Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby's Total Health Newsletter #3. Week ending June 7th 2009
Please feel free to forward this to friends who might be interested in reading it.

Menu:

1. How Beauty Is An Important Part Of Health
2. What Happened To The Swine Flu Pandemic
3. Was Arsenic The Trigger In Mexico?
4. Wash Your Mouth Out With Soap!
5. Have You Got Rhythm?
6. You Guys Are Hot!
7. What's In A Word?
8. This Week's Quote

Use your BACK browser button to return here each time.

Sign up here if you want to receive "Letter From Serendipity" on a regular basis Email address:  I do not spam and do not sell, share or lend email addresses.

click the image or click here for more info

1. How Beauty Is An Important Part of Health

Years ago I planned a book about the beneficial, even therapeutic, effects of beauty in our surroundings. I still haven't written it, because there has been little or no study of this phenomenon. I remain convinced but it must only be a personal opinion.

George Santayana, the modern Spanish philosopher wrote convincingly about the same thing (The Sense of Beauty, 1896).

One thing came to me very vividly, early in my medical career: that a woman's beauty is a state of mind, not physical form.

I say that because one day, long ago, I was in theatre scrubbed for an elective on a very beautiful woman. She was gorgeous! Yet, as soon as the anesthetic hit, she transformed into a sack of jelly. Her face slumped and went plop! All the beauty was gone.

I realized in that instant that beauty is how a woman holds herself. If she thinks she is beautiful, or should be, then her musculature responds and holds her face and bearing in a certain assured way. But take away the conscious aspect of beauty, I realized, and it vanishes.

I even wrote a powerful poem about this. But it was in a briefcase that was stolen and I cannot, for the life of me, re-create that poem. Hah well!

But I dug up a similar idea from an old self-development writer Orison Swett Marden. In his classic best-seller "Every Man A King" (1906) he penned these words:

It is perfectly possible for the girl with the homeliest face, with the ugliest expression, if she has a an honest heart to make herself beautiful to everyone who knows her by the perpetual habit of holding in her mind the beauty thought; not the thought of mere superficial beauty, but that of heart beauty, soul beauty. The basis of all real beauty is a kindly, helpful heart, and a desire to scatter sunshine and good cheer everywhere, and this, shining through the face, makes it beautiful. The longing and the effort to to be beautiful in character cannot fail to make the life beautiful, and since the outward is but an expression of the inward, and mere outpicturing on the body of the habitual thought and dominating motives, the face, the manners, the bearing, must follow the thought, and become sweet and attractive. If you hold the beauty thought, the love thought, persistently in the mind, you will make such an impression of harmony, of sweetness, and soul beauty wherever you go that known one will notice any plainness of deformity you may possess.

I have known a girl whose extreme plainness of features and awkwardness of manner so pained her as she approached womanhood that she almost despaired of ever making anything of herself, and even contemplated suicide. She was so convinced that she was a target for cruel remarks, and became so impressed with the conviction that she was not wanted anywhere, and that she was constantly being insulted, that she resolved to make one supreme effort to redeem herself from her handicap. She resolved that she would make people love her, that she would attract them instead of repelling them; that she would take such an unselfish interest in them that they could not help loving her.

She determined to develop those beautiful heart qualities which would more than compensate for mere physical beauty. She began to sympathise with people and to take thought of their welfare. Wherever she went, if she saw anyone who was ill at ease or looked troubled or friendless, she immediately took such a deep interest in him that she won his friendship at once.

She began to cultivate her mind in every possible way in order to make herself interesting, bright, cheerful, and hopeful. She cultivated optimism, and she was soon surprised to see how the young people who formerly shunned her flocked around her and began to love her; and she not only succeeded in compensating for her physical deformity, which she thought was fatal to her pleasure and her usefulness, but she also developed a soul beauty that did not pass with years, and which was infinitely superior to that beauty, which comes from regularity of features and beauty of form. So popular did she become that the so-called pretty girls envied her.

So there you are girls: a free tip for a good complexion!

And need I say it guys? No, of course not...

Well, here's something short and beautiful we can all share...

Turn up your speakers and chill out for a moment!  

2. What Happened To The Swine Flu Pandemic?

I have said countless times not to listen to the whipped up hysteria and fear of the media. US television is the worst I’ve seen in my travels around the world for lies and exaggeration. They WANT a pandemic and are thirsting for anything which creates anxiety.

