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August, 2007 Newsletter
Dear Lovers of Herbs:
News Alert from Peru: As most of you probably know the coastal region of Peru has suffered a devastating earthquake which read 8.0 on the Richter Scale. Tremors were felt as far north as Columbia, as far south as Chile and all the way to Japan. Elena Rojas, CoFounder of Whole World Botanicals is in Peru, and experienced the tremors for 2 minutes and 37 seconds, the longest tremor she has ever experienced. Her family's house in Nasca was damaged, but the major devastation occurred in Pisco and Ica where more than 500 people died, 1,500 were injured and estimated quarter of a million homeless. Although the tremors were felt in Iquitos, a northeast rainforest city, none of our collectors or growers in the different areas of Peru were adversely affected by the quake.
Our heart goes out to the Peruvians. If you would like to make a donation to help with emergency relief and reconstruction, it is recommended that the two relief organizations operating in Peru with the best track record for effective response to such situations are Caritas del Peru and Oxfam International. You may click on the following links if you wish to make a contribution to the relief effort through one of these two organizations.
Most of you are aware that nearly all of our herbs/botanicals come from Peru and the Whole World Botanicals has a very strong connection with this country, both through WWB's Peruvian co-founder, Elena Rojas Martinez, and through the native Peruvians who grow or collect our botanicals. We are also aware that a surprising number of our customers have visited Peru and feel a particular bond with the people and the cultures. Therefore the devastating earthquake suffered by Peru two weeks ago hit us particularly hard. Click on the following links to see up close what the devastation looked like.
In June, Whole World Botanicals entered a whole new area of collaboration with our Peruvian herbal partners. WWB has designed and funded a Pilot Solar Heating Project with the maca growing communities which supply WWB´s Certified Organic maca roots for our Royal Maca products. Read more about it below in
Viana’s Green News
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AUG - SEPT 2007 – SPECIAL Offer!
Offer expires on Sept. 30, 2007
Buy
Royal Break-Stone™ Tea (125g)
(makes 125 cups of tea)
&
Get a
Royal Cat's Claw™ Tea (140g)
FREE
(makes 70 cups of tea - 140 servings)
See below for the Health Benefits and
Click here to take advantage of this incredible offer
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Royal Break-Stone™
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Royal Cat's Claw™
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Traditionally used to
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Promote healthy digestion of fats
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Detoxify the liver
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Promote kidney health
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Support the gallbladder function
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Provide nutritional support for bladder health
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Promote healthy uric acid level
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Promotes
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A healthy Immune system
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Healthy cell formation
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Healthy blood ecology
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A healthy heart and arteries
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Healthy bowel ecology & elimination
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Click here to read more about Cat's Claw
Click here to read more about Break-Stone
You just pay the shipping & handling charge of $5.95 and we will mail this product to the person receiving your gift and even enclose a gift card with your personal message, if you like!
Cat's Claw
Cat's Claw (botanical name is Uncaria tomentosa) is the most researched herb in South America . Nicole Maxwell, author of
Witch Doctor's Apprentice
says that if she had to choose one medicinal plant from the Peruvian rainforest that had more healing properties than any other, it would be Cat's Claw.
Traditional Uses: anti-tumor, anti-inflammatory, improved bowel ecology, detoxification and regularity; relieves disorders involving the stomach and intestines.*
Scientific research: increases the production of killer-T cells and macrophage cells in the body; strengthens immune system function; anti-inflammatory; anti-viral.* For a review of the research on this important rainforest botanical, go to the
Cat's Claw section of the Herbal Library
.
Please click on the photo to enlarge.
DISCLAIMER: Information on this site is provided for informational purposes and is not meant to substitute for the advice provided by your own physician or other medical professional. All claims for the effectiveness of our herbs have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Phyllanthus niruri and diabetes
Royal Break-Stone Kidney-Bladder Support™ can also be helpful to your diabetic friend or family member. Clincal studies have shown that
Phyllanthus niruri
, the herbal basis for the Break-Stone products, lowers aldose reductase levels. Elevated aldose reductase levels are associated with high blood sugar levels and can cause peripheral nerve damage. Diabetics also suffer high rates of kidney failure and are filling up the dialysis clinics all over the United States. Several customers have reported to us what we believed to be impossible. But then the good news was confirmed by a gifted practitioner in Michigan, when a customer in Chicago sent in her lab report showing her creatinine and albumin levels. The report showed significantly lower levels of creatinine and albumin after taking the product as directed on the bottle for 3 months, compared to before.
