Herbal flu protection

by Owen Waters

The news media loves to spread fear because it makes the
public pay them more attention. Even better, from their
perspective, is a full-blown panic, which the current swine flu
outbreak may become.

The problem with colds and flu is that modern medicine has no
cure for them. While there are many antibiotics to choose from,
antibiotics only stop bacteria, not viruses.

For virus protection, I have three recommendations. These are
based upon my own experience.

Disclaimers: I am not a medical doctor. All statements in this
article are my own opinion and are not medical advice. Nothing
in this article is FDA approved. I have no financial ties with
any of the following sources. This is a non-commercial,
independent review.

1) Colloidal silver solution kills both bacteria and viruses
within 7 minutes of contact. You can take a tablespoonful twice
a day for a general immunity boost, or, best of all, get a
nasal spray bottle and use it to inhale some colloidal silver
spray into your nostrils and throat for instant protection. It
will also very effectively disinfect your hands. You can buy
colloidal silver from most health food or nutrition stores, or
search the web for suppliers. From past experience, I rather
like www.UtopiaSilver.com.

2) ImmunoPhase from www.PureTango.com was released right after
the SARS scare in 2003. It was created by traditional Chinese
herbal doctors to not only protect against viral infection, but
also to cure it, provided it is taken as soon as symptoms
appear. In our experience, it contains powerful-acting herbs
which should be taken with food to avoid a feeling of upset
stomach.

3) Alternative health proponent Mike Adams, the Health Ranger,
also recommends another herbal combination. PowerImmune from
www.Fitura.com is a blend of just about every virus-fighting
herb known to traditional herbal medicine.

Finally, watch out for those unsolicited hunches that appear
from time to time. Your intuition will always work to help you
avoid showing up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If, out of the blue, a thought appears 2 or 3 times in a row
that you should avoid a certain place or planned activity,
that's your intuition keeping you away from danger. Find a way
to follow unsolicited, repetitive hunches. Then you'll never
need to say, "I knew I shouldn't have. . ."

When you develop and follow your intuition, you never need
fear anything in your future.

Eliminating Stress

by Michael Masterson

You can’t lead a happy, healthy, and productive life when you are feeling crummy. You can’t work very well. You can’t be creative. And you can’t enjoy the company of others.

So why is it that so many people, so much of the time, are downright miserable?

Is it the existential situation - the psychological default program that kicks in when we realize we are alone? Is it the result of thinking we are alone when we are not? Is it what happens when we live without purpose, as Victor Frankl suggests? Or is it merely too much sugar?

Answer: All of the above.

But what do you care? You can’t avoid getting into a funk now and then. However, you can learn to recognize the onset of a bad mood and get yourself out of it before it ruins your day (or your life).

I should know. I’m a moody bastard. If I could gather up all the time I’ve spent fretting, frowning, grousing, and/or complaining, I’d have enough to become a medical doctor and start my own emergency clinic. (That would cheer me up!)

Grumping around is not only wasteful; it’s limiting and potentially destructive. When you feel bad, you lack the emotional strength to try new things or overcome obstacles. As a consequence, you tend to spend your time on very ordinary chores, the kinds of tasks that will ensure the same old ho-hum life.

I once read a book on optimism and pessimism that made the case that the difference between feeling sad and clinical depression is not one of kind but of degree. If this is true, two conjectures come immediately to mind:

1. That moodiness should be actively combated, because moodiness can lead to despair.
2. That despair is an extreme form of moodiness, and so some of the techniques that eliminate moodiness can cure clinical depression.

Versions of despair - cynicism, anger, and fear - have no place in your business or personal life. If you let them in, you will give up too easily - and that can cost you.

Bad feelings are usually triggered by stress - some external event that creates a feeling of emotional discomfort. To lead a psychologically comfortable life (free of unnecessary stress and open to happiness and other good things), you must learn to recognize stress in its early stages and do something to reduce it.

Avoiding a bad mood is much like avoiding a common headache: If you can feel it coming on early enough and get some aspirin into your system, you’ll never be in pain. But if you wait till the pain is planted in your head, you’ll have a very difficult time getting rid of it.

