Diet is the number one controllable factor of preventative medicine. Through eating a truly balanced diet, and limiting the number of processed and conventionally grown foods, we can feel great on a daily basis. Our bodies can resist common colds and viruses and repair itself from dis-ease. Health is about balance. The human body will always migrate towards balance, unless it is restricted one way or another. A few principles you should always consider with diet include:

1. Drink more water than you think (and less when you are eating - it dilutes your digestive enzymes). Try taking a digestive enzyme supplement before eating if you usually feel bloated and tired after a meal. Try ‘Garden of Life’ products, they’re awesome.
2. Try to consume primarily organic foods. Not many people can say their heart disease (1 in 6 affected in this country) was caused from eating too many fruits and vegetables. It’s worth the extra money - you not only support sustainable agriculture and prevent environmental destruction, your food has more available nutrients which makes your body much healthier.
3. If you do choose to eat animal products - buy organic grass-fed pasture raised meat and stick to cold water, wild caught fish. Note: Avoid farm-raised salmon (which is what you are getting at restaurants if it doesn’t specifically say “wild caught”). Avoid shellfish and bottom dwellers - toxins are concentrated in their flesh which then find their way into your flesh.
4. Eat as little processed foods as possible. Does the food look like the way it was grown? If not, its processed. Buy whole-grain breads and pasta if you must.
5. Do something physical everyday and make it fun. You will feel much better physically and mentally.
6. Take care of yourself. Soak in Epsom salt baths and take time to do breathing exercises to calm your mind. Get massaged often. It might be a more expensive lifestyle than you are used to, but you’ll save money in the long run with health care expenses. You are worth it.
7. Cleanse your body at least twice a year. It makes such a difference. The Blueprint Cleanse juice cleanse is nice. Also you can try the popular Master Cleanse diet. Squeeze 1 organic lemon, 2 tablespoons grade B organic maple syrup, a pinch of cayenne pepper into 12 oz filtered water. Drink 6-10 glasses a day to fight hunger pains and fatigue. Drink a laxative tea in the evening if you feel the need. Don’t eat anything else. Whether you can fast for 24 hours or 10 days, you will feel better. Note: It’s not recommended to fast for more than 2 weeks without a doctor’s supervision.

The healthier you eat, the healthier you are. You will get the most out of your Structural Integration sessions if you change your diet for the better. The connective tissue in your body that provides structure and support needs to be well nourished to respond properly to change.

This is a great study from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Guide to Mercury in Sushi
Women who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant should be especially careful about eating sushi. Many of the fish chosen for sushi are the apex predators of the fish food chain, which means they can bear high concentrations of mercury. The following list highlights sushi choices highest and lowest in mercury.

HIGHEST MERCURY
Avoid
Kajiki (swordfish)
Saba (mackerel)

HIGH MERCURY
Eat no more than three 6-ounce servings per month
Ahi (yellowfin tuna)1 Buri (adult yellowtail)2
Hamachi (young yellowtail)2 Inada (very young yellowtail)2
Kanpachi (very young yellowtail) Katsuo (bonito)2
Maguro (bigeye, bluefin* or yellowfin tuna)1
Makjiki (blue marlin)* Masu (trout)
Meji (young bigeye, bluefin* or yellowfin tuna)1
Shiro (albacore tuna) Toro (bigeye, bluefin* or yellowfin tuna)1

LOWER MERCURY
Eat no more than six 6-ounce servings per month
Kani (crab)
Seigo (young sea bass)*
Suzuki (sea bass)*

LOWEST MERCURY
Enjoy these fish
Aji (horse mackerel)2 Akagai (ark shell)
Anago (conger eel) Aoyagi (round clam)
Awabi (abalone) Ayu (sweetfish)
Ebi (shrimp)* Hamaguri (clam)
Hamo (sea eel) Hatahata (sandfish)
Himo (ark shell) Hokkigai (surf clam)
Hotategai (scallop)* Ika (squid)
Ikura (salmon roe) Kaibashira (shellfish)
Kaiware (daikon-radish sprouts)
Karei (flatfish) Kohada (gizzard shad)
Masago (smelt egg) Mirugai (surf clam)
Nori-tama (egg) Sake (salmon)
Sawara (spanish mackerel)2
Sayori (halfbeak) Shako (mantis shrimp)
Tai (sea bream) Tairagai (razor-shell clam)
Tako (octopus)
Tamago (egg) Tobiko (flying fish egg)
Torigai (cockle) Tsubugai (shellfish)
Unagi (freshwater eel) Uni (sea urchin roe)

* Fish to avoid for reasons other than mercury: Fish and other types of seafood are marked with an asterisk above if any of their populations are depleted due to overfishing or if the methods used to catch them are especially damaging to other sea life or ocean habitats.

