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

Click the play button to listen now:
 

Enjoy!

In medicine, we see the touch of God all the time, but it is called “spontaneous remission.” If it happens at a prayer meeting, then God gets the credit! Otherwise it is just said to be one of those inexplicable marvels of the human body.

Is there any science that tells us whether prayer is working or not? You bet!

Dr. Randolph Byrd, a Christian cardiologist, conducted a study in 1984 that has led to a resurgence of scientific evaluation of the effect of prayer on healing.

393 patients, admitted to the coronary care unit at San Francisco General Hospital, over a 10 month period were randomly selected, by computer, to either a 201 patient control group or the 192 patients who were prayed for daily by 5-7 people in home prayer groups. This was a randomized, double-blind experiment in which neither the patients, nurses, nor doctors knew which group the patients were in.

Dr. Byrd discovered a definite pattern of obvious differences between the control group and those prayed for:

1. None of those prayed for required endotracheal intubation compared with twelve in the control group requiring the insertion of an artificial airway in the throat.
2. The prayed for group experienced fewer cases of pneumonia and cardiopulmonary arrests.
3. Those prayed for were five times less likely to require antibiotics.
4. The prayed for group were three times less likely to develop pulmonary edema, a condition where the lungs fill with fluid.
5. Fewer patients in the prayed for group died.

Dr. Larry Dossey, M.D., referring to Dr. Byrd’s remarkable experiment, states that “If the technique being studied had been a new drug or a surgical procedure instead of prayer, it would almost certainly have been heralded as some sort of amazing breakthrough.”

As you would expect, most doctors ignored the proven vallue of prayer.

Now a new study has confirmed yet again that prayer works.

The experiences of 24 Mozambicans, part of a study reported in the September issue of the Southern Medical Journal, a peer-reviewed journal, suggest to the researchers that “proximal intercessory prayer (PIP)” — in which the healer is in close proximity to the patient, often touching or hugging him or her — may be a useful complement to Western medical practice.

In this study, the degree of improvement seen in people with vision and hearing impairments was more than that seen previously in hypnosis or “suggestion” studies.

“We found a statistically significant effect of PIP for the population of both those with auditory and visual impairments,” said study lead author Candy Gunther Brown, associate professor of religious studies at Indiana University in Bloomington.

“We didn’t generally find that people who were totally deaf or blind to start with ended up with 20/20 vision and perfect hearing,” she remarks, “But those with moderate to severe impairments when tested before the intervention, had a much, much improved threshold.”

In “Cancer Confidential” I also looked into the research into what is called distant intercessory prayer. There was some evidence that even that works. But don’t forget, that’s not how people actually pray for healing, so researchers were not testing something valid.

[SOURCE: September 2010, Southern Medical Journal]

Not a Christian? I don’t think it matters at all. You can pray to any higher authority you respect. It’s a myth that prayer is somehow “Christian”. It is common to all Mankind, as is the Creator, of course.

If you still haven’t got “Cancer Confidential” eBook, there’s a good price on it right now. You can get it by clicking on this link: Cancer Confidential.

A 37-year old woman in Germany has strange epileptic seizures: she feels she has turned into a man. This is accompanied by a deeper and more masculine voice and even her arms have grown hairier over time.

MRI scans revealed damage to the woman’s right amygdala, a tiny little almond-shaped group of nerve cells at the base of the brain, known to be associated with mood and emotions (amydala is Greek for the almond).

There’s more: EEG electrodes recorded abnormal activity in the surrounding right temporal lobe, suggesting that this region is the source of her seizures. What are called “temporal lobe seizures” are notorious for causing strange disorientation, sensations of déjà vu or jamais vu (unfamiliarity in everyday surroundings) and even past life recall. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote of feeling the presence of God in the moments preceding such a seizure.

But this gender transformation, though entirely consistent with weird temporal lobe perceptions, is actually quite unusual. That’s surprising.

Now, here’s where I come in with my renegade view of things. I like to ask questions; real questions, like: could this be a case of possession? I mean real possession, a real spirit, entering at the time of the seizure?

Doctors would never ask themselves this question. To them the idea would be ridiculous.

But why not?

I’ve dealt with countless lives and events centered around spirit entities coming and going, personality changes, past lives and identity switches. It’s actually much more common than people might suspect. But the victim usually dismisses it as illusory; they and the doctors will record the events in terms like “seems as if…” there was a take-over. But what if it is real?

I have known cases of total personality change after an operation—put down to anesthetic damage—but in which that’s hard to justify clinically. Yet the patient woke up with entirely new characteristics. Not brain damaged; one was fiendishly clever and turned into an international crook and possibly a murderer (never been proved).

I believe it was a case of a permanent take-over. He ended up in jail and nobody yet knows the final outcome. He threatened his son’s life, from within jail. Yet this man started out as an amiable professor.

Shades of “The Exorcist”!