You see plates of starches and sugar, sauces, dairy shlock and mayo or ketchup, all piled high, as if there was a famine on the way. Big portions are the modern American specialty, where just one single dish can be over 2,000 calories!

The days of nouvelle cuisine (tiny portions) are long gone. It only turns up occasionally these days, chiefly one suspects, in pretentious establishments that want to make more profit: sell less food for more money but with a French accent!

Olive Garden’s spicy Alfredo Chicken is 2,800 calories a portion!

3 Diets Tested

An interesting study from Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland, published online March 6th, 2019, looked at three different scientifically-recognized diets and evaluated which were best for middle age health and for maintaining cognitive function (thinking and memory skills).

These were:

The Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes whole grains, fruits, vegetables, healthy fats, nuts, legumes and fish and limits red meat, poultry and full-fat dairy. It also includes moderate alcohol, usually omitted by propagandists, but essential if you live in Spain, Italy or the south of France!

The DASH diet (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension), which emphasizes grains, vegetables, fruits, low-fat dairy, legumes and nuts and limits meat, fish, poultry, total fat, saturated fat, sweets and sodium. No alcohol.

The CARDIA APDQS diet (a priori Diet Quality Score) emphasizes fruits, vegetables, legumes, low-fat dairy, fish, and moderate alcohol, and limits fried foods, salty snacks, sweets, high-fat dairy and sugar-sweetened soft drinks. A priori just means dietary factors chosen in advance of the study. CARDIA stands for Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults.

So What Were The Results?

Eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, moderate in nuts, fish and alcohol and low in meat and full-fat dairy seems to be associated with better cognitive performance in middle age. Cognitive abilities include thinking and memory skills as the years go by.

“Our findings indicate that maintaining good dietary practices throughout adulthood can help to preserve brain health at midlife” said study author Claire T. McEvoy, PhD, of Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland.

The study involved 2,621 young people (average age of 25), who were then followed for 30 years. The participants’ cognitive function were tested twice, when they were about 50 and 55 years old.

We call this a longitudinal study and these are much more reliable than demographic surveys. It means researchers are much more likely getting a result that relates to a known cause.

The participants’ dietary patterns were evaluated to see how closely they adhered to three heart-healthy diets. Study participants were then divided into one of three groups – low, medium or high adherence score – based on how closely they followed the diet.

The researchers found that people who closely followed the Mediterranean diet and the APDQS diet had significantly less 5-year decline in their cognitive function at middle-age. But not so with the DASH diet,

In fact people with high adherence to the APDQS diet were 52 percent less likely to have poor thinking skills than people with low adherence to the diet.

People with high adherence to the Mediterranean diet were 46 percent less likely to have poor thinking skills than people with low adherence to the diet. Of the 868 people in the high group, 9 percent had poor thinking skills, compared to 29 percent of the 798 people in the low group.

Put another way, if you adhere reasonably well to either the Mediterranean diet or the CARDIA APDQS, you are 2 – 5 times more likely to avoid dementia and senility.

So forget the Alfredo sauce and the ketchup! A couple of glasses of wine will be far healthier. Go for a side-salad with light vinaigrette dressing! And have a bowl of fruit, instead of that tempting sugar dessert. It’s good for your heart and good for your brain!

The Failed DASH Diet

Doctors like to push the DASH diet and consider it “proven”. But it didn’t work nearly as well as the other two diets!

The DASH diet is a politically-correct diet. It’s supposed to work. They just ignore evidence that it is worthless (or even harmful). It’s a “committee” diet, rather than a real researchers plan.

Plus, it doesn’t include any alcohol and I am tired of repeating myself: that moderate wine intake is POSITIVE, health-wise. Not just “OK”, it adds subtle health factors.

Moreover, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with resveratrol or antioxidants or any other chemical factor. I think it’s the camaraderie, the joy-of-living factor that it brings to the table. It lowers stress and teaches us that life is good! Bonhomie is hard nutrient to score but a definite nutrient, nevertheless.

My friend Dr. Stephen Sinatra shares this view.

“One possibility is that DASH does not consider moderate alcohol intake as part of the dietary pattern, whereas the other two diets do,” Dr. McEvoy said. “It’s possible that moderate alcohol consumption as part of a healthy diet could be important for brain health in middle age…”

I say yes to that! Cheers!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby

The Official Alternative Doctor

SOURCE:

“Dietary patterns during adulthood and cognitive performance in midlife” Claire T. McEvoy, Tina Hoang, Stephen Sidney, Lyn M. Steffen, David R. Jacobs, James M.]Shikany, John T. Wilkins, Kristine Yaffe Neurology Mar 2019, 10.1212/WNL.0000000000007243

Here’s the story: the patient is me (truly, this happened to me yesterday afternoon). I was sitting in a restaurant on the shores of lovely Lake Lucerne (photo), eating a plate with Parma ham and melon salad–a mix of watermelon, canteloupe and honeydew, drizzled with a balsamic dressing. It was delicious.

