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You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
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Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park / Congo)
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Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives.
To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates.
'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic.
They've served their purpose.
Nature is unsentimental.
Death is built in.
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Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Earth Before Human)
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That's a rhetorical question, and trying to answer rhetorical questions instead of being cowed by them is a good habit to cultivate.
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Daniel C. Dennett (From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds)
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Vaginal cleaning will damage the good bacteria and mucus, increasing a woman’s chance of odor, bacterial vaginosis, and sexually transmitted infections.
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Jennifer Gunter (The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine)
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Almost nothing influences our gut bacteria as much as the food we eat. Preboiotics are the most powerful tool at our disposal if we want to support our good bacteria - that is, those that are already there and are there to stay.
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Giulia Enders (Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ)
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He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He’d been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken to its fullest capacity, so as soon as a restaurant served his dish, he would promptly cut it in half and ask for a to-go container. Portions are too big anyway, he’d grumble, patting his waistline. He’d only give away his food if the corners were cleanly cut, as he believed a homeless person would just feel worse eating food with ragged bitemarks at the edges – as if, he said, they are dogs, or bacteria. Dignity, he said, lifting his half-lasagna into its box, is no detail.
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Aimee Bender (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake)
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Still i knew because of my own feelings there was something wrong with me and i knew it wasnt only me. I knew it was everybody. It was like a bacteria or a cancer or a trance. It wasnt on the skin, it was in the soul. It showed itself in lonliness, lust, anger , jealousy and depression. It had people screwed up bad everywhere you went- at the store, at home, at church, it was ugly and deep. Lots of singers on the radio were singing about it and cops had jobs because of it. It was as if we were broken I thought, as if we were never supposed to feel these sticky emotions. It was as if we were cracked, coudlnt love right, couldnt feel good things for a long before screwing it all up.
I am talking about the broken quality of life.
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Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)
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I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.
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James E. Lovelock (The Revenge of Gaia)
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Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria.
Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, "ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.
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Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)
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You can’t just do whatever you feel like.” “You can’t just do anything you want.” “You have to learn self-restraint.” “You’re only interested in gratifying your desires.” “You don’t care about anything but your own pleasure.” Can you hear the judgmentality in these admonitions? Can you see how they reproduce the mentality of domination that runs our civilization? Goodness comes through conquest. Health comes through conquering bacteria. Agriculture is improved by eliminating pests. Society is made safe by winning the war on crime. On my walk today, students accosted me, asking if I wanted to join the “fight” against pediatric cancer. There are so many fights, crusades, campaigns, so many calls to overcome the enemy by force. No wonder we apply the same strategy to ourselves. Thus it is that the inner devastation of the Western psyche matches exactly the outer devastation it has wreaked upon the planet. Wouldn’t you like to be part of a different kind of revolution?
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Charles Eisenstein (The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Sacred Activism Book 2))
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I can't help but recall, at this point, a horribly elitist but very droll remark by one of my favorite writers, the American "critic of the seven arts", James Huneker, in his scintillating biography of Frédéric Chopin, on the subject of Chopin's étude Op. 25, No. 11 in A minor, which for me, and for Huneker, is one of the most stirring and most sublime pieces of music ever written: “Small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should avoid it.”
"Small-souled men"?! Whew! Does that phrase ever run against the grain of American democracy! And yet, leaving aside its offensive, archaic sexism (a crime I, too, commit in GEB, to my great regret), I would suggest that it is only because we all tacitly do believe in something like Hueneker's' shocking distinction that most of us are willing to eat animals of one sort or another, to smash flies, swat mosquitos, fight bacteria with antibiotics, and so forth. We generally concur that "men" such as a cow, a turkey, a frog, and a fish all possess some spark of consciousness, some kind of primitive "soul" but by God, it's a good deal smaller than ours is — and that, no more and no less, is why we "men" feel that we have the perfect right to extinguish the dim lights in the heads of these fractionally-souled beasts and to gobble down their once warm and wiggling, now chilled and stilled protoplasm with limitless gusto, and not feel a trace of guilt while doing so.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid)
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Isn’t everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine? I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now and maybe not even any day but this day, this moment, right now a plane could fall out of the sky and crush you or the building you’re in could just crumble and kill you or kill the someone you love— and to love someone is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria— and who knows where it came from, that flesh-eating bacteria, he was such a nice-looking fellow, it is such a shame— and your wildebeest, everyone’s wildebeest, just wants to get it over with, can’t bear the tension of walking around the world as if we’re always going to be walking around the world, because we’re not, because here comes a cancer, an illness a voice in your head that wants to jump out a window, a person with a gun, a freak accident, a wild wad of flesh-eating bacteria that will start with your face.
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Catherine Lacey (Nobody Is Ever Missing)
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Here’s the weird part: even when I was in the darkest and most despairing times of my depression, I still found depression funny. It was funny to me that the illness distorted my view of the real world like a funhouse mirror. It was funny that I could be immobilized by something that had no basis in a broken bone or bacteria or any tangible factor. And when other people, especially comedians and writers, shared their experiences with depression and those experiences were resonant with my own, I could laugh because we were all getting fooled together. I laughed in the same way an audience laughs at a particularly good trick pulled off by a magician. “We’ve all been deceived, but we don’t know how!
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John Moe (The Hilarious World of Depression)
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Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable. Gut bacteria, chloroplasts, mitochondria: all parasites, once.
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Peter Watts (Echopraxia (Firefall, #2))
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Sure, you know that tea is good for you, but pu-erh tea? Go to the head of the class if you guessed what it does: it promotes the growth of Akkermansia muciniphila bacteria!30
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Steven R. Gundry (The Longevity Paradox: How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age (The Plant Paradox, #4))
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However, a recent small study found probiotics after antibiotics actually delayed repopulation of good bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract.
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Jennifer Gunter (The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine)
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A glass or two of red wine may be good for your heart but not for your microbiome. Studies show that just one drink per day in women and two in men can induce dysbiosis and bacterial overgrowth. Levels of good bacteria like Lactobacillus fall, while potential pathogens rise, leading to an increase in toxins and other chemicals that can cause inflammation, damage the liver, and increase permeability of the gut. Most of the overgrowth happens in the small intestine and can lead to malnourishment because the excess bacteria consume the nutrients that the small intestine would normally absorb. Some studies report an incidence of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) in alcoholics that’s three times that of the general population.
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Robynne Chutkan (The Microbiome Solution: A Radical New Way to Heal Your Body from the Inside Out)
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The aim of cleaning, then, should be to reduce bacteria numbers—but not to zero. Even harmful bacteria can be good for us when the immune system uses them for training. A couple of thousand Salmonella bacteria in the kitchen sink are a chance for our immune system to do a little sightseeing. They become dangerous only when they turn up in greater numbers. Bacteria get out of hand when they encounter the perfect conditions: a protected location that is warm and moist with a supply of delicious food.
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Giulia Enders (Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ)
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Sadie scanned the wild tangle of greenery surrounding them. Ferns were striving towards the light, spiraled stems uncoiling into fronds. The sweet scent of honeysuckle mingled with the earthiness of recent rain. Summer rain. She'd always loved that smell, even more so when Bertie told her it was caused by a type of bacteria. It proved that good things could come from bad if the right conditions were applied. Sadie had a vested interest in believing that was true.
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Kate Morton (The Lake House)
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No one knows what causes it. It’s not passed in the air. It’s not sexually transmitted. It’s not a virus or a bacteria, or if it is, it’s nothing scientists have been able to find. At first everyone blamed the fashion industry, then the millennials, and, finally, the water. But the water’s been tested, the millennials aren’t the only ones going incorporeal, and it doesn’t do the fashion industry any good to have women fading away. You can’t put clothes on air. Not that they haven’t tried.
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Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
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For many Westerners, “it’s natural” seems to mean “it’s good.” This view is wrong and comes from shopping in supermarkets and living in landscaped environments. Plants evolved toxins to deter animals, fungi, and bacteria from eating them. The list of “natural” foods that need processing to detoxify them goes on and on. Early potatoes were toxic, and the Andean peoples ate clay to neutralize the toxin. Even beans can be toxic without processing. In California, many hunter-gatherer populations relied on acorns, which, similar to manioc, require a labor intensive, multiday leaching process. Many small-scale societies have similarly exploited hardy, tropical plants called cycads for food. But cycads contain a nerve toxin. If not properly processed, they can cause neurological symptoms, paralysis, and death. Numerous societies, including hunter-gatherers, have culturally evolved an immense range of detoxification techniques for cycads. By contrast with our species, other animals have far superior abilities to detoxify plants. Humans, however, lost these genetic adaptations and evolved a dependence on cultural know-how, just to eat.
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Joseph Henrich (The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter)
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In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can’t conceive. If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains—about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils and fortifying minerals that seep out from every pore and fissure. You are for them the ultimate food court, with the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. By way of thanks, they give you B.O.
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
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Life on earth is such a good story you cannot afford to miss the beginning... Beneath our superficial differences we are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.
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Lynn Margulis
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imported this probiotic, which is called LKM512, from Japan, and now I have friendly bacteria in my gut producing plenty of spermidine for me. No more bad-tasting spermidine to swallow, and there’s a good chance I’ll live longer as a result!
