We'll get to the doctor's remarks in a moment but first I want to talk about this latest shooting in Oakland at a progressive Religious school where they teach Bible and other liberal arts courses such as nursing. Apparently one student went brazerk and began firing and and six or seven fellow students are dead so far. Of course you know Dan White had the Twinkee defence. However, we do know that sugar makes kids hyperactive. So much sugar, and particularly the wrong kind of sugar, certainly is not a good thing. Because if a person is eating all that sugar, particularly children, it means they aren't getting other needed nutrients. It also brings about bad eating habits in our children. Many things are not bad when used properly - - for instance marriage, religion, guns - - governments. Man has evolved for instance to trust sweet things because the saying goes "nothing in nature is poisonous if it is sweet to the taste". Certainly sweetness is seen as a positive metaphore in the Bible. In one case Johnathin and another were doing battle against the enemy but King Saul had imposed a fast in the land but Johnathin broke it and ate honey for renewed strength, and he was able to complete the battle. But with our gun laws the climate in the land now is that "anyone should be allowed to own a gun because the more guns in private citizen's hands, the safer America will be". And yet Cops will tell you - especially if you have a gun - - not to go out into a crime scene "looking for the bad guy yourself". Another officer will see you waving a gun around and not know who you are or why you are there. Sometimes innocent people can wander into bad situations. Like wandering into a religious Cult by mistake. People in this world still judge you by who you are rather than your character, which they don't know. I'm just saying that too much sugar as a percentage of the total diet isn't a good thing. Last night on Sixty Minutes they said that companies have taken out fat, which is natural, and replaced it with some sort of synthetic sweetener because fat among other things creates a feeling of satiety, or feeling full and satisfied. You take the fat out of something and people will actually eat more. Think about it. Here's the article. By the way I got tricky and altered this guy's photo from my original posting of yesterday. I just felt like being cute.
We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries, today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact. I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled "opinion makers." Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol. The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice. It Is Not Working! These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated. The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences. Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before. Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year. Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes. Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended. It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped. Inflammation is not complicated -- it is quite simply your body's natural defence to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus. The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders. However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process,a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial. What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body? Well, smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully. The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream diet that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels. This repeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity. Let me repeat that: The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine. What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods. Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now. Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.
Nobody bothers to actually study cause and effect in so many areas. If exporting American jobs were caused by taxes being too high, the economy should be going like gangbusters right now. Many times people of the more right wing perswasion are absolutely correct however. For instrance that the way to handle bullies is to stand up to them. Any intervention on a "well intensioned" parent to prevent his kid from taking, shall we say "pro-active" action against bullies, weakens the child's resolve and thusly strengthens the hand of the bully. It's an old addage also that you have more power BEFORE you get married, if youre a woman, or joining a religious Cult, then you will ever have AFTER you join. This is ironic because these two things Advertize that they will give you status and respectability, while in truth both take it away. Today the adage "Ignorance is Strength" has gathered momentum. It's right out of Orwell's "1984" of course. It comes off as a varient of the adage of "What you don't know won't hurt you" which is one of the biggest all time classic lies. It takes on forms such as Santorum's "college snobbery". It seeks out the dumbest hicks and indoctrinates them and gives them something to hate and at least in theory "a reason for their pathetic lives" that they didn't have before, so that the very poorest among us are exploited by the very richest. Neil Savedra may have mixed in a little "dog whistle speech" in with his discourse on anger today. Perhaps his remarks were innocent and perhaps I'm over-reacting. Maybe. But when someone talks about "righteous indignation boiling up so that you just have to do something" I have to question where, or more important WHO that is coming from. I don't think anger is usually the answer. Was for instance George Zimmerman really "Making a political statement" in shooting Trevon Martin about either restrictive gun laws, or perhaps the whole "Obama is just a government - - Negro" or whatever it is Santorum was trying to say. Also Neil seemed to say that anger as a normal transient human emotion at life's frustrations is somehow "sinful". This may come as a shock to Neil but not all sin is "transgression". We are accountable to God for our transgressions but not necessarily all of our sins. For instance under Neil's logic, the expert marine marksman and Don Knotts are equally "bad shots" because one can argue that neither is able to hit a target from an infinite distance away down to the last micro milimeter. Hence under Neil's Marcionistic reasoning, both are sinners who have "fallen short". The entire perceptual frame of Christians here is wrong. Thom Hartman has pointed out that Communist China and some new "Government Emergency laws" play off the same delusion. They have laws on the books which may never be enforced but knowing they CAN be is somehow supposed to make us ALL better citizens. After all they would argue "You wouldn't want the Government to Compromize with Pure Rightiousness". So the idea is to meditate on how unreachable the perfection of The Government alias "God" is and to never question its wisdom. Why if they were to for instance, suspend an election, something which has "never been done before" we should not be alarmed because they argue "just because something has never been done before doesn't mean that the move is long overdue". (Selah)
Here is some typical Tea Party rhetoric on energy by a guy hawking his book: Congress has been urged—and sometimes threatened—by special interest groups to take a negative stance on energy production, but they have miserably failed to take proper action to increase our domestic production. In fact, as you read this book you must come to the realization that energy production has been fiercely stifled by "Government Bureaucracy, " and Congress has sat on its collective hands. You, the reader, will be left to make your own conclusions as to why this set of facts and circumstances conflict many times with what we have been told by the news media—which is fed its information by Government Agencies and Departments.
It's people on the right rather than on the left which are most often guilty of "re working" Bible verses and quotations. One commentator today was quoting from Psalm 8 and he described this psalm as "A brief psalm, but deciphering it is like having a box of your grandfathers old things all packed together in one box, and you have to fish through it and 'piece the clues together". Let me make a long story short. There were in ancient times a strain of "messiamic Jews" that may not have even been in the majority. But they are into "typology". Nothing in the Bible is as it seems. For instance when it talks about how King Saul should utterly wipe out the Amalikites" according to Rev Chuck Smith "Amalikites" are a type of Flesh, and is one is able to somehow wipe out and transcend the Flesh then one can truely "move into the Spiritual, blessed Life with the Lord". So in Chuck's view, Salvation is synanomus to "complete mastry over the Flesh", which apparently he has achieved. Some see everything in the Bible as though each and every song writer was historically aware of the Gospel Story. So they fish out minutia and split sentenses and often change whole words and phrases to "make the scripture say what they want". So they engage in what is known as "Endogesis" or "If it isn't there I'll find it somewhere - even if I die in the attempt".
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