Living healthy is an ongoing process. Choosing between healthy and unhealthy habits are decisions we need to make again and again each day.

This isn’t always easy but building up a supportive community that shares information is a great way to keep up the enthusiasm to reaffirm our decisions and goals.

Information about how to live healthy and what we should and should not be doing to achieve and maintain a healthy lifestyle is readily available nearly everywhere we look.

The problem? Not all of that information is necessarily going to be reputable.

How do we know what advice we should heed and what we should ignore? With the Internet growing as a mode for finding information quickly about health, it pays to have a go-to website that provides the right information.

Enter Melslife.com, an up-and-coming social networking site focusing on sharing healthy living advice and research. Founded by Melissa Melcombe, this website makes the latest health news available to the public.

“ How do we know what advice we should heed and what we should ignore?

Melcombe boasts life experience and a passion for health in addition to having studied nutrition at university. Her mission statement involves offering advice and enjoying the ongoing learning process.

With pages labeled Food, Medical Information, and Healthy Living among others, the website covers an enormous range of topics.

“I wanted to create a site where people could get basic information about healthy eating and healthy living without being overwhelmed by big words – a place that had more fun information,” said Melcombe.

Functioning on a community level, the target audience is echo boomers so that there is more of an emphasis on shared knowledge among peers rather than being talked down to by experts.

Melslife.com is a good place to go to for basic health information that has been amalgamated from a number of books and websites written by nutritionists and doctors.

Whether interested in specific illnesses and diseases, the benefits of certain nutrients, what types of wine and cheese go well together, or about how to get involved in social activism for health organizations and causes, you can find it all on this website.

Wellsphere.com is another healthy living social networking site. Arranged in such a way that there is constant interaction between users, Wellsphere does not offer the same tips and advice that Melslife.com does but it allows for the opportunity to meet with like-minded individuals and join various groups in the community to share knowledge.

Published in Volume 63, Number 26 of The Uniter (April 2, 2009)