The phone was ringing off the hook yesterday here at Bazi World HQ with the news of the latest review of energy drink in the medical journal, Pediatrics.

You already go the extra mile in your workout routine. Does your passion and drive for excellence carry over when it comes to nutrition? We understand that other energy shots are more convenient to purchase. Heck, they're located in convenience stores. You have to ask yourself if the ease of purchase is worth ingesting a drink whose ingredients are crafted in quarantined labs by scientists with plastic coats and chemistry goggles?

Don't let ordering online stop you from healthy, nutritious, of the earth energy. We want to fuel your next great achievement. Go the extra mile.

"But I want the energy shots now! BAZI takes a few days to ship. :O(."

Okay. We get it. Convenience goes a long way. In fact, you may have heard that we are poised to move into a store near you this year. 2011 isn't the year of the Hare. It's the year of the BAZI! Take advantage of this time right now. Know cool before it becomes super cool. Trend set the playing field with your shot of BAZI. Outperform you competitor with our sustainable, 8 superfruit powered, no crash energy. Be BAZI before everyone else!

Now's the best time to order! Along with the release of our Energy-A-Holic web series, we're offering a 12-Pack Buy One Get One Free Sale! Don't sleep on this offer. The sale ends at January 31st. If you've been procrastinating now's the time to take action! Go the extra mile.

           Energy drinks were originally conceived of as a means for active people to gain extra energy while performing physical activities. The immense popularity of energy drinks has boiled over into the world of industry, where thousands of workers need that extra pep in their step just to keep up with their job(s) and the rest of life’s challenges. As the popularity of these drinks increases, it shouldn’t be a shock to witness them pop up in other walks of life. However, an alarming place where energy drink use has been sprouting is during Home Economics 101. That’s right, middle school students are starting to use energy drinks.

What is incredibly unnerving is the fact that these early users are starting on Rock Star, Amp, and Red Bull because these are the brands with the catchy names that pre-teens and teens are attracted too. Physical Education Coach Sharon Means of Lufkin Middle School said, “I've seen a trend that young students are looking to other avenues for their energy or happiness.” Means is surprised by how many parents allow their kids to drink these high sugar, high-caffeine beverages.

Dr. Rima Kittley, board certified in family medicine, is equally concerned. Kittley said, “They're drinking sugar water and/or artificially sweetened water with colors and flavors and caffeine, caffeine, caffeine.” Kittley said the side-effects of kids and young adults drinking artificial stimulant energy drinks include obesity, attention problems, and dehydration.

Pre-teens are supposed to have boundless levels of energy. They should be bouncing off the walls – always looking for a ball to catch, a tree to climb, or a field to run through. Imagine yourself back in middle school. You sit down, put your pencils in order, and take a look over your lunch to make sure your mom packed you a Snack Pack. After confirming that your mother still doesn’t realize that a bag of baby carrots is no Snack Pack, you look up and see something even more disturbing. All your classmates are drinking cups of coffee. Is this middle school or a college study session in Starbucks?

Sharon Means wants parents to understand the dangers involved in introducing an artificial stimulant energy drink to students at such an early age. “Students need to get energy from sleep, nutrition, and physical activity,” said Means.

If it’s nutrition Means wants, it’s nutrition he can get. BAZI is an all natural energy drink made up of 8 superfruits, 12 vitamins, and 0 chemicals. Our philosophy is Energy + Nutrition = Healthy Fuel. BAZI comes with no warning label, is low in both sugar and caffeine, and doesn’t cause sharp crashes in energy.

For more information click here.

For a drink that’s referred to as “healthy hydration for every occasion,” being sued by a non-profit public interest group on the grounds of unwarranted health claims is quite the shock. For that drink’s manufacturing company to defend themselves by asserting that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking [Coca Cola's] vitaminwater was a healthy beverage” is quite something else.

If you haven’t become an informed consumer by reading John Robbins’ piece, The Dark Side of Vitaminwater, please do yourself favor and do it! In this Huffington Post article,  Robbins eloquently writes:

Does this mean that you'd have to be an unreasonable person to think that a product named "vitaminwater," a product that has been heavily and aggressively marketed as a healthy beverage, actually had health benefits?

Or does it mean that it's okay for a corporation to lie about its products, as long as they can then turn around and claim that no one actually believes their lies?

In fact, the product is basically sugar-water, to which about a penny's worth of synthetic vitamins have been added. And the amount of sugar is not trivial. A bottle of vitaminwater contains 33 grams of sugar, making it more akin to a soft drink than to a healthy beverage.

About 35 percent of Americans are medically obese, two-thirds of us are overweight. With 25% of the calories Americans intake coming in liquid form, it would appear that what one drinks is just as important as what one eats. Researchers at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published a report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the quickest and most reliable way to lose weight is to cut down on liquid calorie consumption.

                So when a health conscious, generally overweight public decides to get healthy, they shouldn’t be required to navigate through the murky waters of false-advertising that companies like Coca-Cola pull. Just like how Roger Clemens can’t misremember his steroid past, Coca-Cola can’t misremember that they have famous athletes endorsing their products as being able to catalyze a "healthy state of physical and mental well-being."

                John Robbins said it best, “I still can't get over the bizarre audacity of Coke's legal case. Forced to defend themselves in court, they are acknowledging that vitaminwater isn't a healthy product. But they are arguing that advertising it as such isn't false advertising, because no could possibly believe such a ridiculous claim.”

                Meanwhile, we don’t need a backwards talking lawyer to explain the intentional health benefits of BAZI to you. And if we did? So what, we’ve got a page for that. For the record, BAZI is INTENDED to be a HEALTHY FUNCTIONAL BEVERAGE. Any reasonable person can see that. If you think BAZI is unhealthy, than you are in fact, UNREASONABLE.

