Health & WellnessS


Bacon n Eggs

The Keto Diet: Benefits beyond weight loss

Pamela Bofferding
Ready Nutrition
Mon, 18 Jul 2016 18:23 UTC
keto food pyramid
Low-carb, higher fat/protein diets are nothing new in mainstream culture - chances are you've heard of the Atkins Diet or Protein Power or some other version of these weight loss plans. These diets are at their core high-fat, low-carb Keto Diets or KDs, so called because they put your body into a state where it runs on ketones, rather than glucose or glycogen (you can read more about the science behind the process here). But what you might not be aware of are the myriad medical studies that show how Keto Diets go far beyond weight loss. In all reality,the Keto Diet is common sense eating.

The following is a list of health issues and the way that the Keto Diet brings about positive effects in each of them. As always, speak to your doctor before beginning any new diet or exercise plan—I'm not a scientist or a doctor, but this list was compiled based on studies from the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.

Comment: For more on the low-carb or ketogenic diet see:

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Health

Ayurvedic amla for hair loss and dandruff

Surbhi Kanur
Curejoy
Thu, 21 Jul 2016 18:16 UTC
amla
Amla
Antioxidant-rich amla prevents graying by fighting free radicals and cooling the pitta dosha. It nourishes hair follicles and increases blood supply to the scalp. Being anti-microbial, it also inhibits dandruff. Apply a paste of 1/2 cup yogurt, 2 tbsp gooseberry powder, 1 tbsp fenugreek powder, and 1 tbsp curry leaves paste on damp hair. Rinse after 20 min to get lustrous, durable tresses.

Aren't we willing to go to any extent to make our hair look lustrous? Of course our hair is precious to all of us! Hair fall is a major concern for many and should be treated in time. But little do we know that to have healthy hair is actually very affordable and simple, provided we choose the appropriate natural ingredients for our hair.

If you are one of those who want to give your locks a boost, here is a quick guide on how to get naturally healthy hair.
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Bacon n Eggs

Watch out for these counterfeit food scams

Anna Hunt
Waking Times
Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:53 UTC
supermarket shelves
The food industry scams its customers on a daily basis. The quicker you realize this, the faster you'll start to learn just which foods to look out for and how you can improve your diet.

Author of the book Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don't Know What You're Eating and What You Can Do About It, Larry Olmsted, is a food journalist that explains how you are being fooled every day by the food industry. Olmsted has researched the approach that the food industry takes to food labeling and marketing. He is of the opinion that people are being fooled more often than they realize:
"Some of the adulteration — when they cut olive oil with other oils or substances, they cut honey with corn syrup — that is a violation of the law. But a lot of it is labeling issues that are unregulated. Like 'natural' would be the perfect example. You could slap 'natural' on pretty much any food product. It's meaningless."
Let's take a look at three common misconceptions used by the food industry to scam customers.

Comment: Further reading:

Food industry corruption: Almost everything we eat is fake

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Cow

Sally Fallon Morell: How do animals feel about being killed for meat?

Sally Fallon Morell
Nourishing Traditions
Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:47 UTC
Weston Price Foundation
I am reminded of a letter from a chapter leader, Elizabeth Benner, about the nature of animal sacrifice, which we published in Wise Traditions some years ago:
"It is crucial to understand and accept the gift of sacrifice from our animal friends. Otherwise an individual can really struggle with the eating of animal foods that are so important in developing the will and the physical body to do one's calling here on Earth. This mystery was understood in all ancient cultures and is still found in the indigenous cultures. Living here in Kansas, I find that American lore is full of the esoteric mysteries on the great sacrifice of the buffalo. I am always moved by the stories that they tell. When the tribal community was in need of buffalo, they always performed a great ritual of prayer and ceremony. Deep was the appreciation and understanding of what this buffalo was going to offer them. The tales are told repeatedly of how, after the prayer and ceremony, one buffalo always separated itself from the herd to offer itself up.
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Bullseye

The government ignores the truth: Opioid use plummets in states with legal cannabis

Justin Gardner
The Free Thought Project
Wed, 20 Jul 2016 14:18 UTC
US Drug use
Yesterday we reported how Congress' "opioid bill," or Comprehensive Addiction & Recovery Act (CARA), was a hollow achievement, as it ignored medical cannabis alternatives and said nothing about the role of Big Pharma in the opioid abuse epidemic.


