Food and Health Rethought

So when LDL cholesterol combines with sugar (glycation), it becomes smaller and denser and new regions of its surface are exposed. It becomes much more sticky and thus much more likely to clog arteries.

This is another reason to eat less sugar - or to eat fewer foods that cause massive amounts of sugar to enter your bloodstream relatively quickly.

sunshel:

Bright yellow bananas are sold everywhere. In fact, it’s rare that you’ll find a truly ripe, spotted banana for sale at a convenience store or gas station. That’s probably why many of us grew up with the backwards idea that Yellow=Good and Brown=Bad.

Eating unripe fruit (those bright yellow/green bananas!) can cause a number of digestive problems, like constipation and stomach aches, and can also be harmful to your enamel.

The Difference Between Unripe & Ripe Bananas

• Unripe (yellow/green): 80% starch, 7% sugar, hard to digest, bad taste
• Ripe (brown spots): 5% starch, 90% sugar, easy to digest, tastes sweet

How Do I Know if It’s Ripe?

It should have brown spots all over it, and no visible green at the top or bottom. The banana on the far right is at it’s sweetest, most digestible form, and is perfect for eating.

For more information on fruit ripening and how to speed up the process, check out this great website.

pulsed digital signals from cell phones disrupt DNA, impair brain function, and lower sperm count.

Insect studies have demonstrated that acute exposure to GSM (Global System for Mobile) signals brings about DNA fragmentation in insects’ ovarian cells, and consequently a large reduction in the reproductive capacity of the insects. 

 exposure to radiation for just six minutes a day affects the bone formation of fetuses. 

Dr. Seyhan found that the increasing use of cell phones — and the increasing number of associated base stations — are becoming a widespread source of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation. This work suggests that some biological effects are likely to occur even with low-level electromagnetic fields. The team concluded that 900 and 1,800 MHz radiation levels is related to an increase in the permeability of the blood-brain barrier in young adult male rats. The rat’s brains can be used to correspond to the brains of human teenagers.

Just because radiation is not ionizing, doesn’t mean it won’t do damage….

Wow, this is kind of an eye opener.

The basic premise is that the ACS gets huge donations from the mammography industry and the cancer drug industry, so this tends to focus the ACS on cancer curing. In other words the ACS focuses on dealing with cancer after you’ve already gotten it. 

It makes very little effort to focus on prevention.

“The ACS … [has] long continued to devote virtually exclusive priority to research on diagnosis and treatment of cancer, with indifference to prevention, other than faulty personal lifestyle, commonly known as ‘blame the victim,’ … Not surprisingly, the incidence of cancer over past decades has escalated”.

In Guam, a study of why some populations had a high risk of developing a Parkinson’s-like disease discovered that a specific compound in cycad seeds eaten by these populations was neurotoxic. The compound, which resembles a cholesterol with an attached sugar group, is almost identical to a compound produced by H. pylori.

interesting.

via @mocost

TA-65 is a ‘supplement’ extracted from the herb Astragalus which repairs the telomere – the straggly bits at the end of our DNA wich get shorted each time our cells divide. This process – the reducing of telomere length – eventually kills us off at the age of a maximum of 120. In other words, if we were healthy enough that nothing else killed us off, the shrinking of the telomere would do so at this age.

This is an interesting idea. 

Went to the company website:

Why not simply buy Astragalus extracts in a health food store?

Astragalus extracts can be found in most health food stores, but such products contain little or no TA-65. We tested 4 commonly available Astragalus extracts and none of them contained any measureable amounts of TA-65 (the test assay is accurate to one part per million). Our proprietary production process starts with 3 tons of plant material and ends up with capsules that we guarantee contain 5mg of TA-65.

So at this point it’s an expensive treatment that requires a doctor that may or may not increase cancer, but it’s an interesting idea.

What coconut oil can do for your skin it can do for your hair.  It is wonderful to use as a hair conditioner.  Beauticians who are familiar with coconut swear by it.  It softens the hair and conditions the scalp.  Using the coconut oil as a pre-wash conditioner can rid a person of dandruff better than a medicated shampoo.

