How Vaccines Cripple Your Immune System
During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, researchers at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control originally thought seasonal flu shots from 2008 might offer extra protection against the new pandemic strain. They were puzzled to find instead, seasonal flu vaccination almost doubled the risk of infection with pandemic flu.
- British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, http://tinyurl.com/kn2u4j4
One sad but undeniable characteristic of human nature is that most of us trust those in authority, follow what they say as truth, obey their rules and laws as if they were commandments dictated by God.
The good people of Germany, in a free and democratic election, elected Hitler and the Nazi (National Socialist) party to power in 1933.
Though a huge majority of medical doctors in Canada (two surveys said 92% and 100%) would refuse chemotherapy if they got cancer, it is still the #1 recommended therapy for newly diagnosed cancer patients. The "success" rate for chemotherapy is five years because doctors don't dare to look beyond that to see a failure rate close to 92%. Chemo is still the therapy accepted as first choice by people diagnosed with cancer.
We are so addicted to following what we are told that thinking people refer to mindless followers as sheeple [sheep + people]. It is in our nature as members of a social species to follow a leader, especially so if the leader shows confidence or is powerful. However, nothing in our nature demands that we accept everything we are told without question, especially when it comes to our own personal health.
Louis Pasteur was hailed as a hero when he discovered that heating would kill "germs" in our foods and beverages. At the time, every form of microscopic life was considered to be a germ by most people. The process of pasteurizing milk was named after him by a grateful world.
Even today we can watch many commercials on TV that promise to kill almost 100% of "germs" on whatever the product touches. The trouble is, most of what these products kill are beneficial bacteria.
Our immune system is comprised almost entirely of beneficial bacteria. In fact, we have 10 to 20 times (some estimates go as high as 100 times) as many good and healthful bacteria that comprise our immune system as we have cells of our own body. We are truly, as Star Trek called them, symbionts. We can't even survive without them and they can't live without us.
When we get sick we dutifully take antibiotics our doctor prescribes to kill the evil bacteria. Even when we suffer from a virus (which antibiotics do nothing to kill), we may be prescribed an antibiotic "just in case of attack by bacteria while you are vulnerable." Antibiotics, especially broad spectrum ones, kill the very bacteria that comprise our immune system. So, kill 10% bad and 90% good.
Vaccines and antibiotics were hailed as health saviours when they first came out. Both were intended to help our immune system defeat the dastardly microscopic pathogens.
While antibiotics kill a good percentage of the bacteria that comprise our immune system, vaccines do assist. Annual vaccine shots against influenza were considered to be so beneficial that many governments offered them free to citizens. So, because they were free and government said vaccines would protect them, people took the shot annually.
Now one study (see the top of this article) shows that the annual flu shot actually impairs the immune system so much that it increases the incidence of flu. Increases. Immune systems got so used to the vaccine doing their job for them that they got lazy.
Does that matter? Many children are required to have a minimum of 48 vaccines before they can enter school. Some kids get their first vaccine two months after they are born.
Please think about this. Before a child's immune system has had a chance to develop, it is already being encouraged to be lazy. Remember "childhood diseases" in years past? They helped to develop the immune system. Vaccines impair the immune system. Vaccines make the immune system lazy. Lazy things don't work.
What happens when we don't exercise enough? We gain weight and lose muscle mass (get weak). What happens when we don't think enough? We develop dementia, even Alzheimer's, when we get older. We know these things, yet people persist in not exercising either their bodies or their brains. We have epidemics because we are lazy.
Now we have chemical and drug companies intending to make permanent patients out of us until we die by impairing our health by depressing our immune system through chemical pesticides (they kill small creatures--including bees--then larger ones that eat the smaller ones), herbicides (they kill the food that small animals that benefit our food plants eat), antibiotics and vaccines.
Our medical systems fully support vaccines. Doctors never mention that at least some of them are rewarded financially and with gifts for prescribing certain drugs (that tend to be the most popular drugs prescribed).
Despite vigorous campaigns to get people to stop smoking (tobacco accounts for over half the diseases and a majority of deaths from health problems each year), an estimated 25 percent of adults in North America still smoke. Smokers know how to kill themselves, but not how to live.
People are knowingly harming their health, causing their own early deaths and making themselves dependent on others for the latter decades of their lives. Most don't yet know what they are doing to their own immune systems with the vaccines they willingly accept from their doctors.
You know. Think about it. How willing are you to harm your own health and limit your own future?
All you need to do to stay healthy is get some exercise, eat clean food and stay away from things that will harm your immune system. Think now while you still have time.
Bill Allin is the author of the book Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems and hundreds of published articles. It is a massive social problem when people knowingly and willingly harm their own health.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Saturday, April 04, 2015
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Why The World Needs Stupid People
Why The World Needs Stupid People
I'm not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher.
- Stephen Malkmus, American musician (b. 1966)
[WARNING: This article does not encourage the development of stupid people or advocate that we keep stupid people stupid. We need some stupid people, some argue, but we have far too many and are developing more too quickly.]
First, an apology for the errors and misinformation in the quote above. While the United States has the third largest population on the planet, that means that--all other factors being equal--the US should have a greater number of stupid people, not a greater percentage. The United States is one country, so the verb should be in the singular form. Decide for yourself if that says anything about the author of the quote.
Despite the fact that the US is a highly developed nation in many ways--it even calls itself First World--it excels in turning bright children into stupid adults.
A redefinition of "stupid" is needed. The word originally referred to a range of IQ scores well below the "normal" of 100 (average being between 90 and 110). Some experts claim the average IQ score across the globe is now between 80 and 85. It is now generally accepted that IQ scores are not just flawed and skewed culturally, but that there are many kinds of intelligence other than that tested by Intelligence Quotient tests.
One key problem in defining intelligence is that the definitions are invariably made by people of high intelligence. Even the name of our species, homo sapiens sapiens (thinking man), was devised by highly intelligent thinking people. Those who came up with the name in fact described themselves, not the species in general. Even Albert Einstein said that if you define intelligence as the ability to climb a tree, a fish will not do well on such an intelligence test.
I prefer to use what is generally called the Law of Consequences in defining intelligence. As with Newton's Third Law of Motion (every action has an equal and opposite reaction), the Law of Consequences states that every action has a consequence, sometimes more than one consequence.
If you hit your finger with a hammer, the finger will hurt. If you drive your car off a bridge, you will likely die. Those are consequences. No one intentionally does either. But people do these things regularly because they do other behaviours the consequences of which are hurt fingers or death from crashing a car below a bridge.
Holding a nail with one hand while swinging a hammer at the nail with the other hand requires intense concentration, on the nail and the hammer. The person who swings the hammer thinking only of the satisfying result of having the nail permanently in place will not be thinking of the necessity for intense concentration. Concentration requires a second level of thinking.
Someone who drives too fast is careless. Driving too fast is exciting, evokes thrills. A driver who focuses on the thrill but not on the danger of a slippery bridge surface may cause the car to career off the bridge, resulting in the death of the driver and likely of passengers as well. Focusing on the safety issue when driving (at all times) requires a second level of thinking that few people indulge in once they become familiar with driving.
Anyone who has played chess with a good player knows that the good chess player thinks ahead. Expert level chess players think ahead not just one move or two, but many moves in many different possible scenarios. Being able to hold these multiple scenarios in your head while assessing each to decide what move you should make next requires levels of thinking that few people ever use.
Stupid people think only of one consequence--having the nail in place, the thrill of driving too fast, or whatever. They think only of what is immediate, of one goal. They react to present circumstances, rather than initiating new actions or thinking.
To a scientist who studies the brain, that is using the unconscious, not the conscious mind. Basically, the unconscious mind reacts to stimuli. The stimulus might be having the nail in place or experiencing a thrill. Real thinking takes place with the conscious mind. The conscious mind considers possibilities beyond the immediate, including smashing a finger or driving off a bridge. It considers consequences. It thinks beyond the immediate.
Over a long term, people use their unconscious mind so much that they become used to it, rarely moving to the stage of using their conscious mind. With practice of using only the unconscious mind all the time, people become stupid. Consciousness researchers claim that we use our unconscious mind about 95 percent of the time, our conscious mind only 5 percent. I would maintain that many people nudge the use of their unconscious mind closer to 100%.
If you have ever watched someone do something and wondered "Why did that person do something so stupid?" you have seen someone who probably is stupid by this new definition. As evidence, watch what people do with their shopping carts in a supermarket (turning them sideways to block the aisle while they look at something on a shelf) or check out many examples of thrill-seeking but stupid and risky behaviour on YouTube.com Stupid behaviour is so common today that several shows focus on videos of it. One show is even called The Science of Stupid.
The argument is often made that we need stupid people to make pizzas, work on assembly lines, drive taxis, and so on. In a sense, that is true. But there are also highly intelligent Mensa members who do these jobs as well. Nothing about these jobs demands that the worker must not think. That part is voluntary, a commitment to laziness.
Where do we develop people to be stupid in our societies? At home and in schools when they are children. We don't stimulate kids enough, challenge their brains, give them enough stimulating activities to do, teach them the Law of Consequences.
Many people become uncomfortable or edgy when I speak of deficits in parenting skills or education systems. Fair enough. Look at our dog and cat pets. Most would agree that they become more docile, more cooperative, more friendly, more loving of cuddles as our pets get older. Ask yourself why. It's not age. The reason is that they have been dumbed-down, their natural intelligence and curiosity suppressed until they eventually just look for simple gratification from humans.
We make our children dumb in the same way we make our pets dumb.
Do we need stupid people for our society to function? Leaders of industry and natural resources companies say yes. They need employees to do a job, work on an assembly line or dig mines deep underground, without thinking about what they are doing to themselves or about what their activities are doing to the long term survival of our planet.
Should we maintain our present course of developing intelligent and naturally curious children into dumb adults? That depends on how much you want to encourage and support leaders of industry and natural resource companies who get obscenely rich from the labour of their dumbed employees. Please note that the rich never do these activities.
The system will remain the way it is until we bravely step forward and insist that our education systems teach kids what they really need to survive and thrive instead of what they need to be dumbed-down. And until we insist that every young adult who becomes a parent knows what their children will need in the way of developmental skills, before those skills are needed.
Are you tempted to wonder if you might be stupid? The answer is: you read, stupid people don't read. By reading to the end of this article you have already exercised your conscious brain more today than a majority of people in your country.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about easy and inexpensive solutions to our world's seemingly intractable problems. Stupidity is a highly fixable social problem.
Learn more at http://billallin.com Find the link there to join the TIA group to receive daily delivery of tips for teaching kids who seem to not want to learn from their parents, tips that all adults seem to enjoy as well.
I'm not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher.
- Stephen Malkmus, American musician (b. 1966)
[WARNING: This article does not encourage the development of stupid people or advocate that we keep stupid people stupid. We need some stupid people, some argue, but we have far too many and are developing more too quickly.]
First, an apology for the errors and misinformation in the quote above. While the United States has the third largest population on the planet, that means that--all other factors being equal--the US should have a greater number of stupid people, not a greater percentage. The United States is one country, so the verb should be in the singular form. Decide for yourself if that says anything about the author of the quote.
Despite the fact that the US is a highly developed nation in many ways--it even calls itself First World--it excels in turning bright children into stupid adults.
A redefinition of "stupid" is needed. The word originally referred to a range of IQ scores well below the "normal" of 100 (average being between 90 and 110). Some experts claim the average IQ score across the globe is now between 80 and 85. It is now generally accepted that IQ scores are not just flawed and skewed culturally, but that there are many kinds of intelligence other than that tested by Intelligence Quotient tests.
One key problem in defining intelligence is that the definitions are invariably made by people of high intelligence. Even the name of our species, homo sapiens sapiens (thinking man), was devised by highly intelligent thinking people. Those who came up with the name in fact described themselves, not the species in general. Even Albert Einstein said that if you define intelligence as the ability to climb a tree, a fish will not do well on such an intelligence test.
I prefer to use what is generally called the Law of Consequences in defining intelligence. As with Newton's Third Law of Motion (every action has an equal and opposite reaction), the Law of Consequences states that every action has a consequence, sometimes more than one consequence.
If you hit your finger with a hammer, the finger will hurt. If you drive your car off a bridge, you will likely die. Those are consequences. No one intentionally does either. But people do these things regularly because they do other behaviours the consequences of which are hurt fingers or death from crashing a car below a bridge.
Holding a nail with one hand while swinging a hammer at the nail with the other hand requires intense concentration, on the nail and the hammer. The person who swings the hammer thinking only of the satisfying result of having the nail permanently in place will not be thinking of the necessity for intense concentration. Concentration requires a second level of thinking.
Someone who drives too fast is careless. Driving too fast is exciting, evokes thrills. A driver who focuses on the thrill but not on the danger of a slippery bridge surface may cause the car to career off the bridge, resulting in the death of the driver and likely of passengers as well. Focusing on the safety issue when driving (at all times) requires a second level of thinking that few people indulge in once they become familiar with driving.
Anyone who has played chess with a good player knows that the good chess player thinks ahead. Expert level chess players think ahead not just one move or two, but many moves in many different possible scenarios. Being able to hold these multiple scenarios in your head while assessing each to decide what move you should make next requires levels of thinking that few people ever use.
Stupid people think only of one consequence--having the nail in place, the thrill of driving too fast, or whatever. They think only of what is immediate, of one goal. They react to present circumstances, rather than initiating new actions or thinking.
To a scientist who studies the brain, that is using the unconscious, not the conscious mind. Basically, the unconscious mind reacts to stimuli. The stimulus might be having the nail in place or experiencing a thrill. Real thinking takes place with the conscious mind. The conscious mind considers possibilities beyond the immediate, including smashing a finger or driving off a bridge. It considers consequences. It thinks beyond the immediate.
Over a long term, people use their unconscious mind so much that they become used to it, rarely moving to the stage of using their conscious mind. With practice of using only the unconscious mind all the time, people become stupid. Consciousness researchers claim that we use our unconscious mind about 95 percent of the time, our conscious mind only 5 percent. I would maintain that many people nudge the use of their unconscious mind closer to 100%.
If you have ever watched someone do something and wondered "Why did that person do something so stupid?" you have seen someone who probably is stupid by this new definition. As evidence, watch what people do with their shopping carts in a supermarket (turning them sideways to block the aisle while they look at something on a shelf) or check out many examples of thrill-seeking but stupid and risky behaviour on YouTube.com Stupid behaviour is so common today that several shows focus on videos of it. One show is even called The Science of Stupid.
The argument is often made that we need stupid people to make pizzas, work on assembly lines, drive taxis, and so on. In a sense, that is true. But there are also highly intelligent Mensa members who do these jobs as well. Nothing about these jobs demands that the worker must not think. That part is voluntary, a commitment to laziness.
Where do we develop people to be stupid in our societies? At home and in schools when they are children. We don't stimulate kids enough, challenge their brains, give them enough stimulating activities to do, teach them the Law of Consequences.
Many people become uncomfortable or edgy when I speak of deficits in parenting skills or education systems. Fair enough. Look at our dog and cat pets. Most would agree that they become more docile, more cooperative, more friendly, more loving of cuddles as our pets get older. Ask yourself why. It's not age. The reason is that they have been dumbed-down, their natural intelligence and curiosity suppressed until they eventually just look for simple gratification from humans.
We make our children dumb in the same way we make our pets dumb.
Do we need stupid people for our society to function? Leaders of industry and natural resources companies say yes. They need employees to do a job, work on an assembly line or dig mines deep underground, without thinking about what they are doing to themselves or about what their activities are doing to the long term survival of our planet.
Should we maintain our present course of developing intelligent and naturally curious children into dumb adults? That depends on how much you want to encourage and support leaders of industry and natural resource companies who get obscenely rich from the labour of their dumbed employees. Please note that the rich never do these activities.
The system will remain the way it is until we bravely step forward and insist that our education systems teach kids what they really need to survive and thrive instead of what they need to be dumbed-down. And until we insist that every young adult who becomes a parent knows what their children will need in the way of developmental skills, before those skills are needed.
Are you tempted to wonder if you might be stupid? The answer is: you read, stupid people don't read. By reading to the end of this article you have already exercised your conscious brain more today than a majority of people in your country.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about easy and inexpensive solutions to our world's seemingly intractable problems. Stupidity is a highly fixable social problem.
Learn more at http://billallin.com Find the link there to join the TIA group to receive daily delivery of tips for teaching kids who seem to not want to learn from their parents, tips that all adults seem to enjoy as well.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Don't Fear Microbes, They Keep You Alive
Don't Fear Microbes, They Keep You Alive
When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
- Jeremy Rifkin, American writer and social theorist (b. 1945)
Rifkin refers to plants and seeds that have been genetically modified or sprayed with poisons (herbicides, pesticides--any chemical that ends with -ide is a poison). What this quote fails to include is how repeated ingestion of plants and animals that have been poisoned by our agricultural sprays and fertilizers will affect us.
Read any old detective series such as those of Agatha Christie or Arthur Conyn Doyle to see how clever killers of the past killed their victims by feeding them small amounts of poison over long periods of time. Poisons are not easily eliminated from our body system, so they accumulate until they harm, often irretrievably, one or more of our organs. Poisons are effective killers over long periods of time.
