Tag: hydration

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Fitness Health

DripDrop ORS: A Better Way to Hydrate

DripDrop
Photo courtesy of DripDrop

The average adult is supposed to consume at least eight 8oz glasses worth of water per day. It’s 85 degrees in NYC today, so I should probably be drinking more. If you’re one of the people I see jogging through the streets of Manhattan in this weather, that goes double for you.

DripDrop’s Oral Rehydration Solutions (ORS) sticks are a flavored powder you can mix with water to help with rehydration. DripDrop’s ORS was designed to be used to combat extreme dehydration due to illness as well as extreme conditions and has been used to assist foreign relief missions as well as California wildfire fighters. 

Taste is the biggest challenge to making an appealing sports drink. The sodium in sports drinks helps your body absorb water faster, helping you hydrate faster, but since saltwater tastes terrible, most sports drinks offset the taste with tons of sugar. That sugar matters a little less when you’re drinking it after a workout, but you’re not burning nearly as much off when you drink it to halt a hangover or hydrate while you’re sick.

DripDrop inventor and founder Dr. Eduardo Dolhun, an MD from California, found a way to keep the taste with a minimum of sweetener, which also helps the absorption process. He replaces the sucrose (sugar) in most drinks with sucralose (aka Splenda), which is much sweeter. Some drinkers might have concerns with Splenda, which DripDrop tries to address. This, the company claims, allows their ORS to deliver 2-3 times the electrolytes with ⅓ of the sugar of most competitors. 

DripDrop’s ORS is surprisingly drinkable and comes in a few different flavors. I liked the berry. The sweetened, sports-drink-like flavor fades into a salty aftertaste, so it’s not going to be my new drink of choice, but if you just finished a long run, have the flu, or if you’re waking up from an epic night out, you’ll want to have a packet or two of this stuff handy. 

DripDrop
Three different flavors of DripDrop sticks. Photo courtesy of DripDrop
Categories
Beauty Featured

Tata Harper: The Green-Beauty Goddess Ups Her Game for Her Namesake Skincare Line

Scouting the world, Tata Harper is always striving to improve her eponymous skincare line and beautify her loyalists to the max, naturally, with nontoxic, hyper-potent, and uncompromising ingredients.

Photo Courtesy of Tata Harper Skincare

First came the “essence,” which launched early in the new year. “Essences are supposed to be penetrating enhancers to moisturize your skin, and this formulation has 5 to 250 kilodaltons of molecular weight! That is really small, so that it can get to the deepest layers of your skin,” Tata Harper shares with much pride. “And it helps to reduce redness and even reduces darkening spots. This composition is 100 percent.” She is speaking of her beloved Hydrating Floral Essence, a true hydrating booster with dual-weight hyaluronic acid that provides intense hydration but is super-lightweight with natural scents that calm your mind and spirit within seconds. Combined with nature’s goodies like rose, lavender, and neroli, hydrosols provide a smoothing effect, while the anti-oxidant floral blend helps to fight free radicals, preparing your skin for the next step in care.

Photo Courtesy of Tata Harper Skincare

That brings us to the Hydrating Floral Mask, a multi-hyaluronic treatment that has proven to improve hydration by 46 percent, even after 24 hours of application, and provide a 100 percent decrease in redness for the flushed, rosacea-prone skin type. This formulation was one-and-a-half years in the making, and it houses 2,000 kilodaltons, drenching every layer of your skin, from sub-dermis to fascial layer, to plump up the skin. “It’s like a creamy gel and has amazing redness reduction. Do a thin layer, but if you’d like to go to sleep with it at night, do a thicker layer. Moreover, to remove, don’t wash it off. Use the essence, which turns the mask into a milky texture, which you can tissue off to keep all the goodness on your skin,” Harper explains.

