YoNaturals Organic and Natural Vending

For the most part, in America, obesity in children is associated with a poor diet and a lack of exercise. In many cases, it is a simple caloric imbalance that is causing a child to tip the scales. Considering the number of hours that children spend plopped down on the couch watching television or playing video games, it should come as no surprise that they are oftentimes eating more calories than they expend in their daily activities. In fact, by the time that many of these children reach their teenage years, they have already established a pattern of going to school and then coming straight home to zone out in front of the TV or the computer, never minding that their daily routines lack exercise or much physical activity of any sort. At YoNaturals, one of our biggest priorities is fighting this epidemic across the country.

Nevertheless, many parents wake up each day to discover that they are the caretaker of such a child and then begin to wonder what they should be doing to encourage better habits. For these parents, one of the best things that they can do for their child is to change their child’s home environment. Through making some small yet very important changes in diet and exercise regimes within their homes, parents can have a very large impact on the health of their children. Furthermore, by implementing these changes within the entire household, a parent can not only improve the health of their overweight child but can also improve the health and general fitness of the entire family.

It cannot be overemphasized how important it is to start with small steps toward better health by making sure that your expectations are in line with reality. If you have a child that eats only snack cakes and mac & cheese, you cannot expect them to give these things up overnight in exchange for broccoli and cauliflower. For example, if your child is used to eating a snack cake after school each day, try substituting a similarly sweet but definitely healthier alternative (like apple sauce). At YoNaturals, we know that children need to enjoy what they eat or they will not eat it regularly, which is the most important thing.

An equally important aspect of the battle is to get your whole family involved in this change in lifestyle. Don’t allow your obese child to feel like she is fighting this disease by herself. Sit down with the entire family and talk about healthy living and the ways of tracking success. One idea is to have each family member write down his or her weekly or monthly fitness goals and post these on the fridge or in another common space. Let your children see that their mom and dad are taking care of themselves as well. Keep everyone accountable and consider offering rewards to the members of the family who do meet their health goals.

Encourage your children and reinforce these ideas by choosing healthy snacks. Don’t let a seeming lack of convenience throw you off your game. Choose snacks from YoNaturals vending machines and keep your family on the path to fitness. Every small step counts.

The problem of obesity in both children and adults is very real, and when you look at the statistics that show there is not one state where the problem is decreasing, that shows a real problematic trend. Where does the problem begin and where is it going to end? It’s obviously the way we feed the children that allows them to grow into obese adults that starts the trends. An obese adult sends a message to the children that it’s normal to consume an enormous amount of food at one meal and throughout the day. Although we can accept the fact that a small percentage of obesity in adults is related to conditions such as those caused by thyroid problems, the majority of cases exist because of poor eating habits.
In order to combat the problem of obesity within our population, YoNaturals is starting at the beginning—with our children.

Although we cannot be in every home to monitor what children eat, we can encourage healthy eating through school projects that include replacing current vending machines in schools with ones that are filled with natural and organic snacks instead of high calorie ones that lack nutritional value. Children learn by example so will follow what they see others doing. If you want your children to eat healthy foods, you must set the example by preparing healthy meals at home and making sure they have access to healthy snacks when they are away from home. With more schools opting for vending machines that include healthy YoNaturals snacks, parents know their children are eating healthy snacks in school instead of junk food. The ultimate solution is for more schools to include the healthy YoNaturals snacks in their vending machines—though only a partial solution to the problem, it is surely a start.
If we are to eliminate the problem of early childhood obesity, we must begin as early as possible. Teaching our children healthy eating habits is something that should begin in infancy and continue into their adult life. The efforts YoNaturals is making in that direction will help guarantee a future that may not be free of childhood obesity, but it will certainly indicate a much lower number of cases than we presently see. The percentages in the United States and other Western countries is proof positive we need to do something, and with the efforts of YoNaturals we can surely beef up those efforts.
Author: Brenda Coxe

If you expect your family to eat healthy meals you have to start with the way you cook and prepare meals. Unless you take the initiative to prepare healthy meals for your family, they are not going to learn what foods are healthy, which in turn will prevent them from learning how to make healthy choices when they are away from home. Healthy eating goes beyond just the foods you serve—it includes the way you prepare those foods as well. If you prepare fresh broccoli, for example, but load it with butter or cheese sauce, you have defeated the purpose completely. Do not make the excuse that your family won’t eat it any other way because once you begin preparing foods in a healthy way your family will grow accustomed to eating them.

