Dear Friends,

There comes a time in a company's evolution when it finds its own stride, when its sense of itself and its sense of the value and scope of its mission allow it, finally, to own its own future. With Convention 2003, that time has arrived for Youngevity. No longer are we merely a loose collection of DDDL enthusiasts, charged by that compellingly sensible, yet revolutionary, message of self-health, to touch and improve the lives of others. Rather, now, we are a true company, a company that has come of age: incredibly strong; incredibly well organized and beautifully poised to effect a bottom to top transformation of the society in which we live. Yes, our path is frightfully clear. Through our own service, friend to friend, neighbor to neighbor, we shall form a bridge over which humanity can pass, from a world stunted and shackled and bled dry by a callous and predatory "sickness industry" to one able to embrace wellness, self-reliance, dignity and human potential on a scale few have ever dared to imagine.

How can I write this? How can I make such lofty claims? Because of the company I met or, rather, was re-introduced to, just this past weekend, at Convention, in Phoenix, Arizona. The Convention started out, appropriately, with a short speech by Pharmacist Ben Fuchs. Ben is one of the most highly educated, well informed, articulate, and compassionate men I know, when it comes to addressing the subject of human health and longevity. He sees it from a biochemist's perspective, from the perspective of pharmacology and from the perspective of nutrition and whole life choices. Watching Ben, standing there at the podium, tall, laser focused, tan, fit, a cerebral dynamo, one had the sense that through sheer will and sheer presence he was compressing thousands of years of insights and information and experience into the very best words he could choose for the twenty minutes he was allowed. And he did it! He laid it out: concise; succinct; spare; powerful. What we need, bottom line, to do right by and to be proper stewards of, the miracle of life each of us has been handed, can be summarized by eight simple, what Ben calls, "chapters:" "Eight Chapters of Good Nutrition," as Ben labels them. These are: Proteins (Nature's Whey); Fats (Ultimate EFA products); Carbohydrates (specifically the complex carbohydrates we need from vegetables � Beyond Juice); fiber (again vegetables to keep the lower GI tract working for us); water (pure water); Vitamins (Tangy, Classic, Daily, Sports, Tropical, etc.); Minerals (ME Minerals � in all the liquid supplements) and, finally, the Conditionally Essential Trace Nutrients (like the pro-biotics Youngevity offers in, for example, the Classic and FloraFx). I haven't space for it here, but in his talk Ben goes into considerable detail arguing for why each of the above is so important. A tape of his talk is available, at cost, upon request.

After Ben, Jonathan Ebor took the stage. Jonathan is an attorney and principal partner of the firm representing Youngevity in its efforts both to push nutrient health claims through the quagmire of the FDA and its efforts to block passage of Senate Bill S722, a bill designed to close down the supplement industry, altogether. Jonathan gave us a history lesson. But it was no ordinary lesson. Instead it was more of a collective "remembering" of who we are as a people, of what we stand for, of what those before us have fought and died for. From the Greeks to the Magna Carta, to the Enlightenment, through such despots as Henry the VIII, to the birth of the radical Whigs, to Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, to the French and the American Revolution, to what we have today: it is no accident that freedom of speech has always stood as the very first of an individual's inalienable rights. In yet, alarmingly enough, it is that very right that is on the line, this minute, as the AMA and Pharmaceutical lobby and the government, itself, seek to gag and censor and impede the work of companies such as ours. When it comes to reclaiming, preserving, extending and enhancing health, our products combined with the low tech, common sense strategies Dr. Wallach advocates, work. They offer an alternative to dangerous drugs and expensive surgeries that is radically safer, less expensive and, in many cases more effective. In yet, in spite of the fact that the evidence is there, the government wants to frighten us into silence. Will we be cowed? Will we be intimidated? Do we want the government to make our own health choices for us? Dr. Wallach has positioned himself at the absolute point of the spear, taking on the government, in court, bankrolling the battle, continuing with his tapes, with his message and all at great personal risk. Ours is the only company of its kind to prevail against the FDA. Ours is the only company or one of a very few with sufficient courage to grab hold of the torch of freedom that the bravest and best before us have entrusted to our care.

Following Jonathan a whole series of other speakers weighed in. This is a company that never sits still. We have an entire "brain trust" of research scientists, doctors, nutritional experts and formulators who continue to develop unique and powerful new products. Our sports line is being improved with a new performance drink. Several NBA greats are heralding in the breakthrough in this area, people like Theo Ratliff and Mike ? I'll have more in future newsletters on that. VisionFx is a new product, now available. Here we combine a group of herbs and nutrients ideal for the health of our eyes. During the middle of the unveiling of the VisionFx product an Opthamologist, actually sitting right in the audience, stood up, declaring, unequivocally, that 95% of all eye problems can be effectively stopped using the VisionFx on a regular basis. We learned of new research on nutrients and nutrient co-factors that help the brain: memory; processing; cognitive function and performance. We learned about improvements being made to the OPC-T product and the CardioFx and MemoryFx. The price stays the same on both. GlucoGel is coming out in a large size. Here, proportionally the price is reduced. Nature's Whey bars are now in raspberry as well as chocolate.

