Amazing Story Behind 256 Year-Old Man

No Comments 04 November 2011

Amazing Story

Behind 256

Year-Old Man

Too amazing?

Photo: Li Ching-Yun. 李清雲 Image from The People’s Republic of China

_________________________

Official Media Report of His Death

(Healingtalks) According to the obituaries in both Time Magazine and the New York Times on May 6, 1933 Li Ching-Yun was reported to have buried 23 wives and fostered 180 descendants by the time he died at the age of 256. Was he really that old? Was he really married every 10 year or so , on average? Could he have forgotten his own birthday or exaggerated his claim wildly?

______________________

Secrets of Li Ching Yun’s Life

“Keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon and sleep like a dog.”

These were the words of advice Li gave to Wu Pei-fu, the warlord, who took Li into his house to learn the secret of extremely long life. Li maintained that inward calm and peace of mind were the secrets to incredible longevity. His diet after all, was mainly based on rice and wine.

____________________

From 0 to 256 Years of Age

Unsurprisingly, not much is known about Li Ching-Yun’s early life. He was born in the province of Szechwan in China, where he died. We also know that by his tenth birthday, Ching-Yun was literate and had traveled to Kansu, Shansi, Tibet, Annam, Siam and Manchuria gathering herbs. Then for over one hundred years, Li continued selling his own herbs and then subsequently sold herbs collected by others. He also (according to Time) had six-inch long fingernails on his right hand. You might be thinking that he looked decrepit, shriveled, leather-like and creepy, however sources at the time were astonished at his youthfulness. Was this suspect? Was Li Ching-Yun as old as he claimed he was, or was his birthday a clerical error or exaggeration?

____________________

Nine Lives of Li Ching-Yun

By his own admission he was born in 1736 and had lived 197 years. However, in 1930, Wu Chung-chien, a professor and dean at Minkuo University found records “proving” Li was born in 1677. Records allegedly showed that the Imperial Chinese Government congratulated him on his 150th and 200th Birthdays. So the question is, had he forgotten his own birthday? Was this even the same Li Ching-Yun? Looking at all of this from a medical and documented perspective: Jeanne Louise Calment, a French woman who died in 1997 so far holds the title for the person who has roamed the earth the longest: 122 years and 164 days. That means, that if the records discovered by Wu Chung-chien were accurate, Li Ching-Yun’s age would surpass the official record by more than 130 years.

__________________

Li Ching-Yun’s Exercises

One of his disciples, the Taijiquan Master Da Liu told of Master Li’s story: at 130 years old Master Li encountered an older hermit, over 500 years old, in the mountains who taught him Baguazhang and a set of Qigong with breathing instructions, movements training coordinated with specific sounds, and dietary recommendations. Da Liu reports that his master said that his longevity “is due to the fact that I performed the exercises every day – regularly, correctly, and with sincerity – for 120 years.”

_______________

Keeping Emptyness

The Taoist Master Liu Pai Lin (劉百齡), who lived in São Paulo, Brazil from 1975 until 2000, had in his classroom another photograph of Master Li Ching Yuen unknown to the West. In this photo his face is clearly visible, as are his long and curled fingernails.^[10] Master Liu had met him personally in China, and considered him as one of his Masters. He used to say that Master Li answered to him that the fundamental taoist practice is to learn to keep the “Emptiness” (Wuji). Master Liu’s son, Master Liu Chih Ming, teaches the 12 Silks Qigong in CEMETRAC, as transmitted by Master Li.

____________________________

Li Ching-Yun’s Youthful Appearance

Then there is Li’s youthful appearance, noted in a 1928 article from the New York Times. Visually and physically, he appeared to look like a typical 60 year-old. Does this mean he had a superhuman body capable of lasting one quarter of a millennium, or is the story of Li Ching-Yun a hoax, a tall Asian story based on a fabrications and exaggerations?

Unfortunately, we may never know. You draw your own logical conclusions.

Sources: Wikepedia, Environmental Graffiti

Keywords: li-ching-yun, li-ching-yuen, 256 year-old man, longevity in men, secrets of health, secrets of longevity

Aerobic Exercise, Featured, HEALING US

Groundbreaking News: Forced vs. Voluntary Exercise – Which Is Better?

No Comments 18 October 2011

Groundbreaking News:

Forced vs. Voluntary

Exercise -

Which Is Better?

Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Healingtalks Editor

(Healingtalks) Scientific discoveries can seem to come out of nowhere, as occurred when Jay L. Alberts, then a Parkinson’s disease researcher at Emory University in Atlanta, mounted a bike with Cathy Frazier, a Parkinson’s patient. The two were riding a bicycle tour across Iowa, hoping to raise awareness of the neuro-degenerative disease and to “show people with Parkinson’s that you don’t have to sit back and let the disease take over your life,” Dr. Alberts said

Something Unexpected Happened

Then something unexpected happened. One of Cathy Frazier’s symptoms was micrographia, a condition in which her handwriting, legible at first, would become smaller and unreadable as she continued to write. After a day of pedaling, she signed a birthday card with no difficulty, her signature “beautifully written,” Dr. Alberts said. She also felt as if she didn’t have Parkinson’s.

Impressed by these results, Dr. Alberts started a series of experiments in which he had Parkinson’s patients ride tandem bicycles. The preliminary results are raising fascinating questions not only about whether exercise can help counteract the disease but also whether intense and forced workouts affect our brains differently than gentler activity, even in those of us who are healthy.

Difference Between Forced vs Voluntary Exercise

Scientists have known for some time that in lab animals, forced and voluntary exercise can lead to different outcomes. Generally, mice and rats enjoy running, so if you put a running wheel in a rodent’s cage, it will hop aboard and run in a voluntary way. But if you place an animal on a treadmill and control the speed so it must keep pace, often with a finger prod or electrical shock, the activity is forced.

Animal Experiments with Forced vs Voluntary Exercise

In animals, the effects on the brain tend to be more beneficial after forced exercise. In one study from 2008, rats forced to run wound up with much more new brain cells after eight weeks than those who only ran voluntarily – and even though the latter animals ran faster! In a similar experiment, mice that were required to exercise on treadmills performed better on cognitive tests than those given voluntary access.

First Human Experiment with Forced vs Voluntary Exercise

Before Dr. Alberts’s work, there had been few human experiments of this kind because no one had known how, ethically, to “force” people to exercise. Dr. Alberts solved that problem by placing volunteers with Parkinson’s on the back seat of a tandem, which had been modified to ensure that the back rider would have to actively pedal. The subject could not just passively let the pedals of the bike turn. First, they had each volunteer ride a solo stationary bicycle at their own pace, often pedaling at a relaxed 60 revolutions per minute.

But on the tandem, the rider in front had been instructed to pedal at a cadence of around 90 r.p.m. and with higher force output or wattage than the patients had produced on their own voluntarily. The result was that the riders in back were forced to pedal harder and faster.

After eight weeks of hour-long sessions of such forced riding, most of the patients showed significant lessening of tremors and better body control, improvements that continued for up to four weeks after they stopped bicycling.

Exciting Brain Health Findings

These findings were exciting because they contrast with some earlier results involving voluntary exercise and Parkinson’s patients. In those experiments, the activity was more localized. Weight training, for instance, led to stronger muscles, and slow walking increased walking speed and endurance. But such regimens typically did not improve Parkinson’s patients’ overall motor control. “They didn’t help people tie their shoes,” Dr. Alberts says.

The forced pedaling regimen, on the other hand, did. Dr. Alberts was led to conclude that the exercise must be affecting the riders’ brains, as well as their muscles, a theory that was substantiated when he used functional M.R.I. machines to see inside their skulls. The scans showed that, compared with Parkinson’s patients who had not ridden, the tandem cyclists’ brains were more active.

Why forced exercise would have a greater effect on brain functioning than gentler regimens isn’t clear. Scientists have speculated that in animal experiments, being forced to work out may cause the release of stress-linked hormones in rodents’ brains, which then prompt various reactions in the cells and tissues. But Dr. Alberts suspects that in Parkinson’s patients, the answer may be simple mathematics. More pedal strokes cause more muscle contractions than fewer pedal strokes, generating more nervous system messages to the brain. There, he thinks, biochemical reactions occur in response to the messages, and the more messages, the greater the response.

Going Outside One’s Comfort Zone

Whether forced exercise would similarly affect healthy brains is unknown.

“It seems likely,” he continues, that intense exercise of any kind should produce comparable brain reactions and “there is data showing that people who exercise intensely have less risk” of developing Parkinson’s and other neurological conditions. So perhaps, if you do not have a tandem bike for two, try cranking up the speed of your solo bike until you are outside your comfort zone.

Dr. Alberts remains most enthused, though, about the implications of his findings for people with Parkinson’s and other brain-related conditions.

Expanding The Program Nationwide

He has partnered with Y.M.C.A.’s in several cities to offer special tandem cycling programs for Parkinson’s patients and is hoping to expand the program nationwide. He is also planning studies with patients who’ve suffered strokes, in hopes that the brain changes following forced exercise could ease the relearning of physical skills.

“This is not a cure” for Parkinson’s or other brain conditions, he cautions. “But it seems to help significantly” with tremors and other symptoms, “and it gives people a chance to be active participants in their own treatment.”

He plans to return to the Iowa bike event next summer, as a representative of a program he founded – Pedaling for Parkinson’s, and he expects to be joined again by Ms. Frazier – enabled to sign her name legibly.

Keywords: forced exercise for parkinson s, should children be forced to exercise, forced exercise for parkinson s disease, forced exercise, voluntary exercise, benefits of exercise, bicycle exercise, stationary bike exercise, involuntary exercise

Based on an article published in the NY Times written by GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Featured, Political Freedom

Has America Become A Corporate Police State

No Comments 23 July 2011

Has America

Become a

Corporate Police State?

By David Sirota, AlterNet

“Corporate Police State,” it’s a fraught — some might even say, overwrought — term. But in its purest, apolitical form, it simply describes the periodic commingling of state and corporate power to protect private interests.

In the American psyche, any discussion of that phenomenon typically brings one of three images to mind. There’s the Old Corporate Police State — the sepia-toned America of decades long past, a place where state militias murder striking mine workers on behalf of Gilded Age barons and Congress empowers the government to forcibly ban work stoppages that defy corporate executives’ wishes. There’s the Fictional Future Corporate Police State — that smoldering bombed-out world depicted in “Robocop,” “Fortress” and every other dystopian flick in Hollywood’s post-apocalyptic catalog. And there’s the Foreign Corporate Police State — think Dubai, Singapore, Monaco and every other lavish enclave defined by lots of rich people, lots of corporate headquarters, lots of heavily armed cops — and almost no civil liberties.

By imagining the Corporate Police State primarily as a historical, fictional or foreign monster, these snapshots encourage us to believe that this monster poses no threat to us in the here and now. They encourage us, in other words, to ignore the monster’s creeping advances in present-day America.

In just the last few years, the Corporate Police State has reared its head at every level of government.

States and municipalities, for instance, have toughened criminal penalties and immigration laws at the behest of the private prison industry; empowered Wall Street banks to not only collect taxes but levy additional tax penalties; and allowed energy companies to exploit so-called forced pooling statutes, thereby creating what one Republican governor calls a new power of “private eminent domain.” One state is now even considering making it a criminal act to share your Netflix password with friends and family, because that is cutting into Netflix revenues.

In Washington, D.C., the federal government just enacted a healthcare bill whose individual mandate forces citizens to purchase private insurance, and the Pentagon has developed a reliable pattern of using military power to occupy resource-rich countries — and then to privatize those resources at the barrel of a gun.

This same government, which has granted corporations the rights of “personhood,” has also used its power to let corporations avoid the responsibilities of personhood — effectively using state power to create a new privileged status that is above the law. For instance, federal statutes have trampled the concept of “equal protection” by deliberately exempting corporate interests from the laws the rest of us live under — laws like the Safe Drinking Water Act (which doesn’t apply to natural gas drillers) and antitrust statutes (which still don’t apply to private health insurers). Federal courts have used judicial power to limit corporations’ legal and financial liability for fraud and lawbreaking.

This modern Corporate Police State differs from what we call “corporatism” in that it is not merely about funneling public dollars to private interests à la the Wall Street bailout. Indeed, this new monster has bigger goals than the occasional bailout. It is all about using the government’s position as society’s supreme rule maker and law enforcer to create a fully- functioning corporate state — one that doesn’t just channel police power into crushing the occasional protest, but constructs an entire legal and military framework around preserving and expanding private profit. And, as we’re now seeing, that includes a radical reimagining of the U.S. Constitution.

