Dr. Oz has a belly-fat control JumpStart for our Mornings

I am a regular viewer of the familiar and helpful health show and I just wanted to remind everyone to utilize the online resources offered on this caring practitioner’s web site.

View Episodes you missed, like THIS great jumpStart segment Video

This episode segment tells us about how using real cream, or half-and-half, in our morning coffee may be less likely to cause an insulin spike. Therefore it may actually be smarter than use of fat-free non-dairy substitutes.  I recently made this change, before hearing this advice, so I’m feeling like an extra early adopter and everything.  I just want to get back to natural foods, use just a touch of cream.  For me, often the cream joins a cup of  Weavers Coffee,  a Peet’s roaster superstar.

Caveat:  Always go ORGANIC.  I love it!  The good  Doctor OZ covers this point for us on a previous episode.  I fully agree, being the child of someone who worked for a dairy company for about half of his life.  Things have changed, mass production.   Yes!   Buy Organic Dairy

One thing I want to also throw in is a concept I picked up from a wonderful junior college professor.  Remember to rotate your  SOURCE of fruits, vegetables, and dietary supplements.  Variety of SOURCE is just as important as variety in your actual food choices.  So don’t always shop at the same chain-store for your produce, shop around regularly and include the local Farmer’s Market options at least once per month.  Don’t always buy the same brand name of vitamins, herbs, and supplements either.  Today’s earth offers us a bounty, though with everything comes impurities…  Us human animals have elected to cause some unearthing of natural toxins, and in other cases big company profits, and lazy consumers ways that we all can be party to, leave us with toxins being found in even the highest alpine mountain lakes. 

Can you say Lake Tahoe.  So can the big corporations. 

Another key these days is in the processing.  Take the time to read up on the particular nutrient in question and be sure that your purchase focuses on eliminating products with unfriendly binders, or that are processed in an adverse fashion.  One fundamental of modern processing techniques centers around purification, decontamination unfortunately being a real factor for us humans and the earth we Sheppard.  Look for krill oil, or Omega-3 rich Fish Oils that are *molecularly distilled* or filtered, for instance, ensuring that you’re not loading up on mercury from cheap poorly processed fish oil.

I’m a huge believer in ASTEXANTHIN too, another nutritional agent that I first saw on the Doctor OZ show long ago.  I rotate my source brands and take an 8 mg dose each morning with some healthy fat-containing foods, (aids absorption),  like lots of walnuts, or a bit of  “Product of Italy” Olive Oil, in my Bob's Red Mill Oatmeal.

In the last 6 months I’ve started biking 40 miles per week, along with taking the astaxanthin, and I have so much more energy and stamina, having led to a 20 pound weight reduction.  I started taking the astaxanthin for the eye health benefits, anti-oxidant source, and the potential help it may offer in relation to sun exposure, but after loosing so much weight without much effort, I recently went back and found more information that included many reports of weight loss catalyst effects. 

Another exciting yummy that’s new to many here in the U.S. is Yerba Mate, an herbal tea sort of drink option also mentioned on one of  Dr. OZ’s JumpStart  episodes that the example segment above came from.  I started drinking Yerba Mate about 2 years ago, after learning of it while viewing one of the amazing PBS public TV shows I often have on in the background when I’m working.  Some people use it as a coffee substitute, while the mention on the OZ show was in relation to fat-burning possibilities.  I also like the ritual involved, some going all out authentic on us and going for the special cup and straw used by the expert consumers of Yerba Mate in parts of Central and South America.

All in all, we have so many choices these days as consumers, even with the mega monopoly companies locking up many product categories.  The secret is in taking back our power by READING the LABELS,  following up with digging deeper, then sometimes picking our just battles well and making a very loud noise when we see a product that shows up as an obvious disservice to consumers. 

Let’s all remember, for instance, that while we love our Trader Joe’s, we still need to read up on processing practices in relation to this or that favorite health aid or food product and exercise lots more Caveat Emptor.   Fish Oil, filtered? …

Here’s another one, and it says so much:  “Made in Italy”  and “Product of Italy”, two totally different things, when it comes to Olive Oil for instance.  Beware, because even that isn’t so simple. Maybe I’ll mix in more  California Grown Olive Oil,  with  higher hopes of legitimacy these days. 

It’s up to you and I to decode “the good, the bad, and the ugly”, all the way up to and including keeping on top of deception and fraud trends.  Many things these days just aren’t what they appear to be.  I’ll take oil made from olives actually grown in Italy via the experts please, and I want it to really be olive oil, if possible.  I’d also like my fish or krill oil without Mercury and PCB’s, thank you.