Not only do industrial agriculture giants poison animals and microbial organisms, we eat the same stuff that has killed the animals and microbes. Our health authorities, chemical companies and food distributors claim it will do us no harm. Anyone who believes that is dangerously simple-minded.
Chemicals (including drugs) are tested only over a short term before being approved for agricultural applications, on plants or animals people will eat. The danger is not in the short term, but over decades. We have middle aged and elderly people dying decades before they should as a consequence. Worse, many of them suffer for decades in hospitals and nursing homes before they die. This costs them dearly with loss of livable years and we all pay through our taxes and insurance premiums.
Why not fear microbes? Didn't Louis Pasteur prove that they are dangerous? No. In fact, what Pasteur proved is that some dangerous microbes (the bad guys) can be killed, such as by pasteurizing milk, before the food is consumed.
What Pasteur did not show and what our media and medical professionals since have failed to speak openly about is the fact that useful and helpful microbes are killed, billions of them, along with the few bad guys with pasteurization.
Our immune systems, the feature of our body that prevents us from dying from the first pathogen that comes along and that heals us naturally when we do get sick, are composed mainly of microbes. About 80% of our immune system is made up of good microbes (good guys) that are not even part of our body cells. They live in a symbiotic relationship with the cells of our body.
How significant are their numbers? Estimates by professionals of the numbers of microbes in our immune systems as compared with the number of cells in our body range from ten times to 100 times as many. That makes them really important to our health and our life.
Here is the critically important part. When these microbes (mostly bacteria, but they may include some viruses that actually help us) are killed, we die. Or we get very sick. Or our organs are damaged so badly that we eventually die, such as through cancer. We can't live without those good guys.
So what's the problem? We eat food that contain chemicals designed to kill microbes. When we get sick, doctors give us antibiotics. Antibiotics, by definition, are designed to kill microbes. Antibiotics kill the good microbes that comprise the majority of our immune system. No wonder so many people get tragic diseases months after taking antibiotics.
If we get cancer, they give us chemotherapy drugs, which are poisons. Please understand this, chemo drugs are poisons. No one disputes this. Radiation is not a poison, but it can damage healthy body cells around a cancer site so that surviving cancer cells can spread more easily. Radiation does not come with 100% guarantees of effectively killing all cancer cells.
Check survival rates for cancer victims beyond five years. Why five years? Because chemo and radiation tends to slow cancer development enough for most people to live that long. But not much longer. If I were "cured" of cancer I would hope to live many more than five years. If I had chemo treatments or radiation, even "successful" ones, I should not make long term plans.
How about surgery? Same problem as radiation, a surgeon with human eyes can't see something as small as a cancer cell. Surgeons do not use microscopes while they operate. Miss one or a few active cancer cells and cancer is just delayed, not cured.
Prevention, then. Mammograms squash the female breast so much that if there is a cancer site in one, the cancer cells may be physically pushed elsewhere so they can spread. It's called metastasizing when cancer cells are spread through the body, often through the bloodstream. If you have any cancer cells in your breast when you have a mammogram (to detect cancer), your cancer may spread by the very means doctors use to detect cancer. Clever, huh? Guess who gets more work when you have more cancer.
Vaccines? Vaccines were originally intended to boost the body's natural defence against disease and degradation, the immune system. For many years, vaccines have migrated (with the guidance of Big Pharma chemists) to the point where they actually harm the immune system. These medical "professionals" believe their chemicals can effectively replace the immune system instead of boosting it. These chemists and their pharmaceutical employers are not smarter than nature.
Follow the link below to view a video and read a short article about how the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be directly responsible for untold number of children becoming autistic because of a vaccine widely accepted to be applied to young children. It still is injected. Even when its fraud has been made public, it has done nothing to prevent young and helpless children from becoming autistic.
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/breaking-whistleblower-names-cdc-scientists-covering-vaccine-autism-link
I can't overstress the importance to supporting, not killing, your immune system microbes. Pay attention to television commercials that promise to kill microbes in your mouth, on your skin, even to quell disturbances in your belly. These are all places where microbes that form the majority of your immune system are located. Are these manufacturers trying to kill you? Not intentionally. They are just trying to sell you as much product as possible before you learn the truth.
Now you know what to look for. Make wise choices. Practice wise habits.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of cheap and easily implemented solutions to problems that plague every culture, every city, most families.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
- Jeremy Rifkin, American writer and social theorist (b. 1945)
Rifkin refers to plants and seeds that have been genetically modified or sprayed with poisons (herbicides, pesticides--any chemical that ends with -ide is a poison). What this quote fails to include is how repeated ingestion of plants and animals that have been poisoned by our agricultural sprays and fertilizers will affect us.
Read any old detective series such as those of Agatha Christie or Arthur Conyn Doyle to see how clever killers of the past killed their victims by feeding them small amounts of poison over long periods of time. Poisons are not easily eliminated from our body system, so they accumulate until they harm, often irretrievably, one or more of our organs. Poisons are effective killers over long periods of time.
Not only do industrial agriculture giants poison animals and microbial organisms, we eat the same stuff that has killed the animals and microbes. Our health authorities, chemical companies and food distributors claim it will do us no harm. Anyone who believes that is dangerously simple-minded.
Chemicals (including drugs) are tested only over a short term before being approved for agricultural applications, on plants or animals people will eat. The danger is not in the short term, but over decades. We have middle aged and elderly people dying decades before they should as a consequence. Worse, many of them suffer for decades in hospitals and nursing homes before they die. This costs them dearly with loss of livable years and we all pay through our taxes and insurance premiums.
Why not fear microbes? Didn't Louis Pasteur prove that they are dangerous? No. In fact, what Pasteur proved is that some dangerous microbes (the bad guys) can be killed, such as by pasteurizing milk, before the food is consumed.
What Pasteur did not show and what our media and medical professionals since have failed to speak openly about is the fact that useful and helpful microbes are killed, billions of them, along with the few bad guys with pasteurization.
Our immune systems, the feature of our body that prevents us from dying from the first pathogen that comes along and that heals us naturally when we do get sick, are composed mainly of microbes. About 80% of our immune system is made up of good microbes (good guys) that are not even part of our body cells. They live in a symbiotic relationship with the cells of our body.
How significant are their numbers? Estimates by professionals of the numbers of microbes in our immune systems as compared with the number of cells in our body range from ten times to 100 times as many. That makes them really important to our health and our life.
Here is the critically important part. When these microbes (mostly bacteria, but they may include some viruses that actually help us) are killed, we die. Or we get very sick. Or our organs are damaged so badly that we eventually die, such as through cancer. We can't live without those good guys.
So what's the problem? We eat food that contain chemicals designed to kill microbes. When we get sick, doctors give us antibiotics. Antibiotics, by definition, are designed to kill microbes. Antibiotics kill the good microbes that comprise the majority of our immune system. No wonder so many people get tragic diseases months after taking antibiotics.
If we get cancer, they give us chemotherapy drugs, which are poisons. Please understand this, chemo drugs are poisons. No one disputes this. Radiation is not a poison, but it can damage healthy body cells around a cancer site so that surviving cancer cells can spread more easily. Radiation does not come with 100% guarantees of effectively killing all cancer cells.
Check survival rates for cancer victims beyond five years. Why five years? Because chemo and radiation tends to slow cancer development enough for most people to live that long. But not much longer. If I were "cured" of cancer I would hope to live many more than five years. If I had chemo treatments or radiation, even "successful" ones, I should not make long term plans.
How about surgery? Same problem as radiation, a surgeon with human eyes can't see something as small as a cancer cell. Surgeons do not use microscopes while they operate. Miss one or a few active cancer cells and cancer is just delayed, not cured.
Prevention, then. Mammograms squash the female breast so much that if there is a cancer site in one, the cancer cells may be physically pushed elsewhere so they can spread. It's called metastasizing when cancer cells are spread through the body, often through the bloodstream. If you have any cancer cells in your breast when you have a mammogram (to detect cancer), your cancer may spread by the very means doctors use to detect cancer. Clever, huh? Guess who gets more work when you have more cancer.
Vaccines? Vaccines were originally intended to boost the body's natural defence against disease and degradation, the immune system. For many years, vaccines have migrated (with the guidance of Big Pharma chemists) to the point where they actually harm the immune system. These medical "professionals" believe their chemicals can effectively replace the immune system instead of boosting it. These chemists and their pharmaceutical employers are not smarter than nature.
Follow the link below to view a video and read a short article about how the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be directly responsible for untold number of children becoming autistic because of a vaccine widely accepted to be applied to young children. It still is injected. Even when its fraud has been made public, it has done nothing to prevent young and helpless children from becoming autistic.
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/breaking-whistleblower-names-cdc-scientists-covering-vaccine-autism-link
I can't overstress the importance to supporting, not killing, your immune system microbes. Pay attention to television commercials that promise to kill microbes in your mouth, on your skin, even to quell disturbances in your belly. These are all places where microbes that form the majority of your immune system are located. Are these manufacturers trying to kill you? Not intentionally. They are just trying to sell you as much product as possible before you learn the truth.
Now you know what to look for. Make wise choices. Practice wise habits.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of cheap and easily implemented solutions to problems that plague every culture, every city, most families.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, October 27, 2014
Your body Will Heal Itself If You Give It A Chance
Your body Will Heal Itself If You Give It A Chance
Your body has natural healing capacities that nobody in the field of medicine can pretend ultimately to understand. If you break a bone it will heal itself. All the doctor does is make sure the pieces of the bone are properly set back together.
- Wayne Dyer, American counseling psychotherapist and motivational speaker (born 1940)
The human species has not lasted as long as it has by pumping itself full of chemicals and vaccines. Yet that is exactly what we are doing at present. Another human species, Neanderthals, lived many times longer than homo sapiens has been around and never had vaccines or even much in the way of diseases (other than what they may have caught from eating diseased animals or spoiled food).
When I was a child every kid in every family had what was called childhood diseases. In fact, often mothers would closet all the children in her family together in a room with a sick sibling so that all the kids would get the same disease at once, getting the inconvenience of one childhood disease over in one big session.
It was called building an immune system. Today we have doctors pumping kids with vaccines, sometimes over 60 of them before the child goes to school, all in the name of helping the child's immune system. In some jurisdictions, laws force this before children are allowed to enter school. What nature used to do free, now parents and their insurance plans pay for. Yet the kids have more problems than ever before in history.
Asthma and allergies at rates unheard of in the past. Autism many times greater than even 20 years ago. When I was a child I never experienced one other child who was autistic. The odd one had allergies, primarily in spring or fall. Nothing that held back his or her education.
Today we have schools that demand all kids' lunches must be made at home with allergen-free products. Other schools demand that all lunches must be prepackaged with allergen-free products--nothing may be made at home. Some children, it is feared, could breathe the aroma of peanuts and die. These kids have immune systems that actually attack themselves.
Medical science now helps almost all children survive childhood. But the food they eat has poisons and unneeded antibiotics added before it leaves the farm. The apple, one of the naturally healthiest foods we can eat, is sprayed with poisons at the blossom stage, before the fruit even forms around the seed. Then it is sprayed with more poisons every two weeks until it is picked. Potatoes, the most common vegetable in the western diet, endures almost as much spraying with poisons before it is dug from the ground.
For those who care enough to buy foods that are clean of chemicals and poisons (herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers--all poisons, as anything that ends in "ide" is) there are vegetables and fruits that are grown organically (without poisons or chemicals). Yet these cost more than the produce sprayed with poisons because the farmer must pay to prove that poisons have not been added to his or her product--certification is necessary before the producer can call the product organic. The farmer has to prove he has not added poisons to the food he sells, and pay to certify that proof.
Meat, poultry and their associated food products have been proven through many studies to cause weakness and failure of certain body organs, cancer and many other diseases that left untreated would cause death.
Not everyone is prepared to eat healthy. Eventually, over a few decades of ingesting poisons and unnatural chemicals, the body succumbs to one or more of a variety of syndromes (diseases doctors know nothing about), diseases and general weaknesses of health. We have more incidents of dementia, Alzheimer's, diabetes and other afflictions common among older people than ever before in history.
Big pharmaceutical companies pay or bribe many doctors to prescribe antibiotics and other medicines that destroy the immune system, thus keeping people weak and depending on more chemicals for the last few decades of their lives. What their vaccines did not destroy in children, their prescription drugs will finish off in the middle ages and the elderly.
One of the "forever" drugs most commonly prescribed for people is statins to lower cholesterol. Older people need more cholesterol to carry poisons from their body cells. Statins, themselves proven to be health hazards (though approved by governments and doctors associations who are well paid for their endorsements) limit the ability of the body to remove poisons from cells by lowering cholesterol. Your doctor won't tell you that if he or she is paid to prescribe statins.
Governments refuse to pass laws to prevent agriculture giants, pharmaceutical internationals and chemical corporates from harming our health so that they can extract greater profits from us. People who are sick, weak and have no significant immune systems left by the age of retirement are a vibrant and dependable source of profits for these companies. Sick old people are the proverbial cash cow.
Does the situation seem hopeless? It's not. We need to use our bodies to get exercise so they do not atrophy from lack of use. And we need to find clean sources of food from organic farmers. With those two, we have little need for doctors because our bodies will heal themselves so long as we have an immune system left. Self healing is how nature works. This is not to say that doctors have no place, only that they must not be allowed to dominate the health of the elderly.
The future is not bleak. Things are changing as more and more people learn the truth about health and the lies they have been told for many years. Every region has a core of people who are actively working toward good health and clean sources of food. Find them. A variety of clean and nutritious food is the best preventative medicine you can buy.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of simple and cheap solutions for expensive problems. Bad health is a social problem because it affects so many people and adds huge costs to tax dollars.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Your body has natural healing capacities that nobody in the field of medicine can pretend ultimately to understand. If you break a bone it will heal itself. All the doctor does is make sure the pieces of the bone are properly set back together.
- Wayne Dyer, American counseling psychotherapist and motivational speaker (born 1940)
The human species has not lasted as long as it has by pumping itself full of chemicals and vaccines. Yet that is exactly what we are doing at present. Another human species, Neanderthals, lived many times longer than homo sapiens has been around and never had vaccines or even much in the way of diseases (other than what they may have caught from eating diseased animals or spoiled food).
When I was a child every kid in every family had what was called childhood diseases. In fact, often mothers would closet all the children in her family together in a room with a sick sibling so that all the kids would get the same disease at once, getting the inconvenience of one childhood disease over in one big session.
It was called building an immune system. Today we have doctors pumping kids with vaccines, sometimes over 60 of them before the child goes to school, all in the name of helping the child's immune system. In some jurisdictions, laws force this before children are allowed to enter school. What nature used to do free, now parents and their insurance plans pay for. Yet the kids have more problems than ever before in history.
Asthma and allergies at rates unheard of in the past. Autism many times greater than even 20 years ago. When I was a child I never experienced one other child who was autistic. The odd one had allergies, primarily in spring or fall. Nothing that held back his or her education.
Today we have schools that demand all kids' lunches must be made at home with allergen-free products. Other schools demand that all lunches must be prepackaged with allergen-free products--nothing may be made at home. Some children, it is feared, could breathe the aroma of peanuts and die. These kids have immune systems that actually attack themselves.
Medical science now helps almost all children survive childhood. But the food they eat has poisons and unneeded antibiotics added before it leaves the farm. The apple, one of the naturally healthiest foods we can eat, is sprayed with poisons at the blossom stage, before the fruit even forms around the seed. Then it is sprayed with more poisons every two weeks until it is picked. Potatoes, the most common vegetable in the western diet, endures almost as much spraying with poisons before it is dug from the ground.
For those who care enough to buy foods that are clean of chemicals and poisons (herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers--all poisons, as anything that ends in "ide" is) there are vegetables and fruits that are grown organically (without poisons or chemicals). Yet these cost more than the produce sprayed with poisons because the farmer must pay to prove that poisons have not been added to his or her product--certification is necessary before the producer can call the product organic. The farmer has to prove he has not added poisons to the food he sells, and pay to certify that proof.
Meat, poultry and their associated food products have been proven through many studies to cause weakness and failure of certain body organs, cancer and many other diseases that left untreated would cause death.
Not everyone is prepared to eat healthy. Eventually, over a few decades of ingesting poisons and unnatural chemicals, the body succumbs to one or more of a variety of syndromes (diseases doctors know nothing about), diseases and general weaknesses of health. We have more incidents of dementia, Alzheimer's, diabetes and other afflictions common among older people than ever before in history.
Big pharmaceutical companies pay or bribe many doctors to prescribe antibiotics and other medicines that destroy the immune system, thus keeping people weak and depending on more chemicals for the last few decades of their lives. What their vaccines did not destroy in children, their prescription drugs will finish off in the middle ages and the elderly.
One of the "forever" drugs most commonly prescribed for people is statins to lower cholesterol. Older people need more cholesterol to carry poisons from their body cells. Statins, themselves proven to be health hazards (though approved by governments and doctors associations who are well paid for their endorsements) limit the ability of the body to remove poisons from cells by lowering cholesterol. Your doctor won't tell you that if he or she is paid to prescribe statins.
