bookmark_borderTen Reasons to Fix School Lunch and Save Our Children’s Future

Reposted From “Nutrition In The Schools”
Originally Posted on Chef Ann Cooper’s Blog

Ten Reasons to Fix School Lunch and Save Our Children’s Future

Five Facts to Motivate Us

1. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has stated that of the children born in the year 2000, one out of every three Caucasians and one out of every two African Americans and Hispanics will contract Diabetes in their Lifetime – most before they graduate high school.

2. The achievement gap, which is truly a social justice issue will never be shrunk unless we clearly understand that healthy food is linked to academic performance. Hungry or malnourished students cannot learn to the best of their abilities.

3. Studies have shown that a diet consisting of foods high in fats, sugars, food additives and artificial colors, and low in vitamins, minerals and other protective factors such as fiber and phytochemicals commonly found in fruits, vegetables and whole grains can negatively impact learning.

4. National Institutes of Health has stated that, of the six leading causes of death in the United States, four are linked to unhealthy diets. The gap in life expectancy between the rich and poor has widened by almost 50% in the last 20 years – much of that can be attributed to diet and exercise.

5. Exposure to pesticides, antibiotics, hormones and other chemicals through our food supply is being increasingly linked to such conditions and ADD, ADHD, antibiotic resistance and early onset of puberty, as well as diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

Five Facts to Give Us Hope

6. Because Harry S Truman was right when he said; “No nation is healthier than its children or more prosperous than its farmers.”

7. A study done by Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the CDC of a school in New York showed that 80% of the children and or parents changed the way they cooked, ate or shopped because of the school’s food program.

8. A recent study in Berkeley CA done by the UC Berkeley Center for Weight and Health provided findings that children in the school districts program ate three times as many vegetables when eating school lunch as those students who brought their lunch from home.

9. A study done by Massachusetts General showed that children served a nutritious breakfast were better able to learn and had less behavioral problems.

10. Removing chocolate milk from schools could remove 4 – 6 pounds of sugar from children’s diet every year.

All facts attributable to Chef Ann Cooper and citations can be found on this http://www.chefann.com/

bookmark_borderFour Tips for Staying Healthy this Autumn

From Live Well Holistic Health Center

Autumn, with its crisp, cold weather, is ‘Vata’ season, according to Ayurvedic medicine. Ayurveda describes three ‘doshas’ or qualities ascribed to all things. The Vata dosha is often compared to the wind, being erratic and changeable, quick, cooling and drying.

Autumn is a time of high energy, unpredictable weather, and increased activity. To counter the unbalancing qualities of this season, try to follow the general guidelines below. You will likely catch fewer colds, have less dry skin and chapped lips, and feel better overall.

First and foremost, protect your neck from the cold and wind. According to traditional Chinese medicine, the neck is the most vulnerable to those elements and the number one way we catch colds. So never go out without a scarf.

Second, begin shifting away from cold, raw foods like salads and cold cereal and toward warm, unctuous (more oily), nurturing, cooked foods such as oatmeal, soups and casseroles.

Third, get a little extra rest by adding another half hour (and full hour by Winter) to your night’s sleep.

Lastly, a technique from Ayurveda to further protect yourself from the drying effect of the cold and wind is to take a little ghee, cooking oil, nose oil (we have some for sale at Live Well) or even butter on your pinky fingers and lubricate inside your nostrils and ears. Trust me, its great, and it really helps kids.

So stay warm, get your rest, keep lubricated, and hopefully you’ll enjoy a cold-free Autumn! If that’s not the case, we’re here to support you, so please don’t hesitate to call us.

Live Well Holistic Health Center
Dr. Martin Orimenko, DC, ND, FIACA
16 East Lancaster Avenue, Plaza 16 Building – Suite 104
Ardmore, PA 19003
610.896.1554

bookmark_borderMaking Sense of Intuitive Eating

By Heather Rudalavage, Registered Dietician

One of the most challenging pieces of the the intuitive eating approach is that people don’t see how it can work. People don’t trust themselves. They believe they won’t be able to stop eating chocolate or cake or pizza. Maybe it’s because the diet message is so pervasive in our society, or maybe we are just narcissistic in nature, but it continues to astonish me how much my clients rely on external sources to know what, when and how much to eat. Odd because hunger is a physiological response similar to breathing or having to pee. When we visit the restroom, we don’t say, “did I pee too much?” When we take a breath, we don’t say, “it’s not time to breathe yet”. But clients ask me all the time, “how much should I eat?” Or, “I am hungry all the time.”

