Frizzy hair is something women avoid like the plague! Most of what is known as a “bad hair day” usually consists of a frizzy, untamable hair. The reason behind frizzy hair is the breakage in the hair and severe damage on hair strands that causes it to feel coarse.

Major frizz most often occurs to those people who have wavy and curly hair, naturally or otherwise, as well as for those people whose hair have undergone a little too much styling and treatment. Frizziness can also be attributed to the none-too-gentle way of daily handling like using of harsh ingredients in your shampoo, combing harshly, blow drying daily, etc.

What can you do to prevent frizzy hair, then? Well, if your hair has had a few bad hair days and tends to be frizzy, then you must review your hair care routine and check:

1. Your shampoo – Shampoo products are made specifically for different hair types. For those with oily hair, there’s a shampoo that absorbs and lessens the oil produced by the hair strands; for those with color-treated hair, there’s a shampoo designed to help your hair maintain its brilliant color; for dry and frizzy hair, there are lots of moisturizing and repairing shampoos. Always check what kind of hair the shampoo is made for.

2. Your conditioner – With the proper conditioner, bad hair days can be lessened. Hair experts recommend deep conditioning once a week to help give life to coarse, frizzy hair. Most of the instructions at the back of conditioner bottles recommend users to leave the product on the hair for 1 minute, but you can actually leave it on for 3 minutes for the best results. Another trick is to condition your hair and wrap a hot towel around it.

3. Your hair tools – Are you using hair-friendly combs? Wood-based combs or even those that come in soft plastic can do wonders rather than the metal-based ones. If you have frizzy hair, it’s really important that you stay away from fine-toothed combs and use those that have wide gaps. Since frizzy hair has a tendency to tangle a lot, wide gaps will help in detangling without stressing the hair too much like what a fine comb would usually do. Avoid scrunchies and ponytail barrettes with rubber, as the friction could only cause disaster, and it’s much better to use scrunchies in stretchable cotton or soft silk.

Keep in mind you should refrain from scrubbing your hair too hard with a towel. Instead of rubbing it vigorously, simply squeeze the excess water out or keep your hair twisted in a towel to absorb the water. The more you find ways of preventing breakage, the less chance for frizziness!

How about for those with seriously frizzy hair?

1. Hair spa – opposed to having your hair styled, blowdried, colored, straightened, bleached in a salon, taking your hair to a “hair spa” is more on letting your hair down to be pampered and stripped off harsh chemicals. Hair spas have become a clinic or a center for problematic hair. You can pamper your hair at least twice a month to get some mild treatments like deep moisturizing and revitalizing, as well as getting treatments for the healthiest hair possible.

2. Deep conditioning, repairing serums, and leave-on hair creams – all these serve as ‘medicine’ and ‘vitamins’ to your hair. Deep conditioning brings back the softness of frizzy hair, making it more manageable and less prone to excessive frizziness. It’s important that you visit a hair expert before using any kind of serums for the hair. There are too many instances that people buy hair repair serums only to make the damage even worse. Serums are concentrated in hair repair ingredients, too. It is used sparingly and conditionally. When serums are used properly, they provide instant boost to the health of your hair. When it comes to leave-on hair creams, pick one that’s light and one that doesn’t have an overpowering fragrance.

Whatever skin type or skin color, everybody is prone to sunburn from spending too much time under the sun. When exposed to UV rays, it doesn’t take long for the skin to begin to “burn”. It can be as mild as a slight itch to actual peeling.

There are a lot of different treatments for sunburns – both medical and natural. The most important thing you can do with either a medical or natural treatment is to act fast. You do not want to wait and damage your skin more. It’s important that you put some salve onto it as soon as possible.

Below are some great natural do-it-yourself treatments to alleviate itchy and painful sunburns:

Apricot Anti-Itch Salve:
1. Get an apricot or two, depending on how wide the sunburned area is. Soften the apricots by letting it sit in warm water for 5 minutes.
2. As it gets soft, peel the skin gently. Then mash the apricots in a bowl.
3. Add a little bit of honey, just a teaspoon will do. Mix well with the mashed apricots.
4. Apply the salve on the sunburned area. Rinse off with warm water after 15 minutes.

