Fitness, protein, and supplement powders are a great way to pack in the nutrition, but outside of the home context, it can be hard to keep up with them. Powders are...powdery. They’re difficult to store without making a mess. They take up a lot of room. Carelessly stored, and it’s impossible to tell one from another.
For all of these reasons and more, powders are notoriously troublesome to take on the road. Whether you’re on a holiday, business trip, camping expedition, or moon mission, it’s way harder to maintain a powder regimen than it is in the comfort of your own kitchen.
This doesn’t mean it’s impossible. We’ll give you some quick tips that’ll make your nutritional powders much easier to manage on the road.
Capsule Fillers Are Your Friend
If you take a powdered supplement, such as many of the ones offered by Garden of Life, a capsule filler can make your life a whole lot easier. Typically manufactured and sold in China (where traditional medicine makes nutritional powders ubiquitous), capsule fillers are plastic devices in several parts that let you package your powders in gelatin capsules. Capsules can be bought in drug stores or online in quantities of 1000. Most of the capsules hold about half a gram of powder. For powders you consume only a few grams at a time, this is an ideal solution, though powders you consume in greater quantities such as soy protein won’t work as well.
Buy Protein Powder at Your Destination
It’s very cumbersome to lug protein powder in your suitcase. If you’re cultivating mass at the moment, we still want you to be able to take your protein powder on vacations and work trips. However, if you’re going to be gone for a short amount of time, just eat a bit more meat at meals instead of lugging around the protein tub. If you are going to be gone for more than a few days, just buy some protein powder when you arrive at your destination. You can even have protein powder or protein shakes from Orgain delivered straight to your AirBNB. Just remember to pack your blender bottle.
Put Powders in Your Checked Luggage
If you insist on bringing powders on a plane, make sure to put them in your checked luggage (as powder baggies labeled in Sharpie tend not to go over well with the TSA). Make sure to triple bag these powders, or bring them in their original tubs. If you do choose to bag them, include a cardboard label or other identifying feature from the original package. Not only will this help you distinguish one from another when you arrive at your destination, it’ll also help prevent the TSA from opening up the bags if they do decide to search your checked luggage for some reason.
Be Conscious of Heat and Moisture
If traveling by road, you may have to contend with hot summer days. If you store nutritional or protein powders in the trunk of your car, they may react to heat or moisture that’s present in this environment. Heat, especially, can cause certain powders to denature or cake together. Read the storage directions on each of your powders, and make sure to provide the proper environment for every one, even if it means using ice packs and multiple airtight plastic bags.
Powders can be tricky to deal with, but if you depend on them, there’s a way to make your powder regimen work on the road. Plan ahead, think about every step of your upcoming process, and get creative. You can make road powder work, no matter your destination.
Homeopathy is the largest form of alternative medicine to have evolved out of Europe in the past several hundred years. Widely adopted in the West, especially the United States, homeopathy is a multi-billion dollar industry, continually popularized by well known figures such as Dr. Mercola.
Homeopathy is based upon simple ideas that run in sharp contrast to the esoteric foundations of conventional medicine. Patients of homeopathy are often made to feel like they themselves are in the driver’s seat of their own recovery, and are given resources and medical explanations that are simple to comprehend and practice. Often lower-cost than their conventional medicine counterparts, homeopathic cures are seen by some as the most accessible path toward healing and recovery for various illnesses.
Clearly, homeopathy is popular. But where did homeopathy come from?
Homeopathy was developed by German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755 - 1843). Hahnemann had little luck making a living in the first decade following his medical education. During his early career struggles, Hahnemann experimented with taking small daily doses of quinine, then a common treatment for malaria. He discovered that small regular doses produced symptoms similar to malaria, but with much lesser severity. It was here that Hahnemann cooked up the notion that by treating a patient with medication that produces symptoms similar to those of certain illnesses, the illnesses might be healed or prevented.
In some ways, this concept was in keeping with standard medical understanding. After all, the entire principle of vaccination is in giving a patient a small dose of some infectious agent, thereby training their immune system to fight off the real thing. However, Hahnemann and his acolytes took the principle much farther. Symptoms were used to fight symptoms, without any deeper investigation into the cause and effect of illness and cure.
This was a system that anyone could easily understand, and homeopathy quickly became a kind of folk medicine popular among the middle and upper classes. Hahnemann made his system even more widely accessible by incorporating another principle: that homeopathic medications should be given only in the barest minimum dose, so as to produce the slightest possible symptomatic effects, and nothing more.
To accomplish this, Hahnemann compiled a vast list of illnesses and related homeopathic cures - those medications that produced similar symptomatic effects to one or more illnesses. These medications were then diluted, sometimes only 1 part in 100,000,000 (or more) remaining in the final solution. Hahnemann countered critics by claiming that these medications retained the power of the original drug, and that this potential could be realized by shaking the solutions vigorously prior to consumption. This process was known as “potentization”.
This, more or less, is the way that homeopathy is understood and practiced today. In addition to the medical aspect, patients are taken through highly personalized journeys, often sitting for an hour or more with the homeopath, examining all aspects of their personal and medical lives. Following these intense sessions, the homeopath prescribes one or more medications, and the patient returns at various intervals to chart progress.
If you are interested in homeopathic medicine, you can get trusted medications of this sort from Boiron and Herb Pharm. It would probably also be a good idea to sit down with a homeopath for one of these personalized sessions. Much like other forms of counseling, these homeopathic sessions may be therapeutic in their own right. If you choose to take homeopathic medicine, take careful note of the effects you observe, and the frequency and nature of the drugs you choose. If you find something that works, stick to it, and you could be yet another person to benefit from homeopathy.