One way to deal with stress is to get rid of the external cause of it. If, for example, a new client is a royal pain, figure out how to deal with him or pass him off to a competitor. If a new set of regulations is making your routine work difficult, master them and they’ll cease to give you stress.

Another, sometimes more practical, way to defeat stress is to change the way you react to it. As Victor Frankl pointed out in his classic book "Man’s Search for Meaning", it is impossible to control the external circumstances of our lives. We must accept what comes to us with equanimity. But we do not have to accept the way we respond.

Frankl argues that if you see a purpose in your role in life, you’ll have a much easier time avoiding the stress of not knowing what to do. Two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius said, "If you are distressed by anything internal, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to the view you have of that thing. How you view anything is a power you can revoke at any moment."

Here are 12 ways to deal with problems without getting stressed over them:

1. Forgive yourself for feeling bad. Depending on your biology, your upbringing, and your circumstances, you may feel blue rarely, sometimes, or often. Accept it as normal.

2. Count your blessings.

3. Take a nap. You’d be surprised by how often you can make yourself feel better simply by taking a 10-minute catnap.

4. Take a stress break. If you work as hard as I do, you will be forever on the verge of a nervous breakdown unless you do something about it. One of the best things you can do is schedule at least two (and preferably three or four) stress breaks every working day.

• A stress break is not a stress break unless:
• You get at least 10 feet away from your desk.
• You are completely distracted by it.
• It lasts at least five minutes.
• It relaxes you.
• It energizes you.

If you have good control over your daily schedule, you can plan stress breaks between tasks. Ideally, you’ll want a five-minute break every 90 to 120 minutes. If your schedule is too frenetic or unpredictable to do it that way, use an egg timer and simply break away from whatever you are doing when it rings.

5.Cut out the crap food. Remember, sugar and starch are poisons. Be aware of how they affect your moods.

6. Spend as much time as you can with upbeat people. Moody people are often helpful, productive, inspiring, and useful. But they are always an emotional drag. If your life involves moody energy-sappers, refresh with positive friends.

7. Follow Dale Carnegie’s Three C’s: Don’t criticize. Don’t condemn. Don’t complain.

8. Make sure you are getting enough sleep. If you are not sleeping well, chances are you are irritable and somewhat unproductive. This is a vicious circle. Get out of it. Get some sleep.

This will not only keep your stress level in check but will also improve your overall health. And remember this: The sleep you get before midnight is twice as good as the sleep you get afterward. So go to bed early. In fact, your entire health-and-fitness program should be based on the "early to rise" concept. Get to bed early enough so that you can wake up refreshed and stress free, eat properly, get your cardio workout done, and get to work at least an hour before you have to. (Two hours earlier is better.)

9. Exercise. Intense exercise will tire you out, but it won’t reduce stress. Walking, biking at a medium pace, swimming slowly - these are the sorts of exercise that can reduce stress.

10. Play. Again, be cognizant of what forms of play reduce stress and which add to it. Golfing is mostly, from what I’ve seen, a stress producer. So are most competitive sports. Yes, they’re fun if you have a competitive nature. But they don’t reduce stress.

11. Work to improve things. If you are bummed out about problems at work, do this: Compose a list of your five most pressing incomplete jobs. Then break down each job into specific tasks that can be accomplished in an hour or less. Arrange those tasks in order of priority. Finally, choose one. Just one. Put everything else out of your mind and get to work on it. Immediately. No excuses.

12. Listen to classical music. Researchers have discovered many interesting things about the effects of classical music - especially Mozart’s - on the brain. For example:

• In 1996, the College Entrance Exam Board Service conducted a study of all students taking their SATs. Students who sang or played a musical instrument scored an average of 51 points higher on the verbal portion and 39 points higher on the math portion of the test.
• In a controlled University of California study, students who listened to 10 minutes of Mozart before taking SATs had higher scores than students who didn’t.
• Major corporations like Shell, IBM, and Dupont, along with hundreds of schools and universities, have started using classical music to cut learning time in half and increase the retention of newly learned material.
• And in a University of Washington study, people who listened to light classical music for 90 minutes while copyediting a manuscript caught 21% more mistakes.

