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Black's ok, Green is Better, Best of All is White

  

A study cited in Science Daily... 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071113163016.htm

... found that complementing green tea with either citrus juices or vitamin C likely increases the amount of catechins available for the body to absorb. Citrus juice increased recovered catechin levels by more than five times, the study found. Lemon juice in the tea caused 80 percent of tea's catechins to remain viable. Following lemon, in terms of stabilizing power, were orange, lime and grapefruit juices. 

It appears that vitamin C and citrus juices interact with catechins to prevent their degradation in the intestines and thus help them to deliver their health benefits to the body.

What health benefits?

Green tea's beneficial effects are due chiefly to catechins.  One of them, epigallocatechin gallate, is an antioxidant about 25-100 times more potent than vitamins C and E.  The high antioxidant activity of green tea protects the body from oxidative damage due to free radicals. Research also shows that green tea may help the arterial wall by reducing lipids, i.e., fats that can plug up the arteries. 

As if that weren't enough to make green tea part of your daily ritual, further research has demonstrated that the tea can protect against experimentally induced DNA damage, and slow or halt the initiation and progression of undesirable cell colonies. Some studies have shown evidence that green tea provides immuno-protective qualities for people undergoing radiation or chemotherapy.

Hmm... what about green tea cooked by the sun in glass jars?

And if you really want to suss out the benefits of green tea, try it in its concentrated form known as Matcha in Japan. One standard strength cup of Matcha delivers around the same potency of benefits as ten cups of regular green tea.  

A little Googling will qucikly reveal that green tea from Japan is generally produced according to much better standards of purity and organic integrity than is green tea produced in China.

Is Green Tea the perfect health drink?  No. Despite its numerous benefits, it does contain caffeine (much less than coffee) and some fluoride. However, there is an outstanding option... White Tea!

It turns out that green tea, white tea, oolong, pu-erh tea and black tea are all produced from the same plant, Camellia sinensis.  White tea is the least processed, the least denatured  of the bunch, the highest in health promoting antioxidants.

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Probiotic Means Pro Life

Naturopaths and organic food advocates in general have, for many decades, been extolling the virtues of fermented vegetables in the diet.

Sally Fallon's book 'Nourishing Traditions',,co-authored with Mary Enig, Ph.D., draws our attention to the fact that every long term human culture on the planet has a tradition of including fermented foods in their diet.  Around the world, these include such items as kefir, yogurt (Russia, Caucasus, Balkans),  kim chi (Korea) ,  miso, natto and tempeh (Japan), sauerkraut (Europe, principally),  kombucha,  traditionally prepared pickles, aged cheeses, blue cheese is particularly good (processed cheeses are useless).

In the past five years or so there has been a tremendous revival of interest in fermented foods and the healing, health promoting microorganisms they contain. For a detailed rundown of the many ways in which fermented foods can contribute to your heath, check out this link, Akea.

Also, go to www.mercola.com and type probiotics in their search window. You will not be disappointed.

Finally, one very important point. If you are going to buy commercially prepared fermented foods, don't waste your money on canned sauerkraut. Almost all canned or bottled sauerkrauts on your supermarket shelf have been pasteurized. The high heat destroys most of the health promoting microorganisms and enzymes.  Find a grocer or farmer's market source of fresh, unpasteurized sauerkraut.  You'll love it and so will your entire gastro-intestinal tract.

Long & Winding DNA Road

Take the Ginkgo Biloba tree and the herb, Horsetail.  These are two of the oldest plants on our planet, said by science to have been around as far back as the dinosaur days.

Aspartame and genetically modified soy have been around for about 0.00000001% of that time.

Which of those two sets of edibles would you say your human DNA is better suited to handle?

There's this long, slow organic winding evolutionary trail that begins with the Big Bang and, over eons, goes through very long, slow metamorphoses to which life forms adapt, change and evolve. Then we get to our little eye-blink of post-modern, technological time where we VERY SUDDENLY introduce into organisms which are the crowning glory of 14 billion years of evolution, a relentless cascade of synthesized chemicals --preservatives, additives, colorants, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, artificial flavors, flavor enhancers, excito-toxins, neuro-toxins, coagulants, surfactants, stabilizers on and on and on and we haven't even mentioned pharmaceutical drugs, illicit drugs and cosmetics, the latter of which we 'ingest' through our skin.