Governments refuse to pass laws to prevent agriculture giants, pharmaceutical internationals and chemical corporates from harming our health so that they can extract greater profits from us. People who are sick, weak and have no significant immune systems left by the age of retirement are a vibrant and dependable source of profits for these companies. Sick old people are the proverbial cash cow.
Does the situation seem hopeless? It's not. We need to use our bodies to get exercise so they do not atrophy from lack of use. And we need to find clean sources of food from organic farmers. With those two, we have little need for doctors because our bodies will heal themselves so long as we have an immune system left. Self healing is how nature works. This is not to say that doctors have no place, only that they must not be allowed to dominate the health of the elderly.
The future is not bleak. Things are changing as more and more people learn the truth about health and the lies they have been told for many years. Every region has a core of people who are actively working toward good health and clean sources of food. Find them. A variety of clean and nutritious food is the best preventative medicine you can buy.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of simple and cheap solutions for expensive problems. Bad health is a social problem because it affects so many people and adds huge costs to tax dollars.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, August 24, 2014
What Makes People Want to End Their Own Life
What Killed Robin Williams And Other Suicide Victims?
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows, their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
- David Foster Wallace, American writer and professor (1962-2008)
[Wallace hanged himself, at home, alone, on September 12, 2008]
This is easily the most difficult article I have ever written. It has taken me months to commit it to written text. It takes me somewhere I never wanted to visit again.
I hope to take you today somewhere you have never been. To have a shallow experience of something tragically deep so that you can better understand why suicide has been a taboo subject for so long. Then leave quickly, never to return.
Most of what you have likely read about suicide is wrong. The reason, simply, is that most writers about suicide consider that because anyone can kill themselves, anyone can write about it with authority. The reasoning is similar to that used by people who write about heaven. If you haven't been there, you just don't know.
The topic of suicide can be separated roughly into three categories. One is the kind where the victim is distraught, has great difficulty finding a secure place in life, makes what he or she knows is generally accepted as a means of killing yourself, but never intends to die. Such attempts usually attract the attention, or some attention, the person desperately needs but can't get otherwise and rarely end in death.
This category is the one most people think of when they claim that depression is the mental illness that drove someone to end their life. This is the one where people say "Depression will end" and "Life will get better" and "Find someone who can help." It's a call for help that often goes unanswered once the emergency of the moment has passed.
This category is the one most people think causes people to end their lives, when what these people want most is to find someone who will help them to build a life. It is, in its simplest terms, a cry for help. A desperate cry.
These people can be talked out of their suicide attempt. They are most persuaded by the help line "Somebody does care about you, somebody does love you, somebody will miss you terribly if you die." Later, when they recover and the attention has passed, they find that no one did care that much. So they make another attempt. Sometimes several attempts over a period of years. They seldom succeed because that is not their objective.
They lack the social and emotional/psychological skills that should be taught in schools, but aren't. Even under care they are more likely to be given drugs than the skills they need to survive and build new lives.
A second category might be called failed attempts at coming close to death without actually dying. In a sense, thrill seeking. People indulging in this may overdose on drugs, even engage in a game where they intentionally asphyxiate themselves. They hope to "see the light" without having to walk into it, to experience coming dangerously close to death without having the inconvenience of dying. Inconvenience for others, of course, if they die, not for themeslves.
People who engage in this also lack social and/or emotional coping skills. Again, despite how basic these developmental streams are to life (the other two being physical and intellectual development), they are not taught in schools. Most parents know very little about these developmental streams, so can't teach their own children.
Social and emotional skills are surprisingly easy to teach if a teacher knows what to teach and has permission to teach them. If you remember a couple of important life lessons you learned from someone as a kid and remember how easy they were to learn and how simple they were to convey by someone who knew, you understand how easy and devastatingly cheap these would be to add to a school curriculum.
For some reason that is hard to rationalize, some parents object to teachers teaching these skills, claiming that it should be the responsibility of the parents. It is, of course, but so few parents know what to teach, and when. So most parents miss the lessons entirely.
The third category of suicide is the one that has impacted so many of us recently with the death of Robin Williams. Robin intended to die that day. For him, life was over. He tried to slit his wrists, failed, likely because he realized how messy it would be for someone who would find him, then chose to hang himself with his belt. He did not intend to fail.
Though many people in this third category who end their lives leave notes of apology, explanation or (rarely) of accusation, Robin did not. Leaving a note is common, but nowhere near universal for type three.
Why did he do it? we ask ourselves and anyone else who will listen. Was it depression, as many claim, something he was known to suffer from? Was it severe financial difficulty or fear of bankruptcy and the shame of failure society visits on those who fail, as he was known to be obsessed with this struggle? Or the future struggles with Parkinson's Disease with which he had been diagnosed?
Was it his continuing struggle with substance abuse? Not long before he died he had checked himself voluntarily into the rehab facility he has used previously. Were the mind altering substance the cause or effect of depression? No one can be sure.
Individually, these are each reasons or problems which can be solved, that may be overcome. Collectively? No one can be certain.
There is still another cause for depression, suicide, mental illness, even murder and other forms of criminal activity. Continual and unrelenting stress. The push to succeed, to get even better, to make even more money, to be even more successful. That stress, the driving force of capitalism, never ends.
Is there a pinnacle, a platform at the top for those who have reached the ultimate success, a place to rest when you have finally made it? No. The drive to improve never stops. Most people adjust their lives, recognizing that they have had enough, that it is time to ease back before they crack. Given the shocking number of suicides in the entertainment industry and among other leaders of industries, it's obvious that too many do not make that adjustment.
We read about the suicides among leaders. Rarely do we read about suicides in the military, among teenagers, among the poor, in aboriginal communities. Suicide rates in these groups are nothing short of shocking. Many times the national average in every case.
Robin Williams was not drugged, drunk or likely depressed enough to want enough to die that he would be willing to resort to suicide. So, why?
Suicide is not an act of selfishness. It's not a matter of thinking only of themselves, nor an act of cowardice or an easy way out of problems, excuses those who know little attribute as causes. The kind of suicide where the person fully intends to die is completely different, something beyond human life experience.
Have you ever been so wrapped up in music you are enjoying that there is no other world around you but you and that music? If you write or think deeply, the rest of the world disappears, there is nothing around you but your thought. You may attach yourself to a character in a movie so much that you live the role in the movie right along with the character. An actor or performer may be so into a performance that there is nothing else to life but that moment, at that moment. You are no longer an observer, but now an integral part of the action.
Would science call that depression, as it does the cause for suicide? Science either totally denies the existence or has trouble diagnosing or explaining anything that isn't broad enough to shoot a gun at from a short distance. I would call it the human spirit separated from the confines of the corporeal body. With suicide--real suicide--the spirit seeks to make that separation permanent. Whether that may be considered a mental illness or something different may depend on whether or not you have had such an experience.
For a person about to end his life (males end their lives much more often than females--there's an important lesson there), there is no one else in the world. No family, no friends, no neighbours. No one exists but them and "now" at that time. There is no world other than the room the person is in. Most suicides happen indoors, usually at night, in a closed room, where it is quiet, when they are alone. Their whole world is inside their body.
Isn't that strange? Yes, may it always seem strange to you.
What could you do to prevent a person in this third category from ending their life? That's a burning question. Intervention is possible with the first two categories as has been demonstrated many times. But the third?
My theory is that a person in the third category can be forced to postpone suicide, but not to avoid it completely. At least not easily. Anyone who can be talked out of it would be in the first category. Short term intervention for someone committed to killing himself will not work. It will only delay the event.
Consider this: if you are in a position to think about ending your life, or even to consider the pain you will suffer in doing so or the mess and distress you will leave for others if you die, you are not a candidate for category three. You may be depressed or you may be normal as almost everyone thinks about ending their life at some point. They don't do it for a reason. Category three people don't consider reasons or consequences. They are alone in their world. There is no "other," "else," "later" or "future."
Isn't it cruel to end an article on such a depressing note (pun unintended)? Let me throw you a rope of hope. Successful suicides in the third category almost always have the person being alone. Never leave a person who may be at risk alone in a room. Never without another person who is awake and paying attention. All the time, 24/7.
A person who is at risk of suicide in this third category will tell you of his intentions, if asked. Most category threes have hinted or told others outright of their intent to end their life. What if he says no, he does not intend to kill himself? No one says you have to believe him. It may seem surprising, but few category threes will lie about their intent.
If you get the person out of his normal environment, away from the usual stresses of his life, for long enough (it may take at least a year), you may be able to cause something in his brain to change enough to alter his life course.
The other alternative would be akin to brainwashing. This would have to be done by a professional, over several successive long days of intensive therapy, non-stop over those days. A regular psychologist or psychiatrist would not know what to do or how to do it. Drugs would not be used because they would prevent voluntary changes within the brain. Finding a person who could do that would be harder than finding a needle in a haystack. But they exist.
I wish I had positive or encouraging suggestions for you if you know or learn of someone in category three. Let me make it even more complicated.
If a person wants to end his life because he can't get whatever he needs, may not even know what he needs, what are the ethical questions surrounding denying him that right? A person who is "saved" from suicide by persuasion may not get the help and personal care he needs later. Is that ethical?
What is society's obligation, if any, to someone who wants to end his life? What would your own obligation be? What is right? Each of us must make that decision, if the time comes, and live with the consequences of that choice.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of easily implemented and relatively cheap solutions to problems that plague every community. Suicide is a social problem, likely more of a problem than you are aware of in your own home area.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows, their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
- David Foster Wallace, American writer and professor (1962-2008)
[Wallace hanged himself, at home, alone, on September 12, 2008]
This is easily the most difficult article I have ever written. It has taken me months to commit it to written text. It takes me somewhere I never wanted to visit again.
I hope to take you today somewhere you have never been. To have a shallow experience of something tragically deep so that you can better understand why suicide has been a taboo subject for so long. Then leave quickly, never to return.
Most of what you have likely read about suicide is wrong. The reason, simply, is that most writers about suicide consider that because anyone can kill themselves, anyone can write about it with authority. The reasoning is similar to that used by people who write about heaven. If you haven't been there, you just don't know.
The topic of suicide can be separated roughly into three categories. One is the kind where the victim is distraught, has great difficulty finding a secure place in life, makes what he or she knows is generally accepted as a means of killing yourself, but never intends to die. Such attempts usually attract the attention, or some attention, the person desperately needs but can't get otherwise and rarely end in death.
This category is the one most people think of when they claim that depression is the mental illness that drove someone to end their life. This is the one where people say "Depression will end" and "Life will get better" and "Find someone who can help." It's a call for help that often goes unanswered once the emergency of the moment has passed.
This category is the one most people think causes people to end their lives, when what these people want most is to find someone who will help them to build a life. It is, in its simplest terms, a cry for help. A desperate cry.
These people can be talked out of their suicide attempt. They are most persuaded by the help line "Somebody does care about you, somebody does love you, somebody will miss you terribly if you die." Later, when they recover and the attention has passed, they find that no one did care that much. So they make another attempt. Sometimes several attempts over a period of years. They seldom succeed because that is not their objective.
They lack the social and emotional/psychological skills that should be taught in schools, but aren't. Even under care they are more likely to be given drugs than the skills they need to survive and build new lives.
A second category might be called failed attempts at coming close to death without actually dying. In a sense, thrill seeking. People indulging in this may overdose on drugs, even engage in a game where they intentionally asphyxiate themselves. They hope to "see the light" without having to walk into it, to experience coming dangerously close to death without having the inconvenience of dying. Inconvenience for others, of course, if they die, not for themeslves.
People who engage in this also lack social and/or emotional coping skills. Again, despite how basic these developmental streams are to life (the other two being physical and intellectual development), they are not taught in schools. Most parents know very little about these developmental streams, so can't teach their own children.
Social and emotional skills are surprisingly easy to teach if a teacher knows what to teach and has permission to teach them. If you remember a couple of important life lessons you learned from someone as a kid and remember how easy they were to learn and how simple they were to convey by someone who knew, you understand how easy and devastatingly cheap these would be to add to a school curriculum.
For some reason that is hard to rationalize, some parents object to teachers teaching these skills, claiming that it should be the responsibility of the parents. It is, of course, but so few parents know what to teach, and when. So most parents miss the lessons entirely.
The third category of suicide is the one that has impacted so many of us recently with the death of Robin Williams. Robin intended to die that day. For him, life was over. He tried to slit his wrists, failed, likely because he realized how messy it would be for someone who would find him, then chose to hang himself with his belt. He did not intend to fail.
Though many people in this third category who end their lives leave notes of apology, explanation or (rarely) of accusation, Robin did not. Leaving a note is common, but nowhere near universal for type three.
Why did he do it? we ask ourselves and anyone else who will listen. Was it depression, as many claim, something he was known to suffer from? Was it severe financial difficulty or fear of bankruptcy and the shame of failure society visits on those who fail, as he was known to be obsessed with this struggle? Or the future struggles with Parkinson's Disease with which he had been diagnosed?
Was it his continuing struggle with substance abuse? Not long before he died he had checked himself voluntarily into the rehab facility he has used previously. Were the mind altering substance the cause or effect of depression? No one can be sure.
Individually, these are each reasons or problems which can be solved, that may be overcome. Collectively? No one can be certain.
There is still another cause for depression, suicide, mental illness, even murder and other forms of criminal activity. Continual and unrelenting stress. The push to succeed, to get even better, to make even more money, to be even more successful. That stress, the driving force of capitalism, never ends.
Is there a pinnacle, a platform at the top for those who have reached the ultimate success, a place to rest when you have finally made it? No. The drive to improve never stops. Most people adjust their lives, recognizing that they have had enough, that it is time to ease back before they crack. Given the shocking number of suicides in the entertainment industry and among other leaders of industries, it's obvious that too many do not make that adjustment.
We read about the suicides among leaders. Rarely do we read about suicides in the military, among teenagers, among the poor, in aboriginal communities. Suicide rates in these groups are nothing short of shocking. Many times the national average in every case.
Robin Williams was not drugged, drunk or likely depressed enough to want enough to die that he would be willing to resort to suicide. So, why?
Suicide is not an act of selfishness. It's not a matter of thinking only of themselves, nor an act of cowardice or an easy way out of problems, excuses those who know little attribute as causes. The kind of suicide where the person fully intends to die is completely different, something beyond human life experience.
Have you ever been so wrapped up in music you are enjoying that there is no other world around you but you and that music? If you write or think deeply, the rest of the world disappears, there is nothing around you but your thought. You may attach yourself to a character in a movie so much that you live the role in the movie right along with the character. An actor or performer may be so into a performance that there is nothing else to life but that moment, at that moment. You are no longer an observer, but now an integral part of the action.
Would science call that depression, as it does the cause for suicide? Science either totally denies the existence or has trouble diagnosing or explaining anything that isn't broad enough to shoot a gun at from a short distance. I would call it the human spirit separated from the confines of the corporeal body. With suicide--real suicide--the spirit seeks to make that separation permanent. Whether that may be considered a mental illness or something different may depend on whether or not you have had such an experience.
For a person about to end his life (males end their lives much more often than females--there's an important lesson there), there is no one else in the world. No family, no friends, no neighbours. No one exists but them and "now" at that time. There is no world other than the room the person is in. Most suicides happen indoors, usually at night, in a closed room, where it is quiet, when they are alone. Their whole world is inside their body.
Isn't that strange? Yes, may it always seem strange to you.
What could you do to prevent a person in this third category from ending their life? That's a burning question. Intervention is possible with the first two categories as has been demonstrated many times. But the third?
My theory is that a person in the third category can be forced to postpone suicide, but not to avoid it completely. At least not easily. Anyone who can be talked out of it would be in the first category. Short term intervention for someone committed to killing himself will not work. It will only delay the event.
Consider this: if you are in a position to think about ending your life, or even to consider the pain you will suffer in doing so or the mess and distress you will leave for others if you die, you are not a candidate for category three. You may be depressed or you may be normal as almost everyone thinks about ending their life at some point. They don't do it for a reason. Category three people don't consider reasons or consequences. They are alone in their world. There is no "other," "else," "later" or "future."
Isn't it cruel to end an article on such a depressing note (pun unintended)? Let me throw you a rope of hope. Successful suicides in the third category almost always have the person being alone. Never leave a person who may be at risk alone in a room. Never without another person who is awake and paying attention. All the time, 24/7.
A person who is at risk of suicide in this third category will tell you of his intentions, if asked. Most category threes have hinted or told others outright of their intent to end their life. What if he says no, he does not intend to kill himself? No one says you have to believe him. It may seem surprising, but few category threes will lie about their intent.
If you get the person out of his normal environment, away from the usual stresses of his life, for long enough (it may take at least a year), you may be able to cause something in his brain to change enough to alter his life course.
The other alternative would be akin to brainwashing. This would have to be done by a professional, over several successive long days of intensive therapy, non-stop over those days. A regular psychologist or psychiatrist would not know what to do or how to do it. Drugs would not be used because they would prevent voluntary changes within the brain. Finding a person who could do that would be harder than finding a needle in a haystack. But they exist.