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Herbal News: After more than one year, we finally have the Royal Desmodium™ Tea back in stock!
It was difficult to get the permit to take this herb out of the rainforest, even though it is not endangered. We have many customers who are Desmodium fanatics and have called at least once a month for the past year to find out if the product was available again!
Desmodium Tea has a delicate flavor all by itself or you can add a squirt of lemon. It opens up the sinuses, is an instant bronchial-dilator, has anti-histamine and has anti-anaphylactic shock properties, making the tea perfect for anyone with allergies, breathing issues, or head/chest colds.
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It also relaxes muscle spasms and is great for backaches, sore knees, shoulders, and necks and is very popular with body builders, martial artists, as well as people doing manual labor or repetitive labor. It is called Strong Back Herb in Jamaica because it is famous for its ability to ‘cure’ a backache. There are also clinical studies showing a great improvement in liver function (lowers elevated liver enzyme levels) in people with cirrhosis of the liver or hepatitis (Royal Break-Stone™ provides great nutritional support for hepatitis as well).
Note: Our Royal Desmodium™ extract capsules should be available sometime within the next two months.
Viana’s Green News
I am writing this newsletter two weeks after returning from Peru where I spent time with the maca growers who live at a very high altitude in the Central Sierra of Peru. Every year--sometimes more often--I look forward to visiting our herbal partners-- the native communities of Peruvians who provide our herbs.This trip was particularly exciting because together we were making history in the Andes : the Whole World Botanicals´Pilot Project for Passive Solar House Heating was initiated with the communities which supply WWB with certified organic maca roots. And the project to introduce solar cookers which we started about a year and a half ago got a big boost. This time the season was right--the combination of bright sunshine and freezing to subfreezing temperatures every night lasts from April to October. Everyone was amazed and fascinated with how well a solar cooker could cook food and it took no convincing at all for the whole community to embrace this new (old) technology. That's because fire wood must be brought from the rainforest and costs a fortune. The maca growers have to rely on sheep dung and cattle manure, along with some peat moss sod to provide their cooking fires. No one likes the smell or the smoke produced by this kind of cooking fire. For them a miracle happened when the solar cooker appeared, cooking their potatoes, onions, mashua, trout and maca roots perfectly in about an hour! For us at WWB the miracle was in finding the right person to help us with this ground-breaking project.
Whole World Botanicals is thrilled to partner with Dr. Richard Komp, a solar energy expert with lots of experience in Third World solar projects, ranging from inexpensive solar-powered photo voltaic cells to solar powered cookers to passive solar house heaters. Whole World Botanicals’ project is to help the communities of maca growers, with whom we have been partnering for more than a decade, learn how to make their own passive thermal solar energy collectors out of inexpensive local materials. Our summer (June – August) is the ideal time to get this pilot project underway, as the sun is very bright during these months and the nights are extremely cold. We will keep you posted on this pioneering effort. (In the next Newsletter I will post photos for you to see related to this project.)
Wishing us all greener lives.
Hasta pronto!
Viana
HEALTH ACTION
DSHEA is in GRAVE DANGER as a result of the passage of the bills S. 1082/HR 1561, which threaten our right to use vitamin, herbs and other food and dietary supplements.
Following is information posted by Maureen Heffernan Rich, who is on the board of directors of the National Health Freedom Coalition (NHFC).
Major Concern
The legislative bills S1082/H1561 just passed into law right before the summer recess of Congress sets up a non-profit corporation called the Reagan-Udall Foundation that gives the FDA a new and expanded role in the area of new drug development. This means that the same organization that will be developing drug evaluation technology is also enmeshed in the agency that regulates the drug approval process, thus creating a situation that could potentially reduce the safety of the drugs and products made available to the public.