Comprising ingredients from 25 countries, this is indeed global technology. “Ingredients from 25 countries and 43 high-performing actives, that’s intense!” So why this mask now? “We didn’t have a mask for moisture. I think that masks, the way I see it, are medicine-cabinet items. One day you’re dull, you need a glow. Another day you’re congested and you need purification. Another day you’re blemish-full and breaking out, you need purifying. I have all that in the line, but I didn’t have one for moisture.” But the real reason Harper hadn’t made one way sooner is that she was never satisfied with the technology in existing moisturizers. But now, she says, “hydration technology in the last three years in the natural spaces has exploded. The sizes of hyaluronic acids and the options on barriers, as in how to keep things inside of your skin, have advanced so much!” 

Photo Courtesy of Tata Harper Skincare

Utilizing advanced applied science from England, Germany, and Israel, and with hyaluronic acid extracted via fermentation technology from tremella mushrooms from the Czech Republic, this reformulated magic mask, launched only a couple of months ago, has ten molecular grades of hyaluronic acid, and drenches the deepest layer of the skin. With a floral blend derived from the Australian Coastline, which addresses skin’s redness, and rich vitamins and minerals like eskolaite, squalene, and vitamin F, it has already become a classic. Topping off the lineup launching at the end of May is the Hyaluronic Gel Moisturizer. Harper calls it a “weightless daily hydrator,” and that is an undeniable fact. It’s made with all of the advanced hyaluronic-acid technology mentioned earlier and has the appropriate gel-water technology powered by chia-seed water from the U.S.A. and marsh samphire from France. What’s more, it incorporates tremella-mushroom technology (which expands two times in weight in water) and even banana flower from Thailand. This powerful combination provides clinically proven redness reduction, plumping and smoothing, and protective antioxidants. Can you say, “Uncompromised power of non-toxic weightless hydration?” Naturally.

Categories
Health Nutrition

Refreshing Biotta Juices

If you’re anything like us, you love a good juice. And with the heat we’ve been experiencing this summer, staying hydrated is important. But staying hydrated doesn’t just mean guzzling down water, there are many beverages — juice included — to help keep your water intake up.

One of our new go-to juices are the ones from Biotta. With ten different varieties, there are plenty to choose from, and they each come with a punch of vitamins and minerals, meaning you’re not only keeping your hydration in check — there are other added benefits to adding a glass of juice to your daily diet.

Downtown had a chance to talk to Matt Herzog, President of Biotta’s U.S. distributor, about its juices and history, his current favorite and what makes Biotta special in the juice industry.

Biotta has been around since 1931 – what’s the secret behind staying on the market for this long?

Matt Herzog: Founded in Switzerland in 1931 by Dr. Hugo Brandenberger, Biotta, has remained dedicated to our original goal of producing top-quality juice from vegetables and fruits just as nature intended–fresh from the field into the bottle. Biotta produced and launched our first line of juices in 1957 and is now sold in more than 40 countries. Established in business for 60 years, including 40 years in the U.S., Biotta is one of the top selling functional juice brands in the world. The secret to Biotta’s success is the unique combination of great taste, high quality ingredient and processes, and a focus on health and wellness. 


What do you think has been key to Biotta’s success? 

MH: As mentioned above, the key is really the combination of superior vegetables and fruits, superior processing techniques and Swiss quality throughout. Over the years, Biotta has farmed more than 1,700 acres of chemical-, fertilizer-, and toxic-free land — a very rare find among today’s farmland. Along with three generations of family farmers, Biotta has established reliable and scientific organic growing techniques, protecting the natural wholesomeness and taste of all ingredients. Biotta juices use only natural and physical processing methods as opposed to commonly used chemical methods. Production routines at Biotta have a direct impact on the quality of the juices: the fewer processing steps, the higher the nutritional value.


What does a normal day of work look like for you? 

MH: One of the things I love about my job is the routine varies from day-to-day. Some days find me in the office working on sales and marketing plans or tasting potential new juices, other days I am at our warehouse where we receive shipments in from Switzerland and ship out to customers. I also travel some, not only seeing customers and attending trade shows, but also visiting our factory in Switzerland and the fields where are ingredients are grown.


When not a work, what do you enjoy to do? 

