It’s sort of ironic, I know, that my smartphone serves as a portal into nature, but my Instagram feed is full of green foliage and cactus flowers. On Instagram, this is not hard to do. The social media platform is teeming with design enthusiasts and plant lovers, who, more and more, seem to be becoming…
Articles by Maria Grusauskas
Why Dark Chocolate Should Be Your New Healthy Habit
Chocolate is loaded with flavonoid antioxidants—more than green tea, red wine, or an apple. This justification alone seems to defend the private euphoria of a square (or entire bar) here and there, right?
A Holistic Approach to Breast Cancer
In a crowded Aptos bistro, I am a nervous ball of energy by the time I locate Christina Grant, Ph.D., holistic healer and author of the recent book The Holistic Approach to Breast Cancer: Every Woman’s Guide to Health, Vitality & Wellbeing. In truth, the topic we are about to confront horrifies me. I don’t…
The Dirty Secrets of Processed Food
Katherine Reid, Ph.D. is a biochemist and founder of the nonprofit organization Unblind My Mind, whose mission is to raise awareness about what’s in our food, and how it might contribute to the diseases plaguing Americans.
Santa Cruz Challenge Starts Up Its Fourth Year
Turning over a new leaf of good health is always a challenge. But in the case of the 12-week Santa Cruz Challenge, it’s the heaping spoonful of Santa Cruz that seems to make the medicine go down.
Patch Cuts Santa Cruz
Last Wednesday, the new owners of Patch.com pulled the plug on over 300 of its remaining editors, including Santa Cruz’s own, Brad Kava, who ran Santa Cruz Patch for the past three years.
“I never worked so hard in my life,” says a recovering Kava.
Cleansing to Fight Gut Fungus
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.
Why Switch from Coffee to Green Tea?
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.
Can Fitness Culture Embrace Yoga’s Spiritual Roots?
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.
Santa Cruz Group Scrutinizes Powerful Psychedelic
The Santa Cruz-based organization, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, has been tracking the long-term progress of ibogaine in treating opiate addiction.
