Cause for Rampant Afflictions Our Grandparents Never Had
"I have never met a parent willing to sacrifice their child for the good of the herd. The vaccines have become more important than the child. It is time to stop allowing our children to be used as pharmaceutical pincushions. It is time to demand transparency in the tight relationship between pharmaceutical profits and government vaccine mandates."
- Allison MacNeil
If you mixed mercury, aluminum phosphate, ammonium sulphate, and formaldehyde, then got a syringe and injected it into your child, you would be arrested and sent to jail for child endangerment and abuse. Then why is it legal for a doctor to do it? And why would you let them [inject your child with a vaccine that contains these elements]?
- Facebook anti-vaccine poster
Almost everyone has opinion about why children need to get so many vaccinations these days--one count says 49 inoculations of 14 different vaccines
in one area, others say more--and those are before a child enters the first grade of school. Most centre around two claims:
(1) Each vaccine prevents a child from getting a disease;
(2) Each vaccine helps the pharmaceutical company that made it increase its annual sales exponentially (customers) and to provide capital to develop more health vaccine safeguards (companies).
In a sense, both are correct. Yet both miss the most important point about childhood vaccines. Vaccines are meant to tweak the immune system, gently, to produce antibodies that will ward off attack by their respective diseases in the future.
In trying to protect our children from having any harm come to them, we overprotect them. We don’t want anything bad to happen to them. Harm happens anyway, but not in ways we expect or understand.
We don’t allow our kids to go out with other children on the streets because we believe it’s too dangerous out there. So we keep them home, give them video games, iPads and television to keep them busy because today’s parents don’t have any more time to devote to playing with their kids than parents of previous generations. In some areas it’s even illegal for kids to play in the street.
We watch them get fat. We don’t see them fail to develop social and emotional skills children always did by playing with other kids. We focus on the intellectual and physical development we know more about.
We see them--some of them--develop autism, allergies their grandparents knew hardly anything about, diseases such as asthma that were extremely rare a couple of generations ago, and put it down to modern life in the city.
Families of some school children have been told to not feed peanuts or peanut butter to the kids in case they touch a child with a dangerous peanut allergy, at school, and that child dies. One news story even had a US school banning kids who have eaten peanut butter in case the child breathes on another child with a peanut allergy.
We don’t understand why our children become obese (about one-third of them), why they don’t have interests we had as kids or why they develop health problems that we rare or almost unknown until recent decades. And why they have more problems getting along with their peers than any previous generation.
One thing that affects each of us every day of our lives is our immune system. Yet we know so little about it. We take the word of our family doctors that we should protect ourselves--flu and other vaccines for adults and dozens of vaccines for our kids--so that we will be protected from terrible diseases.
Setting aside the great debate about whether or not these vaccines do more harm than good, let’s look at one of the fundamentals of our own bodies.
Our immune systems protect us from diseases and help to cure us when we get one. Do we actually protect ourselves by getting needles? Remember, many of us believe those commercials that tell us we should rid our mouths of "germs" (bacteria and other microbes), despite the fact that good bacteria in our mouths are our first line of defence against disease. Does that make sense? We do the same thing with our immune systems.
The whole purpose of a long childhood for humans--far longer than the development periods of most other animals--is to prepare us for adulthood. We need that long to prepare. That includes our immune systems.
Our immune system, like other body systems, is not designed to be eased into adulthood. We don’t gain strength by pushing open swinging doors and pulling on our socks, but by working our muscles, sometimes very hard. We don’t gain intellectual strength by spoon feeding our brain with facts and ideas from television, but by forcing ourselves to think our way through difficult problems.
And we don’t develop a robust immune system by easing it along with regular vaccinations. In the past, our ancestors got sick and their immune systems had to work extremely hard just to help them recover. They did, and in the process they became stronger, more immune to disease attack, and overall healthier.
Yes, some children died. That’s the hook pharmaceutical companies use to get us to buy their vaccines. We don’t want our kids to die, so we administer all sorts of chemicals we know nothing about, hoping to save them. School age kids didn’t die in huge numbers in the past, as we have been misled to believe by Big Pharma.
Immune systems that are fed regularly in childhood with vaccines never have to work very hard. Without thinking about it much, that seems lovely. When we examine it, an easy life for the immune system in childhood means a major body function looking for work has nothing much to find.
So what does it do? For one thing, it develops allergies so it has some work to do. It develops asthma, which is basically a form of allergy. Allergies are, in effect, the body attacking itself. It doesn’t have diseases to fight, so it fights itself. Like a cat chasing its own tail, only the cat knows enough not to bite hard. Our immune system is not allowed to develop enough to learn that.
Our bodies are designed to work hard. When they don’t, they find other ways to work. Muscles that don’t have much physical work to do, as those of our ancestors did, find themselves having to tote around far more body weight than in the past. Some of that comes from increased height, some from more fat.
Young brains that find themselves understimulated by lockstep lessons in school find other forms of stimulation, such as with drugs and video games. They want excitement, which is the brain’s backup plan when other opportunities for stimulation don’t present themselves.
Adults that have relatively safe and anxiety-free daytime lives may have overly exciting dreams. Even the brain needs to work hard, at something useless at night if not something productive or dangerous during the daytime.
While it is certainly true that some children died from childhood diseases in the past, was that not a form of natural selection, the process by which those with certain weaknesses or inability to adapt to certain environmental conditions die out? Yes, that seems harsh, but it may be true.
By feeding young children so many vaccines, we may be condemning them to a lifetime of weak health. Of dependence on doctors and medicines. Yes, medicines made by the very same companies that convinced us and our governments and education systems that it was the healthy thing to do to give our young children vaccines.
By feeding our kids dozens of vaccines, pharmaceutical companies develop lifelong customers. A close examination of the health care industry shows that their plan is working. Today’s parents raise patients, not healthy young children.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow healthy children, not mentally and physically health-hampered kids.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Showing posts with label health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
What’s The Real Cause for Climate Change?
What’s The Real Cause for Climate Change?
"Wasted milk in the U.K. has the same carbon footprint as emissions from 20,000 cars"
- study by the University of Edinburgh, published in Nature Climate Change
We have a natural tendency to blame everything that goes wrong, first of all, on the behaviour of others. A look through human history at sacrifices and executions shows that if someone were not killed because others believed the person’s blame for something, people believed that the behaviour of actually sacrificing a life would solve the problem.
We want someone to blame. When weather patterns began to go screwy, with winters being cold enough to kill people and summers hot enough to cause others to expire, we looked around for someone to point the finger at.
In the case of climate change, as it came to be known after we gave up on "global warming" because some places got colder, the first cause was deemed to be "greenhouse gases" and the greatest emitters vehicles driven by us.
While generally speaking people know more about weather today than people before us did, what we know little about is the history of weather and how climate changes. We--many of us--assumed that climate and weather had never changed radically before in history.
Those of us who believed that were mistaken. Barely 160 years ago the northern hemisphere ended a period referred to in history as "the Little Ice Age." That had lasted for 400 years.
What would you expect to happen at the end of an ice age? Of course, the northern part of the planet warmed up. It’s still warming. Climatologists (the honest and older ones) will tell you that climate cycles back and forth over the years, it never remains the same.
We can blame the warming on vehicle emissions and the Industrial Revolution, but ice ages have always ended by themselves, without human intervention, including with tail pipes.
Vehicles that burn fossil fuels do emit greenhouse gases into the air. This accounts for about 10 percent of what we add. Car manufacturers work to improve the fuel consumption in their vehicles. But why? To satisfy regulations in places such as the state of California.
I recently bought aftermarket (and "exotic") air filters for two cars. I tested both and found dramatic improvements in fuel consumption, meaning I have to buy gasoline less often and the cars emit less greenhouse gases. Have such filters ever been found installed on stock vehicles right from the manufacturing plant? No.
Jet airplanes account for almost as much greenhouse gas in a year as all the cars (about 8%). No government has suggested grounding planes.
Among the worst contributors to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are power generating stations, many of which are owned by governments and all of which fall under government regulations. They add about 25% of all the gases. While there has been much talk of closing the coal-fired stations, the worst emitters, few have actually shut down.
In Japan, where most of the power used in the country before the tsunami came from nuclear generating stations, virtually every station has been closed since the tragedy at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear station. Nuclear power generation produces almost no greenhouse gas emissions.
Getting back to the wasted milk in our opening quote, that "wasted" means milk that was never used for anything to do with food consumption. Down the drain, so to speak. The study says that 360,000 tonnes of milk is wasted in the U.K. each year. Wasted.
Yet greenhouse gases resulted from use of fertilizers that produced the food to feed the cows and the cows themselves contributed a shocking amount of methane (far worse than carbon dioxide) into the air, plus there was fuel needed to transport the milk to the drains it eventually went down.
The study, titled "Global agriculture and nitrous oxide emissions," also claims that if the British were to reduce their consumption of chicken to the level of the Japanese (26 kg down to 12 kg per person per year), that would dramatically reduce nitrous oxide emissions (emitted by soil and fertilizers) by 20%.
"Eating less meat and wasting less food can play a big part in helping to keep a lid on greenhouse gas emissions as the world's population increases," according to study leader Dr. David Reay.
Meanwhile, as the effects of the Little Ice Age ending fade and those who know about it die off, we can expect to be blamed for climate change according to our behaviour.
We can also expect to hear very little about the 300,000 chemicals that industries pour into public waterways each year. And the nearly half a million chemicals that industries chuff into the air we breathe. Who would tell us? Not the industries themselves.
As we learn about dramatic increases in diabetes, COPD (and other lung diseases) and allergies in our children, we must remember that those industries provide jobs. They could provide even more jobs if they stopped putting poisons into our air and water, but we shouldn’t count on hearing much about that either.
We are told that greenhouse gas emissions are largely responsible for the warming of the planet by a tiny amount. We are not told that industries are poisoning our air and water, harming our health and causing drug manufacturers to make fortunes every day.
As individuals, we can’t do much about the rising temperature of our atmosphere. Industries know that. We could do something about the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. They know that too. But they don’t want us to know.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents to help grow kids who will contribute to their communities instead of bringing them suffering and harm.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
"Wasted milk in the U.K. has the same carbon footprint as emissions from 20,000 cars"
- study by the University of Edinburgh, published in Nature Climate Change
We have a natural tendency to blame everything that goes wrong, first of all, on the behaviour of others. A look through human history at sacrifices and executions shows that if someone were not killed because others believed the person’s blame for something, people believed that the behaviour of actually sacrificing a life would solve the problem.
We want someone to blame. When weather patterns began to go screwy, with winters being cold enough to kill people and summers hot enough to cause others to expire, we looked around for someone to point the finger at.
In the case of climate change, as it came to be known after we gave up on "global warming" because some places got colder, the first cause was deemed to be "greenhouse gases" and the greatest emitters vehicles driven by us.
While generally speaking people know more about weather today than people before us did, what we know little about is the history of weather and how climate changes. We--many of us--assumed that climate and weather had never changed radically before in history.
Those of us who believed that were mistaken. Barely 160 years ago the northern hemisphere ended a period referred to in history as "the Little Ice Age." That had lasted for 400 years.
What would you expect to happen at the end of an ice age? Of course, the northern part of the planet warmed up. It’s still warming. Climatologists (the honest and older ones) will tell you that climate cycles back and forth over the years, it never remains the same.
We can blame the warming on vehicle emissions and the Industrial Revolution, but ice ages have always ended by themselves, without human intervention, including with tail pipes.
Vehicles that burn fossil fuels do emit greenhouse gases into the air. This accounts for about 10 percent of what we add. Car manufacturers work to improve the fuel consumption in their vehicles. But why? To satisfy regulations in places such as the state of California.
I recently bought aftermarket (and "exotic") air filters for two cars. I tested both and found dramatic improvements in fuel consumption, meaning I have to buy gasoline less often and the cars emit less greenhouse gases. Have such filters ever been found installed on stock vehicles right from the manufacturing plant? No.
Jet airplanes account for almost as much greenhouse gas in a year as all the cars (about 8%). No government has suggested grounding planes.
Among the worst contributors to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are power generating stations, many of which are owned by governments and all of which fall under government regulations. They add about 25% of all the gases. While there has been much talk of closing the coal-fired stations, the worst emitters, few have actually shut down.
In Japan, where most of the power used in the country before the tsunami came from nuclear generating stations, virtually every station has been closed since the tragedy at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear station. Nuclear power generation produces almost no greenhouse gas emissions.
Getting back to the wasted milk in our opening quote, that "wasted" means milk that was never used for anything to do with food consumption. Down the drain, so to speak. The study says that 360,000 tonnes of milk is wasted in the U.K. each year. Wasted.
Yet greenhouse gases resulted from use of fertilizers that produced the food to feed the cows and the cows themselves contributed a shocking amount of methane (far worse than carbon dioxide) into the air, plus there was fuel needed to transport the milk to the drains it eventually went down.
The study, titled "Global agriculture and nitrous oxide emissions," also claims that if the British were to reduce their consumption of chicken to the level of the Japanese (26 kg down to 12 kg per person per year), that would dramatically reduce nitrous oxide emissions (emitted by soil and fertilizers) by 20%.
"Eating less meat and wasting less food can play a big part in helping to keep a lid on greenhouse gas emissions as the world's population increases," according to study leader Dr. David Reay.
Meanwhile, as the effects of the Little Ice Age ending fade and those who know about it die off, we can expect to be blamed for climate change according to our behaviour.
We can also expect to hear very little about the 300,000 chemicals that industries pour into public waterways each year. And the nearly half a million chemicals that industries chuff into the air we breathe. Who would tell us? Not the industries themselves.
As we learn about dramatic increases in diabetes, COPD (and other lung diseases) and allergies in our children, we must remember that those industries provide jobs. They could provide even more jobs if they stopped putting poisons into our air and water, but we shouldn’t count on hearing much about that either.
We are told that greenhouse gas emissions are largely responsible for the warming of the planet by a tiny amount. We are not told that industries are poisoning our air and water, harming our health and causing drug manufacturers to make fortunes every day.
As individuals, we can’t do much about the rising temperature of our atmosphere. Industries know that. We could do something about the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. They know that too. But they don’t want us to know.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents to help grow kids who will contribute to their communities instead of bringing them suffering and harm.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Why Cancer Deaths Have Dropped
Why Cancer Deaths Have Dropped
When you smoke you inhale up to 4000 chemicals [that do not naturally occur in tobacco].
- Canadian Cancer Society
Deaths in Canada from almost all kinds of cancer have decreased dramatically over the past decade or two. Both organizations that address cancer as their main mission and individual doctors with a direct interest in oncology attribute this drop to two main causes:
(1) a precipitous drop in the number of Canadians who smoke tobacco (except in the 16 to 24 year age range) in recent years;
(2) better testing, of more patients, that detects cancer in its early stages, making treatment and recovery highly likely.
A few years ago, the Canadian Cancer Society published a postcard sized handout that listed some of those 4000 chemicals that tobacco companies add to cigarettes. Some you would recognize, some may be new to you. You will likely wonder why it’s necessary for tobacco companies to add these to their products. You should. One thing for certain, we won’t learn the answers from the tobacco companies.
Please read the list carefully. Imagine anyone ingesting these chemicals every day of their life:
- acetone (paint stripper, poisonous, dangerous when inhaled)
- mercury
- lead
- benzene
- dimethylnitrosamine (a known carcinogen)
- nicotine (world’s most widely used addictive drug)
- cadmium (used in car batteries)
- carbon monoxide
- benzopyrene (carcinogen, even present in the cheapest forms of olive oil)
- vinyl chloride (makes PVC)
- hydrogen cyanide (used in chemical warfare, interferes with the body’s ability to utilize oxygen)
- aminobiphenyl (carcinogen)
- urethane (modern form of varnish)
- toluene (industrial solvent)
- arsenic (poison for white ants)
- dibenzacridine (listed as a hazardous material in workplaces)
- phenol (listed as a hazardous material in workplaces)
- DDT (insecticide)
Those who ingest these chemicals in effect are committing a slow form of suicide. Yet tobacco remains legal and little has been done by governments to force tobacco companies to remove these harmful additions from their products.
Along with earlier testing of patients for cancer, paid for in Canada by provincial health care programs, everyone in the medical community has actively encouraged patients to have the necessary tests.
In my personal case, my family doctor recommended a colonoscopy when I was in her examination room for another purpose. Subsequently, procedures by two gastroenterologists removed four slow growing tumours from my colon. My wife would have become a widow within a decade had the tumours not been removed.
I was informed that my tumours meant that my children should be examined similarly when they reach age 40. Colon cancer can run in families.
In turn, I encouraged my wife to have a colonoscopy. Over the past few months she has had two fast growing tumours removed from her colon. Without encouragement from me (and prior to that from my doctor to me), I would likely have become a widower within one year. One year.
My sister and parents all died years ago of cancer, almost certainly caused by smoking and in my mother’s case from inhaling second-hand smoke over many decades from my father, a heavy smoker. My sister became a heavy smoker during her failed marriage. Addictions of all kinds take hold in people who can’t cope with the constant stress and anxiety they experience.
