Senin, 29 Desember 2008

Top 10 Reasons to Turn Off Your TV

From Mark Stibich, Ph.D.,

Turning off your television will gain you, on average, about 4 hours per day. Imagine if you took that time to exercise, give your brain a workout and develop strong relationships. Not only would you be adding years to your life, you would become more interesting, energetic, and fun. So take the plunge and try not watching TV for a week. At first it will be strange and awkward, but stick with it and soon you will love all the extra time.

1. Television Eats Your Time

The average U.S. adult watches more than 4 hours of television a day. That's 25 percent of waking time spent every day. Imagine if you suddenly had 25 percent more time -- that's three extra months per year! You could get in all your exercise, cook your meals from scratch and still have time left over to write a novel.

Over a lifetime, an 80-year-old person would have watched 116,800 hours of television, compared to only 98,000 hours of work. As a nation, adults watch 880 million hours of television every day or 321 billion hours per year. Whew! Imagine what could get done if we all just stopped watching TV.

2. Television Makes You Stressed

With the average of four hours a day gone, it's no wonder everyone is feeling stressed out and overwhelmed. We put aside paying bills, finishing projects, making phone calls and cleaning our homes to watch TV. We feel overwhelmed because of all the things we should be doing (exercising, spending time with family, eating right) go undone.

And when we feel overwhelmed, tired, and exhausted we don't have energy to anything but -- you guessed it -- watch TV. It is a dreadful cycle. So take a break from TV for a week and see what happens to your life.

3. Television Makes You Overweight

Eating while distracted limits your ability to assess how much you have consumed. According to Eliot Blass at the University of Massachusetts , people eat between 31 and 74 percent more calories while watching TV.

This could add, on average, about 300 calories extra per TV meal. Now consider that at least 40 percent of families watch TV while eating dinner. It becomes clear that TV is a big part of the obesity epidemic in the U.S. and that TV, in fact, makes you gain weight.

4. Television Makes You Uninteresting

Many people have whole conversations that are recaps of TV programs, sporting events and sitcoms. When asked about their real lives, there is little or nothing to report and no stories to tell (except the TV shows they have watched).

Life is too interesting and wonderful to spend your time either watching TV or recapping television to your friends. Find something interesting to do: volunteer, read, paint -- anything but watch more TV.

5. Television Ruins Your Relationships

A television is turned on an average of 7 hours and 40 minutes per day in many U.S. households. With the TV on that much, there is little time for you and your significant other or children to spend time together, share experiences, and develop deeper relationships.

Sitting together and watching TV does not grow a relationship. Turn that TV off and find something to do together -- cooking, exercising, taking a walk, anything.

6. Television is Not Relaxation

TV is the opposite of exercise. If you are watching TV you are usually sitting, reclining or lying down. You are burning as few calories as possible. All that extra food you eat while watching TV does not get burned off. Your brain goes into a lull.

But you are not relaxing -- your mind is still receiving stimuli from the TV, you are processing information and reacting emotionally. Have you ever found yourself thinking about TV characters? Do you ever dream about TV shows? These are signs that the brain is working hard to process all the TV you have been watching.

7. Television Loses Opportunities

If you are sitting and watching TV, nothing new or exciting is going to happen to you. New opportunities and ideas come from being out in the world, talking to people, and reading interesting things.

Watching TV isolates you. Nothing is going to change in your world if you are watching TV. Turn off the TV, go out into the world, talk to people, and see what happens.

8. Television is Addictive

Television can become addictive. Signs of TV addiction include:

* using the TV to calm down

* not being able to control your viewing

* feeling angry or disappointed in how much TV you watched

* feeling on edge if kept from watching

* feeling a loss of control while watching

If the idea of giving up TV for a week is horrifying, you may be addicted to television. Luckily, TV addiction is a habit and not a physical addiction like smoking. You should be able to control it once you are aware of the problem and make a decision to change.

9. Television Makes You Buy Things

By age 65, the average American has seen 2 million commercials. Your knowledge of products and brands comes from these TV commercials. Your perception of what you need also comes from these commercials.

If you didn't know that your iPod could talk to your running shoes, you wouldn't feel like your current shoes are too low-tech. If you didn't know about vacuums that never lose suction, your current vacuum would seem fine. Our perception of need is determined by what we see. Need less by watching less TV.