Learning to prepare healthy meals begins with the desire to ascertain your family is eating the foods they need in ways that will promote good health. Although it may not seem like a matter of importance when you are raising young children, you have to remember that it is difficult to break old habits. That’s why there are so many obese children and adults today—they have never been taught how to eat meals that are prepared healthy because their parents never attempted to prepare foods without added cholesterol, grease and other fattening additives. Some people are of the mistaken idea that foods have to be loaded with fattening seasonings in order to have flavor, but the truth is that substituting healthy herbs and seasonings for butter and other fattening condiments will provide better flavor and create a healthier dish.

One of the biggest problems people have is wanting to cook foods in fattening oil instead of steaming or oven baking foods. In fact, with the availability of the George Forman grill, there is no need to fry meats of any kind. The problem is people have become so use to eating foods with grease dripping from them that they think the food id dry otherwise. We need to change the way we look at foods and how we prepare them before we will see any real changes. YoNaturals is attempting to encourage the healthy preparation of foods in order to assure a healthier nation in the future and the reduction of childhood obesity. By teaching parents how to prepare healthy foods, perhaps we will have a future of healthier children and adults.

Author: Brenda Coxe

Many people are choosing to improve their diets by increasing their fiber intake these days. This is probably due in part to the mounting evidence that a fiber-laden diet provides many health benefits to its consumers. Although fiber is probably best known as a cure for constipation, it should also be touted for its usefulness in lowering a person’s risk of diabetes and of heart disease. The good news for most people is that getting your recommended amount of fiber is relatively easy, and you can increase your dietary fiber intake by making some small changes to your diet.

To make those changes, though, you must know the basics about fiber, and we at YoNaturals vending would like to discuss some these basics. First off, dietary fiber is the plant material that you’ve eaten but your body cannot break down. Also known as “roughage” or “bulk”, this material passes through your entire digestive system practically untouched. In other words, it exits the body in an almost unaltered state.

Beyond this larger classification, dietary fiber is classified as either soluble or insoluble fiber. The difference is that soluble fiber will dissolve in water, whereas the insoluble fiber will not. This key difference in solubility defines how the fiber interacts with your body and thus determines what kind of health benefit it provides to your body. Since soluble fiber dissolves in water, it forms a gel-like substance once it enters your digestive tract, and this substance has been shown to lower blood sugar levels as well as cholesterol levels. Soluble fiber is found in many items at your local grocery store, including oats, legumes, apples, and carrots. Insoluble fiber, on the other hand, is unchanged by the presence of water in your digestive tract, and it simply gives more bulk to your stool (alleviating constipation in many people). Insoluble fiber is commonly found in vegetables, whole-wheat flour products, and nuts. From curing constipation to controlling cholesterol, the benefits of eating plenty of dietary fiber are hardly ever overstated.

If you think that you are not getting enough fiber in your diet or are simply interested in maintaining a high-fiber diet for yourself, then make sure to bring this up to your health care provider at your next appointment. In the meantime, make healthy choices for yourself by choosing a wide variety of foods that have high fiber content. And, when you’re out and about, choose healthy snacks from YoNaturals health food vending machines, and think of them as your lifeline to high fiber foods when you’re away from your own pantry.

Most of us learned in school about the importance of eating food from all the food groups and to eat plenty of fruits and vegetables instead of sweets. The problem is we grow into adults and either forget what we learned about nutrition or toss it aside as lacking in importance. As a result of our callous attitudes many of us have grown into obese and unhealthy adults. Even worse is that many people claim to be happy with their weight and are making no effort to do anything about it. A good question to ask is how anyone can be happy being more than fifty pounds overweight and lacking the energy they used to have with they weighed much less. Even if they don’t claim to be happy about it, they develop an attitude that there is nothing they can do about it or they choose not to attempt to do anything about it.

When parents develop a nonchalant attitude about their weight and eating habits, they transfer it to their children. This attitude not only breeds children who don’t understand the importance of healthy eating, they turn into children who don’t care how they look. No one can think they look good when they are more than twice their normal weight yet we hear this all the time. It’s an attitude that has become a part of them since childhood and began because their parents took a nonchalant attitude as well. The thing we need to consider is that what our parents and grandparents taught us came from a different era. Our grandparents didn’t buy processed foods or bake cakes from a box – they didn’t even buy birthday cakes at the bakery! Everything was either home grown or purchased at the supermarket or produce stand fresh. That meant they had control over how the food was prepared and what went into it thus they could eat foods similar to what we now eat but they prepared them at home with fresh meat, fruits and vegetables.