 

NOTE: Health supplements and vitamins are not regulated by the FDA as we all know, and so goes the usual disclaimer about how drugs are much safer and hardly ever hurt us, but nutritional supplements offer no guarantee of anything and may be harmful or cause side-effects.  I say,  Just do your own Due Diligence, along with physician consult, and follow the path you determine is best.

drugstore.com - KIND Sample Bag Offers Get Posted online! …

WOW!  What a Great offer, spend about $40 and get a “Sample Bag” of all sorts of product samples, including a re-usable KIND BAR Tote Bag, and since drugstore.com has done this Sample & Tote Promo offer many times before with other brand affiliates  they of course have experience and know how to do it right,  or do they!  Hmm. What exactly was their intention with this promo.  My heart tells me that it started out on the right track, (I want so to be able to like and trust companies I do business with.)  In this case my brain and my gut are talking over my heart,  saying “wait a minute.”

Instead of emailing out Special Invitations with Single-Use Promo Codes, waiting to see how many invited customers act on the offer, and then having a 2nd round with any leftover Promo Sample Tote Supplies, drugstore.com apparently just sent out a huge bulk mailing, (obviously knowing as well that word spreads fast and promo codes get posted on social and coupon sites), and then they just waited for all the cash to roll in and didn’t stay on top of the process.  To this customer it feels like the management and marketing staff just had fun over their weekends and didn’t feel the need to monitor and regulate their offer to ensure it stayed fair and legal. . 

 

 

They seem to have neglected to TAKE DOWN the offer from the site promptly, upon surpassing the number of Promo Orders that they could honor.  (I have proof of 2 orders placed about 5 hours far apart time-wise.    NOT  just the later order but both the EARLIER and LATER order had the promo killed, sold to me then taken away,  a day later,  after shipping the items  I now feel  manipulated into ordering.  

 

 

I want so much to give drugstore.com the benefit of the doubt.   I really want to be “KIND”, though some would report this seemingly borderline practice to their State Attorney Generals office, and to other state and federal agencies that drugstore.com is subject to.

Anyhow, they fill the orders that were placed in order to avail of the promo KIND BAR Sample Tote Bag,  the Sample Tote was represented as AVAILABLE upon check-out, my not seeing a thing about any “back-order” wording even being quoted,  and then it isn’t until the next day that they send out an ORDER CANCELED email, saying the “Back-Ordered” item will not be available.  Oh, but wait, it gets better, they just used a generic phrasing from their email database and said not to worry that customers wouldn’t be CHARGED for the unavailable item, a Promo Item that was to be FREE!

If they cared about their customer relationships, they’d have made that a special APOLOGY email, with a $10 coupon without any restrictions…  Maybe I’m rushing to judge, and they’re still working on some sort of damage repair efforts, I don’t know. 

Either way, I will be REFUSING my orders from drugstore.com and they’ll just go back with more free shipping back to where they came from.  I did try to call and express my dissatisfaction but the agent just went on about how they had no idea it would get posted “online” (something they emailed out ONLINE), and had this tone that seemed to express this feeling that someone else had done poor drugstore.com wrong.

I can’t help but feel that they were in no hurry to remove the offer from the site and that 1000’s or orders were accepted for the offer AFTER they knew full well they had no more Promo Sample KIND BAR Tote inventory left. 

In the past I’ve felt drugstore.com  was a decent company to do business with, and I’m hoping that this long time honorable and fair retailer, (possibly recently purchased by Walgreens), will re-think their handling of this debacle and re-address this issue with us very disappointed customers out here. 

A manipulative promo that is intended to trick customers in to purchases without any real intention to ENSURE best-practices in fulfillment is all too common these days.  Handling an OFFER this poorly  is much much worse for a company than having no offer at all, UnLess us consumers continue to “let it go”, keeping such bad news only in Short-Term memory.   Start having the memory of an elephant, and stop letting these big companies off the hook when they act badly. 

We CAN shop somewhere else…

It’s going to take a lot of hard work for drugstore.com to repair the damage done, and I for one will just give up on working so hard to put all the promo CODES and OFFERS together, and I’ll just move on over to Amazon Subscribe & Save and their *can’t Beat this Pricing* thing they’ve got going, at least for now.

 

(Note: The topic and content offered in this article are based on my personal opinion and experiences only.  While I strongly feel all data to be accurate, please enact your own verification where needed.  No Liability or Guarantees offered. Isn’t that Much more honest than the reality of  divisiveness behind most “guarantees” anyhow.:)

Good Morning kids, Tony Loves Pringles. At Kellogg chip talk is Hot!

