A Sweet Way to Lower Blood Pressure

By Kelley Herring

Great news for chocoholics: Dark chocolate, a good source of powerful antioxidant phenols, has recently been found to help reduce blood pressure.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association included six men and seven women ages 55-64 with mildly high blood pressure. Every day for two weeks, participants ate a 100-gram piece of dark chocolate. They balanced its hefty 480 calories by not eating other foods similar in nutrients and calories. Half of the participants got dark chocolate, while half got white chocolate.

At the end of the study, those who ate dark chocolate saw a significant drop in blood pressure (by an average of five points for systolic and two points for diastolic blood pressure). Those who ate white chocolate experienced no benefit.

To enjoy the health benefits and delicious flavor of dark chocolate, you don't need to eat a 480-calorie candy bar. In fact, one tablespoon of unsweetened dark cocoa has a mere 80 calories, with all the benefits. So mix it into your coffee or whirl into a smoothie to help keep your blood pressure in a healthy range.

It's Fun to Know: Monkey Baby Talk

Baby talk isn't just for human parents. According to a study by University of Chicago researchers, female rhesus monkeys in Puerto Rico use distinct sounds to communicate with their infants. The scientists have identified several sounds, as well as behaviors such as tail swinging, that the monkeys use only with their babies. The noises match the raised pitch and sing-song style of baby talk used by people around the world, but so far the researchers have not been able to translate any of them.

(Source: National Geographic)

Word to the Wise: Garrulous

"Garrulous" (GARE-uh-lus) - from the Latin for "to chatter" - means talking a lot, especially about trivial things.

Example (as used by Mark Twain in an article titled "Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion II" in The Atlantic): "He took a great liking to this Rev. Mr. Peters, and talked with him a great deal: told him yarns, gave him toothsome scraps of personal history, and wove a glittering streak of profanity through his garrulous fabric that was refreshing to a spirit weary of the dull neutralities of undecorated speech."

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These articles appear courtesy of Early to Rise [Issue #2172, 10-13-07], the Internet's most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com/.

Nuts: From Natural Treasure to Man-Made Trash

By Kelley Herring

Nuts are undoubtedly one of the healthiest foods you can eat. Research shows that nut noshers have the slimmest waistlines and a significantly lower risk of heart disease.

But the benefits don't end there. Nuts are packed with life-essential minerals, including magnesium and selenium. And they are a concentrated source of brain-nourishing and blood-sugar-balancing fats.

Still, manufacturers have found a way to meddle with the nut and muck up Mother Nature. In fact, the "Diamond" brand has been turning treasure into trash by adding genetically modified corn oil and BHT to its walnuts, hazelnuts, and other naturally pure tree nuts.

Protected by their shells, nuts are a relatively "clean" plant food - unadulterated by pesticide toxins - even when grown conventionally. But add corn oil - which is high in inflammatory omega-6 fats as well as being genetically modified almost 90 percent of the time - and you've completely changed their lipid profile and biochemical nature.

Corn oil itself is a preservative, but Diamond adds BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene) to ensure shelf stability. BHT prevents oxidation. It is used to preserve food odor, color, and flavor. It is banned in Australia, Japan, Romania, and Sweden due to its carcinogenic activity. In the United States, BHT is prohibited only in infant formula.

Avoid inflammatory corn oil and carcinogenic BHT by reading the labels before you buy. You'll be pleasantly surprised to find that many inexpensive brands of nuts are free of these unnecessary additives. They contain only one simple ingredient: "nuts."

Just take a few moments to pick the treasure... and leave the trash.

Word to the Wise: Flummery

"Flummery" (FLUM-uh-ree) - from a Welsh word for a kind of soft oatmeal - is an empty compliment; nonsense.

Example (as used by Gregg Easterbrook in the New Republic): "One reason there is so much flummery in the global warming debate is that the weather in the Northeast United States, where the opinion-makers live, has a disproportionate effect on whether greenhouse concerns are taken seriously."

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These articles appear courtesy of Early to Rise [Issue #2621, 03-20-09], the Internet's most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com/.

Reload This Lost Fat Buster

by Dr. Al Sears

The mineral magnesium is gaining a reputation as a simple and easy way to lower your insulin - exactly what you need to lose fat fast.

If you’re a regular ETR reader, you know that insulin signals your body to make and store fat. Magnesium plays a prime role in keeping both blood sugar and insulin in check.

It’s been estimated that our lean, muscular hunter ancestors got over 1,000 mg of magnesium from their native diet every day. On the average American diet, you’re getting less than 20 percent of that… if you’re lucky.

Restoring your magnesium levels to those of your caveman ancestors will take you a step closer to your real native diet - the kind you were designed to eat. It will also take you a step toward dropping fat and staying lean.

You can add magnesium to your diet by eating nuts, seeds, dairy products, and dark green, leafy vegetables.

Your Best Sources of Magnesium
Food Choice	Milligrams (mg)	%DV*
Halibut, cooked, 3 ounces	90	20
Almonds, dry roasted, 1 ounce	80	20
Cashews, dry roasted, 1 ounce	75	20
Spinach, frozen, cooked, 1/2 cup	75	20
Nuts, mixed, dry roasted, 1 ounce	65	15
Yogurt, plain, skim milk, 8 fluid ounces	45	10

*The recommended daily value for magnesium is 400 milligrams (mg)

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This article appears courtesy of Early to Rise [ETR #Sears, 10-13-07] the Internet's most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com/.