I just finished reading a wonderful book called, “The Only Diet There Is”, among emphasizing that loving yourself and forgiveness, is the best diet there is, she also addresses the impact of guilt and negativity on our weight. Science may have not been able to prove this exactly, yet, but it seems that our body’s react more strongly to how we feel about the food we eat than the actual content of the food. Astonishing! If we think the food we are eating is “fattening” than our body will treat it as thus.

So, I just can not emphasize enough, the answer lies within. If you drop the dieting mentality and the voices in your head that tell you that a particular food is bad, you will be able to tune in and when you tune in, your body will tell you what, when and where to eat. Sometimes your body may say, chocolate and sometimes it may say a tuna melt, but whatever your body says, listen, because it is the right choice for you at that moment.

Here is the link to a nice article about guilt and intuitive eating : article

bookmark_borderSpring Into Wellness

Whole Foods Market Plymouth Meeting
500 W. Germantown Pike, Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462
phone 610-832-0020
wholefoods.com/stores/plymouthmeeting

Thursday, March 18th
6 pm – 7 pm
FREE!
Please join us in welcoming Doctors of Naturopathy, Jackie and Angel Giordano, as they invite us on a journey on how to enhance your well being in preparation for spring! This class will cover the basics on how to support the healthy structure of your body through the use of nutritional supplements, diet, and lifestyle, as well as clearing the congestion in your personal space to enhance optimal living conditions. There will be a 15 minute personal tour of the Whole Body Department immediately following the class! Sign up required.

An Afternoon at the Spa
Saturday, March 20th
12 pm – 3 pm
FREE!
Come discover one of the best kept secrets at Whole Foods Market Plymouth Meeting – our Whole Body Department! You’ll have the chance to chat with vendors and sample their unique products while snacking on light fare right in the department. You can even enter to win a spa goodie bag, packed with all of our favorite Whole Body Department products! You don’t want to miss this educational, relaxing event.

Country Life – Vendor Lecture
Tuesday, March 23rd
6 pm – 7 pm
FREE!
Join us in our Community Room for an hour-long information session with a representative from Country Life. Learn all about their products, so your next trip to our Whole Body Department will be even better! Sign up required.

bookmark_borderFooling Our Bodies, Fooling Ourselves

America has become the greatest “Pop” culture in the world… as in popping pills to make us feel better. Got a headache? Take an aspirin. Can’t sleep? Take a sleeping pill. Depressed? Take an anti-depressant, and so on. Men over 40 are urged to pop a “love pill” in order to be able to “perform” in bed. The mantras of the pharmaceutical industry are being chanted to us over and over again; each time we turn on the TV we are bombarded with commercials that tout the miraculous effects of such-and-such a drug, followed by a myriad of
possible side effects, including death! But the mantra goes on, chanting us into a dangerous illusion that everything will be alright if we just take that pill…

Wait a minute… Is there not something terribly wrong with this picture? Are our bodies so innately dysfunctional that we have no other choice than to hope the doctor will figure out which drugs or surgery are going to solve our problem? The answer to the last question is NO. I have nothing personal against doctors – in fact, I probably wouldn’t be here today without them. However, the system into which they have been trained – and entrained – more often than not, doesn’t respect the natural healing mechanism of our bodies, assuming instead that when a function goes wrong it must be “fixed” by drugs or surgery. Diet
and nutrition are wholly underestimated in the healing process, as are lifestyle and relationships. Medicine has become so compartmentalized and specialized that we tend to concentrate on the details of a particular ailment and lose the greater picture of what is actually happening for the patient. The myth that the medical industry has all the answers is so prevalent that the bodies that it is supposed to heal have little or no say in their own healing process.

