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Mindconnection eNL, 2002-11-02

In this issue:

  1. Featured product line
  2. Brainpower tip
  3. Finance tip
  4. Health tip
  5. Fitness tip
  6. Thought for the day

 

1. Featured product line

Here we are, over halfway through the current semester of school. If you have kids in school, you are probably wondering if they are learning anything of value. Most likely, the answer is no. Mindconnection offers some ways to overcome that. For example, we offer "Minding Your Money," a book that helps children learn lessons that will allow them to prevent the one problem that is the number one cause of suicide and the number one cause of divorce: poor money management. Yes, most of us consider ourselves above average drivers, above average money managers, and so on. But, let's set that aside and focus on helping kids where it really counts. See:

https://www.mindconnection.com/product/BK-H-MYM.html

If I were buying "Minding Your Money," I would take into account peer pressure and buy a lot of 50 so my kid could learn alongside other kids in school. Makes a nice tax deduction, but the real value would be showing a commitment to my child's future success. Then again, you can always hope your kid simply "gets it" despite being drenched by thousands of "be a stupid consumer" messages each week. I don't know that I would take that chance, but your decision is up to you.

 

2. Brainpower tips

You have heard the expression, "You are known by the company you keep." Well, it's also true that your brainpower depends, in part, on the people you associate with. That's one reason why I suggested a bulk order in the message above. Let's look at some ways this principle affects you:

  • Negative people. These are the folks who see the downside in everything or rarely see the good side in things. They will cloud your thinking and sap your energy. You just need to set limits with them. If they ignore the limits, avoid them.

  • Pollyanna people. These are the folks who can't see reality, and make like everything is wonderful. They love the emperor's new clothes, fail to realize a tax increase is a wage cut, believe they can drink "osteoporosis in a can" and not get osteoporosis, and so on. These folks will lead you over a cliff. Avoid them.

  • Realistic people. These are the folks who understand cause and effect. They may not always agree with you, but they challenge your thinking even when they are wrong. In so doing, they spur your brain to add synaptic connections. They make you smarter, in an organic way. Cherish them!

  • Dreamers. These folks may be pollyannas or realists. They share with you visions of how things can be. They are inspiring, and they are the kinds of folks who help others reach new heights. Having a few among your friends is a very good idea.

  • Fact gatherers. Often boring to the mentally-asleep, these folks have a passion for finding things out. They revel in knowledge. Go ahead and let them do the gruntwork and share their findings with you. You'll be more knowledgeable and more interesting.

  • Control freaks. These people are very insecure and work hard to satisfy those insecurities by "fixing" other people, telling them what to do, or outright punishing them for not following their personal "party line." Do not confuse these folks with friends who intervene in your life with good advice or in some other way seek to help you or just challenge you. The difference is in the need of the other person. It can be hard to spot. If someone is smothering you, simply tell that person you feel pressured and you need a break. If you don't get that break, you are dealing with a control freak. Tip: the person who always has to drive is usually a control freak.

  • Opposites. If you are a conservative, you need a friend or two who is liberal (at least until you can cure that person!). By making sure you have a "devil's advocate" for some or most of your beliefs, you can be more sure in what you believe. You can also be more sensitive to the beliefs of others (while plotting the best way to embarrass or discredit them <grin>).

This is not an exhaustive list. It's just a few ideas to get you thinking about your relationships. If they are too homogenous, you need to seek out folks who are different from you. If some folks make you feel bogged down, you need to re-examine your relationships with them.

 

3. Finance tips

Did you know "family size" containers of popular grocery items cost more per pound than smaller sizes? Note, I said "grocery items" rather than "foods." The reason for this distinction is clear when you start reading the labels on these items. It's best not to buy them at all. But, since I am not a control freak (see item #2 above), I am simply telling you this fact about them. You don't automatically save money by getting a larger package. The manufacturers know folks assume the savings are there, so they jack up the prices on larger sizes and ask grocers to place them in the most prominent display positions. Caveat emptor.

 

4. Health tip

We all know to drink plenty of water. But, what is water? If you are in a raft on the ocean and drink the water you are floating on, you will get sick. Hmm. What about your tap water? Let's take a look. And, just so you don't think I am full of hooey, I have worked as an engineer in public water treatment, public waste treatment, and water deionization for industrial purposes. I know a guy who constantly smells like a distillery, but we'll leave any contributions from him out of this.

