Unfortunately, experts agree that it is nearly impossible to adequately meet your nutritional needs with our modern diet alone. Our soils have been depleted of most essential nutrients since 1930’s. Farmers regularly replace nutrients required for plant growth-nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, but it is up to us to replace minerals and other nutrients missing from our diets.

Modern processing and marketing techniques also contribute to our lack of adequate nutrition. Produce picked in it’s green state, then allowed to ‘ripen’ in transit to market often lacks nutritional quality of their field ripened cousins.

Poor nutrition combined with stress of our modern lifestyle and constant exposure to environmental toxins means it is unreasonable to expect good health in our mature years (or any year, for that matter) without adequate supplementation.

Picking correct supplement is essential to your health as well. The vast array of options are enough to make your head spin. Testing by independent labs show huge differences in quality between brands. The cheapest drug store ‘has everything’ vitamin may not have much in way of active ingredients, but most expensive brands may not, either. Once again, take time to do research. Find out what quality control methods company uses. Are their products manufactured to pharmaceutical standards? What is company’s commitment to using best available ingredients and how do they test for ingredient quality?

In addition, investigate latest scientific evidence on what nutrients are needed for good health. There have been important breakthroughs recently in our understanding of what cells need to function and how proper cellular nutrition contributes to body’s ability to restore and repair itself. Find a nutrition company whose products reflect these advances.

The last, and perhaps most important way to stay healthy as years go by, is to pay attention to you. Respect yourself enough to take care of your physical needs. If something needs fixing, do it. Learn to like yourself if you haven’t already. Don’t just feed your body, feed your mind as well. Make your brain work. Take time to laugh everyday. Laughter stimulates immune system and just plain makes living more fun. Do things in life that give you pleasure. After all, there is more to life than work and worry. You deserve to be happy, but it is up to you to BE happy. When it comes down to it, you are all you’ve got. Be someone whose company you enjoy.

Doing all these things won’t guarantee you a long, healthy life. After all, “times and unforeseen circumstances befall us all”. But they may help time you do have on this planet be enjoyable for you and those whose life you impact. Best wishes for a good life!

Karen Walker is a life long student of healthy living. She works from her home in Montana.

Here’s what I use daily. Spectrum Essentials puts out an excellent product called

Omega-3 Norwegian Fish Oil

Two capsules contains

EPA – 360mg

DHA – 240mg

Omega-3 – 892mg

Stearic, Lauric, Palmitic Acids - 508mg

Using Omega-3 Norwegian Fish Oil is critical in getting relief from acne, so take two capsules per meal.

When your body creates prostaglandins, it creates a good prostaglandin and a bad prostaglandin. Here’s how to encourage production of good prostaglandins.

·Maintain a ratio of two times more omega-6 than omega-3 in your diet.

·Eating too much omega-6 can lead to producing excess bad prostaglandins.

·Take a multi-vitamin and minerals with your meals to provide these nutrients for breaking down the

essential fatty acids into prostaglandins

·Reduce amount of meat, saturated fat, dairy, and eggs you eat to reduce production of AA, which blocks activities of good prostaglandins

·Eat cold water fish at least twice a week to provide EPA and DHA to your diet

Include at least 20% of your diet calories as good fats – omega oils and fish oil. This is essential for controlling excess activity of your hormones and reducing inflammation of your acne.