FOOD LABELING
I found a terrific article tonight about what the food labeling terms really mean.  Foods that we think are not GMO are, in fact, GMO foods.  Foods labeled as organic, ah, not so much.  So the labeling is itself an industry that serves manufacturers.  Companies can call their food "organic" and charge more.  It has always been a marketing ploy.  And nothing else.  But I want to highlight a few statements on meat labeling that I found shocking. 

Here's one. 
"Hormone-free: This means something with beef, but is nothing but a marketing ploy when you see it on poultry or pork, as the USDA does not allow the use of hormones with those animals.  Hormone-free does not mean antibiotic-free."

Here's another.
"Antibiotic-free: Because of poor and stressful living conditions, factory-farmed animals are very susceptible to illness.  Antibiotic-free means they were not prophylactically treated with antibiotics. This does not, however, mean that the animal is hormone-free."

A third.
"Grass-fed: Grass-fed cows are allowed some access to the outdoors and are not fed grains or corn.  This does NOT mean they are organic, because the grass they are grazing on may have been chemically fertilized and sprayed.  Unless you have actually seen them roaming around the farm, keep in mind their access to the outdoors may not be the lovely rolling pastures that you have in your mind, but a crowded corral with hundreds of other cows."

These comments sound like anti-meat arguments, for they certainly turn me off from beef, Tyson and Foster Farms chicken, and others. 

And I don't know about you, but I have put a lot of faith and meaning in the term "Free-range," but according to the article that label means nothing.  "Free-range: This label doesn’t mean diddly squat.  It means that the animal is allowed a minimum of an hour a day outside.  This could mean that they are crammed into an open area with a billion other chickens, still, without room to move, or that their cage is put outside, leaving them still tightly confined. Like the grass-fed cows above, unless you actually see the farm with the gallivanting chickens or pigs, take the label “free-range” with a grain of salt."

PACKAGED FOODS: IT'S NOT GOOD.
"Nearly every packaged food on the shelf is seasoned with MSG in one of its many names, and many lower calorie foods and diet drinks are sweetened with aspartame.  Both of these are excitotoxins that cause brain cell death instantly, causing decreased IQs, headaches, depression, and seizures."

"The length of the ingredients list in your food is often a direct indicator of the unhealthiness of the item. When an item contains a host of additives, colors, flavors, and preservatives, you can safely bet that most of the nutrients are gone."

FRUITS & VEGETABLES
"If organic produce is not an option, look for the items with the lowest pesticide loads.  (This list by the Environmental Working Group is based ONLY on pesticide loads – some of the items they recommend could be GMOs).  Fruits and vegetables that can be peeled often subject you to less pesticides than thin-skinned items. If you must buy conventional, wash the produce carefully and peel it if possible.  Look to these stand-bys:"

• Apples (peeled)  [I eat these]
• Asparagus
• Avocados
• Cabbage  [I eat this]
• Cantaloupe
• Eggplant
• Grapefruit  [I eat these]
• Kiwi  [I eat these and love these]
• Mangoes
• Mushrooms
• Onions  [I eat onions with meat]
• Oranges
• Pineapples  [Love pineapple]
• Rutabagas
• Sweet Peas
• Sweet Potatoes  [I eat these frequently during winter]
• Turnips

DAIRY PRODUCTS
"Conventional dairy products are absolutely loaded with hormones.  Dairy cattle are given high levels of female hormones to make them produce a greater quantity of milk. This makes little boys develop female characteristics and makes little girls hit puberty at a far younger age than normal, which is the reason you see 4th graders with large breasts and hips.  These hormones can also trigger obesity in both genders.  Because of the public outcry, some dairies have pledged not to use rBST, the most commonly used of the growth hormones.  Do your research to discover if there are any such brands available to you.  The Lucerne brand from Safeway is guaranteed to be hormone free. (It’s interesting to note that Monsanto, the company that pushes rBST, wants the FDA to disallow dairies to put this on their labels, and that the FDA forces those who label their products rBST-free to also put the following disclaimer on the containers: “No significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rBST-treated and non-rBST treated cows.” (source). 