The Importance of Children

"The whole future of the race depends upon its attitude toward children. And a race which specializes in women for 'menial purposes' or which believes that the contest of the sexes in the spheres of business, action and politics is a worthier endeavor than the creation of tomorrow's generation, is a race which is dying. We have, in the woman who is an ambitious rival of the man in his own activities, a woman who is neglecting the most important mission she may have. A society which looks down upon this mission and in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men and the creation of the future generation, is a society which on its way out. The historian can peg the point where a society begins its sharpest decline at the instant when women begin to take part, on an equal footing with men, in political and business affairs, since this means that the men are decadent and the women are no longer women. This is not a sermon on the role or position of women. It is the statement of a bald and basic fact. When children become unimportant to a society, that society has forfeited its future." - L. Ron Hubbard, Science of Survival, c 1951, 2007 edition, pg. 136-137.
"Training women extensively in political economy, symbology or the care and cleaning of rifles is not conducive to a forthcoming sane generation." - p. 296

"When It Is

Dark Enough,

You Can See

The Stars"

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Modern Science and Totalitarianism

"One might postulate two more realities. The first is that of the Supreme Being. No culture in the history of the world, save the thoroughly depraved and expiring ones, has failed to affirm the existence of a Supreme Being. It is an empirical observation that men without a strong and lasting faith in a Supreme Being are less capable, less ethical and less valuable to themselves and society. A government wishing to deprave its people to the point where they will accept the most perfidious and rotten acts, abolishes first the concept of God. And in the wake of that, destroys the family with Free Love, the intellectual with police-enforced idiocies, and so reduces a whole population to an estate somewhat below that of dogs. A man without an abiding faith is, by observation alone, more of a thing than a man. Modern science, producing weapons for the annihilation of men, women and children in wholesale lots, has solidly run itself aground on the reef of godlessness. Modern science has gone so far as to advocate the rise of Man from mud and clay alone, has denied to him even a semblance of a soul and so has not only solved none of the problems of the humanities, but has aided and abetted a godless, totalitarian government which seeks nothing less than the engulfment and enslavement of all men and the extinguishment of every spark of decency in the breast of every human being. These two tracks which have led away from the affirmation of the existence of a Supreme Being (modern science and totalitarianism) are both bringing Man into a machinelike state of being, where the ideal has become a lump of muscle, greasy with sweat, or a grimy mechanic serving a howling monster of steel. The arts, the humanities and the decencies are fallen away from until they are like tiny stars shining across a great, black void. The abandonment of the admission of a Supreme Being, as a reality intimate to the life of Man, makes prostitution the ideal conduct of a woman, perfidy and betrayal the highest ethic level attainable by a man, and obliteration by treachery, bomb and gun the highest goal attainable by a culture. Thus, there is no great argument about the reality of a Supreme Being, since one sees in the failure to countenance that reality, a slimy and loathsome trail downward into the most vicious depths." - L. Ron Hubbard in Science of Survival, 1951, 2007 edition, pg. 113-114.
"Materialistic science operating on the premise that Man came from mud only, that the human soul is a delusion, that God was a myth of some aberrated Mesopotamian, has presented us at last with the immediate and real threat of Man's extinction as a species. In view of the fact that this materialistic science led only, then, in the direction of death, even the unthinking should see the fact that something must be desperately wrong with the teachings of the Lysenkos, the Darwins and my learned schoolmates, the atomic scientists who have given Man at last, for his grave spade, the atomic bomb... But Bacon and Newton did not espouse the materialist cause. Their disciples developed the doctrine that Man came from mud and that Man's destiny was mud... When science thrust this onto the scene of thinking, Man's willingness to accept a fact merely upon faith was in itself reduced. Caught unprepared before this new doctrine, without which (so its espousers claim) nothing could be valid, the religions still attempted to hold at high value what was actually a vitally necessary part of Man's social existence. But generation after generation of young men and (why, we certainly cannot tell) young women came off the assembly lines marked 'educational courses,' filled full of doctrine that they must believe only what they could experience and ground very fine in the mills of the materialist... These generations were wracked by divorce, inhibitions, purposelessness, sophistication, insincerity and general hopelessness. Representative of their feeling in the field of humanity were schools of thought which taught them that a man's highest goal was to become 'adjusted to his environment' (without once realizing that Man's only advance depended on Man's ability to adjust the environment to him as a species), which taught that genetic heredity alone was responsible for neurosis and insanity and that filth and muck alone covered the entire problem of the human mind from top to bottom. This is a sad and piteous thing. No empire one has studied in any former day has ever become so depraved and godless in its senility as the overall average of the societies of Man in the world today. It is no wonder that an ideology which holds that Man, generation after generation, can be molded into mindless machine parts, that there is no destiny for the individual beyond his place as an emotionless, rigidly held cog in a dully, hopelessly grinding social wheel, commands of its minions the destruction and eradication from any society of the producer, the individualist, the thinker or any noble man.
The progress upward toward survival on higher levels is a progress, as well, toward God." - pg. 486-488