Even if you rarely listen to classical music, give it a try. "The Mozart Effect" will help you on some level by having a positive, lifelong effect on your health, learning, and behavior.

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

Avoid Cholesterol Lowering Drugs

One Damn Good Reason to Avoid Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs
by Shane Ellison (03/14/2008)

I’ve been called a lot of things. Science Nerd… Professor… and Cholesterol-Lowering Drug Nazi are among those that can be mentioned here. The only one I’ll admit to is being a Cholesterol-Lowering Drug Nazi.

Cholesterol-lowering drugs (statins) amass billions of dollars each year pretending to be a safe and effective way to protect against heart disease. Yet science shows that these drugs represent a clear and present danger to your health. In addition to lowering cholesterol, they elicit some really nasty side effects. Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS) is just one of them.

ALS occurs when cells of the nervous system (brain and spinal chord) become inactive. This can be caused by many cellular dysfunctions. But it’s usually from a protein entanglement within the nerve cell. Once tangled, these cells can no longer pass electrical messages through the body, resulting in a loss of voluntary muscle control. As time passes, muscle wasting (a Science Nerd would call it "atrophy") develops. Victims of ALS usually die from the inability to breathe when muscle loss has reached an extreme.

The national average of those who suffer from ALS is a mere .0005 percent. But - sit down for this one - among those who reported suffering from "drug-induced ALS," nearly a third were using cholesterol-lowering drugs! Apparently, this class of drugs can "tangle" something known as "tau proteins."

But protecting yourself from premature heart disease does not mean you have to put yourself at risk of wiping out your nervous system. You can do it with four simple tactics: Minimize your sugar intake, take part in interval training, maintain healthy vitamin D levels by spending time in the sun, and supplement with fish oil to boost your omega-3 levels.

[Ed. Note: Shane Ellison (www.thepeopleschemist.com) is an author, organic chemist, and contributor to ETR’s free natural health newsletter. He is a two-time recipient of the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Grant for his research in biochemistry and physiology. An internationally recognized authority on therapeutic nutrition, he is the founder of The AM-PM Fat Loss Discovery package. Click here to learn more.]

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

Natural Supplement Boosts Male Vigor

L-arginine is an amino acid naturally found in meat and in your body. It helps make nitric oxide (NO), which helps blood vessels relax and expand. If you lack NO, your blood vessels become hard and narrow. But the more you get, the more your blood vessels expand.

Cure Impotence with Self-Hypnosis

Because l-arginine acts as a nutrient, you can take it without fear of dangerous side effects. And one study in particular showed an 80 percent improvement in erectile function for men who took 2.8 grams of l-arginine for two weeks.
Whey Protein

You'll get l-arginine by eating red meat, fish, and chicken. But for more noticeable results, you can take it in supplement form. Start with a 500 mg capsule every day. If you don't like to swallow pills, a powdered form is also widely available.

Study Suggests Folic Acid Improves Thinking Skills

This news item from the New York times says that a recent study in the Netherlands found that folic acid supplements improves thinking in older people.

Heal your Body with Self-Hypnosis

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Folic acid dietary supplements significantly improve thinking skills that tend to decline with normal aging, a Dutch study has found.

Researchers randomly assigned 818 men and women ages 50 to 70 to take a daily oral dose of 800 micrograms of folic acid or a placebo. All the subjects, who were otherwise healthy, had elevated blood levels of homocysteine, which has in previous studies been associated with poor cognitive performance.

All the subjects took five tests of mental functioning. At the beginning of the study, there was no significant difference in the scores between the groups. But at the end, after controlling for cholesterol, blood pressure, body mass, smoking status and other variables, the folic acid group performed significantly better on three of the five mental tests, and their average for all tests was significantly higher.

Although the lead author, Jane Durga, affirmed that the study was carefully randomized and controlled, she said, “Based on this paper alone, I wouldn’t be waving it around” to urge people to supplement their diets.

