March 20th, 2008 cate
Spring has sprung sort of and the weather is warming up. Well, it’s supposed to be warming up in most parts of the world and that means it’s time to think about flea control for your beloved pets.
Since most flea collars use very strong chemicals, keep your little cutie safe and use an herbal, natural flea collar as an alternative. That way, neither you or your animal family member needs to be touching dangerous substances. Your little guy will be free of fleas and everyone will be happy about that! Take a look at the cat flea collars here
and the dog flea collars here.
These collars repel fleas, ticks, mosquitoes, gnats and biting flies using natural, safe essential oils.
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March 17th, 2008 cate
Times are tough right now in the U.S. The strongest currency, the greenback, has dropped to number 2. Yup, now the euro is number one and well, it looks like it’ll be like that for a while. During times like these, anything can happen, including losing your job. If you lose your job, how will you pay your mortgage? This is happening all over the country and many people like you and me are finding themselves homeless. We can’t imagine ourselves homeless, can we? They felt exactly like us just a few months ago.
When the economy takes a hard hit like this, companies downsize, which might make your job position vulnerable. Anne Fisher, over at Fortune Magazine has written an article called, “8 ways to recession-proof your job.”
It might be a good thing to secure your job position but it will also be wise to have a Plan B.
Article
Here’s another article: How to protect yourself in a recession.
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March 13th, 2008 cate
The Empowered Patient – is a new must-read book from author, Julia Hallisy. She has written something so fundamentally necessary that everyone will benefit from reading it. Some background: Her daughter, Kate, had been diagnosed with a fast-spreading cancer of the eye when she was just five months old. She’d underwent chemotherapy, radiation, reconstructive surgery, and an operation to remove her right eye. She’d developed a infection directly related to hospital malpractices that led to toxic-shock syndrome and a leg amputation. Kate died in 2000. She was only 11 years old.
“The Empowered Patient is by far one of the best resources available for patients and families to learn more about their health care experiences. The Empowered Patient is all-inclusive and speaks directly to the basic concerns that are faced in health care every day, raising issues rarely discussed with patients and families by providers. It is crucial to know what to do when seeking health care in our complicated and multi-faceted system, and this valuable resource will draw a clear path for the reader. The Empowered Patient might very well be the first of it’s kind in that it will educate and enlighten those who read it about issues that are either unknown or taken for granted by the reader. In the healthcare arena, what you don’t know can hurt you. The Empowered Patient is a book that belongs in every home and will no doubt save countless lives. “
–Jennifer Dingman, Co-President, PULSE of America
Available at Amazon
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March 11th, 2008 cate
From AP:
PALENQUE, Mexico (AP) — North American Indians assembled in the shadow of ancient Mayan pyramids Monday discussed how their tradition wisdom could help save the planet, and were told that even indigenous cultures have struggled with environmental abuse.
More than 200 leaders from 71 American Indian nations in Mexico, the United States and Canada came together in this Mexican jungle to find indigenous solutions to pollution and ecological problems threatening the planet.
“Our Mother Earth is being polluted at an alarming rate, and our elders say that she is dying,” said Raymond Sensmeier, a Tlingit leader from Yakutat, Alaska. “The way the weather is around the world … a cleansing is needed.”
The conference began with a pre-dawn ceremony that included fire, copal incense, chants in Lacandon Maya and blasts from a conch shell.
Speakers reminded attendees that even Indian cultures have battled with environmental abuse and pointed to theories that deforestation contributed to the collapse of the Maya who built the temples at Palenque.
“As we stand here, very near Palenque, I am mindful that some scholars have suggested that environmental stressors contributed to the decline of the Mayan civilization,” said U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator Elin Miller. “The planet-wide stress on the environment today means that collaborative efforts … are not just good things. They may well be essential for our survival.”
But, as Bill Erasmus, a representative of the indigenous people of Canada’s Northwest Territories noted, “part of our role is to wake up the world. It is very obvious to us all that the climate is changing.”