My wife and I have encouraged her siblings to have colonoscopies soon. My wife’s father died of cancer many years ago. He did not smoke, but he did have a colon. At that time it was not considered wise for doctors to discuss cancer with the families of cancer patients (and victims), especially colon cancer because it happened in a part of the body nobody wanted to discuss openly.
We consider ourselves very lucky to have learned about this one kind of cancer in time.
A very close friend is dying of colon cancer as I write this. He didn’t know about getting tested in time. Even if he did, he likely would not have been tested because he believed that cancer hits others, but would not strike him down. It did.
This brings us to cancer prevention and cures. A cure is what a medical professional or other consultant does for you. Prevention is what you do for yourself. My mantra is: don’t concern yourself with fixing it after it’s broken, prevent it from happening in the first place.
Our bodies come already primed with up to 150 specific micro-locations in which cancer can grow. Most of them, in most of us, never blossom into full blown cancer. Why does it happen in some of us, but not all? As cancer takes many different forms in our bodies, we may assume that, like the common cold, it is almost impossible to stop. We may be wrong.
Most of us non-chemistry-loving folk have a clue about what acid is. Vinegar, for example, is an acid. So is the liquid in lead-acid batteries, as evidenced by clothing I have had to discard in the past because it developed acid holes from my careless handling of car batteries. We can consume some mild acids, while others will kill.
Ordinary drinking water is mildly acidic. Our bodies, being mostly composed of water, tend to be mildly acidic unless we undertake measures to counteract the acidic effects of water.
Cancer cells tend to develop and reproduce in an acidic environment.
Fruits and vegetables tend to be slightly alkaline, the opposite of acidic. We have been told to eat fruit and veggies for their nutrition and their anti-oxidant effect. Anti-oxidants float around our bloodstream corralling little buggers called free radicals, that left on their own will find cancer starting places and tickle them until they grow into cancer cells.
Cancer cells do not thrive in an alkaline environment. In fact, they tend to shrivel and die when our body is slightly alkaline. [The internet abounds with anecdotal examples of consuming alkaline substances curing cancer.]
In general, our bodies function in a more healthy manner when they are slightly alkaline. That is, when our pH level is slightly below the even or balance mark of 7 (on a scale from 0 to 14).
I will leave it to you to google the subject of pH (Potential Hydrogen, the way acidity or basicity is valued). As to possible alkaline therapies or body maintenance, only people in extreme need of immediate pH correction (“Help, I’m dying of cancer and don’t know what to do to save myself”) need to adopt unusual measures. Everyone should eat fresh fruit and veggies.
Hydrogen peroxide and baking soda (not baking powder) are known to be alkaline if you are looking for places to start searching.
In conclusion, I leave you with one thought about your health: if you are not in control of your own health by being fully informed about what you eat, drink and breathe in, you leave your health and your life in the control of large corporations that make pharmaceuticals that supposedly cure you and chemicals that poison the food you eat.
Ignorance is not pretty. It’s comforting for a while, but it never ends well if adopted as a lifestyle.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to raise children with enough life skills to help them survive a world filled with harmful influences.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
When you smoke you inhale up to 4000 chemicals [that do not naturally occur in tobacco].
- Canadian Cancer Society
Deaths in Canada from almost all kinds of cancer have decreased dramatically over the past decade or two. Both organizations that address cancer as their main mission and individual doctors with a direct interest in oncology attribute this drop to two main causes:
(1) a precipitous drop in the number of Canadians who smoke tobacco (except in the 16 to 24 year age range) in recent years;
(2) better testing, of more patients, that detects cancer in its early stages, making treatment and recovery highly likely.
A few years ago, the Canadian Cancer Society published a postcard sized handout that listed some of those 4000 chemicals that tobacco companies add to cigarettes. Some you would recognize, some may be new to you. You will likely wonder why it’s necessary for tobacco companies to add these to their products. You should. One thing for certain, we won’t learn the answers from the tobacco companies.
Please read the list carefully. Imagine anyone ingesting these chemicals every day of their life:
- acetone (paint stripper, poisonous, dangerous when inhaled)
- mercury
- lead
- benzene
- dimethylnitrosamine (a known carcinogen)
- nicotine (world’s most widely used addictive drug)
- cadmium (used in car batteries)
- carbon monoxide
- benzopyrene (carcinogen, even present in the cheapest forms of olive oil)
- vinyl chloride (makes PVC)
- hydrogen cyanide (used in chemical warfare, interferes with the body’s ability to utilize oxygen)
- aminobiphenyl (carcinogen)
- urethane (modern form of varnish)
- toluene (industrial solvent)
- arsenic (poison for white ants)
- dibenzacridine (listed as a hazardous material in workplaces)
- phenol (listed as a hazardous material in workplaces)
- DDT (insecticide)
Those who ingest these chemicals in effect are committing a slow form of suicide. Yet tobacco remains legal and little has been done by governments to force tobacco companies to remove these harmful additions from their products.
Along with earlier testing of patients for cancer, paid for in Canada by provincial health care programs, everyone in the medical community has actively encouraged patients to have the necessary tests.
In my personal case, my family doctor recommended a colonoscopy when I was in her examination room for another purpose. Subsequently, procedures by two gastroenterologists removed four slow growing tumours from my colon. My wife would have become a widow within a decade had the tumours not been removed.
I was informed that my tumours meant that my children should be examined similarly when they reach age 40. Colon cancer can run in families.
In turn, I encouraged my wife to have a colonoscopy. Over the past few months she has had two fast growing tumours removed from her colon. Without encouragement from me (and prior to that from my doctor to me), I would likely have become a widower within one year. One year.
My sister and parents all died years ago of cancer, almost certainly caused by smoking and in my mother’s case from inhaling second-hand smoke over many decades from my father, a heavy smoker. My sister became a heavy smoker during her failed marriage. Addictions of all kinds take hold in people who can’t cope with the constant stress and anxiety they experience.
My wife and I have encouraged her siblings to have colonoscopies soon. My wife’s father died of cancer many years ago. He did not smoke, but he did have a colon. At that time it was not considered wise for doctors to discuss cancer with the families of cancer patients (and victims), especially colon cancer because it happened in a part of the body nobody wanted to discuss openly.
We consider ourselves very lucky to have learned about this one kind of cancer in time.
A very close friend is dying of colon cancer as I write this. He didn’t know about getting tested in time. Even if he did, he likely would not have been tested because he believed that cancer hits others, but would not strike him down. It did.
This brings us to cancer prevention and cures. A cure is what a medical professional or other consultant does for you. Prevention is what you do for yourself. My mantra is: don’t concern yourself with fixing it after it’s broken, prevent it from happening in the first place.
Our bodies come already primed with up to 150 specific micro-locations in which cancer can grow. Most of them, in most of us, never blossom into full blown cancer. Why does it happen in some of us, but not all? As cancer takes many different forms in our bodies, we may assume that, like the common cold, it is almost impossible to stop. We may be wrong.
Most of us non-chemistry-loving folk have a clue about what acid is. Vinegar, for example, is an acid. So is the liquid in lead-acid batteries, as evidenced by clothing I have had to discard in the past because it developed acid holes from my careless handling of car batteries. We can consume some mild acids, while others will kill.
Ordinary drinking water is mildly acidic. Our bodies, being mostly composed of water, tend to be mildly acidic unless we undertake measures to counteract the acidic effects of water.
Cancer cells tend to develop and reproduce in an acidic environment.
Fruits and vegetables tend to be slightly alkaline, the opposite of acidic. We have been told to eat fruit and veggies for their nutrition and their anti-oxidant effect. Anti-oxidants float around our bloodstream corralling little buggers called free radicals, that left on their own will find cancer starting places and tickle them until they grow into cancer cells.
Cancer cells do not thrive in an alkaline environment. In fact, they tend to shrivel and die when our body is slightly alkaline. [The internet abounds with anecdotal examples of consuming alkaline substances curing cancer.]
In general, our bodies function in a more healthy manner when they are slightly alkaline. That is, when our pH level is slightly below the even or balance mark of 7 (on a scale from 0 to 14).
I will leave it to you to google the subject of pH (Potential Hydrogen, the way acidity or basicity is valued). As to possible alkaline therapies or body maintenance, only people in extreme need of immediate pH correction (“Help, I’m dying of cancer and don’t know what to do to save myself”) need to adopt unusual measures. Everyone should eat fresh fruit and veggies.
Hydrogen peroxide and baking soda (not baking powder) are known to be alkaline if you are looking for places to start searching.
In conclusion, I leave you with one thought about your health: if you are not in control of your own health by being fully informed about what you eat, drink and breathe in, you leave your health and your life in the control of large corporations that make pharmaceuticals that supposedly cure you and chemicals that poison the food you eat.
Ignorance is not pretty. It’s comforting for a while, but it never ends well if adopted as a lifestyle.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to raise children with enough life skills to help them survive a world filled with harmful influences.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, January 29, 2012
We Assume Too Much And Pay Dearly For It
We Assume Too Much And Pay Dearly For It
All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.
- Abraham Maslow, American professor of psychology, creator of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (1908-1970)
We assume. We assume. We assume.
We can’t get through life without making assumptions that certain things will remain in order, that there is a structure of life and matter that won’t suddenly change on us, that someone won’t stab us in the back when we aren’t paying attention.
We require those assumptions in order that we can carry on our lives and concentrate on the business at hand. Of course life--indeed, existence--does not follow our need for assumptions that things won’t change on us too dramatically. Nature, like luck, can be brutal.
Japan studied its seismic history and since the 1970s built structures to last, based on earthquakes that had affected the country in the previous 400 years. For the most part, modern buildings survived the 9.0 quake of 2011. However, protective seawalls were overwhelmed and 20,000 people lost their lives in the tsunami that followed. The 9.0 earthquake, among the strongest in modern history, follows a pattern that only strikes about every 1000 years.
The Japanese government assumed that studying 400 years of history was enough. Not enough to account for a cycle of at least 1000 years.
We assume, those of us who marry, that "till death us do part" means forever, that our partner will never leave. We do not assume that the commitment means that both parties must work to maintain the relationship every single day or it will fall apart. We assume it’s a forever commitment, at least on the part of the other person in the relationship.
We assume that "for better or for worse" are only words, that the "worse" part won’t be any worse than it was before the wedding. When the relationship is required to endure a whole lot worse than that, trouble starts.
We assume that sex with our partner will be as gratifying and as fulfilling--maybe even improve with experience through the years--as it was before the wedding. The sex drive can be impacted for many reasons, both internal and external. The partner who is not affected--needing more--looks for satisfaction elsewhere. The partner who is affected assumes the relationship will continue, unaffected, because of a commitment of a few words spoken during a ceremony. The vows say nothing about sexual commitment.
We buy food at a market assuming that it will be tested safe. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides and preservatives in all foods have been shown to be unsafe for health over a long term. Fresh produce, advised by all health professionals to be the healthiest foods of all, are heavily laced with chemicals, even preservatives to keep them from spoiling.
We assume that preservatives that keep our food from spoiling are safe. They are, for food sitting on a shelf. Inside our bodies they also preserve our food from decay, which is exactly the opposite of what we want. Our body detects whole fats and automatically stores them in fat cells. Result: obesity in people with efficient digestive systems, even if they do not overeat.
We assume that by visiting a medical doctor when we are not well, or even for a regular checkup when we feel well, the doctor will provide us with the best care. Yet some doctors take money from drug companies when they prescribe drugs from one of them. Some of the drugs, such as statins to counteract cholesterol, become lifelong commitments when there are safer and healthier alternatives available (including common mineral niacin and exercise).
We assume that what we wear and our cosmetics will enhance our status among our workmates or acquaintances, as we have been taught by commercial interests. In general, virtually no one cares what we look like, except maybe a boss if we dress inappropriately. We just believe that others care.
We assume that the vehicle we drive will somehow deliver a message to others that we have a personal value greater than we know we have. Again, no one else cares.
We assume that people we associate with often are friends. As soon as we have a serious problem, they are nowhere to be found. Casual friendships exist when people have something to gain by associating with us, or us with them. True friendships are hard to make, take years to build, and true friends don’t care about trivial matters and will stand with you through your worst troubles. Simply assuming that someone is a good friend may be plain wrong.
We assume that those who mean the most to us will be with us forever, so we take less care with them than with acquaintances who can help us in the short term. When those loved ones die, we aren’t prepared for the loss and often suffer ourselves as a consequence. We assumed they would be with us forever.
We assume that our religious leaders teach us facts and truths beyond reproach. Most is just fantasy or wishful thinking, sometimes even an effort to control our mind. Just examine the "truths" taught from the pulpits of various Christian denominations to learn how greatly they vary, though they all claim to use the same holy book.
We make countless assumptions to get us through our lives. Some help us to get through the day, or night. Every assumption has a consequence if something does not work the way we had assumed. If we don’t consider the consequences of our assumptions, we pay a price later.
Children should be taught about consequences of their assumptions. Risky behaviour, for example, could result in early death. Unwise behaviour in their youth will inevitably result in bad health in later years.
Who should teach this Law of Consequences? Parents? Teachers? Relatives? Neighbours? Friends?
Yes. Children who do not understand the Law of Consequences, who make assumptions that are unwise, suffer huge setbacks later, if they survive. We pass laws to protect children, then ignore the laws. Many parents are not aware of the laws that should guide them through parenthood. No one taught them how to be parents. They figured out the conceiving part themselves. The rest they guess and learn by accident (sometimes).
Every adult has a responsibility to each child he or she knows. The degree of responsibility will vary from one child to another. The need for commitment will not.
There is an old saying: it takes a village to raise a child. Our ancestors knew that. Today’s kids don’t have that village. We need to help them avoid the deficit. They need to learn. We need to teach.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book for parents, teachers, for all adults, who want to help children grow to be responsible, to lead well balanced lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.
- Abraham Maslow, American professor of psychology, creator of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (1908-1970)
We assume. We assume. We assume.
We can’t get through life without making assumptions that certain things will remain in order, that there is a structure of life and matter that won’t suddenly change on us, that someone won’t stab us in the back when we aren’t paying attention.
We require those assumptions in order that we can carry on our lives and concentrate on the business at hand. Of course life--indeed, existence--does not follow our need for assumptions that things won’t change on us too dramatically. Nature, like luck, can be brutal.
Japan studied its seismic history and since the 1970s built structures to last, based on earthquakes that had affected the country in the previous 400 years. For the most part, modern buildings survived the 9.0 quake of 2011. However, protective seawalls were overwhelmed and 20,000 people lost their lives in the tsunami that followed. The 9.0 earthquake, among the strongest in modern history, follows a pattern that only strikes about every 1000 years.
The Japanese government assumed that studying 400 years of history was enough. Not enough to account for a cycle of at least 1000 years.
We assume, those of us who marry, that "till death us do part" means forever, that our partner will never leave. We do not assume that the commitment means that both parties must work to maintain the relationship every single day or it will fall apart. We assume it’s a forever commitment, at least on the part of the other person in the relationship.
We assume that "for better or for worse" are only words, that the "worse" part won’t be any worse than it was before the wedding. When the relationship is required to endure a whole lot worse than that, trouble starts.
We assume that sex with our partner will be as gratifying and as fulfilling--maybe even improve with experience through the years--as it was before the wedding. The sex drive can be impacted for many reasons, both internal and external. The partner who is not affected--needing more--looks for satisfaction elsewhere. The partner who is affected assumes the relationship will continue, unaffected, because of a commitment of a few words spoken during a ceremony. The vows say nothing about sexual commitment.
We buy food at a market assuming that it will be tested safe. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides and preservatives in all foods have been shown to be unsafe for health over a long term. Fresh produce, advised by all health professionals to be the healthiest foods of all, are heavily laced with chemicals, even preservatives to keep them from spoiling.
We assume that preservatives that keep our food from spoiling are safe. They are, for food sitting on a shelf. Inside our bodies they also preserve our food from decay, which is exactly the opposite of what we want. Our body detects whole fats and automatically stores them in fat cells. Result: obesity in people with efficient digestive systems, even if they do not overeat.
We assume that by visiting a medical doctor when we are not well, or even for a regular checkup when we feel well, the doctor will provide us with the best care. Yet some doctors take money from drug companies when they prescribe drugs from one of them. Some of the drugs, such as statins to counteract cholesterol, become lifelong commitments when there are safer and healthier alternatives available (including common mineral niacin and exercise).
We assume that what we wear and our cosmetics will enhance our status among our workmates or acquaintances, as we have been taught by commercial interests. In general, virtually no one cares what we look like, except maybe a boss if we dress inappropriately. We just believe that others care.
We assume that the vehicle we drive will somehow deliver a message to others that we have a personal value greater than we know we have. Again, no one else cares.
We assume that people we associate with often are friends. As soon as we have a serious problem, they are nowhere to be found. Casual friendships exist when people have something to gain by associating with us, or us with them. True friendships are hard to make, take years to build, and true friends don’t care about trivial matters and will stand with you through your worst troubles. Simply assuming that someone is a good friend may be plain wrong.
