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Thursday, April 16, 2015

Our Society is Clearly Doomed: kid's cell phones - porn and a brain tumor

I saw a link for an article about whether or not a parent was too harsh for putting their child's iphone behind a picture frame because of their bad grades (with the words, "In case of B, break glass" on it).  Questioning taking a phone away - a smart phone at that - for for grades (or any reason, for crying out loud) is the blaring neon sign that we, as a society, have supremely failed.  After I rolled my eyes so hard it hurt and smacked my forehead and slid it dramatically and forcefully down my own face, I thought about how we are pretty much not going to continue as a society after the next generation.  It's pretty much guaranteed.  And for so many reasons.


First of all, giving your (especially young) child a smart phone is questionable in the first place.  Yeah, I know.  It's common.  "Everybody" has one.  Well, when I don't even have a smart phone, I can tell you that no offspring of mine will be getting one unless they have a job and they are paying for it.  Your kid needs a cell phone?  (Do you know what "need" means?)  How is that even possible?  Because he is never around other people who have a phone and can't use theirs?  Or do you not trust him to memorize your phone number well enough and need to program it in with a picture of your face so they don't screw up? 

A smart phone comes with a free pass to all that is on the internet.  Really?  You don't care that your 12 year-old son has access to everything on the interwebs?  I know I sound like a crazy tyrant, but if my offsprings are going online, I am sitting next to them or within earshot/view of what they're doing.  Call me crazy, but I'm not a superfan of having a preteen porn addict in my house, or having potential human traffickers hook up with my kid.

Besides all this, I wouldn't want to subject a small person to the amount of radiation emitted by a smart phone into their brains on their ears, into their boy (or girl) parts by sitting on their lap all the time, or otherwise.  CNET has a ranking for the top 20 highest radiating phones - Motorola Droid Maxx is #1 (and Motorola has taken gold, silver, and bronze in this list).  Check it out here.  I chose my phone from the reverse list and then found it on ebay for about $20.  Brain cancer? No thanks, I'm good.  Even the National Cancer Institute (out of the NIH) will tell you that it's a horrible idea and that cell phones are great sources of getting yourself a big ol' blob of cancer.  In order to reduce the chance that you are going to have a giant brain tumor, the EWG suggests you hold it away from your head, talk on speaker, text instead of talk, don't put it in your pocket or under your pillow, and only use it when the signal is strong.  There are physical barrier devices that may be employed to reduce the amount of emf/radiation into your soft tissue, and you may want to check them out if you can't live without your smartphone.  

Taking away a luxury item (like a smart phone) is such a pathetic picture of a first world problem that the shame of it reverberates in my brain (kind of like the radiation).  Add it to the other problems we have, like "my wallet has so much money in it, it hurts my butt when I sit on it", and "I won a sales campaign at work and was awarded a day of golf with the director, but I already took that day off to play golf" or, "I have to take a crap, but my maid is cleaning the bathroom right now".  

So sad.  Big elephant tears of suffering.  

Get a FREAKIN' GRIP, people!  Hello?  This is reality calling, wakey wakey, eggs and bakey?  

Nah, whatever.  It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.  

Peace, love, and fail harder, 
Ms. Daisy

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Sinus Infections - A Few Natural Options

Sinus infections are the best, aren't they?  It's so fantastic how you can't hear, can't breathe, and the rhino sitting on your cheekbones feeling is really supreme.  It's almost as good as swimming a 200 fly.  What can you do when you get hit with one of these doozies?  

Well, you can go trip out on pseudoephedrine (Sudafed), whose side effects include fear, anxiety, tremors, hallucinations, dizziness, excitability (I need this.  I need to be MORE excited in general.), and convulsions.  Oooh.  Cool.

Or.  (Yeah, pick the "or".)  You can try a couple of natural remedies.  (Hey, why not?  Better than convulsions and hallucinations?  I mean, unless that is your idea of fun...)  

I think the best remedy is a combination of physical irrigation combined with some herbal and dietary adjustments.  What does that look like?  I am so glad you asked!  

So, let's start with the "physical irrigation" thing.  You've heard of a neti pot, right?  If you go to the large get everything store, you can find it in the drug area.  It is also sold at pharmacies and health food stores.  The one you can find most often is made of blue plastic.  The idea is of Asian and Ayurvedic origin.  The gist of it is that you get some good clean water (not tap water, no really, not tap water - unless you boil it and cool it down), add a little mix of salt and baking soda (making a saline solution), stand over your sink, put one end in your nostril, tilt your head and watch as water magically flows out of your other nostril like you are a human waterfall. It. is. great.  



At first, I was moderately terrified of this, as being a swimmer and thinking of water going up my nose was not really the experience I was looking forward to.  But I pulled up the big girl panties and man-ed up.  It was totes no bigs.  If you do it without saline in it, you might want to kill yourself, but if you go with the mix, you're good to go.  I did have the packets of stuff at first that came with the blue plastic neti pot, but I recently ran out and opted instead to just make it (since it was bedtime and easier for me to do at the time).  