Last month in California, the Los Angeles Times reported that “the recording industry is pushing California’s lawmakers to approve legislation that would allow warrantless searches of companies that press copies of compact discs and DVDs.” The Democratic bill, which includes no “standard for suspecting that counterfeiting is occurring,” would “give law enforcement officials the power to enter manufacturing plants without notice or court orders.” As one legal expert told the Times: “We have the 4th Amendment that generally requires probable cause (and) this is a huge exception” — that’s right, a huge potentially precedent-setting exception designed not for national security or the common good, but for protecting private corporations’ profit.

Likewise, at the federal level, the New York Times this week reported that the FBI, wielding the Fourth Amendment-trampling Patriot Act, targeted a peaceful political activist with three years’ worth of round-the-clock surveillance. What caught Big Brother’s watchful eye? Was the activist cavorting with al-Qaida? Was he conspiring to commit mass murder? No, the Times reports that the FBI deployed its “anti-terrorism” apparatus specifically because the activist participated in a protest against Exxon Mobil — aka the Most Profitable Corporation in the World. And in case you thought that was an “isolated incident,” this revelation comes just a few years after the ACLU discovered that other similar “anti-terrorism” surveillance efforts have been aimed at animal rights and environmental activists who wage protests against private agribusiness and energy interests.

Meanwhile, in the wake of a cyberattack on private military contractor Lockheed Martin, the Wall Street Journal this week reported that the Pentagon may begin classifying cyberattacks that impact “commerce” (read: corporate profit) as official “acts of war” meriting military retaliation — no doubt, sans constitutionally mandated congressional authorization in this age of extra-constitutional power grabs. Yes, hackers who infiltrate, say, an energy company’s mainframe won’t just face prosecution anymore. Instead, as a military official boasted to the Journal: “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.”

Granted, in outward appearance, this Corporate Police State still resembles the America we’ve come to know and love. It doesn’t yet look like the Ludlow Massacre, Abu Dhabi or post-apocalyptic Detroit under the iron fist of Omni Consumer Products.

But the operative word is “yet.”

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books Hostile Takeover and The Uprising. He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/151186/

[w2]

Conventional Medicine, Featured, Other Failures

Nutritional Illiteracy – What the Average Doctor Doesn’t Know

2 Comments 16 October 2010

nutritional illiteracy

Introductory comments by Nathan Batalion

The wealth of information provided below is from Natural News. It was first published October 11 2010. I think the article still understates the extent of the problem. Doctors are trained in the mechanical vision of nature and so have almost zero knowledge of a life-centered view of nature and our bodies . A life-centered view is practiced at alternative/natural health centers like the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center or Hippocrates Health Institute. As a result, they routinely reverse chronic illnesses naturally. Sometimes the patients have been so wasted, their doctors have told them to carefully straighten out their affairs, such as ordering a burial plot and get ready to die. After going to such a healing retreat, they return re-enlived and to befuddle and refute their doctors.

We occasionally need a surgeon after a car accident when an arm is severed. But with deep chronic conditions their mechanical approaches tend to be either worthless or do harm. Just as the total impact of synthetic chemicals is pollute our environment, the effect on our bodies can be expected to be the same – doctors are taught to study drugs separately in isolation from each other. This creates marketing biases for individual drugs, or a lack of objectivity. Yet allopathic medicine claims a monopoly ownership of objectivity. The great truth is that without a view of the whole of chemical impacts, this objectivity is a corrupt and total illusion. Doctors are intentional mis-educated not to recognize this. For example, the word “detox” is relegated to heroine addict clinics or the like, as if there were no chemical toxins at all to deal with in the real world – making drug administering just fine and dandy. What imaginary world are they living in, so corrupted by trillion dollar chemical industries.

With natural healing we focus instead on whole-body healing nutrition and supportive detox (getting out what shouldn’t be there) Doctors are often so surprisingly ignorant of anything outside of the world of dispensing drugs, surgery and radiation. As a result, I have often view them as among the single most mis-educated members of our society.

Here is the story:

(NaturalNews) America is a nation of widespread health and nutritional illiteracy. And I’m not just talking about the knowledge gaps of health consumers, either. It’s the doctors and health “experts” who have astonishing gaps in knowledge that should be considered basic health information in any first-world nation.

Parents, too, lack any real literacy in nutrition and health. That’s largely because medical journals, health authorities and the mass media actively misinform them about health and nutrition issues, hoping to prevent people from learning how to take care of their own health using simple, natural remedies and cures.

Here are some shocking examples of the huge gaps in knowledge among doctors, parents and others…

What your doctor doesn’t know might actually harm you

Most doctors have little or no understanding of the nutritional difference between LIVE foods and DEAD foods. Most doctors think they’re nutritional identical!

Most conventional doctors don’t know that the NIH actively funded and operated criminal medical experiments on human prisoners (http://www.naturalnews.com/029920_U…).
Most parents have no idea that processed meats (bacon, sausage, sandwich ham, etc.) are laced with the sodium nitrite coloring chemical that promotes aggressive brain, pancreas and colon cancers. (http://www.naturalnews.com/007024.html).
Most doctors have no idea that seasonal flu vaccines are little more than quackery and simply don’t offer any real protection against the flu. (http://www.naturalnews.com/029641_v…)
Very few parents know the difference between the words “natural” and “organic” on food labels. Most parents just think “natural” means “organic” and so they buy more products that claim to be natural (even when the word means nothing).
Few doctors realize that statin drugs were engineered from a molecule called lovastatin, found naturally in red yeast rice. The drug companies pirated the molecule from nature (biopiracy), then patented it. Then they pressured the FDA to declare that red yeast rice was an “adulterated” supplemented because — get this — it naturally contains the drug they stole from it!
Most parents are completely befuddled by the nutritional claims of infant formula. They are astonishingly unaware that some of the most popular infant formula products such as Similac are made with over 50% sugars (http://www.naturalnews.com/029863_S…)
Virtually no one outside the natural health community knows that soy protein is extracted using a toxic, explosive chemical called hexane. (http://www.naturalnews.com/026303_s…)
Very few people know that the carmine food coloring used in fruit punch drinks and strawberry yogurt is actually made from smashed red beetles.
Most doctors remain completely unaware of the anti-cancer nutrients found in celery, grapefruit, cabbage and chocolate. They tend to believe that medicine comes from laboratories, not food.
Very few parents are aware that processed milk and dairy products promote obesity, heart disease and acne in their teenage children. Astonishingly, most adults have been fooled into thinking that yogurt is good for them because it contains probiotics (never mind the homogenized milk fats).
Most people of all ages, come to think of it, believe that frozen yogurt is somehow good for them, even though it’s really just processed ice cream sprinkled with probiotic powder (http://www.naturalnews.com/029038_f…).
Most doctors are completely unaware of the health dangers of aspartame and MSG and make no attempt to educate their patients about avoiding these excitotoxins.
Most people don’t know that if you sign up as an organ donor, literally millions of dollars may be made off your body parts while your organs go to murderers! (http://www.naturalnews.com/029296_o…) Also, if you’re an organ donor recipient, you may receive a cancer-ridden, diseased organ as your “new” transplant. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027353_h…)
Think cooking on non-stick cookware is safe? Most people have no idea that non-stick cookware surfaces are made of highly toxic chemicals, and if you heat a non-stick pan on the stove, it will actually off-gas enough toxic chemicals to kill your pet parakeet (this is not a myth).
Very few doctors know that the human body has a second brain. It’s located in your gut, and it’s a highly complex mass of interconnected neurons that give real “intelligence” to your digestion and your interactions with food. There’s even a book called The Second Brain (http://www.amazon.com/Second-Brain-…) that explains how it works.
A typical conventional doctor cannot tell you the health benefits of blueberries — even though blueberries can make statin drugs obsolete for many people! Most naturopaths, however, are well aware of the benefits of blueberries and may even prescribe them to you.
Most doctors DO know the truth about how toxic chemotherapy is for patients, but they won’t tell patients the details of what they know. It turns out that 91% of oncologists would not choose chemotherapy for themselves. (http://www.naturalnews.com/029996_c…)

This list could continue, of course. There are seemingly countless examples of extreme gaps in the knowledge of doctors who should frankly know better.

Med school graduates get an “F” in health

So why do conventional medical doctors remain so ignorant of the basics of human health and nutrition? Because medical schools don’t teach health. They teach disease, surgery and pharmacology. They offer virtually no material on nutrition, disease prevention or mind-body medicine, so the doctors that graduate from medical school are nutritionally illiterate and lacking basic health knowledge.

Yet, at the same time, they are being told that they know everything about health and the human body, so they suffer from the most dangerous combination of all: A smug, know-it-all attitude combined with far-reaching health illiteracy. This is one of the key reasons why America’s health care system is such an utter failure — the people who are supposed to possess more health knowledge than everybody else are the very same people who actually lack it. In a sense, they have been “de-educated” by medical schools and come out knowing less than they did when they entered med school.

I’m not the only one who thinks this. In fact, you’ll find some of these concerns reflected by other doctors who are appalled at the arrogance and health illiteracy of their own peers. For example, a commentary published in the July 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) features Dr. Pronovost, a professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explaining how physician arrogance is killing tens of thousands of patients across America today.

Holistically-trained doctors who went way beyond medical school and taught themselves principles of nutrition often describe their own conventional medical school training as wildly inadequate. Dr Andrew Weil, for example, famously describes his conventional medicine colleagues as “nutritionally illiterate.”

And he’s right. Most conventional doctors are nutritionally illiterate. So are most parents. And if we wish to change the health future of America, this situation obviously needs to change. Nutrition should be the foundation of med school training, not an afterthought.

You can’t create a healthy nation if the people practicing medicine don’t know much about health and nutrition themselves.

Featured, Toxic Ag & Food Processing, Vegan Diet

Major Victory For US Raw-Organic Almond Growers

No Comments 11 August 2010

Breaking Story 08/11/2010

The USDA nearly destroyed US raw organic almond business by forcing the toxic fumigation and pasteurization of their product. A federal appeals court just ruled that California farmers have a right to challenge the USDA’s “nutty” regulation in court – overturning the view that farmers had no rights and that the power of the USDA was dictatorial, beyond challenge or absolute!

Here is the story from the Cornucopia Institute press release

The original release is at http://www.cornucopia.org/2010/08/f…

WASHINGTON, DC – A federal appeals court ruled today, overturning a lower court decision, that a group of California almond farmers have the right to challenge a USDA regulation requiring the treatment of their raw almonds with a toxic fumigant or steam heat prior to sale to consumers. For the past three years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has denied American consumers the right to buy raw almonds, grown in the USA, when they shop in grocery and natural food stores.

A group of almond growers sued the government to challenge USDA’s rule, but the federal district court ruled that courtroom doors were closed to the growers’ claims. The controversial rule has cost individual farmers millions of dollars in lost sales since it was enacted in September 2007.

“We are delighted by the court’s decision,” said Will Fantle, Cornucopia’s Research Director. Cornucopia has been coordinating the legal strategy for the farmers’ lawsuit. “At long last the farmers who have been injured by this rule will have the opportunity to stand in court and state why this poorly thought out regulation should be thrown out,” Fantle added.

The USDA and the Almond Board of California imposed the treatment scheme to minimize the risk of salmonella contamination outbreaks like those that had occurred with almonds in 2001 and 2004. USDA investigators were never able to determine how salmonella bacteria somehow contaminated the raw almonds that caused the food illnesses but they were able to trace back one of the outbreaks, in part, to the country’s largest “factory farm,” growing almonds and pistachios on over 9000 acres.

Family-scale growers have argued that the onerous and expensive mandated treatment regime is only needed by the giant industrial producers, who have less control over the quality of their nuts, and has hurt their market because it consumer resistance.

Many in the industry have questioned the logic exempting foreign-grown almonds from the treatment scheme. Imports have displaced raw domestic nuts in many major markets and retail locations across the U.S. This regulatory loophole is part of what has been crushing California producers.

“I am very happy with this first step in overturning this destructive regulation,” said Nick Koretoff, an almond farmer and plaintiff in the lawsuit. “The treatment mandate has been a financial catastrophe for me. My consumers want raw, untreated healthy almonds and I have been denied the opportunity to sell them what they want.”

Attorney John Vetne, who has been representing the almond farmers, said the Appeals Court made a “very strong decision affirming farmers’ rights.” The USDA had been arguing that farmers did not even have the right to legally challenge the USDA regulation. “We are pleased that the Appeals Court rejected USDA’s argument that courthouse doors are closed to farmers. We now intend to demonstrate to the federal district court that USDA acted outside of authority granted by Congress when it denied California almond growers a consumer market for raw almonds,” Vetne added.

Tens of thousands of consumers have expressed their discontent with the raw almond treatment rule in comments to the USDA. Organic and raw foods enthusiasts were particularly incensed that the nuts, despite being processed with propylene oxide (identified as a carcinogen by the federal EPA) or steam-heat, were still allowed to be labeled as “raw” — many believe that essential nutrients in food can be destroyed by heat, radiation and toxic chemicals.