I wish I had positive or encouraging suggestions for you if you know or learn of someone in category three. Let me make it even more complicated.
If a person wants to end his life because he can't get whatever he needs, may not even know what he needs, what are the ethical questions surrounding denying him that right? A person who is "saved" from suicide by persuasion may not get the help and personal care he needs later. Is that ethical?
What is society's obligation, if any, to someone who wants to end his life? What would your own obligation be? What is right? Each of us must make that decision, if the time comes, and live with the consequences of that choice.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of easily implemented and relatively cheap solutions to problems that plague every community. Suicide is a social problem, likely more of a problem than you are aware of in your own home area.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Friday, August 15, 2014
Keeping Kids "Innocent" Is Wrong, Ultimately Harmful
Keeping Kids "Innocent" Is Wrong, Ultimately Harmful
"Now I really suspect that Grandma is hiding [the newspapers with news about the Great War]. That would mean the news was so bad she did not want me to read it. But knowing the truth is better than imagining the worst."
- Jean Little, If I Die Before I Wake: The Flu Epidemic Diary of Fiona Macgregor, part of the Dear Canada series that teaches history and culture to children through story telling
They grow up so quickly, don't they? How often have you heard that? Or maybe you have said it yourself.
Too many parents try to protect their children from the "cruel world out there" by hiding truth and reality from them. "There will be time for them to learn that later, when they are old enough and mature enough to handle it."
The trouble is, by the time the parents believe their kids are old enough to handle the bad news about life, the kids have usually already experienced the bad part. They are past the time when they needed the input. The parents failed in their most important function, to raise their children to know how to handle what they face in their lives.
Compared with most mammals and primates, humans have an extremely long period of childhood. Nature has accommodated this by allowing for the slow development of a child's body. Girls don't begin to become fertile (able to procreate) until they are old enough that their prehistoric female ancestors were ready to be mothers. Similarly with boys becoming sexually mature.
The frontal lobes of the brain, the parts that help us tell right from wrong, good from bad, and that help us to think our way through serious problems do not fully develop until well on into the teen years.
By the age that adolescents become sexually mature, most of them know almost nothing about what is happening inside their bodies (how the hormones will affect them, not just the mechanics of reproduction as studied in school), how the same is affecting those of the opposite sex and how they can and should manage their strong feelings of sexual attraction toward others.
A recent study in the United States showed that fully half the college students surveyed knew almost nothing about how to avoid pregnancy. Does that seem unbelievable? It isn't to those college students.
At the adolescent age of their kids, many parents are saying to other parents that "Kids are interested in sex too young these days," and "I don't want my kid to be having sex until he (or she) is much older and can handle the responsibility." That age is not 12 years. But kids (about 15%) have their first sexual experiences by that age. By age 14 or 15, virtually half of them have had sex at least once. Parents are in denial, unless a daughter becomes pregnant. Then they blame the daughter, or TV, or movies, or their family doctor, just about anyone.
There is no such thing as an age when a child is too young to learn about matters of adulthood. That's the whole purpose of childhood, for them to learn about being adults before they actually get there and have to live it.
However, there is a secret about conveying adult information and knowledge to children. It's not what you tell them so much as how you tell them. Like any kind of communication, the message must be formed in such as way that the receiver understands it and can absorb it. Preferably that the young person has understood the message enough that he or she can process how to incorporate it somehow into his or her life.
A child can know the intricacies of sex without actually feeling the need to have it with another person. There are consequences. One is pregnancy and that includes becoming a parent long before the adolescent is ready to become a parent, to raise, provide for and protect a child.
Teens have learned how to avoid having intercourse by having sex in such a way that pregnancy is not possible. One method for each gender is cunnilingus (for the female) or fellatio (for the male). These do open the possibilities for STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases), including HPV infection, even throat cancer or HIV. The answer is not to hide these possibilities, but to discuss them so the adolescent has a chance to understand the risks.
Those who do not know make the most mistakes. The consequences of those mistakes often affect a person for the rest of his or her life. The knowledge young people need is not just about sex. It's about everything they may be exposed to in their lives, including at school, on the streets, on televison and on the internet.
Innocence in childhood becomes ignorance in adulthood. Innocent children suffer great disadvantages. Ignorant adults become victims of all kinds of problems. To make life worse, ignorant adults who received little help from their parents tend to be shy about asking for help from others when they are adults. In other words, ignorant adults tend to remain ignorant, often to the extent of refusing to learn when they have the opportunity.
There are no advantages for a child to remain innocent. There are huge and harmful disadvantages for an adult to be ignorant about the realities of life. One of those disadvantages is that ignorant adults tend to be more fearful of more different things than those who are knowledgeable. They also tend to lack empathy and often find it hard to be sympathetic. These are critically important characteristics we want in the generation that will soon run our country.
If you want a child who never grows up, get a dog or cat. If you are the parent of a child, help that child become a well balanced and responsible adult. It's the primary life responsibility of every parent. Talk about it.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of easy and inexpensive solutions to seemingly impossible problems. He gives advice through his web site and his internet group. To learn more about these go to http://billallin.com
"Now I really suspect that Grandma is hiding [the newspapers with news about the Great War]. That would mean the news was so bad she did not want me to read it. But knowing the truth is better than imagining the worst."
- Jean Little, If I Die Before I Wake: The Flu Epidemic Diary of Fiona Macgregor, part of the Dear Canada series that teaches history and culture to children through story telling
They grow up so quickly, don't they? How often have you heard that? Or maybe you have said it yourself.
Too many parents try to protect their children from the "cruel world out there" by hiding truth and reality from them. "There will be time for them to learn that later, when they are old enough and mature enough to handle it."
The trouble is, by the time the parents believe their kids are old enough to handle the bad news about life, the kids have usually already experienced the bad part. They are past the time when they needed the input. The parents failed in their most important function, to raise their children to know how to handle what they face in their lives.
Compared with most mammals and primates, humans have an extremely long period of childhood. Nature has accommodated this by allowing for the slow development of a child's body. Girls don't begin to become fertile (able to procreate) until they are old enough that their prehistoric female ancestors were ready to be mothers. Similarly with boys becoming sexually mature.
The frontal lobes of the brain, the parts that help us tell right from wrong, good from bad, and that help us to think our way through serious problems do not fully develop until well on into the teen years.
By the age that adolescents become sexually mature, most of them know almost nothing about what is happening inside their bodies (how the hormones will affect them, not just the mechanics of reproduction as studied in school), how the same is affecting those of the opposite sex and how they can and should manage their strong feelings of sexual attraction toward others.
A recent study in the United States showed that fully half the college students surveyed knew almost nothing about how to avoid pregnancy. Does that seem unbelievable? It isn't to those college students.
At the adolescent age of their kids, many parents are saying to other parents that "Kids are interested in sex too young these days," and "I don't want my kid to be having sex until he (or she) is much older and can handle the responsibility." That age is not 12 years. But kids (about 15%) have their first sexual experiences by that age. By age 14 or 15, virtually half of them have had sex at least once. Parents are in denial, unless a daughter becomes pregnant. Then they blame the daughter, or TV, or movies, or their family doctor, just about anyone.
There is no such thing as an age when a child is too young to learn about matters of adulthood. That's the whole purpose of childhood, for them to learn about being adults before they actually get there and have to live it.
However, there is a secret about conveying adult information and knowledge to children. It's not what you tell them so much as how you tell them. Like any kind of communication, the message must be formed in such as way that the receiver understands it and can absorb it. Preferably that the young person has understood the message enough that he or she can process how to incorporate it somehow into his or her life.
A child can know the intricacies of sex without actually feeling the need to have it with another person. There are consequences. One is pregnancy and that includes becoming a parent long before the adolescent is ready to become a parent, to raise, provide for and protect a child.
Teens have learned how to avoid having intercourse by having sex in such a way that pregnancy is not possible. One method for each gender is cunnilingus (for the female) or fellatio (for the male). These do open the possibilities for STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases), including HPV infection, even throat cancer or HIV. The answer is not to hide these possibilities, but to discuss them so the adolescent has a chance to understand the risks.
Those who do not know make the most mistakes. The consequences of those mistakes often affect a person for the rest of his or her life. The knowledge young people need is not just about sex. It's about everything they may be exposed to in their lives, including at school, on the streets, on televison and on the internet.
Innocence in childhood becomes ignorance in adulthood. Innocent children suffer great disadvantages. Ignorant adults become victims of all kinds of problems. To make life worse, ignorant adults who received little help from their parents tend to be shy about asking for help from others when they are adults. In other words, ignorant adults tend to remain ignorant, often to the extent of refusing to learn when they have the opportunity.
There are no advantages for a child to remain innocent. There are huge and harmful disadvantages for an adult to be ignorant about the realities of life. One of those disadvantages is that ignorant adults tend to be more fearful of more different things than those who are knowledgeable. They also tend to lack empathy and often find it hard to be sympathetic. These are critically important characteristics we want in the generation that will soon run our country.
If you want a child who never grows up, get a dog or cat. If you are the parent of a child, help that child become a well balanced and responsible adult. It's the primary life responsibility of every parent. Talk about it.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of easy and inexpensive solutions to seemingly impossible problems. He gives advice through his web site and his internet group. To learn more about these go to http://billallin.com
Monday, March 24, 2014
Why GMO (GE) Foods Are Dangerous
Why GMO (GE) Foods Are Dangerous
The safety of GMO foods is unproven and a growing body of research connects these foods with health concerns and environmental damage. For this reason, most developed nations have policies requiring mandatory labeling of GMO foods at the very least, and some have issued bans on GMO food production and imports.
In Canada we do not.
- David Suzuki Foundation Dr. David Suzuki is a Canadian environmentalist.
GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) and GE (Genetically Engineered) are, for all intents and purposes, identical and interchangeable. North America tends to use GMO, Europe GE, usage varies in the rest of the world.
Simply put, the process involves taking genetic material from the DNA of one organism and inserting it into the DNA of another organism. The idea is to confer the benefit of the genetic material of the donor organism onto the receiving organism, thereby "improving" the recipient organism.
Opponents of GMOs call it "playing God." This seems excessive. Playing the Devil might be a more appropriate label. We will return to the labeling idea later.
The governments of the USA, Canada and a few other countries that tend to go along with whatever the US says are either supremely stupid or unspeakably corrupt. While both are highly negative, the shocking possibility exists that those same governments are both stupid and corrupt. That is shocking because, given the present staggering power of chemical giants such as Monsanto, little short of physical revolution may be considered to cause committed countries to back away from decisions that have harmed and will harm their own people.
This article will not attribute opinion to the results of scientific research. That has been done too often. The research has been done, the conclusions are public, but the chemical giants have managed to cover it up so successfully that the majority of people know little about them. Governments who have committed to allow GMOs are too embarrassed to admit their grievous mistakes, so remain silent. They fear litigation as a consequence of allowing harmful foods on the market. Millions of people are now in the process of destroying their health as a result.
This article will instead appeal to logic, to your sense of right and wrong, to what used to be known as common sense. GMOs are purely destructive over the long term, covertly destructive in the short term. Here's why.
Genetically modified seeds are engineered to withstand poisons. These poisons are spread over the land in which the seeds will grow, ostensibly to kill off pests and plants that would compete with the seed during the growing season.
You need to understand that these poisons are not selective. They are broad spectrum. That is, they kill everything, every living organism, every plant, every animal, every bacterium and other microbe in the soil they touch. As there are literally millions of microscopic organisms in every teaspoon of fertile soil, that is a massive amount of destruction.
Then the genetically modified seeds are planted. They sprout, they grow, they eventually produce food-like products you will find in your food market. The chemical companies claim the seeds carry none of the poisons with them to maturity. Research proves this is a lie. More recent research has found these poisons in the air people breathe and the water they drink.
So, prove it, you say, give us the research. No, I won't do that. Articles that provide support for their arguments based on "scientific research" can and often are embarrassingly biased, edited not to give all available evidence but to provide evidence to support the opinion expressed. The internet will give you the evidence if you search. This article will not give you one-sided evidence to support its claims.
Search "organic foods pros and cons." And "gmo foods" to start. Then "gmo damage."
Now to the logic or common sense part. It has been well known and documented for centuries, even millennia, that very small amounts of poison ingested over an extended period of time will eventually cause ill health, then death. Kings and emperors used to have tasters (or the chefs who prepared their meals) eat some of the food intended for the leaders before they indulged.
Some fine mysteries, such as by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, showed how murderers killed their victims by giving them small amounts of poison over weeks, months, even years. Court records show how some people murdered others in similar ways today.
The very same companies that produce the seeds that can survive the assaults of poisons on fields in which they grow also produce the poisons themselves. Even today some governments are approving GMO seeds on which DDT (an insecticide banned in most countries decades ago) and components of Agent Orange (best known for killing countless innocent people in SE Asia during the Vietnam war, though people are still suffering and dying from it today) may be sprayed. Yes, you read that right.
Not only do they give permission for farm fields to be poisoned lifeless before seeds are planted, they are now giving permission for industrial farmers to spray poisons directly on the crops.
You decide, is that stupidity or corruption? Or both.
Ask yourself how much sense it makes for a human to take as a blood thinner a poison (warfarin) that in stronger doses kills rats, a fellow mammal. With all of the advice we receive about the importance of eating green leafy vegetables to keep us healthy and extend our lives, warfarin users must be careful of them because the vitamin K1 they contain interferes with warfarin's effectiveness as a blood thinner. Eating an extremely healthy food can harm a warfarin user.
At a time when health care costs soar dramatically to previously unimagined heights, governments are knowingly making more of their own citizens sick. It is known that those living today will be the first generation in centuries to live shorter lifespans than their parents. That prediction was made because of widespread obesity.
We may also expect it because of widespread poisoning of the foods we eat. Yet government food and drug agencies still call GMO foods safe in some countries.
Many of these same governments are refusing to allow food products with GMO ingredients to have labels clearly stating their GMO content. What would you call it? Consumers are not allowed to know if the food they buy and eat and feed to their children is unhealthy or toxic.
You have a choice about what you eat. Learn about it first or suffer the consequences. Those consequences could include not only a shorter lifespan, but years of ill health before you die. Nobody wants that.
Final note: chemical giant and the world's most powerful advocate of GMO seeds (it sells both single year seeds and Roundup, the poison that kills everything before its seeds are planted) Monsanto refuses to allow any GMO products or food components in its own staff canteen.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about cheap and easily implemented solutions to pervasive social problems. Yes, ill health from GMO food consumption is a serious social problem.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
The safety of GMO foods is unproven and a growing body of research connects these foods with health concerns and environmental damage. For this reason, most developed nations have policies requiring mandatory labeling of GMO foods at the very least, and some have issued bans on GMO food production and imports.
In Canada we do not.
- David Suzuki Foundation Dr. David Suzuki is a Canadian environmentalist.
GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) and GE (Genetically Engineered) are, for all intents and purposes, identical and interchangeable. North America tends to use GMO, Europe GE, usage varies in the rest of the world.
Simply put, the process involves taking genetic material from the DNA of one organism and inserting it into the DNA of another organism. The idea is to confer the benefit of the genetic material of the donor organism onto the receiving organism, thereby "improving" the recipient organism.
Opponents of GMOs call it "playing God." This seems excessive. Playing the Devil might be a more appropriate label. We will return to the labeling idea later.
The governments of the USA, Canada and a few other countries that tend to go along with whatever the US says are either supremely stupid or unspeakably corrupt. While both are highly negative, the shocking possibility exists that those same governments are both stupid and corrupt. That is shocking because, given the present staggering power of chemical giants such as Monsanto, little short of physical revolution may be considered to cause committed countries to back away from decisions that have harmed and will harm their own people.
This article will not attribute opinion to the results of scientific research. That has been done too often. The research has been done, the conclusions are public, but the chemical giants have managed to cover it up so successfully that the majority of people know little about them. Governments who have committed to allow GMOs are too embarrassed to admit their grievous mistakes, so remain silent. They fear litigation as a consequence of allowing harmful foods on the market. Millions of people are now in the process of destroying their health as a result.
This article will instead appeal to logic, to your sense of right and wrong, to what used to be known as common sense. GMOs are purely destructive over the long term, covertly destructive in the short term. Here's why.
Genetically modified seeds are engineered to withstand poisons. These poisons are spread over the land in which the seeds will grow, ostensibly to kill off pests and plants that would compete with the seed during the growing season.
You need to understand that these poisons are not selective. They are broad spectrum. That is, they kill everything, every living organism, every plant, every animal, every bacterium and other microbe in the soil they touch. As there are literally millions of microscopic organisms in every teaspoon of fertile soil, that is a massive amount of destruction.
Then the genetically modified seeds are planted. They sprout, they grow, they eventually produce food-like products you will find in your food market. The chemical companies claim the seeds carry none of the poisons with them to maturity. Research proves this is a lie. More recent research has found these poisons in the air people breathe and the water they drink.
So, prove it, you say, give us the research. No, I won't do that. Articles that provide support for their arguments based on "scientific research" can and often are embarrassingly biased, edited not to give all available evidence but to provide evidence to support the opinion expressed. The internet will give you the evidence if you search. This article will not give you one-sided evidence to support its claims.