Most of us woke this morning, scrambled through getting kids ready for the day, hit ourselves with a couple cups  of coffee, (maybe some blue Jamaican, from Hawaii Roasters if you’re lucky), and maybe we  brushed shoulders with a KELLOGG product or two during our AM shuffle too. 

Today, this February 2012,  (K)  is big talk around some breakfast tables, with a genuinely sad story about a gone-wrong bad-apple, or two, out under the walnut trees (DMND) having opened up availability and re-positioned a little grocery darling, PRINGLES, being up for ‘offering’  by  (PG)  as they look to off the PRINGLES unit as a product line focus strategy.  It’s the general consensus as most can tell from the common buzz via  Yahoo! Finance. 

 

Now, whenever I mention the stock market, or my own isolated perspective on any certain value that a particular publicly held security may contain, I’m always right up front and clear to say that I never give personal advice about the market and each person’s choices are their own, based on heaps of due diligence.  Having said that, I can’t help but feel that if this announcement for a potential to add PRINGLES to the KELLOGG product line comes to full fruition with the closing of a deal, in my opinion it will have a very measurable potential as a factor in additional expansion of
international sales for  (K.)

 

Pringles is a familiar friend on the store shelves, my personally having traveled in Asia every year recently, places like Hong Kong, the Philippines, and seen how they are even more of a snack staple than here in the U.S.  Same story goes in Mexico too and though I haven’t been to South America myself, I’m pretty sure Pringles has…  Kellogg is already in those places too of course, though to me it looks like they’re just getting started with real international roll-out, being a bit of a comparative slow starter in that arena but having great things to come that may only make Tony an even happier Tiger than ever.   Can you say “K”?   

“K” is for Pringles! 

Yes, I am in long on a small investment in Kellogg  stock, as of  late 2011.

 

(Note:  Products and Brands mentioned and represented are registered trademarks
of their respective companies, Kellogg, Proctor & Gamble, Hawaii Roasters, and Diamond Foods.)

$9.95 mo. BroadBand for today’s Budget Magicians

 Yes, by now we all know that the concepts associated with “SUCCESS”,  may have been off track for us westerners now for a time.  Certainly many extremely  “successful”  people aren’t currently bringing in as much income as they really need to in order to care for their families in keeping with the same familiar old standards.  Though, actually most of us have turned the corner by now with our thinking, knowing often life circumstances are  a great opportunity for us to revise how we feel about things like success,  as well as forging on with what we want from the exchange of ideas we have on these topics with the younger generation, the children along for this ride.

Nothing like a down-turn to teach us again how coupons are really worth the time they take, and saving on every re-occurring monthly bill that we can is and always has been a key to future liberties.  

Enough!  Today, with a bit of esoteric food for thought, I also have a chance to ask for a big favor in spreading the word about the opportunity of affordably priced Broadband, (and even an option for help with low-cost computers), via an arrangement with Comcast and their big deal of having finalized the purchase of a share in the little company a few of us have heard of, NBC TV. 

www.internetessentials.com

COMCAST, through this  Press Release,  expresses their great commitment in providing this new set of mission standards that act to protect access to high-speed internet connections (and PC’s too!)  And, IF they only hear about it,  this really is GREAT news for  so many of our families that are on a very tight budget these days.  Evidently It’s expected that this whole thing is a concession that helps temper the resulting bond being forged between a cable system owner and a company that, well, that makes some of the TV channels and programing we consume via that now ever transformed network.  Gee, then there’s that thing about being head over heals deep into their works with the not so behind the scenes HULU goodness.  Yes!

 

It’s Called   “Internet Essentials”

Take it at face value and  HELP  make sure that we get the word out about this option to as many families as we possibly can.   Let’s also hope that the included low-cost PC program turns out to truly be within grasp, delivering unimaginable goodness in a series of momentous outcomes.

The deal here is, again, I am hoping we can all work together in favor of those who would benefit from this specially priced internet service, if they only find out about it. 

COMCAST has a   Partner Page   where you can sign up and obtain promo materials, including 100’s of   Printed Flyers   to be  sent out FREE of charge,  so that you can get them into the hands of brilliant young people who can teach their parents about how to save a buck.

 

LET’S MAKE THIS HAPPEN, BIG TIME!

 

Here we go grammar school teachers and staffers, Elementary, and High School workers, get on board with this program, and let’s all help Comcast make the very most out of this small but viable positive influence.  

 

 

 

NOTICE:  This site and author are in no way affiliated with Comcast or NBC, or any of their wonderful products, those being registered property of their respective entities.  This site does not receive any financial influence in relation to coverage of this program offering and we have published this information as a public service.