Lee Swanson: Hi! I'm Lee Swanson, President of Swanson Health Products. I'm here today with a good friend of mine, Lyle Hurd. Lyle is a publisher and editor of Total Health magazine. What I consider to be the finest natural health magazine in the country.
Lyle Hurd: Thank you.
Lee Swanson: Lyle, you have the interesting concept called age management, not anti-aging, but age management. Can you please explain to our listeners, our viewers today, what age management is?
Lyle Hurd: Well, first of all there's no such thing as anti-aging. Someone wrote sort of the day who born is a born who being to die. And that's literally probably pretty true. The age management really stands for the fact that we can do a multitude of things that will help us have healthy and extended longevity. One of the problems today, which seems like a blessing, it's the fact that now we're at 80 years as an average life span. Probably for a lot of people, who don't die of accidents and disease earlier, its maybe 85 or 90 years; the prospect of being locked into a body or brain that doesn't work for the last 20 years of that period of time is terrible. It really, literally, begins prior to conception. So we would really call it age management just controlled in the beginning by the people who parent you. Then, by the time you're out of high school or into college, you are hopefully learned enough. Then, the course that you choose is your path through your life.
Lee Swanson: Talk about your history in the natural health field, you used to write for Sports Illustrated magazine and Playboy.
Lyle Hurd: Well, actually I was in marketing for both Sports Illustrated and Playboy although I kind of consulted with the promotion and merchandising departments and interpreting research. At one point in time, we had a magazine rep firm where we did consult with lots of publishers, and also represented them in their area relative to advertising.
Lee Swanson: Yeah that was how you first became interested in taking supplements and vitamins. You were leading, it's not a fast lifestyle, but it's a lifestyle of parties and that type of thing and you started taking supplements and you found that that benefited your health?
Lyle Hurd: Absolutely. Absolutely, it really all came about because of the fact and I guess, I don't feel embarrassed to say this, I was involved for 50 years in a business where we did a tremendous amount of entertaining. And, where people that were in your market were scattered when you would have functions at your home or you go to New York, I remember driving 60 miles to a dinner party where everyone had three or four cocktails and we all drove home and never thought much about it. Someone once told me that vitamin B, I'm not sure whether it was 1, 12 or 6, I was very healthy for or helped people not really suffer the effects of alcohol the way they did. At that point in time no one gave much consideration to alcohol consumption or to smoking. So, I went to a pharmacy, and I asked the pharmacist about vitamin B and he said, well, yes there is some evidence of that. I said, well, can I buy a bottle of about a thousand capsules? He looked at me and said don't you think that's admitting something to yourself? I said, no, no, no. I said I want to give these to people who come to my house and before they leave, if there is any alcohol being served. So, basically that led me to -- begin to investigate what really was going on with vitamins and minerals. I'll tell you where it was at that point because we went from there to a situation where we became involved in starting a direct marketing vitamin company with some folks. We worked for The Enquirer, its one of the magazines.
Lee Swanson: The National Enquirer?
Lyle Hurd: That's right. I had worked for Playboy and Sports Illustrated, and then we went into our own business and were independent reps and consultants. So, they wanted to do something in The Enquirer and I said, well, you know, you get eaten alive by the other people in The Enquirer, but what you really need to do is look to affinity groups. You know, an affinity group, I guess that's what I would call the people that you have they have an affinity for your products. They understand what you're doing. There's a credibility.
Lee Swanson: Natural health and wellness.
Lyle Hurd: That's right. And so on I asked the two people that where that owned the vitamin company, they said no. Do vitamins really work? And they said, well, if you believe it that's 90% of the whole situation. Now as you and I both know now there is empirical evidence that if people read it carefully and understood where they were in life, it would mandate the use of supplements. So, when we talk about age management, age management literally begins prior to conception. Now what does that mean? That means that a woman and a man, primarily a woman needs to understand or knows that she wants to have children and have a family. At the point that that becomes important, she really needs to understand that there are also something's that she needs to do. The essential fatty acids, DHA and EFAs are an imperative, not only to all the things that are going on in our lives all the time, but to someone who is trying to build enough of that into their system because our body can't replace those, nothing there in their system.
They would be able to sustain the growth of a fetus in their womb. Consequently, whether it's that which becomes imperative to the nervous system, to the brain and to the heart, which are three major organ systems in our body whether it's that, or whether they need to understand that they shouldn't be smoking or drinking. They should be taking folic acid, which they should be anyhow they should be taking a multiple, a good multiple vitamin, so that they are potentiating that system that's going to have that child survive in. Keep in mind that that system is entirely different than it used to be. It used to be when we lived in a society that's a little different than the one we live in now that you had a pretty pure environment that you lived in. Today, there was a subject, there was a survey done, I think about a year and a half ago and I think you are familiar with, that took the umbilical cord of new born babies and investigated the contents and found an average of 287 chemical substances in the blood of that umbilical chord.
Lee Swanson: That's amazing.
Lyle Hurd: Sixty to seventy of which were potentially carcinogenic. So, what we're doing is we are now sharing with that fetus, with that newborn, the pollution of the environment that we are living in. Consequently, right from the beginning, we're giving them some handicaps. So that means that the mother needs to then, at that point, hopefully have enough nutrition in her system if she's feeding her own child that will be able to help counteract some of this and give that child the best opportunity. Right from the very beginning, it has a little bit to do with the attitude of the baby too, I mean the whole idea of essential fatty acids, the DHA/EFAs, is probably one of the most important which I believe, things that we've realized in the last 20 years. The mother also needs to make sure if she is giving a formula to the child that, that's included in the formula. Now, four or five years ago it really wouldn't have been the case, but I think enough of us have been making people aware of it that I think it's pretty common now that it's in the formula.
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