We assume that those who mean the most to us will be with us forever, so we take less care with them than with acquaintances who can help us in the short term. When those loved ones die, we aren’t prepared for the loss and often suffer ourselves as a consequence. We assumed they would be with us forever.
We assume that our religious leaders teach us facts and truths beyond reproach. Most is just fantasy or wishful thinking, sometimes even an effort to control our mind. Just examine the "truths" taught from the pulpits of various Christian denominations to learn how greatly they vary, though they all claim to use the same holy book.
We make countless assumptions to get us through our lives. Some help us to get through the day, or night. Every assumption has a consequence if something does not work the way we had assumed. If we don’t consider the consequences of our assumptions, we pay a price later.
Children should be taught about consequences of their assumptions. Risky behaviour, for example, could result in early death. Unwise behaviour in their youth will inevitably result in bad health in later years.
Who should teach this Law of Consequences? Parents? Teachers? Relatives? Neighbours? Friends?
Yes. Children who do not understand the Law of Consequences, who make assumptions that are unwise, suffer huge setbacks later, if they survive. We pass laws to protect children, then ignore the laws. Many parents are not aware of the laws that should guide them through parenthood. No one taught them how to be parents. They figured out the conceiving part themselves. The rest they guess and learn by accident (sometimes).
Every adult has a responsibility to each child he or she knows. The degree of responsibility will vary from one child to another. The need for commitment will not.
There is an old saying: it takes a village to raise a child. Our ancestors knew that. Today’s kids don’t have that village. We need to help them avoid the deficit. They need to learn. We need to teach.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book for parents, teachers, for all adults, who want to help children grow to be responsible, to lead well balanced lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Friday, December 23, 2011
She’s A Stupid Old Fart
She’s A Stupid Old Fart
She’s an annoying old thing. She sleeps much of the day, but when she is awake she can’t be satisfied.
She seems to want only the basics of life that please her, satisfying both ends of her digestive system, getting constant attention while she’s awake, being left undisturbed when she is asleep. And treats, she loves her treats.
She has some problems with bowel movements, but she is somehow aware enough to eagerly take her laxative each day. Some part of her natural brain endowment is still working.
Sometimes she acts stunned, frozen in place in the middle of a room as if she can’t remember what she was doing or why or where she wants to go. Give her some food and she may begin to eat, turn away, then ask for more food without even looking at her plate to see that she hasn’t finished what she had just been given.
I get frustrated. I don’t know what to do to please her. I have a better understanding of elder abuse now that I have an elder with dementia to look after. It’s easy to let your emotions and thoughts go wild when you don’t know what is happening in the brain of another. I don’t strike out. I don’t shout, though I grumble my frustration sometimes. She doesn’t seem to care.
Her name is Lucy. Who names anyone Lucy? Well, in this case, my long deceased mother-in-law, but that’s another story.
At least I don’t have to physically feed Lucy. She feeds herself. Cats don’t use forks and spoons. Yes, Lucy is a senior feline with dementia. (A UK survey found that one in ten cats develops dementia as it gets well into its teen years.)
Though the lifespan of cats is normally much shorter than that of humans, their behaviour during their lives often matches that of humans to a shocking extent. Cats and humans do not speak the same verbal language, though both have had thousands of years to learn from the other.
Having studied cats intensively for the past two decades (my background is in sociology and education), I have observed only one marked difference between the behaviour of cats and people: when a kitten or cat wants something, it does everything within its power to get it. Human children, sadly, do not, so often miss out on much of the adult attention they desperately want.
OK, if you want to get technical, people don’t clean their behinds by licking, as cats do. But cats have almost germ-free mouths, while people can have billions of bacteria and viruses in theirs. There’s a lesson there, but I’m not sure what it is.
Every cat has a certain level of "talkativeness" some are always quiet and purring, some meow about everything. The change seen with senior dementia is one of increased or excessive vocalizations, and not just a simple meow. They may appear confused and not totally sure of their surroundings while vocalizing, and this behavior is more common at night, often waking up the household.
- Janet Tobiassen Crosby , DVM, veterinarian and author of materials about small animals
As in humans, dementia leaves [cats] confused and distressed...Researchers from the University of Edinburgh now believe half of all cats over the age of 15 and a quarter aged 11 to 14, are suffering from "geriatric onset behavioural problems".
-Laura Donnelly, Health Correspondent, The Telegraph
Feline dementia is very similar to dementia in humans. Here’s the killer: dementia is the most avoidable disease known in either species. Yes, dementia is avoidable, if those in charge of a cat or a child begin early enough.
Cats in the wild live about ten years. Indoor cats often live twice that long. The older they get, the more likely they are to get a disease of old age.
The difference between a cat or a person who will eventually get dementia and one who will not is curiosity or creativity in childhood. Both, in the early years of life, require lots of attention and opportunities to explore, to learn, to satisfy their natural curiosity.
Curiosity, so the old saw goes, killed the cat. But cats have nine lives, so another goes, so they have resources people don’t. When a cat lacks stimulation and inspiration for enough years, it becomes dull. When a child is denied sufficient stimulation and inspiration for its first few years, then again in the primary grades of school, it will stop being curious. As an adult, that child will join the legions of stupid people you see around you, almost everywhere you go.
Have you walked down the hallway of a nursing home that caters to the frail elderly? They sit outside their bedroom doors, staring blankly, hoping for something or someone to pass by to relieve the monotony. Dementia is the last stage of what began as a bored child, then developed into a stupid adult.
If dementia is avoidable, what can we do to help ourselves and others to avoid it? To begin with, you will not likely develop dementia because you were curious enough to read this article. Curiosity is the key. Curiosity doesn’t come out the end of a hypodermic needle or in table form.
Curiosity is, in effect, a desire to learn. A constant desire to learn. It doesn’t seem to matter what a child or even a middle aged adult wants to learn or to explore, so long as it’s new and requires learning. Try something new. Embrace change. Get used to something different. Explore, even if it’s only at your local library. You will never see a demented adult in a library.
Now you know something that could change lives. You, being curious yourself, will not likely suffer from dementia in your later years. But what you know now could prevent someone else from suffering that fate. You could change the life or your grandchild, or your child.
You could change the life of a complete stranger, if you care enough. Consider this: how might the life of a homeless person change if they had a drive to learn, to improve themselves, to change for the better? You might not be able to help that way directly, but you could join an organization with that as its primary objective.
Bill Allin in the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to ensure the kids they know continue to exercise their curiosity throughout their lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
She’s an annoying old thing. She sleeps much of the day, but when she is awake she can’t be satisfied.
She seems to want only the basics of life that please her, satisfying both ends of her digestive system, getting constant attention while she’s awake, being left undisturbed when she is asleep. And treats, she loves her treats.
She has some problems with bowel movements, but she is somehow aware enough to eagerly take her laxative each day. Some part of her natural brain endowment is still working.
Sometimes she acts stunned, frozen in place in the middle of a room as if she can’t remember what she was doing or why or where she wants to go. Give her some food and she may begin to eat, turn away, then ask for more food without even looking at her plate to see that she hasn’t finished what she had just been given.
I get frustrated. I don’t know what to do to please her. I have a better understanding of elder abuse now that I have an elder with dementia to look after. It’s easy to let your emotions and thoughts go wild when you don’t know what is happening in the brain of another. I don’t strike out. I don’t shout, though I grumble my frustration sometimes. She doesn’t seem to care.
Her name is Lucy. Who names anyone Lucy? Well, in this case, my long deceased mother-in-law, but that’s another story.
At least I don’t have to physically feed Lucy. She feeds herself. Cats don’t use forks and spoons. Yes, Lucy is a senior feline with dementia. (A UK survey found that one in ten cats develops dementia as it gets well into its teen years.)
Though the lifespan of cats is normally much shorter than that of humans, their behaviour during their lives often matches that of humans to a shocking extent. Cats and humans do not speak the same verbal language, though both have had thousands of years to learn from the other.
Having studied cats intensively for the past two decades (my background is in sociology and education), I have observed only one marked difference between the behaviour of cats and people: when a kitten or cat wants something, it does everything within its power to get it. Human children, sadly, do not, so often miss out on much of the adult attention they desperately want.
OK, if you want to get technical, people don’t clean their behinds by licking, as cats do. But cats have almost germ-free mouths, while people can have billions of bacteria and viruses in theirs. There’s a lesson there, but I’m not sure what it is.
Every cat has a certain level of "talkativeness" some are always quiet and purring, some meow about everything. The change seen with senior dementia is one of increased or excessive vocalizations, and not just a simple meow. They may appear confused and not totally sure of their surroundings while vocalizing, and this behavior is more common at night, often waking up the household.
- Janet Tobiassen Crosby , DVM, veterinarian and author of materials about small animals
As in humans, dementia leaves [cats] confused and distressed...Researchers from the University of Edinburgh now believe half of all cats over the age of 15 and a quarter aged 11 to 14, are suffering from "geriatric onset behavioural problems".
-Laura Donnelly, Health Correspondent, The Telegraph
Feline dementia is very similar to dementia in humans. Here’s the killer: dementia is the most avoidable disease known in either species. Yes, dementia is avoidable, if those in charge of a cat or a child begin early enough.
Cats in the wild live about ten years. Indoor cats often live twice that long. The older they get, the more likely they are to get a disease of old age.
The difference between a cat or a person who will eventually get dementia and one who will not is curiosity or creativity in childhood. Both, in the early years of life, require lots of attention and opportunities to explore, to learn, to satisfy their natural curiosity.
Curiosity, so the old saw goes, killed the cat. But cats have nine lives, so another goes, so they have resources people don’t. When a cat lacks stimulation and inspiration for enough years, it becomes dull. When a child is denied sufficient stimulation and inspiration for its first few years, then again in the primary grades of school, it will stop being curious. As an adult, that child will join the legions of stupid people you see around you, almost everywhere you go.
Have you walked down the hallway of a nursing home that caters to the frail elderly? They sit outside their bedroom doors, staring blankly, hoping for something or someone to pass by to relieve the monotony. Dementia is the last stage of what began as a bored child, then developed into a stupid adult.
If dementia is avoidable, what can we do to help ourselves and others to avoid it? To begin with, you will not likely develop dementia because you were curious enough to read this article. Curiosity is the key. Curiosity doesn’t come out the end of a hypodermic needle or in table form.
Curiosity is, in effect, a desire to learn. A constant desire to learn. It doesn’t seem to matter what a child or even a middle aged adult wants to learn or to explore, so long as it’s new and requires learning. Try something new. Embrace change. Get used to something different. Explore, even if it’s only at your local library. You will never see a demented adult in a library.
Now you know something that could change lives. You, being curious yourself, will not likely suffer from dementia in your later years. But what you know now could prevent someone else from suffering that fate. You could change the life or your grandchild, or your child.
You could change the life of a complete stranger, if you care enough. Consider this: how might the life of a homeless person change if they had a drive to learn, to improve themselves, to change for the better? You might not be able to help that way directly, but you could join an organization with that as its primary objective.
Bill Allin in the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to ensure the kids they know continue to exercise their curiosity throughout their lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Friday, July 08, 2011
To Fear Change Is To Fear Life
To Fear Change Is To Fear Life
If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.
Every living thing finds life dangerous. Every living thing becomes food for other living things. Those that do not become food for other as prey or fodder become food for microbes and other life forms after they die.Those at or near the top of the food chain tend to be in the latter group. We humans, with few natural enemies, tend to die for reasons that have nothing to do with predators.
Yet so many of us act as if we have something to fear at every moment of our lives.
Caution and the fight or flight response and its attendant physical stressors are built into us from birth. Fear is not. Fear is learned. In nature, an animal in fear tends to soon become lunch for a predator. We humans experience fear and its consequences differently.
Some kinds of fear result from unfortunate events in our lives. In my case, I fear heights (acrophobia) and closed-in spaces (claustrophobia) as consequences of seeing many movies, as a young child, that intentionally made viewers afraid as a form of thrill. The producers of the films set out to create shock in viewers. Indeed, it's what most kids my age wanted when we watched a film. The producers did not intend to develop phobias in their viewers. But they did in some.
Some kinds of fear are taught. They might be taught through role modeling by a parent ("my mother hates spiders and I do too"), by a teacher ("you don't want me to send you to the principal, do you?"), or by another person known to the one developing the fear ("Wait till your parents get home").
The colour-coded risk alert levels broadcast in the USA after 9/11 accomplished absolutely nothing in terms of preparing citizens for a possible attack by terrorists, but "amber alert" notices from the White House built fear into the hearts of people, of others who were "different" in appearance or in the way they speak or dress ("You don't see anyone from Sweden becoming suicide bombers"). This in a country that for a very long time claimed to be a melting pot of cultures, where everyone could mix freely and join into one nation in the process. Fear taught by the nation's leaders brought that claim to an end.
Those who fear seek stability. They want the same weather at the same time each year, which can't happen any more, if it ever could. They want stability in their family life, which is awkward with over half of marriages ending in divorce and grown children moving to all parts of the world for work in their specific fields. In fact, a fearful parent is more likely to cause other family members to want to get away from them.
They want stability in their jobs, which is nearly impossible in today's economic climate. More than anything else, they want to avoid change. To a person with fears, change means instability and instability ramps up their fear level.
Yet change is not just a major factor in today's world, it's critically important and inevitable. It's even part of nature.
It's possible to overcome fear, as many can attest as they have had to do so to survive. An overcome fear hides in the background, the way alcohol does to a recovering alcoholic or casinos and lotteries do for a recovering gambling addict. In the background it doesn't impact daily life. It's tolerable.
Fear of change is much more difficult to conquer. In many societies, such as the USA, fear has become a cultural norm. How do you overcome a cultural norm? The same way the US tackled the problem of tobacco smoking, reducing adult smoking from around 75 percent of adults to just over 20 percent (including the major smoking group teens).
As Hazel Henderson said in the quote that began this article, people must be taught that change and uncertainty are normal. That means, as is the case with most teaching, these lessons should be taught to children (whose lives change frequently anyway). They must also be taught how to cope with change. That means they must know what to do when something major happens in their lives over which they have no control. That means planning ahead and having coping skills.
Children need stability as much as adults. They must have stability in some parts of their lives. But they should be taught how to cope, what to do, where to turn, who to ask for help, if unanticipated change strikes them suddenly.
As grown adults, we can learn to cope by planning as well. If your parents are alive today, it's highly likely that they will die before you do. What plan should you have, at least emotionally, for that? Your spouse or a child could die in an accident any day, or from terminal illness in the near future. What would you do then? These are problems most people would rather leave until the last minute, until they happen. Then their impact can be tragic, such as a fear of commitment to someone who might die.
We know that birth and death are part of life, even though either can come unexpectedly. But "unexpectedly" means major change. If you lost your job, what plan would you put in place so that you could get back on your feet as soon as possible? If your home burned so badly it was no longer habitable, what would you do?
Being prepared for life's possible emergencies means you can cope. Coping means less chance of emotion turmoil, including fear or turning to unhealthy alternatives such as addictions, bullying, depression, thrill-seeking and cutting of social connections that brought love into your life. When your life is upside down and inside out, that's when you need love more than ever. Do you know how to handle the love relationships in your life so that they do not get destroyed when another part of your life implodes?
Change and uncertainty are inevitable, but that doesn't mean we can't prepare for them. When these events trouble you most, you need those who love you to depend on. Having no one to fill that role can be devastating.
If you do not have anyone who loves you unreservedly, this would be a good time to learn how to develop that kind of relationship. Social skills are learnable. You can learn them by reading or taking courses.
No one's life is easy. The ones who survive best are those who prepared for downturns ahead of time. They do not become emotionally destroyed. They put their plan in place. They know how to cope.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers who want to help children grow and develop so they know how to cope with the most important things that happen in their lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/ - Hazel Henderson, English television producer, futurist, author (b. 1933)
If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.
Every living thing finds life dangerous. Every living thing becomes food for other living things. Those that do not become food for other as prey or fodder become food for microbes and other life forms after they die.Those at or near the top of the food chain tend to be in the latter group. We humans, with few natural enemies, tend to die for reasons that have nothing to do with predators.
Yet so many of us act as if we have something to fear at every moment of our lives.
Caution and the fight or flight response and its attendant physical stressors are built into us from birth. Fear is not. Fear is learned. In nature, an animal in fear tends to soon become lunch for a predator. We humans experience fear and its consequences differently.
Some kinds of fear result from unfortunate events in our lives. In my case, I fear heights (acrophobia) and closed-in spaces (claustrophobia) as consequences of seeing many movies, as a young child, that intentionally made viewers afraid as a form of thrill. The producers of the films set out to create shock in viewers. Indeed, it's what most kids my age wanted when we watched a film. The producers did not intend to develop phobias in their viewers. But they did in some.
Some kinds of fear are taught. They might be taught through role modeling by a parent ("my mother hates spiders and I do too"), by a teacher ("you don't want me to send you to the principal, do you?"), or by another person known to the one developing the fear ("Wait till your parents get home").
