diet

Mental Health and the Brain in Our Gut

Dora Smith helps you connect your gut to your brain.
Mental Health and the Brain in Our Gut (by Dora Smith)

In our society today mental health has become an epidemic of vast proportions. The overly taxed mental health system struggles to reach around to the needs this epidemic has created. Our beautiful parks and our sidewalks overflow with garbage and tents, and people with no homes. Our jails and our psychiatric wards overflow with some of these same victims of mental health. Our psychiatric doctors continue to prescribe powerful but insufficient antipsychotics, antidepressants, and mood stabilizers. And yet the problem of mental health remains and many patients repeatedly cycle through the revolving door of the psychiatric ward, or worse, the criminal justice system. If psychiatric medicines truly healed an individual or gave them the ability to function normally in society, why do these individuals continue to haunt the halls of our psychiatric institutions? Individuals and families who have found psychiatric medicine to be wanting, may desire to explore alternatives. However, most psychiatrists are not versed in nutritional healing (Naidoo p. 1) and may even discourage an alternate approach to treating mental health. There are also few resources and little education available outside of traditional psychiatric treatment. But what if a focus on healing the gut could improve mental health beyond what psychiatric medicines are able to do?

Science has verified the connection between our brain and our microbiota. Read it all

Starting Healthy

Mark's early-morning consumings and some of their health benefits -- green tea, enzymes, multi-vitamins, cayenne pepper, and so forth.

I launched my day in a fashion good for my health:

  • Invested time praying for my family and me.
  • Read this morning’s Scripture selections from Daily Light on the Daily Path. (And highlighted one verse at Panting Hart.)
  • Gingerly ate half a banana (too green yet to eat a whole half).
  • Sipped (happily) two cups of Nescafé Clásico.
  • Slurped (less enjoyably) one cup of Blueberry Breeze Green Tea. I’ve told you before about the benefits of green tea (but you have to drink it, OK?).
  • Chomped down three Papaya Enzymes tablets. They taste good and when I consume them faithfully I don’t need Tums or Rolaids like before.
  • Shook cayenne pepper onto the fried egg I ate.
  • Ate slice of homemade bread. Toasted. Under fried egg, in lieu of plate. (Yes, I ate the lieu too.)
  • Swallowed two Vitamin Code 50 & Wiser Men. (I suppose that’s what the cannibal said too.) 😯

Read it all

Busting Hunger With Bananas

Ever grab a snack but then feel hungry again 20 minutes later? Next time, reach for a banana. It’s loaded with Resistant Starch RS, a healthy carb that fills you up and helps to boost your metabolism. Slightly underripe medium-sized bananas have 12.5 grams of RS—more than most other foods. Ripe bananas give you 4.7 grams of RS, still enough to keep hunger pangs away.

Source: Bananas: The ultimate hunger buster

Green Tea Creativity

Do you know how to write creatively?

Here are some examples of non-dull writing.

Drink a few cups of green tea and you could avoid dentists drills and bills.

Fortunately, a few cups of green tea may bring him back so he can help you avoid diabetes — or at least fend off its complications.

Drinking green tea isn’t like putting a bodyguard between you and skin cancer — it’s like having a whole team of them.

Those who drank at least two cups of green tea every day had the lowest risk of losing their memory and thinking ability.

Green tea turned 20 percent of drug-resistant superbugs into helpless wimps…. The same bacteria that had virtually ignored antibiotics before were easily wiped out by a combination of antibiotics and green tea.

A compound found in soothing green tea could be the key to reducing inflammation, joint damage, and more.

Don’t believe everything you read. A 2006 study found that drinking green tea makes no difference in your risk of prostate cancer — yet, a newer study disagrees. This study suggested that green tea may not prevent all prostate cancers, but it may cut your odds of advanced or life-threatening cancer by half.

Make lemon your main squeeze when you drink tea and you may get four times as many health-building compounds from your tea.

The Kitchen Table Book

The Kitchen Table Book tells me so.

I’ve been drinking green tea for quite a while (it seems like). But not enough. Time to ramp it up, folks! And add lemon juice as well. This is exciting stuff!

Please note: No cynics or mockers were hurt in the production of this post. I reject responsibility for what happens to them if they read it.

Three Cheers for Mushrooms

“Most of the world is deficient in Vitamin D and I think we have been misled in the past by governmental and scientific advice on needed levels of Vitamin D for healthy nutrition.”

He said the U.S. government has been under dosing the population (with its recommended levels of Vitamin D) and the American Academy of Pediatrics has agreed.

That’s what our local Mushroom Doctor said. And here’s more:

“It is a possibility that even viral flu occurrences could be related to deficiency in Vitamin D and same with the swine flu. Recent published scientific articles throughout the world have suggested that mushrooms have the potential to help with symptoms related to arthritis, immune function, energy levels and perhaps even memory.”

And more:

“I can put in one capsule your daily dose of vitamin D. It’s unheard of. This is all new stuff. The body needs vitamin D and you should be sitting in the sun for 30 minutes a day … just the opposite of what dermatologists say. “I am really excited.”

Source: Wisdom in mushrooms?

The article starts this way:

For Dr. Marvin Hausman, surgically saving lives has been his life’s calling — until now. The long-time urological and transplant surgeon and research doctor may have found the key to an effective treatment, if not cure, to a devastating disease that has had doctors puzzled for decades.

Recently, through extensive research with collaborators at the University of Texas and Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) and through his own work, Hausman may have found an effective treatment, even prevention, for Alzheimer’s disease.

So be sure to have lots of extra mushrooms on your pizza and in your stir fry.

And go get your daily 30 minutes of sunshine.

Right now.

Go! Go! Go!

BwaHaHaHa!

The Neanderthal Thinker

Going veggie can slash your carbon footprint: study

Giving up meat could drastically reduce your carbon footprint, with meat-eaters’ diets responsible for almost twice the emissions of those of vegetarians, a German study said on Tuesday.

A diet with meat is responsible for producing in a year the same amount of greenhouse gases as driving a mid-sized car 4,758 kilometres (2,956 miles), the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IOeW) said.

But the food a vegetarian consumes in 12 months is responsible for generating the same emissions as driving 2,427 kilometres, the IOeW said in a study commissioned by independent consumer protection group Foodwatch.

😆

OK, I’m sure that’s a serious study. But I still think it’s kinda funny.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the “photo” at the top, it goes with this story:

Neanderthals were not stupid

Neanderthals were not as stupid as they have been portrayed, according to new research Tuesday showing their stone tools were as good as those made by the early ancestors of modern humans, Homo sapiens.

When I saw that headline, I wondered if it had some sort of potentially-humorous connection to the veggie/carbonfootprint story. I assumed ole Neander and Friends were meat consumers…and look what their carbon footprint got them.

Anyway, I went beyond the headline into the story itself and found this gem of a concluding paragraph:

Other studies have claimed that Neanderthals may have died out because they struggled with changing conditions brought by increasingly cold temperatures, failing to adapt their hunting methods when species such as mammoth and bison fled south and a once-forested Europe changed into a sparsely vegetated landscape during the last Ice Age.

So there you are. If they would have increased their meat consumption, they would have increased their carbon footprint. That would have resulted in more global warming which might have reversed those “increasingly cold temperatures.”

Maybe they weren’t so smart after all. 🙄

Oh well.

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Above all, love God!