Comment: Congress passes opioid bill while ignoring research on the pain-killing effects of medical marijuana


Among the information missing from the conversation was an eye-opening study done last year. A JAMA Internal Medicine study looked at ten years of data in all 50 states, concluding that states with medical cannabis laws had significantly lower rates of opioid overdose mortality.

Comment: The opioid epidemic: What big pharma does not want you to know

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Document

Scary study shows virtual reality games could be used as pain killers

Rachel Metz
MIT technology review
Mon, 18 Jul 2016 00:00 UTC
virtual reality
© Eran Fowler
Not so far in the future, your doctor might prescribe playing a few games in virtual reality to ease aches and pains, rather than popping a pill.

That's Matthew Stoudt's hope, anyway. He's the CEO of AppliedVR, a startup that's building a library of virtual-reality content for alleviating pain and anxiety before, during, and after medical procedures. The company is working with hospitals and doctors to get patients using the technology on Samsung's Gear VR headset and to study its effectiveness as well.

So far, the company has created three different virtual-reality pain applications, as well as one for reducing anxiety, Stoudt says, and it's using some third-party content, too. Headsets running AppliedVR's platform are being used in hospitals, doctors' offices, and clinics for things like drawing blood and administering epidurals, as well as for pain management after operations.

Comment: While there are noted benefits to this 'therapy' which include the ability to making surgery less stressful and reduce pain, it's important to remember that video games used in this way are basically facilitating the dissociation from your current reality. It's unclear whether this disconnect from what is happening to you while you are 'in another world' could have serious psychological impacts, especially for children.

And could these findings also suggest why there are now hoards of people engaging in the pokemon go craze, is it to numb the psychological pain that humans are going through at this moment in time?
  • Pokémon Go and mass dissociation: Anchoring the frequency of chaos and destruction
Guided meditation sounds like a healthier and psychologically safer approach, see our Eiriu Eolas website for more information and testimonials on the benefits of meditation

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Shoe

Mind-clearing magic of running explained

Melissa Dahl
Science of Us
Thu, 21 Apr 2016 19:56 UTC
runner
© Pearson
It is something of a cliché among runners, how the activity never fails to clear your head. Does some creative block have you feeling stuck? Go for a run. Are you deliberating between one of two potentially life-altering decisions? Go for a run. Are you feeling mildly mad, sad, or even just vaguely meh? Go for a run, go for a run, go for a run.

The author Joyce Carol Oates once wrote in a column for the New York Times that "in running the mind flees with the body ... in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms." Filmmaker Casey Neistat told Runner's World last fall that running is sometimes the only thing that gives him clarity of mind. "Every major decision I've made in the last eight years has been prefaced by a run," he told the magazine. But I maybe like the way a runner named Monte Davis phrased it best, as quoted in the 1976 book The Joy of Running: "It's hard to run and feel sorry for yourself at the same time," he said. "Also, there are those hours of clear-headedness that follow a long run."
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Heart - Black

See no evil: EPA ignores synergistic toxic effects of pesticide cocktails in its approval process

Lauren McCauley
Common Dreams
Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:00 UTC
toxic effects chemical mixtures
© Chafer Machinery/cc/flickr"It’s alarming to see just how common it’s been for the EPA to ignore how these chemical mixtures might endanger the health of our environment," said Nathan Donley, a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity and author of the report.
Despite the EPA's claims, information on dangerous synergistic effects is publicly available. In fact, the agro-giants collected it themselves.

