NOT Milk!

Thanks to whoever drew this!
  

   When I tell people I don't drink milk they look at me like I must be from a different planet! Of course the next question I get is "where do you get your Calcium from". It really amazes me that with all the technology and science we have available today at the press of a button, the mindless masses still learn how to live by watching TV commercials. Did it ever occur to them that the people who make the commercials are the people benefiting from the sale of the product? They learn what to drink, what to drive, the kind of pants to wear, the kind of poison to put on their skin and of course what to eat from TV. Whatever is in fad, low fat, green is the new black, juice boxes, where to buy your coffee and what kind of phone makes you look cool. They have to fit in and follow as not to be criticized for not fitting in,  in so perpetuating the lies and stupidity of it all. I call this the Lemming Effect, they will follow each other blindly over a cliff just to be a part of the crowd.

  As you may have guessed by now I look to Nature to learn the right things to do to be healthy. I remember I was teaching a class in Primitive Technologies to a group of forth graders and during lunch the fact that I was drinking only water seemed to fascinate the kids (and the teacher), as if drinking water was such a foreign thing to them. I explained that water was THE only thing humans should be drinking because in nature that is the only thing there is for animals to drink. With a few exceptions, like those that drink flower nectar, thats all any other natural animal on the planet drinks. There are no gatorade trees or soda falls or streams to drink from. There are no orange juice ponds or fruit juice lakes to drink from and no chocolate milk aquifers. Then of course the question of drinking milk came up and they ask why I don't drink milk. I answered, "because I am not a cow"! They looked at me perplexed. This may seem like a simple statement but it is very deep in its meaning. I explained that milk is species specific and is only used for a short period of time for babies of that species till they are developed enough to start eating real food. No other animal in Nature drinks the milk of another animal. I asked if they could imagine a Mouse going to a Deer to suckle for milk. I also explained that once an animal is weaned it never drinks milk again for the rest of its life. Humans are the only animal that drinks the milk of another species and we continue to drink milk for our whole lives, and no other animal in Nature ever does that. As a mater of fact, Humans didn't even do that for all the time they have been evolving up until recently in our evolutionary history and now we have broken two rules of nature at once!

  Breaking the laws of nature always comes with a price. It may seem we have been smart to take advantage of this easily gotten food source, and maybe it wasn't such a bad thing when we started taking Raw milk full of all the enzymes and vitamins and minerals from wild animals once in a while, who fed on their natural diets, as a survival food source when we needed it to stay alive during hard times . But to exasperate the problem we decided to "improve" on the real thing. We domesticated animals, started feeding them things they would never eat in Nature, pumped them full of anti-biotic's, steroids, pesticides and fungicides from their un-natural foods, enclosed them in an area where they can't move to get natural exercise to keep them healthy and we expect to get a healthy product from this system. Than we take the milk and destroy any health giving effects it still might have and pasteurize and homogenize it to kill all nutritional value it may have had left. The milk at this point does not resemble anything found in nature, to top it off, this crap is full of sub-clinical doses of anti-biotics, growth hormones, pesticides, fungicides, allergens, rodent feces, and puss just to name a few. So, not only are we drinking something that evolution shows us we shouldn't be drinking in the first place but than we take it and turn it into something that should never exist on the face of this Earth at all. Hey, lets sell it to the mindless masses as a "Health Drink", they'll believe us!
  Than of course the subject of calcium always comes up. It amazes me how brainwashed people are that every person that I talk to about milk asks the exact same question, " so where do you get your calcium from ?" First of all, most of the Calcium in milk is not usable by Humans. Second, green leafy vegetables have way more bio-available calcium than milk. You never hear that on a TV commercial! Also, milk actually helps cause osteoporosis, contrary to one of the main arguments for drinking milk from the dairy industry in the first place. Having an alkaline body is extremely important to being healthy. Again, look to Nature to see how important PH is to health. Ever have a fish tank? Keeping the PH correct to the specific species is one of the most important things to having a healthy fish tank. Ever own a pool? Keeping the PH correct is vitally important to a healthy pool. Why is acid rain so bad for our lakes, rivers, streams and forests ? It changes the PH of course!  I bet if you have a pool or a fish tank you check the PH at least weekly, when was the last time you checked the PH of your blood or your body?
  Milk is an acid forming food, and your blood needs to be Alkaline for you to be healthy, heck to be alive! Your body knows how important it is to keep a proper blood PH and will do anything to keep it that way, including taking calcium from you bones so you don't die. Sounds to me like osteoporosis in the making! 