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Dave Asprey (Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever)
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Once we obtain high-quality foods, we still must prepare them properly. The first step in nontoxic food preparation is to wash or peel foods in order to remove agricultural chemicals, bacteria and molds. Waxed foods (such as most cucumbers, eggplant, turnips and apples) definitely should be peeled, because the wax often is covering surface residues of pesticides and fungicides that are applied before the wax is applied; also, questions abound about the safety of some of the waxes. For foods that cannot be peeled, washing under running water for a minute or two does a relatively good cleaning job; using a pure, liquid castile soap (a mild soap made from olive oil and sodium hydroxide) cleans even better. For foods like lettuce,
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Raymond Francis (Never Be Sick Again: Health Is a Choice, Learn How to Choose It)
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Mindful yogurt manufacturers often use bacteria that produce more dextrorotatory (right-turning) than levorotatory (left-turning) lactic acids. Molecules of the two kinds of lactic acid are mirror images of each other. Feeding the human digestive system with levorotatory lactic acid molecules is like giving a left-handed pair of scissors to a right-handed person: they’re hard to handle. That is why it is a good idea to pick yogurt from the supermarket shelves that states on the container: “Contains mainly dextrorotatory [or right-turning] lactic acid.
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Giulia Enders (Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ)
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Day and night. Friends and colleagues were lowered into the earth. Dust to Dust. The dust temporarily settling, as though in a temporary truce, then rising, swirling and rushing David’s laboratory windows, bearing mites and putrescine and bacteria, threatening to begin its irreversible process of decay.
The men watered and watered and watered.
Maybe such unruly persistence is beautiful.
Maybe it is not mad, after all. Maybe it is the quiet work of believing in Good. Of believing in a warmth, which you know does not exist in the stars, to exist in the hearts of fellow humans. Maybe it is something like trust.
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Lulu Miller (Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life)
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Consciousness surely did not, James said, suddenly irrupt into the universe fully formed. The history of life is a history of intermediates, shadings-off, and gray areas. Much about the mind lends itself to a treatment in those terms. Perception, action, memory—all those things creep into existence from precursors and partial cases. Suppose someone asks: Do bacteria really perceive their environment? Do bees really remember what has happened? These are not questions that have good yes-or-no answers. There’s a smooth transition from minimal kinds of sensitivity to the world to more elaborate kinds, and no reason to think in terms of sharp divides.
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Peter Godfrey-Smith (Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness)
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I never leave home without my cayenne pepper. I either stash a bottle of the liquid extract in my pocket book or I stick it in the shopping cart I pull around with me all over Manhattan. When it comes to staying right side up in this world, a black woman needs at least three things. The first is a quiet spot of her own, a place away from the nonsense. The second is a stash of money, like the cash my mother kept hidden in the slit of her mattress. The last is several drops of cayenne pepper, always at the ready. Sprinkle that on your food before you eat it and it’ll kill any lurking bacteria. The powder does the trick as well, but I prefer the liquid because it hits the bloodstream quickly. Particularly when eating out, I won’t touch a morsel to my lips ‘til it’s speckled with with cayenne. That’s just one way I take care of my temple, aside from preparing my daily greens, certain other habits have carried me toward the century mark.
First thing I do every morning is drink four glasses of water. People think this water business is a joke. But I’m here to tell you that it’s not. I’ve known two elderly people who died of dehydration, one of whom fell from his bed in the middle of the night and couldn’t stand up because he was so parched.
Following my water, I drink 8 ounces of fresh celery blended in my Vita-mix. The juice cleanses the system and reduces inflammation. My biggest meal is my first one: oatmeal. I soak my oats overnight so that when I get up all I have to do is turn on the burner. Sometimes I enjoy them with warm almond milk, other times I add grated almonds and berries, put the mixture in my tumbler and shake it until it’s so smooth I can drink it. In any form, oats do the heart good.
Throughout the day I eat sweet potatoes, which are filled with fiber, beets sprinkled with a little olive oil, and vegetables of every variety. I also still enjoy plenty of salad, though I stopped adding so many carrots – too much sugar. But I will do celery, cucumbers, seaweed grass and other greens. God’s fresh bounty doesn’t need a lot of dressing up, which is why I generally eat my salad plain. From time to time I do drizzle it with garlic oil. I love the taste.
I also love lychee nuts. I put them in the freezer so that when I bite into them cold juice comes flooding out. As terrific as they are, I buy them only once in awhile. I recently bit into an especially sweet one, and then I stuck it right back in the freezer. “Not today, Suzie,” I said to myself, “full of glucose!”
I try never to eat late, and certainly not after nine p.m. Our organs need a chance to rest. And before bed, of course, I have a final glass of water. I don’t mess around with my hydration.
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Cicely Tyson (Just as I Am)
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This vitamin cannot be produced by higher plants (the ones that yield our fruits and vegetables), but like vitamin K, vitamin B12 is made by beneficial bacteria living in the small intestine. Meat, fish, poultry, milk products, and eggs are good sources of vitamin B12. Grains don’t naturally contain vitamin B12, but like other B vitamins, it’s
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Carol Ann Rinzler (Nutrition for Dummies)
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Oh, I prefer not to touch people if I can possibly help it. Did you know that we carry an average of thirty-two hundred bacteria from a hundred and fifty species on our hands at any one time? This includes fecal bacteria! If I shook hands with everyone I met at the library, I’d be constantly ill, not to mention contaminated with god knows what.
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Sally Hepworth (The Good Sister)
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Quantity isnt to be equated with quality, but success in propagation is, in the end, as necessary for memes (however excellent) as it is for organisms. Most organisms leave no issue, and most published books have readerships in the dozens, not thousands, before going out of print for good. Even the greatest works of genius must still pass the test of differential replication.
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Daniel C. Dennett (From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds)
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But you know, the longer you listen to this abortion debate, the more you hear this phrase “sanctity of life”. You’ve heard that. Sanctity of life. You believe in it? Personally, I think it’s a bunch of shit. Well, I mean, life is sacred? Who said so? God? Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death. Has been for thousands of years. Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians all taking turns killing each other ‘cause God told them it was a good idea. The sword of God, the blood of the land, vengeance is mine. Millions of dead motherfuckers. Millions of dead motherfuckers all because they gave the wrong answer to the God question. “You believe in God?” “No.” Boom. Dead. “You believe in God?” “Yes.” “You believe in my God? “No.” Boom. Dead. “My God has a bigger dick than your God!” Thousands of years. Thousands of years, and all the best wars, too. The bloodiest, most brutal wars fought, all based on religious hatred. Which is fine with me. Hey, any time a bunch of holy people want to kill each other I’m a happy guy.
But don’t be giving me all this shit about the sanctity of life. I mean, even if there were such a thing, I don’t think it’s something you can blame on God. No, you know where the sanctity of life came from? We made it up. You know why? ‘Cause we’re alive. Self-interest. Living people have a strong interest in promoting the idea that somehow life is sacred. You don’t see Abbott and Costello running around, talking about this shit, do you? We’re not hearing a whole lot from Mussolini on the subject. What’s the latest from JFK? Not a goddamn thing. ‘Cause JFK, Mussolini and Abbott and Costello are fucking dead. They’re fucking dead. And dead people give less than a shit about the sanctity of life. Only living people care about it so the whole thing grows out of a completely biased point of view. It’s a self serving, man-made bullshit story.
It’s one of these things we tell ourselves so we’ll feel noble. Life is sacred. Makes you feel noble. Well let me ask you this: if everything that ever lived is dead, and everything alive is gonna die, where does the sacred part come in? I’m having trouble with that. ‘Cuz, I mean, even with all this stuff we preach about the sanctity of life, we don’t practice it. We don’t practice it. Look at what we’d kill: Mosquitoes and flies. ‘Cause they’re pests. Lions and tigers. ‘Cause it’s fun! Chickens and pigs. ‘Cause we’re hungry. Pheasants and quails. ‘Cause it’s fun. And we’re hungry. And people. We kill people… ‘Cause they’re pests. And it’s fun!
And you might have noticed something else. The sanctity of life doesn’t seem to apply to cancer cells, does it? You rarely see a bumper sticker that says “Save the tumors.”. Or “I brake for advanced melanoma.”. No, viruses, mold, mildew, maggots, fungus, weeds, E. Coli bacteria, the crabs. Nothing sacred about those things. So at best the sanctity of life is kind of a selective thing. We get to choose which forms of life we feel are sacred, and we get to kill the rest. Pretty neat deal, huh? You know how we got it? We made the whole fucking thing up! Made it up!
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George Carlin (More Napalm and Silly Putty)
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The egg industry tells us eggs are good because they are high in protein, but I have already shown you we don’t need the protein, and in fact the FDA does not allow the egg industry to advertise that eggs are a healthy food. Both because even one egg exceeds the recommended daily allowance for cholesterol, and because so many eggs harbor harmful salmonella bacteria, eggs are barely this side of legal.
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Garth Davis (Proteinaholic: How Our Obsession with Meat Is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It)
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Drugs and oils work in opposite ways. Drugs toxify. Oils detoxify. Drugs clog and confuse receptor sites. Oils clean receptor sites. Drugs depress the immune system. Oils strengthen the immune system. Antibiotics attack bacteria indiscriminately, killing both the good and the bad. Oils attack only the harmful bacteria, allowing our body’s friendly flora to flourish.” David Stewart, Ph.D., R.A., The Chemistry of Essential Oils, 2005
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Jen O'Sullivan (The Essential Oil Truth: The Facts Without the Hype)
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antibiotics, the more opportunity they have to develop resistance. What you are left with after a course of antibiotics, after all, are the most resistant microbes. By attacking a broad spectrum of bacteria, you stimulate lots of defensive action. At the same time, you inflict unnecessary collateral damage. Antibiotics are about as nuanced as a hand grenade. They wipe out good microbes as well as bad. Increasing evidence shows that some of the good ones may never recover, to our permanent cost.