Search "organic foods pros and cons." And "gmo foods" to start. Then "gmo damage."
Now to the logic or common sense part. It has been well known and documented for centuries, even millennia, that very small amounts of poison ingested over an extended period of time will eventually cause ill health, then death. Kings and emperors used to have tasters (or the chefs who prepared their meals) eat some of the food intended for the leaders before they indulged.
Some fine mysteries, such as by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, showed how murderers killed their victims by giving them small amounts of poison over weeks, months, even years. Court records show how some people murdered others in similar ways today.
The very same companies that produce the seeds that can survive the assaults of poisons on fields in which they grow also produce the poisons themselves. Even today some governments are approving GMO seeds on which DDT (an insecticide banned in most countries decades ago) and components of Agent Orange (best known for killing countless innocent people in SE Asia during the Vietnam war, though people are still suffering and dying from it today) may be sprayed. Yes, you read that right.
Not only do they give permission for farm fields to be poisoned lifeless before seeds are planted, they are now giving permission for industrial farmers to spray poisons directly on the crops.
You decide, is that stupidity or corruption? Or both.
Ask yourself how much sense it makes for a human to take as a blood thinner a poison (warfarin) that in stronger doses kills rats, a fellow mammal. With all of the advice we receive about the importance of eating green leafy vegetables to keep us healthy and extend our lives, warfarin users must be careful of them because the vitamin K1 they contain interferes with warfarin's effectiveness as a blood thinner. Eating an extremely healthy food can harm a warfarin user.
At a time when health care costs soar dramatically to previously unimagined heights, governments are knowingly making more of their own citizens sick. It is known that those living today will be the first generation in centuries to live shorter lifespans than their parents. That prediction was made because of widespread obesity.
We may also expect it because of widespread poisoning of the foods we eat. Yet government food and drug agencies still call GMO foods safe in some countries.
Many of these same governments are refusing to allow food products with GMO ingredients to have labels clearly stating their GMO content. What would you call it? Consumers are not allowed to know if the food they buy and eat and feed to their children is unhealthy or toxic.
You have a choice about what you eat. Learn about it first or suffer the consequences. Those consequences could include not only a shorter lifespan, but years of ill health before you die. Nobody wants that.
Final note: chemical giant and the world's most powerful advocate of GMO seeds (it sells both single year seeds and Roundup, the poison that kills everything before its seeds are planted) Monsanto refuses to allow any GMO products or food components in its own staff canteen.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about cheap and easily implemented solutions to pervasive social problems. Yes, ill health from GMO food consumption is a serious social problem.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Nutrition vs. Big Pharma
Nutrition vs. Big Pharma
It's all in what we eat. Just as inadequate nutrition will cause our chromosomes to get shorter faster and younger, good nutrition can help us to boost our DNA to help us live longer and stronger and more active lives as we get older.
- "Why I Take Vitamin and Mineral Supplements"
There is no doubt, health is a very personal and controversial subject. Very personal because each person makes his or her own decision and choices about what to eat and what to avoid.
Controversial because those who take an interest in learning about health matters are battered from all sides with information, often conflicting with other information on the same subject.
The term "Big Pharma" is itself derogatory, used by those (especially by conspiracy theorists who believe pharmaceutical companies plan to keep everyone sick to maintain their profit margins) who advocate good nutrition over running to the doctor with each runny nose.
Many studies have shown that taking vitamin and mineral supplements does little or no good for health. Some even claim supplements can harm health. It should be noted that pharmaceutical companies (the international corporations that make drugs prescribed by doctors) have become skilled at hiding their sponsorship of supposedly independent scientific studies.
It has been said that producers of "real food" and food supplements of value can't afford to conduct the kinds of studies that big pharmaceutical companies can, which explains why they have so little support from scientific studies. Yet studies exist supposedly "proving" that supplements are useless and foods not enhanced by chemicals from big corporations such as Monsanto and Dow don't offer dependable product. If producers of 'real food' can't afford to conduct studies but Big Pharma and the chemical giants can, does that give you a clue about who is behind the negative studies?
The claim that advocates of good nutrition and big pharmaceutical companies are at war over health information you receive has merit. They are at war.
When a pharmaceutical company (or a study sponsored by one or more of them) claims that nutritional or vitamin supplements are not covered by law (technically they are not drugs, which are covered), thus their contents cannot be verified by their manufacturers, you have to think "conflict of interest." They have profit in mind at all times and the money to make the competition look weak or harmful through studies they sponsor covertly.
Nutritional supplements and vitamin supplements derive from nature, from plants that have grown and developed since long before humans inhabited the planet. Have you ever challenged a farmer to prove that each carrot he sells has the same nutritional value as each other carrot? Of course not.
Farmers are not the ones who claim the nutritional value of eating carrots. They leave that to health authorities who have studied the chemical components of carrots and how they affect the health of people. Nature is not consistent. The nutritional value of a carrot grown in one field may differ markedly from that of a carrot of similar size grown in an adjacent field.
No respectable health authority has ever advised people to eat only carrots. They advise people to eat a wide selection of fresh fruits and vegetables, including carrots and plants of other varieties, especially those with strong colours (they tend to have greater health benefits). Yet food and supplement "studies" take these out of context of the normal consumption and digestive systems and find results that make them look bad.
A person who paid attention only to the results of studies that in effect say it doesn't matter what you eat, it only matters whether or not you are sick, may believe that they can eat anything. If they do get sick, it's bad luck and drugs or (in extreme cases) a stay in a hospital will fix them up.
Now we can make the distinction between a healthy body and an unhealthy body. Note that you will likely not be able to tell by looking at someone whether their body is healthy or unhealthy. Nature has made us strong and fairly resistant to attacks by pathogens in our young (and therefore reproductive) years.
Once our reproductive years have passed, the effects of an unhealthy lifestyle and unhealthy eating habits begin to show. People don't get sick by accident or bad luck. Generally speaking, they get sick for a very good reason.
Unhealthy eating practices over several years result in an unhealthy body. An unhealthy body is vulnerable to attack by disease bacteria and viruses. The immune system of a healthy body will fight off these pathogens. The immune system of a healthy person will kill those bad guys.
But won't doctor-prescribed drugs do the same thing if you get sick? Yes, sort of. The number of drugs that will defeat viruses can be counted on your thumbs. The number of viruses that may attack your body is so large that it can't be counted. The common cold alone has about 200 viruses that cause you to "have a cold."
As to fighting bacteria, doctors have many drugs they can prescribe. If a doctor doesn't know exactly which bacterium has caused a disease you have, he will likely prescribe a broad spectrum antibiotic. That should get rid of the worst of the bacteria that are attacking you.
The trouble with that is that the antibiotic will also likely destroy most of your immune system. Your immune system, after all, depends almost entirely on its own collection of microbes in your gut, in your mouth and on every organ of your body. Antibiotics kill far more good bacteria--the ones that form the core of your immune system--then they kill harmful bacteria. The doctor takes credit only for killing the bad ones.
Pharmaceutical companies don't tell you that. They want you to believe that their drugs will kill the bad bacteria. After that, forget about other consequences. If you contract some other illness because you have no immune system to fight it off, the companies want you to believe that you simply have bad luck (take more drugs). But that's not true. You may simply have a knowledge deficit. And a naïve belief in the ability of your doctor and drugs to cure you of anything.
But drugs don't cure you. More often than not, they do you more harm than good.
Cancer, for example, is now considered by many outside the medical establishment to be a voluntary disease. That is, you have a choice to avoid cancer. If you eat properly. Same with heart disease and most of the other ailments people suffer from before they reach 90 years of age.
The purpose of this article is not to give you medical or nutritional advise. Its purpose is to get you to give direction to your thoughts about your ability to control your own health.
You make the choice to be healthy, especially past middle age (though ideally you should begin before that), or to be a medical patient and regular customer of Big Pharma. If you choose the latter, the companies will love you for it. They won't respect you, but they will love you because you will be one of the geese that lays golden eggs for them.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of solutions that are cheap but effective, as well as hundreds of articles that are available on the internet. Yes, health is a big social problem in the world, not just in the west, but everywhere.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
It's all in what we eat. Just as inadequate nutrition will cause our chromosomes to get shorter faster and younger, good nutrition can help us to boost our DNA to help us live longer and stronger and more active lives as we get older.
- "Why I Take Vitamin and Mineral Supplements"
There is no doubt, health is a very personal and controversial subject. Very personal because each person makes his or her own decision and choices about what to eat and what to avoid.
Controversial because those who take an interest in learning about health matters are battered from all sides with information, often conflicting with other information on the same subject.
The term "Big Pharma" is itself derogatory, used by those (especially by conspiracy theorists who believe pharmaceutical companies plan to keep everyone sick to maintain their profit margins) who advocate good nutrition over running to the doctor with each runny nose.
Many studies have shown that taking vitamin and mineral supplements does little or no good for health. Some even claim supplements can harm health. It should be noted that pharmaceutical companies (the international corporations that make drugs prescribed by doctors) have become skilled at hiding their sponsorship of supposedly independent scientific studies.
It has been said that producers of "real food" and food supplements of value can't afford to conduct the kinds of studies that big pharmaceutical companies can, which explains why they have so little support from scientific studies. Yet studies exist supposedly "proving" that supplements are useless and foods not enhanced by chemicals from big corporations such as Monsanto and Dow don't offer dependable product. If producers of 'real food' can't afford to conduct studies but Big Pharma and the chemical giants can, does that give you a clue about who is behind the negative studies?
The claim that advocates of good nutrition and big pharmaceutical companies are at war over health information you receive has merit. They are at war.
When a pharmaceutical company (or a study sponsored by one or more of them) claims that nutritional or vitamin supplements are not covered by law (technically they are not drugs, which are covered), thus their contents cannot be verified by their manufacturers, you have to think "conflict of interest." They have profit in mind at all times and the money to make the competition look weak or harmful through studies they sponsor covertly.
Nutritional supplements and vitamin supplements derive from nature, from plants that have grown and developed since long before humans inhabited the planet. Have you ever challenged a farmer to prove that each carrot he sells has the same nutritional value as each other carrot? Of course not.
Farmers are not the ones who claim the nutritional value of eating carrots. They leave that to health authorities who have studied the chemical components of carrots and how they affect the health of people. Nature is not consistent. The nutritional value of a carrot grown in one field may differ markedly from that of a carrot of similar size grown in an adjacent field.
No respectable health authority has ever advised people to eat only carrots. They advise people to eat a wide selection of fresh fruits and vegetables, including carrots and plants of other varieties, especially those with strong colours (they tend to have greater health benefits). Yet food and supplement "studies" take these out of context of the normal consumption and digestive systems and find results that make them look bad.
A person who paid attention only to the results of studies that in effect say it doesn't matter what you eat, it only matters whether or not you are sick, may believe that they can eat anything. If they do get sick, it's bad luck and drugs or (in extreme cases) a stay in a hospital will fix them up.
Now we can make the distinction between a healthy body and an unhealthy body. Note that you will likely not be able to tell by looking at someone whether their body is healthy or unhealthy. Nature has made us strong and fairly resistant to attacks by pathogens in our young (and therefore reproductive) years.
Once our reproductive years have passed, the effects of an unhealthy lifestyle and unhealthy eating habits begin to show. People don't get sick by accident or bad luck. Generally speaking, they get sick for a very good reason.
Unhealthy eating practices over several years result in an unhealthy body. An unhealthy body is vulnerable to attack by disease bacteria and viruses. The immune system of a healthy body will fight off these pathogens. The immune system of a healthy person will kill those bad guys.
But won't doctor-prescribed drugs do the same thing if you get sick? Yes, sort of. The number of drugs that will defeat viruses can be counted on your thumbs. The number of viruses that may attack your body is so large that it can't be counted. The common cold alone has about 200 viruses that cause you to "have a cold."
As to fighting bacteria, doctors have many drugs they can prescribe. If a doctor doesn't know exactly which bacterium has caused a disease you have, he will likely prescribe a broad spectrum antibiotic. That should get rid of the worst of the bacteria that are attacking you.
The trouble with that is that the antibiotic will also likely destroy most of your immune system. Your immune system, after all, depends almost entirely on its own collection of microbes in your gut, in your mouth and on every organ of your body. Antibiotics kill far more good bacteria--the ones that form the core of your immune system--then they kill harmful bacteria. The doctor takes credit only for killing the bad ones.
Pharmaceutical companies don't tell you that. They want you to believe that their drugs will kill the bad bacteria. After that, forget about other consequences. If you contract some other illness because you have no immune system to fight it off, the companies want you to believe that you simply have bad luck (take more drugs). But that's not true. You may simply have a knowledge deficit. And a naïve belief in the ability of your doctor and drugs to cure you of anything.
But drugs don't cure you. More often than not, they do you more harm than good.
Cancer, for example, is now considered by many outside the medical establishment to be a voluntary disease. That is, you have a choice to avoid cancer. If you eat properly. Same with heart disease and most of the other ailments people suffer from before they reach 90 years of age.
The purpose of this article is not to give you medical or nutritional advise. Its purpose is to get you to give direction to your thoughts about your ability to control your own health.
You make the choice to be healthy, especially past middle age (though ideally you should begin before that), or to be a medical patient and regular customer of Big Pharma. If you choose the latter, the companies will love you for it. They won't respect you, but they will love you because you will be one of the geese that lays golden eggs for them.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of solutions that are cheap but effective, as well as hundreds of articles that are available on the internet. Yes, health is a big social problem in the world, not just in the west, but everywhere.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Living Longer Means Living Healthier
Living Longer Means Living Healthier
Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.
- Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister (1874-1965)
Of course I want to live longer than my parents and grandparents.
With the exception of one grandfather who could not cope with financial tragedy during the First World War, so ended his own life, my parents and grandparents lived reasonable lifespans. For their times.
Their times were not my time, our time, your time and mine. Whereas those folks in the past were lucky to live beyond 80 years (most were lucky to reach age 40), my neighbours consider that anyone who dies before age 88 "died too young." That may be peculiar to where I live.
Many people who have reached and passed age 65 today expect to live to 100, some even well beyond that. A Canadian competitive swimmer of 105 years has forced competitive swimming organizations to create a new age category for people 105 to 109 years. Otherwise he would have to stop competing in competitions and he does not want to do that.
My parents both died of cancer. There was no cancer in our family before they died. My sister died too young, also of cancer. One of my grandmothers died of cancer. Cancer is now considered to be a voluntary disease. That is, you can avoid it if you know how, if you adopt an appropriate lifestyle. It can even be cured, though many still die from it because they don't know how to cure themselves or will not change if they do know. Some of us are devoted to our bad habits.
One of my grandfathers died of Alzheimer's. Another disease considered by many who study good health to be a voluntary disease. Although it has been shown to have a genetic component, that component can be overcome with diet and the right mental exercises. Bad health habits increase the risk hugely.
One grandmother died of heart disease. Another disease now considered to be voluntary. Heart disease is avoidable. Not with an unhealthy lifestyle and eating habits.
Why do doctors, hospitals and drug companies focus so much attention on these diseases, but have so limited success at curing them? Because their livelihoods depend on these people being repeat patients, regular customers. Is that cynical? Not when you consider the very real possibility of conflict of interest. The busier these people are, the more money they make. Doctors are small businesses and business depends heavily on a regular income stream.
Though only one of my immediate ancestors died by choice, the others all died because they did not know how to avoid practices that were, on reflection today, bound to give them an unhealthy lifestyle.
It could have been different for them if they had known how. I am determined that I will live longer than they did because I do know how.
One of the main causes of death in elderly people is that the gene strings (telomeres) get shorter with repetition over a long period of time and this means that genes intended to fight off various health problems may no longer be strong enough to do that. A good diet can actually help to lengthen the telomeres, perhaps extending life in the process.
Here's the catch. If I tell you, I could be legally liable for dispensing medical or health advice without an approved licence. Am I afraid of being sued, of being attacked by the medical establishment of my country? Frankly, yes. It's that bad. Medical associations and their Big Pharma supporters are constantly in court fighting those who want to dispense good health advice and cures for diseases.
I will tell you that the information you need to live longer is available on the internet. I will tell you that you should stick strictly with foods that grow in the ground or from plants that do. I will tell you that you will surely shorten your life by taking drugs, either prescribed by doctors or the bad illegal kind. Yes, there are good illegal kinds (illegal in some countries, not all), but you need to find that out for yourself.
The choice is yours. Of course you don't have time to research this stuff now. You are too busy. But you will have time when you are dying and unable to do much else but suffer.
If you don't mind a simple observation, that's too late.
When my time comes, I want to die of "natural causes." I want those natural causes to strike much later than they did for my immediate ancestors. And they will. Because I took the trouble to learn how to delay them. You can too.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of simple and cheap solutions to major problems. Yes, dying too young is a social problem and being feeble for the last decade or more of your life is another one. Healthy people do not have that problem.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.
- Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister (1874-1965)
Of course I want to live longer than my parents and grandparents.
With the exception of one grandfather who could not cope with financial tragedy during the First World War, so ended his own life, my parents and grandparents lived reasonable lifespans. For their times.