           A group of researchers at Mayo Clinc found that green tea extract has kept cancer in check in a majority of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients who used it in a phase II clinical trial. These findings are the latest in a series of Mayo studies to show promise for the therapeutic use of epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), the major component of green tea, in reducing the number of leukemia cells in patients with CLL.

"Although only a comparative phase III trial can determine whether EGCG can delay progression of CLL, the benefits we have seen in most CLL patients who use the chemical suggest that it has modest clinical activity and may be useful for stabilizing this form of leukemia, potentially slowing it down," says Tait Shanafelt, M.D., a Mayo Clinic hematologist and lead author of the study.

"These studies advance the notion that a nutraceutical like EGCG can and should be studied as cancer preventives," says Neil Kay, M.D., a hematology researcher whose laboratory first tested the green tea extract in leukemic blood cells from CLL patients. "Using nontoxic chemicals to push back cancer growth to delay the need for toxic therapies is a worthy goal in oncology research -- particularly for forms of cancer initially managed by observation such as CLL."

Dr. Shanafelt and Kay did caution that EGCG should never be considered a substitute for chemotherapy. It is important to note that all patients Mayo tested were early stage, asymptomatic CLL patients who would not otherwise be treated until their disease progressed.

CLL is a type of blood cancer that fits between leukemia and lymphoma. When the amount of leukemia cells in the blood and bone marrow increase, as well as when the lymph nodes enlarge, the disease is said to have progressed. 69 percent of CLL patients had a biological response to EGCG as evidenced by a 20 percent or greater sustained reduction in blood lymphocyte count and/or a 50 percent or greater reduction in lymph node size, the researchers say.

"All in all, the treatment was well tolerated with very mild side effects in most patients," Dr. Shanafelt says.

"Without a phase III clinical trial, we cannot make a recommendation that EGCG be used by CLL patients, but those who want to take supplements should consult with their oncologists and need to receive appropriate monitoring using laboratory tests," Dr. Kay says.

A major source for our daily intake of vitamin D comes from the rays of the sun. However, for black teenagers in sunny Georgia, this is simply not the case. In a recent study, 95% of the 44 black teens who took part in the research were classified as vitamin D deficient. This vitamin D deficiency is a risk factor for heart disease and stroke. This startling information helps shed some light on why black teens are more inclined to suffer from arterial stiffness. Those who took 2,000 IU, international units from vitamin D supplements daily showed a decrease in arterial stiffness.

The study focused on 44 black teenagers, both male and female. They were randomly given either 400 IU of vitamin D or 2,000 IU of vitamin D per day. Those who took the 400 IU supplement still remained vitamin D deficient.

Yanbin Dong, MD, PhD, of the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta and lead author of the study said, "Our study is the first clinical trial of vitamin D intervention to use 2,000 IU in black subjects and to include cardiovascular risk factors as outcomes in youth. Our study indicates that the current recommendations for vitamin D intake in black teenagers may need to be revised upward." For more information, click here.

Prevention magazine reports that “conventionally grown produce isn't as healthful as it was 30 years ago - and it's only getting worse.”  Researchers are finding that our produce is losing its nutrients – in the 43 fruits and vegetables tested, levels of vitamins and minerals were as much as 64% lower than in the past.  Experts believe the reduction of nutrients is a result of the farming industry’s attempt to grow bigger vegetables faster.  Learn 9 ways to maximize the nutrients in your fruit and veggies at prevention.com.

If you spend any time shopping in the supplement section of your local super-mart, you’ll more than likely see a product touting its ORAC score. Of course you may wonder what ORAC is, and what does it matter if something has an ORAC score or not. Hopefully I can help shed a bit of light on the subject for you.

ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) testing is widely used to evaluate the antioxidant activity of foods and nutritional products. It’s not an absolute validation since ORAC does not evaluate the body’s ability to absorb and utilize (known as “bioavailability) an antioxidant, but, it is a fantastic and reliable reference from which to compare the health benefits of different foods and products.  As with all good things there is a limit, however, and simply having the highest ORAC score does not make something better for you. You have to keep several issues in mind. 

First, human metabolism is set up to take in nutrients in levels that are found in foods, not in levels that are cooked up in a lab or concentrated to meet the demands of a marketing team who is trying to win a “we have more in ours” campaign. From a scientific standpoint we have little data to predict what effect on the body there will be by taking in massive amounts of concentrated antioxidants over a period of years. One would like to think that it would be beneficial, but that’s not always the case. Instead, it’s better to rely on delivering nutrients in ratios and amounts that are closer in line with how they are found in foods. Think of it as how nature intended it. 

Secondly, as I stated earlier, not all antioxidants are easily absorbed by the body. Sure, they can add to an ORAC score, but they may not be even utilized; subsequently that high score can mean very little in the end. You want a balance between high antioxidant protection and bioavailability. 

As an example, BAZI, with its unique combination of eight superfruit concentrates, 12 vitamins and proprietary trace mineral blend, has an ORAC value which certainly classifies it as a potent source of antioxidants. On an ounce-for-ounce comparison, BAZI holds it own against the most popular fruits and juices. Plus, as I mentioned, its values are in line with what nature intended and that’s exactly how we think it should be.  The big advantage of BAZI over all the products listed below is in its nutrient diversity. No single juice or fruit has the wide variety of nutrients as BAZI does. That is what makes BAZI unlike any other product in the market today!

                                                 Total ORAC score (2 ounces/60ml)

*Source-USDA ORAC values of selected foods, 2007. 

http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/ORAC/ORAC07.pdf

** Source-Comparison of Antioxidant Potency of Commonly

Consumed Polyphenol-Rich Beverages in the United

StatesJ. Agric. Food Chem. 2008, 56, 1415–1422