Acupuncture Girl

fastcompany:

You can find out a bit more about this image from our May 31 Infographic Of The Day: 56 Years Of America’s Most Terrifying Tornadoes
newsweek:

56 years of tornado tracks, mapped.

You can find out a bit more about this image from our May 31 Infographic Of The Day: 56 Years Of America’s Most Terrifying Tornadoes

newsweek:

56 years of tornado tracks, mapped.

Why I am not a fan of total Raw Food Diets

Chinese medicine considers each ailment in the context of the individual person who is exhibiting the symptom. No diet, herb, or treatment is ‘best’ for everyone.

When I hear of a person who does well with a raw diet, I’m glad for them. And I wonder - was it just that they eliminated all the unhealthy processed food, and factory-farm meat? Having detoxed from the ‘standard American diet”, they now they feel better. But you don’t have to go to a raw diet to give up the bad stuff. Here is an example of how, for some people, a totally raw diet is not the right thing.

I’m still going to recommend that people focus on eating organic, local, whole foods. But you can cook these and include grass-fed, pastured livestock meats, and still be healthy.

Listen to your own body, whatever I or anyone else tells you.

—————————————————————

Dr. Ben Kim’s Natural Health Newsletter

April 18, 2013

“Dear Reader,

If you connect with those who encourage a 100% raw food diet

for optimal health, I hope that you’ll read today’s newsletter

with an open mind.

In my experience, eating plenty of fresh, nutrient-rich raw

foods is a huge plus for most people. But where there is a long

history of gastrointestinal distress, I have consistently found

that during the initial phases of healing and recovery, it’s

actually better to eat more cooked foods than raw.

Please note that this opinion isn’t based on theory - it’s based

on working intimately with people with a wide range of GI

conditions, from people with ulcerative colitis who have

suffered through bloody diarrhea dozens of times daily, to

those with more manageable conditions like mild gastritis or

a peptic ulcer.

If your GI tract - specifically, the muscles that govern its

contractile waves and the mucosal lining that regulates

processing of the foods that you eat - has been damaged

by many years of inflammation, eating large quantities of

plant fibers can actually further stress weakened areas.

When you cook plant foods, you soften their fibers, making

it easier for your GI tract to handle these foods and extract

nutrients from within.

Where there is pain from inflammation and ulcerations, I

find that potato soup is a reliable soothing remedy. I

routinely advise clients to blend steamed Yukon gold potatoes

with mineral rich broth (vegetable, chicken, or beef broth

work equally well), and to have nothing but this soup until

their pain abates.

As chronic GI inflammation subsides, you can use a blend of

potatoes and other cooked vegetables in soups as preventive

tonics to protect against further irritation of a sensitive GI mucosal

lining. A good example of this type of soup can be found

here:

http://www.drbenkim.com/restaurant-quality-soup.htm

In this example, we combine potatoes with well cooked

cauliflower and shallots or onions, but you can blend broccoli,

spinach, or any other vegetables along with the

potatoes, provided that they are first softened by cooking.

Please consider sharing this information with those in your

life who have chronic digestive trouble.

***

Also an excellent tool for chronic GI stress is a quality blend

of health-enhancing organisms. The idea behind taking

therapeutic amounts of probiotics is to ensure that the walls

of your colon are well protected by a dense shield of

immune-strengthening organisms. This shield can protect

your GI tract from colonization by large numbers of organisms

that can take root in your mucosal lining and even create pores

in your GI wall that can allow incompletely digested food

particles to enter your bloodstream and trigger inflammation

elsewhere in your body.

Creating a protective shield of health-enhancing organisms

along your colon wall is much like laying down grass seed

to create a thick lawn that doesn’t allow room for weeds to

take root. When you have large numbers of healthy organisms

in your GI tract, it becomes near impossible for undesirable organisms

like yeast and some types of bacteria to establish a significant

presence in your body.

If you’re interested in taking a professional grade probiotic

that I have consistently found to be helpful in reversing and

preventing “dysbiosis,” feel free to have a look at Synbiotic

Plus:

https://www.drbenkim.com/sunshop/index.php?l=product_detail&p=123

I am finding that three capsules, twice daily is a good amount

in most cases, but where there isn’t enough improvement

with this amount, I typically increase to three capsules, three times

a day.

So there you have it - blended potato soup and quality

probiotics - these are two highly effective tools that I

utilize to address most cases of chronic GI distress.

That’s all for today. I wish you and yours a safe and healthy

week ahead. Let’s not forget to chew well and dwell on

things that we’re grateful for!”

“To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal,
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it,
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”

— ~Mary Oliver

Meghan Telpner on Sustainability in the Yoga Studio (and in your Home)

There is much to be said for what we do on our mat.

We know it goes well beyond the physicality of our practice in connecting us with our truest, sweetest being. Somehow, however, we often put up a block to what else we can be doing to strengthen the practice of yoga.

It’s not always about logging more hours on the mat, or getting more training.

Sometimes, the deeper practice comes from questioning everything that happens around our mat and off our mat. One of the first places to look, might even be the accessories of our practice—the products we use that are intended to heal us, lend to a deeper and more beneficial practice, but that may actually be doing the opposite.

This is how we can start to look at UnDieting our yoga practice.

To UnDiet is to questioning what we see around us and stop accepting it as normal because everyone else is doing it; we can undiet the way we eat, the way we work and our beauty care routine.