The Cornucopia Institute, an organization known for its research and defense of family farmers involved in organics, artisan and local food production, was impressed with how many consumers have a real passion for maintaining the availability of raw food and nuts, including almonds, and have been willing to financially support the farmers in their legal challenge. “Contributions continue to flow in supporting this effort,” Fantle noted.

“I and many of my friends look forward to the day when we will once again be able to easily purchase truly raw, authentic almonds from California in my local store,” said Joan Levin, a Chicago resident and raw foods consumer. “We hope this Appeals Court ruling brings that day closer,” she said.

For more info see:
http://www.cornucopia.org/almonds/

Alzheimer's, Featured, HEALING US

ALZHEIMER’S DRUG FRAUDS

1 Comment 15 July 2010

Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Healingtalks Editor

(Healingtalks) Aricept, a drug given to Alzheimer’s patients, has the following potential “side-effects” - difficulty breathing; depression; fainting; seizures; severe dizziness or headache; shortness of breath and tremors. Would you give that drug then to an aged person or loved one? Given that the drug does not reverse Alzheimer’s disease at all but offers these so-called “side-effects,” wouldn’t you call that an Alzheimer’s drug fraud?

Alzheimer’s as a consciousness disease

My intuition tells me that such chemical drugs as Aricept will and even cannot reverse Alzheimer’s disease, by their very nature as pharmaceuticals. The reason is that Alzheimer’s disease is a consciousness disease – and which then leads to a number of insightful conclusions.

What is consciousness?

First you need to know exactly what consciousness is in order to treat such a consciousness ailment. William James once wrote the discovery of what consciousness is will be the greatest of all discoveries, paling other scientific breakthroughs. He was right. Let me thus clue the reader in on solving this mystery of mysteries. Perhaps the single greatest discovery of my life was to realize that consciousness forms the universal principle of connection in nature, or the principle of connection itself. As a universal principle, it then unifies nature as a whole, forming nature’s essence and the essence of ourselves and our life force – a view that is contrary to the mathematical central paradigm of nature which Sir Isaac Newton advocated in the 17th century. Newton died a schizophrenic which tells you how much he knew

Manifesting consciousness

As machines manifest or model mathematical order, we as living organisms manifest this core consciousness in all parts of ourselves – and especially in our human brain. When that consciousness recedes through aging and in our highly polluted world, we fail then to make good brain connections, especially with our memory. We fail to also connect images as a whole – such as in the vital face-recognition of loved ones.

Why chemical drugs will never heal Alzheimer’s

And here is the root philosophical reason why drugs will never cure such a receding of consciousness. Remember that philosophy offers the greatest of wisdom because it is a peak view, the “eye on the whole,” or what looks especially in the healing arts at the most holistic perspective. So philosophically, it is critical to know that we first create drugs synthetically in the laboratory and under the designing guidance of a 17th century, math-bound vision of nature. What’s wrong with that quantitative view applied to living domains and not just machines?

What is wrong with the mathematical view
representing and altering the essence of life

All symbols in our consciousness are pointing tools. Math symbols are indeed very special and point us where? They expertly direct us to best separate elements of consciousness. That is what counting does. We can’t count three apples if we make apple sauce or connect what was separately counted.

Math symbols point us thus to the polar opposite of the connective quintessence of consciousness – the opposite or what opposes the essence of life!

How can that be is our technological age also helps our advancement. That is only because there are double negative ways of using machines and technolgy – such as to have a machine do a mechanical chore so that we avoid doing something mechanical. Double negative only form superficial positives that have no depth to them. That is why the chemical drugs impact our consciousness in such ways as to change symptoms but not to heal chronic and systemic illnesses.

Testing the mathematical order of chemical designs, including drugs

What happens when we take a random and large mix of chemicals, including drugs in order to test not a drug in lab-isolation as the industry does to convince us of their value…but synthetic chemicals as a whole?

This destroys the entire life in the compost heap. Nothing can then grow with that compost becoming a supertoxic waste site! What happens inside our bodies is the same. Synthetically-isolated/separated chemicals pollute our bodies living, conscious cells. Synthetic chemicals pollute our overall living surrounding environment.

Abominable nursing homes, Big Pharm profit-centers,
where innocent patients are drugged

Now in regard to Alzheimer’s disease, almost every day I drie past a most beautifully-looking nursing home in my home town. It is beautiful at least form the outside, in the surface appearance or in the continuation of an illusion. Indeed the outside lawns are magnificently kept as the nursing home has plenty of dollars to do so. Inside the patients are, in my opinion, heartlessly poisoned with terrible chemical drugs that but feed an industry’s profits. The more drugs these nursing home patients take, the more they will walk the nursing home halls like unconscious zombies. This is a HUGE and indescribable tragedy in our culture because reaching old age should be a time for the warmest, most loving transmitting a lifetime of wisdom to our next generations. Instead our aged and beloved are poisoned and rendered unconsciously useless – useless except to the profit-garnishing, scavenger drug companies profit activities.

Extent of Alzheimer’s epidemic

Note that Alzheimer’s disease now affects over half of Americans aged 85 or older. But Americans who are 85 or over with Alzheimer’s only represent only1/2 of 1% of the US population. Alzheimer’s more broadly affects 11% of those over 65 (who in turn represent 12% of the total US population). Doing the math, 11% X 12% equals 1.3% of the US population as Alzheimer’s sufferers.

Selling yet more drugs, with doctors as the frontline salespersons

The above creates a relatively limited selling market. It is not great news for Big Pharma. How to solve that commercial problem? The drug industry has a plan. They are campaigning to potentially triple sales. How ingenious! Indeed the NY Times announced that “medical experts” have such a plan via changing the criteria for the Alzheimer’s diagnosis. This is now the typical route for increasing sales in dozens of disease venues, sometimes even creating disease names out of thin air – or where there are little or no real symptoms to sell drugs with. As the NY Times chronicles:

“The new diagnostic guidelines, presented Tuesday at an International Alzheimer’s meeting in Hawaii, would mean that new technology like brain scans would be used to detect the disease even before there are evident memory problems or other symptoms. If the guidelines are adopted in the fall, as expected, some experts predict a two- to threefold increase in the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Many more people would be told they probably are on their way to getting it. The changes would help drug companies….The biomarkers were developed and tested…provide strong indications that Alzheimer’s is present, even when patients do not yet have dementia or even much memory loss. Dr. Aisen says he foresees a day when people in their 50′s routinely have biomarker tests for Alzheimer’s and, if the tests indicate the disease is brewing, take drugs to halt it…This is a major advance.”

It will certainly be a potentially “major advance” strategy for Big Pharma sales and PR, namely to now reach the 50′s crowd (27.5% of the US population instead of a paltry 1.3%) with the fear of getting Alzheimer’s to drive sales! This doesn’t mention that the biomarker tests themselves can be harmful and can even cause cancer and can help induce Alzheimer’s.

Diabetes Drug Fraud

Beware of CT Brains Scans

Video

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Chemical Pollution, Consciousness & Healing, Develop Consciousness, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALING, Featured, HEALING MIND, HEALING US

A NON-SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENT- PART I

No Comments 07 July 2010

Everyone knows we’re created a non-sustainable condition for our environment.

Our planet is a global mess and something has to give or turn things around.

Key species, like honey bees, are dying.

The riches of natural ecologies like rain forests and coral reefs are being devastated or are dying.

Pollution is everywhere on the planet and within us. Human beings are certainly not immune from what is happening, and thus we are increasingly suffering from systemic and chronic health challenges.

But to do something, and effectively, requires knowing the root cause. Is that possible?

IS THE CAUSE WITHIN?
Here is my take on this very critical issue.

First I believe we must assume personal responsibility for this ecological mess on the premise that the cause is not “out there.”

Secondly, that means we need to look within at what is directing us to cause such damage to our environment and ourselves. Somehow if the outside world is a huge mess, our inner world must be comparably out of sorts or very poorly organized. If that is so, how exactly did this first come about?

BEGINNNG WIH THE GREEKS
I believe this has to do with certain deep cultural roots, beginning in ancient Greek times – and screwing up a best integration of our whole inner consciousness.

Remember we have main sides to our brain, one is skilled at conceptual languages and the other at seeing things in a raw and naked without the use of words. One tends to experience any consciousness of our world “connectively” and holistically, and the other oppositely. It is better at taking things apart or seeing things with separate and detailed precision.

Now let me propose it is not ata ll wise to make the latter side (takes-things-apart-with-precision side) dominant. That that indeed screws the whole of our consciousness up. Why? Because then we tend to take apart what most whole, ending up again with a huge mess. On the other hand if the other side is dominant, we can oppositely and with greatest skill reconnect to wholeness or heal what is most apart, asunder, ill, a mess or in shambles.

Which side then is dominant in our times and for the overall integration of consciousness?

I will argue it is the former thus making a mess or creating a non-sustainable environment. This is happening as we have gone actually to the greatest extreme of such left-brain dominance.

HOW WE BECOME EXTREMELY LEFT-BRAIN DOMINANT
Words form ideologies and philosophies and so they can structure the whole of our consciousness and thereby direct our lives. The role of language here is critically important. If we now go back to Greek times we see that the Greeks did something very, very important to their language – influencing how we integrate our inner world in the west. It doesn’t seem like they did something dramatic at first sight, but indeed it was monumental from an inner point of view.

The Greeks simply added vowels to their language!

Why did that matter at all? What does this have to do with anything? How does it relate to our modern ecological crises?

My explanation is as follows.

Before they added vowels, the Greek language was read from right to left like the Hebrew was. Eye movements for reading from right-to-left is thought to be right-brain dominant – the connective over the separative.

Within about a hundred years of making this language shift, or after the adding of vowels which allowed each word to have a specific, isolated, and therefore disconnected/separative meaning,eye movements for reading changed! The inner consciousness was rewired. The Greeks suddenly read in a “boustrophedron” style or like an ox plows a field. Once vowels were added, the average reader didn’t have to necessarily look at the whole context of a dialogue or written work to decipher what any given word meant!

Looking at the whole triggers the right brain’s functioning, not needing to do so triggers the left brain’s functioning coming to the foreground. Reading thus went back and forth (or right-to-left and from left-to-right alternatively) as if balancing out the too or consciousness appeared confused. It couldn’t make up its mind which way to dominantly go.

Then after about a hundred fifty years it finally settled on reading from left-to-right.

The use of language, as evidenced by the way it was read, became more left-brain dominant. The latter gained the controlling “upper hand.”

Lab testing has shown that individuals who are disabled by car accidents and the like to become right-brain damaged, and thereby severely left-brain dominant, will largely go insane or suffer from dementia. Patients with the opposite malady, or being more left-brain damaged but right-brain ok, will remain completely sane or oriented, but will have great trouble verbalizing things or explaining what they experience in precise detail. They also will have trouble drawing straight linear lines because their consciousness can’t sharply separate elements spatially! They are not likely to wear suits and work on Wall Street because their consciousness, as we used to say in the 1960′s, is “not straight.”

The significant Greek cultural/language shift came to a pinnacle expression during the Golden Age of Greece. This brought us the taproot foundations of western civilization’s whole worldview.

For a little more background, go to Part II.

Chemical Pollution, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALING, Featured, Global Mind Change, HEALING US

A NON-SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENT – PART II

No Comments 07 July 2010

This is a continuation of Part I which explains how we relate to all of nature through our culturally-chosen language!

HISTORY OF ANCIENT WESTERN LANGUAGES
“Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Both were well known in the part of the Middle East that produced the first widely used alphabet, the Phoenician.” Actually, a very recent discovery of cave writings thought to have been done by the ancient Israelites during their 40-year’s exodus from Egypt predate Phoenician writings. It is now thought that the Israelites developed their alphabet from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the Phoenicians copied it. The Greeks are credited with adding vowels (since neither the Hebrew nor Phoenician alphabets had vowels), and the English alphabet was based on the Greek (and later Latin), not the Phoenician. “Most alphabets in the world today either descend directly from this development, for example the Greek and Latin alphabets.” SOURCE: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090112110219AAJkD6o

ROMANS FOLLOWED THE GREEKS
The Romans also added vowels, just a bit later. This was to give each word in the Bible a more exact, precise meaning. This afforded the Roman Empire more spiritual control over the inner life of the Empire, supporting in their brutal push for dominion via the Crusades. From the Romans’ Latin came the modern Romance languages of Europe.

A FURTHER SHIFT TO LEFT-BRAIN DOMINANCE
A further shift to left-brain dominance came about in the 17th century. This happened because of the introduction by Sir Isaac Newton and others of the uniquely math-bound vision of nature – the vision of physics, chemistry and biotechnology. Mathematics represents the highest left-brain integrating symbols - and together construct a penultimate left-brain cosmic view. Why? This is because math symbols abstracts how to separate all elements of consciousness. The right brain, which should be dominant, see in the opposite way. I learned this in my youth when after being a math prodigy I had a high fever and my left brain shut down. This afforded me the opportunity to personally see the universe in an opposite way!

