HOW TO KEEP YOUR IMMUNITY STRONG

With the Covid crisis, "keeping your immunity strong" has become a trending topic. The doctors only talk about it, but they have no clue as to what immunity even means. They don't study such things in medical school. The newspapers publish many articles and suggestions, because it is the trending thing. The journalists who write or, a better term would be compile, have no clue themselves what immunity means.

 

The answers we are seeking is not new. It is all out there, and has been, for ages. Traditional wisdom across cultures, has the answers. However, traditional wisdom never anticipated the onslaught of modern methods of processing food, the allopathic school of clueless doctors, and the pharma and food industry trying their utmost to peddle misinformation.

 

Let us try to go from the ground up, and understand some of these things.

 

Germs are not bad. Germs are everywhere. Our body, as is the body of every living being, is a colony of co-existing "germs". In fact, there are trillions of different varieties of "germs" within us, helping us to survive.

 

The human body has evolved over the years to stay healthy in the environment of the earth. Throw any germ at it, and the body will fight it, develop anti-bodies against it, and remember the precise formulations for ever, so if that germ invades again, the body uses the experience it already has gathered in dealing with it.

 

Part of the human body's defence mechanism is also the skin. The skin is a living organ which is the first defence and shield against the environment.

 

The body has evolved to survive and thrive in nature, that is, when it is exposed to the elements, when it is exposed to sun, wind and water.

 

Emotions play a critical role in maintaining the entire body, including the immune system. Anyone who is anxious, fearful, or angry, or sad, will immediately be susceptible to even a passing cold, since their immunity will be compromised.

 

The body has evolved to eat whole foods grown by nature. All foods have co-evolved with man, and are a synergistic package of nutrients that the body can assimilate and thrive on. It is not possible, or at best sub-optimal, to try to extract "nutrients" in isolation and take them either as foods or supplements.

 

Man is a social animal. A large part of his happiness is linked to meeting other people and bonding with them.

 

A lot of this might seem like simple common sense, but is it? A lot of the advice that is being thrown at us due to Covid, goes against this.

 

The governments, in announcing their lockdowns, and their social distancing measures, are perhaps doing the right thing, or perhaps not. That is a debatable point, not the subject of this article.

 

What should you do, personally,  to keep our immunity high?

 

1.     Keep a positive mental state. Do not read all the bad stuff out there on covid and worry yourself to death. It is just another virus, like a flu, and our body is capable of handling flus. It is out there in the air. How long will you escape it? Where will you run? How will you shut yourself up for ever?

 

You are doing yourself a lot of harm by cowering in fear; when I see people walking around these days, it is difficult to understand whether they are on the Earth or on the Moon!

 

To the extent government regulations or social norms require, by all means wear masks. Otherwise, a mask is not necessary at all, in fact it is a damn nuisance.

 

2.     How often will you wash your hands? Be reasonable about it, and don't overdo it. Washing with soap is still fine, but I don't understand how people can even be using hand sanitizers. Remember, anything that is supposed to kill the bad germs, will also kill the good germs along with it. Every time we wash our hands with alcohol, we are reducing our immunity.

 

 

3.     Don't shut yourself up, away from fresh air and light. Go for that walk, soak in that sun, be out there! By hiding inside your house, afraid of the very air you breathe, you are further destroying your immunity.

 

 

4.     Sleep well. Lack of sleep is an immunity destroyer.

 

5.     Eat right. What constitutes "eating right" is the subject of a whole series of articles, but a few key rules would be as follows. Avoid eating processed foods. Buy stuff from the grocery store and cook at home. Eat only fresh food, within hours of cooking. Eat mainly vegetarian, and eat mainly whole foods. Replace the "processed salt" in your house with Himalayan rock salt or Raw Sea Salt (unprocessed). Replace the "refined oil " you buy with cold pressed oils. Avoid sugar to the extent possible. Avoid milk and milk products to the extent possible, unless you procure organic milk.  

 

Eat a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables. Eat sprouts as part of your diet.

 

Some superfoods that you can include in your diet, in any form, are Amla, Honey (raw and unprocessed only), turmeric (anyway part of our cooking), ginger, black pepper, and lemon (have a limbu sherbet everyday). Seeds, soaked, dried, and lightly roasted, are a great snack, in small quantities every day.

 

If possible, and if the budget permits, buy only organic foodstuff.

 

6.     Exercise.  Your favorite form of exercise is fine, so long as you keep your body moving. Do not sit for too long, get up and stretch and walk around, once every hour at least. If possible, sit on the ground – why are you at the table all the time? You are working from home now, so you are more free to move around. When the body does not move, "prana", the vital force, stagnates. When prana stagnates all kinds of health problems ensue.