Their times were not my time, our time, your time and mine. Whereas those folks in the past were lucky to live beyond 80 years (most were lucky to reach age 40), my neighbours consider that anyone who dies before age 88 "died too young." That may be peculiar to where I live.
Many people who have reached and passed age 65 today expect to live to 100, some even well beyond that. A Canadian competitive swimmer of 105 years has forced competitive swimming organizations to create a new age category for people 105 to 109 years. Otherwise he would have to stop competing in competitions and he does not want to do that.
My parents both died of cancer. There was no cancer in our family before they died. My sister died too young, also of cancer. One of my grandmothers died of cancer. Cancer is now considered to be a voluntary disease. That is, you can avoid it if you know how, if you adopt an appropriate lifestyle. It can even be cured, though many still die from it because they don't know how to cure themselves or will not change if they do know. Some of us are devoted to our bad habits.
One of my grandfathers died of Alzheimer's. Another disease considered by many who study good health to be a voluntary disease. Although it has been shown to have a genetic component, that component can be overcome with diet and the right mental exercises. Bad health habits increase the risk hugely.
One grandmother died of heart disease. Another disease now considered to be voluntary. Heart disease is avoidable. Not with an unhealthy lifestyle and eating habits.
Why do doctors, hospitals and drug companies focus so much attention on these diseases, but have so limited success at curing them? Because their livelihoods depend on these people being repeat patients, regular customers. Is that cynical? Not when you consider the very real possibility of conflict of interest. The busier these people are, the more money they make. Doctors are small businesses and business depends heavily on a regular income stream.
Though only one of my immediate ancestors died by choice, the others all died because they did not know how to avoid practices that were, on reflection today, bound to give them an unhealthy lifestyle.
It could have been different for them if they had known how. I am determined that I will live longer than they did because I do know how.
One of the main causes of death in elderly people is that the gene strings (telomeres) get shorter with repetition over a long period of time and this means that genes intended to fight off various health problems may no longer be strong enough to do that. A good diet can actually help to lengthen the telomeres, perhaps extending life in the process.
Here's the catch. If I tell you, I could be legally liable for dispensing medical or health advice without an approved licence. Am I afraid of being sued, of being attacked by the medical establishment of my country? Frankly, yes. It's that bad. Medical associations and their Big Pharma supporters are constantly in court fighting those who want to dispense good health advice and cures for diseases.
I will tell you that the information you need to live longer is available on the internet. I will tell you that you should stick strictly with foods that grow in the ground or from plants that do. I will tell you that you will surely shorten your life by taking drugs, either prescribed by doctors or the bad illegal kind. Yes, there are good illegal kinds (illegal in some countries, not all), but you need to find that out for yourself.
The choice is yours. Of course you don't have time to research this stuff now. You are too busy. But you will have time when you are dying and unable to do much else but suffer.
If you don't mind a simple observation, that's too late.
When my time comes, I want to die of "natural causes." I want those natural causes to strike much later than they did for my immediate ancestors. And they will. Because I took the trouble to learn how to delay them. You can too.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of simple and cheap solutions to major problems. Yes, dying too young is a social problem and being feeble for the last decade or more of your life is another one. Healthy people do not have that problem.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, January 27, 2014
How You and Your Doctor Could Be Destroying Your Immune System
How You and Your Doctor Could Be Destroying Your Immune System
Immune system (Wikipedia) The immune system is a system of biological structures and processes within an organism that protects against disease. To function properly, an immune system must detect a wide variety of agents, from viruses to parasitic worms, and distinguish them from the organism's own healthy tissue.
Note that the quote from Wikipedia (above) is so vague about what the immune system actually is that from reading it you have no idea what the immune system is. The rest of the page, indeed the rest of the sources on the internet, are equally vague. Okay, let's be honest, they're not just vague, they tell you nothing about what the immune system is.
Your doctor will tell you about vaccines that will help your immune system. Doctors never mention the small amounts of toxic additives (such as mercury) that are in the vaccines because "such tiny amounts can't do you any harm." They never mention that repeated doses of tiny amounts of toxins add up to something significant. If you read Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle mysteries you will better understand that. Killer toxins accumulate.
Your doctor may also give you antibiotics to help you get over an illness. He or she, only if asked, will tell you that the antibiotics will help your immune system overcome bad bacteria that are causing your illness. Antibiotics kill bacteria, that's their main function. Please remember that because it is very important to the purpose of this article.
We have such procedures as pasteurization of milk and irradiation of other food products that also kill bacteria and make the food "safe" to consume. Back in the late 18th century Louis Pasteur won numerous awards for his process for killing bacteria.
Over succeeding years bacteria and other microscopic organisms (now known as microbes) came to be known as "germs." Germs, everybody knew, were bad. If it was living and microscopic, so the generally accepted belief went, it was a germ, it was dangerous and it could do you harm. Medical science and pharmaceutical chemical companies were ready to come to the rescue. Doctors welcomed their chemical treatments with open arms.
Many health magazines and apparently reputable sources on the internet will tell you how to boost your immune system. They act as if taking the supplements or eating the right foods will have the same kind of effects on your immune system as exercising has on your physical strength and endurance. But they never tell you what the supplements or foods are actually boosting or affecting.
Here is the information they won't tell you, either because they don't know (most likely) or because they are afraid to tell you. Prepare yourself, I am not afraid.
You are not alone in your body. You will likely think of your body as consisting of billions or trillions of cells, each containing DNA that program every cell to do its respective job and proteins to tell the cells when to do each job and for how long. You may even know that some proteins code for cell death, for killing old cells so they don't hang around to cause you grief, so they may be flushed out by the back end of your digestive system.
You are more than that. Much more. The DNA in your cells contain remnants of DNA from bacteria, some of which used to cause people to die, but no longer do because our DNA adopted (co-opted them) to prevent them from doing harm to our human and pre-human ancestors. Your DNA even contains bits of genetic code from viruses, which also were adopted eons ago so our ancestors would not die from attacks by their ancestors.
Wait, there's more. Your stomach contains billions of bacteria. Good bacteria. How good? You could not digest food without them. Literally. Your intestines also contain billions of bacteria. Not the same bacteria because the stomach is very acidic (about 2 on the pH scale where 7 is neutral), while the pH of the intestines is about 9, making them the opposite of acidic, alkaline. The two environments are extremely different as you might imagine.
In fact, every organ of your body has bacteria all over it. Your skin is covered with good bacteria. Your mouth is coated with them. They protect you from invasion by diseases caused by bad bacteria and viruses. So when you use antibacterial soap and mouthwash that promise to make your skin and mouth perfectly clean, you are killing off the very same good bacteria that protect you. But don't worry, your doctor has drugs to help you when you get sick because you destroyed your body's natural protection. (That is sarcasm, in case you missed it.)
Back to those bacteria in your gut, your intestines. There are lots of them. Many many times more of them than you have cells in your whole body. You live in symbiosis with them. You can't survive without them. And they can't survive without you. They are your immune system, at least the biggest part of your immune system.
People of some tribes who live in areas where their diet lacks necessary nutrients or gut bacteria eat a particular kind of clay to get what they need. Chemical companies want us to kill bacteria that our bodies need. They want us to fear anything that is "dirty." That "dirt" could be what helps us to develop an healthy immune system.
Kill the good bacteria in your mouth and you kill what protects disease bacteria and viruses from entering your body through your mouth. Same with the bacteria in your nose, on your skin, and so on. The flu we hear about each year enters the body through the mouth or the nose. Antibiotics and other bacteria killers in mouthwash and nasal spray remove your ability to kill the invaders before they reach your blood stream.
Kill the good bacteria in your gut and you destroy your immune system. At the very least you disrupt it horribly. That's what antibiotics do. They kill billions of good bacteria that constitute your immune system as they kill the bad ones (if they can, which they often can't). Antibiotics kill bacteria, they don't distinguish between "good" and 'bad."
Should you get cancer (now considered a voluntary disease because, according to many researchers who are trying to be heard, but are being silenced, you can prevent it by eating a good diet), your oncologist will likely urge you strongly to take chemotherapy. Chemo kills bacteria, it kills your immune system. Ask anyone who has taken a full course of it and you will find that they have to take pills every day to account for the fact that they no longer have an immune system.
In healthy people, the immune system kills cancer cells. In unhealthy people whose bodies have allowed cancer cells to overwhelm the natural defences of the immune system, chemo destroys the rest of the immune system. Is it any wonder that a majority of medical doctors in the west would refuse chemo if they got cancer? Is it any wonder that an even bigger majority of oncologists (tumour specialists) would refuse chemo if they got cancer? Chemo patients have a shockingly low five year survival rate.
This is not to say that the medical system is out to kill you. The medical system, after all, is designed to treat sick bodies, bodies that have already been severely compromised for many years (in many cases) by an unhealthy lifestyle. Doctors treat broken people. By the time you go to your doctor with a problem that is serious, your natural protective defences have largely been destroyed. By you, not by your doctor.
Doctors have the unenviable task of trying to help severely damaged bodies, even though the patients themselves do not think of themselves in those terms. (I felt well and healthy until I went to my doctor.")
It is not the purpose of this article to give advice, either of a medical or of a health nature. If what you have just read means something, use it as motivation to learn more about your health and how to look after it. However, don't expect to find answers in a pill. There is no instant solution, no quick fix.
The solution to good health is in the food you eat. Healthy food. Deliciously tasty food if you prepare it properly. But that food may be harder to find than you think. Almost all fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables were treated, in the field or in a factory, with pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, antibiotics and preservatives that, you will learn, do exactly the opposite of what you want to happen in a healthy digestive system. You need to learn what food is healthy and where to find it.
As you launch your research, be prepared to find descriptions of the immune system that say nothing about those billions of good bacteria that protect you. It's part of how the medical system operates. For reasons unknown, it doesn't think you are smart enough to handle the truth. I believe you are, or you would not be reading this article.
You will find information about foods and even supplements that are known as probiotics. They are good guys. Anything known as prebiotic is food (usually vegetables and fruit) that the probiotic bacteria (the good guys that constitute your immune system) need to eat. No matter what foods you may find tasty, those immune system bacteria don't have taste buds, just nutritional needs.
Now I turn your health, especially in the last decades of your life, back over to you. If you eat properly, you may even be able to extend those years and be healthier than the doomsayers claim you will be in your old age. You can live longer, healthier and happier. Or, by making no change, you will not.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's epidemic Social Problems, a book of solutions in an age of problems, and hundreds of articles that are available on the internet. Search: "Bill Allin".
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Immune system (Wikipedia) The immune system is a system of biological structures and processes within an organism that protects against disease. To function properly, an immune system must detect a wide variety of agents, from viruses to parasitic worms, and distinguish them from the organism's own healthy tissue.
Note that the quote from Wikipedia (above) is so vague about what the immune system actually is that from reading it you have no idea what the immune system is. The rest of the page, indeed the rest of the sources on the internet, are equally vague. Okay, let's be honest, they're not just vague, they tell you nothing about what the immune system is.
Your doctor will tell you about vaccines that will help your immune system. Doctors never mention the small amounts of toxic additives (such as mercury) that are in the vaccines because "such tiny amounts can't do you any harm." They never mention that repeated doses of tiny amounts of toxins add up to something significant. If you read Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle mysteries you will better understand that. Killer toxins accumulate.
Your doctor may also give you antibiotics to help you get over an illness. He or she, only if asked, will tell you that the antibiotics will help your immune system overcome bad bacteria that are causing your illness. Antibiotics kill bacteria, that's their main function. Please remember that because it is very important to the purpose of this article.
We have such procedures as pasteurization of milk and irradiation of other food products that also kill bacteria and make the food "safe" to consume. Back in the late 18th century Louis Pasteur won numerous awards for his process for killing bacteria.
Over succeeding years bacteria and other microscopic organisms (now known as microbes) came to be known as "germs." Germs, everybody knew, were bad. If it was living and microscopic, so the generally accepted belief went, it was a germ, it was dangerous and it could do you harm. Medical science and pharmaceutical chemical companies were ready to come to the rescue. Doctors welcomed their chemical treatments with open arms.
Many health magazines and apparently reputable sources on the internet will tell you how to boost your immune system. They act as if taking the supplements or eating the right foods will have the same kind of effects on your immune system as exercising has on your physical strength and endurance. But they never tell you what the supplements or foods are actually boosting or affecting.
Here is the information they won't tell you, either because they don't know (most likely) or because they are afraid to tell you. Prepare yourself, I am not afraid.
You are not alone in your body. You will likely think of your body as consisting of billions or trillions of cells, each containing DNA that program every cell to do its respective job and proteins to tell the cells when to do each job and for how long. You may even know that some proteins code for cell death, for killing old cells so they don't hang around to cause you grief, so they may be flushed out by the back end of your digestive system.
You are more than that. Much more. The DNA in your cells contain remnants of DNA from bacteria, some of which used to cause people to die, but no longer do because our DNA adopted (co-opted them) to prevent them from doing harm to our human and pre-human ancestors. Your DNA even contains bits of genetic code from viruses, which also were adopted eons ago so our ancestors would not die from attacks by their ancestors.
Wait, there's more. Your stomach contains billions of bacteria. Good bacteria. How good? You could not digest food without them. Literally. Your intestines also contain billions of bacteria. Not the same bacteria because the stomach is very acidic (about 2 on the pH scale where 7 is neutral), while the pH of the intestines is about 9, making them the opposite of acidic, alkaline. The two environments are extremely different as you might imagine.
In fact, every organ of your body has bacteria all over it. Your skin is covered with good bacteria. Your mouth is coated with them. They protect you from invasion by diseases caused by bad bacteria and viruses. So when you use antibacterial soap and mouthwash that promise to make your skin and mouth perfectly clean, you are killing off the very same good bacteria that protect you. But don't worry, your doctor has drugs to help you when you get sick because you destroyed your body's natural protection. (That is sarcasm, in case you missed it.)
Back to those bacteria in your gut, your intestines. There are lots of them. Many many times more of them than you have cells in your whole body. You live in symbiosis with them. You can't survive without them. And they can't survive without you. They are your immune system, at least the biggest part of your immune system.
People of some tribes who live in areas where their diet lacks necessary nutrients or gut bacteria eat a particular kind of clay to get what they need. Chemical companies want us to kill bacteria that our bodies need. They want us to fear anything that is "dirty." That "dirt" could be what helps us to develop an healthy immune system.
Kill the good bacteria in your mouth and you kill what protects disease bacteria and viruses from entering your body through your mouth. Same with the bacteria in your nose, on your skin, and so on. The flu we hear about each year enters the body through the mouth or the nose. Antibiotics and other bacteria killers in mouthwash and nasal spray remove your ability to kill the invaders before they reach your blood stream.
Kill the good bacteria in your gut and you destroy your immune system. At the very least you disrupt it horribly. That's what antibiotics do. They kill billions of good bacteria that constitute your immune system as they kill the bad ones (if they can, which they often can't). Antibiotics kill bacteria, they don't distinguish between "good" and 'bad."
Should you get cancer (now considered a voluntary disease because, according to many researchers who are trying to be heard, but are being silenced, you can prevent it by eating a good diet), your oncologist will likely urge you strongly to take chemotherapy. Chemo kills bacteria, it kills your immune system. Ask anyone who has taken a full course of it and you will find that they have to take pills every day to account for the fact that they no longer have an immune system.
In healthy people, the immune system kills cancer cells. In unhealthy people whose bodies have allowed cancer cells to overwhelm the natural defences of the immune system, chemo destroys the rest of the immune system. Is it any wonder that a majority of medical doctors in the west would refuse chemo if they got cancer? Is it any wonder that an even bigger majority of oncologists (tumour specialists) would refuse chemo if they got cancer? Chemo patients have a shockingly low five year survival rate.
This is not to say that the medical system is out to kill you. The medical system, after all, is designed to treat sick bodies, bodies that have already been severely compromised for many years (in many cases) by an unhealthy lifestyle. Doctors treat broken people. By the time you go to your doctor with a problem that is serious, your natural protective defences have largely been destroyed. By you, not by your doctor.
Doctors have the unenviable task of trying to help severely damaged bodies, even though the patients themselves do not think of themselves in those terms. (I felt well and healthy until I went to my doctor.")
It is not the purpose of this article to give advice, either of a medical or of a health nature. If what you have just read means something, use it as motivation to learn more about your health and how to look after it. However, don't expect to find answers in a pill. There is no instant solution, no quick fix.
The solution to good health is in the food you eat. Healthy food. Deliciously tasty food if you prepare it properly. But that food may be harder to find than you think. Almost all fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables were treated, in the field or in a factory, with pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, antibiotics and preservatives that, you will learn, do exactly the opposite of what you want to happen in a healthy digestive system. You need to learn what food is healthy and where to find it.
As you launch your research, be prepared to find descriptions of the immune system that say nothing about those billions of good bacteria that protect you. It's part of how the medical system operates. For reasons unknown, it doesn't think you are smart enough to handle the truth. I believe you are, or you would not be reading this article.
You will find information about foods and even supplements that are known as probiotics. They are good guys. Anything known as prebiotic is food (usually vegetables and fruit) that the probiotic bacteria (the good guys that constitute your immune system) need to eat. No matter what foods you may find tasty, those immune system bacteria don't have taste buds, just nutritional needs.
