5 Back-To-School Wellness Tips from Dr. Melissa

Video Transcript:

So, it’s back-to-school wellness tips time for many of us parents and teachers, and folks that are working with kids and communities of school students. Today, I want to share with you five powerful back-to-school wellness tips that I recommend and utilize myself with my little and hope you find these tips extremely helpful for powering up your kids’ bodies, and to enhance their wellness, their immunity, and enhance their brain health and brain function so they have the best school year this year.

1. Enhance Hydration with Key Minerals

Tip number one is to enhance your child’s hydration by using liquid minerals. I love using Trace Minerals. They’re a little bottle that you can put drops in their water bottle. Or you can use some of those really clean hydration packs, like IV Hydration, or there’s an assortment of kids’ versions. My son actually likes the lemonade version the best, and so I recommend that.

But you want to make sure you’re getting a well-balanced spectrum of minerals in your child’s water source, because let’s face it, whether you’re using your tap water, filtering from your refrigerator, or buying spring water, or even using reverse osmosis, or they’re using those things at school, there’s not enough minerals, and the mineral density in our water is highly lacking. And one of the things that kids need are key nutrients, and minerals being absolutely essential.

2. Support Brain Function with Omega 3s

Now, number two, this really helps support their brain function and enhances their heart health and their skin health, and it is incorporating omega three fish oils. And primarily for kids, we concentrate our omegas. You want, at minimum, 1500 milligrams of fish oil in your child’s daily diet.

And with fish oil, one of things here is not just eating good, healthy fish or seed-oriented omegas. We want to enhance it with supplementation, and my son has these little capsules that he breaks open, squirts the oil in, and downs his juice in the morning, and that’s a very powerful way to enhance your child’s brain function.

There are tons of studies about the assorted nutritional components in omega threes that help our infants, so in utero, and as the baby, infant, child, preteen, and teen brain is growing, it needs omegas for optimal support. Omegas are also anti-inflammatory, so it keeps the inflammatory state–not just in the brain, but in the whole entire body–tamed.

So, omegas are really key, and I really, really encourage folks to look for cleaner omegas. You want to choose omegas that are either individually packaged or might need to be refrigerated, but be mindful of buying online–Amazon is notoriously known for having rancid omegas, so just be mindful. I like cold- pressed omegas. My favorite brand is called Green Pasture, and they’re a Wisconsin-based manufacturer of cold-pressed omegas. Super powerful.

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3. Manage Stress

My third tip is to really help enhance your child’s stress-management balancing. Going back to school, getting in the school group, being accountable, and developing responsibilities, and doing homework, and social activities, it’s highly stress-inducing and it produces a lot of anxiety and stress, not just for parents, but kids.

We’re seeing more and more kids presenting with anxiety, depression, mood disorders, and overall stress-enhanced sleep imbalances and hormonal imbalances. So, these tips here in this stress management bucket are really key. If you have a child that might be a little bit more sensitive to their environment or a child that displays anxiety or depression, these can help calm and ease their central nervous system and support their body.

Supplement with Magnesium to Support Sleep & Relaxation

Number one for stress management is incorporating a well-balanced full-spectrum magnesium. This is on top of the mineral density you’re getting in the hydration of their water with minerals, but Mag 7, Magnesium 7, that we have here at Organixx, I break mine open and will add half of the capsule into Gabriel’s Greek yogurt, nut yogurt, smoothies, and even baked goods that I make him on the daily.

So, that’s really important, that children are, at minimum, getting 300 milligrams of magnesium a day. That’s really important for also enhancing their sleep cycle and producing calm. Magnesium relaxes the body, relaxes the vascular channel [1]. That’s to all of the synapses and all parts of the brain as well as the muscles, so that’s really important.

