Jessica Vachal wrote this article for Yo Naturals vending.

Money always plays a very strong role in how people live their lives. When they have money, they tend to do very little for their neighbors and fellow humans. After all, why would the wealthy need to make moves that would save their neighbors stress or environmental toxins? These wealthy individuals are able to drive their gas-guzzling cars and buy conventionally grown foods with little care of how their actions are affecting the rest of the world. They do not care that they are polluting the air with their oversized vehicles and polluting the ground with the pesticides put onto the conventionally grown foods they choose to purchase and consume.

That is how the wealthy are portrayed, and of course that is how some wealthy think and act. Yet there are plenty of other wealthy Americans who understand that they are part of the world as a whole, who are conscientious of the way they live their lives, who eat organically because they can afford to, and who help to educate the rest of the world on how numbers equate power, and if we all banded together to fight for organic foods or cleaner-burning cars, the industries would respond accordingly. However, those strapped for cash could hardly be bothered to listen, generally-speaking, as they were more concerned with putting food on the table than with the impact they were having on the masses.

However, now that America is undergoing such economic struggles and almost all monetary circles of our society are struggling to save some pennies here or there, people are becoming more aware the impact an individual has on the whole. People are suddenly become much more cognizant of buying their food locally, of looking not only for organic foods but also for food which was grown in their city or their own, that which was grown close to home, literally. The reasons that people are looking to buy foods locally are so that the additional prices and taxes due to the costs taken on in trucking the produce into your particular city or town will be mitigated and the savings transferred onto you, the consumer.

The power of money is a strong one, people always need or want more of it, and when they have it, it hardly seems like enough. Yet when money is tight, the ways to be frugal seem to crop up with much more frequency and the ways to live your life in a more green fashion very often follows suite. Buying your food organically and locally are one ways to keep costs down – in comparison – while upgrading the quality of the life you lead. Buy organic and buy local, like Yo Naturals – your body, and your wallet, will feel better, and the rest of the world will become better for your actions as well.

This post was contributed by Laura Rayburn for YoNaturals Organic and Natural Vending Business based in San Diego, California.

Perhaps your mother always told you that starting your day off with a good breakfast is the key to a great day. And she was right. The value of a nutritious morning meal can not be understated. Some research even points to a link between skipped breakfasts and elevated cholesterol levels and a lesser sensitivity to insulin. This is in addition to the general impact on one’s daily caloric intake since people who skip breakfast also tend to eat more calories throughout the day.

What foods should be included in a nutritious breakfast then? Whole grain cereals are a great place to start, especially if lowering your cholesterol is a primary concern. In fact, whole grain cereals stand out as a good breakfast food no matter what your health concern is. The other good news is that it’s also quick to prepare for those of us who find ourselves in a rush to get out the door in the morning.

Dr. Hamid R. Farshchi, a researcher at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, has delved deeper into this question of breakfast eating to figure out what kind of impact a skipped breakfast meal can have on an individual, and he began by first assembling a study group of 10 young and normal-weight women. One group was instructed to eat bran flakes with low-fat milk for breakfast, whereas the second group was asked to skip breakfast and eat the bran flakes around noon instead. Both groups were allowed two meals, two snacks, and one cookie during the rest of the day.

At the end of this short study, Dr. Farshchi’s team gave the women milkshakes in order to measure their metabolic responses. After taking blood samples and comparing those samples to samples taken earlier, the researchers noted that the women who had been skipping breakfast for the past two weeks had higher levels of cholesterol and a poorer response to insulin after ingesting the milkshake.

The women in the breakfast-free group also reported generally higher calorie intakes during the study, and although they showed no sign of a change in body weight, this may be attributable to the length of the study. Dr. Farschi noted that a longer study would need to be undertaken to determine the relationship between skipping breakfast and gaining weight.

One of the most interesting things about this study was that the timing of the meals seemed to have a large impact on the women’s metabolic rate and her cholesterol levels, as both groups ate the same things, just at different times of day. With this knowledge in hand, it becomes evident even to non-scientific types that eating a good breakfast is an important part of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. So eat up, to your health. Cheers from YoNaturals!