Exercise: The Elixir of Health

Exercise is elixir of health.  No food, no anti-oxidant, no vitamin, no leafy green vegetable or healthy fat will invigorate or boost you almost immediately the way exercise can and will. A walk around your neighborhood will raise your mood.  So, walk.  If you must, walk.  So, walk you must.

If you want more bang for your buck, then climb.  Go for a short hike.  One immediate benefit of exercise is that it will elevate your mood so that you can be more productive.  Pick a local foothill with a gentle grade and walk it.  Another benefit of a hike is that you get out of the hubbub of the city.  You step away from the confines of your computer.  You breathe.  You climb.  You smell the flowers.  The wild ones are incredible.

Joel Salatin: Food Production Is Out of Sync

Jazzy Ginger

"Eat functional foods" was the command from Dr. Barry Sears of the Zone Diet.  Though I don't follow the Zone Diet, I thought that Dr. Sears advice was invaluable.  At least for me, facts don't always speak for themselves.  What is a functional food?  I drink coffee.  In my mind, it's functional: I drink it for a boost.  I eat eggs.  In my mind, their function is to power me through the morning.  I eat green leafy vegetables.  I eat them to get enzymes in me to help digest my heavy protein diet.  Each food already has a function.  Certain foods are good for this, certain foods are good for that.  What I want to know is which foods are best for the gut?  That depends.  What do you want your gut to do?  Purge?  Be less irritable and settled down?  One food that ranks high in soothing the gut is ginger root.  Another, which I heard about just tonight, is cabbage juice.  I'll write about that later after I try it.


And by ginger, I don't mean ginger snaps.  Skip the ginger candies.  Ixnay on the sweetened ginger drinks, eh.  But the raw ginger root.  Remember, food is serious stuff.  The best way to consume this is in tea form.  Easy to make.  Slice a few discs of ginger, place them in a pan of water, and boil.  And you've got refreshing hot tea.  I love coffee.  I love it as a stimulant, but despite all of the evidence to the contrary it is not so healthy for your gut.  It may have anti-oxidants but it doesn't have gut-heatlhy properties the way that raw ginger root does.  You will find the ginger tea a pleasant substitute, particularly if you are trying to recover from gut problems.  And what are these gut problems?

Leaky gut is one.  What is a leaky gut?  It's where your intestinal lining becomes more porous and toxins from the intestines spill out into the blood stream.  I had this once.  The toxins stained my lower legs with red blotches.  A regimen of antioxidants fixed that.  If you get leaky gut, try this.  I've heard all kinds of ways to describe the stomach, one, as the second brain that signals a "gut feeling," which may be an idiomatic that really expresses a visceral thought.  I'd read recently that your gut has several neurotransmitters in the tissue.  That's kind of brainy.  In fact, something I found just recently and very interesting was that there is an organ called the abdominal aorta.  An aorta in the stomach.  Talk about a vital organ!  Your heart has aortic valves.  Your stomach does too.  Go figure.

 

Eczema is a symptom of a leaky gut, which just goes to show you how gut health is implicated in so many other ailments and areas of your body.  Writing on eczema, Carolanne Wright, a contributor over at Mike Adams, says that more than likely it is caused by a leaky gut. 

In addition to healing a leaky gut, ginger tea, according to this article, enhances your mood, the same thing that you expect from your hot coffee, yet it provides the following benefits:

1. Impedes Motion Sickness: Have a quick cup before traveling to keep the sickness and headaches at bay.
2. Combats Stomach Discomfort: Great for digestion and aiding the absorption of food.
3. Reduces Inflammation: Can ease joint inflamation and helps ease the joint soreness.
4. Fights Common Respiratory Problems: Perfect for fighting off coughs and colds.
5. Encourages Normal Blood Circulation: Not only does the drink help blood flow, it also can stop excessive sweating and fever.
6. Remedies Menstrual Discomfort: One tip to relieve menstrual pains is to place a hot towel drenched in ginger tea on your stomach.
7. Strengthens Immune System: Packed with antioxidants, it is a sure start to better health.

8. Relieves Stress: Even one sniff of the drink can improve your mood.

RAW GINGER
It is known that raw ginger contains "chemicals that work in a similar way to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as ibuprofen and aspirin. . . . The studies showed daily ginger intake reduced the exercise-induced pain by 25 per cent. Heating the ginger had no effect."

Ginger is good for arthritis.

Health Care in Thailand

For now, or at least until Mr. Bernanke's inflationary money printing does in the cheap prices of health care service in Thailand, medical treatment there is currently very cheap and of excellent quality.

Food or Doctor-Prescribed Antibiotic?

