How to prevent getting sick from the flu

You can prevent germs from making you ill in two ways: prevent entry into the body by careful hygiene, and if they do get in, make sure your body’s natural immune system is able to fight these germs, so they self-destruct before overwhelming the system.

Most flu germs are spread in two ways:

• touching such as hand-to-hand contact
• droplet spread when germs ride along on tiny water droplets that are sneezed or coughed into the air

Try these flu prevention tips to avoid person-to-person spread:

• avoid shaking hands, but bow or give a head nod
• avoid nose-picking as the nose is a breeding ground for germs
• sneeze into a disposable handkerchief and if you don't have one available, sneeze inside your elbow
• shun coughers and sneezers as much as possible.
• avoid crowded rooms

Why does stress make us sick more easily?

Most diseases that we are dealing with nowadays are chronic diseases as a result of poor lifestyle choices that will only affect us later in life. However, we can get sick much sooner when exposed to chronic stress. How can this happen?

Stress is defined as a series of events, starting with a stimulus leading to a stress response known as the 'fight-or-flight' reaction that can affect many body systems.
Physical or physiological stress is mostly short-lived, while psychological or emotional stress can last for a very long time.

Why are multivitamins important for your health?

Sometimes, when your only source of news is from mainstream media, it seems as if taking nutritional supplements is worse than taking medicines. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Especially multivitamins and fish oil can be your cheapest way to top health in addition to a healthy diet. People following healthy diets, are as rare as diamonds and it most certainly doesn't mean following the latest fad diet where you must buy expensive exotic ingredients to be doing it right.

Sadly this is possible when the general public is not being educated properly. Even our national nutritional council (Voedingscentrum) still keeps spouting how you should be consuming artificial margarine instead of real butter as it 'contains extra vitamin D' while butter from grass-fed cows will contain this naturally.

However, there is one truth that is universally embraced by almost everyone: in order to become healthier one has to consumer larger amounts of vegetables and fruits and less heavily processed foods. The sad truth is how most Dutch citizens don't even ingest 200 grams of vegetables and fruit on a given day, a far cry from the recommended 500 grams never mind the optimal 750 grams that is considered to be ideal when you're striving from longevity.

A multivitamin a day keeps the doctor away 

With so many supplements available, and a lot of supplement advertisements in sports magazines targeted at athletes, one is rarely seen: ads for a multivitamin and mineral. 

When you think about supplements, what are the first thoughts that go through your mind? Whey protein, nitric oxide, creatine, fat burners, or maybe something else? These are the ones that consume the ads.

What if I told you though that the most important supplement that you must have in your arsenal is not on this list? That is your basic multivitamin. From the chewable ones you took as a kid to the ones you have now. Oh, you don't take them? If not, you better change that immediately if you want to meet your fitness goals.

For the human body to complete all the tasks it has in a normal day, it must be given a wide and complex variety of vital nutrients. Becoming deficient in any one of these essential vitamins or minerals causes breakdown of the metabolic pathway that produces optimum efficiency and performance goes down quick. Obviously, this is NOT what you want!

Timing of supplements

We frequently receive the question whether it really matters when to use a particular supplement.
Most supplements come with instructions to ingest them with a meal. This is in the assumption that meal contain fat, as fat will aid with absorption through the gut wall. Whether or not this can be your first meal of the day, depends on how much fat it contains. Especially fat-soluble vitamins, such as A,D, E and K need fat for proper absorption.
A work-around is to ingest them together with a larger amount of fish or krill oil softgels if your first meal doesn't contain enough fat.
Another reason take supplements with a meal, is that taking it by itself, can cause nausea or discomfort.

Fears about contamination of eggs or supplements

In the past week of early June, a lot of fear was placed in the heart of the public of both Dutch, German and French customers, when officials from the National Food Safety Board announced eggs had to be destroyed due to contamination with a banned substance, called fipronyl.
The reason this happened, is that fipronyl is an amazingly effective insecticide that was perfectly legal for use in stables where egg laying poultry live. This insecticide was however banned from January 1 onwards for use on animals in the food chain, with the main reason behind the ban being its toxicity to bees.