Nature’s Sunshine has added two new products to their portfolio: Vitamin K and Quercetin. Since 1972 Nature’s Sunshine has grown from a small, family-owned business to one of the leading health and wellness companies in the world. Created from nature and rooted in science, Nature’s Sunshine’s remarkable products deliver extraordinary results again and again. Their premium products can do much more than improve your health, they can transform your life.

Vitamin K

Vitamin K is an essential fat-soluble vitamin of only recent discovery and is still not fully understood. Not a single compound, vitamin K is a family of vitamins divided into K1 and several forms of K2. In the body, some K1 is converted into a form of K2 called menaquinone-4. Each form of the vitamin provides unique health benefits: K1 is mainly recognized for helping blood naturally clot to avoid excessive bleeding; K2 helps build and maintain strong skeletal structure and teeth, and puts calcium where it belongs in the body while keeping it out of soft tissue where it can calcify in blood vessels, etc. In the diet, K1 is derived mostly from leafy green vegetables and K2 from fermented foods, organ meats, egg yoke, oily fish, butter and some cheeses.

Did you know? Dentist and nutrition pioneer, Dr. Weston Price, spent much of his life documenting the superior health of traditional peoples verses their modern-eating counterparts. In his 1945 second edition release of his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, he documents the excellent health he found among traditional peoples and attributed it to a yet unknown “new vitamin-like activator” that spared these people from the diseases of modern life. He dubbed this mysterious nutrient “Activator X” and attributed it to their robust health, perfect teeth, strong skeletal structure, and lack of degenerative diseases.

For over 60 years after the death of Dr. Price, nutrition scientists worked to identify his Activator X. It is now recognized that Dr. Price’s mystery nutrient is in fact vitamin K. Scientists are still unravelling all the health benefits of vitamin K, and this relative newcomer to the vitamin scene has a growing list of health benefits as scientists learn more. 

    • Recognized for helping blood naturally clot to avoid excessive bleeding

    • Helps build and maintain strong skeletal structure and teeth

    • Traditional herbal diuretic to increase the flow of urine.

    • May help treat water retention.

    • Stimulates the kidneys to eliminate body wastes.

Quercetin

Natural herbal allergy remedies abound, and one of the most studied is quercetin, a plant pigment (flavonoid) with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects. It’s found in common foods including onions, green tea, apples, berries, Ginkgo biloba, St. John’s wort, American elder, red wine, and buckwheat tea, and it’s also available in supplement form.

The way it works is by stabilizing mast cells, which release histamine and other inflammatory signals that trigger sinus congestion and sneezing and all the miseries that come along with it. Quercetin stabilizes mast cells in a way that helps reduce the release of inflammatory, allergy-symptom-producing chemicals. Quercetin can strengthen the cell membrane of mast cells, but that process takes time, so get nice and fortified before symptoms have a chance to kick in.

Because of its wide range of health benefits, quercetin has earned the reputation of “king of the flavonoids.” Flavonoids are a class of compounds found in the bark and rind of vegetables and fruits with notable vitamin C content. Flavonoids were originally named vitamin P due to their ability to prevent tiny blood vessels and capillaries from becoming permeable and leaking or hemorrhaging. Later, it was discovered that flavonoids were not vitamins at all but a new class of nutrients with many of the characteristics of vitamin C. In fact, flavonoids play an important role in protecting vitamin C from oxidation in cells and thus keep vitamin C active in the body longer, whereby it can continue to work as an antioxidant and to stimulate the synthesis of collagen to keep blood vessels and capillaries strong and healthy.

Flavonoids not only support vitamin C’s antioxidant activity, but they have their own antioxidant properties as well. As such, flavonoids, like quercetin, provide many of the same biological actions expected from vitamin C and other antioxidants: anti-inflammatory, anti-histamine, thereby preventing free radical cell/organ damage, immune support, cardiovascular health, etc.

Did you know? Zinc is an important antioxidant and powerful immune system modulator that helps protect against and lesson the severity of colds/flu and other illnesses. The problem with zinc is that it’s poorly absorbed by cells. Quercetin to the rescue: science has discovered that quercetin is what’s known as a “zinc ionophore” — meaning that quercetin acts as a zinc chelator transporting zinc through immune cell membrane and into the cell where it can do its work. This zinc ionophore action of quercetin may be one of the underlaying reasons that quercetin is said to support immune function, say researchers.

      • The King of the Flavonoids

      • Prevents blood vessels and capillaries from leaking or hemorrhaging, and to protects vitamin C from oxidizing in cells

      •  Provides antioxidants for the maintenance of good health.

      • Used in Herbal Medicine as a capillary/blood vessel protectant.

 

About the Author

Bryen Dunn is a freelance journalist based in Toronto with a focus on tourism, lifestyle, entertainment and community issues. He has written several travel articles and has an extensive portfolio of celebrity interviews with musicians, actors and other public personalities. He’s willing to take on any assignments of interest, attend parties with free booze, listen to rants, and travel the world in search of the great unknown. He’s eager to discover the new, remember the past, and look into the future.