 

 

The above suggestions are all broad, I have not gone into details in any of them. If a lot of it seems like common sense, it is. If it seems like a lot of the advice being bandied about nowadays ignores many of these things, it does. If it seems like the world is going collectively insane, then I agree with you fully.

 

Stay home, Stay safe, is the usual way to end any article or conversation nowadays, but I shall eschew that.

 

Go out there, be happy, and keep your immunity strong!

ESCAPE

Everyone wants to run away,

To a distant utopia,

Romantic idylls of sun and sea,

Away from it all!

 

Everyone wants to go and stay,

In heavens drawn from picture books,

Where the lands flow with milk and honey,

And life doesn't intrude!

 

Everyone wants to go elsewhere,

Even God from his paradise,

But he's stuck, he doesn't know where,

He has nowhere to go!

 

Leafy bowers, shady arbours,

Chirping birds amidst babbling brooks,

Are good in story, for the mind

Never likes to stay!

 

Dinesh Gopalan

30 July, 2019

The Story of Milk

Man first lived in the jungle. He ate fruits, nuts and berries, and was happy.

 

Then he started hunting in the plains. Meat entered his diet.

 

Infants were reared on mother's milk, and when they were weaned, they stopped having milk. Which was as it should be.

 

Now, man noticed that all mammals fed their young. Man thought, why not take that milk and have it ourselves?

 

He realised that the milk of other animals would be particularly suited to their young, and not to Man. For, being wise, man knew that that is how God made the world.

 

However, man being man, still went ahead. He found that the milk of goats was the most suitable for humans. However, goats did not produce much milk. Then he looked at the cow. The cow was a docile animal, easy to manage, and it gave a lot of milk. The milk of the cow was not really suited to the human body, but man went ahead anyway. He started keeping cows.

 

Over a period of time, those people who reared cows and had its milk learnt to digest it. Given enough time, man learnt to digest anything, for that was how God made man. Some of these communities only took the milk from the cow, and converted it into tasty things like butter, ghee, curd and the like. Some communities even drank the blood of their cows, in small quantities at a time, so they were not only milking them, they were also blooding them.

 

And thus, milk became a part of the diet. At the same time, there were peoples across the world who could not digest milk, since they never had it, unlike the pastoral people, of say, the Northern part of what is now called India who kept cows and had lots of milk.

 

These pastoral people of India not only depended on the cow for their milk, they elevated the cow to something holy. They started worshipping the cow. Somehow, this meant that they could seize the milk from the cow meant for its calf, but they could never kill it. Killing a cow was decreed to be a sin worse than killing a Brahmin, and killing a Brahmin was a heinous sin, naturally, since the Brahmins wrote the scriptures.

 

The pastoral people raised cows. The cows were taken to the jungle by the cowherds, and they munched on natural rain-fed grass, in peace and contentment, while the cowherds played the flute and kept them entertained. The cows were treated like part of the family and they were well cared for. So the milk that the pastoral people had was happy milk. And they prospered.

 

The many other people who did not keep cows nor have their milk, prospered too, on diets which did not include milk.

 

And then, ages flew by. People across the world had milk, or did not, depending on where they were from.

 

And then man arrived in the modern age. Where everything was being industrialized. Scaled. Multiplied. Distributed. Commoditised. Made more freely available.

 

Milk had to go the same way. There were many people staying in the cities in India who wanted milk. Not least because they were addicted to chai and coffee. They also made many sweets and delicacies from milk, and learnt to like them, and crave them.

 

So they established milk factories. And they started collecting milk from across the countryside. And transporting it to the milk factories. The farmers who supplied the milk to the factories started keeping different cows for themselves and different cows for supplying to the factories. The milk of the same cow which would not be used if she was not well, was now usable, for supply to the factories. They changed the diets of the cows also, to save money, since now they were breeding cows to make money from selling the milk, and not merely to supply milk to their family and village.

 

The people from the factories collected all the milk and put everything in the same can and mixed it up. The milk from good cows, bad cows, healthy cows, diseased cows, happy cows, sad cows, all got mixed up in the same can. And they transported it to the factories which were far away. Now milk does not take kindly to such transportation. It stated curdling. So the factory people added certain things to the milk, to keep it from curdling, like, for instance Urea. Now people knew Urea was a fertilizer but those who were observant realised that the sales of urea seemed to more in milk producing regions than in regions that did not produce milk.

 

The milk, still being natural, started becoming bad very quickly. Left outside for some time, the bad germs in the milk started multiplying. The factory people had to stop this, since their supply chain from the time they procured the milk from the villages, to the time they distributed it in the cities, was long, it definitely took at least a day, if not two. So they invented a process called pasteurization which killed all the bad germs. The problem was, it killed all the good germs also. To assure the people that everything was all right, they said that pasteurization is the same as boiling, the boiling of the milk that everyone does at home, and that it actually protects people from catching diseases from drinking the milk. Now they knew that pasteurization was not the same as just boiling, but they continued to say so. And they never admitted that good germs got killed along with the bad germs, though in this, they were very much in sync with their scientific brethren who popularised the germ theory. They always believe that the world is full of only bad germs. And, they want to zap the bad germs. In the process, much of the goodness is lost, but that is not something they talk about.

