Health Ranger's Health-Enhancing Travel Journal: Veggie Magic Cafe and Hotel Laundry Fragrance Madness

Tuesday, July 29, 2008 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: raw foods, health news, Natural News

(NaturalNews) This article continues the travel journal I started yesterday in the article entitled Twelve Natural Health Tips for Smart Travel (https://www.naturalnews.com/023715.html)

Today I woke up in Sarasota, Florida and searched the web for a raw foods restaurant. Wouldn't you know it, Veggie Magic Cafe came up (www.VeggieMagic.com), so we grabbed the video camera and headed over there to order some delicious raw foods and get it all on film.

One of the owners, Evona Poplawski, was there and happily jumped in for a spontaneous on-camera interview (which we'll be featuring on NaturalNews soon). The other owner, Jenna Norwood, is the creator of the hot new film Supercharge Me (www.SuperchargeMe.com), which documents her raw foods discoveries in South America and elsewhere.

Check out her website for some fascinating video clips! www.SuperchargeMe.com

We also filmed two chefs at Veggie Magic preparing our delicious raw foods meals and smoothies. Both are featured in our video coverage of Veggie Magic which you'll see soon. I chatted with one of the customers, too, who turned out to be the owner of a national chain of steakhouse restaurants. I couldn't resist asking him why he was eating at Veggie Magic when he owned his own restaurants, and he told me, "I can get all the filet mignon I want for free, but to get real food like this, I come here!"

Finding the Veggie Magic Cafe was definitely the highlight of our week. It's like finding an oasis in the desert, and it was without question the best food I've eaten in months. We should all be eating raw food cuisine, y'know? It's not only the healthiest food in the world, it's also the most delicious by far!

This got me thinking: There are huge opportunities for raw foods chefs to open up small cafes in other cities. I couldn't find a raw foods cafe in Boca Raton, for example, and yet the popularity of raw foods is surging! Any entrepreneurial-minded raw foods chef should seriously consider opening a cafe in these cities and towns that don't yet have one. Sooner or later, by the way, somebody is going to have an online raw foods cafe directory (maybe we'll do it!) that will list all the world's raw restaurants. (If you want to do this and partner with NaturalNews, contact us! We'll publicize it!)

Maddening fragrance chemicals in the hotel sheets

Does it drive you crazy when you arrive at a hotel and find they've washed all the sheets and pillow cases in toxic laundry chemicals? (Or am I the only one who notices?)

This happened to me today, and when I called the front desk to tell them that I didn't want to sleep in sheets that were soaked in cancer-causing chemicals, they insisted the sheets were fragrance free (which is like calling a bottle of Vodka alcohol-free...)

It didn't help matters when I brought the pillow cases to the front desk and asked the people there to sniff them, then explained how they all had their olfactory senses burned out of the skulls by using too many fragrance products. Some people just can't handle true statements about themselves, unfortunately, and I stopped caring about social graces long ago, which is why I tend to just tell people what they NEED to hear, regardless of whether they WANT to hear it.

So how did I solve the toxic laundry problem? Easy: I bought a new set of sheets and pillow cases at a local retailer and laundered them myself in the local coin-operated washing machines (if you use this tip, be sure to buy sheets that aren't white, or the hotel will accuse you of stealing their sheets when you take your sheets with you!)

What did I use for laundry detergent? Two things, actually: 1) My own Bodhi Soap Nuts (http://www.betterlifegoods.com/BodhiSoapNuts...) and 2) Dr. Bronner's liquid soap (www.DrBronner.com), which is good for washing just about everything: Clothes, countertops, hair, armpits, hands and feet, and not necessarily in that order.

This combination of natural cleaning products has worked miracles, and as I write this, I'm only minutes away from some much-needed sleep on a completely non-toxic sleeping surface. I have no idea why all the other hotel guests don't seem to notice their bed sheets reek of brand-name, chemically-infused laundry products, but it probably has something to do with the fact that their olfactory senses have also been burned out of their skulls by exposure to toxic fragrance products and cigarette smoke.

