Holiday Newsletter (Dec. 2007)
Dear Lovers of Herbs:
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Can you believe it? The holidays are upon us again -- and holiday eating! Here's an eating tip for those of you who use the Royal Break-Stone™ Tea, Capsules or Liquid Extract. Instead of taking it three times a day between meals as a liver cleanse, try drinking the tea or adding the Liquid Extract to water and sipping it with your meal. You can also drink it immediately after eating while still at the table. Taken this way, Chanca Piedra (as it is called in Spanish) increases bile flow and aids digestion. It also helps lower LDL cholesterol. And everybody agrees that it tastes good! You can also add a squeeze of lemon to your Break-Stone beverage. I love to incorporate Royal Break-Stone Tea into my holiday meal when I have guests. I serve it after the main courses. It creates a soothing interval for digestion before we bring out dessert. This tea is so welcome. It takes away any heaviness in the stomach and makes us all eager for the meal's sweet ending. For December only, when you buy a container of Royal Break-Stone tea, we'll attach a red ribbon so you can take it as a gift for the host when you are invited to dinner. |
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Holiday Special!
Looking for an unusual and inexpensive premium quality gift for someone in your family or at the office?
20% off of Royal Maca (Trial Size) 90 Gelatin Caps
Full Retail Price: $21.14
Special Holiday Price: $16.91
BUY NOW
What about that fabulous man in your life pushing 50-or 60-or 70 who wouldn't be caught dead taking Viagra® but in all truth could use a little help in the intimate relations department? (It's good for energy, mental stamina and the immune system too, so it's not like telling a man that he has a problem.)
Think about your girlfriend at the office who suffers cramps for a day or two every month and barely functions at work or even stays home. Maybe she isn't "into alternative medicine" but wouldn't object to trying a vegetable in the same botanical family as broccoli (like Maca) to help her get her hormonal system back into balance. And after you introduced her to Royal Maca, you can almost count on her surprise and delight at how well it works for hormonal balance issues.
What about giving our trial size Certified Organic Royal Maca Gelatin Capsules at 20% off retail price? This trial size NEVER is discounted on our website, but for the holidays ONLY you can buy this special gift at a very special price. |
- Support hormonal health
- Support healthy sex drive
- Promote energy
- Supports bone health
- Relieve vaginal dryness due to menopause
- Relieve PMS symptoms in healthy women
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Holiday Special!
40% off of Royal Camu (Trial Size) 70 Gelatin Caps when you purchase a
Royal Maca (Trial Size) 90 Gelatin Caps
Full Retail Price for both Products: $46.64
Special Holiday Price: $36.64
BUY NOW
For December only when you purchase one small bottle of Royal Camu Capsules (gelatin or veggie caps), you get a small bottle of Royal Maca caps (gelatin or veggie caps) for 50% off! |
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News from Chicago on Kidney Stones!
I got a call from a Polish woman who owns a health food store in Chicago a few days ago who wanted to order 100 canisters of Royal Break-Stone Tea! Since this is an unusually large order and she was a new customer, I asked her how she had heard about our Company and what had created her great enthusiasm for our Tea. She told me that one of her customers had come into her store and told her the following story: Jean (that’s what I’ll call her) had recently been in the hospital in agonizing pain due to kidney stones. Her urologist had scheduled her for surgery to remove her left kidney saying that she had “hundreds of stones” and that her kidney could not be saved. Jean, astonished and not believing that she was about to lose a vital organ, mobilized her support network to find some effective natural help for her kidney. Her friends found Royal Break-Stone Tea and had it overnighted to her. She signed herself out of the hospital and began drinking eight glasses a day away from food. Her pain began to diminish in a few days and disappeared within a week. A follow-up CAT Scan a few weeks later, found no stones in her kidneys.
Royal Maca increasing hot flashes? A detective story...
Two weeks ago a very knowledgeable manager of a health food store (18 years in the business) sent me an email saying “I’m postmenopausal and I’ve been using Royal Maca for about a month now, and my hot flashes are just as bad if not worse than they were before I started. I thought this was supposed to be a very effective product. Why isn’t it working?”