If you think the above list is alarmist or an exaggeration, go to:

http://www.yourtruhealth.com/page/1/default.asp

and check out the A-Z listing of the additives that  have entered our food chain. Many are natural, or derived from natural sources, but hundreds are synthesized compounds and/or chemicals which have been demonstrated to be harmful.  Two obvious examples are Mercury and Fluoride.  Evidence of their harmfulness is so ubiquitous that a simple Google search on either one will make you wish you had never listened to your dentist.

 Big Bang Cuisine, is inspired largely by the Paleo Diet approach to eating and by certain tenets of the organic raw foodist movement. The content is for information purposes only and is in no way meant to diagnose or treat illnesses, nor to substitute for the services of a bonafide health care professional.  A whole other blog could be launched just to define exactly what 'bonafide' means in this context.

AIDS in the Jungle

French medical researchers observing chimpanzees, noted that chimps in the wild eating their natural raw diet would live out normal life spans even while carrying the HIV virus, while chimps in zoos fed cooked and processed  foods, developed the debilitating symptoms of AIDS and died before their time.

"Caged chimpanzees fed raw foods and infected by the AIDS virus, do not show the slightest symtpom.... There is also an illness similar to human AIDS that occurs in domestic cats fed industrial products, "feline AIDS". Cases of this illness have never been observed in wild felines."

                         -- Bruno Comby, "Maximize Immunity", p. 123

Does this mean I'm advocating a totally raw diet for the rest of your life?  Not at all. The great California naturopath, Bernard Jensen, used to talk about two ways of eating: the cleansing diet and the building diet.   During cleansing and healing times, resorting to a totally raw diet can do wonders to rejuvenate body and mind.  But you can only cleanse for so long. Alas, some people treat their body like a sewer system that they have to be constantly scouring and cleaning out.  Not a very friendly attitude to take towards one's own body.

After cleansing, says Jensen, go on a building diet. Eat more protein, yes even cooked protein, always keeping fresh fruits and vegetables in the diet as well.  Balance and harmony.

Everything Almost Works

Once Upon A Time...

 ·        

T   Thousands who converted to vegetarianism for health, environmental and ethical reasons were lead to believe, by a ton of health literature, that soy was their protein salvation. Google: soy phytoestrogens problems.

·        

     Followers of a famous, deceased Tibetan Rinpoche finally got to meet the young man who was touted as his reincarnation.  The young man basically told everyone he thought the Tibetan rituals were a bunch of superstitious gobbledy-gook and he just wanted to be everyones' friend.

·   Marxist Communism sounds great on paper. Nothing even remotely close to it has ever been practiced by any nation on earth.

·    Virtually every pharmaceutical product advertisement on commercial television lists more potentially dangerous side effects than benefits of the advertised drug.

·   You're so committed to health excellence that you take up running marathons, only to read that serious long distance runs a high risk of harming the right side valves in the heart.

·   An attractive young couple co-author a best selling diet book which proclaims in the most enthusiastic terms that a mostly raw vegan diet of fresh organic fruits and vegetables is the ONLY way to be truly healthy. A few years later, without even blushing, they publish another book proclaiming that ya gotta have meat to be healthy.

·   You commit to a meditation path, led by an enlightened master who becomes involved in sex scandals with half a dozen female students.

·   Millions of bottles of synthetic vitamin C are sold every year. No one ever shows you the stark photographic differences between a molecule of synthetic C and one of organic C.  

·   This list so barely scratches the surface intems of frustrations, setbacks, challenges and disappointments which beset us all, that one cannot help but conclude...

"The universe is not here to satisfy your desires.  It is here to wake you up."     - Eckhart Tolle

If Tolle is correct, what are we  to infer about embodiment in a space-time continuum if awakening and the satisfaction of desires are not compatible?

I have no idea. I'm just asking.