10. Television Costs Money

A basic cable package costs $43 per month and many packages cost much more than that. That comes to at least $500 a year spent on TV. For that much money you could: buy a membership to every museum or zoo in your town, get a gym membership, buy a nice bicycle, invest it every year for 10 years at 10 percent interest and have more than $10,000.

Sources: TvTurnOff.org; US Census Bureau http://longevity.about.com/od/lifelongrelationships/tp/Turn_Off_TV.htm

Kamis, 25 Desember 2008

Sinusitis

Sinusitis generally refers to inflammation of mucous membranes of the panasal sinuses, which are bone cavities located in the skull near the nose. They include the frontal sinuses, located above the orbits of the eyes; the maxillary sinuses, located in the cheekbones; and the ethmoid and sphenoid sinuses, located behind the nose. All of these sinuses drain mucus into the nose sults from an

Senin, 22 Desember 2008

The Racial and Colonial Politics of Meat-Eating (part 2)

Colonialism: Cattle, Class, and Hunger
Tragically, the genocidal imperialist policies of the United States did not cease at the end of the 19th century. David Nibert, who in Animal Rights/Human Rights (
2002) argues that human and animal rights cannot be fully achieved within consumer capitalism, notes that 20th century American agricultural interest in Guatemala and other Central American countries resulted in the deaths and disappearances of tens of thousands of people.[17] The United States supported and helped install dictators in order to secure land from which to extract agricultural resources, mostly fruit and beef. Communities of people were uprooted and displaced from their land as U.S. corporations and regional elite bought or leased it until only 3 per cent of Guatemalans owned 70 per cent of the arable land.[18] In the Amazon, competition over land has resulted in the cattle ranchers appropriating forest from the indigenous and forcing them into slavery.[19]Read more »

The Racial and Colonial Politics of Meat-Eating (part 1)

Introduction
Contrary to the perceptions of many Americans whom I have met, a plant-based diet is not isolated to a middle-class white elite in Anglo-American countries; it is quite common among people of color if one is to take into account countries outside of Europe and former British rule. The invisibility of the much more common plant-based diet is in part a product of most U.S. Americans’ deficient education in world geography, culture, and history. Further, because many East Asian and Latin American restaurants in the USA have menus filled with meat-centered entrees, many white Americans falsely assume that those animal-based dishes are commonly eaten within their countries of origin, forgetting that restaurant meals, gourmet food, and meat are primarily foods for the middle and upper class (the minority).

According to World Watch, collectively a person in industrial nations (most likely an affluent white person) will consume on average three times the flesh of mammals and birds as someone from developing nations (most likely a poor person of color), and a person in the U.S. will consume five times that amount. [1*] When fish and dairy are taken into consideration, Western Europe becomes the world’s largest consumer of animal products. [2*] In both cases, with the exception of Japan (a huge fish consumer) and a few South American countries (Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay—huge beef consumers), people of color have very little access to animal products. Of course, much of this distribution is related to class--which only further highlights the intersections of speciesism, nationalism, racism, and classism.

Not until after WWII have US Americans had "privileged" access to cheap, fast, subsidized “meat.” Most Americans seem to have little conscious that only a little over one hundred years ago, almost 90 per cent of American resided in rural areas[
1] and chicken was as expensive as shrimp and eaten in only 1/100th of the quantity today.[2] In an interesting reversal, today the poor commonly lack geographic and/or financial access to fresh produce. Recent studies have shown that even in in the agricultural state of Iowa, rural people have limited access to food, living in what are called “food deserts”[3]—a situation more associated with poor intercity neighborhoods.[4].

The privilege assigned to meat by the U.S. federal government is very evident in a graphic from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine that juxtaposes the federal subsidies pyramid with the federal nutrition recommendation pyramid: while over one-third of one’s servings should come from fruits and vegetables, these foods receive less than one percent of federal subsidies, while meat and dairy receive almost three-fourths. [3*] Even when made more affordable, nutritious whole plant-based foods are neither affordable enough nor culturally valued enough to overthrow meat and dairy as the centerpieces of the American diet. Even with a 10-percent subsidy on fresh produce, low-income Americans would still not be eating the dietary recommendations of fruits and vegetables.[4*]

In the following post I will examine--following Carol Adams analysis of the “sexual politics of meat”--the racial and colonial politics of meat (and milk). Unlike previous discussions of the topic such as The Dreaded Comparison (
1996), I will not cover the psychological and analogous dimensions of racial/interspecies oppression, but rather the structures of Northern, American, White, and middle-class privilege that drive the intersections between the subordination of non-human animals and non-white human animals.