On the business side of the story, things have never been better. New videos are out or soon to be released, professionally produced, that communicate the essence of what we have to offer on a very human, very real level. Wiley and the wizards in the tech department offer us new features through Home Office, like a mass email (to your downline) feature and a free website for every Associate. Yougevity is one of the fastest growing companies in Australia and New Zealand at 60% per month growth and we are getting ready to open Japan. Les Lyons has released a marvelous new Cd that both starts and frames the conversation we all want to be having with both ourselves and others concerning building financial security through multiple streams of income. Les, cleverly, does not even mention Youngevity on the Cd, but, rather, takes an honest, objective look at each of five different vehicles for building personal wealth and lets the listener decide which combination is best for him. Tons and tons of other new business tools were showcased at the Convention as well. In the early days we had nothing but the tape. Now there a half dozen well thought out plans that marry service to community with the building of a business asset capable of setting a person financially free.

I'll close with a sobering story, one that Dr. Wallach, I think reluctantly, told at Convention. It illustrates that what we are doing, what we are all involved in, is far from trivial. We're not merely filling refrigerators with plastic containers (Tupperware) or pushing a better vacuum (Orick). What we are involved in has to do with life and death itself. Dr. Wallach's message saves lives. Dr. Wallach's products save lives. When we tell people about our products, when we hand them a tape we may well be, literally, throwing them a lifeline.

A year or so ago the proprietor of an L.A. Fitness Club in Atlanta, Georgia asked Dr. Wallach to speak to his club members about nutrition and how nutrition relates to health challenges athletes face. As an incentive to attend the meeting, the club owner offered attendees a one month free membership. Three hundred people showed up. Few had ever heard of Dr. Wallach or listened to his argument concerning exercise and supplementation. As everyone settled in Dr. Wallach got busy putting up all the grim statistics concerning the catastrophic deficiency diseases athletes invite upon themselves by failing to replace the valuable, life giving, minerals that pour out of them, daily in enormous quantity, through their sweat. Couch potatoes live to an average age of 77. Athletes, on the other hand, as a group, are lucky to live past 65. Soon Dr. Wallach was really hitting his stride, pulling out slide after slide, fact after fact. Then a young woman in the back stood up. This woman was around 32 years of age and, apparently, drop-dead gorgeous. As Dr. Wallach tells it, on a scale of 10 for female beauty, she was an easy 15. She obviously worked very hard at maintaining a flawless physique. Anyway, she stood up, right in the middle of Dr. Wallach's talk and screamed "LIAR, DR. WALLACH, YOU ARE A LIAR! YOU KNOW NOTHING. FITNESS AND HEALTH ALL ARE A RESULT OF DILLIGENT EXERCISE AND QUALITY TRAINING. I AM NOT LISTENING TO THIS NONSENSE!" And then she walked out. There was a pause. And then half the audience followed her. Apparently she was a well known, well respected and well loved in-house trainer for the facility. Half of the audience followed her out the door. Dr. Wallach finished off his talk. That night not one bottle of supplements was sold.

Ten months later sales for Youngevity products began to explode in the Atlanta area. No one knew what was happening! Dr. Wallach hadn't put on any shows or made any radio or television appearances in that area since the event described above. Then the news came in. The young trainer who had stood up and walked out had died, suddenly, at age 33, of a cardio myopathy heart attack, something entirely preventable by adequate supplemental intake of the mineral selenium.

Of course, this woman's death was a horrible tragedy. No one can feel any joy concerning the event. But what a chilling account! For us to know what we know concerning the message and Dr. Wallach's products and NOT tell everyone, friends and family, athletes we know, the mother next door, in short, EVERYONE, would be almost criminal. Our products are true life lines! Everyone needs to take in all 90 nutrients and in a form the body can easily recognize and use on a day in and day out basis. Athletes and laborers, people that sweat a lot, need to take more than the rest of us. We can't get all 90 from the food we eat. Even the government admits that, now. For every one nutrient we go without for an extended period of time we subject ourselves to, on average, ten different deficiency diseases. Most of the capsule and pill supplements on the market are useless, either from the wrong source material, in the wrong proportions or quantities or lacking the proper, necessary co-factors for the body to be able to recognize them. We're not designed to get our calcium from chalk (CaCO3), for example, from rocks, from is essentially limestone. Such insights and many more stand as a body of information that, if acted upon, if followed can literally mean the difference between life half lived and life fully lived; between life, at all, and death.

Until next time. Best of health to all.

Stu Hunt
Don Ellis