Friday, December 23, 2016

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!  Oh, to be 17 again...



Was that a cool head of hair, or what? 1982 was a great year for hair and rock&roll, but a bad year for food. Here's an article from 1983, FOOD TRENDS: WHAT AMERICANS ARE BUYING. It's quite illuminating. The quotes below are from the article.

Americans continued their helium-fueled search for lightness in everything from cereals and spaghetti sauce to wine -even that insouciant big guy on the block, Coca Cola, acknowledged that it was time to go on a diet.

Growing up in rural Ohio, I don't remember ever worrying about the quality of the food Mom fed us.  Bologna sandwiches, TV dinners, homemade bread and jam, margarine, ice cream...good wholesome food. And we thrived on it. We played in fields of corn sprayed with paraquat herbicides, drank from the hose, and rode bikes without helmets. And we survived.

But now it seems all this emphasis on health is taking its toll.

A large contingent of low-calorie, low-salt and low-fat foods led the parade.

It's hard to say exactly what changes in the food supply made the biggest difference, but the '80's were undeniably the start of something bad.



Fast-food restaurants seemed to pop up on every corner in the '80's. Mom's started working outside the home more.

There are dozens of ''natural'' foods sold in supermarkets today that contain artificial coloring, monosodium glutatmate, processed oils, thickeners, stabilizers and preservatives.

Technology exploded in the '80's with the first home computers, but also for food manufacturers who learned to make fake sugar, fake fat, and fake food in general.

Finally, 1983 may be the year of aspartame, the low-calorie sugar substitute that is said to be indistinguishable from the real thing. Aspartame, which is called NutraSweet on food labels and Equal when sold by itself, is expected to receive Food and Drug Administration approval soon for use in carbonated soft drinks. 

It's not too late for us to turn back the clocks of food-time. Just eat real, whole foods. Pass on the fast food and fake food. It's time we stop looking to food manufacturers to create foods that will keep us healthy and lean. Nature's been doing it for millions of years.

Just thought I'd throw this out there, holidays and all. Think about this when trying to decide what to eat for the next couple weeks.

Merry Christmas!
Tim

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Oil Pulling with Sesame Oil: Before and After Bacterial Analysis, Case Study



Abstract: Oil pulling with sesame oil is said to be a very effective means to remove pathogenic bacteria while allowing healthy oral bacteria to survive. Chemical mouthwashes, such as Chlorhexidine, are shown to indiscriminately kill all oral bacteria and have many side-effects. Oil-pulling with sesame oil has few side-effects and may aid in establishing a healthy oral microbiome, dental health, and overall health. Additional benefits of oil-pulling are derived from the length and nature of the treatment which causes prolonged vagus nerve stimulation. To confirm that a change in the oral microbiome occurs due to the effects of oil-pulling, samples of oral bacteria were analyzed using uBiome's 16s rRNA bacterial sequencing prior to, and after a 20 minute oil-pulling session using sesame oil. These results show an increase in probiotic strains of oral bacteria and a decrease in pathogenic strains.

Friday, December 2, 2016

My New WordPress Blog: PotatoHack.com

I've been playing with a Wordpress blog for the past year, and created www.potatohack.com to coincide with the release of my book back in March. While I like some of the features of Blogger, I find that WordPress has more features and the comments are easier to manage, and don't disappear like they do here. I've also been plagued with loads of complaints that some people cannot leave comments at all here.