Last week I attended a 4-day conference in Chicago on nutrition and chronic disease.  The conference itself was fantastic, but I’m writing this blog to tell you of my 4-day love affair with the free samples of magnesium glycinate (the same form of magnesium found in our very own Mag Calm and Essential Calm) that were provided at the conference.  You see, the conference was sponsored by a supplement company that wanted to make sure the practitioners in attendance knew all about the wonders of their supplements so they had open bottles of their entire product line for us to sample.

Magnesium is commonly used for the nutritional treatment of a diversity of issues including osteoporosis, pre-menstrual syndrome, fatigue, fibromyalgia, arthritis, insomnia, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, arrhythmia, and diabetes.  I personally experience none of the above but since an estimated 80% of the US population doesn’t get enough magnesium in their daily diet I thought I’d take advantage of the free samples.

After just one day of taking about 400 milligrams of magnesium I found myself sleeping better, waking up easier, and just generally feeling relaxed and refreshed – which is not usually how I feel when sitting in a chair for 8 hours a day listening to scientific lectures.  The dosage I took is slightly above the RDA of 310 mg/day for women but magnesium is hard to overdose on when taken orally – if you get too much your body will eliminate the extra via the bowels (translation: if you find yourself running to the bathroom, you took too much).  The only exception to this would be if you have inadequate kidney function or are on medications that alter your metabolism of magnesium.

As I write this blog I’m staring at my own bottle of Mag Calm, which I keep by my computer to remind me to keep up the experiment I started at the conference.  It’s been a week and I’m still feeling energetic and waking up refreshed and happy in the morning which is highly unusual for me when it starts getting cold outside!

Magnesium has so many amazing qualities that I couldn’t do it justice in one blog so I wanted to also provide you with a link to one of my favorite reference websites on nutrition – the Linus Pauling Institute.  Here is the link to their page on magnesium.  Enjoy!
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/minerals/magnesium/

Hi everyone –
 
Marilyn Farms is in the process of making some changes to our website.  Our goal is not only to provide incredible educational information and products, but make it easy for you to access that information and find the products you need. We know the best input comes from you, our customers, so we have a favor to ask.
 
Would you please take a few moments to add a comment below about things that you both like and dislike about our existing site?  Don’t worry, we won’t be offended! You could also include topics for us to cover or products that we don’t currently provide but you believe would be a good fit to our current offerings of “Products for Health, Health for Life”.
 
We can’t promise that we’ll make every change and add every product, but we’ll certainly listen and seriously consider all of your input.
 
Thanks in advance for your time and on-going support of Marilyn Farms!

I went camping this past weekend. For me, camping is just an excuse to eat constantly from waking until sleeping (and sleeping for me happened in a tiny tent shared with my husband and my dog).  It was very fun! 

As a nutritionist and someone with an inordinate love of food, I just love the idea of cooking everything outside on a grill.  My favorite food in the world for grilling is kabobs.  I don’t know where this food originated, probably somewhere in the Middle East, but I am thankful for the genius who first thought of cooking food on a stick.  Kabobs are the one camping food that will please everyone from the vegetarian to the pure carnivore.  And they’re easy to pack – just put all the cut, marinated ingredients in a sealed container and assemble them by the grill.  No condiments or utensils needed! 

This camping trip I chose to make kabobs consisting of an assortment of shrimp or grassfed beef for protein, bell peppers and hot peppers for antioxidants and fiber, and onions for flavor and detoxification support.  Everything was marinated in a homemade wasabi teriyaki sauce (1 part tamari soy sauce, 1 part sweet chili sauce, and a generous glob of wasabi paste).  It was a tasty and nutritionally balanced way to make a quick meal! 

The traditional summer cookout season has ended, but for those of you who live in areas where the camping season is just beginning (or maybe the camping season lasts all year for you, I just live in Iowa where it is probably going to be arctic cold outside in about 2 weeks) I encourage you to get out those colorful vegetables and some kind of protein, marinate them, string them up on a stick and grill away.  Enjoy your Fall!

For today’s entry I wanted to inform you of two new educational pieces on our website.  Both of these came out of our recent Nutrition & Diabetes webinar, which will be repeated November 1st.  The first is a sample menu for blood sugar control – in our original slide handout it was way too small to read so we decided to make it available online for webinar attendees and any others who need ideas for healthy menus.  Sample menu for blood sugar control.

After the webinar ended we had a few technical difficulties with our Q&A session so decided to take questions via e-mail for several days afterward.  This method ended up working perfectly because we were able to easily post the written questions and answers on the website in order to share them with all of you!  From now on – even when we don’t have technical difficulties – I would like to post portions of our Q&A sessions that may apply to many of you out there so that even if you weren’t able to attend the webinar, you can benefit. Nutrition and Blood Sugar Webinar Q & A.