In order to achieve the health we once had, we will need to make some changes beginning with the way we eat. One of the most important things we need to do is learn how to feed our children healthy snacks—fresh fruits and vegetables and natural and organic snacks. School Healthy Vending is attempting to create change in schools by filling their vending machines with healthy and organic foods instead of soft drinks, chips, candy, and other unhealthy choices. With the cooperation of schools and parents perhaps the idea of healthy snacks will go beyond the school cafeterias.

Author: Mark Trotter

Author: Jessica Vachal

If you are trying to get your kids to eat healthfully, you are obviously already a strong parent. You should pat yourself on the back and be proud that you are taking such steps to take care of your family and make sure that you are teaching them the proper eating habits and weight management techniques so that they can continue to live happy and healthy lives all throughout their childhoods into their adulthoods and beyond. It can be a very daunting task – to take on caring for your own health and diet goals while also managing your children’s which are going to be quite different from yours. But that is the sacrifice that is taken on when one becomes a parent, and you deserve kudos for taking your parenting so seriously.

However, it can still be daunting – getting up to make a lunch is harder than simply telling your children that eating fresh fruits and vegetables is a much better selection for long-term healthy eating than fast food is. Yet leading by example is the best thing you could do for an impressionable youngster, and that is hwy it is very important that you make healthy eating a family affair. Don’t tell your children they should not eat cookies after every meal and then bust out the cookie tin after dinner. If you are going to sell your children that they should save sweets for special occasions, you yourself have to do the same. Which is the hard part – adults tend to feel like they have already gone through all the struggles of youth, and they are content with their builds, their statures, etc. and they want to treat themselves

Author: Jessica Vachal

Everyone wants to try their best to be healthy and make sure that they look the best at the same time – eating healthy comes to play a large role in this mindset also. It’s just a fact of life really, humans tend to be rather superficial creatures, something to do with the pack mentality that we all have deep within our evolutionary biology. We all want to look as good as our neighbor, and keep up with the Jones’ in that manner as well. Of course, we also want to make sure that we can get the most out of our daily lives and make them last as long as possible, an eating healthfully comes to play in that mentality as well.

In order to ensure that we can indeed look our best at every possible moment, however, there is a certain amount of physical upkeep which must be embraced – this includes working out a swell as eating healthfully, although it must be admitted that usually the eating healthfully is much easier to attain than the exercising. Do you scoff? Do you truly think it can be so hard to stay trim and fit by watching what you eat? It need not be such a struggle my friends, you simply need to know what foods to eat in abundance and which foods to eat in tiny portions, if you must eat them at all.

Namely, steer clear of processed foods and eat as much fresh fruits and vegetables as you can possibly hold. Think of the leisure with which you will dine when you are well aware that you can eat as many helpings of your vegetable soup as you please all the while knowing that it is helping to keep your waistline trim and allowing your muscles to be seen to the greatest of their abilities. All the working out at the gym you do, it need not be all for naught simply because you can’t seem to lay off the hamburgers and fresh fires when you get back from the gym!

Keeping fresh fruits and vegetables on hand when you are running errands is also a safe bet, to make sure that you are able to avoid running to the bending machine when hunger strikes. Unless, of course you happen to find yourself at a vending machine carrying the YoNaturals goodness of organic fruit juices and organic snacks so that you can pop in your change and get back a snack that will be as healthy for you as any carrots you could have cut up and stuck in a baggie before running out to your errands

The writing is on the wall; the legislative branches in this country have junk food vendors targeted in their sites. The unhealthy companies sense it and are squirming like a “lady of the night” in church. In fact, look at the healthier generation website. It looks legitimate, it says all the right things, and it has enough important figures behind it (Mr. Clinton, for example) to give it some clout in the media. It has all the elements of a campaign that will look good to the average person.

Unfortunately, it’s probably little more than a front, an attempt at the junk food companies to band together in an attempt to save their own hides. Much like the children’s cereal companies, they have reluctantly made the minimal changes in their processed foods which allow them to pretend to keep up with the changing standards in health and nutrition. As long as they can jump the minimum height to get over that hurdle, they can continue to produce processed foods for our malnourished children; and now they can even claim to be a healthy choice, and put words like “all natural” and “healthy” on their foods, even though it’s the same junk.

Should these companies be applauded because they have finally been forced to remove SOME of their deleterious ingredients from their foods that are so modified, they barely qualify as humanly edible? Of course not. But money is a powerful force. The junk food industry has so much money and therefore so much lobbying power in our government that they can get away with almost anything. They market well, they all but bribe politicians, and they always have their fingers to the winds of change in public opinion. They are quick to react to such shifts, and will transmogrify their products just enough to slip past this round of public scrutiny, in order to continue peddling their unhealthy wares.