Treatment of tap water, at the source, is pretty good. If you look at the stats for most localities, the water is safe to drink. The various levels of contaminants are at levels most people's bodies can safely handle, provided their bodies are not taxed by other factors. The water isn't pure, but it is potable. However, the water that comes out of your tap is toxic. What happened? Several things:

  • Because the water travels through a maze of old piping--much of which leaks--it is contaminated by various flora and fauna. Some of these are downright lethal. Rather than re-pipe water systems every year, the solution is to add an algaecide. That algaecide is chlorine. It works great. However, it is also toxic to people. Further, the chlorine reacts with other substances in the water to form compounds that are highly carcinogenic. If your water tastes like swimming pool water, you are drinking poison. We can't stop chlorinating the water--that would simply expose us to other poisons. But, we can treat the water at point of use. More on that, in a bit.
     
  • The United States has a myriad of laws prohibiting the prescription of random doses of medication, yet we have a medicine added to our drinking water. We don't know anything about its toxicity--that is, we don't know what level is safe. However, we know for a fact that communities with fluoridated water have abnormally high levels of lead poisoning. You can quickly find stories on this with any search engine. Here's one link: http://www.nofluoride.com/mountjoy.htm.
     
  • We also know that fluoride strengthens enamel when topically applied and given time to fill in the porous surface of the tooth. There is considerable evidence that ingested fluoride weakens the tooth. The logic that ingested fluoride strengthens the tooth would mean that adding wax to your gas tank makes your car shiny. I'm not sure that's true, but let me know if you try this. Because of the brainwashing on the fluoride issue, many folks pooh-pooh any criticism of fluoride in the water. Well, ask yourself why there are such stern warnings on over the counter fluoride rinses. Ask yourself why a dentist, after applying a fluoride treatment to your tooth with a rotary tool, asks you to spit the leftover stuff out. Hmm. Repeat after me: "Two plus two is four."
     
  • Various gases. A major source of intestinal bloating and flatulence is dissolved gas in the water. Because water is flowing through a maze of leaky pipes while various chemical reactions are going on in the water, you are going to be drinking a lot of gas when you drink directly from the tap. If you have a passion for belching or passing gas, this may actually be useful to you. Do note, however, that many of those gases are toxic.
     
  • Dissolved particles, noticeable as turbidity. If you look at the water in a strong light, you'll see a certain amount of cloudiness. More so when it is fresh out of the tap and also after it's stirred. Some of this is feces from the organisms in the water, some of it is entrained pipe crud, and some of it is air. Even if the water is perfectly pure when put into the pipes, it will have junk it in at the tap

What can you do about these items in your water? Here are some strategies, ranked roughly in order from least effective or advisable to most effective or advisable:

  • Drink bottled water. Uh, you have no guarantee this isn't bottled tap water. So now, you get the chlorinated plastic fumes plus whatever was in your tap water.
     
  • Simply let it stand. If you have fish, you know most of the chlorine will evaporate if the water is left to stand at room temperature in an open container for 24 hours. Fail to let it stand, and you get a massive fish kill. Chilling the water retards this process. You may not always have a 24 hour lead time to let your water stand, so know that you get significant benefit by simply pouring the water into a glass. So, if you are in a restaurant, order water with no ice and let the glass sit for a while before you drink from it. This will make the water much safer. It'll still have the various flora, fauna, and feces in it, but most of the gases will be gone.
     
  • Distill it. This removes most impurities. Some people claim it removes all the impurities, but that is not so. It will remove all the minerals, but some of the dissolved gases will be entrained in the steam and simply return to the condensate. This is why nuclear power plants use deionization, rather than distillation, for the water they put in their piping systems. Distilled water is simply too corrosive, because it still contains impurities. Also, distilling water removes one of the primary benefits of drinking water: getting minerals you need for health. You can use mineral supplements, but that approach still is likely to leave you with a hole in your mineral uptake.
     
  • Deionize it. You can't afford a deionization plant, but if you could you would get very clean water. Such a plant also means having to stock a lot of toxins onsite to make the deionization work. This is not recommended for home use, unless you have IRS agents frequent your home.
     
