Lindberg Nutrition information, tips and advice

Continuing her mother's legacy, McFarland is a mentor to those confused about conflicting nutrition messages.

For years, hormone replacement therapy was supposed to ward off heart disease, but now experts are back-tracking. Eggs were the worst thing for cholesterol. Now they are touted as one of the best sources of protein. Margarine was good, butter bad. Now we are hearing the reverse is true.

McFarland has never embraced fads. And she's not a health food nut.

"I preach common sense," she says, holding court from her desk at Lindberg's Nutrition, where she dispenses free nutritional consultation most Thursday and Saturday mornings.

For McFarland, promoting optimal health is as much a personal ministry as it is a business.

Her goal as a nutrition counselor, she says, is to help people become as healthy as possible, but she doesn't pretend to offer medical advice.

Surrounded by about 14 customers on a recent Saturday morning, she repeats the refrain her mother used to express to those asking for advice: "I am not a doctor and cannot treat disease, but healthy people don't have that, so let's make you healthy."

Starting with the basics, she launches into a discussion of the importance of taking daily vitamins and minerals. She calls the practice an inexpensive insurance policy against deficiencies of key elements that the body needs to function properly.

In response to a woman complaining about lack of energy, she asks: "What did you have for breakfast this morning, honey? Let's start with the basics. Just about every nutritionist in the world agrees that breakfast is the most important meal of the day."

Learning that the woman typically either skips breakfast or consumes a bagel and coffee, she launches into the power of protein for breakfast.

"Your energy level in the afternoon hours is determined by what you had for breakfast," McFarland says. "Eggs have received a lot of negative press in recent years, but they contain the best protein source plus lecithin to emulsify the cholesterol in the yolk.

"Remember your hormones are made out of cholesterol. Eggs are God's perfect food, but it's best to use fertile eggs, which result when a rooster mates with a chicken and the egg can then hatch. With infertile eggs, the chickens have never seen a rooster. The DNA and RNA is different in the fertile eggs since they are live foods."

While fertile eggs are the best, she stresses that it is fine to eat regular eggs to punch up your protein source.

Following the guru

Visitors listen intently as McFarland sings the praises of antioxidants such as Vitamin A, C, and E, selenium, beta-carotene, alpha lapoic acid, CoQ10, grape seed extract and others. Finally, they implore her to share with them her own daily regime.

McFarland has been asked the question so often, she included it in "Judy's Nutrition Corner," on page 68 of Nutrition Express, a catalog produced by Lindberg Nutrition Service, the company's mail-order division, run by Don McFarland and their sons. (The company fills up to 1,000 mail-order requests per day.)

In the catalog, McFarland writes that she starts her day with her own Varsity vitamin and mineral packets with a Protein Blend milk shake.

To this she adds soy lecithin granules, nature's Roto-rooter for the arteries that are helpful in fighting mild memory loss due to aging; MSM (methyl-sulfonyl-methane) powder for joints, lustrous hair and to prevent wrinkles; L-Glutamine powder, which helps support muscles and raises the level of the growth hormone; L-carnitine, which has recognized benefits for the heart and aids in weight loss; and organic flax seed oil, a rich, vegetarian source of the Omega 3, 6 and 9 fatty acids. (Omega 3 is the valuable oil found in fish.)

In discussing these and other vitamins, minerals, herbs and enzymes, McFarland regales her audience with stories of her mother's early successes in putting her sickly children on a healthy regime. Her reputation snowballed into a barrage of friends and neighbors who came to Gladys Lindberg's home for help.

"People were noticing their friends were looking and feeling much better and asked what they had done," McFarland says. "They would tell them about mother and pretty soon they would be in mother's kitchen and she'd be consulting them."

Lindberg was an avid reader of scientific journals and attended lectures and conventions on all aspects of nutrition. But she didn't drive, so her daughter was her chauffeur. As a result, at a young age McFarland met many of the early pioneers in nutrition, such as close friend Adelle Davis, author of Let's Eat Right To Keep Fit; Gayelord Hauser, author of Look Younger, Live Longer; author Carlton Fredericks; and nutrition/exercise guru Jack La Lanne.

In the early days, Lindberg would buy vitamins by the thousands and people would come and count out their own tablets and put them in white envelopes and pay for them.

When a blind customer couldn't distinguish between envelopes of various tablets, Lindberg set out 100 small squares of wax paper on the dining room table and placed a daily supply of about six vitamins and minerals on each square, McFarland says. Then she twisted the squares into packets so the woman could take just one packet a day.

This service evolved into Lindberg being the first to package daily vitamins in cellophane packets.

"Mother believed no single vitamin or mineral could contain a high enough potency for her formulas without becoming too large to swallow. She never agreed with the one-a-day concept," says McFarland. Southern California mainstay

The first Lindberg Nutrition opened in Southwest Los Angeles in 1949 with the motto, "Keep in the pink." Lindberg wore only pink clothes and was driven in a pink Cadillac.

The second store, a 10,000-square-foot shop, opened in 1955 in the Baldwin Hills shopping center in Los Angeles. In the mid-1960s Lindberg opened the signature store on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles, site of frequent visits from celebrities, who consulted with her.

Doris Day and her husband Marty Melcher, Robert Stack, Jennifer Jones and her then ill husband David O. Selznick, Arlene Dahl, Gloria Swanson, Rock Hudson, Merle Oberon, Art and Lois Linkletter, and Mahalia Jackson were among the people who consulted with Gladys, often at their homes.

Over the years, McFarland and her mother traveled extensively. They visited China in 1978 after it opened to the West. In India they had a private meeting with Indira Gandhi.

More recently, McFarland has appeared on "Live With Regis and Kelly." Regis Philbin has been taking Lindberg vitamins for about 20 years and often refers to McFarland as "my vitamin lady." In addition, McFarland has done eight television programs with Pat Robertson on The 700 Club, on the Christian Broadcasting Network and appears on the Trinity Broadcasting Network's "Doctor to Doctor" show.

Though McFarland maintains that much of the research written about in nutrition classics by Davis and Hauser still applies today, she constantly keeps up on new information. In her latest book, Aging Without Growing Old (its third printing is due out in January), she substantiates her 516-page reference with no less than 890 footnotes covering 40 pages.

Yet the book is easy to read for nutrition novices. It is divided into 17 chapters that discuss natural prevention and treatment of such wide ranging conditions as Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, osteoporosis and gout.

In a chapter on "Men's Health," McFarland shares a story about a couple in their mid-70 who consulted with her. The wife had been taking vitamins and supplements for years, but her husband was not very interested.

McFarland said to him, "Now you need to be able to keep up with your wife, so you can chase her around the house!" They all laughed, but later he whispered to her: "Do you have something to take in case I catch her?"

McFarland's response was to go back to the basics. "For sex to work, things have to be right biochemically," she writes.

find out more

- Visit: Lindberg Nutrition Service is at 3804 Sepulveda Blvd. (at Hawthorne Boulevard), Torrance. Call 310-378-9490 or go to .com.

- Consult: Judy Lindberg McFarland is generally available at the store 11 . Thursdays and Saturdays.

- Read: Nutrition Express, Lindberg's 120-page catalog, is available free at the store. Her book, Aging Without Growing Old, will be available in its third edition at the store the third week in January.

- Watch: McFarland can be seen on the Trinity Broadcast Network's "Doctor to Doctor," airing at 9 . Tuesdays and 5 . Thursdays.