This is a great synopsis of the Ominivore’s Dilemma reblogged from the informative Paleo Diet Online:

“Michael Pollan’s 2006 New York Time’s best seller is a 400 page, eloquently written novel based around 4 meals followed from sunlight to stomach. “The pleasures of the one [meal] are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance.” (p410) The third and fourth meals, lost in this quote, were equally steeped in knowledge as the former.

To start, Pollan acknowledges the current abysmal state of American health. The prevalence of heart disease, diabetes, and new disorders popping up overnight. This is what spurred him to entrench himself in this research, why was this happening? In the first section, he starts on the farm of Iowa corn grower George Naylor, whose family farm has transformed from multi-organism just 100 years ago into the modern day monoculture of corn. From here, Pollan asks the question, have we domesticated corn or has corn domesticated us? After reading Pollan’s description of the history of corn, you’d start to believe that the plant has a mind of its own. In this section, Pollan uncovers the simplicity of farming corn: “driving and spraying” as Naylor says, and how it has changed from what used to be a very cerebral occupation to one relying on mega corporations and petroleum. For example, corn may be planted every year due to the involvement of pesticides and fertilizer (thank you Haber-Bosch process…turning nitrogen and hydrogen captured from the air into ammonia and eventually ammonium nitrate). Before this, nitrogen consuming corn had to be cycled with nitrogen providing soy year after year. After the corn had been grown and harvested, with a long summary of the political nuances (or atrocities if you asked Naylor) thrown in, Pollan follows the corn to the local grain elevator and onto the processing plant, although the processing plant only sees a fraction of the corn output. In the processing plant, each corn kernel is broken down and about 30 different basic food components are made, including the now infamous High Fructose Corn Syrup. HFCS is made by treating the corn-based glucose with the enzyme glucose isomerase. (Isomers: 2 compounds having the same chemical formula yet a different structure. In this case, glucose being a 6-carbon ring and fructose being a 5-carbon ring.) Fructose is sweeter than glucose, meaning less of it needs to be used and hence less money spent. Pollan also tells the story of corn through a steer he bought named #534, who grew up in a feed lot and was eventually slaughtered in a place Pollan was denied access. Reading about Pollan’s trip to the feedlot (classified as a CAFO-concentrated animal feeding operation) will make you want to turn vegetarian, or at least avoid all commercially made meat. #534’s diet consisted of corn flakes (more easily digested by the cow who is not supposed to digest corn), liquefied fat, molasses, and urea, along with the cocktail of antibiotics and growth-hormones. All the components needed to supply a cow with each element necessary to build protein. Remember though, cows are ruminants whose stomachs are set up to eat grass and allow the bacteria which colonize its stomachs to ferment it, making it digestible. Two of the best statements made during this section included “another vet told me the diet [fed to the cow] would eventually ‘blow out their livers’ and kill them. The other was that “I don’t know enough about the emotional life of a steer to say with confidence that 534 was miserable, bored, or indifferent, but I would not say he looked happy.” The entire experience of corn was summed up by the essential corn meal, McDonald’s, eaten at 65 mph.

The second section starts on the lush hills of Polyface farms where Joel Salatin considers himself a grass farmer. His farm is a tightly wound system made to intertwine many different organisms. Sun feeds grass, grass feeds cows, manure grows grubs, grubs feed chickens, chicken poop feeds grass, and the cycle starts over again. Salatin has many of these circles of holons (holon is a term coined by this particular industry to mean a part of the whole) which keep his farm as self-sustaining and healthy. In this section, Pollan takes a foray into the organic industry and how it has grown from underground political movement into money making government run industry. After describing his week of working on Polyface farms, Pollan describes in depth the slaughtering of chickens which occurs on the farm in a open-air slaughterhouse, which allows patrons to watch the actual killing and cleaning of the product, a statement about the cleanliness of the whole farming process, which of course has very little waste as everything is recycled and reused in some way to grow another food. This section leaves you yearning to go into the garden and start your own little circle of holons. Of course Pollan ends it with an organic meal made with fresh slaughtered Polyface farms chicken.