Yogurt-and-Cucumber Moisturizing Treatment
This home remedy is really great for those lighter burns. Yogurt has wonderful enzymes and acids that are great to treat dry, irritated skin. Cucumber can nourish the sunburned skin, and has that cooling effect you will love.
1. Simply clean the sunburned area with lukewarm water, pat very gently with cotton to dry.
2. Get half a cucumber and peel the skin out. Take the seeds out and mash the cucumber in a blender until it’s a paste.
3. In a small bowl, pour the cucumber paste and add plain yogurt. Mix well.
4. Spread it evenly across the damaged skin. Let it sit for 20 minutes or until the cucumber’s cooling effect fades.

For Inflamed Sunburned Skin:
If you’re having trouble with heavy redness on your sunburn, you can simply take a cool shower to help the outer layer of the skin cool down a bit. Be sure not to use ice on sunburned skin, as ice has an extremely cold temperature that could also shock the skin. A slight, cooling bag would suffice.

Gentle Skin Peeling Treatment:
When it comes to helping the skin peel naturally, there’s nothing that works as well as Tea Tree Oil. Imagine a sunburned area of skin where you see little dry, flaky patches of peeing skin that doesn’t seem to go away. With the use of a Tea Tree Oil solution, you can speed up the peeling progress.

1. Get a small container ready, tea tree oil, a bottle, a tablespoon of extravirgin olive oil and square cotton swabs.
2. In the container, mix in the two oils 1:2, tea tree oil and olive oil respectively
3. Moisten the cotton and apply it to the peeling oil

When it comes to caring for your sunburned skin, cooling and lessening the irritation of the skin is your outmost priority. The best thing is to keep the area moisturized and hydrated! That means drink lots of water.

As long as you avoid putting strong, acidic ointments on the skin you should be fine. Some advice I’ve seen is kind of scary, involving toothpaste too supposedly cool the skin, which is wrong. The mint in the toothpaste does not cool the skin, but burns it even more. Don’t use apple cider vinegar, either. ACV is considered a cure-all but in this case it will do more harm than good. The worse kind of sunburn would be one where the skin looks oddly shiny and blistering, so if it gets to this point, I suggest bandaging it up and going to your dermatologist and have your doctor take a look at the skin.

Salt is one of the most important ingredients ever discovered. It’s uses are so wide and extremely significant that even historic wars and battles have been fought for it. Salt has a wide use when it comes to food preparation. Salt not only gives food flavoring, providing a much-needed flavor to what otherwise would be bland food, provides nutritional benefits, but it also is used for food preservation.

Salt is absolutely indispensable, but there’s something we should all know about salt. Most of the time, the salt that we are using is unhealthy and we don’t even know it. Another thing that we don’t know is that there is a pure salt that we can replace the not-so-healthy salt that we’re using everyday. Let’s weigh in on the three kinds:

1. Table Salt or Sodium Chloride – This is the most common type of salt that we see in the kitchen and it comes in coarse or very fine form. Some countries still use the coarser version of table salt, but in the US, coarse table salt has been done away, replacing it with the finest grains of salt. Most often this kind of salt is one that has to be bleached and stripped of minerals. We can see from here that the table salt has some very bad “cons” to it, as the salt undergoes too much processing for it to be called natural or organic, or at the very least ‘healthy’.

Sodium Chloride is harmful to the body as it introduces toxins that the body will have trouble expelling. It is a well known fact that pure Sodium Chloride causes dehydration. It occurs when the body tries to extract water from cells as a way to recuperate the damage the toxins from the salt have wrecked havoc on. Some have countered that table salt isn’t pure Sodium Chloride. To a length, it is right, but the fact remains that table salt is around 98% Sodium Chloride and just around 2% of good minerals like iodine.

2. Sea Salt – Commonly known as the healthier, organic alternative to processed table salt. But a closer look under a high-powered microscope would reveal that sea salt has irregular structures that separates the minerals. The body will have very little to gain as the minerals in the isolated structure is something that’s not easy to absorb.

When it comes to harvesting sea salt, there are additional issues. The seas have become more polluted; the oceans have been exposed to all kinds of things, such as human-produced garbage, and to even more deadly chemicals like factory wastes, oil sludge, mercury, dioxins and all other pollutants that harm us. A huge amount of the toxins are being absorbed in the salt, which makes the sea salts in the market today not a very good alternative to table salt.

