Test for Kelley
I am sitting with Kelley at MacQueens just after my first spinning class of the fall.
Recent Posts
November 23, 2006
August 24, 2006
August 02, 2006
The Myth of Sunscreen
I have had a lot of parents ask me about sunscreen for their children. Which one is safest? The best for kids with allergies? Do they actually work?
I have discovered that wearing sunscreen actually is harmful to your health.
This article below presents a scary perspective.
Skin cancer afflicts 1 million Americans each year—an incidence almost equal to all other cancers combined—and the rate has been climbing sharply. For example, in 1980, research indicated that one in 250 people would develop deadly melanoma skin cancer, but, today, that number one in 84.
In the U.S., people tend to think of sunscreen as the first line of defense against deadly skin cancers. The American Cancer Society, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and the American Academy of Dermatology put sunscreen near or at the top of their lists for sun protection. It is commonly believed that, as long as you've got sunscreen on, you're safe. But, it may not be so.
Australia can boast what is widely considered the world's most ambitious skin-cancer prevention campaign in the world, and sunscreen definitely has a role, but it is downplayed. Australians regard sunscreen as the very last resort, and, Down Under, they consider it far more important to wear protective clothing and stay in the shade. According to one of the designers of Australia's prevention campaign, "Relying on synthetic chemicals to prevent skin cancer is laughable. It's like giving people saccharin and then telling them they can eat whatever they want and stay thin."
What do the Aussies have against sunscreen? Sunscreens now on the market simply do not eliminate the hazards of ultraviolet radiation. According to a University of Pittsburgh dermatologist, sunscreens are ineffective at safeguarding against cancer, or, at best, only weakly effective.
Experts once assumed that sunburn was the main cause of skin cancers, so sunscreen was developed to block out rays of the type of ultraviolet light that burned the skin, called UVB. Then, it was discovered that UVA, the other, non-burning type of ultraviolet light, was the real cancer initiator. Ooops! For years, people had used sunscreen, and were told they could stay out in the sun longer than usual because they didn't burn. All the while, however, they were increasing their chances of skin cancer.
After this discovery, sunscreen lotions were reformulated, but they still do not block out all the UVA. In fact, tests show that a fairly high-protection sunscreen is not able to block skin damage associated with cancer. Research done in several European countries discovered that people with melanoma were more likely to have used sunscreen than were those without the disease.
The truth is, scientists remain largely ignorant of what causes deadly melanoma skin cancer. They believe the sun is the main initiator, yet, inexplicably, melanoma often appears on body areas unexposed to the sun, such as the buttocks or soles of the feet.
In related news: Melanoma can be cured if detected early and surgically removed. Unfortunately, doctors are now learning that in many cases the disease is not really cured, but lies dormant for several years with deadly results when it resurfaces.
[Editor: Experts are not recommending that people stop using sunscreen, but it should no longer be viewed as a magic shield that will make people invulnerable to excessive sun exposure.] Based on information in: Health, July/August 1997; Science News, 6-21-97
Excerpted from Spectrum Magazine
July 28, 2006
Meat sleeps
Oh, I have been slacking! My computer is dying a slow death. I have not been online much this week.
Tues July 25
Apple and tea - breakfast
Spinach, tofu and chickpea curry for lunch
Smoked Mackerel & marinated zucchini salad AND some bubbly (celebrating)
Oh..... this was an incredible salad
Shaved zucchini
lemon zest
fresh basil
chopped sundried tomato
lemon juice
flax seed oil
hemp seeds
pepper and sea salt
fig balsamic vinegar
Mix it all around and let it marinate for about 1 hr!!!
Wednesday July 26
Apple and herbal tea for breakfast
Spinach Salad and tomato, pea and rice stew for lunch
Almonds, fruit and then bites of a friends steak tartare for dinner...sips of their wine!
MEAT at night is a nightmare. I forgot how much energy it takes to digest meat. I had terrible dreams all night long. I woke up feeling groggy. Promised myself that I wouldn't do that again.
Thursday July 27
Apple & mango and herbal tea for breakfast
Humus and broccoli for lunch
Steak, coleslaw, corn on the cob, asparagus and ice cream for dinner.
I did it again! I had meat for dinner. Not a good sleep again.
When I go to someones house for a meal I find it hard to say that I cannot eat what they have so painstakingly prepared. I have to learn to just listen to myself and say no.
I hate food allergies!!!!!!!
Rob Menu July 27
It's hard but the no wine is continuing
Breakfast - Smoked Trout and a plain 3 egg omelet from Margaret and Craig's hens that run free - juice and 3 coffees
Lunch - Pickled herring and Rye bread - water
Dinner - Ribs and a small burger (no bun) beans and broccoli from our garden and chips made from sweet potatoes - no booze!
