Zicam and Thoughts About Zinc

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

A recent conversation also has me looking into Zicam, another over-the-counter cold remedy. If you are unaware, this product uses primarily zinc as its weapon for fighting the cold.

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7 Ways to Preserve Fruits and Vegetables

Image via Wikipedia

  When it was autumn the fathers gathered the barley and wheat and corn that they had planted, and found that it had grown so well that they would have quite enough for the long winter that was coming.
  "Let us thank God for it all," they said.

THE FIRST THANKSGIVING DAY by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith

In modern America, foods such as cheese, sauerkraut, picklets, jellies, jams, and smoked meat are prepared more for their taste than for their natural ability to keep long on the shelf. In fact, store-bought preparation of these types of foods can sometimes even include artificial preservatives so that their shelf life is extended even further in an attempt to gather more dollars for the manufacturer. Along with the loss of the skills for putting aside food, activities such as bee-keeping, maple syrup creation, and so on have been delegated to hobbies - something a very few people do (and love doing), but is also forgotten by most.

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Let's Broaden Our Minds... About Cosmetics

Image by Gilberto Viciedo via Flickr

Whenever I consider beauty aids or makeup, the nerd in me always reaches out to the original Batman movie - you know, the one where Jack Nicholson did such a fantastic job as the Joker? I think about how the entire city stopped using beauty supplies because they didn't know what secret combination of chemicals in the cosmetics would kill them.

Ironically, life imitates art as much as the opposite is true when we're sold a bunch of poisonous preparations in lieu of makeup, perfumes, and skin cream. The huge difference between what we have and the fiction of Batman is that our deaths come slowly with diseases like cancer.

While coconut oil is still one of the healthiest and easiest treatments you can give to your skin, I thought I'd take a look at even more comparisons and solutions to this problem.

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A Skin Care Product You Can Eat

Tomogram of skin - Image via Wikipedia

"Being a guy" I never really cared too much about keeping my skin healthy when I was growing up. I look back and realize that I should have, of course. It just goes to show how disconnected I was from my body at that time. Your body talks back to you in more ways than just feeling pain when you're sick. Whether it's acid indigestion telling you that you just ate a whole bunch of stuff your body really hates, or just dry skin as a result of the wrong kind or not enough oils throughout the day, you should try to listen to what it's saying.

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You had me at coconut. [recipe + tip]

I love how YourGlutenFreeRecipes is adding personal commentary and sensible health tips along with each of the recipes. I found this fascinating quote today:

Amazingly my kids actually like fish, which is really a good thing.  We try to eat fish at least once a week to get the healthy fats in them.  We try to find wild caught, as many fish farms feed their fish corn and other grains which could create a problem for those who are gluten free.  They also dump a lot of antibiotics and growth hormones in the water to help keep diseases down created by the small living space and to grow them faster to make more money.   Since I created this recipe, I have found it very difficult to find wild caught Talapia, so I use it on any wild caught fish we can find at the market. It is very simple but has tremendous flavor.yourglutenfreerecipes.blogspot.com, Your Gluten Free Recipes, Dec 2008

You should read the whole article.

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Today Ice Cream is More than Just Frozen, Sweet Cream!

Image via Wikipedia

The subject of ice cream came up recently in a conversation and as I also have a sweet spot for the stuff, I thought I'd put my response out here for more to share.

Ice cream should be an occasional treat and we can probably all start in agreement on that point. It's typical high in calories considering the concept of it is frozen, sweetened cream. In America it's probably eaten more often than it should. Working in a downtown area, it is unsurprising to see people eating as they walk down the skyways at any particular time of the year. So what exactly are we eating when we devour this evilly-delicious stuff?

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MSG in your H1N1 vaccine?

H1N1 virus via Wikipedia

As perhaps further evidence, if it is needed, that pharmaceutical companies' primary interest is not in your optimal health but in your wallet and what they can extract from it, here is a small peek into one of the recent swine flu vaccines available to the public, revealing some of its unexpected and hopefully uncommon ingredients.

TruthInLabeling.org has a headline at the top of their page as of this writing that reads:

MedImmune’s H1N1 vaccine contains monosodium glutamate, hydrolyzed protein gelatin, and various forms of phosphates. See section 11, page 13 of the package insert.

If you don't want to pull up the PDF at the end of that link, here's a screenshot of what you'd be looking for, with some fun highlights:

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Book Review: The Unhealthy Truth

Cover via Amazon

I literally just finished The Unhealthy Truth by Robyn O'Brien and cannot emphasize what a blessing it is to the state of health for anyone who may read it. The book follows the discoveries of a woman who can easily be described as a very typical working mom. 


Her first awakening came with an unexpected allergic reaction of her youngest child to some eggs, and this discovery eventually leads her to the revelation that the people and organizations she thought were looking out for her health were more concerned about how much money they could fit in their bank accounts. 

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