The third section focuses on a meal made with ingredients, all of which have been hunted or gathered. Before going into the details, Pollan spend many pages describing the mental intricacies needed to be overcome before one will go hunting or even eat meat, basically answering the question of why eat meat? Why not be a vegetarian? Backed up with the stories of the pig he hunted, the mushrooms he collected, and the vegetables he gardened, Pollan prepares an exquisite meal, shared with his family and the people who helped him gather all the ingredients.

If you have stumbled upon this website or are a dedicated reader, you need to read this book. It will change the way you think about food at its most basic level as well as help you decide if you want to have the composition of a human being or of a corn chip with legs.”

This is a great excerpt from New Scientist:

Don’t try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it’s not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don’t know.

Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson’s disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients’ brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson’s symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer “bursts” of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson’s. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body’s biochemistry. “The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction,” he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don’t know.

8.8 billion bottled waters were sold in 2007 and discarded or recycled.

From USAToday:

Plastic water bottles produced for U.S. consumption take 1.5 million barrels of oil per year, according to a 2007 resolution passed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. That much energy could power 250,000 homes or fuel 100,000 cars for a year, according to the resolution.

In roughly the last 10 years, the amount of polyethylene terephthalate plastic bottles being recycled increased from about 775 million pounds in 1995 to about 1,170 million in 2005, according to the Container Recycling Institute.

But during the same time period, the amount of PET bottles going into landfills skyrocketed from 1,175 million to 3,900 million pounds.

Cornell University professor and environmentalist Doug James said the irony of bottled water is that it’s marketed as clean and healthy when its production contributes to unnecessary environmental degradation. “Fiji water, for example,” he said. “A one-liter bottle is taken out of the aquifer of this little island, and shipped all the way across the world, producing like half a pound of greenhouse gases so you can have this one-liter bottle of water.”

Why are there no deposits on bottled water? We have deposits on 2-liter bottles and they are plastic bottles. Bottling companies have huge lobby groups railing against deposits laws. This is obvious as they don’t want to be involved in cleaning up their mess after they have made their profits.

According to wikipedia:

Studies show that beverage container legislation has reduced total roadside litter by between 30% and 64% in the states with bottle bills.

Studies also show that the recycling rate for beverage containers is vastly increased with a bottle bill. The US beverage container recycling rate was 39.4% in 2001. States with bottle bills recycle approximately 78% while states lacking bottle bill legislation only recycle approximately 23%.

The answer is simple - high quality water filters that attach to the tap. The cost is diffused over time to be very inexpensive and we reap the benefits of good quality water. I highly recommend alkaline antioxidant rich water like that produced by the Jupiter products. I use one and love it. For a big discount, email me directly and I can let you know how I can help you get the water filter you deserve.

I haven’t had any reviews of books or documentaries but that is all about to change. I just saw “King Corn” and was blown away. This is an informative, important look at how the Standard American Diet or SAD as is more appropriate has far reaching effects on our health and how corn is an integral ingredient in this toxic potion.

The film begins when we meet Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis getting their hair analyzed. Hair is a tape recorder of diet and the isotope analysis shows that the carbon in their body primarily originates from corn. They are made out of corn!

Our diets will shorten our generations lifespan and this will be the first time we live shorter lives then the previous generation. Anyone in the health care field can see this process happening.

So what do they do? Best friends Ian and Curt move to Greene, Iowa to grow an acre of corn and experience what it is like and where the corn goes. They grow Yellow Dent Corn, a field corn destined for cattle feed or industrial processing - this isn’t your Hamptons sweet corn.

They produce about 180 bushels of corn, or 5 tons of food per acre, about 10,000 pounds. It took them 31,000 seeds per acre to produce this yield and with the sophisticated machinery only 18 minutes to plant.

Some corn ends up being made into industrial products that become processed foods. Just about every processed food out there contains corn solids, high fructose corn syrup, or some other hydrolyzed corn product hidden behind a chemical name. 70% of high fructose corn syrup ends in beverages. One of the scary ingredients in corn syrup is sulfuric acid, or what you may be more familiar with - battery acid.

But the real scary part is that most of this corn ends up feeding livestock - and this is how we become made up of corn. We eat meat that is made of corn, thus we are made of corn.

For instance, grass-fed free-range livestock take several years to reach maximum yield. This is too slow. So what do they do? They don’t let them move - thats what feedlots are for. Cattle are fed a corn diet for up to 150 days. But they start getting sick with something called acidosis. This is fatal unless treated. This is why livestock consume 70% of the antibiotics used in this country (low doses to combat acidosis). Guess where these antibiotics wind up…yup, in you.