The colour-coded risk alert levels broadcast in the USA after 9/11 accomplished absolutely nothing in terms of preparing citizens for a possible attack by terrorists, but "amber alert" notices from the White House built fear into the hearts of people, of others who were "different" in appearance or in the way they speak or dress ("You don't see anyone from Sweden becoming suicide bombers"). This in a country that for a very long time claimed to be a melting pot of cultures, where everyone could mix freely and join into one nation in the process. Fear taught by the nation's leaders brought that claim to an end.
Those who fear seek stability. They want the same weather at the same time each year, which can't happen any more, if it ever could. They want stability in their family life, which is awkward with over half of marriages ending in divorce and grown children moving to all parts of the world for work in their specific fields. In fact, a fearful parent is more likely to cause other family members to want to get away from them.
They want stability in their jobs, which is nearly impossible in today's economic climate. More than anything else, they want to avoid change. To a person with fears, change means instability and instability ramps up their fear level.
Yet change is not just a major factor in today's world, it's critically important and inevitable. It's even part of nature.
It's possible to overcome fear, as many can attest as they have had to do so to survive. An overcome fear hides in the background, the way alcohol does to a recovering alcoholic or casinos and lotteries do for a recovering gambling addict. In the background it doesn't impact daily life. It's tolerable.
Fear of change is much more difficult to conquer. In many societies, such as the USA, fear has become a cultural norm. How do you overcome a cultural norm? The same way the US tackled the problem of tobacco smoking, reducing adult smoking from around 75 percent of adults to just over 20 percent (including the major smoking group teens).
As Hazel Henderson said in the quote that began this article, people must be taught that change and uncertainty are normal. That means, as is the case with most teaching, these lessons should be taught to children (whose lives change frequently anyway). They must also be taught how to cope with change. That means they must know what to do when something major happens in their lives over which they have no control. That means planning ahead and having coping skills.
Children need stability as much as adults. They must have stability in some parts of their lives. But they should be taught how to cope, what to do, where to turn, who to ask for help, if unanticipated change strikes them suddenly.
As grown adults, we can learn to cope by planning as well. If your parents are alive today, it's highly likely that they will die before you do. What plan should you have, at least emotionally, for that? Your spouse or a child could die in an accident any day, or from terminal illness in the near future. What would you do then? These are problems most people would rather leave until the last minute, until they happen. Then their impact can be tragic, such as a fear of commitment to someone who might die.
We know that birth and death are part of life, even though either can come unexpectedly. But "unexpectedly" means major change. If you lost your job, what plan would you put in place so that you could get back on your feet as soon as possible? If your home burned so badly it was no longer habitable, what would you do?
Being prepared for life's possible emergencies means you can cope. Coping means less chance of emotion turmoil, including fear or turning to unhealthy alternatives such as addictions, bullying, depression, thrill-seeking and cutting of social connections that brought love into your life. When your life is upside down and inside out, that's when you need love more than ever. Do you know how to handle the love relationships in your life so that they do not get destroyed when another part of your life implodes?
Change and uncertainty are inevitable, but that doesn't mean we can't prepare for them. When these events trouble you most, you need those who love you to depend on. Having no one to fill that role can be devastating.
If you do not have anyone who loves you unreservedly, this would be a good time to learn how to develop that kind of relationship. Social skills are learnable. You can learn them by reading or taking courses.
No one's life is easy. The ones who survive best are those who prepared for downturns ahead of time. They do not become emotionally destroyed. They put their plan in place. They know how to cope.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers who want to help children grow and develop so they know how to cope with the most important things that happen in their lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/ - Hazel Henderson, English television producer, futurist, author (b. 1933)
Friday, October 15, 2010
When Is Your Time Up?
When Is Your Time Up?
If you plan for one year, plant rice.
If you plan for ten years, plant trees.
If you plan for 100 years, educate mankind.
- Chinese proverb
"My time wasn't up" a friend said recently as the closing remark to his narrative about a car accident.
I wished we both had time to pursue that statement in a discussion. When would he believe his time was up? Most people reading this will think "His time would have been up if he had died in the accident."
No, he might have died from injuries incurred in the accident because he was involved in an auto accident. No one designed that man's fate by putting another man, in a different vehicle, on the same road at the same time, along with the same thousands of other cars and drivers. Had that been possible, thousands of other car drivers and passengers on the same road would have needed their life courses to be designed outside their personal will so that everyone's pre-destined life course would have come together in one enormous coincidence.
Could life be that pre-determined? If so, what's the point of our living?
Fatalism, the belief that our lives are predestined, inevitable and unchangeable, still holds many followers well past its due date. Determinism (all events are inevitable), often associated with fatalism, relieves believers of responsibility for anything that happens, as if anything that anyone does to try to make the world or themselves better is a waste of time and effort.
How convenient. We die at a predetermined date and all bad stuff that happens to us had nothing to do with bad choices we made in the past. Presumably, all good things that come our way did so by good luck (or God's will), not good management or hard work.
With this belief, it matters little how we live because the date for our death and the state of our health before we get there are predetermined. We can do whatever we like and it won't matter. Even if we do harmful things to ourselves or others, if we become addicts or criminals, we aren't responsible because our lives were cast in stone before we were born.
While it's not clear how much religion had to do with this belief in fatalism and determinism, there is no question that Christianity stepped in to take advantage of it. According to Christian dogma, anyone who repents his lifetime of sins and accepts Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour before he dies will be accepted into heaven.
Again, convenient. While debate over whether heaven would benefit from a surfeit of lifetime sinners who wasted their time on this planet and even may have harmed untold others would serve little purpose, an examination of whether we are responsible for our own longevity and health in old age has value.
Western society has accustomed itself to finding others to blame for our own mistakes. We have the classic case of the woman who spilled hot coffee on herself as she was driving her car, scalding herself in the process, then suing McDonald's for selling her coffee that was too hot, and winning. According to a jury, McDonald's was wrong for selling "hot coffee" while the woman was absolved of any hint of guilt for driving while distracted and harming herself in the process.
Our governments test new food and drug products for safety for three years, at most. If no one has died or been noticeably harmed during the test period, the product is usually approved for sale. Snake oil with different names. I doubt that "snake oil", usually comprised of alcohol and some light oil, ever caused anyone's death. Just as the safety of "snake oil" sold as a cure-all in the 19th century was the responsibility of the manufacturer, our governments put responsibility for testing new food and drug products into the hands of the very companies that stand to benefit from its sale.
Safety of public health has a three year limit, sometimes only one year, according to government standards. Some of the foods sold to us in our markets, foods that include chemical preservatives for example, receive no long term testing. None, except was is done in a lab to create the never-decay masterpiece.
Young adults rarely suffer from their excesses and behaviour that harms them years later. Our bodies were designed to survive all kinds of harm, to even recover from most attacks of disease, when we are young. Indeed, it's how our immune systems develop as children. For most of human history, adults lived about 30 years on average. If our ancestors lived that long, they had fulfilled their mandate of having and raising children. If they died at age 30, no one worried because they had lived an average lifespan.
Now we expect to live past age 80. Within a few years over one million living Americans will have celebrated their 100th birthday. Many of us, including social medical systems in countries such as the U.K. and Canada and insurance companies in the U.S., worry that our financial systems will collapse under the weight of having too many sick and incapacitated old people to care for.
We get what we pay for. We pay for our excesses when we are young, then we pay with our health when we get older. We teach our people that they must pay for what they get at the time. But we do not teach that the excesses we pay for in our younger years we may also have to pay for again with poor health for many years when we are in our "Golden Years."
What we do not teach is that when our bodies survive attacks on our health when we are younger, we must pay the price 40 years or more later. That 40 years is an important number you may want to remember. When something goes wrong with your health in your older years--let's say neuralgia--it may be because of something you did repeatedly years earlier.
Skin cancer is another excellent example. No one thinks much of a child getting then recovering from a bad sunburn. Few think much about a case of skin cancer that is easily fixed in middle age. Forty years later. Medical science knows that association, so it advises us to use sun block on the exposed skin of children when they will be playing outside. Manufacturers of sun block know the association aas well, so it advises everyone to wear sun block whenever they are out in the sun, no matter for how long. What those sun block manufacturers don't tell people is that they may develop a lack of vitamin D in their diet of fast food and use of sun block and other kinds of cancers and diseases of body organs--to say little of depression, one of the most pervasive health problems in modern medicine--are highly likely to result. Forty years later. Less in the case of depression.
More is known about human health today than ever before in history. Much of what you read about health may be slanted to reflect the bias of the writer or researcher. The internet, the greatest source of information ever, has fiction about health as prominently displayed as truth.
It will serve each of us well to research what we should be doing with our lives today if we expect to be around and kicking in 40 years time. Especially if we want to be fit and feeling well. Of course none of us knows if we may be around then. If our "time is up" before then, it could be because we did enough to harm our own health years ago.
We have a better chance of being healthy and fit 40 years from now if we treat ourselves properly today. That means doing a fair amount of reading because the worst advice tends to arrive at our attention easiest, like infomercials on television in the middle of the night.
No one can tell us what is best for us because no one other than ourselves knows enough about us. If we don't care enough about our future, we may have a costly price to pay for surviving for so many years as we get older.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents, written in plain and simple language, about what kids need to learn and when so that they can live well balanced lives as adults. Every child starts out good but some go bad and parents can't figure out why unless they have avoided the risks when their children were growing up.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
If you plan for one year, plant rice.
If you plan for ten years, plant trees.
If you plan for 100 years, educate mankind.
- Chinese proverb
"My time wasn't up" a friend said recently as the closing remark to his narrative about a car accident.
I wished we both had time to pursue that statement in a discussion. When would he believe his time was up? Most people reading this will think "His time would have been up if he had died in the accident."
No, he might have died from injuries incurred in the accident because he was involved in an auto accident. No one designed that man's fate by putting another man, in a different vehicle, on the same road at the same time, along with the same thousands of other cars and drivers. Had that been possible, thousands of other car drivers and passengers on the same road would have needed their life courses to be designed outside their personal will so that everyone's pre-destined life course would have come together in one enormous coincidence.
Could life be that pre-determined? If so, what's the point of our living?
Fatalism, the belief that our lives are predestined, inevitable and unchangeable, still holds many followers well past its due date. Determinism (all events are inevitable), often associated with fatalism, relieves believers of responsibility for anything that happens, as if anything that anyone does to try to make the world or themselves better is a waste of time and effort.
How convenient. We die at a predetermined date and all bad stuff that happens to us had nothing to do with bad choices we made in the past. Presumably, all good things that come our way did so by good luck (or God's will), not good management or hard work.
With this belief, it matters little how we live because the date for our death and the state of our health before we get there are predetermined. We can do whatever we like and it won't matter. Even if we do harmful things to ourselves or others, if we become addicts or criminals, we aren't responsible because our lives were cast in stone before we were born.
While it's not clear how much religion had to do with this belief in fatalism and determinism, there is no question that Christianity stepped in to take advantage of it. According to Christian dogma, anyone who repents his lifetime of sins and accepts Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour before he dies will be accepted into heaven.
Again, convenient. While debate over whether heaven would benefit from a surfeit of lifetime sinners who wasted their time on this planet and even may have harmed untold others would serve little purpose, an examination of whether we are responsible for our own longevity and health in old age has value.
Western society has accustomed itself to finding others to blame for our own mistakes. We have the classic case of the woman who spilled hot coffee on herself as she was driving her car, scalding herself in the process, then suing McDonald's for selling her coffee that was too hot, and winning. According to a jury, McDonald's was wrong for selling "hot coffee" while the woman was absolved of any hint of guilt for driving while distracted and harming herself in the process.
Our governments test new food and drug products for safety for three years, at most. If no one has died or been noticeably harmed during the test period, the product is usually approved for sale. Snake oil with different names. I doubt that "snake oil", usually comprised of alcohol and some light oil, ever caused anyone's death. Just as the safety of "snake oil" sold as a cure-all in the 19th century was the responsibility of the manufacturer, our governments put responsibility for testing new food and drug products into the hands of the very companies that stand to benefit from its sale.
Safety of public health has a three year limit, sometimes only one year, according to government standards. Some of the foods sold to us in our markets, foods that include chemical preservatives for example, receive no long term testing. None, except was is done in a lab to create the never-decay masterpiece.
Young adults rarely suffer from their excesses and behaviour that harms them years later. Our bodies were designed to survive all kinds of harm, to even recover from most attacks of disease, when we are young. Indeed, it's how our immune systems develop as children. For most of human history, adults lived about 30 years on average. If our ancestors lived that long, they had fulfilled their mandate of having and raising children. If they died at age 30, no one worried because they had lived an average lifespan.
Now we expect to live past age 80. Within a few years over one million living Americans will have celebrated their 100th birthday. Many of us, including social medical systems in countries such as the U.K. and Canada and insurance companies in the U.S., worry that our financial systems will collapse under the weight of having too many sick and incapacitated old people to care for.
We get what we pay for. We pay for our excesses when we are young, then we pay with our health when we get older. We teach our people that they must pay for what they get at the time. But we do not teach that the excesses we pay for in our younger years we may also have to pay for again with poor health for many years when we are in our "Golden Years."
What we do not teach is that when our bodies survive attacks on our health when we are younger, we must pay the price 40 years or more later. That 40 years is an important number you may want to remember. When something goes wrong with your health in your older years--let's say neuralgia--it may be because of something you did repeatedly years earlier.
Skin cancer is another excellent example. No one thinks much of a child getting then recovering from a bad sunburn. Few think much about a case of skin cancer that is easily fixed in middle age. Forty years later. Medical science knows that association, so it advises us to use sun block on the exposed skin of children when they will be playing outside. Manufacturers of sun block know the association aas well, so it advises everyone to wear sun block whenever they are out in the sun, no matter for how long. What those sun block manufacturers don't tell people is that they may develop a lack of vitamin D in their diet of fast food and use of sun block and other kinds of cancers and diseases of body organs--to say little of depression, one of the most pervasive health problems in modern medicine--are highly likely to result. Forty years later. Less in the case of depression.
More is known about human health today than ever before in history. Much of what you read about health may be slanted to reflect the bias of the writer or researcher. The internet, the greatest source of information ever, has fiction about health as prominently displayed as truth.
It will serve each of us well to research what we should be doing with our lives today if we expect to be around and kicking in 40 years time. Especially if we want to be fit and feeling well. Of course none of us knows if we may be around then. If our "time is up" before then, it could be because we did enough to harm our own health years ago.
We have a better chance of being healthy and fit 40 years from now if we treat ourselves properly today. That means doing a fair amount of reading because the worst advice tends to arrive at our attention easiest, like infomercials on television in the middle of the night.
No one can tell us what is best for us because no one other than ourselves knows enough about us. If we don't care enough about our future, we may have a costly price to pay for surviving for so many years as we get older.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents, written in plain and simple language, about what kids need to learn and when so that they can live well balanced lives as adults. Every child starts out good but some go bad and parents can't figure out why unless they have avoided the risks when their children were growing up.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Thursday, July 08, 2010
Stuff You Should Know About Fat
Stuff You Should Know About Fat
With two-thirds of Americans overweight or obese and obesity in alarming numbers finding its way into every nation, even poor families in poor nations, let's have a serious look at what the fuss is about.
To begin, let's establish a couple of things. First, if we take everything we eat and drink, then subtract from that nutrition what we use up in energy or function of our organs, convert to muscle or expel as body wastes, what gets left over is stored as fat. Fat is stored potential energy.
Second, no young child aspires to be fat as an adult. None aspire to be insurance salesmen, call centre employees or cubicle workers in offices either, but those are conscious choices a person makes later.
To return to the first point, obese people can't say they didn't notice they were putting on weight. That's the criticism many slim people have of the heavyweights: "they ate too much." While that point can't be debated, the more important point is what they could have done about it. The answer is: they didn't know what to do. In fact, nobody does. Lots of people make fortunes selling to people who want to lose weight, but none are guaranteed, some created yo-yo dieting, some could even be harmful.
I am reminded of an old joke about the owner of a donkey who was determined that he could train his animal to adapt to life without food if he used methods similar to what nature uses to train animals to adapt to other adverse conditions and environmental changes. A year after the man began his program of gradually lowering the amount of food he gave his donkey, a friend asked him how he had made out with the experiment. He replied, "Just my luck, I got him to the point where he could live completely without food and the stupid animal died."
What to do to overcome obesity or being overweight is precisely the same thing as what slim people do to avoid gaining too much weight. Trouble is, no one, including medical science, knows exactly what that is. As ironic as it sounds, obese people usually have more efficient absorption of nutrients in their guts than slim folks. Some could eat like birds and still gain weight. Many slim people could eat boatloads of food and still remain thin because their digestive systems don't work as efficiently.
Diet? Sure but look at the abundance of diet advice we get in newspapers, magazines and on television--especially look at how each suggestion conflicts with other suggestions by "experts"--and you can quickly see that no one really knows. Studies have proven that so-called yo-yo dieting (diet, gain weight, diet, gain weight, repeatedly) has a more negative impact on body organs than simply carrying around too much weight. Even maintaining extra weight is healthier than losing weight rapidly.