Yes, I did say “bodies”, and not “people”. The point I am trying to make here is that we tend to forget that our bodies are not just machines that could use an oil change from time to time. They have their own “consciousness”, and often try to tell us things that we don’t necessarily want to hear. When our body experiences pain, it is telling us that something is wrong and needs to be attended to. Annoying as it can be, pain serves a vital function and must be respected for the message it conveys. Which is not to say that nothing should be done to alleviate the pain, once the message has been acknowledged.
This is a dilemma that modern medicine has created, since it is based on symptomology, which dictates that we treat symptoms instead of taking a look at the bigger picture and figuring out “the cause of the cause of the cause”, just as Hippocrates once stated. Instead of running around trying to put out the fire wherever it pops up, we need to find the reason behind it, whether it be purely physiological, mental, emotional, or even “energetic”. Some of us believe that disease has an energetic cause, meaning that it originates in the energetic field of the person. Looking at health in this way is called a “holistic” view. This term has been overused and abused, but it still has a meaning that no other word can convey: “whole”. And this is the way that we came into this world, as “whole” beings, not just a digestive tube or a nervous system, or a bunch of limbs, a trunk and a head. We are Whole beings, complete with our own unique energies that enable us to function as physical, mental, emotional and spiritual beings.

Looking at things from a greater perspective, one could make the analogy between how our cells work together to create harmony in our bodies (homeostasis) and how our human societies work. As long as our bodies, and our societies, have the necessary elements (healthy food, clean air and water, shelter and clothing, good relationships with self and with one another), both bodies and societies can live in harmony. In our bodies, our cells work hard to build new cells, create tissues, organs and systems, get rid of waste, etc. However, at this time in history, they are constantly being bombarded with new and strange chemicals that they don’t recognize and have no clue what to do with them. Communicating amongst each other, stressed and overworked, they find solutions to deal with these chemicals, such as creating specific, delineated areas to dump the toxic waste, that we call tumors. But when the toxic waste becomes so abundant that the cells can’t even perform their basic functions, the “toxic waste dumps” become overloaded and run into the rest of the body, which could be what we call metastasis. If enough toxic waste overruns the vital systems, the organism shuts down and dies. This is an oversimplified
representation, its purpose being to demonstrate movement and flow, not to prove a point.

In a similar way, human societies are dealing with an overload of unnatural stimuli (drugs, alcohol, toxic TV, artificially imposed work hours, etc.), which push a certain number of us into erratic, unhealthy behavior, such as addiction and violence. Wanting to stop the damage, the system puts those individuals who cannot cope with the system’s constraints into delineated areas (prisons, mental institutions, special schools) but doesn’t realize that its own obsessive behavior (imposition of rules dictated by a few to control the masses) is the cause of the diseased society in the first place. If the cells of the brain suddenly
decided to dictate to the kidneys what they are supposed to do, the body would disintegrate into chaos. It is actually the cells of the kidneys that inform the brain of the levels of sodium and potassium, as well as the blood volume; the brain cells in turn produce hormones to regulate those levels. But one cannot work without the other, and a brain cell has no more importance than a kidney cell to the life of the organism.

This brings me to the crux of this article, which has to do with vaccinations. Vaccinations are the ultimate example of how we, in this society, have been fooling our bodies, and thus fooling ourselves into believing that we are doing something good for our bodies, and thus for society, by getting vaccinated. According to Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com, there is no hard scientific evidence supporting the idea that vaccines can somehow trick our bodies into protecting us from disease. Most of the diseases that we receive vaccines for have disappeared, not because of the vaccines, but because of improved hygiene. Take a look at some vaccine history, gathered from reputable sources like “The Lancet” and “Journal of the American Medical Association”, appearing here thanks to Natural News:

In the 1970`s a tuberculosis vaccine trial in India involving 260,000 people revealed that more cases of TB occurred in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. (The Lancet 12/1/80 p73)

In 1977, Dr Jonas Salk, who developed the first polio vaccine, testified along with other scientists that mass inoculation against polio was the cause of most polio cases throughout the USA since 1961. (Science 4/4/77 “Abstracts” )

‐ In 1978, a survey of 30 States in the US revealed that more than half of the children who contracted measles had been adequately vaccinated. (The People`s Doctor, Dr R Mendelsohn)

‐ In 1979, Sweden abandoned the whooping cough vaccine due to its ineffectiveness. Out of 5,140 cases in 1978, it was found that 84% had been vaccinated three times! (BMJ 283:696‐697, 1981)

‐The February 1981 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 90% of obstetricians and 66% of pediatricians refused to take the rubella vaccine.