You need: salt and baking soda.  If you have a mortar and pestle, that's even better.  The ratio is as follows: 1/3 cup of salt, 2 tablespoons of baking soda.  Mix them together, mortar and pestle to your heart's delight (when it is all powdery small, it dissolves faster).  Use 1/2 teaspoon in 8 ounces (1 cup) of warm, clean water.  A note on the plastic neti-pot.  If it's all you've got, go for it, it's better than nothing.  If you have any other choice, think about warm BPA shooting up your brain and pick stainless steel or ceramic instead.  I got mine online here  if you care.  No, I don't get anything if you order from them.  I'm just letting you know.  I usually use my neti-pot at night before bed, and then I put a few drops of peppermint essential oil on the palms of my hands, rub them together, and inhale like a beast.  It clears me up, and no drainage sore throat in the morning.  
 
Do you like my cape? In a rosebush?

The herbal way to attack a sinus infection is by using the hero of the natural world - turmeric.  If you don't know about turmeric, you betta ask somebody!  This little guy comes complete with a cape, fights inflammation, infection, and baddies like nobody's beeswax.  You can gargle with turmeric and some warm water, you can take it in capsules (500 mg - I take one every day), you can mix it with your saline and shoot it up your nose.  No, I'm not kidding.  I haven't tried it, but I have heard of people doing that.  

What's even more crae crae than that is shooting cayenne pepper up your nose.  Honestly, I'm not going to do that and I don't care how organic and great it is, but if you weren't aware and were extremely desperate, you could try it.  Otherwise, people use apple cider vinegar to reduce their boogery-ness (it's a medical term, I know).  It is an immunity booster that can help you overall.  You can take shots of it in water or (do you see a theme?) you can shoot it up your nose with some saline.  I also use something called Muco-stop.  It is a combination of enzymes that will basically digest the mucus and get rid of it that way.  When taking enzymes for this reason, you have to take it two hours after a meal and one hour before.  


Regarding dietary changes, as with any illness, avoid sugar and sweets like the plague.  Those little bacteria and viruses thrive and multiply on sugar.  Handing them sugar is like giving their army a tank and a million bazookas and having them multiply exponentially.  Eat real food.  Give your good guys the guns they need by eating the pungent, stinky things of this world like garlic (whole roasted cloves, yes, please), onions, ginger, and horseradish.  (You could take a shot of fire cider, too.  That stuff will scare anything out of you.)  Drink your kombucha while you're at it.  Probiotics in your gut are the stuff your immune system longs for.  

And get better soon.  

Peace, love, and nose waterfalls, 
Ms. Daisy

Friday, April 3, 2015

Poison, I mean, cereal.

I pretty much grew up on cereal.  It was what was for breakfast.  My brother ate the crazy ones - Fruity Pebbles, Froot Loops, Reeses, the list goes on and on.  Pretty much if it was bright blue and fluorescent orange, it was his fave.  Note: my brother may or may not have two heads, five eyes, and three arms.  My mom also fed him hot dogs when he was like five days old, so no further explanation necessary, your honor.  He actually LIKED it when his cereal milk turned pinkish orange.  Gag. me.
 
May not contain "froot".

I ate cereal too, but didn't go that route as much.  I liked granola and ones with sliced almonds in them.  Ooh, yummy.  And then Costco had a blip of time where they sold chocolate Love Crunch and I think I ate that for about four hours a day until it was gone (good thing Costco sells really huge bags).  

Mmm, Love Crunch is good.  
 
And then I read Nourishing Traditions (by Sally Fallon).  It changed how I felt about cereal.  I thought I was good - I was eating organic cereal!  (So health conscious!  I probably deserve a shiny gold sticker.)  And then I realized it was pretty much an anti-food quasi-foodlike substance and felt kind of disturbed about my life.  Aw, man!  

Here's the deal.  Grains are so much more nutritious and bioavailable if you soak them (or sprout them).  When you pour milk on pretend grains and eat it for breakfast, it kind of counts the same as punching yourself in the face with a blowtorch...but worse.  

In 1960, a researcher named Loren Zanier at the University of Michigan conducted a very crae crae experiement.  He selected different groups of rats and fed them the following things:  

Group 1 - rat chow (yummy) and water (= control group)
Group 2 - cornflakes and water  
Group 3 - (I kid you not) cardboard and water (Umm...basically testing if you should eat your cereal or your cereal box, I guess...)  


Why did Zanier do this?  He wanted to check out the extrusion process on grains.  Basically, extrusion is when the grains get all gushed up and smashed, then fired through a fast and furious squirter (these are all very scientific terms, I can assure you) into little O shapes (or whatever groovy shape the cereal maker wants), sprayed with sugar, and baked to your crunchy perfection.  

