Wednesday, June 25th, 2014
Stephan: You may have seen this already. I have been holding it for several days waiting to see how the medical research community reacts. It seems solid so you might take this into consideration in your own health program.
Medical News Today recently reported on a study from the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine, which suggests a link between vitamin D deficiency and premature death. Now, new research published in the BMJ links vitamin D deficiency to increased risk of death from all causes – including cardiovascular disease and cancer – and it may even play a part in cancer prognosis.
Vitamin D is essential to our bodies. It helps regulate the absorption of calcium and phosphorus in our bones, strengthens the immune system and helps cell communication.
The main source of vitamin D is from the sun, and some foods – such as fatty fish (tuna, mackerel), cheese and fortified cereals – contain the vitamin. Vitamin D supplements can also boost levels in the body.
Vitamin D deficiency can be caused by low exposure to sunlight, low consumption of dietary vitamin D over a period of time, problems with kidney or digestive tract function and obesity.
Low levels of the vitamin have been associated with numerous health problems, such as increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD), higher risk of cognitive impairment in later life, increased risk of asthma among children and cancer.
But the researchers of this latest study […]
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Wednesday, June 25th, 2014
GRAHAM PICK, - Malta Now (Malta)
Stephan: I might have been inclined to let this pass were it not for the fact that back in the early 80s, an explorer journalist, John Hemming, was my house guest. He had just returned from being with the Leakey family at their early man digs and told me of an impossibly old sandaled foot print that they found. There was no question in my mind but that John was telling the truth.
Here are a litany of other such stories. I don't know how to assess them except to say that almost everything I was taught at University about early man half a century later has been proven to be wrong.
Click through to see the photos.
In June 1936 Max Hahn and his wife Emma were on a walk beside a waterfall near to London, Texas, when they noticed a rock with wood protruding from its core. They decided to take the oddity home and later cracked it open with a hammer and a chisel. What they found within shocked the archaeological and scientific community. Embedded in the rock was what appeared to be some type of ancient man made hammer.
A team of archaeologists analysed and dated it. The rock encasing the hammer was dated to more than 400 million years old. The hammer itself turned out to be more than 500 million years old. Additionally, a section of the wooden handle had begun the metamorphosis into coal. The hammer’s head, made of more than 96% iron, is far more pure than anything nature could have achieved without assistance from relatively modern smelting methods.
In 1889 near Nampa, Idaho, whilst workers were boring an artesian well, a small figurine made of baked clay was extracted from a depth of 320 feet. To reach this depth the workers had to cut through fifteen feet of basalt lava and many other strata below that. That in itself does […]
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LARRY DOSSEY, MD, Executive Editor - Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
Stephan: SR is late today because yesterday at 3:15 thanks to high winds that blew down a tree that took down a power line we lost power, and it did not return until 3:15 this morning, when it announced itself with the blaring of the television in the kitchen, that had not been turned off. As it happened my Kindle battery and my phone battery both ran down as well. Suddenly I was disconnected. I ended up re-reading an old paper copy of William Gibson's novel Neuromancer (1984). It seemed appropriate.
The experience made me think about how much our lives have become dominated by electronic devices, and that put in mind of my good friend Larry Dossey's essay, presented here. It also made me think about the nature of other kinds of connections, and that led me to think about Larry's excellent new book, which I recommend, One Mind, about the ultimate net connection we all share.
Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation.
-Thomas Keating1
We have all seen them: the chic couple in a restaurant passionately thumbing their smartphones while ignoring one another, each cocooned in his or her private world. Then there is the etiquette buster at the movies in the seat in front of us, who ignores the prohibition of texting while his smartphone’s retina-scorching screen blinds us. And there is the annoying person in line at Starbucks who cannot stop messaging long enough to keep the line moving. All these individuals have something in common: They may be suffering from FOMO.
FOMO or FoMO is an acronym for ‘fear of missing out.” It appeared in the Urban Dictionary as word of the day on April 14, 2011.2 FOMO is considered a form of social anxiety-a compulsive concern that one might miss an opportunity for social interaction, a novel experience, or some other satisfying event, often aroused by posts seen on social media sites.3, 4 FOMO reflects a worry that friends may be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.
FOMO Facts
Research psychologist, Andrew Przybylski of the University of Essex, and colleagues3 at University of California-Los Angeles and University of Rochester […]
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Lindsay Abrams, Assistant Editor - Salon
Stephan: Here is the nasty truth about the American food industry. I am amazed this gets so little attention from corporate media. The behavior of this industry is so blatantly obvious, yet few in media seem to care. No one goes to the lengths described here unless they have something embarrassing they are trying to hide. That we tolerate, even encourage this is a measure of how corrupt our government has become. Here is the story of one man and his colleagues using Kickstarter to fight back against this corruption. Reminds my of Upton Sinclair who exposed the meat industry back in the early decades of the last century.
In 2008, the Humane Society released a shocking video taken in a Southern California slaughterhouse. The footage depicted workers using chains and forklifts to drag cows that were too sick to stand across the floor. The abuse was appalling; the cows’ condition, which indicated a food safety risk, led the USDA to order a recall of 143 million pounds of beef. It was the largest meat recall in U.S. history – and it was all brought about by the work of an undercover whistleblower.
Since then, Big Ag has been hard at work preventing this sort of thing from happening again, but not by actually working to stop abuse – at least, not completely. Instead, the industry’s been pushing states to implement laws, known collectively as ‘ag-gag,” aimed at silencing activists.
Nine states currently have ag-gag laws on the books, the most recent of which, in Idaho, takes anti-whistleblower legislation to a worrisome new extreme. Under the law, signed by Gov. C . L. ‘Butch” Otter, it is illegal for anyone not employed on the farms – and undercover activists don’t count – to make recordings of what goes on there without the owner’s explicit consent. In practice, that means videos taken […]
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NICOLA DAVIS, - The Guardian (U.K.)/The Raw Story
Stephan: Don't tell me you have never wondered about this. Well, here is the answer.
Q What happens to the billions of atoms in our body when we die? asks Victor Correa
A Put frankly, they end up all over the place. Once you die, the process/es of decomposition begin in which the vast array of molecules that make up your body, from fats to DNA, are broken down and their atoms incorporated into new molecules. Hence your carbon atoms might, temporarily, be found in a bacterium’s cell wall or combine with oxygen and be released in the CO2 of a rat’s breath. It’s all part of nature’s never-ending recycling system that is born of the law of the conservation of matter. Each element has a slightly different biogeochemical ‘cycle” – the carbon and nitrogen cycles being the stuff of school textbooks – but the upshot is that all of our atoms are incorporated into a huge array of other organisms and materials in a ceaseless game of pass the parcel. The ultimate origin of the vast array of elements is equally astonishing, formed as they were in the bellies of stars and in spectacular supernovae. As Carl Sagan so memorably put it: ‘We’re made of star-stuff.”
Q Is there an evolutionary explanation for the hypnagogic jerk […]
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