 

Now, factory people being factory people, have to "add value" and create products. Else there was no reason for them to exist. So, they started experimenting. They dried the milk into powder with all sorts of chemicals and processes. It was easier to transport, and it would store for months. At the receiving end, someone added water, and voila, it became milk!  Except, no one really asked, is that milk? It was just something that looked like milk, tasted like milk, but was not milk. But they could not admit that. So they put their marketing people on the job to keep calling it milk, and people finally started believing that it was milk. People are easy to fool, since if it looks like milk, and tastes like milk, they will accept it as milk.

 

They even started selling the milk powder as baby food! Milk of another animal, converted to non milk, preserved over a long period, a powdery substance, which they convinced people was good for babies! They again put their marketing people on the job. The marketing people were so good that they convinced people that this powdery substance was actually better for their babies than their own mother's milk!

 

Then they started creating variants. They sold non-fat milk, half fat milk, thin milk, skim milk… the variants were endless. People thought they were buying milk, but what they were buying was actually a manufactured product that had long since ceased being milk. Even the milk that was sold to them in liquid form was first pasteurised, then homogenised, and during the production process it was mixed with lots of dried milk powders, the chemicalised long-shelf life milk from other places, and what came out looked like actual milk.  Now what is homogenization, someone might ask. It is such an innocuous word. Homogenize! Who would not like something that is homogenized, it has such a sanitised feel to it. Well, actually, customers started complaining that they did not like the fact that yellow fat started rising to the top of the milk after boiling, when the milk was cooling. So they said, let us break down the fat molecules, so that they stay integrated, rather than separating as cream. So what did they do? They passed the milk through a very very thin mesh at high pressure. Such high pressure that it is equivalent to about 70 times the pressure in a car tire, at 2400 psi. The molecules broke down. This changed the chemical structure of the milk itself, and the body could no longer recognise it as milk, and appropriately digest it, but no matter. They continued calling it milk.

 

 

They again put their marketing people on the job. The marketing people were so successful at their job that people started believing that the milk they got from the packets was better than the milk they got from cows. So people stopped drinking milk from cows. They were convinced that milk from cows directly is unhealthy. In many countries, especially in the US, selling raw milk directly was banned by law.

 

Meanwhile, farmers who were selling milk to the factories wanted more "yield" to make more money. So they started injecting hormones into the cow to increase the uterine contractions, thus increasing milk production. This hormone, oxytocin, was the same they gave to pregnant women to induce labour.

 

The milk-factory people, meanwhile, said, why not raise the cows in a cow farm? Scaling, processising, control, cost reduction, quality, so many justifications came to mind. So they started raising cows in farms. Now when animals are raised in such close proximity, they start getting diseases. So the factory owners started adding anitibiotics in small doses and mixing it along with the food of the cows. These same antibiotics entered the food chain and entered people, and caused antibiotic resistance, apart from the fact of course, that antibiotics themselves are harmful to health.

 

Meanwhile, milk became an "industry". It itself, from a product, morphed into many products. Each of these products looked like milk, tasted like milk, and felt like milk, but was not milk. But they continued calling it milk. The marketing people were so successful in their job, that all over India today, mothers tell their children "Doodh pee le beta, nahi to thu tandurusth kaisa banega?" and give their children these concoctions they call milk.

 

Meanwhile, some of the communities that never had milk in their diets to start with, still continue with virtually no milk in their diet. The wise ones say that they are more healthy.

 

Why the Microwave is harmful

I never eat food heated / cooked in a microwave oven - we do not have one at home. Even while traveling, I would rather go hungry than eat food which needs to be cooked / reheated in a microwave. 

The reason is simple. It heats the food from "inside out" by tampering with the molecular structure of the food. The "prana pattern" of the food gets vitiated. Understanding things in that paradigm is good enough for me. But the scientific types, they need scientific explanations. Just came across an answer in Quora which addresses the question from that angle, which I am appending below.

For the ultra scientific types who would like to dig out studies that prove the exact opposite, there will be many articles (no doubt promoted by the Devil's Own food lobby) that will prove the exact opposite, that microwaving food is perfectly fine, to them I would say "don't bother" - since I would then go back to my reasons for avoiding microwaved food and be quite smug and happy in my beliefs :-)))

Dinesh

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(From a Quora Answer by Rahul Srivastava. )

This is how microwave ovens work. Microwaves in microwave oven heat food by making the water molecules in the food vibrate at very high frequencies. Water molecules get torn apart and their structure changes. The heated water in turn heats the food. When this happens, the food's chemical structure changes. This differs from conventional heating of food, where heat is transferred by convection inward from outside.