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Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
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ultimately, most of us would choose a rich and meaningful life over an empty, happy one, if such a thing is even possible. “Misery serves a purpose,” says psychologist David Myers. He’s right. Misery alerts us to dangers. It’s what spurs our imagination. As Iceland proves, misery has its own tasty appeal. A headline on the BBC’s website caught my eye the other day. It read: “Dirt Exposure Boosts Happiness.” Researchers at Bristol University in Britain treated lung-cancer patients with “friendly” bacteria found in soil, otherwise known as dirt. The patients reported feeling happier and had an improved quality of life. The research, while far from conclusive, points to an essential truth: We thrive on messiness. “The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan is the great unheralded geographer of our time and a man whose writing has accompanied me throughout my journeys. He called one chapter of his autobiography “Salvation by Geography.” The title is tongue-in-cheek, but only slightly, for geography can be our salvation. We are shaped by our environment and, if you take this Taoist belief one step further, you might say we are our environment. Out there. In here. No difference. Viewed that way, life seems a lot less lonely. The word “utopia” has two meanings. It means both “good place” and “nowhere.” That’s the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn’t want to live in the perfect place, either. “A lifetime of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on Earth,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman. Ruut Veenhoven, keeper of the database, got it right when he said: “Happiness requires livable conditions, but not paradise.” We humans are imminently adaptable. We survived an Ice Age. We can survive anything. We find happiness in a variety of places and, as the residents of frumpy Slough demonstrated, places can change. Any atlas of bliss must be etched in pencil. My passport is tucked into my desk drawer again. I am relearning the pleasures of home. The simple joys of waking up in the same bed each morning. The pleasant realization that familiarity breeds contentment and not only contempt. Every now and then, though, my travels resurface and in unexpected ways. My iPod crashed the other day. I lost my entire music collection, nearly two thousand songs. In the past, I would have gone through the roof with rage. This time, though, my anger dissipated like a summer thunderstorm and, to my surprise, I found the Thai words mai pen lai on my lips. Never mind. Let it go. I am more aware of the corrosive nature of envy and try my best to squelch it before it grows. I don’t take my failures quite so hard anymore. I see beauty in a dark winter sky. I can recognize a genuine smile from twenty yards. I have a newfound appreciation for fresh fruits and vegetables. Of all the places I visited, of all the people I met, one keeps coming back to me again and again: Karma Ura,
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Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)
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Ever since the end of World War II, when antibiotics arrived like jingle-clad, ultramodern cleaning products, we’ve been swept up in antigerm warfare. But in a recent article published in Archives of General Psychiatry, the Emory University neuroscientist Charles Raison and his colleagues say there’s mounting evidence that our ultraclean, polished-chrome, Lysoled modern world holds the key to today’s higher rates of depression, especially among young people. Loss of our ancient bond with microorganisms in gut, skin, food, and soil plays an important role, because without them we’re not privy to the good bacteria our immune system once counted on to fend off inflammation. “Since ancient times,” Raison says, “benign microorganisms, sometimes referred to as ‘old friends,’ have taught the immune system how to tolerate other harmless microorganisms, and in the process reduce inflammatory responses that have been linked to most modern illnesses, from cancer to depression.” He raises the question of “whether we should encourage measured reexposure to benign environmental microorganisms
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Diane Ackerman (The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us)
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In addition to feeding your gut bacteria, it turns out there is a form of citrus fiber called modified citrus pectin (MCP) that has almost magical anti-aging powers. It’s good at removing lead, cadmium, arsenic, and thallium. In one study, about 15 grams of modified citrus pectin powder per day for five days caused the study subjects to pass significantly higher levels of metals through their urine. Specifically, the amount of arsenic leaving the body increased by 130 percent, cadmium levels increased by 150 percent, and lead levels increased by 560 percent.30
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Dave Asprey (Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever)
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Depending on who’s living in your gut, you may or may not benefit from what you eat. Or be harmed. Charred red meat has long been called a carcinogen, but in fact it is only the raw material for making carcinogens. Without the gut bacteria that break it down, the raw goods are harmless. (This applies to drugs too; depending on the makeup of your gut flora, the efficacy of a drug may vary.) The science is new and extremely complex, but the bottom line is simple. Changing people’s bacteria is turning out to be a more effective strategy for treatment and prevention of disease than changing their diet.
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Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
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Daily Fertility Protocol GI cleanse formula on days 1–10: Take 1 to 3 a day to cleanse the candida. Probiotic defense formula on days 11–15: Take 1 capsule, three times a day to feed your body the good bacteria and support your immune system. Detoxification complex: 2 a day to help nourish and detox body filters, liver, kidney, spleen. Detoxification gel caps: 2 a day to help open up the liver ducts so it doesn’t become clogged with the cleansing you are about to do. Lemon essential oil in all your water to assist liver in its work. Basic vitality supplements: Take as directed to nourish your body with the perfect amount of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and omega 3s it needs. Women’s estrogen complex: 1 a day to help eliminate bad estrogens in your body. Bone complex: 4 a day for bone and hormone support. Grapefruit essential oil: 10 to 15 drops under tongue or in veggie capsule once a day to help balance progesterone. You can split this up into a dose in the morning and another in the evening. Women’s monthly blend: Apply to low abdomen, wrists, and back of neck to help balance hormones and mood swings. Avoid sugar, grains, dairy, fruit juice, and caffeine. Follow this protocol until pregnant, then discontinue GI cleansing complex and continue everything else.
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Stephanie Fritz (Essential Oils for Pregnancy, Birth & Babies)
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Overproduction of gas is not a pleasant thing—it bloats the gut, making us feel uncomfortable—but passing a bit of wind is not only necessary, it is healthy, too. We are living creatures with a miniature world living inside us, working away and producing many things. Just as we release exhaust fumes into the Earth’s atmosphere, so must our microbes, too. It may make a funny sound and it may smell a bit, but not necessarily. Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli, for instance, do not produce any unpleasant odors. People who never need to break wind are starving their gut bacteria and are not good hosts for their microbe guests. Pure prebiotics can be bought at
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Giulia Enders (Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ)
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Our modern diets and lifestyles are synergistically ravaging our mitochondria. Our mitochondria and the greater cells that house them co-evolved over eons in relationship with our environment. Their mechanisms work in connection with a combination of inputs and information that come from the outside world into our bodies and ultimately into them. Certain kinds of nutrients, sunlight, and information from bacteria in the gut, among other things, all help trigger or supply the cells and their powerhouses with what they require to work. But many of those inputs and information streams have changed radically, resulting in blocks to proper mitochondrial function and downright damage to
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Casey Means (Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health)
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I would suggest that it is only because we all tacitly do believe in something like Huneker's shocking distinction that most of us are willing to eat animals of one sort or another, to smash flies, swat mosquitos, fight bacteria with antibiotics, and so forth. We generally concur that "men" such as a cow, a turkey, a frog, and a fish all possess some spark of consciousness, some kind of primitive "soul", but by God, it's a good deal smaller than ours is-and that, no more and no less, is why we "men" feel that we have the perfect right to extinguish the dim lights in the heads of these fractionally-souled beasts and to gobble down their once warm and wiggling, now chilled and stilled protoplasm with limitless gusto, and not to feel a trace of guilt while doing so.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid)
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Our brains, for instance, are 70 percent fat, mostly in the form of a substance known as myelin that insulates nerve cells and, for that matter, all nerve endings in the body. Fat is the primary component of all cell membranes. Changing the proportion of saturated to unsaturated fats in the diet, as proponents of Keys’s hypothesis recommended, might well change the composition of the fats in the cell membranes. This could alter the permeability of cell membranes, which determines how easily they transport, among other things, blood sugar, proteins, hormones, bacteria, viruses, and tumor-causing agents into and out of the cell. The relative saturation of these membrane fats could affect the aging of cells and the likelihood that blood cells will clot in vessels and cause heart attacks.
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
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Sourdough isn't only for bread. Any grain-based baked good- from crackers to waffles, from muffins to pasta, can be made with a wild yeast starter. Why would the home baker want to incorporate sourdough into their regular baking? First, it's an excellent way to use the starter you remove during feedings. Instead of throwing the excess in the trash, add it to your pancake batter or chocolate chip cookies. Second, a sourdough starter is an ecosystem of wild yeasts and beneficial bacteria that work together to add B-vitamins to grains, to break down gluten for better digestion, and to neutralize phytic acid and enzyme inhibitors. In other words, it's good for you. And finally, because sourdough eventually becomes a way of life. Experimenting with different ways of using it is one of the most satisfying aspects of using wild yeast in your kitchen.
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Christa Parrish (Stones For Bread)
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Reality is everything that exists. That sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Actually, it isn’t. There are various problems. What about dinosaurs, which once existed but exist no longer? What about stars, which are so far away that, by the time their light reaches us and we can see them, they may have fizzled out?
We’ll come to dinosaurs and stars in a moment. But in any case, how do we know things exist, even in the present? Well, our five senses — sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste — do a pretty good job of convincing us that many things are real: rocks and camels, newly mown grass and freshly ground coffee, sandpaper and velvet, waterfalls and doorbells, sugar and salt. But are we only going to call something ‘real’ if we can detect it directly with one of our five senses?
What about a distant galaxy, too far away to be seen with the naked eye? What about a bacterium, too small to be seen without a powerful microscope? Must we say that these do not exist because we can’t see them? No. Obviously we can enhance our senses through the use of special instruments: telescopes for the galaxy, microscopes for bacteria. Because we understand telescopes and microscopes, and how they work, we can use them to extend the reach of our senses — in this case, the sense of sight — and what they enable us to see convinces us that galaxies and bacteria exist.
How about radio waves? Do they exist? Our eyes can’t detect them, nor can our ears, but again special instruments — television sets, for example — convert them into signals that we can see and hear. So, although we can’t see or hear radio waves, we know they are a part of reality. As with telescopes and microscopes, we understand how radios and televisions work. So they help our senses to build a picture of what exists: the real world — reality. Radio telescopes (and X-ray telescopes) show us stars and galaxies through what seem like different eyes: another way to expand our view of reality.