The industrial, chemical, and biotech revolutions followed the lead of the 17th century, and in a close marriage with commerce’s likewise quantitative focus. This refers to when we try to make money, no matter what the ultimate consequences are from a holistic view and thus also no matter what the impact on the sustainability of life on earth.

ILLUSIONS
Illusions can be called illnesses of consciousness because they involve a breakdown of the integrity of the inner world – and akin to the way our physical body breakdowns in a diseased state. Cosmic illusions are thus the biggest, most powerful inner ills of all. They further manifest, when applied, in the wholesale breakdown within, and in turn making a mess of the outer world!

HEALING THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS
Are we suffering from a grand inner illness that needs healing. I believe so. Imagine that what this word “consciousness” refers to is really the principle of connection itself in nature, the glue that holds things together. This is not what we learn in physics. The latter elicits out of nature, the mechanical – guided by math symbols designing machines made of separate parts.

Consciousness, life and healing are all about undoing separation to reconnect what is cut apart – as in the seamless reconnection of a physical cut (such as when our skin heals after being slit).

If we organize thus our whole cosmic view using abstractions of separation, guaranteeing left-brain dominance, I believe we will end up with an ill or schizophrenic civilization as a whole.

That civilization then starts to create, and progressively, a polluting global mess or a non-sustainable environment.

Blending, Diet and Nutrition, Featured, HEALING US, Juicing

WHAT’S MORE HEALING – MAKING JUICE OR A SMOOTHIE?

No Comments 06 July 2010

Which is best for our health, a luscious juice or smoothie….a fresh ” green liquid soup” or a sweet ambrosia drink? There are a few major issues here we might consider in deciding how best to take sides. So let’s consider the following:

Effect on Weight Loss, Cleansing and Fasting
A strictly juice diet may offer 500 calories a day or less. Thus taking in just juices may, in the short-term, help us lose weight. However, if this puts too much stress on our bodies, after the juice fast there may be greater cravings or binging – canceling the benefits of the prior dieting. A smoothies cleanse is likely to offer 2-3000 calories a day and thus become richer nourishment that is gentler on the body. This means you can keep up either a regular work or athletic schedule. You can lose weight more slowly but more likely permanently. On the other hand if you are suffering from a quite serious illness, you may really want to first juice fast in order to more powerfully draw out toxins.

Effect on the Quality of Nutrients

The theory is that a high speed blender, as the name implies, will more thoroughly oxidize your liquids than say a twin-gear slow-grinding juicer. However Victoria Boutenko did a thought-provoking study in which she used a batch of potatoes placed in a blender and another processed in a juicer with the result were that the blended potatoes oxidized more slowly than the juiced one. The apparent reason was that the fiber in a blend protects the smoothie from oxidizing more rapidly. Juices are more exposed to oxygenation without the fiber. Thus you should drink your fresh juices immediately, if you want the best healing results. This was something very important I learned while working with the Gerson Institute some years ago. They recommended drinking their therapeutic green and carrot juices within minutes of making! However, if you are not so critically in life-and-death battle against cancer or another such serious disease, you can alternatively add a little lemon, lime, or vitamin C and pour the juice into a mason jar with a tight lid. This will keep the juices fresh enough to store for a whole day.

Sugar and Overall Absorption

How urgently do we need fiber? On a raw food vegan diet we get plenty of fiber and hardly need more. On a juice diet, there is a super-powerful and lightening fast absorption of nutrients. Can this be a drawback at times? Yes, if the foods are high on the glycemic scale and thus tend to rapidly raise one’s blood sugar levels. If we have a lot of sweet fruit on hand to liquefy, we might better consider making a tangy smoothie rather than a sweet juice. Or if you are creating a juice feast, consider adding non-sweet fruit elements, like lemon and lime (or vegetable fruits like tomatoes and peppers) to brew the mix.

What this means is that if someone is critically ill and fighting for their life (e.g. has metastatic cancer) you might opt in favor of juicing (especially green and non-sweet juices) in order to best conduct this battle. Also you might better feed on whole sweet fruit where the sugars are absorbed more slowly.

If you have a candida or a fungus condition, you might consider no sweet fruit at all, at least until your blood sugar levels have dropped or normalized.

Ease and Versatility of Making

Here blending wins the prize. This is because, as to their utility, they have usually far less machine parts and thus are easier to both use and clean. You also can make your juice using a blender by simply straining the blended pulp through a nut milk bag. You can add more variety of ingredients to a blend, like seaweeds, which don’t lend themselves to juicing but instead offer high mineral rather than high liquid content.

Conclusion

Which should you ultimately choose? Steve Meyerowitz advocates using both. He juices in the morning and blends later in the day. You can add a green juice to a very high-fiber blend at the same time. You can also add a green juice to an absorbing grain dish. If you are not a 100% raw fooder, you can try drinking a fresh glass of green juice while eating a bowl of brown rice. Call it green macro-biotics! Here the theory is that you might get longer and more thorough absorption – with presumably added health and energy-generating benefits.

At the Gerson Institute they only used juices for their most serious and chronically-ill patients. However, they allowed a more regular diet after 24 months or once the patient fully reversed his or her condition. Victoria Boutenko considers blending to be the superior choice for the average person. The best thing to do, with such conflicting recommendations, is to consider all of the above alternatives for yourself. Then ultimately you have to see what’s both easier for YOU and makes YOU feel the absolute fbest.

Conventional Medicine, Featured, HEALING US, Other Failures

US HEALTH CARE – LAST AMONG SEVEN INDUSTRIALIZED NATIONS

2 Comments 29 June 2010

Our U.S. health care bills are so high they are nearly bankrupting the nation.

The rate of growth in American health care costs has, in fact, outpaced our Gross Domestic Product for decades.

US HEALTH CARE COSTS SOAR AS % OF GDP - HIGHEST ON THE LIST
In 1940, the total spending for health care was only 4.5% of GDP. In 1990, it rose to 12.2%, and in 2005 American health care spending soared to 16% or about $2 trillion and $6,697 per person. This was far more than any other nation. In 2010, health care spending is approaching 18% of GDP. Health care costs are out of control and now amount to nearly $8,000 in the U.S. per capita.

QUALITY OF US HEALTH CARE RANKING – LOWEST ON THE LIST
At the same time, the United States ranks last on several measures of health care performance compared to seven industrialized nations including Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand and the Netherlands (according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund). The Commonwealth Fund is a private foundation that supports independent research on public health policies

INFANT MORTALITY, PREMATURE DEATHS, LIFE EXPECTANCY
On measures that track healthy lives, the United States ranks last in terms of infant mortality and deaths before 75 years of age (preventable with timely access to treatment) and the US ranks next to last for healthy life expectancy at age 60.

LIVING DEATHS
That is not all. More than 80% of people who die in the U.S. have long progressive illnesses that modern allopathic medicine fails to effectively reverse – cancer, heart disease, diabetes and so on. The health care system blames the disease (calling it incurable), assuming no responsibility for a massively failing medical approach. All of these health conditions are clearly preventable and reversible using natural approaches.

LEADING CAUSE OF BANKRUPTCY
Hospitalizations during the last six months of life are rising. Treating chronic illness in the last two years of life is taking up one third of all Medicare dollars. People are sicker now as they die. As a result, medical care is the leading cause of individual and ultimately society-wide financial bankruptcy.

IATROGENIC EVENTS
Then there is the issue of iatrogenic events or errors, surgical mistakes, and drug overdoses or fatal combinations, which Gary Null reports as the leading cause of death and injury in the United States (See Death by Medicine). As many as one million Americans are dying annually due to medical mistreatment and malpractice.

CHRONIC HEALTH EPIDEMICS
With all of this happening several chronic disease statistics are rising to epidemic proportions. The incidences of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and autism were all significantly less some decades ago.

WHY THE U.S. MEDICAL CARE SYSTEM IS IN A SHAMBLES
In short our U.S. medical care system is a shambles and others around the world are emulating this disaster, as medical inflation is spreading around the globe. This is so widespread and systemic that we logically can suspect the “why” of this is occurring being rooted in some very, very deep or permeating and essential foundations. This involves the root cornerstones of all of modern medicine, namely being grounded in a false and failing vision of nature, the mechanical/math-bound that first came to dominance in the 17th century. The seeds of that mechanical worldview are now coming to a black flowering and rotted fruition. It is ultimately an anti-healing and death-laden vision of nature that is also polluting our planet at risk and globally supporting epidemics of species deaths. It is that worldview which fosters a system of medical care based on prescribing chemical drugs, chemotherapy, genetic therapy, surgery and radiation. It overall leads to a diabolical vulture marriage between a grossly failing system of “medical miscare” and vast monetary/financial/profit-motivated forces. Unbeknown to the unwary, sometimes leading university hospital care, the most prestigious, is far more dangerous because of the close marriage with pharmaceutical companies to conduct drug experimental trials and thereby give them authoritative prestige. This close overall marriage (expanded to include related and conglomerate chem-agri-processed-GMO-food industries) and supported by a bought major media, is what has so completely ingrained, deepened and institutionalized the mass deception, the callous cruelty we call modern medical “care.” The word “care” is, in this context, an ultimate misnomer.

NOTHING MORE DESPICABLE
With exception of often effective emergency health responses, for the most part chronic ailments are treated with abominable, horrid illness-maintenance and hidden for-profit approaches. There is hardly anything more disgusting and despicable in modern society. The toll of our whole medical system outpaces the combined toll of international wars, terrorist attacks, transportation accidents, and so on. At the same time, nothing bankrupts us as much financially and in terms of our inner life force or consciousness. For example, Alzheimer’s patients become substantially more unconscious and devitalized (walking the halls of nursing homes like zombies) when fed the typical modern drug cocktails prescribed for that illness. And yet there is no letting up of drug sales and the aggressiveness with which they are pursued.

The same is happening in the overall field of psychiatry. Psychiatry has become mutated into an unabashed drug-pushing industry and little more.

Something has to give. It is up to us to re-educate others and to transform this greatest of travesties in our society.

Featured, HEALING US

A STRENGTH TRAINING SECRET

No Comments 28 June 2010

Physical strength isn’t just about muscle mass. It also isn’t just all about pure exercise.

To prove that, what happens right after we exercise? Do we feel more empowered and charged up at the end of a marathon, running ever faster compared to the beginning? The average person may feel a momentary high at the end comes the crash. Tests have shown that right after a long workout we are weaker.

THE YANG AND YIN OF EXERCISE/REST
It is not just through exercise that we gain strength but rather through a more equal pursuit of intense workouts and complete rest and recovery. When the two are combined, I would almost say recovery is of greater importance! Why?

PULLING TOGETHER
Think of a wave that ebbs and flows along a seashore. It comes out of the ocean and then returns back to it. The ocean here represents the confluence of countless separate elements coming together as one – mostly rivers, groundwater and drops of rain. The return to the ocean is symbolic of a pulling-back-to-oneness of separate flows of life energy. With this metaphor in mind, we know that with any intense workout we expend energy. We burn calories and stimulate a breakdown of tissues, including fat. This, in turn, stimulates the opposite during rest and recovery, namely a building up and re-connective process. Healing, wholeness and strength are all about being connected and energetically solid and strong within. That is the source of our power. We can say about a strong person that he or she really “has it together.”

This is why whenever I pursue training runs, each time I try to stress and challenge my body more and then allow for one or two days rest. If I am really sore, I might even rest for three days. If you are marathon runner, you may want to do short runs everyday as a baseline, but the intense long runs are best accomplished once a week.

Ultimately the secret to optimizing your strength training is spaced apart, intense workouts with a greater emphasis on rest and recovery in between.

Exercise & Athletic Fitness, Featured, HEALING US

TIPS FOR BURNING MORE CALORIES ON A TREADMILL

1 Comment 27 June 2010

I love to run, whether indoors on a treadmill or outdoors in the woods or around a track.

Some of my friends, however, love to run just outdoors. They can’t think of doing it otherwise. Yet for me on a humid or rainy day (and in the winter when it snows or hails fiercely) I very much prefer using a treadmill, at home or in the gym. Using a treadmill is a great way to very consistently burn calories, lose weight, firm up your leg muscles, tighten the abs and keep your heart optimally healthy. Combine the use of cardiovascular workouts with good nutrition, periodic detoxes, and adequate rest and sleep – and you will be on your way to priceless healthy living. In this regard, a treadmill offers more control over the whole process as you can exactly set such parameters on the machine as speed, incline and even heart rate (when a heart monitor is built in or at hand).

Here are some tips for using your treadmill to best burn calories and improve overall circulation:

FOR THE BUSY PERSON – While on the treadmill, turn on an inspiring, entertaining or instructional audio/video or play your favorite upbeat music. Then you are exercising not only your body but also your mind and imagination. This is a great way to start off a day with a bang. You’ll also end up burning more calories because you’ll be looking forward to exercising more and more, as part of a rich multimedia experience.

