Overcome Your Troubles

As years go by, we become more conscious of our age as being a puzzle, a life of uncertainties.

And yet, medical science says that how we think is responsible for sickness and health. Our response to various stresses – and not the stresses themselves – can lead to cardiovascular disease, stroke, and other ailments.

Executive Fitness Newsletter shares with us the century-old advice on health and happiness by Robert Louis Stevenson that is still valid today.

• Make up your mind to be happy. Learn to find pleasure in simple things.
• Make the best of your circumstances. No one has everything and everyone has something of sorrow intermingled with the gladness of life. The trick is to make the laughter outweigh the tears.
• Don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t think that somehow you should be protected from misfortunes that befall others.
• You can’t please everybody. Don’t let criticism worry you.
• Don’t let your neighbors set your standards. Be yourself.
• Do the things that you enjoy doing, but stay out of debt.
• Don’t borrow trouble. Imaginary things are harder to bear than the actual ones.
• Since hate poisons the soul, don’t cherish enmities, grudges. Avoid people who make you unhappy.
• Have many interests. If you can’t travel, read about new places.
• Don’t hold post-mortems. Don’t spend your life brooding over sorrows and mistakes.
• Don’t be one who never gets over things.
• Keep busy at something. A very busy person never has time to be unhappy. – Coffee Break, Brescia College.

Stay healthy in 2012 and the coming years--Happy Holidays!

The Body: A Living Dynamo, Part 2

An Internal Battery. Every functional change in the body is associated with electricity, but the source is uncertain. It is known that all the elements from our food give off electrical radiation. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and all other minerals combine to form an electrical battery within the body.

Our pulsating heart produces an electrical current that creates electrical magnetic fields, measuring less than one-billionth of the earth’s magnetic field. However, it is still not known how these magnetic fields affect our biological metabolism, although their presence suggests that changes in the earth’s magnetic and static electricity fields do have a bearing on the nervous system.

Dr. Hans Neuberger told delegates at a Pennsylvania Health Conference that many investigators have confirmed that natural atmospheric electricity affects living organisms. Scientists now can predict certain sensory responses in humans and animals on the basis of expected weather changes, he said.

Over the past 200 years, Dr. Neuberger noted, it has been shown statistically that the atmospherics can produce pain, stimulate labor and childbirth, and terminate fatal disease. Moreover, atmospherics can slow physical reaction time, “perhaps thereby favoring traffic and industrial accidents.” Television, radio and radar waves closely resemble these atmospherics.

Little is known about the mechanisms involved in physiological reactions to atmospheric electrical factors. Various body functions may well respond to different frequencies of radio-wave pulses, the meteorologists have theorized, but investigations should cover the whole frequency spectrum.

Experiments that have been conducted furnished some clues to the possible limits of human responses to electricity, Dr. Neuberger said. But much more needs to be done, he added, because it is obvious that atmospherics have great significance for anyone concerned with environmental health.

If air ions and atmospheric electricity can stimulate or reduce pain, encourage or discourage the growth of certain diseases, it is possible that electricity in prescribed amounts could do the same.

It’s even possible that in a few years, five cents worth of electrical current will replace today’s handful of pills, concludes the report.

The Body: A Living Dynamo, Part 1

You may not believe it, but we are a living dynamo – a human battery.

Executive Fitness Newsletter reports that the use of electricity in controlling pain, the healing of broken bones, and the treatment of body disorders with acupuncture needles, has been well-known. Yet, most of us still consider electricity alien to the human body; on the contrary, electricity is a basic constituent of every living cell.

In explaining that electricity may replace drugs as the prevailing therapy, British Neurophysicist Dr. W. Grey Walter, compares the human brain to a computer; that it would take at least 10 billion electronic cells, occupying some million and a half cubic feet, to duplicate the brain. The system would require one billion watts of power.

Even heart action in its every beat, is the result of muscle contraction caused by electrical impulses. But it is the nervous system that most graphically illustrates the intricate part electrical energy plays in the various functions of the human body.