In addition and of greater concern for health freedom, the Senate added language to the bill which included food safety. The addition of amendments that include food safety, and the language of the original bill that included food and dietary supplements in the purpose of the Reagan Udall Foundation, are completely unacceptable to freedom advocates because it could mean down the road that foods, dietary ingredients and dietary supplements would be at risk of being treated like drugs when evaluated by the FDA with their new drug tools.
Health freedom advocates are concerned that some of the language in this law addressing drug safety will also be imposed on dietary supplements. They are concerned that this law could be used to "chip away" at the DSHEA law of 1994. Foods and dietary supplements in the U.S. are not currently regulated as drugs, but are regulated as foods under DSHEA.*
Notably because of this, they are evaluated differently. Foods and dietary supplements are considered food nutrients and are generally regarded as safe and the evaluation of their safety is based on whether they cause a significant risk of harm as opposed to being evaluated under the toxic drug risk/benefit assessment. Risk/benefit analysis is reserved for toxic substances and the FDA approves drugs for market if the benefit justifies the risk. These foundational differences of drug and food safety assessments have recently been challenged in the Ephedra cases and because the Supreme Court has denied hearing the Ephedra case May 2007, there is a real possibility that drug assessments might be applied to foods in the future.
With a drug, a consumer has to weigh the risk/benefit ratio in choose whether they are open to the possibility of being harmed by a toxic substance, in order to receive the benefits the drug may provide. And the drug companies have to disclose side effects. But that is not the nature of food. Food is not generally toxic. Whether a food has benefit or not should always be the consumer's decision and the government should only block a food from the market if it has shown harm. Because of the assumption that food is safe we have a wide variety of foods and supplements in the marketplace. If foods and dietary supplements were ever to be evaluated as drugs with technology developed for drugs and a risk/benefit analysis, it would no longer be up to the consumer to decide whether a food or dietary supplement were risky or beneficial to them. The FDA would be deciding that for us before the food or supplement would be allowed on the market. We then run the risk of natural products being incorrectly assessed as harmful because of a drug analysis being applied to them and losing access to many wonderful foods and nutrients that we currently use.
Foods and dietary supplements should continue to be treated as food (DSHEA) and evaluated under food standards and technology instead of with toxic drug risk/benefit assessment tools.
About Codex
Codex is an organization that sets up food safety guidelines and is a joint project of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and has 182 member countries. The guidelines they create concern the shipment of food products between countries. Their purpose is to improve business between countries and is not related to improving health. Sadly, after years of deliberation, they passed Vitamin and Mineral Guidelines in 2005 that say that for products being traded between countries, maximum upper limits shall be set for vitamin and mineral amounts per daily portion of consumption as recommended by the manufacturer. This means that a vitamin or mineral might be limited to a very small dose compared with what we currently enjoy in the US . As an example, vitamin C might be available only in a 30 milligram dose rather than the 500 or 1000 milligram doses we currently have available in the US.
There are no maximum upper limits in the United States for vitamins and minerals today because of our hard won victories in Congress years ago with the passage of the DSHEA legislation. The U.S. is a member of Codex and will need to abide by the Codex guidelines when trading with other international countries but since Codex maximum upper limit guidelines are not U.S. law, they do not apply to trading inside the U.S. And health freedom advocates work hard to protect DSHEA so that the maximum upper limits restrictions never become part of the public policy of the U.S. or become U.S. law.
Read more on Codex and write your legislator
* DSHEA stands for Dietary Supplements Health Education Act. It was passed in 1994 and permits manufacturers of supplements to make health claims for their products, with scientific evidence to back it up, in two categories: promoting the health of the structure of an organ (e.g. “helps maintain a healthy heart”) or the health of a body function (e.g.,” promotes healthy digestion”). These are called structure-function claims. The bill before Congress now (in the Senate it is S1082; in the House it is HR1561) would, according to FDA issues attorney, Jonathan Emord, destroy DSHEA.
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