Suddenly, there came a sharp pain in the side of my cheek. Gosh, I thought, a fish bone spike! Then I realized that was silly; but it could have been a spicule of bone from the ham. I felt it with my tongue and it seemed soft and small.

Nevertheless, the pain rapidly increased until I was forced to borrow a pair of lady’s tweezers from a fellow diner and dash to the restroom.

It was too dark to see much in the toilet so I literally groped blindly with the tweezers inside my mouth and, after a few minutes, got lucky. I pulled something out and the pain lessened a little.

Back outside in the sunshine, I could see a strange object: it was a tiny soft round sac, about 3 mm in diameter, with a little spiky “tail”, another 2.5 – 3 mm long. It reminded me of a small piece of berry fruit with a spike, called a drupe (like in a blackberry).

All was suddenly clear!

YOUR QUESTION: what is the diagnosis? (what was this object?) and what two treatments should you always have with you, for casual emergencies, that would have made this immediately more comfortable for me?

It was a bee sting! The strange object I removed from inside my cheek was the actual sting. That meant it was a bee: the bee loses its sting when it is activated. The bee dies.

But I did not have a bee inside my mouth; trust me! The bee sting arrived on the salad. I called the attention of the management to this unfortunate event and they were profusely apologetic. The boss arrived, very concerned and offered me compensation. I was quite sure at that point that they knew. I think an employee must have swatted the bee hovering over the melon salad, killed it, that pushed out the sting and… lucky me!… I got to swallow it. Most people don’t know that a bee sting is detachable.

But here’s the second part of the question: what two simple remedies should you always have with you, that would have made me more comfortable?

Rescue remedy (Bach flower remedy) and homeopathic Traumeel. Rescue Remedy is great for shock and upset of all kinds; worth taking. Traumeel is an OTC remedy, widely available, designed for traumas of all kinds.

Unfortunately, I had neither with me! Ouch! But if I had, I would have asked for a glass of water, dropped a Traumeel tablet in it and then added 10 drops of Rescue remedy. That’s for sipping slowly over an hour or so. It would have made a big difference. As it was, I had to take the cable car back up the mountain to my apartment, feeling very sore inside my mouth!

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What do you think are the 10 most horrible sounds that can be heard?

The sound of nails on a chalkboard or screams may send shivers down the spine for a good reason.

A new study shows annoying sounds trigger a highly emotional response in the brain.

Researchers found the part of the brain that regulates emotions, the amygdala, appears to take over the hearing part of the brain when people hear an extremely annoying sound.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers looked at activity in the brains of 13 healthy volunteers when they heard a range of 74 different sounds.

The participants rated each sound from most annoying or unpleasant to pleasant.

The results, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, show the top 10 most unpleasant sounds. See if you agree:

1. Knife on a bottle
2. Fork on a glass
3. Chalk on a blackboard
4. Ruler on a bottle
5. Nails on a blackboard
6. Female scream
7. Disc grinder
8. Squealing brakes on a bicycle
9. Baby crying
10. Electric drill

Personally, I can think of some they missed, like the sound of a politician attacking his or her rivals. Or a woman saying “Is that it?” after sex!

On the other end of the spectrum, though, there must be some pleasant sounds. They are:

1. Applause
2. Baby laughing
3. Thunder
4. Water flowing

Again, I can come up with different ideas, like the riffling of a handful of paper money or your sexual rival falling off his bike, and yelling “Ouch!”

What Makes Sounds Unpleasant

The study also shows that sounds in the higher-frequency range of around 2,000 to 5,000 Hz were rated as most unpleasant.

This is the frequency range where our ears are most sensitive and it does include sounds of screams, which we find intrinsically unpleasant.

[SOURCES: Journal of Neuroscience, Oct. 10, 2012. News release, New Castle University]

As Ben Franklin said:

• In wine there is wisdom,
• In beer there is freedom,
• In water there is bacteria.

In a number of carefully controlled trials, scientists have demonstrated that if we drink 1 litre of water each day, at the end of the year we would have absorbed more than 1 kilo of Escherichia coli, (E. Coli) – bacteria found in feces.

In other words, we are consuming 1 kilo of poop.

However, we do NOT run that risk when drinking wine & beer (or tequila, rum, whiskey or other liquor) because alcohol has to go through a purification process of boiling, filtering and/or fermenting.