I had thought that this problem was resolved.  I have paid too much attention to the pro-protein diets, like the Zone Diet and the Weston Price Foundation.  The one complaint that I've heard and read about dairy is that the milk proteins are hard to digest for most people.  That it's not just lactose intolerance that develops, but a host of other digestive ailments.  Oh, boy! 

Mushrooms

Here are the nutritional details on the 8 mushrooms you see below: 
1.  Portobello  

2.  Oyster

3.  Maitake

4.  Shiitake

5.  Crimino

6.  White Button

7.  Chanterelle

8.  Porcino

Apparently, Chaga Mushrooms (pictured above) produce the greatest immune benefit, which according to the article linked herein contains "a special substance known as superoxide dismutase (SOD)."  SOD is an enzyme that halts oxidation.  

Reishi or Lingzhi Mushroom

CORDYCEPS

Cordyceps is a fungus that lives on certain caterpillars in the high mountain regions of China. Supplement makers are able to get enough of the product to sell because cordyceps will reproduce in the laboratory.

 

Cordyceps is used to treat coughs, chronic bronchitis, respiratory disorders, kidney disorders, night-time urination, male sexual problems, anemia, irregular heartbeat, high cholesterol, liver disorders, dizziness, weakness, ringing in the ears, unwanted weight loss, and opium addiction.  

It is also used for strengthening the immune system, improving athletic performance, reducing the effects of aging, promoting longer life, and improving liver function in people with hepatitis B.

Some people use cordyceps as a stimulant, a tonic, and an “adaptogen,” which is used to increase energy, enhance stamina, and reduce fatigue.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Cordyceps might improve immunity by stimulating cells and specific chemicals in the immune system. It may also have activity against cancer cells and may shrink tumor size, particularly with lung or skin cancers.

Read here about their powerful immune enhancing abilities.

Read here about how mushrooms cripple viruses.

Find more evidence of antiviral effects here.

Mushrooms tackle cancer.  Shrinks tumors 75%!!! Note this fact:

Standardized beta-glucan extracts (MDF and maitake D-Fraction) show particular promise for their anti-cancer benefits and ease of use. Extracts, whole maitake powder, or a combination have been shown effective for many health issues. 

http://altmedicine.about.com/od/coldsandflu/a/flu_mushrooms.htm

Vitamin D3 and So Much More with Sunlight

Great article on sunlight as being one of the essential vitamins you need for optimum health.  Through sunlight, you get much more than Vitamin D or D3.

Find yours today.

Sunlight

This one may throw some of you off, but sunlight possesses both energy and information with real, metabolic value and is, therefore, a source of usable energy for the body – and so, in a very real sense it can be considered a form of food that we consume through our skin by way of its built-in, melanin-based "solar panels." Not only does adequate sunlight exposure result in the production of vitamin D, a hormone-like substance that regulates over 2,000 genes in the human body--and as a result prevents or ameliorates hundreds of vitamin D deficiency-associated health conditions--but sunlight exposure itself has a unique set of health benefits not reducible to simply vitamin D production alone. One of the more interesting studies performed on sunlight exposure, based on data gathered from over 100 countries and published earlier this year in the journal Anticancer Research, showed that there was "a strong inverse correlation with solar UVB for 15 types of cancer," with weaker, though still significant evidence for the protective role of sunlight in 9 other cancers. Here are some additional benefits of sunlight exposure: 
Alzheimer's Disease
Depression
Dopamine Deficiency 
Dermatitis 
Influenza 
Multiple Sclerosis 
Psoriasis 

Top Ten Reasons It Makes Sense Not to Enroll in Obamacare
By Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D., of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

The entire article is here.

1) The Obamacare health insurance policies cost significantly more – likely more than the penalty (tax). Most people can expect to see their premiums double.

2) The Obamacare health-insurance policies limit your choice of doctors.

3) The Obamacare health-insurance policies limit your choice of hospitals. For example, several major state-of-the-art, internationally known cancer treatment centers are excluded.