While the use of one toxic chemical—on our foods, lawns, and elsewhere—has its inherent risks, scientists warn that the combination of two or more such ingredients in common pesticides could have an even more noxious impact, one which is commonly overlooked.

In fact, a investigation released Tuesday by the environmental watchdog Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) found that over the past six years the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved nearly 100 pesticide products that contain these so-called "synergistic" compounds, effectively "increasing the dangers to imperiled pollinators and rare plants."

As CBD explains, "[s]ynergy occurs when two or more chemicals interact to enhance their toxic effects," turning "what would normally be considered a safe level of exposure into one that results in considerable harm."

"The EPA is supposed to be the cop on the beat, protecting people and the environment from the dangers of pesticides. With these synergistic pesticides, the EPA has decided to look the other way, and guess who's left paying the price?" asked Nathan Donley, a scientist with the Center and author of the report, Toxic Concoctions: How the EPA Ignores the Dangers of Pesticide Cocktails (pdf).

Comment: EPA favors industry when assessing chemical dangers

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Bacon n Eggs

Running on ketones: The cognitive benefits of a fat-burning brain

Mark Sisson
Mark's Daily Apple
Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:00 UTC
brain
Although mainstream sources still mistake "the brain needs glucose" for "the brain can only run on glucose," regular MDA readers know the truth: given sufficient adaptation, the brain can derive up to 75% of its fuel from ketone bodies, which the liver constructs using fatty acids. If we could only use glucose, we wouldn't make it longer than a few days without food. If our brains couldn't utilize fat-derived ketones, we'd drop dead as soon as our liver had exhausted its capacity to churn out glucose. We'd waste away, our lean tissue dissolving into amino acids for hepatic conversion into glucose to feed our rapacious brains. You'd end up a skeletal wraith with little else but your brain and a hypertrophied liver remaining until, eventually, the latter cannibalized itself in a last ditch search for glucose precursors for the tyrant upstairs. It would get ugly.

That's adaptation. But is there an actual cognitive advantage to running on ketones?

Maybe. It depends. It certainly helps people with neurodegeneration.

People whose brains suffer from impaired glucose utilization see cognitive benefits from ketones. In Alzheimer's disease, aging-related cognitive decline, epilepsy, and Parkinson's disease, brain glucose uptake is depressed—even before any actual cognitive decline appears. Despite high glucose availability, the aging, epileptic, Alzheimer's, or Parkinson's brain can't utilize enough of it to handle cognition. Enter ketones. Ketones act as an alternative energy source for the glucose-starved brains. It's no coincidence that ketogenic diets can improve symptoms (and in some cases abolish them) and cognitive function in all four conditions.

Comment: For help in learning how to implement a ketogenic diet, see: A beginner's guide to the Ketogenic diet and Ketogenic diet plan

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Health

Crazy? Psychiatrist uses fever machine to treat depression

Sarah Beller
The Influence
Wed, 20 Jul 2016 16:15 UTC
fever machine
In Ancient Rome, people suffering from melancholia were sometimes treated with warm baths. Today, Arizona psychiatrist Charles Raison is trying to revive the idea behind the practice by studying the effects of high temperatures on depression.

Even as Americans consume psychiatric medications by the fistful (about one in eight Americans are on an anti-depressant) psychiatry is in a state of disarray. Some studies claim that anti-depressants rely on a placebo effect, pseudo-science pervades addiction treatment, and critics of Big Pharma argue that depression and other mental illnesses have been marketed around the globe in order to create demand for their products.

While the number of people who identify as having a mental illness has grown, so has the proliferation of treatments: mental health professionals praise everything from opioids to psychedelics, to exercise (the New York Times is on it, having re-discovered the therapeutic benefits of exercise year after year: 2000, 2011, 2014, 2016). In Raison's treatment we've apparently got the benefits of hot yoga—without the yoga.

Comment: At least the doc is thinking outside the box and using a bit of creativity. Perhaps the treatment helps detoxify the patients which leads to an improvement in mood?

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