  The dairy industry has such a strong lobby and has so much money for promotion and so many politicians in their back pocket that the truth about drinking milk will never be in the mainstream. So all the health problems associated with feeding our youth, you know, the ones we are supposed to be taking care of, milk for their whole lives will continue. So, as bacteria begin to get more and more anti-biotic resistant from the anti-biotics we ingest on a daily basis and our immune systems get weaker and weaker from the pesticides etc. and other pollutants we ingest all day from the milk, food, air and water we take in, add this to the new tropical diseases and insects moving north because of climate change, we have a recipe for disaster on a global scale not seen or imagined in recent human history. Got milk?

Peace

Don't Blame the Sun!

  Summer is the time for outdoor activity. It is also the time, where everyplace you look, weather it be TV, billboards, posters etc., you are warned to protect yourself from the evil Sun. Long sleeves, hats, SPF this and that, don't go out between the hours of X and Y and so on. The Sun is portrayed as the evil giver of disease and the culprit that will steal years away from your youthful look. Melanoma, wrinkles, age spots, dry skin and the list continues to grow for the resume of this evil culprit of doom. Could it be that the Sun is just getting a bad rap and is the scapegoat of this modern technological, vain, anti-nature, instant gratification society?
  Humans, Genus Homo, have been evolving on this planet for a minimum of 2 million years. If you go back to the ancestors of Homo, you can take humans back to at least 6 million years, if not longer, and the ancestors of these animals back to the beginning of life on Earth. In all this time, the Sun has been there every step of the way. As a mater of fact, if it wasn't for the Sun, life wouldn't exist at all. The Sun is so much a part of our lives that everything that makes us Human is due to the Sun/Earth relationship. Evolving in such a close relationship with the Sun has made the Sun a very important partner in our health. Our sleep wake cycle is the Suns responsibility. This circadian rhythm is so important to our lives that even a small interruption in this cycle has ill effects on our health. Some of the most important vitamins we need to be healthy rely on the Sun for metabolism and without adequate Sun exposure will negatively, and sometimes disastrously, effect our immune system.
  As a Naturalist, I tend to see things in a way that makes me think weather or not we are following the laws of Nature. Through millions of years of evolving with the Sun, Nature has figured out ways to protect us from any negative effects the Sun might have. For instance, Nature had colored our skin to the correct shade, depending on the latitude and therefore the angle of insolation, needed to protect us where our ancestors have evolved. Cultures that have evolved closer to the Equator have more Melanin, or dark pigment, in their skin to protect them from the high angle of UV radiation. People who have evolved in areas of the Earth where the Suns angle is not so high, and the seasons that the Sun is strongest are alot shorter, have fairer skin tones. People who have evolved in these far Northern and Southern Latitudes also have evolved wearing alot more clothing do to the colder climates and the lack of Sunshine, which negated the need for lots of Melanin. In Nature, Humans Migrated relatively slowly allowing them to adapt to their changing environment. Now that technology has allowed Humans, who's ancestors have lived in a geographic location for millenia, to move around the globe almost instantly, taking away Natures ability to protect them in their new home. Imagine someone of Norwegian decent, who's ancestors have live in a high latitude area of the Earth, have light skin and have evolve wearing lots of clothing to protect them from the cold, decides to move to south Florida. Fair skin, high angle Sun, wearing alot less clothes due to the heat and eating the SAD (standard american diet). Every time this person goes out into the Sun they get a Sun burn to some degree and eventually gets skin cancer, is this the Suns fault?
  You know how there are times in you life where something happens and a light bulb goes off and changes the way you think of things for the rest of your life? Well I had one of those moments many years ago while sitting on a small beach close to my hometown. I have always loved the warmth of the summer and I have always loved being in the Sun. I have always had a good tan, and except when I was young and sometimes force to by my parents(sunscreen was a new thing), I have never worn sunscreen. Anyway, I was just hanging at this beach enjoying the Sun and water, when I looked over and saw a girl in a bikini lying about 50 feet from me. Her skin was shinny with suntan lotion and as I glanced over she sat up to get something to drink. Out of the cooler she grabbed a diet coke and than reached over into her bag lit a cancer stick. Besides being turned off by her disgusting stupidity, a light went off in my head, and it occurred to me that one day this girl is going to get cancer and her doctor and her family and friends were going to blame the SUN for her cancer! You godda be kiddin me!
  First, slathering yourself with a bunch of toxic chemicals then laying in the Sun to bake them in is just stupid. Have you ever heard that if you get sea sick you can wear a patch on your skin to slowly deliver a medicine to stop it, or that if you have a heart problem you can wear a patch to slowly deliver medicine to prevent a heart attack or even if you want to stop smoking there is a patch for you also. Does this tell you something? Almost everything you put on your skin gets absorbed into your body and into your bloodstream! I wasn't close enough, but I bet she was wearing highly toxic makeup and neurotoxic perfume to top it off, all getting pumped through her and poisoning every cell in her body. Next, diet soda, don't get me started, I would need ten pages to explain the stupidity of that. There is plenty written on the web for you to read. There is one thing, and only one thing, people and all other animals are supposed to drink, and thats water, period! If you read my last post, you know my feelings about the stupidity of sucking poisonous carcinogenic smoke into your lungs. So, here is this pile of toxic carcinogenic flesh baking in the Sun, what should you expect will happen? To a more and to a lesser degree people all over the planet are doing everything in their power to poison themselves with the food they eat, the air they breath, the crap they drink. On a daily basis they are destroying their immune systems by the choices they make in their lives and you wonder why the rate of cancer and all other degenerative diseases is on the rise. Still think its the Suns fault?
  Our lives center around being indoors, a very unnatural way to be. You live indoors, work indoors, go from place to place indoors. You wear clothes all the time and are told to wear sunglasses to protect our eyes from the evil Sun. Than one day you decide to go to the beach, your skin hasn't seen the sun in six months, you put on SPF one billion and still burn to a crisp! The next day you can't move you hurt so bad, you have blisters all over your back and a slight fever and a headache. You have Sun poisoning, you damage your skin so badly that in ten years you get skin cancer, your doctor blames the Sun.
  When the warm weather comes around all I want to do is lay in the sun because I am so sick of the Winter and being cold all the time. It feels so good and warm I want to lay there all day. But I do the smart thing, my skin is as sensitive as everyone else's after a winter of being covered up, so I only lay out for ten minuets a day till I start to build up a tan, than I increase my time accordingly and by the time the warm weather is here to stay I don't have to worry about working in the garden with my shirt off or lying in the pool after work.
  The Sun is not the culprit, our unnatural way of life that goes against everything or bodies have learned over millions of years of evolution and our modern unnatural technological world is the real culprit here.    
  Go outside, be in the Sun, and enjoy your life in a more natural way, your body will thank you for all that beautiful sunshine it has been craving all these years!