4) Your out-of-pocket costs will skyrocket, with the new Obamacare health-insurance policies doubling and tripling the deductibles you must pay before coverage will kick in.

5) Your medical privacy is lost when you enroll, and your medical information becomes controlled by government agencies.

6) Your personal financial and health information may be seriously compromised by the security flaws in the Healthcare.gov website.

7) You are at risk of identity theft by providing your personal information to the “Obamacare navigators,” a significant number of whom have been found to have criminal backgrounds.

8) Enrolling in the Obamacare health exchange may lead to compromises of your Second Amendment rights, as medical databases collect information on gun ownership.

9) Obamacare enrollees are finding it difficult or impossible to cancel their plan if they find a better option.

10) Obamacare policies are basically “managed care” with limitations on your options – and financial incentives for your doctor to restrict your care.

(h/t Robert Wenzel)

Okay, so the above list consists of 10 good reasons to opt out, but what of the penalties?  Is it worth it, penalty-wise and financially, to opt out?  You can avoid the penalties by filing for exemptions.  The HHS offers 14 exemptions. Claim yours here.  Dr. Gary North had the skinny on these exemptions.  See his comments below.

14 Loopholes: How to Opt Out of ObamaCare Legally
Gary North--March 18, 2014

The Democrats in the Senate see what's coming in November. They pressured the Obama administration to get them off the hook for ObamaCare. HHS complied--sort of.

The HHS created an opt-out form. It exempts 14 categories of people from the obligation of paying the fine. One category is this: your policy was canceled, but you cannot find a low-cost alternative. You don't have to prove this.

Then HHS buried the exemption form. It is hard to find.

The Wall Street Journal found out about this form. It called the public's attention to the existence of this form, but it did not post its URL.

A contact of mine found it. I am posting it here, where it cannot be buried even deeper.

http://garynorth.com/Obamacare-Exemptions.pdf

The Obama administration is playing games. It is playing games with Senate Democrats: "We complied. Now you're off the hook, sort of." It plays games with the public: "We're giving you an escape hatch, if you can find it. Lots of luck!"

No one will be satisfied with this, come November. ObamaCare is the concrete blocks around the Democrats' feet. They know it. The Democrats' defeat last week in the special election in Florida was the warning bell. The Republican ran a poor campaign, but he won. He hammered the Democrat on ObamaCare.

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote this.

Brown jumping in was just one blast of bad news for Democrats. They also lost a special election last Tuesday in Florida by a hair, a defeat David Plouffe called "a screaming siren." Alex Sink, a promising candidate, sank after she could not overcome the blast of ads linking her to President Barack Obama and his health care law.

Republicans had been so worried about losing the Florida election that they prematurely trashed their own candidate, a former lobbyist named David Jolly, telling Politico that his campaign was a Keystone Kops operation.

The law is a political disaster for the Democrats at this point. They have until November to reverse the voters' perception of the law.

Obama's solution so far is to offer delays on implementation. But if the Democrats lose the Senate in November, Obama will be under tremendous pressure to keep delaying implementation, for the sake of the 2016 election.

Meanwhile, people who were sent policy-rejection notices, but who don't know about the exemption, will be looking for revenge in November.

Memory Loss--Not Natural to Aging?
When I taught high school and would forget something, the students mercilessly tagged me with having Alzheimer's.  Who knows?  Maybe I was having an Alzheimer's moment.  But it's not just kids who extrapolate tidbits from the news about older people or what it means to overlook or forget or why someone overlooks or forgets, it's also other adults who believe the propaganda about the mental health of others, and in particular older people.  Turns out that older people are not at any greater risk of memory loss than younger people.  But the fact that we're told that there is we believe it because, well, when we're 27 we may not interact with many 85 year olds on a daily basis to test their memory.  People's memory will surprise you.  It's always surprised me.  When I was in college I had to memorize the titles, the authors, the dates, the first lines, and the theme of over 80 poems for an end-of-the-year English final.  I aced it.  Because I studied for it.  I used flash cards and drilled myself endlessly for three days prior to the test to where I could think of nothing else or wanted to.  Then there is other information, like Los Angeles Dodger's 1969 team rosters.  I could rattle off names, numbers, positions, and some distinctive offensive or defensive strength of the player, whether he batted right or left, and whether or not he was a star or not.  Other folks have tremendous memories, memorizing entire lines of computer code or algorithms.  I am not up to that feat.  But plenty of young folks today are.  So watch out. 