July 27, 2006
Rob Wednesday July 25th
Breakfast - Bran Muffin - 3 coffees and juice
Lunch - Sausage avocado and green salad - water
Dinner - Out - Grav Lax, Lamb chops, green veggies and rice - two glasses of wine!
July 26, 2006
How to get cancer in 5 easy Steps
I found this the other day - Here is the Introduction
How to give yourself cancer in five easy steps
Following with our ever-popular series on "How to Get Disease," this article discusses how to give yourself a raging case of cancer. It could be breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer or even something like leukemia. By following the instructions in this article, you can give yourself almost any form of cancer desirable and if you pursue these strategies to their fullest potential, you could end up with several different forms of cancer all at once. So, let's get started and learn how to give yourself cancer.If you're aiming for a raging case of cancer, the first thing you've got to do is start consuming food ingredients that actually promote cancer. One of the most powerful cancer-promoting food ingredients of all is called sodium nitrate. This is an ingredient that is added to virtually all packaged meat products including hot dogs, pepperoni, ham, lunchmeat and other similar products. You'll also find it in bacon, sausages and most breakfast meats. It's listed right on the ingredients labels of all of these foods. In order to find sodium nitrate, all you have to do is walk around the grocery store, read the ingredients labels of various packaged meat products and purchase those products that contain it. Then, consume them on a frequent basis and before long, you will greatly increase your odds of being diagnosed with cancer.
There are other ingredients that are suspected of causing cancer. These include hydrogenated oils, aspartame, saccharin and artificial colors, to name a few. A diet that is very high in refined carbohydrates has also been clinically shown to increase your odds of being diagnosed with cancer, so be sure to get plenty of these foods in your pro-cancer diet. That means chowing down on white bread, sweetened breakfast cereals, white fluffy pancakes, candy bars, granola bars, cookies, crackers and sweets of all kinds.
The next thing you can do to give yourself cancer is one of the more obvious things: take up a smoking habit. The more you smoke, the more likely you are to get cancer, especially if you're eating cancer-causing foods and ingredients as discussed above. By smoking, you will multiply the carcinogenic effect of everything else in your life. Before long, you will succeed in your goal at being diagnosed with cancer.
Dave Pollard on how we are poisoning ourselves
Dave Pollard is on the same track - Here is a summary of a recent post of his - the link is at the bottom for the full piece.
"So, back to what I know, what I don't know and what I imaginatively or instinctively hypothesize about ulcerative colitis, starting with three hypotheses:
1. Hypothesis 1: Immune Disease is Caused in Part by 'Modern' Malnutrition: By 'malnutrition' I don't of course mean a shortage of consumed calories. And (thanks in my case at least to my wife's cooking), I don't mean lack of variety or balance in cuisine either, though unbalanced eating may be part of the problem for some, and it was a major problem for me in my 'single' years. No, what I'm referring to in this hypothesis is something much subtler and more ubiquitous: the lack of variety of natural micronutrients and non-nutritional microorganisms in what we eat, drink, breathe and otherwise continuously take into our bodies.
This is the internal analogue of the way we use and treat the land, the external space under our 'civilized' care. In gatherer-hunter societies we allowed biodiversity to proliferate, we ate a staggering variety of different foods, and we at them with everything that came with them -- all the bacteria, micro-organisms, parasites and 'dirt' attached to them. As a result, our bodies evolved to cope with this astonishing array of nutritional choices and 'unfriendly' substances, in minute amounts, learning to use exactly what it needed, urge the body to crave more of those needed things, and to neutralize what hurt it.
Before we messed with the program, our bodies became exceedingly good, over a few million years of practice, at doing this, without the need for antibiotics or medical 'experts'. And while few early humans lived to old age, this is because they were eaten young, in the interest of the greater Earth organism, not because they were sickly -- anthropologists increasingly agree that prehistoric humans lived a much healthier, more disease-free, and usually longer, life than most civilized humans ever have.
The digestive system is the very definition of complexity: It contains more nerve cells than the nervous system, so many different enzymes and sub-processes that most of them have not been (and may never be) mapped (the genome is a snap by comparison), the enteric nervous system, chemically very similar in makeup and function to the one managed by our brain, and billions of highly specialized organisms, each evolved for some essential purpose needed to sustain human health.
But today, food processing, the elimination of over 90% of varieties of food we have eaten for millennia (in the interest of agricultural efficiency) and the soaking of our foods and drinking water in chemicals deliberately designed to impoverish the richness and diversity of organisms we consume, means that this incredibly intricate and finely-honed system is largely unused, standing around 'unemployed' looking for something appropriate and useful to do. If you're unemployed long enough you lose your craft, and when essential micronutrients or undesirable microorganisms finally come along now they can surprise our bodies, which may no longer be able to know, from practice, how to handle them properly.