So what were the results?  

The rats who ate the cornflakes died BEFORE the rats who were eating cardboard.  Seriously.  Read up a bit more on it here.  That is inexcusable.  This is the testing that has been done, and it is showing it is better to eat the cereal box than the stuff inside the box.  I'm just going to come right out and say that is kind of scary.  You make your own conclusions.  Paul Stitt, in his book Fighting the Food Giants, talks more about this and other such studies if you are interested in further information.

In another interesting article called, "Cereal: The Breakfast of Toxins", the author posits that extruded grains are toxic to the neurological system.  The extrusion process destroys the good fatty acids within and even the chemical vitamins that  they add to try to make it have something in it ("Fortified with 9 vitamins and minerals!").  That doesn't sound like what you want to serve up to your offspring before you send them off for their statewide standardized tests, now is it?!  

On the wikipedia page (I know, totally not a great source, but anyway), it describes the process of extrusion and makes the following comments: 

It [extrusion] may also cause the fragmentation of proteins, starches, and non-starch polysaccharides to create "reactive molecules that may form new linkages not found in nature". This includes Maillard reactions which reduce the nutritional value of the proteins. Vitamins with heat lability may be destroyed. As of 1998, little is known about the stability or bioavailability of phytochemicals involved in extrusion. Nutritional quality has been found to improve with moderate conditions (short duration, high moisture, low temperature), whereas a negative effect on nutritional quality of the extrudate occurs with a high temperature (at least 200°C), low moisture (less than 15%), or improper components in the mix.  

So, basically, it's a freak of nature, reduces nutritional value, and it's near totally untested.  Awesome.  Sounds good.  Let's do this.  

Over at Nourished Kitchen, she hits it home hard.  She pleads with you in her article called, "Boxed Cereal is not Food" (as she should, and as I will) that you cook a real meal for breakfast, and not fall back on cereal (as tempting as it is to do).  In fact, she suggests that the organic cereals, because of their generally higher protein content, are actually worse for you than their Froot Loopy counterparts.  (No, people eating Froot Loops, you do NOT get to rejoice.  It's still an epic fail.)  She even has a recipe or two at the bottom for you to try instead.  

Soaked grains are the best way for us to be able to digest food, and it is no wonder that there are so many digestive issues going on now (we kind of skipped that step because it takes too much of what we think we are saving by eating cereal - time).  

Personally, I am not a superfan of grains for breakfast.  I am more of the free-range, local, egg cooked in grass fed butter (on a cast iron pan, of course) - add celtic grey salt and a crazy amount of cracked black pepper to help my turmeric absorb - with some spelt/olive oil/rosemary homemade toast with half a gallon of butter kind of person.  Kids add ketchup.  Otherwise, if I'm going to make oatmeal, I try to soak it at least from the night before.  If not either of those, French toast is just fine.  If it's Saturday, well, bring on the pancakes (flour from the grain mill).  That's how you get muscles, you know.  Pancakes.  Please do eat that with some real maple syrup and don't get the toxic fake stuff.  Your muscles (and brain) will shrink.  

So why would it be hard to break away from the habit?  Here are a few (very scientific) answers I've come up with from a poll (also very scientific) I put out.  

People have the following reasons for eating cereal:  

1.  They like it.  Okay, I really have nothing to say about this.  I think if you want to eat it as dessert, you go on with your bad self.  I agree.  Love Crunch is pretty freakin' amazing.  But I'm not going to eat it anymore.  Unless it's for dessert on an amazing glop of yogurt with some berries, but I digress.  (But, if you are eating it as your main start of your day, you might want to ponder that deeply.)  

2.  It is fast and easy.  So is not wiping after you go to the bathroom, but(t) that's not super recommended.  

3.  "It's easy and I like eating ground up bugs/mice/rats."  These are the people I call my friends, if this is any indication to you on anything at all.  I have literally no comment at all except for loud laughing.   

4.  I need fiber.  (So that whole cardboard thing...)  Garden of Life, Raw Fiber.  1 scoop and stay in for the next 24 hours, gather plenty of reading material and put it on your bathroom counter.  Otherwise eat tons of raw fruits and veggies.  You can overdose on some spinach salad, too.  If there are digestive issues, perhaps soaking your grains would help, and I'd douse in some probiotics and tons of water, too.  

Rays of glorious sunshine descend upon the magical treats...
Cereal in this hiz-ouse is a dessert-like treat.  I buy it once in a never.  I will confess something to you, though.  I am buying it for an Easter present for the littles.  Chocolate bunnies ain't got nuthin' on a box of cereal around here.  Yes, it is Cascadian Farms organic fruit and nut granola, but it will be a bigger hit than crack Peeps.  (Don't tell!  It's a secret!)  

Peace, love, and crunchy granola as an adjective for people should maybe be renamed to soggy soaked grain or something,  
Ms. Daisy

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