Mexico’s environment secretary, Juan Elvira Quesada, said the gathering is meant “to present the teachings of the original peoples of North America.”
“In this way, the indigenous communities can become the natural guides to restoring balance and harmony in the world,” he said.
The lessons they have to teach are simple – based on reviving Indian notions about ownership, use, compensation and respect.
“I sometimes talk to scientists,” said Sensmeier, “and they compartmentalize things, put things in boxes and disconnect them, and doing so promotes disharmony and imbalance.”
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March 8th, 2008 cate
From the nyt:
“In 1968 a Chinese-American physician wrote a rather lighthearted letter to The New England Journal of Medicine. He had experienced numbness, palpitations and weakness after eating in Chinese restaurants in the United States, and wondered whether the monosodium glutamate used by cooks here (and then rarely used by cooks in China) might be to blame.
The consequences for the restaurant business, the food industry and American consumers were immediate and enormous. MSG, a common flavor enhancer and preservative used since the 1950s, was tagged as a toxin, removed from commercial baby food and generally driven underground by a new movement toward natural, whole foods.
“It was a nightmare for my family,” said Jennifer Hsu, a graphic designer whose parents owned several Chinese restaurants in New York City in the 1970s. “Not because we used that much MSG — although of course we used some — but because it meant that Americans came into the restaurant with these suspicious, hostile feelings.”
Even now, after “Chinese restaurant syndrome” has been thoroughly debunked (virtually all studies since then confirm that monosodium glutamate in normal concentrations has no effect on the overwhelming majority of people), the ingredient has a stigma that will not go away.
But then, neither will MSG.
Cooks around the world have remained dedicated to MSG, even though they may not know it by that name. As hydrolyzed soy protein or autolyzed yeast, it adds flavor to the canned chicken broth and to the packs of onion soup mix used by American home cooks, and to the cheese Goldfish crackers and the low-fat yogurts in many lunchboxes.
It is the taste of Marmite in the United Kingdom, of Golden Mountain sauce in Thailand, of Goya Sazón on the Latin islands of the Caribbean, of Salsa Lizano in Costa Rica and of Kewpie mayonnaise in Japan.
“It’s all the same thing: glutamate,” said Dr. Nuripa Chaudhari of the University of Miami, who was part of the first research team to identify human glutamate receptors.
In September Dr. Chaudhari will take part in the University of Tokyo’s centenary celebrations honoring Prof. Kikunae Ikeda’s 1908 discovery of glutamate flavor. The Japanese company Ajinomoto turned that discovery into crystalline powder form, MSG, and patented it in 1909.
“Just like salt and sugar, it exists in nature, it tastes good at normal levels, but large amounts at high concentrations taste strange and aren’t that good for you,” Dr. Chaudhari said.
If you live in the United States and like spicy tuna rolls, Puerto Rican roast pork or Thai noodles, there is a good chance you are eating, and enjoying, MSG. And if you are the kind of cook who likes to keep a globe-trotting kitchen, well, then, some of these MSG-laden ingredients may deserve a place in your cupboard.
“I don’t cook with MSG because that’s not my training, but it definitely has its place,” said Zak Pelaccio, a New York chef whose ride to fame has been greased with Kewpie mayonnaise. One of the dishes that put him on the map was a sandwich of roasted salmon on pumpernickel bread slathered with wasabi aioli: wasabi from a tube and the mayonnaise.
In regions where meat and meaty flavors have been out of reach for most cooks, MSG has long filled the gap.
“My father called Maggi sauce la segunda venida, the second coming, because he was not a very good cook and it saved him,” said Irma Cecilia Sanchez, a home health aide from Puebla, Mexico, who was waiting in line at a taco truck on the Upper West Side. Maggi sauce is a 19th-century Swiss creation, a general flavor enhancer now made with MSG, sweeteners and extracts.
Her mother died when …”
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