We can also UnDiet our yoga practice in five simple ways:

1. Ditch the bottled water.

There is no “away.” Let’s be clear. We are all part of this universe and now, unfortunately, so is every bit of plastic ever created. Plastic bottles of water create unnecessary waste, not to mention the BPA that leach from our bottles into our bodies and that disrupt hormones at trace levels. It is not about safe levels—there aren’t any. Drink 100% pure, clean water and do so from glass or stainless steel. Forgot your bottle before class? Get to know the tap or the water fountain. Disposable and/or recyclable plastic is no longer an option.

2. Those oils smell nice…sort of.

Everyone loves a good shoulder and neck massage in shivasana, or maybe a deep inhale of lavender or spruce to tickle the neurotransmitters into calming down. But are those oils truly healing? Most oils that you buy for about $10 a bottle are inedible—meaning they are not food grade, and are made of synthetic chemicals. If we wouldn’t throw it into our blender and make a smoothie with it, should we be rubbing it on our skin or inhaling it, allowing it to bypass our detoxification organs? Those cheap synthetic oils are best used to clean our floors—and that’s about it. Ensure your essential oils, whether as aromatherapy, or a cleaning agent are 100% food grade.

3. Post yoga fuel.

Energy bars sold in the health food store must be healthy, right? They are, after all, at the health food store. Look at the ingredient label: very few of these bars contain any whole, real food ingredients. If you wouldn’t buy each ingredient on its own, probably best to take a pass on it. Make your post yoga fuel real food—an apple and almond butter, a power smoothie, or home baked granola with nuts and dried fruit. There are loads of options, just try and stick to the ones that don’t come in cellophane wrappers.

4. The mat clean up.

Yoga mats will eventually start to deteriorate—that’s sort of inevitable. Sort of. This happens far more slowly if you take the time to clean down your mat after each practice and let it hang to dry. Eco mat or otherwise, you don’t want and shouldn’t have to replace your mat as often as you do. Make an eco-cleaner of water, tea tree essential oil, cinnamon essential oil and a little vinegar or lemon juice. Spritz your mat after every use, wipe it down and hang it to dry. Depending on how often you use your mat, you should likely shower it down once a week to once a month. Remember—there is no land called “away”—so we need to stop throwing things there.

5. What are you burning?

We love our candles. They bring an energy into the room, cast a warm glow and often lend a soft scent. Most of those candles, however, are totally and completely toxic. Most conventional candles are made of  paraffin—the final by-product in the refining of petroleum. When we burn paraffin candles this carcinogenic substance becomes an inhalant—like secondhand smoke.  Many candles also contain wicks with metal cores containinglead which is extremely dangerous when heated. And of course, those artificial fragrances and colors which are really one massive chemical cocktail. Instead, seek out fragrance free beeswax candles, and just let the beeswax and your food-grade essential oils do the aromatherapy.

Once we start to pay attention to the accessories that surround us during our practice, a time in our day when we are likely most present, we will also start to notice ways we can UnDiet, clean up and do better in other areas too.

As with yoga, UnDieting our lives is a practice, and one that is best started today.

Today is the day!

source: Elephant Journal

Meghan Telpner is a Toronto based nutritionista and sought after media personality thanks to her refreshingly humorous, engaging and real approach to healthy living. Her online cooking courses and health programs are improving the lives of people around the world. Meghan’s book UnDiet, Eat Your Way to Vibrant Health will be released North America wide in April, 2013. Join Meghan’s community on twitter @MeghanTelpner. For more visit MeghanTelpner.com.

Study: Saccharin And Sugar Found More Addictive Than Cocaine | Wake Up World

Our findings clearly demonstrate that intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward, even in drug-sensitized and -addicted individuals. We speculate that the addictive potential of intense sweetness results from an inborn hypersensitivity to sweet tastants. In most mammals, including rats and humans, sweet receptors evolved in ancestral environments poor in sugars and are thus not adapted to high concentrations of sweet tastants. The supranormal stimulation of these receptors by sugar-rich diets, such as those now widely available in modern societies, would generate a supranormal reward signal in the brain, with the potential to override self-control mechanisms and thus to lead to addiction.

In a previous article, “Is Fructose As Addictive As Alcohol?”, we looked at the addictive properties of isolated fructose in greater depth, including over 70 adverse health effects associated with fructose consumption. It appears that not only does fructose activate a dopamine- and opioid-mediated hedonic pathway within the body, but like excessive alcohol consumption, exacts a significant toll on health in exchange for the pleasure it generates. The drug-like properties of common beverages and foods, have been the subject of a good deal of research over the past few decades. Wheat and related grains, for instance, are a major food source of opioid peptides. These pharmacologically active compounds, also found in milk, coffee and even lettuce, may even explain why ancient hunters and gatherers took the agrarian leap over 10,000 years ago. Likely, the transition from the Paleolithic to Neolithic was motivated by a combination of environmental pressures and the inherently addictive properties made accessible and abundant due to the agrarian/animal husbandry mode of civilization. For more on this, read our essay “The Dark Side of Wheat.”

As far as synthetic sweeteners, an accumulating body of toxicological research indicates they have a wide range of unintended, adverse health effects beyond the aforementioned problem of addiction. For a comprehensive list, view our Artificial Sweetener Research page.