Exercise off what you eat? Sure, but who is prepared to exercise for that much time in a day, setting aside all other commitments in the process? Society mitigates against it anyway. What would you think of a person who exercised--who even walked--for three hours each day? Could you spare that much time out of your day, every day? If you did, what would you have to sacrifice from your present life?
Why not just eat less? Have you ever tried to do that over a long period of time? Most people who have tried it learn to despise dieting because they always feel hungry.
How about eating different foods? Some kinds of food--such as high fibre--flushes stuff through your gut so fast that it doesn't have time to absorb some of the nutrition in the food. That might be okay if you knew how to balance what you lost by taking supplements a few hours before you ate the fibre and afterwards emptied your bowel. But, despite the advertising that gives you the impression that it knows what a balanced diet is, no one knows for certain. Study evidence conflicts. If you plan to diet, choose your vitamin and mineral supplements carefully, then commit to the bet of your life.
Californians seem to have something going for them. In a study of obesity rates in the U.S. from 1976 to 1999, obesity and overweight numbers increased across the board. However, as of 2007, California was the only state where the obesity rate did not increase. The study did not say exactly what had changed in California that could account for the change. No one is guessing that having a former Mr. Universe as governor has made the difference.
If you are overweight and you lose some of that excess, you will live longer, studies show. But likely only a few months longer. Excess weight reduces a woman's chance of getting pregnant. The U.S. National Institutes for Health believes that obesity accounts for why women under 25 are the fastest growing group experiencing infertility. Losing ten percent of body weight results in an improvement in your sex life.
People who often eat dinner or breakfast at restaurants or fast food outlets double their risk of becoming obese.
Leptin, our body's built-in way to convince us to stop eating when we are full doesn't work in supplement form on most overweight people. Their bodies have become insensitive to it.
Why do people eat more than their bodies need? My personal belief is that eating is a pleasure that never fails over the short term. Food never demands a divorce, gives you a hangover, threatens you or nags you. Only over the long term might it betray you with unwanted fat. But then, that applies to all kinds of activities we do when we are young that we survive, get thrills from, but pay for 20, 40 or more years later when our bodies age faster than those who played it safer.
About ten percent of our fat cells die every year. New ones grow again. Our total number of fat cells remains the same throughout our life. Dieting, even having the stomach stapled, has no effect on the body's number of fat cells. However, new fat cells do not begin their lives bloated with fat. They only grow as the body needs to store more fat. New fat cells begin as skinny fat cells.
The only permanent way to reduce the total number of fat cells in the body is by liposuction. Even liposuction does not remove fat from around body organs, so whatever risk fat presents to them remains unless it is reduced in some other way. Liposuction may make you look good, but not necessarily any healthier.
Obesity occurs commonly within families, but science is not certain if that has to do with DNA (nature) or family eating, exercising and related environmental problems (nurture).
Your brain is comprised about 70 percent of fat. Losing that fat is not recommended. Bottlenose dolphins use a fat sack in their heads to amplify sound as part of their sonar hearing ability. Human fatheads have not advanced to that stage so far as I know.
Whale bodies are surrounded by fat, in some cases up to 45 cm (20 inches) thick. They use it as insulation against the cold of the oceans. In our body fat tends to hold heat in as well, often making us sweaty when slim people feel cool. Camels in the desert don't want to conserve heat, which is why they concentrate their fat in one or two humps on their backs. People who lose lots of weight often complain they feel cold because they have lost subcutaneous fat that previously kept them warm (sometimes sweaty).
Still confused about fat? At least you have more knowledge about it now, and you have lots of company. One factor all serious health professionals agree about is that losing weight safely should be a long term project involving serious lifestyle changes.
In conclusion, it's worth noting that fat is essential to life. When stored body fat reaches zero percent, you die. That's why anorexia nervosa sufferers die even when they are being force fed in hospitals. Like everything else in life, the key is moderation. Even when dieting. Let the first three letters of that word be your guide to caution.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who are healthy and well balanced in mind as well as in body.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
With two-thirds of Americans overweight or obese and obesity in alarming numbers finding its way into every nation, even poor families in poor nations, let's have a serious look at what the fuss is about.
To begin, let's establish a couple of things. First, if we take everything we eat and drink, then subtract from that nutrition what we use up in energy or function of our organs, convert to muscle or expel as body wastes, what gets left over is stored as fat. Fat is stored potential energy.
Second, no young child aspires to be fat as an adult. None aspire to be insurance salesmen, call centre employees or cubicle workers in offices either, but those are conscious choices a person makes later.
To return to the first point, obese people can't say they didn't notice they were putting on weight. That's the criticism many slim people have of the heavyweights: "they ate too much." While that point can't be debated, the more important point is what they could have done about it. The answer is: they didn't know what to do. In fact, nobody does. Lots of people make fortunes selling to people who want to lose weight, but none are guaranteed, some created yo-yo dieting, some could even be harmful.
I am reminded of an old joke about the owner of a donkey who was determined that he could train his animal to adapt to life without food if he used methods similar to what nature uses to train animals to adapt to other adverse conditions and environmental changes. A year after the man began his program of gradually lowering the amount of food he gave his donkey, a friend asked him how he had made out with the experiment. He replied, "Just my luck, I got him to the point where he could live completely without food and the stupid animal died."
What to do to overcome obesity or being overweight is precisely the same thing as what slim people do to avoid gaining too much weight. Trouble is, no one, including medical science, knows exactly what that is. As ironic as it sounds, obese people usually have more efficient absorption of nutrients in their guts than slim folks. Some could eat like birds and still gain weight. Many slim people could eat boatloads of food and still remain thin because their digestive systems don't work as efficiently.
Diet? Sure but look at the abundance of diet advice we get in newspapers, magazines and on television--especially look at how each suggestion conflicts with other suggestions by "experts"--and you can quickly see that no one really knows. Studies have proven that so-called yo-yo dieting (diet, gain weight, diet, gain weight, repeatedly) has a more negative impact on body organs than simply carrying around too much weight. Even maintaining extra weight is healthier than losing weight rapidly.
Exercise off what you eat? Sure, but who is prepared to exercise for that much time in a day, setting aside all other commitments in the process? Society mitigates against it anyway. What would you think of a person who exercised--who even walked--for three hours each day? Could you spare that much time out of your day, every day? If you did, what would you have to sacrifice from your present life?
Why not just eat less? Have you ever tried to do that over a long period of time? Most people who have tried it learn to despise dieting because they always feel hungry.
How about eating different foods? Some kinds of food--such as high fibre--flushes stuff through your gut so fast that it doesn't have time to absorb some of the nutrition in the food. That might be okay if you knew how to balance what you lost by taking supplements a few hours before you ate the fibre and afterwards emptied your bowel. But, despite the advertising that gives you the impression that it knows what a balanced diet is, no one knows for certain. Study evidence conflicts. If you plan to diet, choose your vitamin and mineral supplements carefully, then commit to the bet of your life.
Californians seem to have something going for them. In a study of obesity rates in the U.S. from 1976 to 1999, obesity and overweight numbers increased across the board. However, as of 2007, California was the only state where the obesity rate did not increase. The study did not say exactly what had changed in California that could account for the change. No one is guessing that having a former Mr. Universe as governor has made the difference.
If you are overweight and you lose some of that excess, you will live longer, studies show. But likely only a few months longer. Excess weight reduces a woman's chance of getting pregnant. The U.S. National Institutes for Health believes that obesity accounts for why women under 25 are the fastest growing group experiencing infertility. Losing ten percent of body weight results in an improvement in your sex life.
People who often eat dinner or breakfast at restaurants or fast food outlets double their risk of becoming obese.
Leptin, our body's built-in way to convince us to stop eating when we are full doesn't work in supplement form on most overweight people. Their bodies have become insensitive to it.
Why do people eat more than their bodies need? My personal belief is that eating is a pleasure that never fails over the short term. Food never demands a divorce, gives you a hangover, threatens you or nags you. Only over the long term might it betray you with unwanted fat. But then, that applies to all kinds of activities we do when we are young that we survive, get thrills from, but pay for 20, 40 or more years later when our bodies age faster than those who played it safer.
About ten percent of our fat cells die every year. New ones grow again. Our total number of fat cells remains the same throughout our life. Dieting, even having the stomach stapled, has no effect on the body's number of fat cells. However, new fat cells do not begin their lives bloated with fat. They only grow as the body needs to store more fat. New fat cells begin as skinny fat cells.
The only permanent way to reduce the total number of fat cells in the body is by liposuction. Even liposuction does not remove fat from around body organs, so whatever risk fat presents to them remains unless it is reduced in some other way. Liposuction may make you look good, but not necessarily any healthier.
Obesity occurs commonly within families, but science is not certain if that has to do with DNA (nature) or family eating, exercising and related environmental problems (nurture).
Your brain is comprised about 70 percent of fat. Losing that fat is not recommended. Bottlenose dolphins use a fat sack in their heads to amplify sound as part of their sonar hearing ability. Human fatheads have not advanced to that stage so far as I know.
Whale bodies are surrounded by fat, in some cases up to 45 cm (20 inches) thick. They use it as insulation against the cold of the oceans. In our body fat tends to hold heat in as well, often making us sweaty when slim people feel cool. Camels in the desert don't want to conserve heat, which is why they concentrate their fat in one or two humps on their backs. People who lose lots of weight often complain they feel cold because they have lost subcutaneous fat that previously kept them warm (sometimes sweaty).
Still confused about fat? At least you have more knowledge about it now, and you have lots of company. One factor all serious health professionals agree about is that losing weight safely should be a long term project involving serious lifestyle changes.
In conclusion, it's worth noting that fat is essential to life. When stored body fat reaches zero percent, you die. That's why anorexia nervosa sufferers die even when they are being force fed in hospitals. Like everything else in life, the key is moderation. Even when dieting. Let the first three letters of that word be your guide to caution.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who are healthy and well balanced in mind as well as in body.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Friday, July 02, 2010
Homo Stupidus: Our Present, Former Or Future Selves?
Homo Stupidus: Our Present, Former Or Future Selves?
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
- Charles Mackay, Scottish author, poet, songwriter (1814-1889)
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?
- Kelvin Throop III, fictional science fiction character
One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
- John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian economist (1908-2006)
Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein, physicist and genius (1879-1955)
Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.
- Ancient Zen saying
Quite different quotations. Quite different authors from quite different parts of the world and very different periods of time. Yet in the final analysis their messages bear great similarities.
The scientific name for our species, homo sapiens ("thinking man": the 's' at the end is for both the singular and the plural of this term), was devised by men who think. A large majority of us have no idea of the term's meaning. Most could care less what it means. Why? Because they do not burden themselves with such inconveniences as thinking.
Any thinking required to be done in their lives is done for them and provided by television, advertising, their employers, their parents or spouses, sometimes their children.
Those who define our species think. Even they can't be trusted however. With rare exceptions they all consider humans the most intelligent species on the planet. None have considered who devised the rules for the evaluation, whether the "winners" might be biased in their own favour, or whether the definition applied to every one of their species or just to a limited few. None consulted any other species for their opinions on the matter. They couldn't because we can't communicate with any of them.
We consider any other species of living thing that cannot speak our kind of language to be inferior, despite the fact that we cannot communicate with more than a couple other species ourselves and only with them in a very basic and inadequate manner. For 50 years we have been searching for extra-terrestrial intelligent beings, yet even SETI scientists believe that most beings more intelligent than ourselves would avoid us once they learned a bit about us.
We consider ourselves the epitome of development of living beings, despite that fact that most humans are capable of doing virtually nothing that any other animal on earth can do. Other than eat, poop and reproduce. Or that any plant can do, as every green plant creates oxygen we use to survive. Until very recently, with genetic engineering and nanotechnology, we created nothing, we only transformed what already existed.
In North America, barely six percent of us read more than three books per year. And that's generous because most people who don't read won't admit it to researchers. Many of the people who do read several books a year read on topics related to their occupations or about vocations they aspire to enter one day. Check the records of any public library to see how few people actually check out books they can read free, how many books the "readers" check out and what kinds of books they read. With the exception of students and others doing research papers, most nonfiction books collect dust on library shelves. Nonfiction means learning something new, whereas fiction allows readers to escape into other lives and places. For many of us, studying something new is verboten once we leave school.
In most countries that hold democratic elections, barely half of eligible voters cast ballots, often less. Exceptions include votes on hot button issues, elections where voters want to get rid of the old guard and constituencies where voting is compulsory. Why so few votes cast when everyone enjoys this right? In many cases people who do not vote claim that "They're all the same" or "It won't make any difference anyway." Ask those people what names they would expect to see on the ballots and what the candidates stand for and you rarely get an answer that makes sense.
Those of us who vote elect governments based on promises, usually promises of prosperity and more jobs. Both of these are extremely difficult for government to do and impossible to do without raising taxes, which voters don't like. Even though we know our government will never keep their promises, we continue to hope and vote accordingly.
The more "progressive" the democracy, the more debt load individual free citizens carry. In many cases, people pay twice the price of a big ticket item they buy due to interest rates on money they borrowed to buy it. A shocking number of people owe debts to credit card companies they cannot possibly ever repay because they can barely afford the minimum monthly payment.
But they look good. They drive the right cars. They live in the right neighbourhoods and belong to the right organizations.
Unless you work in your own home, look around you on the way to work and think about what is going on in the heads of the people making the same daily trek you are. Spend a bit of time watching people in the supermarket where you shop to see if what they are doing makes sense to you. Seriously, but take your time because stupid behaviour doesn't happen quickly. Watch people drive around the parking lot in a mall looking for the closest entrance, then walk for hours when they get inside. Compare what you see to what you would observe when watching an ant colony or a bee hive before you decide which species is the smartest.
Listen to conversations of people around you, no matter where they may take place. See how many of them involve any subject other than the weather or something they saw or could see on television. The most popular television stations in North America are the weather channels. Yet it's rare to see someone with an umbrella on a rainy day and common to see people with light shoes and no hats walking on snowy sidewalks in blowing weather.
Think about the people you have met over the past month. Have any of them asked you even one question that was not work related that would help them to learn something new? Intelligent thinking people ask questions.
That's the way it is today. What was it like in the past? Many people tend to believe that the world they live in is getting worse as they get older. It's not. They simply have not studied history enough to know that people were just as stupid, as violent, as careless and as ignorant of what they should know about life in the past as they are today. In fact, likely mores so than today. At least today we have more education worldwide to give us a basis on which to think.
Do conditions today predict anything for the future? In the past diseases and wars kept population levels down. Both of these factors are more limited today than at any time in the past. China, with the largest population in the world, limiting its population indicates that it will change its own future. If other countries take their future survival and health seriously--few do at present--the world may reach sustainable and manageable levels of population, pollution and resource management. Odds are that a massive die-off of people, perhaps related somehow to a failure of electronic technology on a global scale causing stock market crashes, less likely due to disease, will cause us to come together as nation members of one world community to take it's future seriously.
A massive shock of some sort is necessary to bring people around to thinking of the future in global terms rather than of their own present desires and pleasures. As uncontrolled as our world is at present, the shock is a certainty though its nature is in doubt.
Until that shock happens, we don't have enough "thinking men" among us to effect real and lasting change. The shock might come from our atmosphere and our water. As we debate global warming and climate change--who cares if the global temperature rises by half a degree in 50 years?--our industries continue to pour thousands of poisons into our air and our water. While we call them "greenhouse gases." That's the air we breathe and the water that keeps us alive. Darwin's claim that the most adaptable will survive crises will be tested. Check out the kinds of poisons industries are subjecting us and our children to.
Can we teach more of our people to think? Ask the teachers. They are the ones saddled with the impossible task of teaching children to think while working under such hobbling conditions most teachers could never make it happen. Our education systems are designed to produce consumers and employees, and they do it well. Ask any child why he or she should stay in school and get a good education and the answer will almost always be "to get a good job." Never "to have a better life." Jobs mean income to buy stuff our industries produce.
Real change can only happen in schools and homes. Real change in homes will be tough because we do not teach young people what they need to know to be good parents.
Education is the answer. Now, do you remember the question?
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to effect real change in homes and schools so their children will be able to adapt to what life will throw at them in the future.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
- Charles Mackay, Scottish author, poet, songwriter (1814-1889)
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?
- Kelvin Throop III, fictional science fiction character
One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
- John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian economist (1908-2006)
Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein, physicist and genius (1879-1955)
Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.
- Ancient Zen saying
Quite different quotations. Quite different authors from quite different parts of the world and very different periods of time. Yet in the final analysis their messages bear great similarities.
The scientific name for our species, homo sapiens ("thinking man": the 's' at the end is for both the singular and the plural of this term), was devised by men who think. A large majority of us have no idea of the term's meaning. Most could care less what it means. Why? Because they do not burden themselves with such inconveniences as thinking.
Any thinking required to be done in their lives is done for them and provided by television, advertising, their employers, their parents or spouses, sometimes their children.
Those who define our species think. Even they can't be trusted however. With rare exceptions they all consider humans the most intelligent species on the planet. None have considered who devised the rules for the evaluation, whether the "winners" might be biased in their own favour, or whether the definition applied to every one of their species or just to a limited few. None consulted any other species for their opinions on the matter. They couldn't because we can't communicate with any of them.