Remember:

• Water = Poop,
• Wine = Health

Therefore we conclude: it’s better to drink wine and talk stupid, than to drink water and be full of sh**…

[But remember, drink responsibly—gotta say that!]

PS. And wasn’t it W C Fields who said “Don’t drink the water, fish have sex in it” (except that he used the F*** word)?

Wake Up Laughing is where healing laughter and “new edge” comedy meet. For years we have been learning that laughter in and of itself has proven physiological benefits. Laughter produces endorphins, our body’s natural painkiller. Laughter improves immune function. Hearty laughter is literally good for the heart, because when we laugh it causes our blood vessels to dilate. And that is certainly better than having them die early!

But laughter is medicine in the Native American sense as well, a transformational tool that used wisely can bring not just physical healing, but emotional release, mental flexibility and spiritual perspective. George Carlin once said that most people go to comedy clubs to release just enough tension so they can go back to their basically unsatisfying lives. Put all of these unsatisfying lives together and you get … well, just turn on the TV.

What I call “new edge” comedy has enough of an edge to cut through the bull that lurks behind every sacred cow. But unlike the cynical (and even mean) comedy that our culture has cultivated over the past 30 years, Wake Up Laughing offers a healing intention designed to awaken joy, compassion, kindness, wisdom — and the innocent playfulness that so many of us abandoned when we were tricked into believing that life is serious. As Swami Beyondananda has said, “Life is a joke … but God is laughing with us, not at us.” And if God is laughing, who are we to not laugh?

Wake Up Laughing is here to help you wake up to the Cosmic Comedy, and go forth and multiply playfulness and joy.

May you wake up laughing, and leave laughter in your wake. And may the Farce be with you.

10 Ways to Wake Up Laughing — and Leave Laughter in Your Wake

1. Laugh Every Day. Seriously … laughter is good for you. And when things “just aren’t funny” — that’s the most important time to laugh. Try this at home: Watch Funniest Home Videos with the sound off and Spike Jones playing instead.

2. Don’t Worry, You’re Already Funny. Instead of trying to be funny, learn to see funny. Especially learn to see what’s funny about you. Imagine God watching the Comedy Channel, and you are what’s on.

3. Bring Laughter to the Outernet. Take the best of those jokes you get on the internet and share them on the “outernet.” Practice by telling the same joke to five people. Short jokes are fine. Remember, it’s not the length of the joke that matters, it’s how much pleasure it
gives.

4. Savor and Save Humorous Healing Stories. A good laughsitive cleanses the system and leaves the mind open to receive nourishment. Keep a notebook of jokes that “enlighten as they lighten.” You will find yourself remembering and using them just at the right time.

5. Turn Worry Into Laughter. When you find yourself worrying about something, step back from the worry and see if you can find something in the situation to laugh about. Worrying has no proven benefits. Laughter does. Did you know that one Youngman of laughter — the mirth contained in the average one-liner — can release up to a megahurt of emotional pain?

6. Reframe Suffering as Comedy in Disguise. Sing the blues when you are angry, sad or frustrated. If you must complain, complain creatively — and thoroughly enjoy your complaining. Say, “You know what I love about this ….?” Look for the comedy “hidden in this picture.” (e.g., “I’m not on the verge of bankruptcy. I’m just having a near-debt experience.”)

7. Build Critical “Muscle” By Pumping Ironies. Looking for the inherent contradictions and incongruities in situations helps build a strong body politic 12 ways. Train your inner child to ask, “How come that emperor isn’t wearing any clothes?” When you watch the news or read the papers, be on the lookout for truth disguised as humor.

8. Develop a Comic Alter Ego. A shy, mild-mannered man named Edgar Bergen went “inside” and found a brash, outrageous alter ego which he called Charlie McCarthy — who would do and say things that would make Edgar blush. Even if your “character” never makes it beyond your bathroom mirror, a comic alter ego is a great way to give voice to daily frustrations and lovingly laugh at your own “shadow.” One of the best ways to break the addiction to your own personality is try some other ones on!

9. Write Your Laugh Story. Spend an afternoon or evening writing your life story as if it were a comedy. Which comic actors could play your family, friends and foes? Who would you get to play your part? Give your story a title. A friend of mine calls his “Don’t Do What I Did!”

10. Play Regularly. Have you ever felt the Creator is toying with you? Well then, follow Swami Beyondananda’s sage advice and become a creative plaything. Bring the childlike quality of play back into your life. Run up the down escalator. Dress for Halloween — any day the mood hits you. Plant the seeds of harmless fun wherever you go.

© Steve Bhaerman, http://www.wakeuplaughing.com, 2002.
Feel free to circulate, with attribution only.