Hi Ginger,

You bet. Different people respond to herbs in varying degrees. What's more, the actual potency of herbs drops with time and just like the grapes that are used to make wine, there are good years and bad years for herbs. It's important to recognize with the herbs of Sleep Apnea Relief though that if some is good, more is not necessarily better. Too much Lobelia can upset your stomach. You should not take more than two at a time.

Often times, heavier people (those who weigh more than 200 lbs.) will require two capsules to get the benefit of the deep steady breathing. Sometimes, the severity of the apnea requires two capsules. See what works for you but don't take so much that it makes you nauseous.

Best of Health,
Steve Frank

The fruit that we get in the winter is picked green so that it doesn't rot or bruise in shipment. This is part of the bargain that we make when we require any type of fruit any place in the world any day of the year. Winter fruit should be carefully selected. Fruit that can be shipped from the southern part of the country will be the freshest and ripest. If it has to come from New Zealand on a boat, it's going to have a long rough ride to your home.

During the winter, many consumers prize oranges for vitamin C and A. It should be noted that Vitamin C is very fragile and has a very short life. Oranges over two week old can have 20% less vitamin C than fresh ones. Also, many oranges are picked green and ETO ripened. This is a process where the fruit is shipped green (un-ripe) and then at the destination is exposed to Ethylene Tri-Oxide gas. This is a ripening agent that accelerates the final stage of maturation in the fruit. These oranges won't have the high vitamin C content that you are looking for.

So during the winter, it is especially important to select organic fruit that is as locally grown as possible. Also, augment your diet with 2000 IU of Vitamin D per day and 2000 mg of Vitamin C per day even as you are enjoying your winter fruit.

"It Works INSTANTLY!"

We have implemented our new auto-ship program here at Nature's Rite. If you are using some of our products regularly and wish to simply have them sent once a month to avoid having to sign-in and buy them each time you want more, just give us a call. We can send what ever you like and at what ever interval you would like it. You will of course, get a discount for being a regular buyer and this make it a convenient and cost effective solution. And as you would expect, at any time you want to suspend or quit the program, a simple phone-call or email is all that's required.

Save money and save time with regular auto-ship. Call us now to sign up for this terrific program.

This month using Coupon Code sinus3579, you can save $5 off your purchase of the Sinus Trilogy. Be sure to get one set of these valuable sinus products for everyone in your family. You will want to have this on-hand when you get a sinus infection so you don't have to wait for shipping.

One of our popular products, Sinus Relief, is actually very effective against virus. In fact, it can be used to stop most common colds in 12 to 24 hours. Customers have been doing this since the products original introduction in 1999 as a cold and sinus product.

It is best to recognize the early signs of a cold. These usually occur in the wee hours of the morning. You may awake with a dry throat, itchy eyes and a funny feeling in you nose. Usually, you picked up the virus during the day before and it took until the early morning ours to muster enough viral particles in your nose for you to feel its presence. For the first cold of the season, you may be prone to thinking, "well it's cold and the furnace probably dried out the air. That's why my throat feels dry." But don't be deceived, this is the beginning of what could be a 4 to 7 day adventure into sneezing, wheezing and feeling lousey.

When you first recognize the signs of a cold, the number of viral particles is still rather low. This is the time to strike back and strike hard. Take your bottle of Sinus Relief and spray it in your nose every 5 minutes. "Holy Smokes!" you say, "I can't do it that often." O.k. but the choice is yours. When I feel a cold coming on, I spray it every few minutes with the intention of getting a whole bottle sprayed up my nose in the next 12 hours. The mucosal flow is high and this along with sneezing and blowing removes the product from the place where it needs to be. If you keep putting it back there, it will kill those cold virus. If you don't, it won't.

You see, virus are much, much more difficult to stop than bacteria. It takes more spray, more often, to stop them. They multiply at an amazing rate and the damage that they do to your nasal membranes will take days to repair. That is why it is so important to get right on the infection at the first signs. My rule of thumb is the number of days that you are into a cold is the number that you will need to get out once you start spraying with Sinus Relief. If you wait a day, until you are clearly sick, to start spraying, then it will take you a day to stop it. If you start on day two of your cold, then you will need two days to stop it. Start right away. Have a bottle or three on hand this cold season.

