Thursday, January 28, 2016

On Fasting and related matters


See below an article with 'scientific' proof of why fasting is good for the body. I usually don't forward 'scientific' proof kind of articles when it comes to food, because I don't believe in so-called science when it comes to food related matters.  The only reason I forward a 'science' backed article is to discredit other 'science' backed articles, which does not necessarily make this particular article true :-).  

The entire establishment is culpable in keeping the population unhealthy, and that includes the food industry, the pharma industry, regulators, 'nutritionists' (one of the fields where the more they learn the more you pity their state of knowledge, since they learn more and more of the wrong things!), and a lot of well intentioned people who don't know better.

So what are the information sources when it comes to things like this? Try Ayurveda, yoga, naturopathy, Chinese Taoist rules, and the prescriptions of various religions on things like fasting (which has nothing to do with whether you believe in God or not).

So what are the rules when it comes to fasting and related matters? This is my list, based on my reading, from the above sources. I will any day stake my life on these sources rather than the modern food and pharma industry. BTW, I have been following most of these rules myself, and they seem to be working fine as far as I am concerned. 

The rules? A top of mind list follows:

1) Eat only when hungry. What is the definition of hungry? The previous meal should have been digested, i.e. moved out of the stomach into the small intestine. 

2) That brings us to the next question: how long does it take for food to digest? A rough guide (indicative only) is, say: fruits, which are the foods most attuned to the human body, take about half an hour to forty minutes to digest. A 'normal' well balanced traditional Indian meal (if you have not over-stuffed yourself) should take perhaps four to six hours. 'Tiffin' especially of the South Indian variety, perhaps two to four hours. Burgers loaded with cheese, etc. will take more than ten hours to digest.

3) What happens if you eat before the previous meal has exited the stomach? Let us say, you eat fruits immediately after a meal. The fruit gets digested fast, but has no way to exit the stomach, since the meal that is still getting digested is blocking it. Not having an exit route, it putrefies and ends up poisoning the entire system. So fruits should be eaten about an hour or more before meals, never after.

4) How much should you eat? Enough to fill half your stomach. Of the other half, one-fourth should be filled with water, and the other one-fourth with air, i.e. should be empty. 

5) What about calories? Counting calories is a harmful thing to do; don't even bother with that nonsense. 

6) What should be the main meal of the day? According to Ayurveda, the digestive fire is maximum at mid-day, so your main meal should be lunch. Breakfast, of course, can be had, but the most important rule is to keep your dinner light, very light. Eat very little in the evening, or not at all (if you can manage that), and eat it at least a couple of hours before you go to sleep. There should be no food in the stomach when you hit the bed.

There is an old saying that the person who eats once a day is a yogi, one who eats twice a day is a bhogi (fortunate person), and one who eats thrice a day is a rogi (a diseased person)!

This modern tendency of doctors advising people to eat every three or four hours is total rubbish. If it is justified on medical grounds, like say diabetes, I have nothing to say except that one should introspect on why one got a lifestyle disease like diabetes in the first place. It is sometimes also justified on the grounds that eating often keeps the metabolic rate high, thus preventing weight gain. That argument to me sounds worse than models justifying chain-smoking on the grounds that smoking kills the appetite thus enabling them to stay thin!

8) What about fasting? Fasting is good. It is good to fast once in a while. There are various ways to fast. You could start, for example, by undergoing a juice fast, where you have only liquids. Or you could just skip four meals in a row. Or whatever. When all you are required to do is not eat, how much theory do you need to support that? Come out of the fast gently, meaning don't visit pizza hut or McD's to break your fast - some juice or fruits or light khichdi as the first meal would make a lot of sense. 

All religions advocate fasting, and for good reason. The body gets the chance to divert its energies to throwing out accumulated waste from the cells, and generally clean itself up. If you keep stuffing yourself, when will you give the body a chance to do that?

The link to the article I mentioned is attached below:

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

FDA Finally Admits Chicken Meat Contains Cancer-Causing Arsenic


See article below on the FDA admitting that chickenfeed with arsenic is cancer causing. The moral of the story: don't eat arsenic laced food? Hardly.

The moral of the story, is: 

Don't believe whatever the FDA tells you. They certify chemicals as safe because it 'has not been proven' to kill, at least no proof can be obtained in the short run. They will reject stuff like fruit juices and make sale illegal because the sellers claim they are good for health! The FDA continues to oppose sale of raw milk - fact is, both pasteurisation and homogenisation are deadly harmful - it is better not to have milk than to have pasteurised or homogenised milk. 

Another fact is that they insist on feeding cows on animal waste, i.e. the waste products of other animals like viscera, etc. are mixed into animal feed for cows; all animals are raised in feedlots, not in natural meadows; the feed itself is laced with antibiotics since otherwise staying in those unnatural conditions result in all kinds of diseases. What they refuse to acknowledge is that: whatever is consumed by an animal is in some form later consumed by us, who feed on the animal. The reductionist theory of feed getting converted to protein, and then to animal flesh, hence there is no problem, misses out on one important fact: all food is transfer of energy (prana or chi) and this gets transferred further up the food chain.  And 'modern' science no doubt finds it acceptable to feed vegetarian animals, with animal waste - the reductionist theory of food science would in fact argue that it is good for their health!

In other words, eat only those animals that have been raised in natural surroundings ("free range", "grass fed", "wild ocean fish") and are fed their natural food (not 'animal feed', 'fish chow in fish farms').

The food industry and lobby will NOW pass some laws against arsenic in animal feed - but what about the hundred other things that are being fed to the animals now in the name of food. No doubt, we will have to wait for some research in future to prove that they are bad, in the meanwhile they will be substituted with something else.