The following article on memory loss is by Natural News staff writer, David Gutierrez.  The headline gives you what you need.  The contents of the article are not that great.  He explains that memory loss is not age-related condition, but the result of brain damage.  I am always a skeptic, which I guess gave rise to this blog in the first place.  I work on percentages.  Most people don't.  They hear brain damage and are consumed by fear.  Or they hear AIDS and want to throw themselves under a bus. Put that off for another time.  Work in percentages.  Scientists do.  So do good doctors.  If a person has HIV, you have to ask yourself what the percentages are of the virus advance on healthy cells. What's the ratio of healthy cells to sick ones?  80/20?  Same thing with brain damage.  What part of the brain is damaged, and how much of the brain is damaged?  What is the percentage?  Even with these statistics, these only serve doctors in the accuracy or proximation of their diagnosis.  I would take every doctor diagnosis with a grain of salt.  The whole reason that we color their diagnosis as authoritative is because we're taught to.  Applying the concept of percentages, we're more likely to increase the percentage of certainty in a doctor's diagnosis when we know nothing about organ function or how it interacts with other organs or what our medical or biochemical history is or how nutrition mediates any condition.  Medical history is riddled with horror stories of people dying from the wrong diagnosis or a diagnosis mistreated.  I knew of a woman who was admitted to the hospital because her reproductive organ was bleeding.  The admitting ER doctor thought that she may have pneumonia and ordered her a room.  He ordered her a room because she had great health insurance.  So the initial diagnosis was pneumonia and the treatment was antibiotics.  Antibiotics?  For pneumonia? Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  For 10 days.  Technician after technician wheeled their holy hardware into her room as if they were auditioning.  They would conduct a heart exam and show the woman on her back in the hospital bed what the monitor was doing.  But she didn't know what it meant.  She wasn't trained to read it, let alone interpret the data.  No follow-up.  Never heard from that cardiologist again. Then the woman was given a breathing test.  The technician commented that her breathing was pretty good.  I asked, "I thought that she has pneumonia?" "You'll have to check with her doctor" came the retort. Well, where the hell was the doctor!  So we got no valuable information.  Oh, we got information alright, but no integrated information that could either confirm or deny the initial diagnosis of pneumonia.  All we got . . . no, excuse me . . . all she got were orders for more tests.  "To really find out what is going on in her lungs, we'll need to conduct a CT scan."  So the mindless and immoral orderlies transferred her to a mobile bed and wheeled her down the cold hall into an elevator that took her down to the radiation lab in the basement.  I held her hand the whole time.  Her eyes were fixed on mine consoling her fear and suspending the reality and the inevitability of these days and hours being the remaining few she has in this life and what my role in them was. Was I enabling the whole process?  Was I guarding against the monstrous robots who'd surrendered their powers to question for a few bucks, the altruistic psychopaths?  It was clear to me that each player knew his role. They were all just following doctor's orders.  No one stopped to ask.  "She was 89" they rationalized and "She was up there in years" came the reassurances.  Family members too saw the truth of such statements and could not muster the courage or enough self-possession to tell the government-trained doctors to go to hell.  The orderlies, the woman in the bed, and I waited for a minute in the hall for the patient already in the radiation lab to exit.  The door opened, and on her bed out she rolled.  The orderlies steering the litter made of chrome, cotton, and rubber waited patiently before they rolled her inside the room. Sitting at the center of the room, like a lasered Moloch, was the CT scan with intersecting red beams thin as string and transparent as light.  The red lights intersected like the site at the end of the barrel of a rifle. The woman lying in the mobile bed, who just a minute before was making self-effacing jokes to allay the general fears and anxieties, raised herself up by gripping my arm as if with new strength and begged in earnest, "Mike! Get me out of here!"  Her soul flushed with fear, she whispered in panic "I don't want to do this!"  The technician came over to reassure her and me of the harmless nature of the electronic portal.  I told the technician that I want to put the choice over what gets done to her body in her hands as much as possible.  He pressed me, insisting that the risks were low.  Perhaps.  If that were true, then why was his station in a closed booth insulated from any radiation?  The woman begged again.  And I told the doctor we were leaving.  On the stroll back, it pleased me that the woman was relieved and a bit scared for having survived the orders belonging to some anonymous and soulless monster.  Clearly, we could have found out who ordered the CT scan.  Easy enough.  I am sure it was her doctor.  But we were not told.  We never were told anything.  Information did not flow to the family.  Learning the rationale for the order may have proved even more difficult given the fact that the doctor was busy in his own office during the day with his own patients.  Had the doctor exhausted all his other options for discovering the cause of her ill health or for seeing whether his initial diagnosis, like a best guess, was accurate?  One has to wonder how much of the diagnostic hardware is used to fund this or that procedure.  Imagine if that woman had proceeded with the CT scan.  What would it have found that her doctor could use against her to convince her of another procedure, maybe four or five or more procedures.  I had a neighbor once who was diabetic.  She had diabetic wounds on her feet.  Her doctor cut a toe off.  Snip.  Snip.  Snip.  She returned home only to find out six months later that the infection, which the surgery was supposed to curtail, re-emerged.  And what do you think his recommendation was?  That's right . . . Snip.  Snip.  Snip.  Half a foot this time.  I mean he really wanted to get that nasty infection, right?  She went home.  Few months later, foot gets infected again. Snip.  Snip.  Snip.  One foot--gone!  I will spare you the details on that woman's life, except to say that the last time that I saw her in her wheel chair both of her legs were cut to their knees.  All to go after that darn infection.  And that infection is treated like a terrorist, wherein the doctor has to operate in order to prevent greater health calamities for the woman.  Pcychopathic altruists says it best.  