THE HILLS, BRING ‘EM ON- Using a treadmill with an incline helps prevent shin splints in strengthening your knees. It also allows you to have a more intense workout to burn extra calories! For example, a 30-minute treadmill workout at a 10 minute pace will burn 270 calories. However, at a 15% incline it will burn 482 calories or about 80% more!

RUN WITH A BUDDY – If you plan to workout in pairs with a friend, partner or spouse you’ll likely find you will both feed off each other’s energy. You’ll run more intensely and longer, plus you can have more fun at it as you cheer each other on. The end result is that those extra calories are burned and the waste lines are slimmed so that you feel great about yourself.

CHANGE PACE – Vary your runs on the treadmill. Run at a moderate pace and then speed up. Go back to a moderate pace and speed up again. When you do this several times, its called interval training. This is known to burn more fat and build more endurance, strength, and speed. It also helps firm up your stomach muscles.

RUN TOWARD GOALS – Consider mapping out a month-long schedule for the days and times on the treadmill and the speeds and inclines you want to tackle. Next think bigger. Map out long-range goals. Now think even bigger. You can place, in front of the treadmill, any written affirmations or visual aides you like (such as a picture of you at your best or ideal weight). You can then reinforce in your subconscious the image of quickly running toward your life’s goal, which you will then better achieve.

WITH SAFETY – While applying any of these tips, keep in mind to use the treadmill with safety precautions. I once injured myself because I simply failed to tie my shoe laces with a triple knot. Since then, I have never forgotten to do so. Take care of these details. Also don’t run so fast that it makes you feel like you must hold onto the treadmill for dear life (the handrails). If you’re running at an average pace of 10 minute then don’t suddenly run at a 6 minute pace for the workout. Build your running pace up gradually or you risk harm. If you follow these simple precautions, all you calorie burning adventures will succeed!

Diet and Nutrition, Featured, HEALING US, Protein Myth

COLIN CAMPBELL DEBUNKS THE ANIMAL PROTEIN MYTH

No Comments 25 June 2010

Dr. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus at Cornell University, co-organized the famous China Study that blew apart the animal protein myth. In my opinion this myth is among the greatest in terms of harm to the average person’s health.

Here Dr. Campbell explains the essence of the core myth, and how he came to see past it, despite having been rearing as a believer on his parents’ dairy farm. Dr. Campbell’s extensive research (conducted over a 27 year period) led him to understand that plant-based diets are far better for maintaining our health. Even more surprisingly he learned that just minor levels of animal proteins can powerfully contribute to common chronic illnesses such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis and cancer. Dr. Campbell reviewed, monitored or conducted cover a 100 studies that confirmed these findings, first in animal tests and then in the monumental and groundbreaking China Study conducted with human subjects.

Featured, HEALING US

MORE ON THE PROTEIN MYTH/PART I

No Comments 25 June 2010

To use a 1960′s expression, if you really want to “blow your mind” then watch the YouTube made by my friend Tim VanOrden, super-athlete, talk about the protein myth. I have included it here:

Tim has a project called “Running Raw” in which he essentially serves as an outstanding athletic example to help make a deep revolution in dietary habits (and derivatively our worldview) – with the aim to help save ourselves and the planet.

Myths are ultimately derived from flaws of our understanding. Thus I concur with Tim when he says: change your diet, change your life and change the planet. It’s all interconnected. In this Youtube, Tim outlines the reason why we need neither plant nor animal proteins to be healthy and what we do need instead!

WHY WE CAN’T TRUST CONVENTIONAL SCIENCE
As I often write, conventional science is of great value if you want to build a machine (like a race-car) and design it for optimal mechanical performance to win a motor car race. Move the same mechanical science over into a living terrain and it creates false nutritional advice to a super-athlete roadrunners. This is why, in my opinion, most of what nutritionists, even “alternative” nutritionists, offer us (based on what they’re taught in the typical university as foundational principles) is rooted in the same dead, mechanical model that allopathic doctors are indoctrinated to believe in beyond questioning.

A VISION TO BE OVERTURNED
The mechanical view became the controlling or dominant view of nature in the 17th century. It was designed by thinkers who were mathematically brilliant but otherwise, in my opinion, lacked real depth of perception or philosophic insight (requiring right-brain intelligence). Said another way, they were “right-brain disabled.” We should note that there are two fundamental directions of consciousness (separative and connective) and represented by left/right brain intelligence. Making the left-brain’s intelligence choice (separative consciousness) dominant is HUGELY unwise. We then tend to cut apart what is whole rather than make whole or heal what is asunder. Thus the 17th century philosophy, which does precisely that, is progressively problematic and non-healing. It represents a root misunderstanding of the very essence of the world we live in, and derivatively of our bodies and of all the foods we take in.

Yet this is the basis of our modern “nutritional science.”

Also based on this machine-adoring ideology of nature, we are told foods are made up, objectively, of chemically-defined macro elements – proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and water (defined as H2O). But how do we define something chemically? In the laboratory we use fire. In the kitchen, we cook a food to, in parallel, best separate elements to be defined chemically. This is because fire is the “depth-piercing knife” of nature. In this context also, this is why blood samples were always cooked and thus life-destroyed before being chemically analyzed. This is important to understand in the light that mathematics is the highest and best set of symbols for separating all elements of consciousness universally (traveling one of those two main directions)- and thus the use of fire executes and administers (like a executive executes and administers the directives of a business plan) the mathematical ideology of nature. We are never taught this is an ideology or metaphysics – and when cosmically applied an irrational one. It is impossible to connect a vision of nature integrally using the highest abstractions for separating all elements of consciousness. Metaphorically its as insane as attempting to glue things together (in the world of consciousness) via the use of a super-powered chain saw. Sir Isaac Newton insisted that mathematics forms “the cosmic laws of nature” (Principia Naturalis Mathematica) and he died a schizophrenic. This means his consciousness was separating out or falling apart at the end.

WHAT’S WRONG IN THIS WHOLE PICTURE?
What’s grossly misguiding about this whole literally death-centered picture of the entirety of nature, thus of our nature and of the entirety of our foods? It is the non-living view of nature that materializes the processed, devitalized foods in fast-food restaurants and on convenience store shelves. This creates an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer – chronic, systemic, actually life-and-consciousness destroying illnesses. It is the same non-living view of nature that also materializes in a holocaustic wave of species deaths all around our planet. We see this most recently with bee colonies. Thanks so greatly, Newton, for being so left-brain “brilliant.” A genius beyond geniuses is what Newton’s contemporaries thought of him, or as one adoring reader wrote 300 years ago, “Newton knew more about the cosmos than all of humanity combined.” With this faith in Newton, we left the middle ages behind and have since followed the new Newtonian path to the edges of virtual global disaster.

Contrary to that Newtonian worldview, I would affirm on a stack of bibles that the single greatest and most powerful thing I know is that consciousness is the principle of connection itself in nature. Thus we must use the Bunsen burner in a laboratory to effect a non-consciousness and/or non-life-centered ideology about nature. We thereby isolate/separate things to become math-analyzable. We actually recreate our world thereby (rather than purely or objectively discover it). This becomes a world made up of separate/dead mechanical and chemical elements. We, in effect, play out this belief of what the world/cosmos is supposedly made of. The end result, unfortunately, is a derivative system of medicine called allopathy that feeds us chemical drug concoctions. The drugs are tested in relation to isolated symptom relief (the left-brain approach), not the effect on the whole (right brain approach) There is little sense that foods chemically-laced might cause cancer or that our surrounding environs are similarly polluted – including with millions of tons of medical wastes that destroy sea life or degrade our soil and ground waters via supertoxic waste sites. Allopathic medicine sees our bodies and our environment as not so connected. Allopathic medicine further cuts our bodies surgically apart as if we were machines made of replaceable parts.

In this context, doesn’t chemistry represent the laws of nature, and so how can it be otherwise?

How can a deadened food with synthetic chemicals be anything other than natural?

This makes the pursuit of alive organics in health food stores or farmer’s markets utterly foolish. It becomes dumb to avoid chemicals to prevent cancer. We rather need pills! The doctor who ultimately derives his twisted truth-authority from 17th century thought, pontificates that we again need more chemicals prescribed to take daily into our bodies! The MD may tell you to fight cancer with massive doses of chemotherapy. Some MDs even think that naturopaths are dangerous quacks and shouldn’t be licensed. Naturopaths keep patients from taking needed pharmaceuticals, chemotherapy and inoculations.

But what if the allopathic worldview, at its taproot foundations, is wrong , then what?

The answer is simple.

We are on the cusp of a very deepest revolution-in-thought to rescue us from a second dark age. The protein myth is one of a slew of anomalies that busts the core paradigm.

See Part II which thus further explains Tim’ VanOrden’s revolutionary approach to protein.

Diet and Nutrition, Featured, HEALING US, Protein Myth

MORE ON THE PROTEIN MYTH/PART II

No Comments 25 June 2010

This is a continuation of More On The Protein Myth /Part I which outlines how piercing some of the core myths of our time is part of a larger revolution in thought.

THE ROLE OF AMINO ACIDS
Tim VanOrden doesn’t quite use the exact same revolutionary language, but his perspective comes so close to it – close as in wining a game of horse shoes. First he points out that proteins are the middlemen who provide us with amino acids. It takes a huge amount of digestive force, generally using acids, to break down the hardness of proteins (e.g. the hardness of a fibrous steak, fish, bean) – and into simpler component amino acids that we ultimately can assimilate. So why bother with the middlemen to pay a very high exchange price? The price is so huge that excess proteins (more than 5% of caloric intake) do actually cause debilitating and terminal illnesses. The protein myth, and its dangers, were brought out by the vast survey of The China Study.

Thus when asked how does Tim get his protein to develop huge muscles to win competitions over challengers half his age and to be 15 lbs overweight with little or no fat, he answers that he doesn’t need protein! Yes you read that right. He does not eat steaks, fish, eggs, dairy, nuts, soy, or other legumes. You would think he would be almost dead, but he is one of the world’s top athletes! We live under a worldview and commercially-created illusion that we all need protein to be strong. Tim rather eats what he calls amino acids which are instantly assimilated. The key point is that he doesn’t, however, look at amino acids as just chemical elements.

A NOTCH TOWARD A LIFE-CENTERED VISION OF NATURE

Q – How do we get amino acids directly?

Through enzymes. Look it up in any biochemical text. Enzymes are complex amino acids.

Q – How do we get enzymes?

By eating raw and living fruits and vegetables which are full of amino acids…. until you cook it!

Traditionally, foods are chemically analyzed only after being cooked, the same way that elements are isolated in test tubes after also being heated with a Bunsen Burner. This is again derivative of the whole mechanical, math-based, machine-principle-eliciting ideology – the dead view of the essence of nature, and thus derivatively of our own nature and of foods derived from the bosom of nature. This surface illusion of a fundamentally dead sense of literally everything cosmically has dominated western civilization since the 17th century. It is overdue for us to wake up from this worst of ideological dreams and that is so deeply harming life all over our planet and thus also systemically within.

No thanks Newton and thanks Tim for being an example of a more vibrant and sane way of being in our world.

Diet and Nutrition, Featured, HEALING US, Protein Myth

THE GREAT ANIMAL PROTEIN MYTH – PART I

No Comments 24 June 2010

As a result of the famous China Study, which the NY Times called the grand prix of nutritional studies, Dr. Colin Campbell surprisingly discovered that eating even small and occasional portions of animal foods (once a week) matched a significant rise in clustered degenerative diseases. Among these ailments is heart disease. At the time of the study, 17x as many Americans were dying of heart disease compared to the Chinese who ate much less animal proteins on average. Also eating animal proteins was correlated to drawing out alkaline-building minerals from bones and teeth. Eating vegetables in quantity did not have this correlating effect

THE ODYSSEY OF CAMPBELL’S PIERCING THE PROTEIN MYTH

FAMILY AND COLLEGE EXPERIENCE – Dr. Campbell was originally raised on a dairy farm and thus developed a strong faith in the belief that ingesting milk and meat gave everyone a stronger and healthier constitution. Colin Campbell’s belief was sustained even after his father died of a massive heart attack. Colin latter went to veterinarian school and pursued graduate work at Cornell University in the field of animal nutrition. There he was assigned the task of researching better means of animal protein production. This meant making cows and sheep grow fatter faster. In his PhD thesis he continued to express the belief that eating more animal protein equated to the best of health.