And because of the way microwave heats food, microwaving produces radiolytic compounds, which are compounds neither found in humans nor in nature. It is not yet known what effects radiolytic compounds have on human body. Since these compounds are not natural, I wonder if their effects are beneficial or even harmless.

Also, carcinogenic toxins can leach out of plastic and paper containers into the food that is being microwaved. No matter how foolproof your microwave oven is, there is leakage of microwave. Although the leakage of microwave from microwave ovens may be very small, exposure over a long period of time should surely causes some damage to human body. The leakage from microwave oven worsens as it gets older.

Microwaving food also negatively alters its nutritional value. For example, a study showed that one minute of microwaving inactivates allinase in garlic, which is known for its anti-cancer benefits. Another study found that heating milk for about five minutes in a microwave oven reduces the B12 content to nearly half.

Research by Russian scientists in 1970s found that: microwaving of milk and grains converted some of the amino acids into carcinogenic substances; microwaving prepared meats caused the formation of the cancer-causing agents d-Nitrosodienthanolamines; thawing frozen fruits by microwave converted their glucoside and galactoside fractions into carcinogenic substances; microwaving frozen vegetables converted their plant alkaloids into carcinogens etc.

A Swiss food scientist concluded in a study that due to consumption of food prepared by microwave cooking, changes took place in the blood that could cause negative health effects such as increased cholesterol levels; decreased numbers of leukocytes (white blood cells) and red blood cells; production of radiolytic compounds etc.

An interesting problem in Number Theory and Probability

 

Was just talking to a friend who is a Math prof, when she posed me this question: What is the last digit of the number 7 raised to 85?

 

When you start working that out, 7 raised to 1, ends in 7; raised to 2 ends in 9; raised to 3 ends in 3; and raised to 4 ends in 1; and then the cycle repeats. Therefore for any positive integer n, 7 raised to n ends in 7 when n mod 4 is 1; ends in 9 when n mod 4 is 2; ends in 3 when n mod 4 is 3; and ends in 1 when n mod 4 is 1.

 

In case of 7 raised to 85, 85 modulo 4, is 1. Hence 7 raised to 85 ends in 7.

 

Which is fine, but one needs to generalise that for all numbers.

 

Hence one can ask the question:   for a number a^ⁿ   , where both a and n are natural numbers , what is the probability that a^ⁿ   ends in 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, and 0, respectively.

 

Let us first look at each a separately:

 

(a)   For a = any number ending in 1 (the probability of which in a random sample is 0.1) : a^ⁿ   will end in 1 all the time (100%)

 

(b)  For a = any number ending in 2 (the probability of which in a random sample is 0.1) : a^ⁿ   will end in 2,4,8, and 6 , 25% of the time each.

 

( c ) For a = any number ending in 3 : a^ⁿ   will end in 3,9,7 and 1, 25% of the time each

 

(d) For a = any number ending in 4: a^ⁿ   will end in 4 and 6, 50% of the time each

 

(e) For a = any number ending in 5: a^ⁿ   will end in 5 hundred percent of the time

 

(f) For a = any number ending in 6: a^ⁿ   will end in 6 hundred percent of the time

 

(g) For a = any number ending in 7: a^ⁿ   will end in 7,9,3 and 1, 25% of the time each

 

(h) For a = any number ending in 8: a^ⁿ   will end in 8,4,2 and 6, 25% of the time each

 

(i)             For a = any number ending in 9: a^ⁿ   will end in 9 and 1, 50% of the time each

 

(j) For a = any number ending in 0 (not being 0, since we defined a and n as Natural Numbers): a^ⁿ   will end in 0 hundred percent of the time.

 

Now computing each of the probabilities of a^ⁿ   ending in :

 

1: 0.1 x 1 (a) plus 0.1 x 0.25 (c ) plus 0.1 x 0.25 (g) plus 0.1 x 0.5 ( i) = 0.1 x 2 = 20 percent

 

Applying the same method, we get the probability that a^ⁿ   ends in

1: is 20 percent

2: is 5 percent

3: is 5 percent

4: is 10 percent

5: is 10 percent

6: is 20 percent

7: is 5 percent

8: is 5 percent

9: is 10 percent

0: is 10 percent

 

I also ran a simulation in excel with a sample size of 1000 randomly generated a^ⁿ   . The resulting frequency table closely matches my result, hence I think my answer should be correct.

 

The frequency table generated through a Monte Carlo:

 

endnos.	frequency	my answer
0	10.241%	10%
1	19.177%	20%
2	4.618%	5%
3	4.719%	5%
4	11.044%	10%
5	10.341%	10%
6	20.181%	20%
7	4.217%	5%
8	5.422%	5%
9	10.040%	10%

 

 

Your comments are welcome.