  • Filter it. Many types of filters exist. Most are not very good, but some are quite outstanding. The more expensive osmotic membrane filters (which I am too cheap to use) do the best job. I personally have selected a high-end consumer-grade point of use filter. The water system in my location carries one of the best ratings of any water system in the country. However, if I lived in my mom's town--where the tap water smells like pool water (pee optional, I guess)--I would go osmosis. I am convinced the local swimming pools take chlorine out of the tap water so swimmers don't get skin burns. It's that bad. If I lived in Detroit--which is surrounded by five toxic waste dumps (that, to me, explains their far-left politics)--I would buy my drinking water from out of state and filter it.

There you go. Think this over, and do take care of your health--it's your most precious asset.

 

5. Fitness tip

I was in an online conference with fitness guru Bill Phillips when someone asked this question: "Is it true you shouldn't eat carbohydrates within two hours of working out?" Amazing how the exact opposite of fact gets circulated. This shouldn't be surprising, though, because labor unions actually backed Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election despite the fact his intended programs would have sent most of their jobs overseas and granted the survivors a massive paycut. That's a topic for another eNL, but it is instructive when examining fact vs. fiction and how people don't stop to think. Here's the answer to that question:

When you have depleted your glycogen stores due to intense exercise, you are in the best possible of all times to ingest carbohydrates. Following a workout, you want to ingest protein, carbohydrates, and glutamine over the next two hours. The carbos act like carriers, ferrying the building blocks directly into your cells. You need a certain amount of carbohydrates, and the best time to ingest them is after a workout. The second best time is at breakfast. When you ingest them with protein, you make the best use of them.

Working a different body part every day for two or three weeks is a good way to stimulate muscle growth, if you are faithfully sucking down carbs and protein in the two hour window following the workout. You don't want to maintain this pace for more than three weeks, as intense exercise does release free radicals by damaging muscle tissue. If you start feeling weak or tired, take a day off and go back to a four or five day routine for at least a month. Otherwise, you develop too much cortisol--which is catabolic. BTW, cortisol is only one downside of overexercising.

Have you ever wondered why marathoners have such high cholesterol levels and look so bad? It's because they have damaged their arterial walls. When the blood leaks through these walls, the body cranks up its cholesterol machinery and your cholesterol level goes up. Most doctors make uninformed assumptions about cholesterol, and advise people to cut back on eggs. Following this ignorant advice actually causes a rise in cholesterol, if you are eating free-range eggs!. If you speak to someone who is trained in things cardiovascular and endocrinological, you will find out that high cholesterol is the body's way of trying to fix a problem. Taking cholesterol-lowering medication or using other stupid measures to cure the cure of one problem or symptom of another isn't the answer. But, I digress--that is a topic for another eNL. Just make sure to feed your muscles after a workout. Take plenty of vitamin E, vitamin C with B6 and B12, and water. Get enough rest along with this nutrition, and you will gain lean mass while improving your cholesterol profile.

BTW, I eat anywhere between two dozen and eight dozen eggs a week. My cholesterol profile is something that has made every doctor who has ever seen my test results ask me, "How do you do it?" Well, dear reader of the Mindconnection eNL, I just told you the answer. Remember, a healthy mind cannot exist without a healthy body to support it. The brain depends on your vascular system to feed its cells. This is a fundamental you cannot escape from. You can make it work for you, however.

 

6. Thought for the Day

It's not what you know, but what you do with your knowledge that counts.

 

Wishing you the best,

Mark Lamendola
Mindconnection

Authorship

The views expressed in this e-newsletter are generally not shared by criminals, zombies, or brainwashed individuals.

Except where noted, this e-newsletter is entirely the work of Mark Lamendola. Anything presented as fact can be independently verified. Often, sources are given; but where not given, they are readily available to anyone who makes the effort.

Mark provides information from either research or his own areas of established expertise. Sometimes, what appears to be a personal opinion is the only possibility when applying sound logic--reason it out before judging! (That said, some personal opinions do appear on occasion).

The purpose of this publication is to inform and empower its readers (and save you money!).

Personal note from Mark: I value each and every one of you, and I hope that shows in the diligent effort I put into writing this e-newsletter. Thank you for being a faithful reader.

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