MH: I love spending time with my wife and two children, as well as playing tennis.


Out of the ten juices, can you tell us which one is your favorite? 

MH: It shifts around and is often whatever is our newest creation. Right now, it’s our Apple Beet Ginger juice, which delivers the health benefits of Beet juice, but with a wonderful, fresh taste!


What’s your favorite way to enjoy Biotta?

MH: Cold, right out of the bottle… I like Apple Beet Ginger with my breakfast to give me energy for the day and Tart Cherry before bed to improve my sleep.


How often does Biotta come out with a new juice? How much experimenting goes on?

MH: Over the last few years, we’ve launched 1 to 2 new juices per year. We are constantly trying new things and looking at new ideas – someone just put me onto mixing Beet and Carrot juices, and it was delicious. At the same time, in order to produce excellent, high-quality organic juices, we spend a lot of time on research, development, production and quality assurance to be sure that each new juice matches our high standards.

 

Juices look to be an ever-growing market, but what makes Biotta different from other juice brands? 

MH: Biotta’s attention to quality throughout the manufacturing process is critical to delivering the best juice. We focus on one basic principle throughout our process: the fewer the processing steps, the higher the nutritional value of the juice.

First, we pick our vegetables and fruits at the peak of ripeness to ensure the highest quality ingredients. Next, we decant the juice from the vegetables and fruits very quickly after harvest. Instead of pressing the juice, which can damage the nutrients, we use a gentle process of centrifugation to separate the juice from the mash. Then, we put the juice into our proprietary production process. Our process excludes oxygen as much as possible, hindering oxidation and the resulting loss of vitamins and flavor.

Biotta juices are never from concentrate. They are processed without any water removal or reconstitution, producing a fresher tasting, better-for-you juice. With pasteurization, we use a lower temperature to maintain quality and nutrients. Our juice is packaged in 100% non-gas-permeable glass bottles. Glass provides the best product protection and prevents undesired external elements (oxygen) from permeating the product, resulting in the best quality juice.


Finally, what’s in store for Biotta? Anything new and exciting coming up?

MH: 2016 was a record year for us and we look to continue building on that. Right now, we’re focused on our new Apple Beet Ginger juice and developing the next great new flavor!

Categories
Health

St. Patrick’s Day Dos & Don’ts

Photo courtesy of Pexels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4cwCPxrwd8

Dr. Ralph Holsworth is a board-certified osteopathic family medicine physician and director of clinical and scientific research for Essentia Water. He is very knowledgeable about how hangovers really work, and has provided some great tips on how to avoid such during your St. Patrick’s Day festivities:

· DO indulge in (some) fatty foods: A small portion of fatty foods in your stomach prior to drinking slows the absorption of alcohol. But if you eat too much, your body empties the stomach contents more quickly into the small intestine where alcohol is more quickly absorbed. It’s a balancing act — so go ahead and enjoy a little soda bread!

 

Dr. Ralph Holsworth
Dr. Ralph Holsworth

· DON’T consume drinks high in sodium. Avoid those margaritas, dirty martinis and Bloody Mary’s — and even some fruity drinks. Salt with alcohol allows a little valve between your stomach and small intestine to be left wide open, allowing alcohol to more quickly be absorbed into the gut. And isn’t Guinness or Jameson the true drink of the day?

· DON’T pop painkillers. Pain relievers like acetaminophen, or Tylenol, can increase liver toxicity especially after it’s been irritated by alcohol consumption. Consider a more natural option found in your local health store: bromelain. It’s a natural enzyme that may help soothe your headaches.

· DO hydrate. If you’re in for a long day or night of revelry, hydrating beforehand can decrease the change of a hangover significantly. Staying hydrated between drinks is also helpful, reducing the alcohol content in the stomach, and then the bloodstream, giving the liver more opportunity to do its job. Essentia is an ionized, alkaline water that is perfect for hydration. In fact, water decreases the volume of alcohol by 50 percent. Consider making ice cubes using Essentia water for your whiskey!