As the body’s communication system, the nerves are constantly carrying messages throughout the body. Any stimulus – heat, light, sound or whatever it is – acts upon the nerve cell (neuron) to fire an impulse which is transmitted along the nerve fiber (axon).

Electric currents travel along copper wire at a little less than 186,000 miles a second, the speed of light. But impulses traveling through long nerve fibers move at the rate of only 350 feet a second, or 250 miles per hour. The speed is reduced in some shorter fibers to about 2.5 miles per hour.

Copper, the most common type of electric wire, is such a good conductor that most of the electrical energy arrives at the other end. But in the case of axons, energy leaks out so badly that if it were not for the constant amplification all along the way, energy would never reach the end.

There are two types of neurons: sensory nerves that transmit sensations, and motor nerves that send orders. It is the sensory nerves that send out a hurried S.O.S. to the brain when you touch something hot. And it is the motor nerves that race back the signal to move your finger.

Sensory messages, or impulses, travel from billions of neurons to the brain and spinal cord every second. Neurons do not respond to stimuli below a certain threshold – particles of air and fine dust are ignored – and the stimuli above the threshold receive an impulse of a fixed intensity. What is believed to cause different responses to different stimuli is the number of neurons that are activated to form a pattern or code.

Researchers believe nerve cells are fired by the passing of ions across the cell’s membranes. Ions are electrified particles formed when an atom loses or gains electrons. They are contained in every molecule of matter.

(Part 2 will be posted next Monday, Dec. 19, 2011. – J.P.)

Balance: Key To Good Health, Part 2

Balancing the pH. According to Dr. Merced, balancing the pH level in our body is a major step toward well-being and greater health. This is true with the human blood, which should be slightly alkaline (7.35-7.45). Below or above this range means symptoms and disease. A pH of 7.0 is neutral. A pH below 7.0 is acidic, and above it is alkaline.

An acidic pH can occur from an acid-forming diet, emotional stress, toxic overload, immune reactions or any process that deprives the cells of oxygen and other nutrients. The body will try to compensate for pH by using alkaline minerals. If the diet does not contain enough minerals to compensate, a build-up of acids in the cells will occur. And because diet is crucial to overall health and quality of life, our diet should be plant-based enough to balance our body chemistry.

An acidic balance will decrease the ability to absorb minerals and other nutrients; decrease the energy production in the cells; decrease its ability to repair damaged cells; decrease its ability to detoxify heavy metals; make tumor cells thrive and make them more susceptible to fatigue and illness. A blood pH of 6.9, which is slightly acidic, can induce coma and death.

The reason acidosis (over-acidity) is more common in our society is mostly due to the typical Western diet, which is far too high in acid-forming animal products like meat, eggs and dairy, and far too low in alkaline-producing foods like fresh vegetables. Besides, we eat processed foods like white flour and sugar and drink coffee, including soft drinks. Also, we use too many artificial chemical sweeteners like NutraSweet, Spoonful, Sweet ‘N’ Low, Equal, or Aspartame (which are poison and very acidic).

One of the best things we can do to correct our over-acidic body is to clean up our diet and lifestyle.

To maintain health, our diet should consist of 60% alkaline-forming foods and 40% acid-forming foods.

To restore health, our diet should consist of 80% alkaline-forming foods and 20% acid-forming foods.

Generally, alkaline-forming foods include: most fruits, green vegetables, peas, beans, lentils, spices, herbs and seasonings; seeds and nuts. Acid-forming foods, on the other hand, include: meat, fish, poultry, eggs, grains and legumes.

Raw foods are alkaline, while cooked foods are more acidic.

Shift Our pH Toward Alkaline. Our goal is to live healthy and fit, mentally and emotionally stable – right up to our allotted number of years – before we let go… So let’s face it: An acidic body is a sickness magnet. What we eat and drink will impact where our body’s pH level falls. Balance is Key!

(Courtesy of Dr. Fe Jocelyn G. Merced, Lifestream Health Center. www.lifestreamcentre.com; jocelynmerced@yahoo.com; jocelynmerced@lifestreamcentre.com; tel (+632) 7060420 / 09178988226)