3. Himalayan Salt – A relatively new discovery has led experts to believe that this might just be the only toxin-free salt in the world. Though it’s something new for most of us, it has been around for 250 million years. It is produced by the earth and it has been found to be one of the purely natural food item in the world and is entirely toxin-free and full of minerals that have been lost in other salt forms.

Compared to the Sea Salt, the crystalline structure in the Himalayan Salt has a more abundant mineral content – 84 mineral elements to be exact. Additionally is has a structure that is easily absorbed by the body unlike sea salt. Himalayan salt can come in a solid form or in granulated form. Gourmet chefs who use Himalayan salt use blocks of the salt formed into bowls and pots and cook directly from it. In everyday use, a finely grained Himalayan salt is more appropriate.

The only con of Himalayan Salt is its price. It’s not something you can easily find in the market as the salt source itself is very limited. This precious salt is mined from the government-controlled land of the Himalayan Mountains. However, there are many great websites on the internet where you can purchase Himalayan salt as a good price if you’re looking to live healthier.

When it comes to health, our diets are one of the main things that we focus on, but sometimes we think we’re eating right when we are actually eating badly. There have been a countless number of studies that have led us to question the seemingly healthy food we’re eating. In these studies, gluten has come up time and time again as problematic for certain individuals. Who would have thought that eating normal wheat-based cereals or a slice of rye bread could be dangerous to people unaware that gluten can have an adverse effect on them.

First things first: what is Gluten?

Gluten is the protein part of wheat, rye, barley, and other related grains. Gluten is very common among grain food produce. Gluten became infamous when several clinical studies and findings revealed that there are people who somehow, are “intolerant” to gluten-filled food products. These people generally have a problem digesting gluten, especially when gluten is processed in the small intestines.

People with Celiac Disease
The intolerance to gluten is widely known in the medical world as a gluten-sensitive enteropathy (GSE) – a more popular term for it would be “Celiac Disease”. According to Wikipedia, in the United States alone, the cases of celiac disease are between 0.5% – 1.0%. For those who are diagnosed with this kind of condition, doctors have found out through examination that the patient’s gut surface and the lining around the small intestines are severely damaged due to an abnormal immune reaction to partially digested gliadin, present in gluten foods.

With an injured gut and small intestines, the person is likely to experience pain in the stomach close to abdominal cramps. Some may experience severe diarrhea after eating gluten food and are likely to experience the feeling of both bloating and apparent weight loss. People with celiac disease are often found out to have mineral deficiencies or malabsorption of nutrients.

How To Incorporate a Gluten-Free Diet
The good news is that the damage to the gut and small intestines can be reversed by eliminating food with gluten in ones diet. This way, the adverse reaction to the gluten will stop and it gives the body a chance to heal.

The more challenging aspect of adapting a gluten-free diet is finding out what kind of grain, cereal, bread, etc, have gluten and don’t! Grains are a staple on most people’s diets and you just can’t do away with all of them entirely. Gluten can even be found in meds and other tablets/pills that use gluten as a binding agent. It also can be in your cosmetic products like lipsticks, balms and toothpaste.

Other examples of food with gluten are those that contain wheat, barley, rye, made with graham flour, durham, spelt, and kasha. What you can eat are amaranth, quinoa, corn, rice, soy, buckwheat and oats, but do be careful as there might be wheat mixed in inside the package.

It’s more difficult to find the kind of food source that are gluten-free, as it’s often always in a special category or in a special aisle in a specialty food store. Some people suffering from celiac disease may even eat food with gluten in it and they don’t have any idea the damage that it can cause. Doctors often advise their patients to regulate their diet strictly, and do it for a long period of time, possibly even the patient’s whole life. If you’re suffering from celiac, it is quite limiting and frustrating.

One great resource to find gluten free foods is www.Zeer.com. They offer a subscription service that provides their members with detailed information on the gluten content on over 115,000 grocery items. For a monthly fee of $14.95, members of the Zeer website are allowed to instantly check the gluten status on over 30,000 food products, with over 500 products added or updated weekly. Each product is either assigned a “gluten free” or “contains gluten” rating.

The aging process is something that we can’t stop. There are a lot of factors that contribute to aging, especially when it comes to the physical aspects where we see the most visible signs. Like the passing of time, aging is inevitable, but there are things you can do to slow it down to achieve a “gracefully aging” look.