WORKING IN THE PHILIPPINES – A research job at Virginia Tech later involved Colin Campbell working in the Philippines where he looked into the disturbing rise in liver cancers among Philippine children. Liver cancer was typically an adult-onset disease. The suspected culprits were local peanut and corn crops due to their high aflatoxin content. Aflatoxin is a highly carcinogenic poison lives in crop storage molds. Lower levels of liver cancer could be expected in often malnourished children who a) ate more grains that were better stored and b) added more animal proteins to their diet to help strengthen their immunity. As a result, Colin helped establish 110 nutritional education centers all over the Philippines for this purpose. Being dedicated to this mission, he was disturbed upon finding that the wealthiest of families (those who ate the most animal proteins) had the highest, not lowest, cancer rates!

INDIA STUDY - Because aflatoxins were a prime suspect in the Philippine epidemic, an Indian study involving aflatoxins really piqued his interest. It involved feeding an equal level of aflatoxins to two groups of rats. One feasted on a high animal-protein diet and the other on a relatively low animal protein diet. To be more exact, the first group eat a diet consisting of 20% animal protein (casein) and the other of 5% animal protein. The rats in the first group all died of liver cancer. None of the second group of rats died during the testing time period. The score was 100% to zero. Colin and his associates were sure they are accidentally switched the result. They seemed impossible and thus made no sense.

But the quiet voice of the scientist within kept asking. What if the results were valid?

To be continued in Part II

Diet and Nutrition, Featured, HEALING US, Protein Myth

THE GREAT ANIMAL PROTEIN MYTH – PART II

No Comments 23 June 2010

The results of the Indian Study of rats fed aflatoxins with high percentages of animal proteins all dying of liver cancer really nagged Colin. This prompted him to look at other studies which confirmed the Indian findings. The low animal protein diet routinely inhibited cancers (even when high doses of aflatoxins were present) while the high animal protein diets triggered cancers. In fact he could both simply turn on and off any pre-cancerous and cancerous growths by adding or subtracting a percentage of animal proteins from the diet. Using plant-based proteins did not have this ill effect. To Campbell the results were unbelievably earth-shacking. This motivated him to test the same concept on human subjects (which he had a golden opportunity to do via the massive China Study). The China Study confirmed what prior animal testing showed was possible for humans – a progression of degenerative disease in populations relative to the percentage presence of animal protein in the diet. This included an increase in bone fractures, high cholesterol, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and cancer. The study results were clear cut - the higher the animal protein intake, the higher the degenerative disease incidences. Inversely, the more plant-based proteins were ingested, the lower the overall level of degenerative diseases.

DEFICIENT PLANT PROTEIN MYTH
A corollary to the Great Animal Protein Myth, or along with the presumption that eating animal proteins strengthens and heal us, is the assumption that plant proteins weaken us or are inadequate. Nutritionists used to say we eat ”first class” proteins (meat, fish, eggs and milk) and “second class” proteins (plant-based). Today this is considered demeaning to vegetarians. Actually animal proteins are second class or ”second-hand,” being derived from grain feed. Animal proteins also occur in higher-scale, more complex organisms that accumulate greater levels of environmental toxins. Supersize Me was a film that showed this quite dramatically, the downward spiral of health on a meat, fast-food diet which at the same time wastes and pollutes vast agricultural resources.

VEGAN DIET DEFICIENCIES
On rare occassions a limited or highly processed or devitalized vegan diet can also be harmful – even to the point of causing disability and death. French fries doused with transfats are still a “vegan dish.” It is instructional and eye-opening to read about rare cases of, for example, B-12 or DHA deficiencies among vegans. The matter of unbalanced, limited, or highly processed vegan diets - and the resulting deficiencies - is a totally separate issue from the Great Animal Protein Myth.

Thus I always recommend a diverse or “rainbow-spectrum diet“ when adopting a meal plan, including for veganism. This means using the broadest spectrum of foods (often supplemented via so-called superfoods, high-mineral supplements, special powder mixes, juices, blends and sprouts). This then helps to yield optimal nutrition and/or counters digestive weaknesses (genetic, acquired, or later-onset). So just being a vegan alone is not an automatic panacea for all body ills. We still need need a very intelligent, diverse, seasonal, or rotational meal planning.

TWO PARTS TO THE DEFICIENT PLANT PROTEIN MYTH

PLANTS ARE LOW IN PROTEIN – The first states that plants are low in amino acids, thus protein. The truth is the pretty much the exact opposite. Most plants offer more than sufficient protein. One study showed that as a percentage of calories spinach had 49% protein, broccoli 45%, Cauliflower 40% and Celery 21%. Beans ranged for about 25% on up. Grains, nuts, and seeds spanned from 8% up and fruits from 5% on up. Because an ideal diet has 10% or less protein (mother’s milk is about 7%) and as a percentage of caloric intake, it is almost impossible to be vegan and protein-deficient. This is unless one is starving oneself or another. On the contrary a major health threat of our times is, as Dr. Campbell discovered, the over-consumption of animal proteins. Because of acid byproducts of protein digestion, an excess can greatly tax our detox organs such as the kidneys and liver that maintain the integrity of our body fluids. This is why concentrated protein supplements can be dangerous and why bone density goes down and cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis rates go up on the standard, high-animal-protein American diet.

PLANT PROTEINS ARE INCOMPLETE - The second part involves the belief that plant proteins are incomplete or that we need to combine several plant foods to make complete proteins at a given meal. The idea initiated in 1971 with Frances Moore Lappe’s best-selling book, Diet For A Small Planet. Amino acids are stored in the body between meals so most are not aware that this theory was proven to be totally false. Lappe herself recanted the idea.

MY OWN EXPERIENCE
You wonder why I’ve been vegetarian for 30 years now and have never had symptoms of protein deficiency. As a vegan I could win road races in my age class after a week or two or training, due to more rapid muscle gain. So I know from experience that the Great Animal Protein Myth is just a myth.

VEGAN BODY-BUILDERS
There are many sites on the Web belonging to vegan body-builders. Jack LaLane was among them. Still we don’t see a high percentage of vegan body-builders because vegans are relatively rare to begin with (1% or less of the population) and most are not interested in body-building.

VEGAN DIETS FOR CHILDREN
There have been highly publicized cases of children fed a vegan diet who have died. Given that there are probably a million or more vegans in North America, it is not surprising that a handful have died prematurely for one reason or another. I’m willing to bet that a) we know too little of the real causes are unknown, and b) the percentage of vegan children who die prematurely (compared to meat-eating children) is vastly lower. Dr. Spock, in working on the latest update to his famous book on childcare, recommended a vegan diet as the most healthy for growing children.

Featured, HEALING US, Sustainable Living, Volunteers

ORGANIC GARDEN HELP FROM VOLUNTEERS

No Comments 23 June 2010

Organic-Gardening-Volunteers

We are grateful for volunteers from the International Institute for Cooperative Development who came to help with our organic gardens. Thanks to Ayaka from Osaka Japan, who is on her way to Zambia to do childrens aid work; to Hyuna from South Korea who is also going to Zambia to volunteer in an orphanage; and to Christina from Massachusetts who will soon fly to Angola.

ORGANIC GARDENS EXPANDED
Our gardens were expanded with extra organic soil, manure, peatmoss and compost. We made new raised beds and got more seeds ready for a later fall/winter crop of cabbage, collards, radicchio, and kohlrabi. We added more tomato, pepper, eggplant, zucchini, red cabbage, okra and cucumber plants. We also added bottom-line fencing to help keep various critters from digging under the existing fence and eating our produce (as they managed to attack the broccoli in the last couple of days. This is a perennial challenge with organic gardens and farming. This is because so many life forms compete to get access to alive products of organic beds while chemicallized/bioengineered agriculture does not attract other life forms or the soil is life-stripped, deadened and poisoned.

We are glad Christina, Hyuna and Ayaka had a fun time and enjoyed the stay. We invite others to come, learn and benefit from the Raw-Wisdom Community experience.

Conventional Medicine, Diabetes, Featured, HEALING US, Other Failures

Dad Remembered On Father’s Day

No Comments 20 June 2010

I MISS MY FATHER’S HEAVENLY SMILE

My dad Gabriel Bross (step-dad who raised me as Nathan Bross Batalion) passed away just a little over a year ago. He died at the ripe age of 90. I miss him so terribly, and especially on this Father’s Day. He was such an indescribably incredible, simple, sweet and caring, and divinely-spirited man. Because of that, and despite never really having much materially, he acted as if he a was a king, richly endowed - and in fact he was.

CONCENTRATION CAMP HISTORY

“Angel Gabriel” to me, he stayed in a marriage for decades, even though it was bitter for him. This was because he wanted me to be brought up in a loving and caring way. He pushed to send me to private religious school. He was a lay cantor, and knew how to sing from the depths of the heart and soul. We used to play the best of cantorial music at home. His music inspired my eyebrows to turn upward to God. It inspired my daughter to become a cantor. Gabriel Bross maintained his many great and gentle traits despite having endured several concentration camps in Poland and Germany!

A WITNESS

He was a witness for the prosecution at the Nurenburg Trials, testifying against the head of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess. After the Nurenburg Trials, Hoess was hung at Auschwitz in 1947. My dad famously pulled Hoess’ ear as he walked down to Nuremburg Court aisles, and as a show of disrepect for the former head commandant and chief executor of the Fuhrer’s “Final Solution.”

THE HOLOCAUST REALLY HAPPENED

Hoess’ son has a Youtube apparently claiming the Holocaust slaughter of 6 million Jews never happened. I am fortunate for having gotten my dad’s direct account as well as his documented records from the Holocaust archives in Switzerland. Steven Spielberg filmed my dad and in order to preserve, for generations, a record of the horrors of the Holocaust. Because my dad was also a shoemaker, and the German army was in need of boots to endure harsh winters, he somehow came out alive from the gates of Hell. There were several close calls within. While he survived the Nazi’s most inhumane treatment, he did not live past what I consider as unconsciously evil thrusts of our modern allopathic medical system.

TRUST AND FAITH

Gabriel Bross was such a simple man. He was totally trusting at times. He had little or no inkling just how corrupt our modern medical care delivery system tends to be - misguided by both commercialism or the profit-motive and a mechanical view of the universe and our body – or the body as if composed of separate machine parts to be surgically cut out and replaced like car parts. He was as misguided as most medical students are by the established system of education.

OPTING FOR HOSPICE

Melinda and I visited Gabriel Bross in Florida, and after some doctor-administered drugs made him temporarily psycho. We diligently put dad under hospice care. This was just a year earlier. We knew hospice could have been a far better fate. He was not required to take the morphine there and could even remain at home. Also he had a slow progressing prostate cancer that didn’t need to be operated upon. However, his medical guardian and life-long Holocaust-survivor friend thought differently. He was a follower of the same “allopathic religion” that says surgery, radiation and drugs are whatcha-need to heal. The hospital and doctors were therefore allowed to operate on him repeatedly. This was unconscionable at his age. To be blunt, a 90 year-old diabetic could not possibly endure so being knifed. Outside the profit-motive I saw no justification.

GOING BLIND

Actually for nearly half a century my dad had been a diabetic. He took his insulin daily and religiously as the doctor advised. Following this advise, he went predictably blind. We really tried to tell him otherwise, but to no avail. Taking insulin feeds a multi-billion dollar treatment industry rather than a true and honest healing of our bodies. It caters to Eli Lily’s corporate propaganda. Pharmaceutical propaganda is the most corrupt of all on our planet’s media channels. Their justifications are unscientific, just as bloodletting’s justifications were in ancient Greek and medieval times. Taking insulin for a lifetime doesn’t heal Type I or II diabetes. The claim that there are no natural cures is untrue.Thus fragile blood vessels are destroyed over time and eyesight is lost. Going blind is very symbolic of the essential fruits of a medical care system that is grounded in unconsciously blind principles.

BEYOND THE MODERN MEDICAL RELIGON

In our times, as the Robert Mendelsohn, MD’s Confessions of a Medical Heretic points out, doctors have become like priests in our culture. We trust them with out lives. Major media feed the trust, because they depend on the advertising dollars of pharmaceutical conglomerates. I tried to tell my dad a little of this, but he did not believe me. I also told him there was another way – more honest and integral. But again he couldn’t believe me. It involved too deep a cultural shock. I was never adorned with long-flowing white hospital vestments. Nor did I wear a stethoscope (symbolic of the mechanical worldview) like a priest or nun wears a cross over his chest. Also I never hung any MD diploma on my office wall, the seal of final bestowed-upon revelation that one “knows” what one’s talking about. My dad was definitely an unquestioning old-school believer. His first caretaker was just as much. She as blindly followed the allopathic prescriptions, chemically polluting her own body’s interior until she finally died in her young 50′s.

THE IMPORTANCE OF FATHER’S DAY

Father’s Day is for me a most vital time to remember a priceless inheritance. Financially his inheritance was zilch. Spiritually it was worth more than a trillion dollars.

