Improving health mission of new Grand Island business - Grand Island Independent

For Misty Stinson of Alliance, finding alternatives to improve her and her family’s health was a priority as more traditional treatments failed to show tangible results and were costly to her family.

That search for a better way led her to start her own health food store, Alliance Health, in 2013. Since then, her family’s health has shown marked improvement and her business has grown enough to start a second store in her hometown of Grand Island on March 1.

Stinson said her daughter, Breanna, had health problems as a young child.

“She had symptoms that nobody could pinpoint the cause of,” Stinson said.

After the family dentist suggested Stinson investigate whether her daughter was lactose intolerant, Stinson said, she learned there was a link between lactose intolerance and celiac disease.

Celiac disease is a genetic autoimmune disorder in which the ingestion of gluten leads to damage in the small intestine. It is estimated to affect one in 100 people worldwide.

Stinson found her daughter’s health problems were similar to people who are lactose intolerant and have celiac disease. That was in 2013 when her daughter was 6 years old. Stinson and her son, Preston, also had health concerns.

Stinson said one of the first things she did was to eliminate wheat from the family diet.

“After nine days, I slept all night for the first time after seven years,” she said. “My fibromyalgia disappeared, as well.”

Stinson said eating wheat was the cause of some of the problems health care professionals could not diagnose.

“They just wanted to put me on all kinds of drugs and do all kinds of crazy surgeries,” she said.

According to the Celiac Disease Foundation, “When people with celiac disease eat gluten (a protein found in wheat, rye and barley), their body mounts an immune response that attacks the small intestine. These attacks lead to damage on the villi, small fingerlike projections that line the small intestine, that promote nutrient absorption. When the villi get damaged, nutrients cannot be absorbed properly into the body. The only treatment currently for celiac disease is a strict, gluten-free diet. Most patients report symptom improvement within a few weeks, although intestinal healing may take several years.”

Stinson also eliminated dairy from her diet and immediately saw improvements in her health.

Stinson said she began purchasing food from health food stores, but the nearest ones were in Chadron and Scottsbluff.

That’s when she decided to determine what the cost would be to start her own store in Alliance. She opened Alliance Health in July 2013.

“I started with a small inventory, and I have grown and grown and grown,” she said.

Stinson said more and more people where discovering the health problems they suffered could be linked to wheat in their diet.

“I started offering organic and gluten-free items, and then I started doing the organic produce,” she said.

At her new store in Grand Island, Stinson will offer her customers the opportunity to order a wide variety of organic produce, which will be delivered to the store twice a week.

She said she started her second store in Grand Island because many of her family and friends live here. One of those friends, Janet Garrison, manages the Grand Island store. The store has a full inventory of items for people to improve their health through diet, such as gluten-free products.

“I have people who come in and kind of gasp at the prices of health food but don’t gasp at how many prescriptions they are taking or how many times they have been to the doctor, and they are not thinking about how much they have to pay for all of that,” she said.

Part of her mission is to educate people about the alternatives at Alliance Health.

“People come into our stores looking to cure the cause instead of just getting a Band-Aid,” she said. “I’m not here to sell you snake oil, and I tell them that they don’t have to buy my bread for $6.50. Just don’t eat any.”

She purchases her food from United Natural Foods of Denver, which provides customers the choice of more than 100,000 health food products. Stinson gets her produce from Albert’s Organics, a distributor of organically grown fresh produce and perishable items, including meat, dairy, soy products, juices and beverages.