The Biggest Stupidity

 Imagine you are a Scientist studying animal behavior in a Forest. A fire breaks out in the forest, all the animals instinctively run in the opposite direction. Than you notice an animal moving towards an area the fire has just passed, as it gets close, it goes over to a smoldering log and starts to suck the toxic smoke deep into its lungs. Than you notice other individuals of the same species gathering around each other doing the same thing. First you are dumbfounded, you shake your head wondering if you are hallucinating. What you are seeing goes against all the laws of Nature. You think to yourself why would an animal be stupid enough to purposefully suck toxic carcinogenic smoke into its lungs? As you sit there and watch in amazement at this unbelievable behavior,  you notice there are young animals also gathered around, some on their mothers back hitching a ride and others staying close to their mothers for protection and others suckling their mothers for nourishment. As you look more intently, you notice the young ones instinctively wanting to get away from this toxic environment but are afraid to leave the safety of their parents side. Some make a futile attempt to fan the horrible burning smoke from their faces while others just sit there with their eyes and lungs burning from the toxic acrid smoke. You wonder why any animal would subject their young to such punishment when a parents job is to protect their young and nourish their growth to become strong healthy adults. This goes against everything you have ever observed in the animal kingdom, it flies in the face of logic. You realize you have made an unbelievable discovery, so unbelievable in fact, that no other scientist on the planet believes you because they know Nature would never favor such a self destructing behavior, and any animal that would be stupid enough to do such a thing to themselves and their young would have become extinct a long time ago.
  One day after giving a lecture on what you have discovered, you decide to go outside during break time and get some fresh air. It's Autumn, the sky is an incredible blue and the air is crisp and clean and you can't wait to get out of that stuffy lecture hall. As you step out the door, instead of fresh clean air, you get a whiff of some acrid disgusting smelling smoke, you look upwind, and down on the sidewalk you see a group of scientists standing around talking while purposely sucking toxic carcinogenic smoke into their lungs. A light goes off in your head and you say half out loud, holly crap, you godda be kiddin Me!
  Humans are supposed to be the most intelligent species on the planet. How and why it would ever occur to such an intelligent species to purposefully suck hot acrid foul smelling smoke into there lungs is beyond me. Yet as far back as history goes, humans have been purposefully poisoning themselves and their offspring because of this mindless habit. Even though it makes no sense logically and flies in the face of all things natural, and even as their body tells them with violent indignation that this is totally wrong, it is actually their intelligence that allows these people to circumvent their natural instinct. No animal with a lesser brain would ever be so stupid!
  In just the US, smoking kills 438,000 people a year ( http://www.vahealth.org/cdpc/TUCP/documents/2008/pdf/Data%20and%20Statistics/Smoking-Attributable%20Deaths%20in%20Virginia_2008.pdf ) and 5.4 million worldwide
 ( http://www.inforesearchlab.com/smokingdeaths.chtml ) . It also costs the US 167 billion dollars ( http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/medicalnews/a/smokingcosts.htm )
  Smokers are some of the most disrespectful people on the planet, spewing stupidities like "I have a right to smoke if I want to". In all essence saying, "I have a right to kill myself if I want to". That may be so, but you have no right to kill your children and others in your family, or me for that matter,  just because you are a selfish moron. Yet for some reason the human society has allowed this stupidity to go on for thousands of years, what does this really say about human intelligence? Why is it if you smack your kid on the behind to teach them a lifelong lesson, or keep them in a hot car in the parking lot, society calls this child abuse. Yet if you poison your kid several times a day with poisonous carcinogenic smoke there is no recourse in our society. If you purposefully poison your child and put them in a situation that will cause them severe health problems ( http://www.livestrong.com/article/142409-diseases-passed-children-with-smoking-parents/ ), and in reality, possibly murdering them in the long run, society basically accepts this. I believe if you are a parent and you expose your child to this poison several times a day on a daily bases, you should go to jail for child abuse. Someone need to speak for those who can't and it is our job as a society to protect our young and should come together to protect them from selfish harming parents. If you or another animal causes even perceived harm to the young of another species, the parent of that young one has the natural right to fight, protect and possibly kill the threat to protect their young. This is the natural order of things. Yet if someone blows poisonous carcinogenic smoke, which is proven to cause severe health effects or at the least make your child very uncomfortable, into the lungs of your child, you basically have no recourse. If you give the idiot who did this what they deserve, you would be the one to go to jail! How is it that our society is so out of whack with the reality of family and Nature that we would collectively allow this behavior? Well for one thing Big Tobacco has a strong lobby in this country and as we all know money is much more important than the health of the nations people and their children. Many smart caring politicians have tried to protect us and the young future of the nation only to be voted down by the politicians who are being paid by the tobacco companies.
THINK!