Whenever I get an email like this I know that we are at the beginning of a detective story. The woman included her phone number in the email so I gave her a call and began asking the important questions. Was she taking bioidentical hormones? (Answer: No) Was she taking any phytoestrogenic herbs (herbs with a chemical active that attaches to estrogen receptors in the body)? (Answer: She had been taking a Chinese herbal formula that included phytoestrogenic herbs like black cohosh but had read in WWB’s literature that this was not recommended, so she had stopped just before starting Royal Maca) I explained to her that three or four weeks are needed to clear the effects of the phytoestrogenic herbs from the body so it’s preferable to wait three or four weeks after stopping before taking Royal Maca.
“It’s been a month or a little longer since I’ve stopped the phytoestrogenic herbs, but I’m still getting the hot flashes,” she protested. So I probed further. “Are you taking any precursor hormones like pregnenolone or DHEA?” I asked. “Oh, yes I am, and I have for years,” she told me. “I can’t imagine stopping that. I depend on the DHEA for my energy.” I shared with her that this could be the problem since we’ve found that sometimes precursor hormones combined with Royal Maca can be overstimulating and create hot flashes. “Besides,” I told her, “women are generally thrilled with all the energy they get from taking Royal Maca.”
“And what else are you taking,” I asked. “Just my multivitamin and some tribulus terrestis—that’s an adaptogenic herb,” she replied.
“O.K.,” I informed her, “I think we’ve gotten to the bottom of it. We’ve found that women taking Royal Maca and another adaptogenic herb (the maca root is also an adaptogen) such as ginseng or tribulus can sometimes get increased hot flashes. When they stop the other adaptogen, the Royal Maca works beautifully.”
I hope to report the outcome of this “detective story” in an upcoming newsletter. Meanwhile, keep in mind the points I’ve discussed here—that Maca shouldn’t be combined with bioidentical hormones, phytoestrogenic herbs, precursor hormones, or other adaptogen herbs.
Whole World Botanicals' Social Mission
We thought December would be a good month to let you know more fully about the Social Mission of Whole World Botanicals. We know it's a tough world. There's global warming and climate change. Workers are exploited in a globalized economy that does not respect labor rights or environmental concerns. But the founders of Whole World Botanicals, as social entrepreneurs, are concerned not only with providing effective products and excellent support information, but we are also concerned with how our products are produced and the living conditions of the people who produce them. Please read on to discover how we "do business" as committed social entrepreneurs.
Impressed by the amazing therapeutic effects of South American herbs, two women founded Whole World Botanicals in 1997 to produce premium quality certified organic and wildcrafted botanicals in the most ethical and harmonious way and bring them to the U.S. market. Sustainability is a key element of the vision of the founders, an anthropologist and a Peruvian midwife. But as social entrepreneurs, they took their mission to foster social justice seriously and took actions that began to make a real difference in the lives of their Peruvian herbal partners.
WWB sources many of its botanicals by giving interest-free loans to communities living in extreme poverty in order to help them move out of subsistence production into producing a cash crop on their own land. Five Quechua-speaking communities in the high Andes of Peru received loans from the Whole World Botanicals to buy seed, rent heavy machinery to break up the pasture soil, and to build solar dryers. This first economic development project supports them in the production of organically grown maca roots. |
Freshly harvested maca roots: Maca roots have traditionally been cultivated in many different heirloom ecotypes, including purple, red, black, grey with white stripe, red with white stripe, cream, and yellow. Commercial maca buyers generally buy only the cream or the yellow types. WWB encourages the continued production of the heirloom varieties of maca by buying all colors. As a result, our organic maca is a little darker than most. |
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WWB's second economic development project began this year with thirty families practicing subsistence farming in the cloud forest region of Junin. Some children there had orange hair, a sign of severe malnutrition. Families requested help with producing a cash crop and asked for assurance of a secure market for their harvest. WWB gave loans of more than $500 per family to begin organic production of a tropical tree with seeds high in Omega-3 oil. They've just harvested their first crop.