My intent is to show how Anglo-Saxon cultures have juxtaposed themselves to other cultures and “races” through their diets, establishing themselves as the human identity and others as essentially deviant and ethically marginal. Further, I describe the historical and ecological relationship between animal exploitation, colonialism, and the genocide of Amerindians. Finally, I put forth evidence that people of color within the United States (and in other countries) are still marginalized and whose lives are put at risk in order to increase the profits of animal-exploiting, multi-national corporations.
Read more »

Jumat, 19 Desember 2008

The top five cancer-causing foods are:

1. Hot dogs

Because they are high in nitrates, the Cancer Prevention Coalition

advises that children eat no more than 12 hot dogs a month. If you
can't
live without hot dogs, buy those made without sodium nitrate.

2. Processed meats and bacon

Also high in the same sodium nitrates found in hot dogs, bacon, and
other
processed meats raise the risk of heart disease. The saturated fat in

bacon also contributes to cancer.

3. Doughnuts

Doughnuts are cancer-causing double trouble. First, they are made with

white flour, sugar, and hydrogenated oils, then fried at high

temperatures. Doughnuts, says Adams , may be the worst food you can

possibly eat to raise your risk of cancer.

4. French fries

Like doughnuts, French fries are made with hydrogenated oils and then

fried at high temperatures. They also contain cancer- causing acryl

amides which occur during the frying process. They should be called

cancer fries, not French fries, said Adams .

5. Chips, crackers, and cookies

All are usually made with white flour and sugar. Even the ones whose

labels claim to be free of trans-fats generally contain small amounts
of
trans-fats.

BRAIN DAMAGING HABITS

1. No Breakfast

People who do not take breakfast are going to have a lower blood sugar

level..

This leads to an insufficient supply of nutrients to the brain causing

brain degeneration.

2. Overeating

It causes hardening of the brain arteries, leading to a decrease in

mental power.

3. Smoking

It causes multiple brain shrinkage and may lead to Alzheimer disease.

4. High Sugar consumption

Too much sugar will interrupt the absorption of proteins and nutrients

causing malnutrition and may interfere with brain development.

5. Air Pollution

The brain is the largest oxygen consumer in our body. Inhaling
polluted
air decreases the supply of oxygen to the brain, bringing about a

decrease in brain efficiency.

6. Sleep Deprivation

Sleep allows our brain to rest. Long term deprivation from sleep will

accelerate the death of brain cells.

7. Head covered while sleeping

Sleeping with the head covered increases the concentration of carbon

dioxide and decrease concentration of oxygen that may lead to brain

damaging effects.

8. Working your brain during illness

Working hard or studying with sickness may lead to a decrease in

effectiveness of the brain as well as damage the brain.

9. Lacking in stimulating thoughts

Thinking is the best way to train our brain, lacking in brain
stimulation
thoughts may cause brain shrinkage.

10. Talking Rarely

Intellectual conversations will promote the efficiency of the brain


The main causes of liver damage are:



1. Sleeping too late and waking up too late are main cause.

2. Not urinating in the morning.

3. Too much eating..

4. Skipping breakfast.

5. Consuming too much medication.

6. Consuming too much preservatives, additives, food coloring,

and artificial sweetener.

7.. Consuming unhealthy cooking oil. As much as possible reduce
cooking oil use when frying, which includes even the best cooking oils like
olive oil. Do not consume fried foods when you are tired, except if the body
is very fit.

8. Consuming raw (overly done) foods also add to the burden of liver.

Veggies should be eaten raw or cooked 3-5 parts. Fried veggies should be
finished in one sitting, do not store.

We should prevent this without necessarily spending more. We just have
to adopt a good daily lifestyle and eating habits. Maintaining good
eating habits and time condition are very important for our bodies to absorb
and get rid of unnecessary chemicals according to 'schedule.'

DO TAKE CARE ABOUT YOUR HEALTH....