Mistakes occur and are compounded and crises are created as a result. The system staggers and breaks down from disuse caused by the malnutrition -- the lack of practice -- we give it. Exactly in the same way the land we plow into monoculture and soak with artificial fertilizers breaks down, unable to restore itself, starved of natural nutrients, impoverished, blows away in the wind and runs off in the rain, unable to support life at all.
2. Hypothesis 2: Immune Disease is Caused in Part by Antibiotic Toxins: With the natural systems impoverished, malnourished, and bereft of the practice and learning needed to do their job, civilized humans decided they needed a backup system. Just as they did to the land with agriculture, the chemicals of choice for doctors to treat our internal ecosystem were the most potent poisons we could find: the word antibiotic means 'life-killing'.
But we thought we understood complex systems, so the same twisted thinking that came up with the oxymoron 'antibiotic therapy' soon added 'chemotherapy' and 'radiation therapy' to the lexicon. The same simplistic, militaristic thinking that prevailed in agriculture and in war is now employed in the war on all life in the human body, as if the body were some simple mechanical system whose billions of essential living parts were superfluous and dangerous.
What malnutrition didn't mess up, the man-made poisons in our water, food, soil, air, pills, and deliberately sprayed on our gardens, our lawns, and on every surface of our homes have.
When I was in my teens, before the discovery of retinoin, the drug of choice for runaway acne (which I suffered from) was tetracycline, a potent antibiotic that I consumed, on doctor's orders, several times daily for a decade. The drug slowly cleared my acne but wreaked havoc on my digestive system, causing chronic diarrhea and frequent digestive system upsets. I was warned not to take it with milk products or antacids which would lessen its effect. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that that ten years of self-poisoning has contributed to my current condition.
3. Hypothesis 3: Immune Disease is Caused in Part by Musculo-Skeletal Distress: From my early teen years, my posture has been poor. Lousy school furniture, gradual reduction of exercise as coaches focused their attention on 'star' athletes, loss of social self-confidence leading to a semi-permanent slouch, staring away from a world I found bewildering, cruel and unbearable. One girl friend, when I was in my twenties, said I stood as if I were 'hollowed out'. For decades my body adapted to this strange stance, complaining by means of frequent neck and shoulder aches, and an inability to stand for more than a half hour without developing a sore back and having to crouch on my haunches to relieve it.
Then recently, as described above, this awkwardness started to create debilitating spinal distress, to the point that at times I couldn't lie down, couldn't sit, couldn't stand. Three times I went for physiotherapy. Once I was hospitalized, convinced it was a heart attack. My physio applied a technique analogous to traction treatment, extending my spine. It was briefly exhilarating, but caused bizarre immediate after-effects -- abdominal aches, indigestion, and terrible skin breakouts. I stopped going.
And then, when I started exercising, I read about the importance of running posture -- an erect, hips and chest forward posture rather than a hollowed-out, curved running posture. I tried it, and it worked, but it was excruciating -- the same symptoms as the traction, but worse. I relapsed into a curved running posture and my performance plummeted. That was just before the ulcerative colitis showed its full fury. My final note before abandoning the exercise program reads "focus more on running posture and monitor reactions carefully -- something wrong here".
How to Save the Worldtechnorati tags:Food, Health, Immune System, Dave Pollard, Digestive Track
Rob Tuesday 26th July
Breakfast - Raspeberries from our garden and organic Yogurt - 3 cups of cofffee
Lunch - Curry at the new Curry restaurant in Ctown. I had the whole thing from Channa, Popadums, Nan, Chicken and Beef Curry. It was divine! Water
Dinner - Smoked trout, Beans and Broccoli from the garden and Irish Cobler potato saad made at home - No Wine!
This is day 3 with no wine. I stay awake much later an I have lost 3 pounds since Saturday.
July 25, 2006
Saucy Girls
Dinner Sunday night -
Wakame seaweed salad
Babaganouch and rice crackers
avocadoes and tomatoes galore
Monday
Apple - brekkie
split pea soup - lunch
rice crackers - snack
oysters, mussels in a VERY garlicky broth, crab salad and fava beans - dinner w/ my bros @ the fab restaurant STARFISH.
July 24, 2006
Rob's Menu - Monday 24th July
Breakfast - Eggs Sausage and Bacon plus 3 cups of coffee
Lunch - Pasta Puttanesca
Dinner - Smoked Steelhead trout by Kim, Robin's Coleslaw and a Green Salad followed by a chopped banana in organic plain high fat yoghurt - No Wine!!!!
