diseases like the most common form of dementia—Alzheimer’s disease.

Millions of people in the U.S. alone are living with Alzheimer’s. It can be challenging to watch someone you love deal with symptoms of dementia, often including memory loss and trouble with language, along with personality changes, delusions, agitation, and less ability to solve problems or control their emotions. It’s important to note that although dementia risk increases with age, it is not part of the normal aging process.

Dementia Can Strike Early

Dementia can strike people as early as 30 years old. It’s certainly clear that there’s a lot of pain and suffering involved with dementia and Alzheimer’s. Drugs have consistently come up short when it comes to curing the disease. Natural supplements, diet, and exercise can reverse dementia and Alzheimer’s symptoms.

Lower Your Risk of Dementia

Avoid processed foods. Favoring an alkaline diet and exercising lower your risk of dementia. There are other relatively simple, meaningful steps you could take to lower your risk too.

  • Avoid high copper levels in the water. We need trace amounts of the heavy metal copper to survive because it’s vital for bone, hormonal, and nerve health. However, too much of a good thing could be bad for our brain. A study found that copper can trigger the disease. The study found that copper in drinking water at levels one-tenth of the EPA standard caused a toxic accumulation of the pro-Alzheimer’s protein amyloid-beta.
  • The researchers can’t yet say what the exact “level of too much copper” is, but if you have copper water pipes, getting your water tested for excess copper is an excellent place to start.
  • Avoid products containing aluminum, an environmentally abundant metal that has long been implicated in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

Tinnitus and Dementia

Tinnitus was significantly associated with dementia occurrences in the 30–64 year age range. Tinnitus was associated with a 63% higher risk of early-onset dementia. Dementia is generally regarded as a multifactorial disease, and its incidence increases with age.

What Is Dementia?

Dementia is not a specific disease but a group of disorders characterized by the deterioration of at least two brain functions — memory and reason.

Signs and symptoms of dementia result when once-healthy neurons or nerve cells in the brain stop working, lose connections with other brain cells, and die. While everyone loses some neurons as they age, people with dementia experience far more significant losses.

Dementia symptoms lead to the loss of cognitive functioning such as thinking, remembering, and reasoning to such an extent that it interferes with a person’s daily life and activities.

Dementia is more common as people grow older (about one-third of all people age 85 or older may have some form of dementia), but it is not a normal part of aging. Many people live into their 90s and beyond without signs of dementia.

Common Early Symptoms of Dementia

  • Communication problems
  • Difficulty concentrating
  • Finding it hard to carry out familiar daily tasks, such as getting confused over the correct change when shopping
  • Struggling to follow a conversation or find the right word
  • People with dementia cannot control their emotions
  • Being confused about time and place
  • Memory loss
  • Repetition
  • Getting lost
  • Personality or mood changes
  • Ringing in the ears (Tinnitus)

Herbs That Can Provide Cognitive Relief to Those Living with Dementia

Turmeric/curcumin and dementia care significantly lessen its kind in India and Europe, which is due to turmeric and its primary component, curcumin, and their antioxidant benefits.

Helpful Herbs and Natural Aids

  • Holy Basil (Ocimum tenuiflorum)
  • Ginseng
  • Ginkgo biloba
  • Maca
  • Brahmi (Bacopa monnieri)
  • Green Tea (Camellia sinensis)
  • Black Pepper corn extract (Piperine)
  • Cachitozapot (from Nahuatl, meaning “sleep-sapote”) — a tropical fruiting tree also called casimiroa and Mexican apple. It contains a natural sedative and pain reliever.
  • Verdolaga, Purslane (Portulaca oleracea)

Hope for Prevention and Relief

We can feel hopeful that natural integrative, personalized approaches could be the key to fighting this disease. In the meantime, it’s essential to take timely, simple steps to lower your risk of dementia now—before the disease has a chance to set in.

About 35% of dementia cases could be delayed or prevented if attention had been paid to modifiable risk factors, including early education, midlife hypertension, obesity, hearing problems, depression, diabetes, physical inactivity, smoking, and social isolation.