Grain fed livestock is obese (like we get from processed foods), muscle tissue looks more like fat. For instance there are 9 grams of saturated fat verse 1.3 grams of saturated fat per grass fed cow. Hamburgers are fat disguised as meat (65 % of calories are fat). But we can’t blame the producers- Americans demand cheap food so the cycle continues. 16% of our individual wealth is spent on food. This is the best case scenario, 50 years ago this number was double. We are the first generation where abundance brings too much and shortens our lifespan.

Here is the counterpoint put out by the Corn Association.

So I can, so I can
See the light that’s right before my eyes.

-From the 1984 Corey Hart song

And thats some pretty good advice with some new research coming out. From Sharon Moalem’s “Survival of the Sickest“:

“As everybody knows, skin color changes, to some extent, in response to sun exposure. The trigger for that response is the pituitary gland. Under natural circumstances, almost as soon as you are exposed to the sun, your pituitary gland produces hormones that act as boosters for your melanocytes, and your melanocytes start producing melanin in overdrive. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to disrupt that process. The pituitary gland gets it’s information from the optic nerve - when the optic nerve senses sunlight, it signals the pituitary gland to kick-start the melanocytes. Guess what happens when you’re wearing sunglasses? Much less sunlight reaches the optic nerve, much less warning is sent to the pituitary gland, much less melanocyte-stimulating hormone is released, much less melanin is produced - much more sunburn results. If you’re reading this on the beach with your Ray-Bans on, do your skin a favor - take them off.”

This brings us to the topic of Vitamin D and how it can help prevent many forms of cancer. It’s estimated that up to 50,000 people die from cancers that could have been prevented from proper Vitamin D levels. Now, whats the cheapest most effective way to regulate our Vitamin D without overdosing? Sunshine!

I remember a time when my next door neighbor, a biodynamic gardner, took me out to climb Mt. Yale, a 14′er in Buena Vista, Colorado. He abstained from putting sunblock on and when I asked if he was scared of getting skin cancer, he unexpectedly told me, “Yes” and that’s why he wasn’t wearing sunblock. huh? He told me that sunblock was actually implicated in skin cancer. Now I’ve never seen this study before and I’m not saying it’s true, it just got me thinking. The skin is a major detox organ and is going to be damaged by the toxins in our body - not necessarily by the sun. Since we evolved underneath this solar bath for millions of years why all of a sudden has it become poisonous? That makes no sense.

The FDA recommends 200-400 IU’s daily. Guess what - 15 minutes in the sun should garner your body the best type of Vitamin D possible, the endogenous kind, and in the 10,000-15,000 IU’s range (this varies due to altitude, skin color, and latitude). Remember, once the skin shows signs of gently turning pink in the sun- you’ve had enough. Don’t go crazy now - over doing the sun exposure by tanning can prematurely age the skin and increase skin cancer rates. You must build a tolerance this spring just like you need to rebuild your muscles after relaxing on your couch all winter. Avoid tanning beds and go to the source. When you’ve had enough, make sure to avoid sunblocks loaded with toxins. Go biodegradable and organic. Here is a page of good sunblocks. Here is what you want to avoid:

Para Amino benzoic acid (PABA)
Avobenzone
Cinoxate
Dioxybenzone
Homosalate
Menthyl anthranilate
Octocrylene
Octo methoxycinnamate
Octyl salicylate
Oxybenzone
Padimate O
Phenylbenzimidazole
Sulisobenzone
Trolamine salicylate

The question I have and that I want to leave you with is, is there a correlative between the massive widespread use of UV protected eye wear in our culture with a rise in skin cancer?
I’m going to listen to Corey Hart and only wear my sunglasses at night so I can…

Pharmaceutical drugs have now been found in many cities drinking water.

From the health section at CNN:

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

The federal government doesn’t require any testing and hasn’t set safety limits for drugs in water.

And the scary news is that users of bottled water and home filtration systems don’t necessarily avoid exposure. Bottlers, some of which simply repackage tap water, do not typically treat or test for pharmaceuticals, according to the industry’s main trade group. The same goes for the makers of home filtration systems. Click here for the Jupiter Biostone filtration report.

Contamination is not confined to the United States. More than 100 different pharmaceuticals have been detected in lakes, rivers, reservoirs and streams throughout the world. Studies have detected pharmaceuticals in waters throughout Asia, Australia, Canada and Europe — even in Swiss lakes and the North Sea.