(As a side note, I am seriously thinking about setting up a world-wide database of fragrance-free hotel listings and having users submit "fragrance reports" to the site when they visit hotels and motels. I only lack the time to organize such a project, but it sure would be a helpful online resource, wouldn't it? If anybody out there wants to engineer a site that this in partnership with NaturalNews, just contact us with a proposal. I'd love to see something like this become a reality!)

New product finds

In addition to the awesome raw foods I discovered recently and mentioned yesterday (www.RawPhoriaLive.com), I discovered a new superfood bar at Whole Foods today that looks really promising: the Greens+ Chia bar (www.greensplus.com/chia)

The first three ingredients are organic dates, organic almond butter and Omega-3 chia seeds. It also contains smaller amounts of all various healthful ingredients like sea vegetables, grape seed extract, astragalus root extract and even royal jelly. I haven't tasted it yet, but knowing the quality and taste of this company's other bars, I wanted to bring this one to your attention. From the ingredients alone, it looks like an instant winner! (Note to self: I gotta meet this company. They deserve to be profiled on NaturalNews.)

I also dropped by the Vitacost marketing headquarters today in Boca Raton and discovered a huge shelf full of NSI-branded products (Nutraceutical Sciences Institute) that I didn't even know existed. One that caught my eye is called BerryTastic Whole Food Complex (http://www.vitacost.com/NSI-Berrytastic-Whol...)

As with the Chia bar above, I haven't tasted this one yet, but the formulation looked really impressive, especially for the under-twenty-dollars price, which is quite a deal for a superfood powder formulated like this one. I'll try it soon and let you know how it tastes. If you're looking for a great value on a high-end superfood powder, this is definitely one to consider.

Interesting road signs...

A billboard in North Carolina, where I stayed last week, blared, "CHURCH TRAILER STOLEN: God forgives you, but we need our stuff back!"

In Sarasota, Florida, earlier today, I saw a giant billboard advertising "Robotic Prostate Surgery" and showing only a picture of two doctors. Are they the robots, or what? Gee, they almost looked human!

In Boca Raton, Florida, I spotted an oncology center right next to a McDonald's restaurant with a drive-thru. It reminds me of my Counterthink Cartoon entitled, "Business is Booming!" (https://www.naturalnews.com/021218.html)

I was thinking they should extend the drive-thru all the way to the oncology center lobby and just make it an all-in-one "food and chemo" drive-thru that lets you order the dangerous medications at the same time you order the dangerous food that causes cancer in the first place. "Yes, I'll take a double cheeseburger and a large serving of McChemo, please!"

Or maybe they could bundle their Happy Meal with Prozac pills and rename it the "Happy-until-you-committ-suicide Meal." It's quite a racket, when you think about it: Selling consumers the products that make them diseased, and then raking in the profits on the products that claim to treat those same diseases. Corporations profit TWICE from consumer sickness and disease. No wonder there's no effort to teach consumers how to eat right and be well -- there's too much profit at stake to allow it!

Cop cars powered by fast food grease?

Speaking of McDonald's, according to the Associated Press, some McDonald's restaurants are now donating their used frying oil to be used as biofuels in diesel-powered cop cars.

Apparently, their high-trans-fat, heavily-oxidized cooking oils are good for more than just making people obese and diabetic. Mixed with diesel fuel, they can actually help local police departments go partially green! So now when a cop car races past you with sirens blaring, it will smell like french fries instead of donuts.

Exercise and sunshine

I'm hitting the sack and waking up at sunrise to go jogging on the beach in Boca Raton. Natural sunlight, fresh air and invigorating exercise... ahh! This is what we all need to be healthy.

This town is full of healthy people, and I see them jogging and cycling along the roads all day long. It sure makes it easier, of course, to be healthy when you have a sub-tropical climate outside your door every day of the year, right? In fact, Florida would almost be the perfect place to live if it weren't for the hurricanes and rising sea levels (most of Florida is barely one meter above sea level, and there's not a mountain or hill to be found anywhere...). But between the hurricanes -- and until global warming melts all the ice -- Florida might be called an outdoor lover's paradise.

I'll let you know if I meet any nesting sea turtles tomorrow. Until then, stay healthy, stay informed and keeping drinking those fresh juices! If you've been reading NaturalNews for more than a few weeks, you already know just about everything you need to know to reverse disease and protect your health for a lifetime. All you've got to do now is USE that information!