Now I turn your health, especially in the last decades of your life, back over to you. If you eat properly, you may even be able to extend those years and be healthier than the doomsayers claim you will be in your old age. You can live longer, healthier and happier. Or, by making no change, you will not.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's epidemic Social Problems, a book of solutions in an age of problems, and hundreds of articles that are available on the internet. Search: "Bill Allin".
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Wednesday, January 08, 2014
Why I Take Vitamin and Mineral Supplements
Why I Take Vitamin and Mineral Supplements
Aside from vitamins D and K, we humans can’t make any of the vitamins we need to stay healthy.
- Carl Zimmer, "Vitamins’ Old, Old Edge", The New York Times, December 9, 2013
I gotta tell you, right at the top of my list would be taking vitamins. I know that over the years doctors have said they're ridiculous and all that. But I started taking my vitamins at an early age. And I take them every day. Every bloody day! So I think that's number one. For whatever reason, I feel active and pretty good at my age.
Regis Philbin, American media personality (b. 1931--that makes him age 82 )
Regis was active and full of life, even at age 80 when he finished his last "LIVE!" show on television. He holds the Guinness Book of Records title for "Most Hours on Camera."
I hadn't planned on becoming a single parent. Nobody does. More importantly, with two kids under age ten to support and care for by myself, I wasn't ready. I wasn't prepared. How could I feed three people when I had little idea how to prepare meals? I could hardly make toast and prepare canned soup.
Local supermarkets were helpful as they provided suggestions for combinations of foods I could assemble to make something resembling a meal. But how could I be certain I was providing my kids with full and balanced nutrition as I knew that growing children needed?
My solution was to find out what vitamin and mineral supplements would ensure that they and I had minimums of what we needed. That's how it began. If I at least provided foods my kids would eat and that was healthy, I didn't need to worry about balancing nutrition if they got the nutrients they needed. Which was good because my reading was suggesting this could be difficult as research at the time conflicted about what was right, good and balanced. And I didn't have much time to spare as a classroom teacher with 35 needy kids to manage.
One part has not changed. Research results still show great conflicts. Now I know to find out not just who conducted the research, but who paid for it. It made sense then and has proven so many times since that researchers tend to find results favourable to the companies that provided funding for the research. Researchers, now and then, always wanted more funding for more research when their current project ended. Follow the money and you often find yourself where you hoped not to be.
Studies funded by manufacturers of sugar or companies that make products that depend largely on sugar tend to conclude that sugar is not so bad for you. They stress the benefits of other nutrients. Large suppliers of fresh produce stress in their advertising that fresh is good, without noting that their products are often covered in pesticides, fertilizers and other growth stimulants that come straight from a chemical factory.
Monsanto, Dow, BASF and their like stress that the chemicals they make to put onto and into food products vanish shortly thereafter. They often forget to note research projects that have shown their products to be dangerous to human health and the environment.
As for GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms, also known as GEs, Genetically Engineered products, a term more popular in Europe), none of the chemical companies, none of the factory farms and none of the food suppliers point out that some 55 countries around the world have banned such products, deeming them risky to human health. And threatening to foods grown organically nearby through wind blows and other methods by which modified seeds are spread.
All of the above companies spend fortunes to see that laws forcing them to announce these additions to natural foods on labels never get passed. Why don't they want us to know? Because they have something they want to hide, something they don't want you to find out about, of course.
Packaged foods, whether in cans, bottles or other wrappings, tend to have preservative chemicals added to ensure they don't spoil on food market shelves. The trouble is that they don't "spoil" or break down in the human gut either, which is what we all desperately want to happen for digestion to work. Food that remains undigested in the gut or blood vessels is just plain dangerous.
Sometimes it's impossible to avoid products with ingredients we don't want, especially if the manufacturers have made sure the laws don't force them to put information important to consumers on their labels.
What's more, medical and health research (the dependable and honest variety) have shown in recent decades that our bodies need nutrients beyond what they would likely get from foods from the average food market. Why? If our ancestors didn't need these extra nutrients, why should we? Because most of us want to live many years longer than our ancestors did. And the diet of the average person is not prepared to accommodate or provide for those extra years.
And, sad to say, many of the foods we buy in stores is pre-treated before we get it that it has already lost most of its nutritive value. Milk that is pasteurized and now heated to high temperatures to help it last for weeks without spoiling is nothing like the milk your grandma served to her kids.
We all know about how cancer (breast, prostate and colorectal get the most publicity) is far more common now than ever before. Diabetes and obesity, almost rare in past decades, are so common now that doctors call them pandemics. Why are so many diseases more common now than years ago? What we eat--our diet--has changed dramatically. Our diet conforms more to what manufacturers want to sell us than what is best for our bodies to survive and thrive for eight or nine decades. Advertising makes sure we believe what we buy is good for us.
So how do we get the nutrients if we know what our bodies need? Often the only way to get some of them is through what we now call supplements. By the way, only a few decades ago people were told that we would all be eating pills or liquid meals in the 21st Century. Nobody was shocked by that news then, but many are alarmed by people taking pills and liquids that are not prescribed by a doctor now. Why? Big corporations don't make much money when we buy supplements instead of their drug products prescribed by their doctors.
You can see how my thinking on the subject of vitamin and mineral supplements (and now tablet supplements of other edible plant products) has evolved over the years. I have left what is perhaps the most important point to the last.
Why do we get old? What happens inside of us that makes us more vulnerable to disease, bone breakage and so on as we pass the formerly enforced age of retirement, 65? Why are we weaker and more vulnerable to attack by bacteria and viruses? While the answers may seem mysterious to those who have not kept up with research, they are becoming public, albeit slowly.
Our DNA is made up of chromosomes, each of which has many genes. Each cell of our body has these genes. As each cell dies off (most from daily to once a month), they are replaced by newly minted genes that carry the same genetic information. Almost. Over time, many decades for most of us, the tail ends of some of the chromosomes fail to be reproduced when new cells are formed in our bodies.
The tail ends of the chromosomes are called telomeres. These telomeres (they keep chromosomes from getting tangled up with each other) can get lost over countless reproductions. When that happens, parts of genes can be lost as well. With some genes and chromosomes not complete, our bodies are not as capable of defending themselves as they were when we were younger. That makes our body vulnerable to all sorts of things, including aging.
An enzyme called telomerase can add telomeres to the ends of chromosomes when they divide (reproduce). Our DNA, the stuff of life, can actually be improved by having telomerase add telomeres to our chromosomes over time. Okay, enough chemistry and biology.
We can actually improve our own DNA and prevent ourselves from aging too quickly (and dying too soon) if we know how to have our bodies create the telomerase that will fix up our DNA chromosomes. But how?
It's all in what we eat. Just as inadequate nutrition will cause our chromosomes to get shorter faster and younger, good nutrition can help us to boost our DNA to help us live longer and stronger and more active lives as we get older.
What foods or supplements can do that for you? Now that's when it gets hard to answer. First of all, the threat of litigation prevents me from providing easy answers. More importantly, each person is different and requires a different combination of nutrients. There is no one-size-fits-all.
Did it seem to you as if I just hit you and ran away there? I didn't mean to. The answers are not simple or easy to find. What works for me will not necessarily work for you. You will need to find your own answers, what works for you.
Fortunately, the internet has loads of resources that will help you if you want to dig in and do the research yourself. Just don't expect to find the solution in a single pill. There is no magic involved. This science is in its early stages, so no definitive answers are possible. But you can read to learn more.
At the end of this article are some resources to get you started with your reading about supplements.
Finally, a few notes about supplements:
(1) Almost all supplements contain fillers to give them size and colour. While making the tablets or capsules larger, thus seemingly more impressive (worth more) to the customer, they add nothing of benefit. Some claim the fillers could be harmful, though any decent researcher could find that even water can be harmful.
(2) A small number of studies have found that supplements are a waste of money, that they do nothing. Careful scrutiny of each study reveals that in every case the conditions or amounts of each supplement were arranged so that the results were inevitable. Example, if four of a tablet are necessary to accomplish some health benefit and only one tablet is given to test subjects, the results will inevitably show the supplement is ineffective, it doesn't work.
(3) Opponents of supplements, who often share a warm and friendly relationship with pharmaceutical companies, claim that all the necessary vitamins and minerals we need to be healthy are available in food. That is true. If a person eats the diet recommended by health authorities. But nobody does. In fact, "the typical American diet" that students of the subject read so much about is downright unhealthy. Supplements ensure that you don't miss anything you need, including trace minerals that are not in every vegetable and without which you could be unhealthy or die. Supplements lower your risk of dying younger and living a sad and dependent life in the final decades of your life.
(4) Supplements can do you harm of taken indiscriminately or to excess. As with anything else you put into your mouth, moderation is the key. Moderation, not elimination.
(5) Vegetarians and vegans may suffer problems with heart disease and with other body organs if they sustain a chronic shortage of vitamin B12 in their diet. The risk of these problems vanishes when they take B12 supplements.
(6) Some vitamin manufacturers will suggest doses far higher than you need (usually because they believe their vitamin is water soluble, thus you can't overdose). Remember, it's a supplement, not a main course.
(7) Most vitamin and mineral containers will recommend that you ask your doctor before beginning a new series of supplements. This is wise in case they might conflict with something you are already taking or with something in your system. If your doctor says you should not take any vitamin supplements, you may want to consider finding another doctor who is more interested in your health than in his or her income.
This short video is about extending life:
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/methionine-restriction-as-a-life-extension-strategy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=methionine-restriction-as-a-life-extension-strategy&utm_source=NutritionFacts.org&utm_campaign=4656d28168-RSS_VIDEO_DAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_40f9e497d1-4656d28168-22530037
or use this shorter version of the URL: http://tinyurl.com/lfb4w2v
A doctor specializing in nutrition delivers the goods
http://drhyman.com/blog/2013/11/18/setting-record-straight-supplements/#close
You can even heal tooth cavities or prevent them with proper nutrition
http://www.healthy-holistic-living.com/how-to-heal-cavities-naturally.html
Vitamins and minerals to prepare the body to protect against Multiple
Sclerosis, Alzheimer's and many other diseases.
http://www.healthy-holistic-living.com/terry-wahls.html
Human nutrition, the gut microbiome, and immune system: envisioning the future
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3298082/
(This summarizes the relationship between diet/gut bacteria and health.)
Finally science writer Carl Zimmer with a bit of history of humans and vitamins
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/science/vitamins-old-old-edge.html?_r=0
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems as well as hundreds of articles, all available on the internet.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Aside from vitamins D and K, we humans can’t make any of the vitamins we need to stay healthy.
- Carl Zimmer, "Vitamins’ Old, Old Edge", The New York Times, December 9, 2013
I gotta tell you, right at the top of my list would be taking vitamins. I know that over the years doctors have said they're ridiculous and all that. But I started taking my vitamins at an early age. And I take them every day. Every bloody day! So I think that's number one. For whatever reason, I feel active and pretty good at my age.
Regis Philbin, American media personality (b. 1931--that makes him age 82 )
Regis was active and full of life, even at age 80 when he finished his last "LIVE!" show on television. He holds the Guinness Book of Records title for "Most Hours on Camera."
I hadn't planned on becoming a single parent. Nobody does. More importantly, with two kids under age ten to support and care for by myself, I wasn't ready. I wasn't prepared. How could I feed three people when I had little idea how to prepare meals? I could hardly make toast and prepare canned soup.
Local supermarkets were helpful as they provided suggestions for combinations of foods I could assemble to make something resembling a meal. But how could I be certain I was providing my kids with full and balanced nutrition as I knew that growing children needed?
My solution was to find out what vitamin and mineral supplements would ensure that they and I had minimums of what we needed. That's how it began. If I at least provided foods my kids would eat and that was healthy, I didn't need to worry about balancing nutrition if they got the nutrients they needed. Which was good because my reading was suggesting this could be difficult as research at the time conflicted about what was right, good and balanced. And I didn't have much time to spare as a classroom teacher with 35 needy kids to manage.
One part has not changed. Research results still show great conflicts. Now I know to find out not just who conducted the research, but who paid for it. It made sense then and has proven so many times since that researchers tend to find results favourable to the companies that provided funding for the research. Researchers, now and then, always wanted more funding for more research when their current project ended. Follow the money and you often find yourself where you hoped not to be.
Studies funded by manufacturers of sugar or companies that make products that depend largely on sugar tend to conclude that sugar is not so bad for you. They stress the benefits of other nutrients. Large suppliers of fresh produce stress in their advertising that fresh is good, without noting that their products are often covered in pesticides, fertilizers and other growth stimulants that come straight from a chemical factory.
Monsanto, Dow, BASF and their like stress that the chemicals they make to put onto and into food products vanish shortly thereafter. They often forget to note research projects that have shown their products to be dangerous to human health and the environment.
As for GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms, also known as GEs, Genetically Engineered products, a term more popular in Europe), none of the chemical companies, none of the factory farms and none of the food suppliers point out that some 55 countries around the world have banned such products, deeming them risky to human health. And threatening to foods grown organically nearby through wind blows and other methods by which modified seeds are spread.
All of the above companies spend fortunes to see that laws forcing them to announce these additions to natural foods on labels never get passed. Why don't they want us to know? Because they have something they want to hide, something they don't want you to find out about, of course.
Packaged foods, whether in cans, bottles or other wrappings, tend to have preservative chemicals added to ensure they don't spoil on food market shelves. The trouble is that they don't "spoil" or break down in the human gut either, which is what we all desperately want to happen for digestion to work. Food that remains undigested in the gut or blood vessels is just plain dangerous.
Sometimes it's impossible to avoid products with ingredients we don't want, especially if the manufacturers have made sure the laws don't force them to put information important to consumers on their labels.
What's more, medical and health research (the dependable and honest variety) have shown in recent decades that our bodies need nutrients beyond what they would likely get from foods from the average food market. Why? If our ancestors didn't need these extra nutrients, why should we? Because most of us want to live many years longer than our ancestors did. And the diet of the average person is not prepared to accommodate or provide for those extra years.
And, sad to say, many of the foods we buy in stores is pre-treated before we get it that it has already lost most of its nutritive value. Milk that is pasteurized and now heated to high temperatures to help it last for weeks without spoiling is nothing like the milk your grandma served to her kids.
We all know about how cancer (breast, prostate and colorectal get the most publicity) is far more common now than ever before. Diabetes and obesity, almost rare in past decades, are so common now that doctors call them pandemics. Why are so many diseases more common now than years ago? What we eat--our diet--has changed dramatically. Our diet conforms more to what manufacturers want to sell us than what is best for our bodies to survive and thrive for eight or nine decades. Advertising makes sure we believe what we buy is good for us.
So how do we get the nutrients if we know what our bodies need? Often the only way to get some of them is through what we now call supplements. By the way, only a few decades ago people were told that we would all be eating pills or liquid meals in the 21st Century. Nobody was shocked by that news then, but many are alarmed by people taking pills and liquids that are not prescribed by a doctor now. Why? Big corporations don't make much money when we buy supplements instead of their drug products prescribed by their doctors.
You can see how my thinking on the subject of vitamin and mineral supplements (and now tablet supplements of other edible plant products) has evolved over the years. I have left what is perhaps the most important point to the last.
Why do we get old? What happens inside of us that makes us more vulnerable to disease, bone breakage and so on as we pass the formerly enforced age of retirement, 65? Why are we weaker and more vulnerable to attack by bacteria and viruses? While the answers may seem mysterious to those who have not kept up with research, they are becoming public, albeit slowly.
Our DNA is made up of chromosomes, each of which has many genes. Each cell of our body has these genes. As each cell dies off (most from daily to once a month), they are replaced by newly minted genes that carry the same genetic information. Almost. Over time, many decades for most of us, the tail ends of some of the chromosomes fail to be reproduced when new cells are formed in our bodies.
The tail ends of the chromosomes are called telomeres. These telomeres (they keep chromosomes from getting tangled up with each other) can get lost over countless reproductions. When that happens, parts of genes can be lost as well. With some genes and chromosomes not complete, our bodies are not as capable of defending themselves as they were when we were younger. That makes our body vulnerable to all sorts of things, including aging.
An enzyme called telomerase can add telomeres to the ends of chromosomes when they divide (reproduce). Our DNA, the stuff of life, can actually be improved by having telomerase add telomeres to our chromosomes over time. Okay, enough chemistry and biology.
We can actually improve our own DNA and prevent ourselves from aging too quickly (and dying too soon) if we know how to have our bodies create the telomerase that will fix up our DNA chromosomes. But how?
It's all in what we eat. Just as inadequate nutrition will cause our chromosomes to get shorter faster and younger, good nutrition can help us to boost our DNA to help us live longer and stronger and more active lives as we get older.
What foods or supplements can do that for you? Now that's when it gets hard to answer. First of all, the threat of litigation prevents me from providing easy answers. More importantly, each person is different and requires a different combination of nutrients. There is no one-size-fits-all.
Did it seem to you as if I just hit you and ran away there? I didn't mean to. The answers are not simple or easy to find. What works for me will not necessarily work for you. You will need to find your own answers, what works for you.