‐ In the USA, the cost of a single DPT shot had risen from 11 cents in 1982 to $11.40 in 1987. The manufacturers of the vaccine were putting aside $8 per shot to cover legal costs and damages they were paying out to parents of brain damaged children and children who
died after vaccination. (The Vine, Issue 7, January 1994, Nambour, Qld)

‐ In Oman between 1988 and 1989, a polio outbreak occurred amongst thousands of fully vaccinated children. The region with the highest attack rate had the highest vaccine coverage. The region with the lowest attack rate had the lowest vaccine coverage. (The Lancet, 21/9/91)

‐ In the USA, from July 1990 to November 1993, the US Food and Drug Administration counted a total of 54,072 adverse reactions following vaccination. The FDA admitted that this number represented only 10% of the real total, because most doctors were refusing to report vaccine injuries. In other words, adverse reactions for this period exceeded half a million! (National Vaccine Information Centre, March 2, 1994)

The yearly influenza vaccines are prepared using guesswork, not knowing at all which strains of the virus will be predominant. Many people receiving the flu shot do actually get the flu, and often experience flu symptoms more severely than those who are not vaccinated. There have been thousands, if not millions, of vaccination-related accidents, resulting in death or serious impairment of mental and/or physical capacities. These accidents are not always documented, as we saw in the statement released by the National Vaccine Information Center, and never publicized by the drug companies, whose financial interest comes before public welfare. Again, I have nothing against the individuals working for these companies, who are just trying to do a good job and make a
living in a system that caters to the rich and tricks the rest of us into believing we somehow have a chance to “make it rich”. However, the people at the heads of these pharmaceutical giants need to take responsibility for their actions, and instead of asking the Secretary of Health for blanket legal immunity in case of adverse reactions from the H1N1 vaccine, should be taking every precaution to make darned sure that no one will ever have an adverse reaction of any kind to their flu shots. Cut to 25 year-old Desiree Jennings, victim of a flu shot that
robbed her of her ability to walk forward, or to speak coherently. She can walk backwards and run forward, and incidentally when she runs forward her speech becomes normal. Even a one-in-a-million chance of this happening should never be tolerated!

There are many ways of helping our bodies improve their natural immunity, without having to inject toxic waste into them. Eliminating artificial molecules found in our diets and medicine is a good start – drinking clean water is essential, and of course breathing fresh, clean air. Even if we don’t necessarily have access to a totally natural, organic diet and clean water and air, we can still help our bodies to build their own immunities by making sure that we deal with our stress, by getting enough exercise and sunshine, and by learning to breathe in a slow and rhythmic way. Consciousness is the key to living a
healthy, happy life. Becoming conscious of our movements, our bodies, our thoughts and feelings, will help us to go within and listen to our bodies, listen to ourselves. For we have the answers to all of our questions, if only we allow ourselves to go to that place where they are found, in the center of our being where all exists, and all is one.

I realize that this may be difficult for many of us, but I must insist on the fact that most of the difficulty resides in the mind. Our minds are fabulous instruments, but only when they serve our greater purpose, and not the other way around. The analogy I evoked earlier applies here as well: one group of people in power does not serve the greater good very well. In our society, the intellect has been propelled into an all-important role, leaving intuition and emotional intelligence in the dust. By putting the intellect back in its place and giving our other mental and emotional functions their due respect, we increase our chances of becoming happy, healthy individuals, and thus helping to create a more just, healthy and happy society.

So popping pills is not the answer. Nor is getting a vaccination. The only real answer to questions about our health lies within ourselves, and within Nature, who has provided us for millions of years with all the remedies we could ever dream of. We walk upon the Earth, who has supported our lives and our societies for generations, and has never asked for a thing in return. Perhaps we owe her some respect, recognition for all that has been offered to us, instead of
pillaging and raping all that can be exploited from her. In native societies, rape does not exist. Women are treated with the respect that the Mother Earth deserves, and gets. We would do well to learn from these native societies, and treat our bodies, and ourselves, with the respect that we deserve.

Sarah Dickinson Murray,
Medical Intuitive and Natural Health Consultant

Wilmington, Delaware
October 28th, 2009