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Richard Dawkins (The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True)
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Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us. The lines of change are down. We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.
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John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)
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There's a rumor Barsky's Chemistry Club is cultivating some fierce bacteria in the lab," Frankie informed me a few minutes later, after I'd related Mademoiselle Winslow's ultimation, and my soon-to-be tutoring sessions with Alex. "I bet we could break in and get you a good dose of something. Put the kibosh on the tutoring. Could be a little pinkeye, could be leprosy..." He took a cheerful bite of his taco, which flaked everywhere.
"Frankie!" Sadie scolded. "That's awful." She'd already finished her apple and Belgian endive. To me, "If it's this or fail French, well, you don't know; Alex might be just what you need."
"Oh,yeah,he's a prince," Frankie muttered. "Abso-friggin-lutely guaranteed to man up and do the right thing."
With that,he reached over and stole my french fries. He'd already eaten the baggie of almonds Sadie had decided had too much fat. Apparently, she and I were both obsessing with our appearance. She was having a hate-hate day with her upper arms. I was wondering if I was about to be at the tutorial mercy of the guy who'd looked right through me, or the guy who looked at me like I'd never been scarred at all.
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Melissa Jensen (The Fine Art of Truth or Dare)
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James and Colleen Simmons, authors of Daniel's Challenge and Original Fast Foods, and owners of LDShealth.ning.com, have this to say on the subject: “The commercial bread-making industry figured out how to isolate strains of yeast that made bread raise very quickly compared to the old-fashion bread-making method; soon sourdough starts became a thing of the past for most of us. What we didn't know when we traded Old-World leavening techniques for quick-rise yeasts, is that not everything in wheat is good for you. In fact, there are several elements in wheat that are down-right problematic and that have led to grain intolerances in about 20 percent of today's population. When you compare what happens to the bread when it is leavened with commercial yeasts versus a good sourdough starter, another story unfolds…. The sourdough starter contains several natural strains of friendly bacteria and yeasts that also cause bread to rise; however, these friendly bacteria also neutralize the harmful effects of the grain. They neutralize phytic acids that otherwise prevent minerals found in the grain from being absorbed properly; they predigest the gluten, and they also neutralize lignans and tanins found in wheat.”1
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Caleb Warnock (The Forgotten Skills of Self-Sufficiency Used by the Mormon Pioneers (Forgotten Skills of Self-Reliance Series by Caleb Warnock Book 1))
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The most celebrated germ expert in the world is almost certainly Dr. Charles P. Gerba of the University of Arizona, who is so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Escherichia, after the bacterium Escherichia coli. Dr. Gerba established some years ago that household germs are not always most numerous where you would expect them to be. In one famous survey he measured bacterial content in different rooms in various houses and found that typically the cleanest surface of all in the average house was the toilet seat. That is because it is wiped down with disinfectant more often than any other surface. By contrast the average desktop has five times more bacteria living on it than the average toilet seat. The dirtiest area of all was the kitchen sink, closely followed by the kitchen counter, and the filthiest object was the kitchen washcloth. Most kitchen cloths are drenched in bacteria, and using them to wipe counters (or plates or breadboards or greasy chins or any other surface) merely transfers microbes from one place to another, affording them new chances to breed and proliferate. The second most efficient way of spreading germs, Gerba found, is to flush a toilet with the lid up. That spews billions of microbes into the air. Many stay in the air, floating like tiny soap bubbles, waiting to be inhaled, for up to two hours; others settle on things like your toothbrush. That is, of course, yet another good reason for putting the lid down.
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
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Autoimmune Disease—the “Leak” in Your Gut Autoimmune diseases are a disaster and there are no good medicines available (steroids work, but the treatment is worse than the disease). They’ve been around for centuries, but there’s been a clear uptick in the last fifty years. Why? Two hypotheses have been proffered to explain it: the barrier hypothesis (our skin or lungs are letting in antigens) and the hygiene hypothesis (we don’t eat dirt and are too hygienic). But in fact, in the gut, they’re the same thing; because the gut is the dirtiest place in the world—one hundred trillion bacteria to have to fend off at all times—you don’t need an intestine, you need a fortress. We’ve known for a while that leaky gut is akin to chinks in the walls of that fortress. Antigens, like enemy soldiers, escape through those chinks into the bloodstream, where T cells and antibodies react against them. But in a case of mistaken identity, these immune cells then accidentally identify parts of your body as foreign invaders and generate an immune response to kill them off, a process termed molecular mimicry. Then there are two new twists. First, it appears that one autoimmune disease, called ankylosing spondylitis, produces antibodies to a gut bacterium called Klebsiella pneumoniae. Conversely, a different autoimmune disease called rheumatoid arthritis produces antibodies to a second gut bacterium called Proteus mirabilis. Now, this might not seem that earth-shattering, but recent work has shown that the refined carbohydrates in processed food feed those two bacteria in particular, and that carbohydrate restriction improves both of these diseases. Indeed, a low-sugar, high-fiber Mediterranean diet has been shown to be efficacious at prevention and treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Furthermore, introduction of fiber to the diet appears to improve asthma (frequently an autoimmune disease), likely by improving gut function and reducing inflammation.
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Robert H. Lustig (Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine)
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Suppose you entered a boat race. One hundred rowers, each in a separate rowboat, set out on a ten-mile race along a wide and slow-moving river. The first to cross the finish line will win $10,000. Halfway into the race, you’re in the lead. But then, from out of nowhere, you’re passed by a boat with two rowers, each pulling just one oar. No fair! Two rowers joined together into one boat! And then, stranger still, you watch as that rowboat is overtaken by a train of three such rowboats, all tied together to form a single long boat. The rowers are identical septuplets. Six of them row in perfect synchrony while the seventh is the coxswain, steering the boat and calling out the beat for the rowers. But those cheaters are deprived of victory just before they cross the finish line, for they in turn are passed by an enterprising group of twenty-four sisters who rented a motorboat. It turns out that there are no rules in this race about what kinds of vehicles are allowed. That was a metaphorical history of life on Earth. For the first billion years or so of life, the only organisms were prokaryotic cells (such as bacteria). Each was a solo operation, competing with others and reproducing copies of itself. But then, around 2 billion years ago, two bacteria somehow joined together inside a single membrane, which explains why mitochondria have their own DNA, unrelated to the DNA in the nucleus.35 These are the two-person rowboats in my example. Cells that had internal organelles could reap the benefits of cooperation and the division of labor (see Adam Smith). There was no longer any competition between these organelles, for they could reproduce only when the entire cell reproduced, so it was “one for all, all for one.” Life on Earth underwent what biologists call a “major transition.”36 Natural selection went on as it always had, but now there was a radically new kind of creature to be selected. There was a new kind of vehicle by which selfish genes could replicate themselves. Single-celled eukaryotes were wildly successful and spread throughout the oceans.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
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Change Your Look With These Top Notch Fashion Tips
In fashion, there aren't any set rules. There is no one right way to be fashionable. Read a lot of different sources and then take what you've learned, pick it apart and use the tips that are best for you. Continue reading to learn great advice that you can tailor to your own wants and needs.
If you like a shirt or skirt think about getting it in more than one color. Because clothes come in so many varying cuts and styles, you're likely find it difficult to find clothes that fit well for your body type. When you do just get more than one so that you can feel great more often.
If you have thick or very curly hair, using a gel product will help you to create the style you desire. Work the product into towel-dried hair and then style it as you want. You can allow it to dry naturally, or use a hair drier. This is especially helpful in humid weather.
In today's business world, it is imperative that men be well dressed. Therefore, it is essential to shop for top drawer clothing when buying clothes for your next interview. To begin your search, look through today's business magazines to ensure your wardrobe matches the top executives. Look for whether men are wearing cuffed pants or hemmed pants, ties with designs or solid ties as well as what type of shoe is currently in style.
Skimpy tops are comfortable to wear in hot weather, but be careful if you are a big busted gal. Your figure needs good support, and you will feel more secure if you wear a sports bra under a lightweight top that has skinny straps and no shape of its own.
Don't overstock your beauty kit with makeup. Just choose a few colors that match the season. Consider your needs for day and evening applications. Makeup can go bad if it's opened, just like other products. Bacteria can build on it, too.
Have yourself professionally fitted for a bra. An ill-fitting brassiere is not only unflattering, but it affects how your clothing fits. Once you know your true size, buy a few bras in different styles and cuts. A plunge or demi-cup bra, a strapless bra, and a convertible bra give you versatile options.
The thing about fashion is that it's a very easy topic once you get to know a little bit about it. Use the ideas you like and ignore the rest. It's okay not to follow every trend. Breaking away from the trends is better if you desire to be unique.
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David (Hum® Político (Humor Político, #1))
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So why haven’t we been visited? Maybe the probability of life spontaneously appearing is so low that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy—or in the observable universe—on which it happened. Another possibility is that there was a reasonable probability of forming self-reproducing systems, like cells, but that most of these forms of life did not evolve intelligence. We are used to thinking of intelligent life as an inevitable consequence of evolution, but what if it isn’t? The Anthropic Principle should warn us to be wary of such arguments. It is more likely that evolution is a random process, with intelligence as only one of a large number of possible outcomes.
It is not even clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value. Bacteria, and other single-cell organisms, may live on if all other life on Earth is wiped out by our actions. Perhaps intelligence was an unlikely development for life on Earth, from the chronology of evolution, as it took a very long time—two and a half billion years—to go from single cells to multi-cellular beings, which are a necessary precursor to intelligence. This is a good fraction of the total time available before the Sun blows up, so it would be consistent with the hypothesis that the probability for life to develop intelligence is low. In this case, we might expect to find many other life forms in the galaxy, but we are unlikely to find intelligent life.