Back to the woman with the pneumonia.  

Once the doctor and the hospital staff learned that she was refusing tests, there was no more reason to treat her.  She was put on a daily regime of antibiotics called Rosin.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  That antibiotics robbed her of the natural gut flora that kept her well, that fought infection naturally.  I'd heard later that garlic is the best natural antibiotic.  But she remained in the hospital for an additional seven days while the family remained in suspended disbelief.  No information, nothing of value or pertinence was transmitted to me or any other family member.  Her last three days in the hospital were spent in transition care where the antibiotics flowed.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  At one point the woman claimed aloud that she was losing her mind.  She arrived home after ten days in the hospital never having the initial diagnosis confirmed, never having been offered an alternate treatment besides the Rosin.  That is a standard antibiotic a friend explained.  Though she was sent home after ten days, the woman was given a hospital bed to lie in.  It was placed in the front room.  That night we tried to restore her, give her some saturated fats, like coconut butter.  She asked me, and I will never forget this, "Mike, what did they do to me?"

It is not natural for the human memory to decline with age; such memory loss is a sign of disease Friday, March 14, 2014 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer Tags: memory loss, age, brain damage

(NaturalNews) Although the conventional wisdom would have us believe that people's memories naturally deteriorate as they get older, age-related memory loss is not found in all cultures around the world. Indeed, new research suggests that all memory loss is a sign of brain damage, even in patients who are not suffering from clinical dementia. In a study published in 2010, researchers from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago gave 350 Catholic clergy members yearly memory tests for 13 years, then scanned their brains after death. They found that the brains of patients who died without ever experiencing memory loss showed no signs of Alzheimer's disease or strokes. Based on this data, the researchers suggested that all memory loss is a sign of brain damage, most likely early-stage dementia. "What we're saying is the brain changes that are mainly responsible for Alzheimer's and other dementias also seem to be mainly responsible for very mild early changes in memory and thinking," researcher Robert S. Wilson said.