But the air is being strangled from the lungs of the junk food vendors, and they feel the squeeze. Over the past few years, legislation has been passed that will all but completely oust them from school and university campuses. Health clubs don’t want their wares, nor do hospitals. In fact, a generally more health-conscious America is shunning them at every turn. That is why healthy vending is the future; the need for convenience and quick access to food isn’t going to change any time soon. America is built on the need for speed, and until our hectic, fast-paced society changes fundamentally, our eating habits will not change either.

So, that’s where companies like YoNaturals come in: you know, corporations that actually care about the obesity and diabetes epidemics in this country, not those that just pay lip-service to these causes in order to be able to stay in business. I’m talking about companies that base their entire business model around health and nutrition, and live or die by this cause. YoNaturals healthy vending machines aren’t the only company out there selling organic and natural foods and drinks, but we certainly are the first of our kind and the best!

Teaching healthy eating can make sense in the home, and within the family unit. You prepare and eat healthful dinners, and encourage your kids to eat healthy breakfasts. If you are a parent with great organizational and time management skills, you may even make sure that your kids have healthy lunches to take with them to school every day. However, even for the most organized and efficient parent, there are those days – you are sick, you are needed at the office early for a big presentation – when you just don’t have time to make those healthy meals for your kids. These are the days when you will be quite relieved if your child’s school boasts the benefits of YoNaturals’ vending machines. That’s right, there are vending machines that provide organic juices and organic snacks that are much healthier for your beloved children than are the standard vending machine foods that are generally found in schools and, let’s face it, vending machines.

Of course you want to be able to be there for your kids at every chance you have. You want to be able to make them their healthful lunches and make sure that they will be eating healthfully all throughout the day. You worry that giving your kids cash will encourage them to buy junk food at the drug store after school, or that they will spend the cash on silly toys or stickers from the vending machines at the grocery stores. Yet the foods included in the YoNaturals vending machines are tasty, and any child is going to get themselves food for lunch when they are starving from a long morning of learning and classes, rather than wait to save their cash for toys at the grocery store. It may seem surprising that organic snacks and fruit juices could be tasty enough that students would want to eat them when there may be other options around them, from friends who bring sugary and fatty junk food to school in their lunches to fast food joints that may be close by their campuses. Yet, the foods in YoNaturals’ vending machines are as tasty as they are healthy so you can feel good about sending your child out the door with a few one-dollar bills on those mornings when you just can’t spare the time to put a sandwich in a baggie for their lunch.

You don’t need to feel guilty about not always having 100% to give to your kids – everyone has a day when they are just stretched to their limit. Those are the days when it is refreshing to know that you have YoNaturals as an option to ensure that your kids can get healthy, nutritious foods to eat, even if they aren’t being prepared by your hand.

Author: Jessica Vachal

There are many women in this world who buy pepper spray and large dogs in surprisingly high numbers, all as a means to stay safe and keep themselves protected from the various bad eggs out there who might try to do them harm. These are all very smart investments – except maybe the dog, should you live in an apartment complex or a suburban area where your pet will not have room to run around a yard or outdoors area – but they tend to highlight the fact that these women do not feel that they have what it takes to protect themselves. Yo Naturals would like to make a suggestion for women like this. A self-defense or kickboxing class could give this sense of being able to take care of oneself, while at the same time making the heart healthy and strong enough to help you to run away should you ever come face-to-face with real trouble.

Granted, we should not look at these activity classes as mandatory in order to stay safe in the world, otherwise the other benefits of working out and being fit will be lost on the public. We all, men and women, do want to look at martial arts classes, kickboxing classes, or self-defense classes as a means to stay fit and trim, healthy and hearty as well as a means to learn techniques that will enable us to protect ourselves. Plus, when you learn self-defense in a group setting like a self-defense or kickboxing class, you do not necessary keep yourself secluded and focused on all the risks that are out there in the world. You don’t want to go through life terrified and paranoid that every person you pass may want to do you harm. These classes will not make you feel this way – for within these classes are all people who are wanting to learn more about how to take care of themselves should the worst happen, not should the inevitable happen.

An added bonus of taking these classes - in addition to keeping your mind and psyche healthy as you stop fearing the “what-ifs” and start focusing on the multitude of things that you can accomplish – is that you will be benefiting your body and your heart at the same time as you learn to take care of yourself. It takes many impulses to get a person into the gym, and if one impulse is to couple working out with learning how to protect yourself, then a self-defense class, coupled with some cardio perhaps, is a perfect means to do kill two birds with one stone. And we at Yo Naturals  are ALWAYS a fan of improving your health!