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Whole World Botanicals' herbs are bioenergetically grown and harvested. Maca roots, for example, are sown, like all root plants, at the full moon. Leafy plants, with medicinal plant parts above the soil, are sown with the new moon. All plants have maximum medicinal properties when harvested at the full moon. These practices of native peoples all over the world are honored by WWB. |
Bioenergetic farming methods used to grow WWB's maca roots:
The Andean spiritual belief system includes the necessary cooperation between male and female principles for maximum harmony and productivity in all activities and ceremonies. Seen here are the two husbands digging the holes for planting maca and their wives dropping seeds into the holes. Photo taken on the full moon day of November, 2005 by WWB co-founder, Elena Rojas Martinez. |
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Every year the founders of Whole World Botanicals sit down with the maca growing communities to investigate if WWB's floor price is higher or lower than the market price for maca. WWB pays which ever price is higher. |
Whole World Botanicals practices Fair Trade and has partnered for more than a decade with the Quechua-speaking communities who grow our organic maca roots in the high Peruvian Andes. This allows the peasant producers to purchase basic necessities such as clothing, transportation and school materials for their children and to live with dignity.
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Elena Rojas Martinez, Peruvian Midwife and Co-founder of Whole World Botanicals, visiting the 10,000 acre rainforest proterorate entrusted to WWB. |
Whole World Botanicals has a formal commitment to help preserve the Amazon Rainforest which is being destroyed at an alarming rate. In 2007 the Peruvian government granted WWB a Concesión para Conservación protectorate of more than 10,000 acres of virgin old-growth rainforest near the National Park Pacaya-Samiria. It is our responsibility to protect the trees in this territory from the human predators, logging companies, slash & burn colonists. WWB has made a commitment to work with the two native populations whose own traditional lands border this forest area to sustainably collect the renewable small medicinal plants, fruits and nuts in the protectorate. |
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Whole World Botanicals collaborates with its organic farming and wildcrafting partners in the rainforest and the Andes to support not only green farming but also green living. Maca growers live and farm their organic maca crops at 14,000 feet above sea level which is above the tree line. It is cold year round and temperatures drop to freezing or below at night. People living there suffer from the cold. They cook their food by burning animal dung which produces an acrid, smoky fire and blackens their lungs.
Two years ago, WWB initiated a pilot solar energy project with
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Maca-growing farmers learn how to use a solar cooker in demonstration project funded and organized by Whole World Botanicals in June, 2007. Since these maca farming communities are located at 14,000 + ft. above sea level, the sun is very powerful and solar cooking is very efficient. The next step for WWB will to offer a workshop in which they can build out of recycled local materials their own solar cookers. |
maca-growing communities to demonstrate solar cookers and provided a workshop on building a solar space to heat their homes. The excitement was tremendous and there is a long waiting list to obtain solar cookers and a home solar space. As a next step, WWB plans to set up its own 501C non-profit organization in order to be able to accept help from its customers and others in fully implementing our environmental and social justice mission.
To see more photos of our social mission, Click Here
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 Viana's Green News
This has been an extraordinary year for Whole World Botanicals, thanks in large part to the efforts of our co-founder, Elena Rojas-Martinez who has been in Peru since early June strengthening our partnerships with the Peruvian people who grow and collect our herbs and implementing our stewardship of 10,000 acres of old growth rainforest land.
The good news from Peru is that after decades of economic stagnation and civil war, there is a great deal of economic activity and increased economic opportunities for many ordinary Peruvians. The bad news is that part of this economic opportunity is related to destruction of Peru's irreplaceable natural resources, especially the largest rainforest in the world, the Amazon River Basin. The urgency we feel to help raise the awareness in Peru about the destructive effects of the clear cutting of old growth trees and the extinction of hundreds of species a year is only matched by our commitment to devote resources to physically protect the hundreds of thousands of acres the government has set aside as Concessions for Conservation.
You, our customers, are already participants in this great undertaking. By purchasing our products, you are supporting a company which is striving to operate by the highest principles and does not have to answer to shareholders only interested in profits. The founders are devoting both time and financial resources to making a real impact on these issues. In 2008 we will be inviting you our customers to be participants at a new level in supporting our environmental efforts in Peru.
We are proud of our customers, your awareness, your values, the way you live your lives. And we have the pleasure of so often receiving your gratitude -- your spoken and written words to us and your good words to others about Whole World Botanicals, the kind of Company we are and the kind of products we provide. Not least, we also rely on you for giving us feedback on how we can improve. Please keep the communication coming. This is so important to us.
Wishing you an uplifting, joyous holiday season, bathed in beauty and love.
Viana
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