Another way in which life could fail to develop to an intelligent stage would be if an asteroid or comet were to collide with the planet. In 1994, we observed the collision of a comet, Shoemaker–Levy, with Jupiter. It produced a series of enormous fireballs. It is thought the collision of a rather smaller body with the Earth, about sixty-six million years ago, was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. A few small early mammals survived, but anything as large as a human would have almost certainly been wiped out. It is difficult to say how often such collisions occur, but a reasonable guess might be every twenty million years, on average. If this figure is correct, it would mean that intelligent life on Earth has developed only because of the lucky chance that there have been no major collisions in the last sixty-six million years. Other planets in the galaxy, on which life has developed, may not have had a long enough collision-free period to evolve intelligent beings.
A third possibility is that there is a reasonable probability for life to form and to evolve to intelligent beings, but the system becomes unstable and the intelligent life destroys itself. This would be a very pessimistic conclusion and I very much hope it isn’t true.
I prefer a fourth possibility: that there are other forms of intelligent life out there, but that we have been overlooked. In 2015 I was involved in the launch of the Breakthrough Listen Initiatives. Breakthrough Listen uses radio observations to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, and has state-of-the-art facilities, generous funding and thousands of hours of dedicated radio telescope time. It is the largest ever scientific research programme aimed at finding evidence of civilisations beyond Earth. Breakthrough Message is an international competition to create messages that could be read by an advanced civilisation. But we need to be wary of answering back until we have developed a bit further. Meeting a more advanced civilisation, at our present stage, might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus—and I don’t think they thought they were better off for it.
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Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
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Solidarity has its roots in love, Peter. We can say that solidarity is empathy, affection or good feelings. The solidarity, the affection, the good feelings, the empathy or the love that the beings radiate and receive, is an energy of a certain class, a very fine energy, the finest that exists, and it can be measured by instruments like the ones we have.” “Seriously?” “Of course, because it’s a force, a vibration, an energy, which penetrates the entire Universe, which made the Universe possible. So, it could be said that love is a ‘vitamin’ that all life forms need, and the more they need, the greater their evolution.” “How is that?” “A dog or a dolphin, they need more affection than a worm or a bacteria, right?” “Oh, sure.” “And a human being, even more.” “It’s true!” When I saw that so clearly, I didn't feel as bad as before because of my fear that ... I’m almost ashamed to confess it ... Well, this is a secret, shhh ... (my fear that nobody loves me) ... But now I understood that needing greater affection is not a sign of weakness, but of greater distance from a bacteria, a worm and a fly. Good!
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Enrique Barrios (Omi of the Stars)
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In 2017, three research physiologists won the Nobel Prize for their four decades of work unraveling the mysteries of the circadian rhythm in biology. They found that the diurnal rhythm of nature affects the functioning of cells in plants, animals, humans, and even some single-cell bacteria. Specific genes change the function of cells based on the time of day. While this may seem like an esoteric set of discoveries, the new field of chronobiology has practical applications that have revolutionary implications for the future of wellness.
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Suhas Kshirsagar (Change Your Schedule, Change Your Life: How to Harness the Power of Clock Genes to Lose Weight, Optimize Your Workout, and Finally Get a Good Night's Sleep (How to Harness the Pro))
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Research shows that soluble fiber is metabolized by bacteria in the colon, and can increase fecal output by stimulating the growth of healthy intestinal bacteria and fatty acids.1 Because of this, soluble fiber is an important source of fuel for the colon.2 Good sources of soluble fiber include beans; peas; oats; certain fruits like plums, bananas, and apples; and certain vegetables like broccoli, sweet potatoes, and carrots.
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Michael Matthews (Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body)
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Morris’s research found that flu vaccines often induced fever in children and in pregnant women, and serious harm to the fetus. He worried that there were hidden risks for everyone because the vaccine was “literally loaded with extraneous bacteria.”18 According to Dr. Morris, “There is a great deal of evidence to prove that immunization of children does more harm than good.”19 In what serves as a concise epithet for his crosses, Dr. Morris stated, “There is a close tie between government scientists and manufacturing scientists. My results were hurting the market for flu vaccines.”20
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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When Mom says “bong,” she means her nebulizer. It turns water into vapor, and she huffs it all day like a singer breathing hot mist before a performance. Except Mom’s machine is handheld. I’m surprised she doesn’t carry it in a gun sling. But my mom is not just inhaling water. “Let’s get some colloidal silver in those lungs,” she says. Second to prayer, colloidal silver is Mom’s insurance policy on life. She makes her own, soaking two silver rods in a glass vat of water that sits next to her kitchen sink. I’ll let her explain it. This is from one of her emails telling me how to live forever: “I use distilled water and 99% pure silver rods. The rods are connected to a positive and negative charge (think of a jumper cable for your car) and they are immersed in the distilled water. Some people leave the rods in the water 2–4 hours. I leave mine in for 8–12 hours so my silver water is extra strength and powerful…I drink ¼ cup colloidal silver in a glass of water before bed, and have for years and years. RARELY am I ever sick. I take a bottle of colloidal silver on every trip (especially overseas) in case I pick up a stomach bug or am around anyone who is sick. I use it on wounds, use it for pink eye, ear infections, the flu, and more because it kills over 600 viruses and most bacteria, including MRSA. There are also studies that show the benefits of colloidal silver against cancer.” Every time I’m home, she gives me a bottle of the stuff to take back to Los Angeles. I, like a good millennial, googled its effectiveness. The scientific establishment seems to believe that colloidal silver does approximately nothing good, and in large quantities, some bad. Perhaps you’ve seen the viral meme of the old blue man? He consumed so much colloidal silver that his skin dyed blue from the inside. He looks like a Smurf with a white beard. Well, he looked like a Smurf. He’s dead. Maybe from something common like heart failure, but… When I told my mother this, she wouldn’t hear it. “I know it works. I’ve been using it for years. I don’t care what those articles say. I’ve read hundreds of articles about it.
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Jedidiah Jenkins (Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences)
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We’re talking about cellulose plant fiber, especially the parts of raw vegetables and fruits that your body can’t easily digest. This stuff—also known as prebiotics—is gold for your microbiome. It’s the material that serves as food for good gut bacteria. It’s pretty simple to get plenty of prebiotics: Eat the parts of vegetables you normally toss out: the end of carrots, the stump of the lettuce head, the stemmed tips of green beans. This is cellulose fiber (aka insoluble fiber). It gets down to the large intestine undigested, where the good bacteria is waiting to feast.
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Frank Lipman (The New Rules of Aging Well: A Simple Program for Immune Resilience, Strength, and Vitality)
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On the other hand, by eating foods rich in prebiotics, in other words, increasing “whole plant food consumption,”7471 we may select for and foster the growth of our own good bacteria.
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Michael Greger (How Not to Age: The Scientific Approach to Getting Healthier as You Get Older)
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As I’ve discussed, prebiotics are the food components that feed and nourish the good bacteria in the gut, like fiber and resistant starch.
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Michael Greger (How Not to Age: The Scientific Approach to Getting Healthier as You Get Older)
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If your goal is metabolic flexibility, carbs are a tool that can help when used carefully. A diet that is too low in good carbs blocks your liver from burning triglycerides. Carbs also help your liver make glutathione,12 activate thyroid hormones,13 lower cortisol,14 and feed your good bacteria.
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Alan Christianson (The Metabolism Reset Diet: Repair Your Liver, Stop Storing Fat, and Lose Weight Naturally)
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For example, about 30 percent of the caloric content of human breast milk is made of “indigestible” oligosaccharides.7535 Though we may not be able to digest them, guess who can? Bifidobacterium infantis, good bacteria in the guts of infants. That’s how important the human-bacteria relationship is. We were designed to be a symbiotic species.
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Michael Greger (How Not to Age: The Scientific Approach to Getting Healthier as You Get Older)
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Solve this: by taking the following supplements: Vitamin D, as people suffering from gut problems are usually deficient in this vitamin 25–50mg of zinc, 2–4mg of copper, 800mcg of folic acid and 800mcg of vitamin B12, all of which can help repair the gut; and check your iron status too Supplements of homoeostatic soil organisms (HSOs), good-guy organisms found naturally in soil that were part of the human diet before 1930 – these have been shown to calm an inflamed gut Bentonite, or hydrated aluminium silicate, which has the remarkable ability to get bacteria and viruses to stick to it – since bentonite is not absorbed, it passes through the colon, taking toxins with it
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Lynne McTaggart (Arthritis: Drug-Free Alternatives to Prevent and Relieve Arthritis (What Doctors Don't Tell You))
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In Brazil, the rainforests of the Amazon are being destroyed at an alarming rate by bulldozing and burning. There are many excellent reasons to prevent this continuing – loss of habitat for organisms, production of carbon dioxide from burning trees, destruction of the culture of native Indian tribes, and so on. What is not a good reason, though, is the phrase that is almost inevitably trotted out, to the effect that the rainforests are the ‘lungs of the planet’. The image here is that the ‘civilized’ regions – that is, the industrialized ones – are net producers of carbon dioxide. The pristine rainforest, in contrast, produces a gentle but enormous oxygen breeze, while absorbing the excess carbon dioxide produced by all those nasty people with cars. It must do, surely? A forest is full of plants, and plants produce oxygen. No, they don’t. The net oxygen production of a rainforest is, on average, zero. Trees produce carbon dioxide at night, when they are not photosynthesizing. They lock up oxygen and carbon into sugars, yes – but when they die, they rot, and release carbon dioxide. Forests can indirectly remove carbon dioxide by removing carbon and locking it up as coal or peat, and by releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. Ironically, that’s where a lot of the human production of carbon dioxide comes from – we dig it up and burn it again, using up the same amount of oxygen. If the theory that oil is the remains of plants from the carboniferous period is true, then our cars are burning up carbon that was once laid down by plants. Even if an alternative theory, growing in popularity, is true, and oil was produced by bacteria, then the problem remains the same. Either way, if you burn a rainforest you add a one-off surplus of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but you do not also reduce the Earth’s capacity to generate new oxygen. If you want to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide permanently, and not just cut short-term emissions, the best bet is to build up a big library at home, locking carbon into paper, or put plenty of asphalt on roads. These don’t sound like ‘green’ activities, but they are. You can cycle on the roads if it makes you feel better.