We consider any other species of living thing that cannot speak our kind of language to be inferior, despite the fact that we cannot communicate with more than a couple other species ourselves and only with them in a very basic and inadequate manner. For 50 years we have been searching for extra-terrestrial intelligent beings, yet even SETI scientists believe that most beings more intelligent than ourselves would avoid us once they learned a bit about us.
We consider ourselves the epitome of development of living beings, despite that fact that most humans are capable of doing virtually nothing that any other animal on earth can do. Other than eat, poop and reproduce. Or that any plant can do, as every green plant creates oxygen we use to survive. Until very recently, with genetic engineering and nanotechnology, we created nothing, we only transformed what already existed.
In North America, barely six percent of us read more than three books per year. And that's generous because most people who don't read won't admit it to researchers. Many of the people who do read several books a year read on topics related to their occupations or about vocations they aspire to enter one day. Check the records of any public library to see how few people actually check out books they can read free, how many books the "readers" check out and what kinds of books they read. With the exception of students and others doing research papers, most nonfiction books collect dust on library shelves. Nonfiction means learning something new, whereas fiction allows readers to escape into other lives and places. For many of us, studying something new is verboten once we leave school.
In most countries that hold democratic elections, barely half of eligible voters cast ballots, often less. Exceptions include votes on hot button issues, elections where voters want to get rid of the old guard and constituencies where voting is compulsory. Why so few votes cast when everyone enjoys this right? In many cases people who do not vote claim that "They're all the same" or "It won't make any difference anyway." Ask those people what names they would expect to see on the ballots and what the candidates stand for and you rarely get an answer that makes sense.
Those of us who vote elect governments based on promises, usually promises of prosperity and more jobs. Both of these are extremely difficult for government to do and impossible to do without raising taxes, which voters don't like. Even though we know our government will never keep their promises, we continue to hope and vote accordingly.
The more "progressive" the democracy, the more debt load individual free citizens carry. In many cases, people pay twice the price of a big ticket item they buy due to interest rates on money they borrowed to buy it. A shocking number of people owe debts to credit card companies they cannot possibly ever repay because they can barely afford the minimum monthly payment.
But they look good. They drive the right cars. They live in the right neighbourhoods and belong to the right organizations.
Unless you work in your own home, look around you on the way to work and think about what is going on in the heads of the people making the same daily trek you are. Spend a bit of time watching people in the supermarket where you shop to see if what they are doing makes sense to you. Seriously, but take your time because stupid behaviour doesn't happen quickly. Watch people drive around the parking lot in a mall looking for the closest entrance, then walk for hours when they get inside. Compare what you see to what you would observe when watching an ant colony or a bee hive before you decide which species is the smartest.
Listen to conversations of people around you, no matter where they may take place. See how many of them involve any subject other than the weather or something they saw or could see on television. The most popular television stations in North America are the weather channels. Yet it's rare to see someone with an umbrella on a rainy day and common to see people with light shoes and no hats walking on snowy sidewalks in blowing weather.
Think about the people you have met over the past month. Have any of them asked you even one question that was not work related that would help them to learn something new? Intelligent thinking people ask questions.
That's the way it is today. What was it like in the past? Many people tend to believe that the world they live in is getting worse as they get older. It's not. They simply have not studied history enough to know that people were just as stupid, as violent, as careless and as ignorant of what they should know about life in the past as they are today. In fact, likely mores so than today. At least today we have more education worldwide to give us a basis on which to think.
Do conditions today predict anything for the future? In the past diseases and wars kept population levels down. Both of these factors are more limited today than at any time in the past. China, with the largest population in the world, limiting its population indicates that it will change its own future. If other countries take their future survival and health seriously--few do at present--the world may reach sustainable and manageable levels of population, pollution and resource management. Odds are that a massive die-off of people, perhaps related somehow to a failure of electronic technology on a global scale causing stock market crashes, less likely due to disease, will cause us to come together as nation members of one world community to take it's future seriously.
A massive shock of some sort is necessary to bring people around to thinking of the future in global terms rather than of their own present desires and pleasures. As uncontrolled as our world is at present, the shock is a certainty though its nature is in doubt.
Until that shock happens, we don't have enough "thinking men" among us to effect real and lasting change. The shock might come from our atmosphere and our water. As we debate global warming and climate change--who cares if the global temperature rises by half a degree in 50 years?--our industries continue to pour thousands of poisons into our air and our water. While we call them "greenhouse gases." That's the air we breathe and the water that keeps us alive. Darwin's claim that the most adaptable will survive crises will be tested. Check out the kinds of poisons industries are subjecting us and our children to.
Can we teach more of our people to think? Ask the teachers. They are the ones saddled with the impossible task of teaching children to think while working under such hobbling conditions most teachers could never make it happen. Our education systems are designed to produce consumers and employees, and they do it well. Ask any child why he or she should stay in school and get a good education and the answer will almost always be "to get a good job." Never "to have a better life." Jobs mean income to buy stuff our industries produce.
Real change can only happen in schools and homes. Real change in homes will be tough because we do not teach young people what they need to know to be good parents.
Education is the answer. Now, do you remember the question?
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to effect real change in homes and schools so their children will be able to adapt to what life will throw at them in the future.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Friday, June 25, 2010
The Driver Behind You May Be Unconscious
The Driver Behind You May Be Unconscious
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.
- Bruce Barton, American author, advertising executive, politician (1886-1967)
Almost all of us believe that something inside us is superior to the circumstances of our lives. It's what keeps us sane and away from killing each other. Not so many of us accomplish something splendid. The reason may be a disconnect between what we are capable of and what we believe we are capable of.
Hold that thought for a moment while we check out that driver behind you.
Have you ever fumbled with your car radio or to take something out of your glovebox or even had a conversation with someone in the car you were driving and suddenly realized that you had absolutely no memory of driving the past few minutes? Technically you were unconscious while driving.
Unconscious? Doesn't that mean in a coma or dead, or at least asleep? Yes, but not exclusively. To be conscious means to be fully aware of your surroundings. As you were obviously not fully aware of your surroundings while you drove in our example, you could not have been conscious. So what were you?
Social science has given up on the idea formerly called the "subconscious." Mostly because there is no evidence for it. One dictionary describes "unconscious" as "that part of the mind wherein psychic activity takes place of which the person is unaware." In this example you were aware of your radio search or your glovebox search or your conversation. But you were also aware in some very different sense--psychically--of your driving.
Could you be driving "mechanically" as some used to say young adults did after a few years of driving experience? Let's put it this way, would you be comfortable driving on a highway at full speed surrounded by people who were driving only "mechanically"? The ugly truth is that many of us do. That guy behind you may indeed be driving mechanically, or unconsciously, meaning that he may not be able to apply his full attention to any emergency that may arise (such as you having to come to a sudden stop because a dog wandered onto the highway).
You dream with your unconscious mind. When you dream many of the functions of your brain you normally consider part of your waking life are shut down. The frontal lobes, for example, those brain parts that allow you to distinguish between right and wrong and that keep you on "an even keel" when you are awake, don't function. That's why dreams can be crazy sometimes, because the brain's normal control mechanisms are shut down when you are asleep.
Science doesn't know for certain why we need sleep, though recent research suggests it help us to review our activities of the previous day so we can embed them in longer term memory--that is, we need sleep to consolidate our daytime learning. You, very likely, do not know how you managed to pilot your car down the road without being aware of what you were doing while searching for a different radio station. But you are certain you weren't asleep. But were you conscious?
Any activity of the brain that does not involve the full application of all critical brain functions is an activity you do while, technically, unconscious. While unconscious your body may be in bed resting or in a hospital room in a coma. It may also be doing--indeed parts of your brain may be doing--something other than that of which you are fully aware.
What do you think when you hear an argument in a murder case that the defendant was not fully aware of what he was doing when he killed his wife? If you are involved in a collision while you are technically unconscious, the investigating police officer will consider you just as liable. We all assume that we do everything consciously. Science says otherwise, though we all hope that part of science doesn't take the stand in a court case.
Murder cases and car collisions are extreme cases. Most of our lives are lived away from extremes. Yet people sometimes do little things they may not be aware of--things that annoy you greatly or that inconvenience you--without being fully aware (conscious) of what they are doing. You don't want them imprisoned for their faults because then you would have to be behind bars for doing similar things. So, what to do?
The human brain and consciousness are, as you can see, subjects that bear much more study. We understand very little about them. Yet they govern our lives, and the brains and consciousness of others impact our lives, every day. As much as they mean to us and as much as they affect our lives, we know almost nothing about them.
We accept that we are all imperfect beings. Now you have a clue why that is. It may not solve any mysteries for you but it may help you to understand why people do or say things that simply don't seem right or in character for them, things that seem out of place.
As with many human behaviours it's best to ignore the extremes because they do not represent who these people are. Who they are when they are fully conscious. They, in turn, can be expected to forgive your extremes of behaviour.
But, just in case, if the driver behind you seems distracted, maybe you should pull over and let him or her pass before something happens you may find messy and uncomfortable. You can still drive fully conscious.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know how their children can develop socially and emotionally in concert with their intellectual and physical development.
Learn more at http://billallin.c/om
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.
- Bruce Barton, American author, advertising executive, politician (1886-1967)
Almost all of us believe that something inside us is superior to the circumstances of our lives. It's what keeps us sane and away from killing each other. Not so many of us accomplish something splendid. The reason may be a disconnect between what we are capable of and what we believe we are capable of.
Hold that thought for a moment while we check out that driver behind you.
Have you ever fumbled with your car radio or to take something out of your glovebox or even had a conversation with someone in the car you were driving and suddenly realized that you had absolutely no memory of driving the past few minutes? Technically you were unconscious while driving.
Unconscious? Doesn't that mean in a coma or dead, or at least asleep? Yes, but not exclusively. To be conscious means to be fully aware of your surroundings. As you were obviously not fully aware of your surroundings while you drove in our example, you could not have been conscious. So what were you?
Social science has given up on the idea formerly called the "subconscious." Mostly because there is no evidence for it. One dictionary describes "unconscious" as "that part of the mind wherein psychic activity takes place of which the person is unaware." In this example you were aware of your radio search or your glovebox search or your conversation. But you were also aware in some very different sense--psychically--of your driving.
Could you be driving "mechanically" as some used to say young adults did after a few years of driving experience? Let's put it this way, would you be comfortable driving on a highway at full speed surrounded by people who were driving only "mechanically"? The ugly truth is that many of us do. That guy behind you may indeed be driving mechanically, or unconsciously, meaning that he may not be able to apply his full attention to any emergency that may arise (such as you having to come to a sudden stop because a dog wandered onto the highway).
You dream with your unconscious mind. When you dream many of the functions of your brain you normally consider part of your waking life are shut down. The frontal lobes, for example, those brain parts that allow you to distinguish between right and wrong and that keep you on "an even keel" when you are awake, don't function. That's why dreams can be crazy sometimes, because the brain's normal control mechanisms are shut down when you are asleep.
Science doesn't know for certain why we need sleep, though recent research suggests it help us to review our activities of the previous day so we can embed them in longer term memory--that is, we need sleep to consolidate our daytime learning. You, very likely, do not know how you managed to pilot your car down the road without being aware of what you were doing while searching for a different radio station. But you are certain you weren't asleep. But were you conscious?
Any activity of the brain that does not involve the full application of all critical brain functions is an activity you do while, technically, unconscious. While unconscious your body may be in bed resting or in a hospital room in a coma. It may also be doing--indeed parts of your brain may be doing--something other than that of which you are fully aware.
What do you think when you hear an argument in a murder case that the defendant was not fully aware of what he was doing when he killed his wife? If you are involved in a collision while you are technically unconscious, the investigating police officer will consider you just as liable. We all assume that we do everything consciously. Science says otherwise, though we all hope that part of science doesn't take the stand in a court case.
Murder cases and car collisions are extreme cases. Most of our lives are lived away from extremes. Yet people sometimes do little things they may not be aware of--things that annoy you greatly or that inconvenience you--without being fully aware (conscious) of what they are doing. You don't want them imprisoned for their faults because then you would have to be behind bars for doing similar things. So, what to do?
The human brain and consciousness are, as you can see, subjects that bear much more study. We understand very little about them. Yet they govern our lives, and the brains and consciousness of others impact our lives, every day. As much as they mean to us and as much as they affect our lives, we know almost nothing about them.
We accept that we are all imperfect beings. Now you have a clue why that is. It may not solve any mysteries for you but it may help you to understand why people do or say things that simply don't seem right or in character for them, things that seem out of place.
As with many human behaviours it's best to ignore the extremes because they do not represent who these people are. Who they are when they are fully conscious. They, in turn, can be expected to forgive your extremes of behaviour.
But, just in case, if the driver behind you seems distracted, maybe you should pull over and let him or her pass before something happens you may find messy and uncomfortable. You can still drive fully conscious.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know how their children can develop socially and emotionally in concert with their intellectual and physical development.
Learn more at http://billallin.c/om
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Your Momma Should Have Known
Your Momma Should Have Known
"Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes...The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work."
- Carl Zimmer
Nothing against your mother. The point is that your mother and everyone's mother should have been taught what you are about to learn, before you were born. The news is recent, but the information itself has been around since the beginning of our existence.
Caution: What you are about to learn may change what you think about life and how you understand the sometimes mysterious behaviour of others. You won't be asked to convert to any way of thinking. It will simply help you to understand.
Human behaviour, or human nature if you will, may present the greatest mystery and challenge anyone has ever faced. For examples, men ask "What do women want?" while women wonder "What makes men tick?" Neither is a huge mystery, it's just that we haven't taught each other what a few of us already know.
The study you will read about could not have been conducted on humans. At least not on living ones. You will soon understand why. It was conducted on rats. And on the brains of people who had recently died, some from suicide. Just to make it more enticing, love has a great deal to do with it.
In humans, love is a mystery. The word has more definitions than just about any other in the Oxford English Dictionary. The problem is that we can't get a handle on exactly what love is. Yet, in our own lives, we tend to quantify love. We don't measure love as such. We measure loving touch.
In general, we touch those we love more than those we don't love. When the romance of the early months of a new relationship filled with lots of loving touch fades and the touching reduces to little or nothing, we say that love was lost. People leave legal relationships seeking more and better love, but what they really seek is more loving touch. We tend to equate touch with love. We measure how much others love us by the amount they want to share loving touch with us.
Not so easy to test in a science lab. Especially when ethics intervenes when we want to prove that people change for the negative when they lack sufficient touch of others. Many labs have turned to rats as substitutes. The similarities between us and rats in these tests may make you uncomfortable, but they are real.
In one family of rats the mother was allowed to lick the fur of her babies, often and extensively. In another, the mother hardly licked her babies at all. As adults, the two groups of rats turn out very different. In the neglected group, the rats were easily startled by unexpected noises, they were reluctant to explore new places and their bodies produced lots of hormone when they experienced stress.
The licked and loved rats were not easily startled, showed great curiosity in exploring new places in their environment. And they "did not suffer surges of stress hormones," according to Carl Zimmer.
They did not suffer surges of stress hormones. I do. Like many others, I lack the gene that should cause my adrenal gland to produce a hormone that neutralizes the effects of epinephrin (commonly known as adrenalin), the chemical produced by the adrenal gland to prepare us for action in times of sudden stress, known as the fight or flight response. In other words, when my body senses stress, I not only get the surge of adrenalin but it hangs around in my bloodstream for hours, even for days.
Why do some people suffer severely from stress--even to the point of thinking about or actually committing suicide--while others seem able to handle stress with relative ease? The rats in the experiment above and in hundreds of other labs may show us the answer. The rats--and at least some of us--may not be able to handle stress as well as others because our brains and bodies are not prepared for what amounts to prolonged chemical warfare on us. Self-induced chemical warfare.
Two families of molecules control when our genes turn on and off, which ones and for how long. One, the methyl group, essentially plugs the path for genes to express themselves by producing proteins. The other, coiling proteins, wraps our DNA into spools so tight the genes can't become active. If either is too successful or lacking, something can happen with gene expression (or may be prevented from happening) that will affect our health and even our lives.
Our experiences can rewrite these two, collectively called the epigenetic code. Most of the writing or behaviour patterning is done before we are born. However, strong experiences after we are born--even extraordinarily strong experiences as adults--can rewrite the code.
Differences between the brain of the licked rats and the neglected ones were found in the hippocampus. The glucocorticoid receptor gene--the one that controls how long adrenalin stays in the bloodstream--for example, was capped off by methyl groups in the neglected rats and they had fewer receptors than the licked rats. Thus the neglected rats had fewer ways to stop adrenalin from doing its thing when it was no longer needed. They were permanently stressed out.
Neurobiologist Michael Meaney, of McGill University, and colleagues followed his rat studies by studying the brains of people who had recently died. Twelve had committed suicide and had suffered abuse as children, 12 had committed suicide but had not suffered abuse and the final 12 had died of natural causes. The suicide people who had suffered abuse had cortisol receptors capped by methyl groups and had fewer receptors, as they had found with the rats. Abuse in childhood had caused them to be permanently stressed as adults.