Calm the Mind & Body

The other thing that I recommend and incorporate are things called Bach Flowers. Bach Flower Remedies are great for easing the mind that’s racing or the mind that is thinking. If you have a child that might overthink or be concerned or worried or might be demonstrating behaviors of stress, Bach Flowers can calm that. They have some things like clematis and rock rose that are highly, highly effective for calming their body, calming their mind, and just disconnects the kind of mind anxiousness that kids demonstrate. That also is effective for kids with ADD, ADHD, OCD as well.

Incorporate Functional Mushrooms to Help Balance Hormones

Another stress management tool is to incorporate functional mushrooms. Functional mushrooms, we have a whole cascade of options here, with reishi and shiitake and maitake being really core foundational mushrooms, but also incorporating chaga and even incorporating turkey tail are really, really powerful at calming your child’s stress response mechanism. Functional mushrooms, especially ones like chaga, are adaptogenic and chaga is great for so many different things, but with the brain, so powerful at helping ease and calm the brain and calms also hormones.

So, if you have a preteen or a tweener that’s hormonally imbalanced, functional mushrooms are great for them as well. And you can use our 7 Mushrooms. I always open up the capsules. If your child cannot or does not swallow capsules yet, sometimes kids even up to 12 and 13 still are not swallowing capsules, you can break them open and sprinkle them into the foods that you’re preparing. And you can get really creative. I will sprinkle the supplements into our hot foods as well, so you can use this very liberally in your daily diet.

4. Test Vitamin D3 Levels & Supplement Appropriately

Another option, my fourth recommendation here, is to make sure that you are annually testing your child’s vitamin D3 levels [2], and you can test by a blood spot so you don’t have to go through a serum draw. A lot of children are not going to be up for that, but you do a little blood spot prick test and test their vitamin D. Find out where are their vitamin D levels because vitamin D deficiency is a chronic problem, not just with adults. We talk a lot about it with adults, but kids can show deficiencies in vitamin D3. And if your child is deficient, test, don’t guess, but then supplement to the level that we want to optimize for your child. So, vitamin D3 can be the difference between them feeling malaise, low energy, mental acuity, or lack of focus, so ADD, ADHD, OCD, spectrum kids can really benefit from getting their D3 tested.

And also, D3 helps to balance the stress cycle and can calm the imbalance that stress causes in their sleep patterns, so it helps to offset cortisol imbalances that might be limiting melatonin production in their body. So, very, very powerful. Vitamin D3 is something that, unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of pediatricians talking about routinely in the annual visits that we have with our kids.

5. Ensure Daily Diet Contains Ample Greens

Last and final is a new addition here at Organixx that I rolled out with our family, and it is the OrganiGreens where you can incorporate all the green goodness that I know, if your child’s like mine and he is saying no to broccoli or any greens in his daily life, use powdered greens that we have here at OrganiGreens to enhance and offset maybe the lack of powerful veggies that your child is refusing to eat. You can sneak that in and incorporate it in baked goods. You can powder it in and use it in smoothies. I have even used powdered greens before in our ice cream. Shocking, right? But you can be very creative with use, especially when they’re very powerful.

And our OrganiGreens not only give your child the nutritional components we need on a daily basis for minerals and vitamins, but you also get enzymes. There’s the fermentation process that even opens up greater bioavailability. You get really good, powerful probiotics, just it’s so powerful.

And green powders for kids are probably what I consider one of the most underrated nutritional additives that we can add to our child’s diet that we will see powerful brain-enhancing in enhancements in their schoolwork and their focus.

The Right Nutrition Can Support Optimal Wellness

So, if you want to power up your child, you want to make sure you’re getting them all the right nutrition, these five tips will be very helpful in helping you support your child for optimal back-to-school wellness. If you have any kids’ health questions, feel free to comment in the Ask the Dr. Melissa section. I’m happy to answer them in future videos.

Magnesium deficiency is linked to stress, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, anxiety, trouble sleeping, sore muscles, migraines, and many more debilitating health conditions.

If your body needs magnesium, you want the most beneficial kind your body can actually absorb. Organixx Magnesium 7 gives you seven (7) of the very best, most bioavailable types of elemental magnesium available.