You Godda Be Kiddin Me!

 I recently got a job as a "cook" in a nursing home in the town I live in. This is not just a Nursing home but a rehabilitation center, where elders come,  after an illness or accident to get better. It is bound by the laws of the state and the laws of the AMA and the American Dietetics Association.
 I put the word Cook in quotes for a reason. There is really no real cooking going on. They use a food service to supply the "food" they feed these sick and elderly people. 95% of what they give these people, in need of greater nutrition, comes out of a can or a box and is heated in a steamer till it barely resembles anything from this Earth. 85% of this "food" is seasoned with salt, pepper and Margarine! They use sugar, white flower artificial flavors and MSG to feed these sick people. You Godda Be Kiddin Me! Any couch potato that spends their life in front of the TV watching gossip shows knows, these foods are crap and will kill you over the short haul, why is it that the American Dietetics Association doesn't know it? After all the publicity about Trans fats and all the negative press it has gotten and all the scientific studies that have been done to prove it is super unhealthy, why is Margarine allowed within a mile of a HEALTH institution?
 I recently told a friend I finally got a job and when they asked what I was doing, I replied  "I kill old people with food"! I have spent a good part of my life learning about nutrition and eating healthy, it kills me every time I have to put a huge blob of plastic like Hydrogenated Trans Fats or a hand full of white flour and sugar into these peoples food as dictated by the American Dietetics Association. My very first day I asked why we are using margarine instead of butter and I was told it was alot cheaper! So I guess, the bottom line is more important (surprise) than the health of a Human being, a wise elder of our society, that has been entrusted to us for help. I recently went online to see the stats on this new company I am now working for. Turns out they are public and are beholding to their stock holders. So, here we are poisoning these Elders Of our society to save a couple of bucks while the CEO of the company made almost 3 million dollars last year!
  I am doing my best to try to educate the people I work with but as usual they look at me like I have two heads. Almost all the people I work with in the kitchen are poor and uneducated. They don't understand because they grew up eating the same food and feeding the same kind of food to their family's. When you feed your family with food stamps you try to make them stretch as far as you can and that means you buy the cheapest crap you can. In the header of this blog I make the distinction between being ignorant and being stupid, these people are ignorant, be it from cultural pressure or lack of education, most just don't know any better. On the other hand, the dietitian and the owners of this company are just buying into a paradigm that works for them financially, they are just stupid selfish and disrespectful. I am not saying that based solely on their food choices either, but thats another story. Besides, trying to teach the American Dietetics Association about Nutrition is like trying to teach someone from the AMA about the efficacy of Herbs! You might as well be talking to a stone wall.
  Unfortunately I need the Job right now as I have been out of work for almost a year, so I will have to make peace, at least for a little while, about being a part of the very thing I despise and have spent a good part of my life learning not to be a part of.