What it is like to live in a chemical world
Here is a review of the Hundred Year Lie by Randall Fitzgerald that I read on my way back from NPR the other day.
I sort of knew that I lived in a chemical world but not really. Now I do which is one rason I am changing how and what I eat
"Randall Fitzgerald's "The Hundred Year Lie" is the most important, convincing and blunt health-related book I've read since Colin Campbell's "The China Study."
My immediate reaction after finishing this book was fear, but it was followed rather quickly by a sense of empowerment and determination. I am recommending this book to friends and everyone in my family. Mr. Fitzgerald has packed an enormous amount of alarming and scientifically-based information on a wide range of topics that directly impact our health and quality of life into an engrossing, well-organized and shocking book.
Even though much of this information has been available (with a bit of effort) for some time, I have not seen it organized so ingeniously or presented in such a stark, authoritative and grounded fashion. By "grounded", I mean that it is alarming in its content but not hysterical in its tone. Hundreds if not thousands of scientists worldwide have been trying to sound the alarm about the effects of synthetic chemicals on our environment, bodies and reproductive capacity for several years, but because the information is so upsetting it has not been readily accepted or discussed by the larger population.In one of the book's most mesmerizing chapters, Fitzgerald crafts a painstaking, revealing time-line of our last century in which it becomes possible to fathom the causes and effects set into motion by the introduction of synthetic chemicals, drugs and food additives to our lives. It becomes virtually impossible to accept that the exponential rise in cancer, heart disease, birth defects and diabetes are wholly unrelated to these trends in our dietary habits and exposure to unregulated toxins in our food, water and environment.
Mr. Fitzgerald deftly juggles a wide variety of subjects, but the chapter that most outraged me is his chapter on the effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on the reproductive potential of many species--including the human being. I knew that entire populations of amphibians and fish had been decimated by herbicides, fungidcides, pesticides and plastics, but I had no idea the extent to which the human population had been impacted.
Among the many facts presented in this book worth careful consideration is that ten percent of American couples are unable to conceive, and that a recent study of in vitro fertilization revealed that 80% of three hundred embryos sampled from healthy women in their twenties were genetically defective (the actual percentage was probably higher, as only eleven chromosomes were tested). If that is not enough, consider that a 2001 study in China "found that 85 percent of university students tested were infertile."
Am I the only one who finds the implications of this chilling? And Fitzgerald provides page after page of this sort of information along with a bibliography whose sources verify it. I had trouble believing, for example, that in Canada there is a grossly disproportionate ratio of female to male births (less than 35% males) and was able to corroborate this by reading a study on a website managed by concerned scientists and cited in "The Hundred Year Lie." Yes, it is hard to believe--and, Yes, it appears to be true.One reason this book is so solid is that it is not bogged down in sentiment or emotionalism, nor is it an environmental manifesto encouraging some sort of assault against the chemical, pharmaceutical and government regulatory agencies. It is blunter than that, and more in touch with the sad reality we face: We simply will never be able to count on the accurate dissemination of information about how to eat and live healthfully from government agencies like the USDA, the chemical industry that introduces thousands of untested chemicals into our foods and plastics every year, or from the pharmaceutical companies that have a vested interest in Americans remaining chronically ill with cancer, coronary disease, auto-immune disorders and diabetes.
One look at the absurd Food Pyramid should tell you all you need to know about the reliability of the government regarding nutritional and health matters."Hundred Year Lie" is lean and "nutrient-dense" almost to the point of being factually overwhelming. There is no padding, no wasted prose. Fitzgerald's book is an eloquent, provocative, thoroughly-reasoned and ruthlessly pragmatic examination of the situation we find ourselves in, not as it could or should be in some Utopian world. He urges us to take responsibility for our own lives, to disease-proof our bodies and environments to the degree feasible--because, realistically speaking, this is our only option if we want to attempt to free ourselves from the misery of chronic disease. Admittedly, this is not a message most Americans seem to want to hear right now, which is one reason I fear this important book may not receive the attention it deserves.
My hope is that we will be surprised, and that this extraordinary book will awaken people.My only criticism of this book is that I wish it were footnoted--I just like footnotes in science and health-related books. On the upside, the text and bibliography are so comprehensive that it is a simple matter to pursue avenues of interest raised by Fitzgerald. I believe this book is an important achievement: the right book, appearing at the right time, and I hope people read it and alert others about the content contained in it.
What we are going to do
Every day I am going to keep a public diary of what I have eaten. In the next 6 months I hope to have changed my eating habits. The diary is to keep me honest. Over time Hope and I will also add a lot of material about why we are doing this and what we have read that is causing us to make this shift.
Technorati Tags: Food, Food Health
Welcome
Hope and I are going to use this blog to keep ourselves honest as we eat our way back to health
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