Why does someone need to take antibiotics?  Because of bacterial infections.  A bacterial infection is when a bacterial pathogen invades your body.  Just how dangerous are bacteria?  Wikipedia states that the vast majority of bacteria are, get this, harmless or beneficial.  "Although the vast majority of bacteria are harmless or beneficial, quite a few bacteria are pathogenic."  If that is the case, why then are people desperate to receive or request or demand the right antibiotics from their doctors?  Are doctors' diagnoses biased toward bacterial causes or do the pharmaceutical companies have excellent marketing campaigns?  The common bacterial infections that receive a lot of air time and media fear-mongering are, according to Life Extension's Protocol on bacteria, ". . . pneumonia, ear infections, diarrhea, urinary tract infections, and skin disorders."   These seem pretty manageable, to me, with a good diet.  Some would contradict, "No.  Pneumonia is deadly.  Diet can't address pneumonia."  I have had limited experience with doctor-prescribed antibiotics.  I think I tried them twice--both times for a bronchitis.  "You have a bacterial infection," the doctors would explain.  They didn't work, the antibiotics I mean.  They didn't do anything, anything positive that I could perceptibly detect.  In fact, when I reported back to my doctor that I had finished the regime of antibiotics but that they did nothing to relieve my bronchitis, he wanted to up the dose, like upping the ante in a poker hand.  He had nothing to lose.  He was in control of the drugs, their financial benefits, and I was the human guinea pig who believed that doctors had some magic in their bag of tricks.  Maybe.  But it was a crap shoot.  Since then I never took any prescribed drugs, ever.  Nor will I.  Antibiotics require a regimen of two or three weeks or longer.  Are there natural alternatives to pharmaceutical antibiotics?  I thought you'd never ask.  

Consuming a clove of garlic for three sequential days would produce better results.  And by better I don't just mean that the infection or bacterial agent would be removed and cleaned up; what I mean is that function, strength, and energy are increased while a host of other structures are toned by the beneficial side-effects of the garlic.  Pharmaceutical antibiotics are dangerously powerful; or worse, they could be an empty but costly and time-consuming placebo. Garlic is nature's best and most effective antibiotic.  

 

Need proof?  Here is Bill Sardi on the benefits of an amazing drug called GC (it stands for "Garlic Clove").  Part of the therapeutic benefits of garlic include its smell.  It's smell alone will ignite an immune-enhancing response, the way that a strong coffee brewing in the morning alerts your senses.  This is important to remember when choosing foods: smell and color are a key register of anti-oxidant potency.  For some, it is precisely the smell that turns them away from garlic; thankfully, you can obtain it in capsule form, but you'll be cutting out all of the fun of peeling, cutting, and cooking garlic.

From Mike Adams' Natural News, he had this to say about garlic.  Turns out that garlic is better than I had thought:

Garlic has been used worldwide for thousands of years for medicinal purposes. This wonder plant treats everything from a simple earache to pneumonia, MRSA, Helicobacter pylori, the flu and even the black plague. Contemporary research has confirmed that garlic possesses numerous antioxidants that kill bacteria and free radicals in the blood protecting the immune system and making it stronger (that's my emphasis: that feature of garlic impressed me). Garlic's active ingredient allicin can also attack and destroy a variety of viruses--unlike modern antibiotics--as well as fungal infections such as candida. Taking garlic supplements as a prophylactic may help to protect against various pathogens and prevent the onset of disease.

UPDATE:  I was reading tonight how garlic and onions are excellent to leech mercury out of your system as a tonic to prevent mercury poisoning.

Garlic is excellent for managing blood pressure.  But consuming it in a particular way maximizing the effects of garlic 3 to 4 times better than if you eat bulb whole.  If you're taking garlic to remedy a specific ailment, like hyper-tension or bacteria overload, the best way to take it is by smashing a raw bulb so that the bulb is broken.  Apparently, the enzymes need to broken and activated in order for the garlic to really work.  You cannot rely on your digestive tract to break it open efficiently enough.  But once a cracked clove is in your digestive system, your body absorbs the garlic nicely, relaxing your blood pressure, relaxing your muscles, and devouring bacteria.  For these two functions--blood pressure and an antibacterial medicine--you would be hard pressed to find a better, most-effective food remedy.  I place the smashed, not mashed, garlic in my mouth and take an olive oil chaser to sooth the burn.  The combination has a terrific effect.  To good health!!

If you want a powerful alternative to garlic, another good antibiotic is colloidal silver.  Colloidal silver is water ionized with silver.  Now how does silver purge harmful bacteria from your cells?  Ben Taylor explains that "it disables a certain enzyme that is responsible for the oxygen metabolism of the pathogen cells, such as viruses, fungi or bacteria. As a result of the lack of oxygen, the virus or bacteria cells die in a short while. During this procedure, the healthy cells of the body remain untouched and unaffected, since the colloidal silver activates only on the oxygen enzyme of the pathogen cells."