AND MORE

At the same time each Father’s Day reminds me that we must be both loving of and very critical of the lessons of old – of our parents and teachers. We really need entirely new worldviews. Thousands of years ago, the very deepest of authentic spiritual traditions (Daoist, Essene, Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, etc) did not have to face head on the invention of atomic weapons or the proliferation of chemical/genetic pollution or the consciousness-pollution of the underlying math-bound, mechanical vision of nature. It takes really new-borne skills to see through so vast a cosmically-stretched deception. With that deception, we synthetically reconstruct our bodies and surrounding nature accordingly. Countless species have become extinct as a result.

NEVER AGAIN

The rally cry after the Holocaust was “Never Again.” On a new front, we should not passively follow our parents steps to creating the present non-sustainable eco-holocaustic world . No doubt my children will concur, even if in very different ways. As Bill Crosby once said: “If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right.”

My dear dad, bless him, gave me little “clever guidance.” I could never discuss differential or integral calculus, a balance sheet or income statement, or any ivory-tower philosophical paradox. But my dad could speak to me of the truths of his heart, and that is a rare language to master. For he imparted thereby a wisdom of the soul. As a father he thus did better than most. I feel honored that he was my father in spirit. I will continue to miss him constantly.

RE-NAVIGATING

At the same time, I know he shall remain a shining example to me in some ways but not in all ways. We need new levels of deepest wisdom of both heart and mind united to nowadays navigate so many deceptive and treacherous eco-health minefields and “deadly mind-fields” of our times. Otherwise there may not be endless future generations to honor a Father’s Day.

Featured, HEALING US, Vegan Diet

POWERFUL REASONS TO GO VEGAN – Part I

No Comments 20 June 2010

CRUELTY REASONS

Due to economic, profit-squeezing forces, industrialized factory-farming has become ever more cruel. The inhumanity to animals is far worse than we might imagine. There is a systemic denial that animals are sentient beings with great sensitivity to pain, intelligence, complex personalities, , and often rich social organizations in the drive to nurture and preserve life. It is amazing that we call ourselves an advanced civilization when we so cruelly mistreat other creatures. The tragedy is that this is done not due to severe hunger or dietary necessity. It is a good idea to watch the animal cruelty videos of the PETA website. It can remind us that with each meal we either add to or reduce the level of animal cruelty in our world.

PIGS - They are housed in pens that are little more than 6 ft square. Pigs are in metal cages so narrow they can’t turnaround. The animals are treated as if they are machines in a factory, not living organisms. Living in metal or concrete pens, they experience a stench that is overwhelming.

CHICKENS – The chicken birds in such crowded conditions have their beaks cut from a third to a half the length in order to prevent pecking each other. Some chickens cannot eat afterwards and starve to death. Also when so densely crowded together, the chicks let out and live amid vast amounts of excrement. This creates a high level of ammonia which in turn burns the bird’s eyes, skin and respiratory tracts. This cruelty reminds me of my Aunt’s life, and as she went partly blind while in a concentration camp in Germany. We treat our animals with the same level of complete disrespect for life.

EGG-LAYING HENS – They are crowded in less than 1/2 square foot of space so that many hens die of asphyxiation and dehydration. When sent to slaughter due to low production, may have broken bones because their frames have become so under-nourished and fragile.

COWS – From 1940 to 2008, average per-cow milk production rose from 2 to 10 tons per year. This is often due to artificial and unhealthy use of hormones as well as milking done more efficiently by factory machines, not by hand. If the production drops, the calves are slaughtered immediately, usually at 5-6 years of age (about 1/4th of their lifespan). Female calves are not allowed to nurse their young. Male caves may be slaughtered soon after birth. A few may be raised as veal, chained for life on 2-3 ft neck chain.

TRANSPORT – Animals crammed together to endure extreme temperatures, and standing in their own feces for days, hundreds of thousands of such animals die during transport each year. The animals are also prodded with electric shock guns until the animals become so weak they cannot stand. “Downers” are moved via forklifts and loaders off the transport trucks – in states that are dead or nearly dead.

SLAUGHTER – Free-ranged or factory-farmed, the animal is slaughtered. First federal law requires stunning. This can involve a pistol that shoots a bolt pointed to the animals head. Or it can involve an electric stun that produces grand mal seizures before the throat is cut. It can take a half hour to turn a live steer into a steak. The cattle are supposed to be dead before the slaughter process starts, but often the animals are alive half way through the slaughtering. After being stunned, birds are put into tanks of hot water to soften their hides for skinning. Because the stunning may not kill the birds, they die boiled or drowned to death. Birds with broken legs and wings are often hung and mutilated while still alive.

Continued in Part II with health, nutritional, environmental and other reasons and inspirations.

Diet and Nutrition, Featured, HEALING US, Vegan Diet

POWERFUL REASONS TO GO VEGAN – PART II

1 Comment 19 June 2010

HEALTH & NUTRITIONAL REASONS TO GO VEGAN
According to the American Dietetic Association, vegetarians have less obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancers. Studies of vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists have confirmed this along with the massive China Study. You can get a synopsis of this study by subscribing to our newsletter. If you think that a vegan diet lacks adequate nutrients or proteins, think again. See the Great Protein Myth article by Steve Pavlina.

ENVIRONMENTAL REASONS TO GO VEGAN
The way animals are raised in factory farms is not only cruel to animals and harmful to the health of our bodies. It is also highly destructive to our environment. A good book on the subject is Diet for a New American by John Robbins, heir to the Baskin Robbins fortune who turned against his parents’ industry. Animal factory farming is the single largest contributor to global warming and produces more greenhouse gases, according to a 2006 UN study, than all SUVs, cars, trucks, planes and ships combined. Ground and water pollution from intense and large factory farming operations (their sewage and drug disposal) similarly impacts the surface of our planet.

According to Dr. David Brubaker, PhD, at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for a Livable Future, “The way that we breed animals for food is a threat to the planet. It pollutes our environment while consuming huge amounts of water, grain, petroleum, pesticides and drugs. The results are disastrous.” This also means that each meal we eat will greatly impact global warming and surface pollution of our planet.

OTHER REASONS & INSPIRATION TO GO VEGAN

For still more inspirations for going vegan, see Why Vegan Stories

ENVIRONMENTAL HEALING, Featured

GREATEST THREATS TO OUR PLANET – PART I

No Comments 18 June 2010

The following seem to be the greatest threats to our planet or the survival of life thereon – atomic weapons, chemical pollution (derivatively global warming) and bioengineering. The effects of nanotechnology also loom on the horizon.Imagine that the common source of these manifestations is inner, namely our adopting and being guided by a mechanical vision of nature.

POSITIVE USES OF THE MECHANICAL
If I envision, create, manufacture and distribute a machine it may have many salient or healthy uses. Machines are mechanical in nature. They can thus help us replace mechanical chores. The Industrial Revolution helped abolish slavery. In this context, a mechanical chore is generally not uplifting, requires little conscious attention, is repetitive and thus anathema to life. The “double negative” of using a mechanical machine to negate or undue a mechanical human or animal chore (cars replacing horses and oxes) creates a positive for life. Early on in the Industrial Revolution the majority of scientists invented machines to enhance factory and farm production.

HOW THE SAME MECHANICAL VIEW CAN LEAD TO A THREATENING OF LIFE
Inventing factory machines gave a sense of on-going progress. But this was only a very superficial application of a much larger cosmic view. In generally, double negatives only tend to produce superficial and non-depth positives. They are not full or integral positives. We see this in allopathic medicine when we cut away a toxic tumor which only treats a condition without getting at the cause. The same happens with the mechanical view overall. It can be applied to undo something anathema in our lives without more deeply nurturing life itself. Secondly, the early invention of machines had but limited impacts on the condition of human life. Marx and Engels noted some of the impacts as the basis for critiquing capitalism. But early socialists were as fervent advocates of the Industrial Revolution as their opposing capitalists, just offering a relatively superficial change (altering who owns the means of capital or production). Thus the destruction of our planet’s environment proceeded, it seems, as much behind as in front of the iron curtain. It was not until the middle of the 20th century that the same mechanical vision was applied on a far deeper level, primarily via chemistry and physics, and at the very end of the 20th century via biotechnology. The 17th century’s mechanical vision had thus impacted us all and all over the planet, and in ever more seriously life-threatening ways. It was Rachel Carson who first noted this very stirringly in the 1960′s. This was when the chemical revolution’s impact first became widely noticeable. This also gave birth to the environmental movement.

WHAT IS THE ESSENCE OF THE MECHANICAL VIEW?
To answer this question it is important to know what is the essence of “mechanicality.” Machines, unlike living flesh, are made of separate and interchangeable parts. These are often made using hardened steel or plastic – to cause them to be resistant to influences. The tick-tock sound of a clock (with the hands of the clock moving in separate stepped ways – is symbolic of the essential separative-parts identity of machines. What imparts to machines that pervasive identity? The answer is simple. It is the symbols that design and envision the nature of machines. They are at the foundation of the mechanical view and these are none other than the symbols of mathematics. All specific symbols have some unique identity. All symbols gain some unique identity because they are mental pointing tools. What do math symbols point to best in our consciousness? What is their guiding bias? A careful analysis shows that they function as universal symbols for how to separate all elements of consciousness. This is why they so universally used to design machines made of an endless array of separate parts. What does this have to do with threatening life on earth?

FROM SUPERFICIALLY POSITIVE TO DEEPLY NEGATIVE/THREATENING
What happens when we cut something apart with a knife (as in separating the halves of an orange)? Two internal surfaces simply appear. This is symbolic of the close link between what is separative (mechanical) and surface appearing. Thus allopathic medicine has positive uses in emergency medicine (the surface moments of time) plus in fixing anything mechanical like a broken bone in a car accident. The Industrial Revolution and subsequent technologies created a superficial ( illusionary or surface true) sense of progress. But the question remains, what is also happening on the deeper levels.

Continued in Part II – Here we discuss how the same vision can threaten life on earth and how we can change or cure that effect.

Featured, HEALING US

GREATEST SOURCE OF THREATS TO OUR PLANET – PART II

No Comments 16 June 2010

This is a continuing of Part I which explains the greatest threat to our planet comes from within.

THE THREAT OF A UNIVERSALLY MECHANICAL VISION OF NATURE
Understanding this threat involves a deep understanding of what is life and consciousness in nature. Try to ask a physicist or chemist what is “life” and you may not get a clear answer within the context of a math-based vision of nature. Thus imagine instead we look outside that quantified vision to find that life is really the concentrated presence of consciousness. To deepen this sense, we can watch the famous National Geographic film on Planet Earth. It showcases that the vast variety of living species on our planet all have one thing in common - an alive awareness of their surroundings and inner conditions. This is true whether we are talking about micro-organisms, ants or elephants and dinosaurs.

THIS BEGS THE QUESTION
But this begs the question, what is this “consciousness” that defines life so universally? Imagine something extraordinary, that “consciousness:” could be the principle of CONNECTION itself in nature. What would happen then is the following. Laws of nature, especially laws of cause and effect, or how event A connects or ties together with event B in nature would ultimately have to be consciousness based. The mathematical view, which claims to define the laws of nature and helps to create machines or bring out the mechanical could then be pointing to something other than that essence of both life and consciousness in nature. This is because math symbols very precisely abstract the SEPARATION of all elements of consciousness. Could that viewpoint then be moving our awareness away from, opposing or undermining the veru essence of consciousness and of life itself? This would happen only if a math-bound application penetrated nature on deep levels – as chemistry and nuclear weapons do – and not merely via everyday salient measuring by a ruler or numbering or counting of things.

HOW THIS COMES ABOUT
When we green the exterior of our school campuses, lets say by not using herbicides on lawns or by putting solar panels in place, hardly anyone ever hints that we much more urgently need to green our interior landscapes - most especially the core of our modern vision of nature itself, the mathematical/mechanical. Mathematics begins with the number one, the universal separate whole. We can count one thought, feeling, impression, widget, apple, person or “one” anything else. This has a potentially universal reach. Now if you apply a mathematical view on the surface of life, that application becomes appropriate and even positive. When you apply the same vision deeply, past the surface or superficial level and to replace consciousness-connective threads of life, you begin to threaten life on earth. Why? Because you are undermining the essence of life rather than objectively, as physics and chemistry claim, “discovering the laws of nature.” This happens not just here and there or haphazardly. It happens in a global or again universal way. This is exactly why the modern world is beginning to experience three main frontiers that threaten all of life – again atomic weapons, chemical pollution and bioengineering. Subsidiary frontiers include the commercial development of raw land and also new nano-technologies. The operating principles is the same – the attempt to dismember the consciousness-connected, living threads of nature.