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Terry Pratchett (The Science of Discworld (Science of Discworld, #1))
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There seems to be a microbiome “signature” of frailty. Fecal samples from frail individuals show a striking lack of bacterial diversity5698 and, in particular, a deficit of fiber-eating “good bacteria”5699 such as Lactobacillus.
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Michael Greger (How Not to Age: The Scientific Approach to Getting Healthier as You Get Older)
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why is it good to burn fat? Well, among other things, the body has a bad habit of using fat as a temporary garbage bin, where it stores everything from drug residue, bacteria, debris, and environmental toxins. If you force your body into burning fat, you’ll get rid of those toxins at the same time.
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Lina Nertby Aurell (Food Pharmacy: A Guide to Gut Bacteria, Anti-Inflammatory Foods, and Eating for Health)
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How to avoid food poisoning | Free health article.
Food poisoning affects an estimated 4.1 million people in Australia every year. The symptoms of food poisoning can range from mild to severe, but there are steps you can take to reduce your risk, says Jean Hailes dietitian Stephanie Pirotta.
Food poisoning is caused by bacteria, toxins or viruses present in the food or drinks we consume. In Australia, food poisoning is commonly due to bacteria, namely the Campylobacter or Salmonella bacteria types.
However, as Ms Pirotta explains, not all bacteria are bad for you; some bacteria in food is normal – and in some cases, such as the good bacteria found in yoghurts, it can even be beneficial.
“Bacteria becomes a problem and can cause food poisoning when they grow to unsafe levels, or if the type of bacteria present in the food is harmful,” says Ms Pirotta.
Symptoms of food poisoning may include nausea (feeling sick), vomiting, stomach pains, diarrhoea (loose watery bowel motions), feeling weak, headache, fever, chills or sweating. When the symptoms start, how long they last and how serious they are can depend on many factors.
A common assumption is that food poisoning is caused by the last thing the person ate. However, this is often not the case, says Ms Pirotta. “Symptoms of the bacteria Campylobacter food poisoning [one of the most common culprits] usually develop two to five days after eating the food,” she says. And which food is usually the guilty party in cases of Campylobacter? “This type of illness is frequently associated with eating undercooked chicken,” says Ms Pirotta.
So how can you best protect yourself? Below Ms Pirotta answers some frequently asked questions.
For More Information please Visit Our Website;-myhomedoctor.com.au/
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Jean Hailes
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For example, it is only in the past few years that scientists have discovered how the brain gets rid of its waste. In other parts of the body, waste is removed in several ways, including via the lymphatic system, a system of vessels that run in parallel to the blood circulatory system. The lymphatic system picks up waste, broken-down cells, and invaders like viruses, bacteria, and fungi and carries them to the lymph glands, where the immune-system cells deal with them. Despite our well-established understanding of this process, we really didn’t know how the brain accomplished the same feat because the lymphatic system had not yet been discovered in the brain. One of the coolest studies I’ve seen in a long time was released last year by Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center.21 Nedergaard’s team showed that during sleep, the size of the neurons in the brain is reduced by up to 60%. This creates a lot of space between brain cells. Then, still during sleep, a microscopic network of lymphatic vessels—the glymphatic system—clears the metabolic waste from these spaces between the neurons. This research shows that you can literally wash your brain of waste products and damage each night, if you sleep well.22 Dr. Jeffrey Iliff, who works in the same lab as Dr. Nedergaard, has shown that more than half of the amyloid beta, a protein that accumulates in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, is washed out of the brain each night via the glymphatic system. This is important because waste buildup in the brain occurs in nearly all people with neurodegenerative diseases, and this buildup may kill neurons, ultimately leading to cognitive diseases and mental deterioration. (Dr. Iliff’s TED Talk “One More Reason to Get a Good Night’s Sleep” is a great watch.)
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Greg Wells (The Ripple Effect: Sleep Better, Eat Better, Move Better, Think Better)
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Half of the foods you have been told to eat for good health are actually New World plants that most of mankind had no prior exposure to, meaning your body, your gut bacteria, and your immune system are ill prepared to tolerate them.
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Steven R. Gundry (The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain)
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As Stephen Jay Gould argued in his book Full House, it makes for good museum copy to talk about an Age of Dinosaurs or an Age of Man, but in reality it's been one long Age of Bacteria on this planet since the days of the primordial soup. The rest of us are mere afterthoughts.
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Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
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The following are all foods you should feel welcome to eat freely (unless, of course, you know they bother your stomach): Alliums (Onions, Leeks, Garlic, Scallions): This category of foods, in particular, is an excellent source of prebiotics and can be extremely nourishing to our bugs. If you thought certain foods were lacking in flavor, try sautéing what you think of as that “boring” vegetable or tofu with any member of this family and witness the makeover. Good-quality olive oil, sesame oil, or coconut oil can all help with the transformation of taste. *Beans, Legumes, and Pulses: This family of foods is one of the easiest ways to get a high amount of fiber in a small amount of food. You know how beans make some folks a little gassy? That’s a by-product of our bacterial buddies chowing down on that chili you just consumed for dinner. Don’t get stuck in a bean rut. Seek out your bean aisle or peruse the bulk bin at your local grocery store and see if you can try for three different types of beans each week. Great northern, anyone? Brightly Colored Fruits and Vegetables: Not only do these gems provide fiber, but they are also filled with polyphenols that increase diversity in the gut and offer anti-inflammatory compounds that are essential for disease prevention and healing. Please note that white and brown are colors in this category—hello, cauliflower, daikon radish, and mushrooms! Good fungi are particularly anti-inflammatory, rich in beta-glucans, and a good source of the immune-supportive vitamin D. Remember that variety is key here. Just because broccoli gets a special place in the world of superfoods doesn’t mean that you should eat only broccoli. Branch out: How about trying bok choy, napa cabbage, or an orange pepper? Include a spectrum of color on your plate and make sure that some of these vegetables are periodically eaten raw or lightly steamed, which may have greater benefits to your microbiome. Herbs and Spices: Not only incredibly rich in those anti-inflammatory polyphenols, this category of foods also has natural digestive-aid properties that can help improve the digestibility of certain foods like beans. They can also stimulate the production of bile, an essential part of our body’s mode of breaking down fat. Plus, they add pizzazz to any meal. Nuts, Seeds, and Their Respective Butters: This family of foods provides fiber, and it is also a good source of healthy and anti-inflammatory fats that help keep the digestive tract balanced and nourished. It’s time to step out of that almond rut and seek out new nutty experiences. Walnuts have been shown to confer excellent benefits on the microbiome because of their high omega-3 and polyphenol content. And if you haven’t tasted a buttery hemp seed, also rich in omega-3s and fantastic atop oatmeal, here’s your opportunity. Starchy Vegetables: These hearty vegetables are a great source of fiber and beneficial plant chemicals. When slightly cooled, they are also a source of something called resistant starch, which feeds the bacteria and enables them to create those fantabulous short-chain fatty acids. These include foods like potatoes, winter squash, and root vegetables like parsnips, beets, and rutabaga. When was the last time you munched on rutabaga? This might be your chance! Teas: This can be green, white, or black tea, all of which contain healthy anti-inflammatory compounds that are beneficial for our microbes and overall gut health. It can also be herbal tea, which is an easy way to add overall health-supportive nutrients to our diet without a lot of additional burden on our digestive system. Unprocessed Whole Grains: These are wonderful complex carbohydrates (meaning fiber-filled), which both nourish those gut bugs and have numerous vitamins and minerals that support our health. Branch out and try some new ones like millet, buckwheat, and amaranth. FOODS TO EAT IN MODERATION
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Mary Purdy (The Microbiome Diet Reset: A Practical Guide to Restore and Protect a Healthy Microbiome)
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Naturally, immunity is a natural physician that fends off all invading bacteria and viruses, whereas food becomes its medicine or trouble since that appears to increase or decrease your immune system; thus, choose the right and healthy food, and adopt this proverb: Eat to be alive, not live to eat.
Experienced and qualified doctors understand the side effects of medicines before the prescription. Indeed, the majority of doctors hold a professional degree and certificate, whereas virtually none of them has the latest and accurate knowledge; as a result, it executes no difference between such doctors and a robot.
When naturopathy experts and spiritual figures predict with significant certainty that you have no cancer or whatever other sickness, it confuses, surprises, and creates suspicious feelings in your mind, whereas doctors have diagnosed metastatic cancer.
What should one believe and what not? However, one’s enemies are still awaiting its death. One breathes, expecting and waiting for the miracle of God; it will soon happen if one believes.
You neither feel trust in your family doctor and specialists nor feel satisfaction with their treatment. You always realize that they do not tell the truth about how risky your disease is, and they never discuss it.
If doctors fail to meet your sufferings of mucus, shortness of breath, and swallowing difficulties because of medication’s side effects, they will indeed put you on medical victimization, ignoring the better quality of life that the medical system promises.
Most doctors work for the insurance companies instead of caring for patients. It is factually a medical crime that doctors, hospitals, or insurance providers put patients at high risk.
Many doctors do not respect patients’ requests to fulfill it because patients want treatment according to international medical guidelines. Such refusal results in the spreading of their suffering. It saddens patients that the doctors only think about the insurance provider and not the patient.