Delaying the aging process of our skin requires a lot of dedication. Some women choose to undergo the pain of knives and needles, while some choose a less expensive route of topical treatments. Another way to fight the signs of aging significantly is by increasing the intake of antioxidants into our body. The good news is that unlike surgery or topical treatments, antioxidant come in ways that are natural, have no side effects, and aren’t expensive!

Below are our top ten antioxidants:

10. VARIOUS NUTS – Pecans, walnuts, macadamia and almonds, are all a great source of antioxidants. Usually, these nuts also have omega-3, the good kind of fatty acid, and can help lower bad LDL cholesterol levels. Why not reach for a can of softened almonds and walnuts when you want a better option for snack? Another bonus benefit including these nuts in your daily diet include protection against cardiac diseases. They also been shown to help delay brain diseases especially Alzheimer’s.

9. WHOLE GRAINS – Opting for a wholesome breakfast? Try looking into cereals that are 100% whole grains. Whole grains coming from rice, bran, granola, oats, etc, have been found to be a real huge source of phytochemicals and antioxidants. Here’s what you can find in your bowl of whole-grain cereal: a rich amount of Vitamin E and Phytic Acid, both which are potent antioxidants!

8. SPINACH – Incorporating spinach into your meals helps your body in so many ways! The main antioxidant in spinach is Lutein, which will be your eye’s saving grace. Lutien is especially important in protecting our vision from damage, both from outside factors such as sun and dirt. It even protects us from cataracts as well as the free radicals that cause macular damage.

7. CARROTS – The vegetable with the highest carotenoid count, even among other yellow-orange vegetables like beets and sweet potatoes. Carrots have long been offering us its high amount beta-carotene. Beta-carotene provides incredible protection from arthritis. Other benefits include aiding in lowering one’s chances for lung, breasts and stomach cancers, as well as cardiac disease. Additionally, a carrot’s antioxidant levels go higher when it’s cooked.

6. GARLIC – Its medicinal properties know no bounds. With an amazingly deep flavor and exquisite aroma, it is a great complement to any meal that we cook. Garlic has amazing antioxidants that aid in protecting the body against diseases like cancer and heart problems. Not only is this a great way to fight the signs of aging, but its benefits are astounding. It lowers cholesterol levels and is good for our blood pressure.

5. TOMATOES – Like carrots, tomatoes are also part of the carotenoid family. Tomatoes contain Lycopene, which is considered to be as beneficial as beta-carotene. Surprisingly, tomatoes have a high antioxidant quality in the form of glutathione which is well known to provide a big boost in the immune system. That’s why, in recent years, more and more studies have shown positive effects and benefits from including tomatoes in meals. Males who eat more tomatoes or tomato sauce have shown very low rates of prostate cancer. Tomatoes have been shown to be even more effective for women in warding off breast cancer.

4. RED GRAPES – A glass of fine wine can do more than just relax you. The antioxidant resveratrol provides protection to our bodies by fighting free-radicals and provides protection to damaged cells and blood vessels. Another antioxidant in red grapes is quercetin, which helps keep our hearts healthy. While we enjoy drinking wine and munching on red grapes, these antioxidants are doing what they do best to boost the body and keep the aging process at bay!

3. BROCCOLI – Never refuse a brocolli again – it may just be your ticket to protecting yourself against cancer and heart ailments. Broccoli is a wonderful vegetable of similar to brussel sprouts and cauliflowers. The antioxidant in broccoli is indole-3 carbinol, which is important in breaking down compounds and helps women fight off breast and ovarian cancer.

2. TEA – A warm and refreshing cup of tea more than just ails a dry, thirsty throat. Tea leaves have great antioxidant properties, especially black tea, green tea, and red tea which have an equally high amount of catechins and theaflavins that fight off free-radicals in the body. Tea helps reduce the risk of stroke and other serious diseases. People who are conscious of their diets and are strict in maintaining a healthy lifestyle prefer to drink tea of all kinds of flavor! There are so many flavors of tea and all of them are equally healthy!

1. BERRIES – The seemingly tiny, little berries pack a powerful punch when it comes to antioxidant properties. Aside from that, berries have awesome vitamin and mineral content. The best thing about berries is that there are a wide variety, from gooseberries to blueberries to acai berry and raspberries, and everyone in the world loves them! Several berries are abundant in proanthocyanidins, others are wonderfully loaded in ellagic acid. Berries like the powerful acai berry have anthocyanins that is one of the popular treatments for arthritis.