“Although this is a high-quality study,” she continued, “it needs to be repeated in other populations like in the U.S., where there is already folic acid fortification.”

By law, flour in the United States is fortified with folic acid to help prevent neural tube defects in newborns.

“This is only the first study that shows this effect,” Dr. Durga said. “There need to be studies that look at lower doses or increasing natural folates, which may lead to similar or even greater effects.”

At the time of the study, published on Jan. 20 in The Lancet, Dr. Durga was a nutritional epidemiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

Diabetes

Canadian University Team Create Trans Fat Alternative

This looks like a healthy alternative to trans fat. Hope it lives up to its promise.
I got this from CTV news.
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Morphological Self-Hypnosis for Breast Enlargement
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An international research team headed by a University of Guelph professor has developed a new heart healthy alternative to artery-clogging trans fats.


Recent research has shown that hydrogenated oils are heavy in trans fat, which may be even more hazardous to our health. They've been shown to raise our bad cholesterol levels while lowering our good cholesterol and putting us at risk for heart disease.

A federal task force last summer recommended limiting the use of these fats in processed foods, and many food manufacturers have been scrambling to change their recipes to eliminate or reduce the trans fats in their products.

Now, a team led by Alejandro Marangoni, a professor at the Univeristy of Guelph's Department of Food Science, has found an alternative way of turning heart-healthy oils into a solid that doesn't create trans fat.

Marangoni's research group devised a method to mix vegetable oil, water, monoglycerides and fatty acids to form a gel that has the same structural and functional properties as trans and saturated fats.

"So this is no different than your olive oil, your soybean oil, your canola oil but it's now in a solid form," Marangoni explained to Canada AM. "And it has been done without having to add any trans fats or any saturated fats to the product.

"It's a completely different kind of chemistry."

As an added bonus, the new oil formula has been found to release fats in a more controlled way.

By regulating the amount of insulin produced by the body after a meal, controlled release of lipids in the blood may help lower the risk of obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

The research, which included human trials, will be published in the next issue of Soft Matter, a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Hydrogenated fats were welcomed by the food industry when they were invented early in the 20th century because they didn't require refrigeration like butter did, they extended the shelf-life of foods and keep baked products moist.

Marangoni says his new fat has all the same benefits. He hopes the product will be available for use for industrial food manufacturers later this year.

"Because this is a recently patented technology that has just become public, we can actually see this in our products this year."

"So really, the bakery applications, the sort of food service sector, that's where this is targeted to," he says. "That's where we get most of our fat. So that's where we hope to see it this year."

Milton Drepaul

Green Tea Improves Your Health

About 20 years ago when I was living in Kingston , Jamaica ,my landlady An Yueng told me one day that that the secret to her good health was Tai Chi and drinking green tea.
Heal your Body with Self-Hypnosis

She did her Tai Chi every morning. I would watch her go through the graceful routine and she would say," Good for you. Make you peaceful and you make more children." Whenever I visited her she would offer me a cup of green tea. She must have noticed my wrinkled smile at the pale green tasteless (to me) brew. "It makes you live longer, Chinee people not like Westerners. We respect elders. They say green tea good for you."

With the advent of the internet I began to read up about green tea in 1994 after I noticed a small news item on the news. It said that drinking green tea daily is one of the best health habits you can have.

Later I found out that several studies have shown that regular use of green tea can improve the ratio between “good” and “bad” cholesterol, ease mild depression, help prevent diabetes and more.

A recent study, published in the September 13, 2006 Journal of the American Medical Association, found that among 40,530 Japanese adults followed for 11 years, there was a 16 percent lower risk of death from all causes among those who drank more than 5 cups of green tea a day compared to those who drank less than one cup daily.

Even though the health food stores are full of Green-tea extracts I prefer drinking the tea. That's right, I've finally learned to love the pale green brew. Sometimes I add it to regular black tea.

I think An Yeung was right and now the scientific studies seem to back her view that the greater benefit comes from simply drinking green tea.

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