Indeed, such a situation can put one on the track in a dilemma. However, one’s experience and others may prove that none of the medicines give patients a good quality of life, whether homeopathy, allopathy, naturopathy, or even a spiritual one.
If your fate stands as a barrier in front of you, no one sees or realizes what you have faced and is still facing worries about your health.
Factually, robot doctors cannot provide significant information that may help to ease patients’ suffering; there is only one way to change lifestyle and stay strict on diet; it will have a better result than medicine, which is full of toxins that damage patients’ health instead of curing it.
One can think or predict that the medical world has become a medical trade in which one cannot exclude the medical mafia. Is it a valid context that requires an authentic answer?
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Got Milk? For the record, you shouldn’t. I am not advocating for training your gut to handle lactose. We learned about the effect of animal protein and saturated fat on the gut in Chapter 2—less SCFA-producing bacteria, more inflammatory bacteria, increased TMAO production, increased intestinal permeability, and increases in bacterial endotoxin. As we’ve done in the past, when we examine the whole food rather than a sum of its parts, we find that dairy products have been associated with prostate cancer and Parkinson’s disease. Also the link to bone health turns out to be a myth—a prospective study of ninety-six thousand people over twenty-two years showed that milk consumption during teenage years did not protect against hip fracture later in life. In fact, men who drank more milk as a teenager actually had increased risk of hip fracture in the study. In a study of women in Sweden, high milk intake was associated with increased risk of bone fracture, heart disease, cancer, and premature death. One of the first things I do with my patients who have gas, bloating, or diarrhea is to eliminate dairy. You would not believe how many of them are cured just by doing this. Sorry, but milk doesn’t do a body good. The irony is that lactose, which has been vilified through the years as evil, is probably the most redeeming thing about dairy because lactose is actually a prebiotic and can have a beneficial effect on the gut microbiota.
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Will Bulsiewicz (Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, andOptimizing Your Microbiome)
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A closer look at inflammatory foods in the gut Studies keep showing that the complex carbohydrates you’ll find in whole fruits, veggies, legumes, and whole grains are anything but inflammatory. They’re actually anti-inflammatory. But we rely on our gut microbiome to process them, and if there’s damage to the gut then it’s also impaired in carbohydrate processing, which leads to digestive distress. That’s not inflammation, that’s just sloppy processing. It doesn’t hurt you beyond the acute symptoms. But what does hurt you is the effect that you see from animal product consumption—less SCFA-producing good bacteria, more inflammatory bacteria, increased intestinal permeability, release of bacterial endotoxin, creation of carcinogenic secondary bile salts/polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons/N-nitroso compounds/heterocyclic aromatic amines, and vascular disease-fueling TMAO. Yes, it is easier for our body to digest and process meat. We don’t rely on our microbiome as much for that. So you may not feel any discomfort, but keep in mind what’s happening inside you. Silent but deadly.
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Will Bulsiewicz (Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, andOptimizing Your Microbiome)
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secrete bile acids to break the fats down. These acids are another bacterial killing ground for many species, but other bacteria, so-called Bilophila (for “bile-loving”), do well in this environment—especially when saturated fats are involved—and that is not necessarily a good thing. These bacteria can trigger an immune reaction, which may help to explain some of the inflammatory diseases (and associated depression and anxiety) that plague many people on a typical Western—hence, high-fat—diet.
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Scott C. Anderson (The Psychobiotic Revolution: Mood, Food, and the New Science of the Gut-Brain Connection)
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A healthy gut includes a good population of the Lactobacillus bacteria that produce B12, contributing to their psychobiotic properties.
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Scott C. Anderson (The Psychobiotic Revolution: Mood, Food, and the New Science of the Gut-Brain Connection)
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Conjunctivitis: Types, Symptoms, Prevention & Treatment
Conjunctivitis, eye flu or pink eye, is an inflammation of the conjunctiva. The conjunctiva is a transparent membrane covering the eyelid and a part of the eye. Usually, eye flu is caused in the monsoon season by viruses, bacteria, allergies, or other irritants. According to Dr Sunny Narula, MBBS, MD, Consultant- Paediatrician and Neonatologist, eye flu is very common in children during the monsoon. Moreover, in the past few weeks, there has also been a spike in the eye flu cases. Hence, you must take necessary precautions to prevent this from spreading. If you notice any symptoms, visit the best pediatricians in Chandigarh for consultation at the earliest.
What are the Symptoms of Eye Flu?
The most common symptom of eye flu is redness or inflammation of the eye. Other symptoms include:
Itching or burning sensation in the eye.
Watering of the eyes.
Sensitivity to light.
Discharge from eyes.
Sticking of eyelids together.
What are the Types of Conjunctivitis?
The best child specialist doctor in Mohali tells us that there are 3 main types of conjunctivitis:
1.Viral Conjunctivitis
This type is caused by a viral infection including cold or flu. It is highly contagious and lasts up to 2 weeks.
2.Bacterial Conjunctivitis
This type is caused by a bacterial infection. Bacterial conjunctivitis can also cause yellowish-green discharge from the eye.
3.Allergic Conjunctivitis
This type is caused by allergens including pollen or pet dander. It can occur any time of the year and is usually less contagious.
How to Prevent Conjunctivitis?
Conjunctivitis can be prevented by taking the following measures:
Wash your hands frequently, especially before touching your eyes.
Avoid sharing pillows, towels, or other personal items.
Avoid touching your eyes with your hands.
Practice good hygiene, especially during cold or flu season.
Use protective eyewear when swimming or doing any activity with the potential risk of eye exposure.
How to Treat Conjunctivitis?
If you suspect eye flu, the best paediatrician in Mohali recommends the following at-home care tips:
1.Practice Good Hand Hygiene:
The hands of your children can be a potential carrier of viruses or bacteria. Inculcate good hand hygiene habits in them. Wash their hands frequently. Avoid sharing towels, eye drops, or any other item that can spread infection.
2.Warm or Cold Compress:
Apply a clean, warm compress or ice packs to closed eyes as it helps in soothing eyes and reducing swelling. You can use a soft, lint-free cloth soaked in warm water and place it gently over the closed eyelids for a few minutes. Repeat as needed throughout the day.
3.Clean Eyeglasses:
If your child wears glasses, make sure to clean them with mild soap and water to remove any potential contamination.
4.Artificial Tears:
Over-the-counter lubricating eye drops called artificial teas in general can keep eyes moist and prevent irritation. Discuss this with your pediatrician and do not self-medicate.
5.Avoid Eye Touching or Rubbing:
Children can be easily frustrated with the constant eye irritation. They might find comfort in rubbing their eyes. This, however, can further irritate the conjunctiva and spread the infection to the other eye or other people around. Hence, make sure that your child does not touch the infected eye at all.
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Dr. Sunny Narula
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Don’t use Listerine or other antibacterial mouthwashes; these kill the good bacteria too.
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Frank Lipman (The New Rules of Aging Well: A Simple Program for Immune Resilience, Strength, and Vitality)
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Should you be eating soy? There’s been some debate about soy due to the perception of its carrying estrogen, but I want you to understand that phytoestrogens aren’t estrogen, nor do they act like human estrogen. Instead, phytoestrogens are isoflavones, one of the unique phytochemicals in soy beans. There are actually three soy isoflavones: genistein, daidzein, and glycitein. They have a number of health benefits, including: lowering cholesterol, strengthening bones, treating menopausal symptoms, lowering risk of coronary heart disease, and reducing risk of prostate/colon/breast/ovarian cancers. Want even more good news about soy? There are certain gut bacteria that can convert soy isoflavones into an even more beneficial compound called equol. This is like a supercharged isoflavone, giving you even more cardiovascular, bone, and menopausal health benefits. Unfortunately, you need to have the bacteria in order to do this. Equol can be produced by 50 to 60 percent of Asian people but just 30 percent of Westerners. For what it’s worth, diets high in carbohydrates (really meaning fiber) and low in saturated fat are associated with equol production, while antibiotics appear to hinder it. I recommend consuming only non-GMO and organic soy in its whole-foods forms: edamame, tofu, miso, tempeh, tamari, and unsweetened soy milk. Model your soy consumption after the way they do it in Asia. For some delicious ways to consume soy, check out the recipes in Chapter 10.
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Will Bulsiewicz (Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, andOptimizing Your Microbiome)
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important. Isatis (though not discussed in this book) is perhaps the best herb for this (ginger is also good). It should be included if endotoxin release may be a problem.
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Stephen Harrod Buhner (Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria)
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you are treating a systemic infection by a Gram-negative bacteria, the use of an endotoxin scavenger and protectant is often important. Isatis (though not discussed in this book) is perhaps the best herb for this (ginger is also good). It should be included if endotoxin release may be a problem.
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Stephen Harrod Buhner (Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria)
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higher insulin levels than those without acne. High insulin levels are linked to increased production of male hormones that stimulate the production of skin oil, called sebum. When the skin’s oil glands produce too much, sebum can mix with dead skin cells and clog hair follicles, creating an environment where bacteria can thrive. Multiple studies have found that a low-glycemic load (i.e., low sugar) or a low-carbohydrate diet can lead to significant reductions
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Casey Means (Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health)
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Dietary Changes to Improve the 2:16 Ratio There are great foods that can help improve the conversion of estrogen into good metabolites and away from the bad ones. These foods include insoluble dietary fibers, such as lignin found in green beans, peas, carrots, seeds, and Brazil nuts. The reason that dietary fiber, especially lignin, is so beneficial is that it can bind harmful estrogens in the digestive tract, so they can be excreted in the feces instead of being reabsorbed. Dietary fiber also improves the composition of intestinal bacteria so that harmful estrogen metabolites can be excreted from the body. It also decreases the conversion of testosterone into estrogens, maintaining a healthy testosterone level. Sugar and simple carbohydrates cause unfriendly flora to grow in the gastrointestinal tract and disrupt estrogen metabolism. These foods also raise blood sugar and insulin levels, resulting in adverse influences in sex hormone balance. Too many simple carbohydrates have been associated with postmenopausal breast cancer risk among overweight women and women with a large waist
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Daniel G. Amen (Unleash the Power of the Female Brain: Supercharging Yours for Better Health, Energy, Mood, Focus, and Sex)
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pharmacology of its class. A good grasp of the use of specific agents to target specific bacteria leads to
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Donna Coffman (Antibiotics Review)
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Furthermore, because of their completely different chemical mechanisms, viruses are unaffected by the drugs that target bacteria. It has to be a bacterium that’s infecting you for an antibiotic to do any good. (Don’t ask your doctor for an antibiotic if you have the flu; it won’t do a thing except help breed more dangerous bacteria.) Viruses have no cell walls to breach.