A GLOBAL MIND CHANGE
That nearly 1/4th of all species on earth are threatened with extinction is a reality, and few seem to know why. Here we propose that the cause is inner and lodged at the very core of our collective inner life. Nature gave us obligingly a right and left hemisphere to see the world with and to tune into its dual or split consciousness. One can read many books on the traits of our split brain, but they essentially boil down to just two – one side of our brain expertly sees the universe in a more connective/holistic/intuitive way and the other in a more separative/reductionist/logical way (detailed, cut-apart, step-by-step). This amounts to what I consider a first duality of consciousness itself, defined by a moving away or to the underlying connective essence or oneness of consciousness.

ROLE OF THE MATHEMATICAL
Thus the mathematical view, not accidentally, is one of two pinnacle views. It brings our awareness to left-brain heights. If then we are solely left-brain dominant, it appears that a “structurally-separative reality” is the only true view of reality. The world appears to be made of separate physical objects, with the beginning and end points of separation defined using mathematics. Actually we need both sides of our brain to see whole and the right-brain dominant view is the better for this purpose. This means the mathematical view needs to become subordinate and recessive.

WHY THIS ROLE
This is derivative of the fact that one cannot really connect anything unless something else is first separate. At the same time if something at hand is whole and needs to be separated it must first be so connected. Life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, connection and separation are thus intertwined in some underlying oneness or continuum. Now should we start with a knife or glue if our aim is to connect things together? The best way to bring elements of consciousness together is thus not via our sharpest, most precise consciousness separation tools. This is so obvious and yet missed. What this means, in common practice, is that we need our right brain (connective consciousness) to overall guide the healing or reconnection of our depths, and rather than separative consciousness which best guides a cutting apart of the same. This has profound and earth-shaking applications and implications, especially to anything impacting the sustainability of life and consciousness, its healing or non-healing, to its nurturing or destruction in ourselves and our environment.

ADVOCATING A LIFE-CENTERED VISION OF NATURE
At the core of our philosophy of raw-wisdom is thus a right-brain dominant orientation. Underneath the surface veils, we can experience a right-brain seen and connected ocean of consciousness. This is an alternative to a universe seen (per physics, chemistry and biotechnology) as math-defined in terms of again separate matter plus energy (with “energy” often defined via various releases through disintegration of matter. An example of the latter in the modern worldview is the result of an engine’s combustion or the burning of calories within living cells). Imagine on a deeper level the principles of life and consciousness rule, forming the core laws of nature - and not principles of mechanicality, death. machine-parts-quantification are what we need to focus on. For when you cut any living organism apart it dies. When we dismember a whole living ecology, like a rainforest, the same happens. Life dies. When you disassemble a car, by contrast, you can still put the car back together again to operate, to “live” mechanically. Universalizing the mechanical view is thus something not well-taken in a living environment. For as we ever more universalize that mechanical orientation, we really can materialize death all around us and within. This is why, I believe, we now experience ever growing species extinctions as well as epidemics of “consciousness illnesses”- like diabetes with neuropathy, or cancer with unfelt metastasis, or Alzheimer’s disease with a disconnected mind and absent awareness.

A RESCUING APPROACH
It is not easy to extricate ourselves from the more dire conditions of modern living. However we can extricate ourselves inevitably via a deep inner approach to these crises and challenges. This refers to making a global or universal mind change, one that ultimately involves a shift from a death-centered to a life-centered vision of nature. In its details this Healingtalks blog may appear mostly to be about replacing allopathic medical approaches with holistic and organic ones. But in its core essence it is also about a shift in worldviews which heals first our collective consciousness or vision - offering the most practical, enlightened and powerful ways to essentially bring life and consciousness out of the bosom of nature (including physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually) – and to ever higher levels for the well-being of each other and our planet.

Diet and Nutrition, Featured, Superfoods

ON THE SUBJECT OF SUPERFOODS – PART I

No Comments 15 June 2010

INTRODUCTION
I am much in favor of using superfoods into a prudent diet. Any concentrated food nutrient needs to be rotated in the diet rather than depended upon. Our commercial society tends to support dependence, as in multi-marketing monthly buying programs for a single product. What the body really needs is a rainbow-variety of food that change over time.

FOOD ANALYSIS
The suffix “lysis” refers to taking things apart and yet what is most important is that we eat whole foods, not just concentrated separate nutrients. Foods are said to contain first macronutrients. A “macronutrient” is something we consume in large quantities – such as water, fats, carbohydrates and protein. The term may refer to minerals we ingest in large quantities – such as salts (sodium and chloride), calcium, magnesium, phosphorous and sulfur. In addition vitamins can be had in considerable dosages. Foods also are said to contain micronutrients such as trace minerals, including copper, iron, silicon and so on. These nutritional concepts are at the foundation of conventional nutritional understanding. Their presumed objectivity leans on the chemical model of nature, which in turn leans on the mathematical view of the cosmos. I have long disputed the objectivity of that larger view.

OUR ALTERNATIVE APPROACH
Readers of HealingTalks know I offer a revolutionary critique of the mechanical approach to nature and at the same time outline a life-centered or non-mechanical vision. In my opinion, the mechanical view of Galileo, Descartes and Newton (all 17th century philosophers) used dominantly to understand nature ends up corrupting insights in the healing arts. If I make a chemical analysis of water, for example, it fails to reveal why H2O brings out life and plant consciousness from a seed. That knowledge belongs, for me, to a different vision. Knowing what life and consciousness is in nature allows one to focus on eliciting that life and consciousness – rather than mostly the designs of machines.

RELEVANCE TO THE HEALING ARTS
Imagine that at the core of life is consciousness and that consciousness is the principle of connection itself in nature. Being the most purely connective principle, it is not reducible to any separate parts. If there is such a thing as a universal principle of connection in nature, then it becomes the foundation for nature’s oneness (universal connection). Since healing has to do with connection and reconnection (as when a wound reconnects seamlessly) then deep healing also involves becoming whole physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, merging mind, emotions, and spirits. Thus love is a real medicine. Love is a connective emotion. Thus within, the most powerful guide for healing ourselves becomes a veering toward positive, loving emotions in our hearts and towards an overall changed worldview that fosters connective consciousness.

HOW TO HEAL
To heal is really to bring out life and consciousness. Thus the principles of the machine (mathematical designs) are not what we want to bring out to heal. Yet at the foundation of all opathic medical practice is the use of drugs, surgery and radiation. If you want to become a proficient mechanic learn mechanical principles. But if you want heal yourself or any living organism, a different model and direction is needed. In my opinion, the root reason is that our mechanical worldview connects with the surface truths but not piercing many deep truths of nature. The mechanical principles of biology (as in biotech), chemistry and physics are nevertheless what pre-med students centrally must learn to guide their later healing arts. Even the vast majority of alternative practitioners justify alternative therapies using mechanical models . This leads to little fundamental change occurring in our culture. We observe this especially with the science of nutrition becoming increasingly reductionist or more focused on smaller concentrated parts, chemically defined.

How does this relate to superfoods and the use of supplements? See the continuation of this article in PART II.

Diet and Nutrition, Featured, Superfoods

ON THE SUBJECT OF SUPERFOODS – PART II

No Comments 14 June 2010

I respect the study, pursuit and use of superfoods, like wheatgrass, with concentrated healing properties. At the same time, this can be overdone. A balanced diet and using diverse ways to bring in the living forces and take out the death forces (as discussed in Part III) is all of yet greater importance. The commercialization of superfoods has sometimes led to exaggerated and overemphasized, if not misleading claims . So one just needs to sift through the information with prudence to keep the golden kernels and get rid of the chaff.

HOW THE MECHANICAL VIEW FAILS IN THE FIELD OF NUTRITION
Over time the science of nutrition has become little more than a chemical analysis of foods. This is a left-brain dominant view whose focus is on what I call separative consciousness and where the highest paradigm is mathematics (symbols of consciousness-separation) - which yields the chemical view. It has become ever more reductionist (looking at smaller and smaller separate components in a dis-integrative, non-connective, non-whole and unwise way). This is not cured by relinking all the separate elements back together mathematically or via chemical definitions. In nutrition we keep adding to a growing list of tinier and smaller micronutrients defined chemically. Lost sight of are overviewing holistic principles, like eating whole and living foods. There is a long list of similar principles lost sight of because we drown our consciousness in a mechanical view of nature. A chemical analysis might show the same carbon or nitrogen in a whole living food because it doesn’t consider the presence of life as “mathematically” significant. Chemistry uses fire as a subtle sword to breakdown the distinguishing of elements that then can be measured in a lab. But fire destroys life. The chemical/mechanical and living orientations thus do not reach the same conclusions.

PHYTONUTRIENTS
In this context, phyto means plant. The growing list of organic micro-nutrients that are laboratory-discovered via mathematical measurements are called phytonutrients. Among them are arotenoids, flavonoids, phytates, lignans, isothiocynates, indoles, phenols, saponins, sulfides, thiols, and terpenes. The more we study these separately-lab-distinguished elements, the more we need to rely on technicians to guide us or misguide us.We are often misdirected, confused and lost. True healing begins actually with a simplicity, reunifying of our mind and consciousness, not an increasingly dis-integrative perspective.

CONSEQUENCES THROUGH A MARRIAGE OF SCIENCE & COMMERCE
There is a natural marriage of the mechanical/reductionist view of nature with price-tagging and with three primary consequences.

A gradual deadening of foods – When something has a fixed (consciousness-separative) identity, it can be patented and branded as with bioengineered foods. Something otherwise living and ever changing can now be owned separately by a corporation or individual. It will hold its commercial, dollar, mathematical (separative-consciousness) value. This is why we preserve foods. We create commercial value or shelf-death better known as shelf-life. Walk into most convenience stores at local gas stations and 99% of the foods there are preserved or deadened. This is part of what underlies an epidemic of obesity and chronic ailments when ingesting such foods.

Selling of addictive devitalized foods - For example, foods that are high in caffeine and sugar like the soft-dring Mountain Dew tend to sell more. To addict someone’s attention and consciousness is to separate out that inner state to buy a product – and what otherwise is more connected to the whole stream of life.

Corrupt information - When one is selling a product, one wants to create a bias, a partializing focus to , get and buy a product. Missing from the label may be the genetically modified ingredients or what is really in a “natural flavoring.” The problem permeates all approaches that are touched by our commercial society, whether conventional or alternative.

ADVENT OF SUPERFOOD DIETS
Back in 2004, a book called Superfoods Rx popularized the term. A “superfood” is rich or has a concentrated number of what are called phytonutrients. They are partly a by-product of increased reductionism in the midst of a commercial society. A whole industry has sprung up as a result, much like the vitamin industry in the 1960′s. The positive is that we are trying to get the best of nutrition using whole food ingredients rather than separate pills with synthetic chemical ingredients. The negative is that we can go overboard, overusing exotic foods with high levels or one or another isolated micro-nutrient, when sometimes is not necessarily better, and where that approach alone may not sufficient to get optimal healing. Also transporting some of these exotic foods can help to pollute our planet. So its great to add a superfood every now and then. But don’t make it the foundation of your diet – losing sight of more holistic principles like whether your foods are whole, organic, living, locally-grown, bio-available, eaten in moderation with a rotating diet.

CONTINUED IN PART III. This discusses alternative principles for Super Nutrition for healing the body as a whole, and not based on super-isolates.

110,000	60,500
	supplement food	Medium	110,000	60,500
	food and nutrients	Low	110,000	74,000
	food nutrients	Low	110,000	74,000
	organic shops	Low	110,000	60,500
	diet and supplements	Medium	110,000	74,000
	organic health stores	Low	110,000	74,000
	organic health food stores	Low	110,000	74,000
	organic health store	Low	110,000	74,000
	organic health food store	Low	110,000	74,000
	food health organic store	Low	110,000	74,000
	foods online	Medium	110,000	49,500
	foods and nutrients	Low	90,500	60,500
	nutrition health food	Medium	90,500	49,500
	health food nutrition	Medium	90,500	49,500
	whole foods stores	Low	90,500	90,500
	is organic food healthy	Medium	90,500	49,500
	organic food is healthy	Medium	90,500	49,500
	organic healthy food	Medium	90,500	49,500
	organic food healthy	Medium	90,500	49,500
	healthy organic food	Medium	90,500	49,500
	healthy nutrition food	Medium	90,500	49,500
	shop organic food	Low	90,500	60,500
	organic food shop	Low	90,500	60,500
	vitamins & minerals	Medium	90,500	40,500
	vitamins and minerals	Medium	90,500	40,500
	organic food shops	Low	90,500	60,500
	whole food stores	Low	90,500	90,500
	natural supplements for	High	90,500	60,500
	foods and vitamins	Medium	90,500	40,500
	whole foods meals	Low	90,500	60,500
	foods with vitamins	Medium	90,500	40,500
	vitamins and foods	Medium	90,500	40,500
	vitamins foods	Medium	90,500

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© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/151186/

What is wrong with the mathematical view
representing and altering the essence of life

Abominable nursing homes, Big Pharm profit-centers,
where innocent patients are drugged

Nathan Batalion
Certified Traditional Naturopath