Another group studied suicide victims and people who died natural deaths and found methyl groups blocking the gene that produces the protein BDNF in the Wernicke area of the brains of the suicides. Environmental influences--everything after birth, including human interaction--can also affect adults.
Neuroscientist Eric Nestler, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, examined the brains of mice that had been put through so much stress in conflicts with other mice that they were depressed. He found differences in an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is involved with the brain's reward system and helps to set values on things based on the pleasure derived from them. He found the DNA in that part wound tightly with coiling proteins. Nestler's group found the same kinds of epigenetic changes in the brains of depressed humans who had recently died.
Brain changes caused by coiling proteins and methyl groups should be able to be reversed, once we learn how. Nestler injected HDAC inhibitors into the nucleus accumbens parts of the brains of depressed mice to loosen the coils of DNA. Ten days later the mice were less hesitant about approaching other mice and other signs of depression were absent.
These studies suggest that previously intractable human troubles such as depression, suicide and a wide range of problems associated with constant stress (including those that impact the immune system) may be correctable. More study is needed and testing on humans will be tricky, maybe even risky at first.
Any change to the brain is risky. But it may be do-able. Medical science is still in the very early stages of learning about our most complex and sophisticated organ.
Soon taking a DNA sample of a newborn baby will be routine. The sample will be examined for variations from expected norms so the child can have a genetic adjustment made and avoid genetic problems and weaknesses that are an unfortunate part of life today.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow healthy children right from birth. This book shows us how.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: The Brain, by Carl Zimmer, Discover, June 2010]
"Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes...The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work."
- Carl Zimmer
Nothing against your mother. The point is that your mother and everyone's mother should have been taught what you are about to learn, before you were born. The news is recent, but the information itself has been around since the beginning of our existence.
Caution: What you are about to learn may change what you think about life and how you understand the sometimes mysterious behaviour of others. You won't be asked to convert to any way of thinking. It will simply help you to understand.
Human behaviour, or human nature if you will, may present the greatest mystery and challenge anyone has ever faced. For examples, men ask "What do women want?" while women wonder "What makes men tick?" Neither is a huge mystery, it's just that we haven't taught each other what a few of us already know.
The study you will read about could not have been conducted on humans. At least not on living ones. You will soon understand why. It was conducted on rats. And on the brains of people who had recently died, some from suicide. Just to make it more enticing, love has a great deal to do with it.
In humans, love is a mystery. The word has more definitions than just about any other in the Oxford English Dictionary. The problem is that we can't get a handle on exactly what love is. Yet, in our own lives, we tend to quantify love. We don't measure love as such. We measure loving touch.
In general, we touch those we love more than those we don't love. When the romance of the early months of a new relationship filled with lots of loving touch fades and the touching reduces to little or nothing, we say that love was lost. People leave legal relationships seeking more and better love, but what they really seek is more loving touch. We tend to equate touch with love. We measure how much others love us by the amount they want to share loving touch with us.
Not so easy to test in a science lab. Especially when ethics intervenes when we want to prove that people change for the negative when they lack sufficient touch of others. Many labs have turned to rats as substitutes. The similarities between us and rats in these tests may make you uncomfortable, but they are real.
In one family of rats the mother was allowed to lick the fur of her babies, often and extensively. In another, the mother hardly licked her babies at all. As adults, the two groups of rats turn out very different. In the neglected group, the rats were easily startled by unexpected noises, they were reluctant to explore new places and their bodies produced lots of hormone when they experienced stress.
The licked and loved rats were not easily startled, showed great curiosity in exploring new places in their environment. And they "did not suffer surges of stress hormones," according to Carl Zimmer.
They did not suffer surges of stress hormones. I do. Like many others, I lack the gene that should cause my adrenal gland to produce a hormone that neutralizes the effects of epinephrin (commonly known as adrenalin), the chemical produced by the adrenal gland to prepare us for action in times of sudden stress, known as the fight or flight response. In other words, when my body senses stress, I not only get the surge of adrenalin but it hangs around in my bloodstream for hours, even for days.
Why do some people suffer severely from stress--even to the point of thinking about or actually committing suicide--while others seem able to handle stress with relative ease? The rats in the experiment above and in hundreds of other labs may show us the answer. The rats--and at least some of us--may not be able to handle stress as well as others because our brains and bodies are not prepared for what amounts to prolonged chemical warfare on us. Self-induced chemical warfare.
Two families of molecules control when our genes turn on and off, which ones and for how long. One, the methyl group, essentially plugs the path for genes to express themselves by producing proteins. The other, coiling proteins, wraps our DNA into spools so tight the genes can't become active. If either is too successful or lacking, something can happen with gene expression (or may be prevented from happening) that will affect our health and even our lives.
Our experiences can rewrite these two, collectively called the epigenetic code. Most of the writing or behaviour patterning is done before we are born. However, strong experiences after we are born--even extraordinarily strong experiences as adults--can rewrite the code.
Differences between the brain of the licked rats and the neglected ones were found in the hippocampus. The glucocorticoid receptor gene--the one that controls how long adrenalin stays in the bloodstream--for example, was capped off by methyl groups in the neglected rats and they had fewer receptors than the licked rats. Thus the neglected rats had fewer ways to stop adrenalin from doing its thing when it was no longer needed. They were permanently stressed out.
Neurobiologist Michael Meaney, of McGill University, and colleagues followed his rat studies by studying the brains of people who had recently died. Twelve had committed suicide and had suffered abuse as children, 12 had committed suicide but had not suffered abuse and the final 12 had died of natural causes. The suicide people who had suffered abuse had cortisol receptors capped by methyl groups and had fewer receptors, as they had found with the rats. Abuse in childhood had caused them to be permanently stressed as adults.
Another group studied suicide victims and people who died natural deaths and found methyl groups blocking the gene that produces the protein BDNF in the Wernicke area of the brains of the suicides. Environmental influences--everything after birth, including human interaction--can also affect adults.
Neuroscientist Eric Nestler, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, examined the brains of mice that had been put through so much stress in conflicts with other mice that they were depressed. He found differences in an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is involved with the brain's reward system and helps to set values on things based on the pleasure derived from them. He found the DNA in that part wound tightly with coiling proteins. Nestler's group found the same kinds of epigenetic changes in the brains of depressed humans who had recently died.
Brain changes caused by coiling proteins and methyl groups should be able to be reversed, once we learn how. Nestler injected HDAC inhibitors into the nucleus accumbens parts of the brains of depressed mice to loosen the coils of DNA. Ten days later the mice were less hesitant about approaching other mice and other signs of depression were absent.
These studies suggest that previously intractable human troubles such as depression, suicide and a wide range of problems associated with constant stress (including those that impact the immune system) may be correctable. More study is needed and testing on humans will be tricky, maybe even risky at first.
Any change to the brain is risky. But it may be do-able. Medical science is still in the very early stages of learning about our most complex and sophisticated organ.
Soon taking a DNA sample of a newborn baby will be routine. The sample will be examined for variations from expected norms so the child can have a genetic adjustment made and avoid genetic problems and weaknesses that are an unfortunate part of life today.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow healthy children right from birth. This book shows us how.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: The Brain, by Carl Zimmer, Discover, June 2010]
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Robert Heinlein: un-American Rebel With A Cause
Robert Heinlein: un-American Rebel With A Cause
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- Robert A. Heinlein, American science-fiction author (1907-1988)
That's outrageous! Why, look at what our experts have done for us.
Our expert chemists have created chemical fertilizers and pesticides to put on our agricultural crops so megafarming agribusinesses can produce lots more food than our ancestors ever dreamed of. And diseases and weaknesses such as diabetes, allergies and heart disease at rates never previously imagined because our bodies can't cope with the chemical attacks over long periods of time. (Tests are usually over three years, seldom longer, as if nothing could affect our health over a long period of time.)
Other expert chemists, medical specialists, have developed drugs to rescue us from the ravages of those chemicals, which have also made their way into our air (over half a million kinds) and our drinking water (over 300,000 kinds).
Our expert medical doctors happily prescribe those drugs for the rest of our lives so we can stay on our feet and work harder than our ancestors ever dreamed. And, so they won't forget what to prescribe, many of them accept reminder gifts from the pharmaceutical companies. A comfortable arrangement for the experts.
Our business specialists, MBAs tucked neatly in safe locations, figure out how to manufacture things to make our lives easier. Our communications specialists devise ways to sell those products to us through advertising, making us believe we need stuff we seldom use. The facts that our lives are not easier, that we have more stress than any previous generation, take more drugs than any previous generation and buy so much we don't need that we have to have yard sales and to give other stuff to "needy" people in neighbouring countries is never mentioned, so we forget. (Donations by Americans are often sold in Canada, and vice versa, a fact seldom noted publicly.)
Our expert architects design skyscrapers so well that most people who have to work in them have their health compromised. Sick building syndrome--no one knows how it will affect our length of life--stands as a hallmark of modern architectural progress.
Our legal specialists are so good at defending bad guys with cash to spread around that few go to prison and the ones who do have short stays. Our lawyers have reputations worse than used car salesmen of the old days. Their accounting specialists advise them how to Hoover every available dollar from ordinary folks who know so little of the skills of relationships they don't know how to stay married, so little about money management that more cash goes out than comes in for too many people and so little about getting along with neighbours that whole television courtroom series have cropped up to document the conflicts and allow the rest of us to be voyeurs.
Our specialists have made us the great Western World are persuaded those who are not part of it envy to such extremes that some of them want to murder us because of it.
We are, in short, the epitome of progress. We have our specialists to thank.
Let's take a moment to consider the parts of their lives that our experts and specialists don't want us to think about. Would you expect to see one of them changing a flat tire? No, because they have roadside assistance insurance. Or is it because they have no idea how to change a tire? Or because they fear getting their hands dirty. Ask one.
Most pay little attention to their diet until they are diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease, have a stroke or are told point blank by their doctors that they are obese or dangerously overweight such that their lives are at risk. They know little about nutrition, what their bodies need to stay healthy.
Most have no idea how to fix their own computers, even how to keep dust out of them, and many don't even keep their security programs up to date. They don't change the oil in their own cars because they don't know how. They can't change a washer in a leaky tap/faucet. They have to call a plumber when their toilet plugs up because they have no idea how to use a plunger (or how to avoid plugging the toilet in the first place).
They don't plant their own gardens where they can grow pesticide-free and chemical-free veggies and fruit because they "don't have time." In fact, most don't have any idea how to tend a garden.
On the other hand, a high school dropout may know how to do all of these things and hundreds more. Does this make the dropout more fit for life in the 21st century than the highly educated person? Not necessarily. But maybe.
Consider this possibility. Something happens that causes the power to go out in your part of the world and you learn that it will be out for a whole year or more. Would you rather have the high school dropout who has had to survive by the seat of his pants for many years as an ally or one of the experts or specialists mentioned earlier in this article?
Of course you assume that such a thing will never happen, even though a terrorist bomb could accomplish it. The 30 million people of the US state of California believe their state will never sink into the Pacific either, even though scientists have been warning it would happen for years from a split of earth's tectonic plates along the San Andreas fault. Many Americans are unaware that what is known as a super volcano is brewing under Yellowstone Park, even though a blow that would darken the skies of the world possibly for years is overdue. These things can happen. Eventually one will. Some call it Armageddon, but it's really just nature in action.
Am I suggesting that high school and post secondary education is worthless or counter productive? Not at all. What is needed is a change of focus in our elementary and high schools. We need to teach children life skills, not stuff they know they will never need or use. How much do you remember or use of what you learned in high school? Would you have willing traded much of it for some of the life skills you have learned by experience since then?
Adolescents and young adults have trouble in high school often because they see how useless what they are forced to learn is and will be to them in the future. They know they need to learn life lessons--that desire to learn is instinctive--but they don't know what those lessons are or how to get them. They rebel. They drop out. They take drugs or alcohol, get tattoos, listen to music that could destroy their hearing, and so on. Eventually, most of them learn the lessons they need, get back on track and become upstanding citizens. But not quickly enough. Those lessons often come the hard way, by making mistake after mistake and learning from them. A few don't make it.
As radical as Robert Heinlein's suggestion in our opening quote seemed when you first read it, it makes more sense now. We have time to teach these life lessons and more. We simply need to eliminate what was better suited for 18th century schools than it is for today's world. In the 18th century kids learned life lessons at home. Today's kids can't learn them at home because many of their parents don't know the life lessons themselves to teach. With both parents working to earn enough to buy the fun things of life as well as what we believe are necessities, we need someone to teach the life lessons that used to be taught at home.
They aren't being taught at school today because the curriculum is too crowded with other (often unnecessary) stuff. They aren't being taught at home. And our young people experience more problems at school and outside of it than any previous generation.
This is a simple connect-the-dots problem and solution. By the way, I still don't know how to set a bone, but I can do most of the rest of what Heinlein suggested. It took me six decades of life to learn these lessons. I should have been able to learn them in school, before I needed them. You too.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to understand guidebook (with a threatening sounding title) for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know how to manage their lives. It includes specific lessons.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- Robert A. Heinlein, American science-fiction author (1907-1988)
That's outrageous! Why, look at what our experts have done for us.
Our expert chemists have created chemical fertilizers and pesticides to put on our agricultural crops so megafarming agribusinesses can produce lots more food than our ancestors ever dreamed of. And diseases and weaknesses such as diabetes, allergies and heart disease at rates never previously imagined because our bodies can't cope with the chemical attacks over long periods of time. (Tests are usually over three years, seldom longer, as if nothing could affect our health over a long period of time.)
Other expert chemists, medical specialists, have developed drugs to rescue us from the ravages of those chemicals, which have also made their way into our air (over half a million kinds) and our drinking water (over 300,000 kinds).
Our expert medical doctors happily prescribe those drugs for the rest of our lives so we can stay on our feet and work harder than our ancestors ever dreamed. And, so they won't forget what to prescribe, many of them accept reminder gifts from the pharmaceutical companies. A comfortable arrangement for the experts.
Our business specialists, MBAs tucked neatly in safe locations, figure out how to manufacture things to make our lives easier. Our communications specialists devise ways to sell those products to us through advertising, making us believe we need stuff we seldom use. The facts that our lives are not easier, that we have more stress than any previous generation, take more drugs than any previous generation and buy so much we don't need that we have to have yard sales and to give other stuff to "needy" people in neighbouring countries is never mentioned, so we forget. (Donations by Americans are often sold in Canada, and vice versa, a fact seldom noted publicly.)
Our expert architects design skyscrapers so well that most people who have to work in them have their health compromised. Sick building syndrome--no one knows how it will affect our length of life--stands as a hallmark of modern architectural progress.
Our legal specialists are so good at defending bad guys with cash to spread around that few go to prison and the ones who do have short stays. Our lawyers have reputations worse than used car salesmen of the old days. Their accounting specialists advise them how to Hoover every available dollar from ordinary folks who know so little of the skills of relationships they don't know how to stay married, so little about money management that more cash goes out than comes in for too many people and so little about getting along with neighbours that whole television courtroom series have cropped up to document the conflicts and allow the rest of us to be voyeurs.
Our specialists have made us the great Western World are persuaded those who are not part of it envy to such extremes that some of them want to murder us because of it.
We are, in short, the epitome of progress. We have our specialists to thank.
Let's take a moment to consider the parts of their lives that our experts and specialists don't want us to think about. Would you expect to see one of them changing a flat tire? No, because they have roadside assistance insurance. Or is it because they have no idea how to change a tire? Or because they fear getting their hands dirty. Ask one.
Most pay little attention to their diet until they are diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease, have a stroke or are told point blank by their doctors that they are obese or dangerously overweight such that their lives are at risk. They know little about nutrition, what their bodies need to stay healthy.
Most have no idea how to fix their own computers, even how to keep dust out of them, and many don't even keep their security programs up to date. They don't change the oil in their own cars because they don't know how. They can't change a washer in a leaky tap/faucet. They have to call a plumber when their toilet plugs up because they have no idea how to use a plunger (or how to avoid plugging the toilet in the first place).
They don't plant their own gardens where they can grow pesticide-free and chemical-free veggies and fruit because they "don't have time." In fact, most don't have any idea how to tend a garden.
On the other hand, a high school dropout may know how to do all of these things and hundreds more. Does this make the dropout more fit for life in the 21st century than the highly educated person? Not necessarily. But maybe.
Consider this possibility. Something happens that causes the power to go out in your part of the world and you learn that it will be out for a whole year or more. Would you rather have the high school dropout who has had to survive by the seat of his pants for many years as an ally or one of the experts or specialists mentioned earlier in this article?
Of course you assume that such a thing will never happen, even though a terrorist bomb could accomplish it. The 30 million people of the US state of California believe their state will never sink into the Pacific either, even though scientists have been warning it would happen for years from a split of earth's tectonic plates along the San Andreas fault. Many Americans are unaware that what is known as a super volcano is brewing under Yellowstone Park, even though a blow that would darken the skies of the world possibly for years is overdue. These things can happen. Eventually one will. Some call it Armageddon, but it's really just nature in action.