The environmental effect is frightening, and guess what - no one is accountable for our “downstream” pollution so nobody is doing a thing about it. And make no mistake about it - “Recent laboratory research has found that small amounts of medication have affected human embryonic kidney cells, human blood cells and human breast cancer cells. The cancer cells proliferated too quickly; the kidney cells grew too slowly; and the blood cells showed biological activity associated with inflammation.”

These pharmaceuticals in our water are toxic and are dissolved at such very high dilution levels (in the parts per billion and parts per trillion range) that they are acting like homeopathic treatments. There is an unmistakable similarity to homeopathy, which uses dissolved substances in water at such a high dilution rate that the original substance is virtually undetectable. This processing attempts to remove the “toxic” qualities of the substance and leave behind the essence that is used to treat the problem. Homeopathy is an intelligent system and every treatment is highly specific. Our water supply is blanketing us with many different toxic pharmaceuticals: what do you think is happening to us men who are getting small amounts of hormone replacement therapy, estrogen, and mood stabilizers with every sip of water? I feel like less of a man just thinking about that happening. I for one, will continue to use my Jupiter Melody water filtration system. And if you want one to - I will still pass my discount on to you. Nobody should be without a proper water filtration system nowadays.

City Reports

• The New York state health department and the USGS tested the source of the city’s water, upstate. They found trace concentrations of heart medicine, infection fighters, estrogen, anti-convulsants, a mood stabilizer and a tranquilizer.

• Officials in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, said testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city’s watersheds.

• Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.

• Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking water treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in Northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.

• A sex hormone was detected in the drinking water of San Francisco, California.

• The drinking water for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.

I know most of you remember this from the New York Times, but I just had to put it out again as it’s importance and relevance is paramount. It’s easy to forget that Mercury is a huge problem when it gets into our nervous system thus compromising our brain function.

What is mercury?
From MSU:

Mercury can exist as monomethylmercury (MeHg). This form of mercury is 100 to 1000 times more toxic then natural mercury. MeHg participates directly in biochemical reactions. MeHg is created both by humans and by the environment. Industry uses MeHg, and in the past there have been poisonings due to industrial discharge. MeHg is also created through biomethylation processes in the environment, and this MeHg bioaccumulates primarily in fish. The greatest source of MeHg is natural biomethylation, and fish consumption is the principal source of MeHg intake for most people.

How do you test to find out your mercury levels?

Blood, urine, and hair analysis can reveal recent or acute mercury poisoning but these tests don’t do well to uncover chronic accumulation.

How does mercury hurt us?

Monomethylmercury (MeHg) is an estimated 100 to 1000 times more toxic (than elemental mercury) to humans. In fact, MeHg seems to specifically target the advanced Central Nervous System (CNS). Until recently, this was a mystery, as the CNS enjoys the protection of the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB). The BBB consists of tightly packed endothelial cells that line the walls of the blood capillaries in the CNS. The key to understanding why MeHg is so toxic is to see that structural similarities in biochemical reactions can lead to active transport of toxins. In this case organisms with a highly advanced CNS, like humans, this active transport can lead to a brain accumulation of MeHg.

As mentioned before, most of our exposure to MeHg comes from bioaccumulations in fish. When we eat contaminated fish, this ingested MeHg easily passes through the intestines and into the bloodstream. The pathway of MeHg from the bloodstream to the brain is complicated, and we think it is easiest to understand the pathway through a list of the various processes involved:

1. MeHg in blood plasma can combine with cysteine, forming a compound that is structurally similar to the amino acid methionine

2. This MeHg-cysteine compound is actively transported into the endothelial cells in the BBB, on the methionine carrier.

3. A high level of reduced glutathione is maintained in the endothelial cells, and the MeHg switches from a cysteine carrier to a glutathione carrier.

4. MeHg-glutathione is actively transported out of the endothelial cells and into the brain.

5. In the brain, the hydrolysis of MeHg-glutathione generates MeHg-cysteine.

6. This MeHg-cysteine can now enter nerve cells in the brain, where it accumulates.

What if you have high levels of mercury?

Chelation therapy is one option for removing mercury. EDTA is used to bond to mercury in your body and help you safely eliminate it through your urine. Click here for ACAM certified doctors in the NY/NJ area.

Note: I looked for information on the negative side effects of chelation therapy and only came across a piece from Quackwatch - the website of the now disgraced Stephen Barrett, who lost in court in 2005 when it was revealed that he was not a real doctor of psychiatry and was actually paid by the American Medical Association, Federal Trade Commission, and the FDA to “de-bunk” alternative and complementary medicine. We must persevere and stay diligent in our research to show how amazing alternative medicine is when it complements the body’s natural healing response. I can not express how happy I am to see Barrett destroyed in the public arena and his covert relationship with the medical industry’s corporate agenda exposed to us all.

