Maria Grusauskas

Staff Writer

Cleansing to Fight Gut Fungus

Joy Smith of Santa Cruz’s Growing Wild encourages vegging out to restore balance in the digestive tract. Photo by Chip Scheuer.

Native to the human body, candida albicans is a fungus that lives in the intestines, skin and mucosal surfaces. Thriving on sugar and yeast, it releases 79 different byproducts, including the neurotoxin acetaldehyde (a potential carcinogen) and uric acid. Luckily, the “good” microbes in our digestive tracts work to keep candida in check—until they don’t anymore.

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Why Switch from Coffee to Green Tea?

Evidence continues to pile up about green tea’s healthy properties.

For coffee drinkers, that first sip of piping hot java is a crucial part of the morning routine. It jolts us awake, fires up our neurons and gives us the stamina to tackle the day. But is it healthier to free ourselves from the delicious shackles of America’s most widely used psychoactive substance?

In short, it’s a highly personal decision; every human body processes coffee differently, and it changes as we age. But while coffee’s benefits are vast—from improved mental processing and athletic enhancement, to its myriad of antioxidants and nutrients—evidence suggests that it may be worth slogging through the withdrawal headaches and brain fog to replace coffee with an alternative psychoactive substance: green tea.

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Can Fitness Culture Embrace Yoga’s Spiritual Roots?

Yoga instructor Daniela Kosmalski grounds her classes in the philosophy that she studies intensively.

Once upon a time, very few Americans knew what yoga was, and even fewer practiced it. It was just a few decades ago, in fact. But today, yoga is a multi-billion-dollar business in this country, with some 20 million practitioners, and an ever-growing faction of devotees continue to wriggle into those tight pants and take to their mats on a regular basis.

Still, yoga—which means “union” in Sanskrit, as in union of the body, mind and soul—only really caught on in the U.S. after its physical benefits hit the mainstream. Embraced by the fitness boom, yoga-instructor training emerged as a new and profitable market, and here we are today.

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