Am I suggesting that high school and post secondary education is worthless or counter productive? Not at all. What is needed is a change of focus in our elementary and high schools. We need to teach children life skills, not stuff they know they will never need or use. How much do you remember or use of what you learned in high school? Would you have willing traded much of it for some of the life skills you have learned by experience since then?
Adolescents and young adults have trouble in high school often because they see how useless what they are forced to learn is and will be to them in the future. They know they need to learn life lessons--that desire to learn is instinctive--but they don't know what those lessons are or how to get them. They rebel. They drop out. They take drugs or alcohol, get tattoos, listen to music that could destroy their hearing, and so on. Eventually, most of them learn the lessons they need, get back on track and become upstanding citizens. But not quickly enough. Those lessons often come the hard way, by making mistake after mistake and learning from them. A few don't make it.
As radical as Robert Heinlein's suggestion in our opening quote seemed when you first read it, it makes more sense now. We have time to teach these life lessons and more. We simply need to eliminate what was better suited for 18th century schools than it is for today's world. In the 18th century kids learned life lessons at home. Today's kids can't learn them at home because many of their parents don't know the life lessons themselves to teach. With both parents working to earn enough to buy the fun things of life as well as what we believe are necessities, we need someone to teach the life lessons that used to be taught at home.
They aren't being taught at school today because the curriculum is too crowded with other (often unnecessary) stuff. They aren't being taught at home. And our young people experience more problems at school and outside of it than any previous generation.
This is a simple connect-the-dots problem and solution. By the way, I still don't know how to set a bone, but I can do most of the rest of what Heinlein suggested. It took me six decades of life to learn these lessons. I should have been able to learn them in school, before I needed them. You too.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to understand guidebook (with a threatening sounding title) for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know how to manage their lives. It includes specific lessons.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Why Coughing Into Your Elbow Is Wrong
Why Coughing Into Your Elbow Is Wrong
You likely grew up, as I did, being told to cover your mouth and nose with your hand when you cough or sneeze. That has changed.
We are now told to cough or sneeze into the elbow of a sleeve. One commercial currently on television shows a woman carrying a laundry basket and coughing into her shoulder. All in the aid of avoiding the spread of "germs."
Here's the problem. Rather, a combination of them. Let's begin with the objective, confining germs that would normally be spread into the air by coughing or sneezing.
When you cover your mouth and nose with your hand, you prevent most of what comes out of them from reaching anyone else. Witness the fact that sometimes your hand got a bit wet. (I know, the subject is unpleasant, but the title should have warned you.) When you cough or sneeze into your sleeve elbow, a good deal of what comes out of your mouth or nose will miss the fabric.
When you cover your mouth with your hand to cough or sneeze, you can wash your hand. You should wash them anyway, several times a day, so that should not be an imposition. If you have a cold or cough, you can carry disposable tissues.
When you cough or sneeze into your sleeve, it's highly unlikely you will change your clothing until a much later time. What is highly likely is that you will cough or sneeze again and use the same sleeve. When you cough or sneeze, the immediate reflex is to inhale to replace the expelled air. You do that before turning away from your sleeve, which means that you then inhale your own germs.
The whole purpose of using disposable tissues rather than the old style handkerchief was so you could avoid breathing in the same germs you blew into the handkerchief last time. Most of us got that message: don't inhale the germs you sneezed or coughed out last time.
As the saying goes, do the math. Coughing or sneezing into your sleeve causes as much as 90 percent of germs that may exit your mouth or nose to escape into the air around you. Always at least 50 percent escapes.
If you have a colleague who smokes, ask that person to inhale from a cigarette then blow the smoke back out again into their sleeve, as a person would when sneezing or coughing. It may shock you how little smoke sticks to the fabric and how much makes its way into the air. The example isn't perfect, but it will serve its purpose.
People in North America were asked to switch from cloth handkerchiefs to disposable paper tissues a few decades ago to avoid having us breathe our own germs when we coughed or sneezed into handkerchiefs. The same thinking still applies.
The more often a person with a cold or cough expels air into their sleeve, believing that they are doing right by those around them, the more people will catch colds and coughs from them. And the more often those same people may re-infect themselves. The more people get colds and coughs, the more OTC (over the counter) medications the drug manufacturers will sell.
When we learn our health habits from the people who make medicines, we must understand that these companies have far less interest in our health than in our cash, their bottom lines.
We have good reason to believe that coughing or sneezing into our own sleeves may cause more disease than it avoids. Who wins with that scenario?
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to read guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach the right lessons to their children at the best possible times to aid their development.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
You likely grew up, as I did, being told to cover your mouth and nose with your hand when you cough or sneeze. That has changed.
We are now told to cough or sneeze into the elbow of a sleeve. One commercial currently on television shows a woman carrying a laundry basket and coughing into her shoulder. All in the aid of avoiding the spread of "germs."
Here's the problem. Rather, a combination of them. Let's begin with the objective, confining germs that would normally be spread into the air by coughing or sneezing.
When you cover your mouth and nose with your hand, you prevent most of what comes out of them from reaching anyone else. Witness the fact that sometimes your hand got a bit wet. (I know, the subject is unpleasant, but the title should have warned you.) When you cough or sneeze into your sleeve elbow, a good deal of what comes out of your mouth or nose will miss the fabric.
When you cover your mouth with your hand to cough or sneeze, you can wash your hand. You should wash them anyway, several times a day, so that should not be an imposition. If you have a cold or cough, you can carry disposable tissues.
When you cough or sneeze into your sleeve, it's highly unlikely you will change your clothing until a much later time. What is highly likely is that you will cough or sneeze again and use the same sleeve. When you cough or sneeze, the immediate reflex is to inhale to replace the expelled air. You do that before turning away from your sleeve, which means that you then inhale your own germs.
The whole purpose of using disposable tissues rather than the old style handkerchief was so you could avoid breathing in the same germs you blew into the handkerchief last time. Most of us got that message: don't inhale the germs you sneezed or coughed out last time.
As the saying goes, do the math. Coughing or sneezing into your sleeve causes as much as 90 percent of germs that may exit your mouth or nose to escape into the air around you. Always at least 50 percent escapes.
If you have a colleague who smokes, ask that person to inhale from a cigarette then blow the smoke back out again into their sleeve, as a person would when sneezing or coughing. It may shock you how little smoke sticks to the fabric and how much makes its way into the air. The example isn't perfect, but it will serve its purpose.
People in North America were asked to switch from cloth handkerchiefs to disposable paper tissues a few decades ago to avoid having us breathe our own germs when we coughed or sneezed into handkerchiefs. The same thinking still applies.
The more often a person with a cold or cough expels air into their sleeve, believing that they are doing right by those around them, the more people will catch colds and coughs from them. And the more often those same people may re-infect themselves. The more people get colds and coughs, the more OTC (over the counter) medications the drug manufacturers will sell.
When we learn our health habits from the people who make medicines, we must understand that these companies have far less interest in our health than in our cash, their bottom lines.
We have good reason to believe that coughing or sneezing into our own sleeves may cause more disease than it avoids. Who wins with that scenario?
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to read guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach the right lessons to their children at the best possible times to aid their development.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Thursday, August 13, 2009
When Should Children Be Taught Certain Facts and Skills?
When Should Children Be Taught Certain Facts and Skills?
In response to an article I wrote recently about teaching information, facts and skills to children much earlier than most adults think is advisable and possible, one of my readers wrote to ask me to elaborate on the "when." When to teach children what is a critically important question, yet one that is seldom asked.
The following was my reply to her.
............................
Many adults believe that timing of information given to children is extremely important. They think that if the timing of wrong, it may harm the child's mind or morals. This is wrong in every possible way.
Teaching a child about drugs, for example, does not open the possibility that the child will adopt the taking of drugs. The whole purpose of teaching the child about drugs is to inform them about what harm can come to them by taking drugs other than under the supervision of a medical professional. Teaching a child about sex between man and woman does not encourage the child to experiment with sex prematurely. Despite these widespread beliefs, there is no evidence that early teaching about drugs, sex or any other matter that a parent should be teaching to a child affects the mind or body of the child as a result of being taught prematurely.
Despite parent supervision of internet use by children, the truth is that this is impossible. Kids are resourceful and will find ways to circumvent restrictions by the parents. One way, for example, is simply to visit a friend's house, someone who does not suffer such restrictions. In other words, information on every possible subject is available on the internet. However, some of this information is wrong and some (in its wrongness) does harm. Consider how many adults have been fooled by urban legends and so-called Nigeria scams.
A parent should be teaching life skills about all subjects when a child is young. How young is too young? You know your timing is wrong when the child shows no interest in the subject, gets distracted easily. THAT is the only criterion for premature teaching. The child, not the parent, should choose when he or she is ready to learn about a subject.
Innocence in children is admirable if you want them to never grow up. But they do. Children who have been kept innocent by their parents tend to become ignorant adults. Ignorant adults don't know what to do and when to do it. They have few coping skills when life throws them a bad curve, such as a personal assault on their person, a home invasion, divorce or death of a loved one.
Children learn about life in the womb, even before they are born. They have the ability to learn a language (a sophisticated and complex cognitive process) even before they can walk. Studies show that children study language before they even have the ability to make use of that learning through their own speech. Children have the ability to understand the most complex information we can give them at a shockingly early age.
If mistakes are make with early teaching, they would be with the adult, not with the child. The adult (usually parent) might not teach well for the learning style of the child. Imagine a parent using the lecture style of a university professor with a child of two years. No matter how fact filled the lecture might be, the child will not be interested because young children learn by doing more than by listening. They learn language by listening, but that has an incentive because the child wants to participate in family conversations. For most matters to be learned early by a child, they can learn is easier by doing something.
I most cases, children learn while they play. Play is their form of work. A parent can teach a child in the context of play. Make it a fun and enjoyable situation. Because kids want to learn, teaching them something that is given them as if imparting a secret is also a fun learning style. They often want to believe that they know something other kids don't. And they should be in that situation at least once in a while.
Let's take a teaching example. How many facts might a parent possibly teach a child about sex? Let's say 50 facts. A child of three years has no need for or use for 50 facts about sex. The child will not be interested in learning 50 facts. But he might be interested in learning a few of them. It stops being fun for a child to learn when the learning becomes memorization. A child has learning limits. Those limits are more of total accumulation at any given time than of their ability to understand something.
How many lies do parents tell their children so that they can avoid teaching them the truth? A parent may tell a child that a new baby is delivered by a stork or an angel from heaven. The child will know that is wrong. The child sees the mother grow in the belly, then return from the hospital, with baby in arms, much thinner. Which does more harm, telling the child that babies begin with the joining of sex organs (every kid has a set) of mother and father, or telling the child a lie? Believe me, telling the lie to a young child makes the child mistrust information from the parent.
A lie told to a child by a parent, no matter what the intent of the parent, is a lie to the child, a lie that undermines the trust the child has in the most important adult in his or her life. A "white lie" is a lie and it's understood as a lie by the child.
The message a child learns from a lie by his parent, no matter what the nature of the lie, is "I'm a bad parent who can't cope with teaching you the truth, so I am making up this lie. We're stuck with each other, so live with it." Children recognize lies and diversionary tactics far more readily than most adults realize. They don't know what to make of a lie, what to do about the fact that their most important source of information about life has lied to them. The child will still love the parent, but trust between them will have been undermined.
Children can handle truth at any age, even as young as age one year. No child knows what to do with a lie told by a parent, no matter how well intentioned it was. A child's life revolves around trust, and since the young child's life revolves around parents, for a parent to lie to a child to avoid telling the truth helps to destroy that environment of trust between them. It shatters the child's life.
Bad parenting does far more harm to children than teaching them too early has ever done.
Please consider these thoughts carefully. Put them into action yourself and tell other people you know. There is nothing private about this information. You and they are not too young to learn. Nor too old. There is no young age limit to learning just as there is no upper age limit.
Invite others you tell to join our group.
Children, more than adults, are built to learn. They are learning factories. Young children process an alarming amount of information daily, far more than adults do and far more than most adults realize.
Do not hesitate to write back with more questions.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know when, what and how to teach critically important information and skills to children so that they can grow up healthy and truly well balanced.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
In response to an article I wrote recently about teaching information, facts and skills to children much earlier than most adults think is advisable and possible, one of my readers wrote to ask me to elaborate on the "when." When to teach children what is a critically important question, yet one that is seldom asked.
The following was my reply to her.
............................
Many adults believe that timing of information given to children is extremely important. They think that if the timing of wrong, it may harm the child's mind or morals. This is wrong in every possible way.
Teaching a child about drugs, for example, does not open the possibility that the child will adopt the taking of drugs. The whole purpose of teaching the child about drugs is to inform them about what harm can come to them by taking drugs other than under the supervision of a medical professional. Teaching a child about sex between man and woman does not encourage the child to experiment with sex prematurely. Despite these widespread beliefs, there is no evidence that early teaching about drugs, sex or any other matter that a parent should be teaching to a child affects the mind or body of the child as a result of being taught prematurely.
Despite parent supervision of internet use by children, the truth is that this is impossible. Kids are resourceful and will find ways to circumvent restrictions by the parents. One way, for example, is simply to visit a friend's house, someone who does not suffer such restrictions. In other words, information on every possible subject is available on the internet. However, some of this information is wrong and some (in its wrongness) does harm. Consider how many adults have been fooled by urban legends and so-called Nigeria scams.
A parent should be teaching life skills about all subjects when a child is young. How young is too young? You know your timing is wrong when the child shows no interest in the subject, gets distracted easily. THAT is the only criterion for premature teaching. The child, not the parent, should choose when he or she is ready to learn about a subject.
Innocence in children is admirable if you want them to never grow up. But they do. Children who have been kept innocent by their parents tend to become ignorant adults. Ignorant adults don't know what to do and when to do it. They have few coping skills when life throws them a bad curve, such as a personal assault on their person, a home invasion, divorce or death of a loved one.
Children learn about life in the womb, even before they are born. They have the ability to learn a language (a sophisticated and complex cognitive process) even before they can walk. Studies show that children study language before they even have the ability to make use of that learning through their own speech. Children have the ability to understand the most complex information we can give them at a shockingly early age.
If mistakes are make with early teaching, they would be with the adult, not with the child. The adult (usually parent) might not teach well for the learning style of the child. Imagine a parent using the lecture style of a university professor with a child of two years. No matter how fact filled the lecture might be, the child will not be interested because young children learn by doing more than by listening. They learn language by listening, but that has an incentive because the child wants to participate in family conversations. For most matters to be learned early by a child, they can learn is easier by doing something.
I most cases, children learn while they play. Play is their form of work. A parent can teach a child in the context of play. Make it a fun and enjoyable situation. Because kids want to learn, teaching them something that is given them as if imparting a secret is also a fun learning style. They often want to believe that they know something other kids don't. And they should be in that situation at least once in a while.
Let's take a teaching example. How many facts might a parent possibly teach a child about sex? Let's say 50 facts. A child of three years has no need for or use for 50 facts about sex. The child will not be interested in learning 50 facts. But he might be interested in learning a few of them. It stops being fun for a child to learn when the learning becomes memorization. A child has learning limits. Those limits are more of total accumulation at any given time than of their ability to understand something.
How many lies do parents tell their children so that they can avoid teaching them the truth? A parent may tell a child that a new baby is delivered by a stork or an angel from heaven. The child will know that is wrong. The child sees the mother grow in the belly, then return from the hospital, with baby in arms, much thinner. Which does more harm, telling the child that babies begin with the joining of sex organs (every kid has a set) of mother and father, or telling the child a lie? Believe me, telling the lie to a young child makes the child mistrust information from the parent.
A lie told to a child by a parent, no matter what the intent of the parent, is a lie to the child, a lie that undermines the trust the child has in the most important adult in his or her life. A "white lie" is a lie and it's understood as a lie by the child.
The message a child learns from a lie by his parent, no matter what the nature of the lie, is "I'm a bad parent who can't cope with teaching you the truth, so I am making up this lie. We're stuck with each other, so live with it." Children recognize lies and diversionary tactics far more readily than most adults realize. They don't know what to make of a lie, what to do about the fact that their most important source of information about life has lied to them. The child will still love the parent, but trust between them will have been undermined.
Children can handle truth at any age, even as young as age one year. No child knows what to do with a lie told by a parent, no matter how well intentioned it was. A child's life revolves around trust, and since the young child's life revolves around parents, for a parent to lie to a child to avoid telling the truth helps to destroy that environment of trust between them. It shatters the child's life.
Bad parenting does far more harm to children than teaching them too early has ever done.
Please consider these thoughts carefully. Put them into action yourself and tell other people you know. There is nothing private about this information. You and they are not too young to learn. Nor too old. There is no young age limit to learning just as there is no upper age limit.
Invite others you tell to join our group.
Children, more than adults, are built to learn. They are learning factories. Young children process an alarming amount of information daily, far more than adults do and far more than most adults realize.
Do not hesitate to write back with more questions.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know when, what and how to teach critically important information and skills to children so that they can grow up healthy and truly well balanced.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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