The same problem exists with 'processed food' / food made in factories, by the way. All kinds of chemicals are added to them in order to ensure preservation, long shelf life, colour, texture, taste, easy microwavability, easy cold storage, easy packability, and for addiction (an excess of sugar, salt and fat). What do you do? Read the labels and try to figure out whether those foods are good for you? What will you know by looking at 'calories', 'fat percentage', and sundry other statistics? They are useless, worse, they are misleading. 

Avoid all processed food. Whatever processing you do at home is ok, eating in a local restaurant that cooks fresh food is fine, but any food from food factories should be avoided. That includes things like pasteurised milk, biscuits (that are not made home - btw, try making biscuits at home, they are delicious), breakfast cereals, cool drinks, fruit juices in tetrapacks, ready-to-eat foods, and in short, ,most things that make up your grocery basket today. 

Buy only things which grow. Preferably organically grown. Process them yourself, and this includes things like buying whole grain and getting it ground at your local 'chakki'. Pay special attention to salt (buy only non-processed 'sea salt' (kallu uppu in tamil) or rock salt, not table salt), oil (only cold pressed), and sugar (minimise consumption as much as possible).

Eat only things that spoil (and hence have no shelf life, and hence cannot be ready to eat, 'in packets') but eat them before they spoil.

Cook things at home, or get food delivered from a local 'auntieji' who cooks at her home; or eat in a restaurant which is forced to cook everyday (darshinis or udupi hotels are better than five star hotels, for obvious reasons) since they lack any cold storage facilities.

Eat things within hours of cooking, and definitely do not keep cooked food overnight, whether in the fridge or otherwise.

With that message (which I never tire of repeating) let me wish you a Happy New Year - may this year be free of processed food (to the extent possible) and all other sundry poisons!

(Article attached)

Dinesh Gopalan



FDA Finally Admits Chicken Meat Contains Cancer-Causing Arsenic 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 13, 2013 Share on Facebook Select Language​▼ 

After years of sweeping the issue under the rug and hoping no one would notice, the FDA has now finally admitted that chicken meat sold in the USA contains arsenic, a cancer-causing toxic chemical that's fatal in high doses. But the real story is where this arsenic comes from: It's added to the chicken feed on purpose! Even worse, the FDA says its own research shows that the arsenic added to the chicken feed ends up in the chicken meat where it is consumed by humans. So for the last sixty years, American consumers who eat conventional chicken have been swallowing arsenic, a known cancer-causing chemical. (http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/...) Until this new study, both the poultry industry and the FDA denied that arsenic fed to chickensended up in their meat. The fairy-tale excuse story we've all been fed for sixty years is that "the arsenic is excreted in the chicken feces." There's no scientific basis for making such a claim… it's just what the poultry industry wanted everybody to believe. But now the evidence is so undeniable that the manufacturer of the chicken feed product known as Roxarsone has decided to pull the product off the shelves (http://www.grist.org/food-safety/20…). And what's the name of this manufacturer that has been putting arsenic in the chicken feed for all these years? Pfizer, of course — the very same company that makes vaccines containing chemical adjuvants that are injected into children. Technically, the company making the Roxarsone chicken feed is a subsidiary of Pfizer, called Alpharma LLC. Even though Alpharma now has agreed to pull this toxic feed chemical off the shelves in the United States, it says it won't necessarily remove it from feed products in other countries unless it is forced by regulators to do so. As reported by AP: "Scott Brown of Pfizer Animal Health's Veterinary Medicine Research and Development division said the company also sells the ingredient in about a dozen other countries. He said Pfizer is reaching out to regulatory authorities in those countries and will decide whether to sell it on an individual basis." (http://www.usatoday.com/money/indus…) But even as its arsenic-containing product is pulled off the shelves, the FDA continues its campaign of denial, claiming arsenic in chickens is at such a low level that it's still safe to eat. This is even as the FDA says arsenic is a carcinogen, meaning it increases the risk of cancer. The National Chicken Councilagrees with the FDA. In a statement issued in response to the news that Roxarsone would be pulled from feed store shelves, it stated, "Chicken is safe to eat" even while admitting arsenic was used in many flocks grown and sold as chicken meat in the United States. What's astonishing about all this is that the FDA tells consumers it's safe to eat cancer-causing arsenic but it's dangerous to drink elderberry juice! The FDA recently conducted an armed raid in an elderberry juice manufacturer, accusing it of the "crime" of selling "unapproved drugs." (http://www.naturalnews.com/032…) Which drugs would those be? The elderberry juice, explains the FDA. You see, the elderberry juice magically becomes a "drugs" if you tell people how it can help support good health. The FDA has also gone after dozens of other companies for selling natural herbal products or nutritional products that enhance and support health. Plus, it's waging a war on raw milk which it says is dangerous. So now in America, we have a food and drug regulatory agency that says it's okay to eat arsenic, but dangerous to drink elderberry juice or raw milk. Eat more poison, in other words, but don't consume any healing foods. That's the FDA, killing off Americans one meal at a time while protecting the profits of the very companies that are poisoning us with their deadly ingredients. Oh, by the way, here's another sweet little disturbing fact you probably didn't know about hamburgers and conventional beef: Chicken litter containing arsenic is fed to cows in factory beef operations. So the arsenic that's pooped out by the chickens gets consumed and concentrated in the tissues of cows, which is then ground into hamburger to be consumed by the clueless masses who don't even know they're eating second-hand chicken crap. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027414_c…)... Read More: http://www.whydontyoutrythis.com/2013/08/fda-finally-admits-chicken-meat-contains-cancer-causing-arsenic.html