Personally, if I wake up with a dry throat, itchy eyes and groggy feeling, I will get a bottle and sit there in bed holding it. I won't even put it down. I will spray it in my nose every few minutes until the bottle is empty. I've been doing this for 10 years and I haven't had a cold that lasted more than 24 hours in 10 years.

Of course during the cold and flu season, you can use Sinus Relief in a prophylactic manner as well. When you are in an environment with other people during the cold season, wash your hands regularly and spray the Sinus Relief in your nose every few hours to kill anything that you may have breathed in. If you are in close proximity to someone who is obviously sick (sitting next to them on a plane or in a meeting) spray some in your nose every 10 or 20 minutes to keep killing the virus that you inhale.

Once you get used to dealing with the annoyance of having to spray it regularly, you start to appreciate that you are now one of the few people who don't fear getting a cold in the winter. You know how to block them and on the occasion that fails, you know how to stop them. This is a very comforting and empowering feeling. You will eventually realize that the old phrase, "There is no cure for the common cold" can simply be translated into reality as, "We have yet to acknowledge or discover a cure for the common cold."

You can smile to yourself and think, "They haven't. But I have."

In an effort to modernize herbal remedies and offer the control that is expected with products that are overseen by our government, there has been a great deal of interest lately in characterizing the herbs. This is done with high-pressure liquid chromatography to identify the types of constituents present in the herbs and the quantities in which they are present. There are other scientific analytic methods used as well to determine bond-polarity, functional groups and isomers. The idea is that from batch to batch, or lot to lot of herbs, we can "control" the amounts of the vital constituents so that every bottle of an herbal remedy will contain exactly the same amount of the important compounds as every other bottle. Year in and year out.

Well herbs grow in fields. Some years you have more sun. Some years you have more rain and some fields are just better soil than others. There is variation in herbs and there will be until we start farming them. Farming of course will ruin them since we don't provide the diversity of their needs in a commercial farming environment.

The concept behind profiling the herbs is to provide a consistent uniform product. One that is predictable and repeatable. This is admirable and would even be valuable were it not for one problem. This problem is the human factor. Different people respond to the same herbal constituents and concentrations in very different ways. This is true of prescription drugs too. We are all very unique individuals and how we respond to the delicate chemical triggers is vastly different.

We have different digestive systems that degrade ingested herbs in different amounts. We have different skin which remediates absobption in varying degrees. More importantly, the cells that these phytochemicals from plant kingdom trigger to produce the enzymes, proteins, and vital materials vary in their sensitivity and responsiveness to the same level of chemical trigger.

Add to this variability the processing of the herbs for decoctions, tinctures and their resultant lotions or gels. The temperatures of these processes are critical to minimize the breakage of these fragile constituents. The duration of the process can affect the oxidation level of the finished product and these issues alone can make a huge difference in how well an herbal product will work.

We've all been to school and noted that there are some terrific teachers and some terrible teachers. Yet, they all graduated from a teaching college and have teaching "certification". We have all eaten beef-steaks that were "Grade-A" ...some were tough and chewy and others were tender and delicious. Natural products just don't lend themselves to standardization. They are too complex.

When it comes to most herbs, we don't even know which vital constituents are responsible for which actions and which constituents support those. That's not unusual though. If one browses through the PDR (Physicians Desk Reference) they will note that 75% of the drugs have "unknown" listed for the means of action. We don't know how or why they do what they do.

Part of the natural healing products world is to accept variation and work with it. If one doesn't work, we try two. If one brand doesn't seem to be doing all that it should, we try another one. Due to the large variability involved in people, herbs and preparation techniques, this is going to have to remain part of natural healthcare for the foreseeable future. Dosing is an art that involves monitoring the results and making decisions to achieve the desired outcome. This process has to involve the patient for they are the primary source of feedback regarding the effects of the herbs. It was this way before I was born and it'll be this way after I'm dead.