Here is a cool computer to help you figure out your actual carbon footprint and also help you eliminate it by donating to carbon reducing technologies: basic calculator

What most people seem to overlook is that methane gas is 20x’s more greenhouse causing then carbon. So our food choices become just as important to how many miles we carpool or if we drive a hybrid. Driving a hybrid is better then a gas guzzler but it sure does not make you green! Ride a bicycle you bought second-hand if you really want to step it up.

To truly make a difference stop eating meat. Eating more like a vegetarian (or being one) is better for you, better for the environment, and ridiculously better for the animals. This is from the United Nations,

…the livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalent – 18 percent – than transport. It is also a major source of land and water degradation.

From the University of Michigan site:

Each year we add 350-500 million tons of methane to the air by raising livestock, coal mining, drilling for oil and natural gas, rice cultivation, and garbage sitting in landfills. It stays in the atmosphere for only 10 years, but traps 20 times more heat than carbon dioxide. Livestock such as cows, sheep, goats, camels, buffaloes, and termites release methane as well. Bacteria in the gut of the animal break down food and convert some of it to methane. When these animals belch, methane is released. In one day, a cow can emit ½ pound of methane into the air. Imagine 1.3 billion cattle each burping methane several times per minute!

This is an interesting article on non-methane kangaroo farts and the far-fetched idea that cows can switch to this type of bacteria so we can still raise them. Why do we take the hard road when we can just modify our lifestyle? I’m sure William of Occam would say, “Just put down the burger and eat more veggies.” And I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt if we all used some Beano once in awhile!

It’s important to make a clear distinction that all water is not created equal. And I’m not talking about taste. As a snowflake falls to the ground it has a high coherence of hexagonal structure (6 branches) and when it melts retains this coherence in the hydrogen bonds to other H2O molecules. The unique quality of these hydrogen bonds is that they are incredibly strong and make it a good conductor of electricity and also a good solvent for biological materials. This is because it has small positive charge on the hydrogen end and small negative charge on the oxygen end. Now, why is this important to us? As human beings we are essentially water movers. We are born almost 95% water and if we live long enough, 55% water. To me, aging seems to be a dehydration process. So how do we stay hydrated properly?

We can drink naturally structured water, which comes from very pure places like Icelandic glaciers, or Hawaiian or Fijian springs. This water is easily assimilated and very hydrating. The downside to these bottled waters is the high environmental impact of transportation, plastic manufacturing, and besides the risk of potential carcinogenic chemicals from the plastic seeping into the water. We really don’t need to add to the North Pacific Greyere, a floating mass of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean either. So now what?

There are multiple options for getting bio-available water from the tap. Bio-availablility means water that actually makes it into the cells for proper hydration. I’ve had a Jupiter Microlite for years and like the way it tastes and feels going down the gullet. It alkalizes, ionizes, and filters the water all to the tune of “Home Sweet Home”. I’m upgrading to the Jupiter Melody soon - it features an endless supply of water without having to wait for it to get “processed”. It’s a bit pricy at $1250 but I’m ordering a bunch and I can get a couple of hundred off. I’m happy to pass on any savings if anyone wants one. A friend of mine distributes the Kangen water filters but they are way too pricey (over $3k) for not much benefit. I’m not even sure there is a benefit to the Jupiter brand.

Doctor Terry Grossman and Ray Kurzweil were at first skeptical of a water ionizer’s ability to create alkaline water. So they tested the water themselves with a pH meter and an ORP meter. They concluded, “The negative ions in alkaline water from an electrolysis machine are a rich source of electrons that can be donated to these free radicals in the body, neutralizing them and stopping them from damaging healthy tissues.”

Warning: One of the biggest problems and misconceptions are the benefits of Brita and Pur drinking filters. These company’s boast pure healthy water but what actually happens is the filtered water is turned acidic. My home Ph testing kit revealed that new and used filters can make the water up to 5.5 acidic. Oh my god, this is so scary. With evidence pointing to the health benefits of alkaline diets, drinking neutral or alkaline water should match and increase our health. I think what is happening is that these type of cartridge filters strip all the minerals from the water rendering it acidic whereas ionizing filters organize the minerals into alkaline and acidic and split them into different membranes. You drink the alkaline side of the water and the acidic water goes down the sink. Acidic water can be used for washing things like fruit, bath tubs, or your face. This is what I would use Brita for - but absolutely do not drink it!
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