Fortunately, the internet has loads of resources that will help you if you want to dig in and do the research yourself. Just don't expect to find the solution in a single pill. There is no magic involved. This science is in its early stages, so no definitive answers are possible. But you can read to learn more.
At the end of this article are some resources to get you started with your reading about supplements.
Finally, a few notes about supplements:
(1) Almost all supplements contain fillers to give them size and colour. While making the tablets or capsules larger, thus seemingly more impressive (worth more) to the customer, they add nothing of benefit. Some claim the fillers could be harmful, though any decent researcher could find that even water can be harmful.
(2) A small number of studies have found that supplements are a waste of money, that they do nothing. Careful scrutiny of each study reveals that in every case the conditions or amounts of each supplement were arranged so that the results were inevitable. Example, if four of a tablet are necessary to accomplish some health benefit and only one tablet is given to test subjects, the results will inevitably show the supplement is ineffective, it doesn't work.
(3) Opponents of supplements, who often share a warm and friendly relationship with pharmaceutical companies, claim that all the necessary vitamins and minerals we need to be healthy are available in food. That is true. If a person eats the diet recommended by health authorities. But nobody does. In fact, "the typical American diet" that students of the subject read so much about is downright unhealthy. Supplements ensure that you don't miss anything you need, including trace minerals that are not in every vegetable and without which you could be unhealthy or die. Supplements lower your risk of dying younger and living a sad and dependent life in the final decades of your life.
(4) Supplements can do you harm of taken indiscriminately or to excess. As with anything else you put into your mouth, moderation is the key. Moderation, not elimination.
(5) Vegetarians and vegans may suffer problems with heart disease and with other body organs if they sustain a chronic shortage of vitamin B12 in their diet. The risk of these problems vanishes when they take B12 supplements.
(6) Some vitamin manufacturers will suggest doses far higher than you need (usually because they believe their vitamin is water soluble, thus you can't overdose). Remember, it's a supplement, not a main course.
(7) Most vitamin and mineral containers will recommend that you ask your doctor before beginning a new series of supplements. This is wise in case they might conflict with something you are already taking or with something in your system. If your doctor says you should not take any vitamin supplements, you may want to consider finding another doctor who is more interested in your health than in his or her income.
This short video is about extending life:
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/methionine-restriction-as-a-life-extension-strategy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=methionine-restriction-as-a-life-extension-strategy&utm_source=NutritionFacts.org&utm_campaign=4656d28168-RSS_VIDEO_DAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_40f9e497d1-4656d28168-22530037
or use this shorter version of the URL: http://tinyurl.com/lfb4w2v
A doctor specializing in nutrition delivers the goods
http://drhyman.com/blog/2013/11/18/setting-record-straight-supplements/#close
You can even heal tooth cavities or prevent them with proper nutrition
http://www.healthy-holistic-living.com/how-to-heal-cavities-naturally.html
Vitamins and minerals to prepare the body to protect against Multiple
Sclerosis, Alzheimer's and many other diseases.
http://www.healthy-holistic-living.com/terry-wahls.html
Human nutrition, the gut microbiome, and immune system: envisioning the future
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3298082/
(This summarizes the relationship between diet/gut bacteria and health.)
Finally science writer Carl Zimmer with a bit of history of humans and vitamins
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/science/vitamins-old-old-edge.html?_r=0
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems as well as hundreds of articles, all available on the internet.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, September 02, 2013
Aliens Are Among Us And Available to Help Us and Our Planet
Aliens Are Among Us And Available to Help Us and Our Planet
I know some of my hypotheses sound rather extraordinary.
I may be a little weird, but I'd rather be weird and right than normal and wrong.
- Paul Stamets, scholar of ancient mycotechnology, owner of Fungi Perfecti
Paul Stamets is definitely not like you and me. He knows stuff. He knows how to clean up the land around Fukushima without burying millions of tons of contaminated dirt. He offered a method to clean up, naturally, the oil spill from Deep Horizon. Despite his proof, yes proof, no one in power took him seriously.
Frankly, after reading what I have about him, I would not be surprised if one day I learn that he has ways we can adapt to global warming and its inevitable consequences. (But not yet for that. Bear with me.)
This article is not about Stamets, but about the beings he cares about. You may think you know about these beings, but chances are you will be more than a little surprised.
When I was a kid (maybe when you were too) I was taught that everything could be divided into three categories: animal, vegetable or mineral. Everything we could think of fit into one of those three categories.
The beings I refer to are living things on our planet. Yet not animal, vegetable or mineral, by common definitions. These things may be more shocking, based on what they can do, than any you might have imagined. True, a few people have died over the years through contact with them, but the fault was with the ignorance of the people, not of the beings in question.
Note that these are not the vicious conquering type of aliens we have read about or seen in movies for decades in science fiction. They are about as friendly and helpful to humans as it's possible to be.
I never could figure out why humans thought of aliens from other worlds as conquerors who would destroy us and what we know. Would we do that if we sent a ship through space to another inhabited planet? Would our astronauts be expected to destroy any life they may find on Mars in coming decades? No.
Before we get to the names, descriptions and modus operandi of these alien creatures, I want you to try to imagine what you think aliens might look like. The fact is, we have no idea. We don't even know if we would recognize aliens as life forms if they did not conform to our sci-fi images. Remember, it was not that long ago that homo sapiens without white skin were considered to be subhuman, simpler life forms, with much lower intelligence than those with white skin. We really know very little about life of any kind.
Might an alien breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide? Ours do. At least some of them do. How would they move? On feet, hoofs, paws or flexible skin (think snakes), as we are familiar with? Ours don't. They have roots, at least some of them. They spread or "re-seed" as some plants do. In fact, one being in the west of the USA is so large that it lives in the ground under four contiguous states. No other living thing we know is that large.
Would it have a brain? Almost certainly. At least something we might consider a brain. In fact, some of our beings contain pathways inside that, under a microscope, look very similar to pathways of the human brain. Hmmm.
Might they engage in agriculture? Some of our creatures are known to feed trees, from which they later gain nutrients for themselves. In fact, evidence suggests that they have been known to provide extra nutrients for young trees that are suffering because they can't get enough sunlight because other nearby taller trees are blocking light from reaching them.
Might they create chlorophyll, as plants do? Ours don't. In fact, they might consume dying plants (as we do) to extract chlorophyll and other nutrients from them. Keep in mind that all life forms we know consume other life forms to continue their existence--every single one of them.
Some of our aliens live in a symbiotic relationship with plant life we are more familiar with. Some live in a symbiotic relationship with animal life we are familiar with.
You may even have some of our alien life forms in your refrigerator. In fact, health aficionados recommend them highly as extremely beneficial for your health. Not long ago they were considered junk, not worth eating, parasites to the plant world. How our thinking changes as we learn more.
Enough with the teasing. The aliens in your refrigerator are mushrooms. The dangerous ones are called toadstools. Both are fungi, a huge group now considered to be a Kingdom (like animals and vegetables) of their own. When you look at a mushroom in the ground, what you see is the fruit, what you eat is the fruit of the organism.
Fungi are now known to comprise an enormous Kingdom with some 1.5 million members. Among the more familiar ones are yeasts and molds. Yes, they do breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, like animals. Yes, some do have neural systems that look similar to that of human brains. They are subject to many of the same diseases as animals. Like animals, who lack the ability to make chlorophyll and to photosynthesize, they eat other forms of life.
Fungi are a diverse Kingdom. Some, such as yeast, are single cells. Others, like molds, are multicellular. And, yes, the largest known living being is under four states in the western USA. But don't plan a vacation to see it, it is underground. It feeds trees and it feeds off trees. Strange, huh? Kind of....alien.
If humans did the same sorts of things as some fungi, they would be said to be farming, acting in sympathetic or even empathetic ways to other beings, possibly altruistic. As it is, most people think of fungi as some kinds of strange plants.
To conclude, let's look at several ways in which fungi could help us to save our planet.
People have made use of fungi for thousands of years. Ötzi, the famous 5000 year old "Ice Man" whose body was discovered a few years ago, carried amadou with him. The spongy inner layer of the horse hoof fungus, amadou has been used for everything from making clothing (it feels and is worn like felt, and is as warm), as tinder for starting fires, for dressing wounds because of its antimicrobial properties, and for preserving foods.
Amadou is the first medicinal ever recorded. Hippocrates (he who created the Hippocratic oath, sworn by new medical doctors-- basically: first, do no harm) recorded it in 450 BCE as an anti-inflammatory. Of course you would not likely see it for sale today because it is available naturally on every continent and cheap to make (thus making it of no interest to drug manufacturers).
Agriculture
Soil could be enhanced with mycorrhizal fungi which would eliminate the need for toxic chemical fertilizers while improving crop yields.
Biofuels
Biodiesel made from mushrooms would require less soil and other resources than crops used at present. And mushrooms grow fast.
Environmental Cleanup
Petrochemicals and radiation could be removed from contaminated soil and water as mushrooms can break them down and absorb them. Slimy spike-cap mushrooms gobble up radioactive cesium-137, for example. Mushrooms will not harm the environment, rather they improve it. They would improve soil formerly contaminated with glyphosate.
Wastewater Filtration
Mushrooms could be used to clean runoff from storm drains, farms, logging roads or contamination from mines.
Pesticides
Select fungi could be used to kill off certain species of pests while remaining safe for others and not harming the ground in which they are grown.
Medicines
Carefully selected mushrooms could be used to make new antibiotics, antivirals, immune-boosting compounds and even chemotherapies. Agarikon mushrooms, for example, could be used to protect against bird flu, swine flu, even smallpox.
Forestry
Mushrooms could be used to symbiotically enhance growth of new forests or reforestation of clear-cut land. They help trees grow and, in turn, gain nutrients from the same trees.
Famine Relief
Mushrooms grow quickly, provide many essential nutrients and grow in almost any environment. They could be used to provide quick and fresh relief in disaster zones and refugee camps using just wood chips or saltwater-soaked straw as a starting medium.
Space Travel
Mushrooms could be used not only as freshly-grown food for space travelers, but also as materials for terraforming on new planets due to their ability to create new soil relatively quickly.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of solutions for problems that affect every family and every community, but almost everyone believes they are simply consequences of modern society.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
[Primary Resource: "Mushroom Manifesto", by Kenneth Miller, Discover, July/August 2013]
I know some of my hypotheses sound rather extraordinary.
I may be a little weird, but I'd rather be weird and right than normal and wrong.
- Paul Stamets, scholar of ancient mycotechnology, owner of Fungi Perfecti
Paul Stamets is definitely not like you and me. He knows stuff. He knows how to clean up the land around Fukushima without burying millions of tons of contaminated dirt. He offered a method to clean up, naturally, the oil spill from Deep Horizon. Despite his proof, yes proof, no one in power took him seriously.
Frankly, after reading what I have about him, I would not be surprised if one day I learn that he has ways we can adapt to global warming and its inevitable consequences. (But not yet for that. Bear with me.)
This article is not about Stamets, but about the beings he cares about. You may think you know about these beings, but chances are you will be more than a little surprised.
When I was a kid (maybe when you were too) I was taught that everything could be divided into three categories: animal, vegetable or mineral. Everything we could think of fit into one of those three categories.
The beings I refer to are living things on our planet. Yet not animal, vegetable or mineral, by common definitions. These things may be more shocking, based on what they can do, than any you might have imagined. True, a few people have died over the years through contact with them, but the fault was with the ignorance of the people, not of the beings in question.
Note that these are not the vicious conquering type of aliens we have read about or seen in movies for decades in science fiction. They are about as friendly and helpful to humans as it's possible to be.
I never could figure out why humans thought of aliens from other worlds as conquerors who would destroy us and what we know. Would we do that if we sent a ship through space to another inhabited planet? Would our astronauts be expected to destroy any life they may find on Mars in coming decades? No.
Before we get to the names, descriptions and modus operandi of these alien creatures, I want you to try to imagine what you think aliens might look like. The fact is, we have no idea. We don't even know if we would recognize aliens as life forms if they did not conform to our sci-fi images. Remember, it was not that long ago that homo sapiens without white skin were considered to be subhuman, simpler life forms, with much lower intelligence than those with white skin. We really know very little about life of any kind.
Might an alien breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide? Ours do. At least some of them do. How would they move? On feet, hoofs, paws or flexible skin (think snakes), as we are familiar with? Ours don't. They have roots, at least some of them. They spread or "re-seed" as some plants do. In fact, one being in the west of the USA is so large that it lives in the ground under four contiguous states. No other living thing we know is that large.
Would it have a brain? Almost certainly. At least something we might consider a brain. In fact, some of our beings contain pathways inside that, under a microscope, look very similar to pathways of the human brain. Hmmm.
Might they engage in agriculture? Some of our creatures are known to feed trees, from which they later gain nutrients for themselves. In fact, evidence suggests that they have been known to provide extra nutrients for young trees that are suffering because they can't get enough sunlight because other nearby taller trees are blocking light from reaching them.
Might they create chlorophyll, as plants do? Ours don't. In fact, they might consume dying plants (as we do) to extract chlorophyll and other nutrients from them. Keep in mind that all life forms we know consume other life forms to continue their existence--every single one of them.
Some of our aliens live in a symbiotic relationship with plant life we are more familiar with. Some live in a symbiotic relationship with animal life we are familiar with.
You may even have some of our alien life forms in your refrigerator. In fact, health aficionados recommend them highly as extremely beneficial for your health. Not long ago they were considered junk, not worth eating, parasites to the plant world. How our thinking changes as we learn more.
Enough with the teasing. The aliens in your refrigerator are mushrooms. The dangerous ones are called toadstools. Both are fungi, a huge group now considered to be a Kingdom (like animals and vegetables) of their own. When you look at a mushroom in the ground, what you see is the fruit, what you eat is the fruit of the organism.
Fungi are now known to comprise an enormous Kingdom with some 1.5 million members. Among the more familiar ones are yeasts and molds. Yes, they do breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, like animals. Yes, some do have neural systems that look similar to that of human brains. They are subject to many of the same diseases as animals. Like animals, who lack the ability to make chlorophyll and to photosynthesize, they eat other forms of life.
Fungi are a diverse Kingdom. Some, such as yeast, are single cells. Others, like molds, are multicellular. And, yes, the largest known living being is under four states in the western USA. But don't plan a vacation to see it, it is underground. It feeds trees and it feeds off trees. Strange, huh? Kind of....alien.
If humans did the same sorts of things as some fungi, they would be said to be farming, acting in sympathetic or even empathetic ways to other beings, possibly altruistic. As it is, most people think of fungi as some kinds of strange plants.
To conclude, let's look at several ways in which fungi could help us to save our planet.
People have made use of fungi for thousands of years. Ötzi, the famous 5000 year old "Ice Man" whose body was discovered a few years ago, carried amadou with him. The spongy inner layer of the horse hoof fungus, amadou has been used for everything from making clothing (it feels and is worn like felt, and is as warm), as tinder for starting fires, for dressing wounds because of its antimicrobial properties, and for preserving foods.
Amadou is the first medicinal ever recorded. Hippocrates (he who created the Hippocratic oath, sworn by new medical doctors-- basically: first, do no harm) recorded it in 450 BCE as an anti-inflammatory. Of course you would not likely see it for sale today because it is available naturally on every continent and cheap to make (thus making it of no interest to drug manufacturers).
Agriculture
Soil could be enhanced with mycorrhizal fungi which would eliminate the need for toxic chemical fertilizers while improving crop yields.
Biofuels
Biodiesel made from mushrooms would require less soil and other resources than crops used at present. And mushrooms grow fast.
Environmental Cleanup
Petrochemicals and radiation could be removed from contaminated soil and water as mushrooms can break them down and absorb them. Slimy spike-cap mushrooms gobble up radioactive cesium-137, for example. Mushrooms will not harm the environment, rather they improve it. They would improve soil formerly contaminated with glyphosate.
Wastewater Filtration
Mushrooms could be used to clean runoff from storm drains, farms, logging roads or contamination from mines.
Pesticides
Select fungi could be used to kill off certain species of pests while remaining safe for others and not harming the ground in which they are grown.
Medicines
Carefully selected mushrooms could be used to make new antibiotics, antivirals, immune-boosting compounds and even chemotherapies. Agarikon mushrooms, for example, could be used to protect against bird flu, swine flu, even smallpox.
Forestry
Mushrooms could be used to symbiotically enhance growth of new forests or reforestation of clear-cut land. They help trees grow and, in turn, gain nutrients from the same trees.
Famine Relief
Mushrooms grow quickly, provide many essential nutrients and grow in almost any environment. They could be used to provide quick and fresh relief in disaster zones and refugee camps using just wood chips or saltwater-soaked straw as a starting medium.
Space Travel
Mushrooms could be used not only as freshly-grown food for space travelers, but also as materials for terraforming on new planets due to their ability to create new soil relatively quickly.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of solutions for problems that affect every family and every community, but almost everyone believes they are simply consequences of modern society.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
[Primary Resource: "Mushroom Manifesto", by Kenneth Miller, Discover, July/August 2013]
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