Our skin is home to many tiny organisms, most of which are harmless;  some are beneficial.  At least one variety of bacterium is essential to the healthy environment on our skin.  It feeds on the sebum, breaking down the tryglycerides into free fatty acids.  

The bacteria actually feed on the glycerol part of the triglyceride. This leaves fatty acids which are now “freed” from the glycerol unit that held them together. Medium chain fatty acids which are bound to the glycerol unit as they are in coconut oil have no antimicrobial properties. However, when they are broken apart into free fatty acids, they become powerful antimicrobials.

So these bacteria convert the medium chain triglycerides (in the sebum or on the skin) into free fatty acids that can kill disease-causing bacteria, viruses, and fungi. The combination of the slightly acid pH and medium chain fatty acids provides a protective chemical layer on the skin that prevents infection from disease-causing organisms. Due primarily to the action of bacteria, the oil on the surface of your skin and hair is composed of between 40 and 60 percent free fatty acids. The medium chain fatty acids in the sebum provide the protective layer on the skin that kills harmful germs. Coconut oil is nature’s richest source of medium chain fatty acids.

So I’m going to try coconut oil on my hair as a conditioner. I may cut out using apple cider vinegar, as I don’t really want to inadvertently dye my hair red and I’m also concerned about the harsh acidity of vinegar curling or otherwise funking my hair.

Of course I hate traditional shampoos because most contain SLS which causes all sorts of health problems. Shampoos also contain other compounds which might be just as damaging but just haven’t been well studied yet. Your skin is like your second mouth, so if you wouldn’t eat it, don’t put it on your skin.

Apples weren’t typically eaten previous to the 20th century. Before then, apples were generally used to make alcoholic drinks. It wasn’t until around the early 1900s, thanks to groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, that people popularly stopped using apples for drink and decided they should eat them.

Random

Queen Anne’s Lace (qal) seeds are one of the more potent antifertility agents available, and a common plant in many regions of the world. 

The seeds, harvested in the fall, are a strong contraceptive if taken orally immediately after coitus.” (penis/vagina sex) Research on small animals has shown that extracts of the seeds disrupt the implantation process, or if a fertilized egg has implanted for only a short period, will cause it to be released. 

In Chinese laboratory tests, the seeds have been shown to block progesterone synthesis in pregnant animals. Which deprives the uterine tissues of the progesterone needed to make a nutritive bed for the fertilized egg. 

The seeds, collected from the flower head in fall are thoroughly chewed, swallowed and washed down with water or juice. The taste is heavy and oily, not very pleasant, but doesn’t taste terrible. 

semen is such that it carries estrogen, prostaglandins and oxytocin. The first two mentioned have already been proven to lower depression in women. The oxytocin shows up during childbirth, breastfeeding and lactation. So, if these three hormones that make women feel better and bond with others more easily are readily available in semen, then one would assume semen is the gateway to alleviating depression.

The 2002 study, whose results are finally being revealed, analyzed 293 women who either never had depression or currently were suffering from it. The women in the study were instructed to have protected sex (with a condom) and also to abstain from condom use. This would appear to explain whether the act of sex itself was the reliever of depression or if it was the semen itself.

The study revealed that semen is genetically designed to work in the male’s favor. With those aforementioned three hormones embedded in the semen, the woman he mates with has a stronger bond with him, feels satisfied and is less depressed. The male has thus successfully increased his reproductive chances in impregnating the female and/or having further sexual relations with her.

More interestingly, this same study revealed that when the women who didn’t use condoms were put on a temporary sexual hiatus from sex or broke up with the male, they had a harder time with the estrangement. Having regular sex with the male was a mood booster. Infrequent or interrupted sex increased depression.

When you’re constantly switching back and forth between assignments, you use up more brainpower, which then breaks down your self-control.

Not only can shuffling between projects cause angry outbursts or make you less motivated at the gym, it can lead to overeating and bad nutritional choices,

This goes in line with other psychological studies that show that when you’re stressed you make less rational decisions. So the idea is that if you stress yourself out, you eat poorly.

I actually think it’s more about the type of multitasking - in other words. If you’re trying to do too many things at once and it’s stressing you out that’s no good, but if you’re doing two mindless things like driving and gabbing on a cell phone, probably that won’t produce a lot of stress if traffic isn’t horrendous.