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Bill Nye (Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation)
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seems to be a rule of nutritionism that for every good nutrient, there must be a bad nutrient to serve as its foil, the latter a focus for our food fears and the former for our enthusiasms. A backlash against protein arose in America at the turn of the last century as diet gurus like John Harvey Kellogg and Horace Fletcher (about whom more later) railed against the deleterious effects of protein on digestion (it supposedly led to the proliferation of toxic bacteria in the gut) and promoted the cleaner, more wholesome carbohydrate in its place. The legacy of that revaluation is the breakfast cereal, the strategic objective of which was to dethrone animal protein at the morning meal. Ever since, the history of modern
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Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
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Products such as sucralose, saccharin, aspartame, and other nonnutritive artificial sweeteners alter the gut holobiome, killing good bacteria and allowing
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Steven R. Gundry (The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain)
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The antibodies in your breast milk are what will protect her from infection until around six months, when her lining will be thicker and she'll produce antibodies on her own. Your breast milk also assists baby in developing good bacteria that will protect her intestines from pathogens.
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Rea Bochner (How To Raise, Happy, Healthy Newborns Without Losing Your Mind! (0-3 Months) (A Parenthology Series Book 1))
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Because so many people’s inner fermentation tanks are not populated with good bacteria, it is beneficial to consume fermented foods.
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Alejandro Junger (Clean Gut: The Breakthrough Plan for Eliminating the Root Cause of Disease and Revolutionizing Your Health)
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Sugar, wheat, soy, and refined dairy do a number on our digestive system. Not only do they feed bad gut bacteria, they cause insulin spikes (leading to diabetes and weight gain), mess with the balance of your hormones, and damage your mitochondria, which is what produces energy for all the systems in your body to function properly.
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Natalie Loeffler (Transform Your Health: 10 Easy Habits to Lose Weight for Good: Diets Don't Work. Healthy Habits Do. Start These 10 Lifestyle Habits Today to Transform ... Fantastic! (Break The Habit Series Book 1))
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resistant fiber Resistant fiber is the new kid on the block. It is a unique type of starch that is digested, but only many hours later and only by the good bacteria. Also known as resistant starch, this fiber contains calories, but the majority of its calories are not usable and therefore cannot cause weight gain. Resistant fiber is remarkable since it creates little or no insulin response, unlike any other carbohydrate. In fact, it can even produce less of an insulin response than many non-carbohydrate foods like meat, poultry, and eggs. For this reason, many of the low-carb breakfasts on the Adrenal Reset Diet include foods high in resistant fiber. BEST SOURCES: Boiled potatoes, cannellini beans, navy beans, great northern beans, and unripe bananas.
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Alan Christianson (The Adrenal Reset Diet: Strategically Cycle Carbs and Proteins to Lose Weight, Balance Hormones, and Move from Stressed to Thriving)
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When Hamiltonella's genome was sequenced, the real reason behind the bacterium's protective powers became apparent: about half of its DNA actually belonged to a virus. It was a phage - one of those spindly-legged, mucus-loving viruses that we met before. They typically kill bacteria by reproducing inside them and bursting fatally outward. But they can also opt for a more passive lifestyle, where they integrate their DNA into a bacterium's genome and stay there for many generations. Dozens of these phages now hide within Hamiltonella.
The viruses are Hamiltonella's fists; they give the bacterial bodyguard its punch. Oliver showed that when Hamiltonella carries a particular phage strain, it renders aphids almost totally wasp-proof. If the virus disappeared, the same bacterium became useless, and almost all of its aphid hosts succumbed to their parasites. Without the phage, Hamiltonella might as well have been completely absent for all the good it did. The phages could be poisoning the wasps directly: they certainly mass-produce toxins that can attack animal cells, but don't seem to harm the aphids. Alternatively, they could split Hamiltonella apart, causing the bacteria's own toxins to spill onto the wasps. Or maybe the viral and bacterial chemicals are working together. Whatever the case, it is clear that an insect, a bacterium, and a virus have formed an evolutionary alliance against a parasitic wasp that threatens them all.
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Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
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GAPS Diet This diet is intended to heal gut damage in children, which may result in autism, ADHD, severe food allergies, or other outward symptoms. Children who have severe physical and behavioral problems may begin this diet in order to address the underlying causes, which is a so-called “leaky gut.” This means that the good gut flora that should be present isn’t, and that there are “holes” in the gut wall where undigested proteins are leaking through and into the bloodstream, sensitizing the child. There is also an overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria and likely, candida. The GAPS diet[2] addresses this and helps to actually heal the gut.
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Anonymous
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Despite the stunning variety of photoreceptor organs, every animal uses the same kind of light-capturing molecule to do this job. Insects, humans, clams, and scallops all use opsins. Not only can we trace the history of eyes through differences in the structure of their opsins, but we have good evidence that we can thank bacteria for these molecules in the first place.
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Neil Shubin (Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body)
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It is not that simple to adhere to good routines in tri cities wa dentist hygiene, but it is something that you need to do your whole life. You need to stay committed if you want your smile to constantly be a healthy one. This short article is packed with great dental care guidance.
Avoid drinking soda water as part of your daily routine. Beverages rich in sugar can cause dental caries and staining unless you brush your teeth right away. This assists your teeth and naturally your overall health.
It is essential that you brush your teeth regularly. Do it at least twice, preferably post-meal. Take a minimum of two minutes, brushing every surface of your teeth. Never ever brush too harshly, and constantly make use of a tooth paste with fluoride. You ought to also thoroughly floss your teeth afterward.
Do not ever chew on ice. Chewing ice can crack teeth and make it easier for germs that triggers tooth cavities to stick to teeth and develop troubles. In addition, you ought to make use of care when consuming popcorn or nuts because these can also cause damages. If you fear that you have a broken tooth, visit your dental practitioner as soon as possible.
Brilliant use of lipstick can make your teeth look more beautiful. Light average or red coral shades are going to have your teeth looking whiter than they truly are. Lighter shades have the tendency to have a reverse result. If they are white, they can make your teeth appear yellow even!
You have to successfully brush at least two times daily to keep teeth in good shape. It is essential to brush in the early morning in order to remove collected germs from sleeping. During the night, you brush to clean away food debris you gathered during your day.
Does tarter develop up on your teeth rapidly? If you do, you should buy a great anti-tartar tooth paste and mouthwash. Tartar typically kinds on your bottom front teeth and your upper molars. See a dental expert frequently to eliminate tartar.
Do cold and hot foods trigger your teeth to hurt? Select a toothpaste for sensitive gums and teeth, and see a dental expert when you can.
Go to an additional dental professional for a 2nd opinion if your dentist tells you a deep cleaning is needed. This form of cleaning costs a lot more so make certain that you aren't being ripped off.
Does it appear outrageous to pay out $75 for a tooth brush? Well, many dental experts assert that a more pricey electricity toothbrush is one of the most efficient ways of cleaning your teeth, right alongside getting your teeth cleaned at the dental practitioner office. While you will not be removing everything on your teeth 100 percent, you will still get a remarkable clean. Search for models that have numerous styles of heads, and ensure the warranty is excellent!
Take your time when brushing your teeth. Brushing could be something you already do, however you might rush when brushing. Do not make this mistake. Take care and sufficient time while you brush your teeth. Maximize the time when your brushing your teeth. See to it you brush comprehensive for one full minute or more.
Do you really desire to get your tongue pierced? Piercing your tongue makes the location attractive to germs. It could chip off the enamel of your teeth if you aren't careful.
Constantly follow appropriate brushing methods. You must do it as soon as you awaken and right prior to going to sleep. When you are asleep at night, your saliva dries, and this prevents bacteria that cause cavities from working. Make certain you set the timer for at least two minutes and brush around your teeth at a 45-degree angle.
Since these fruits include carbonic acids that can ha
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Do You Dislike Your Teeth Have a look at This Article
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The human body has a hard time digesting prolamins: our digestive enzymes are not very good at breaking apart the bond between two prolamins. The result is twofold: first, gluten is known to cross the intestinal barrier, either intact or partly digested; second, gluten (and other prolamins) can disproportionally feed the bacteria in the gut, leading to gut dysbiosis
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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When researchers explain the methodology of how they performed their research, there is often a portion that describes the preparation of the lab animals. This section explains that standardized such-and-such breed animals (such as Wistar rats) were “put on a Western diet until their cholesterol and inflammation were sufficiently elevated to carry out the research protocol.” What this means is that the Western diet is used to produce specific disease conditions in the lab animals, so that the researchers can carry out their research on different drug effects. Isn't it a bit ironic that poor diet is used to produce disease for drug testing, and yet doctors do not really push good diet as a way of preventing or treating illness?
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Richard Matthews (The Symbiont Factor:How the Gut Bacteria Microbiome Redefines Health, Disease, and Humanity)