The truth is that the H1N1 swine flu scare has all but died. Cases continue to increase but the usual summer slump in flu cases has probably brought it in check.

The WHO official figures are 11,168 cases with lab-confirmed H1N1 swine flu and 86 deaths (most in Mexico). The US figures are 6,552 cases and just 48 deaths.

Not a big deal (I’ll tell you why that isn’t as heartless as it sounds in a moment).

Nevertheless, the pressure from Big Pharma to have this non-event stepped up to a pandemic is enormous. The WHO is being besieged by financial interests who want the WHO criteria changed so this little outbreak can be classed as a pandemic. Currently it’s level 5 and level 6 is pandemic.

That way they make billions more dollars. Everyone will get scared. The (dollar) feeding frenzy will start.

The WHO, so far, is resisting panic. Keiji Fukuda, MD, assistant director-general for health security and environment at the WHO, says they are "trying to walk a very fine line between not raising panic nor becoming complacent."

Why am I saying these unfortunate flu deaths are not a big deal?

What is being missed and carefully glossed over is that there are an average 36,000 flu-related deaths EVERY YEAR in the USA alone. [http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.htm ]

That’s 3,000 deaths or so in the last 4 weeks. What’s 86 deaths compared to that? Worldwide, annual flu epidemics result in about three to five million cases of severe illness, and about 250,000 to 500,000 deaths.[ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs211/en/]

Yet nobody is screaming hysteria and panic about that!

Well, the media frenzy will no doubt continue. Please ignore the stupid statements I have seen like “the the official figures are just the tip of the iceberg”. That’s deliberate agitation. There is NO WAY to know what hasn’t been recorded. And besides, what’s an “unofficial” death? There are no hidden flu deaths, not in this current climate of anxiety.

3. Was Arsenic The Trigger in Mexico?

I came across an interesting study in which arsenic was found to be a significant immune compromiser in mice. ScienceDaily (May 21, 2009)

The ability to mount an effective immune response to influenza A (such as H1N1) infection is significantly compromised by a low level of arsenic exposure that commonly occurs through drinking contaminated well water, according to researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) and Dartmouth Medical School. The findings were published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Normally the immunue response to flu is pretty brisk; just a matter of hours. But when mice were administered 100 ppb (parts per billion) arsenic in their drinking water for five weeks, the immune response to H1N1 infection was initially feeble. When it eventually kicked in it was too late but also very disordered and "over the top". There was a massive infiltration of immune cells to the lungs and a massive inflammatory response, which led to bleeding and damage in the lung.

There were significantly more deaths over the course of the infection for the arsenic-exposed animals than the controls.

Why is this interesting? Well, Mexico has large areas of very high arsenic in their well water, including the areas where the H1N1 flu first cropped up. There is no proof that the Mexicans who got the flu were drinking high levels of arsenic, but the researchers have drawn attention to this very interesting fact.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers 10 ppb arsenic in drinking water "safe," yet concentrations of 100 ppb and higher are commonly found in well water in regions where arsenic is geologically abundant, including upper New England (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine), Florida, and large parts of the Upper Midwest, the Southwest, and the Rocky Mountains.

You can Google your own country and find out more.

One important detail: arsenic does not accumulate in the body over a lifetime, in the way that other toxic metals such as lead, cadmium, and mercury do. Raised arsenic levels require constant imbibing of the element, such as in drinking water. Remember also foods are often treated with arsenic. Typical commercial supermarket chicken has been fed a compound roxarsone as a growth enhancer, and is high in arsenic.

Even if you are vegetarian, I have pointed out in the past you still get roxarsone, because animal fecal waste is used to "fertilize' those nice organic crops!

This research was funded by the Dartmouth Toxic Metals Research Program Project by a grant from NIH-NIEHS and its Superfund Basic Research Program (grant P42 ES007373).

Important: it's not confined to arsenic, of course. Many trace metals are extremely toxic and will compromise the immune system severely. Mercury is an obvious example. There are 5 heavy metals which are known carcinogens:

• Arsenic and arsenic compounds
• Beryllium and beryllium compounds
• Cadmium and cadmium compounds
• Nickel compounds and
• Hexavalent chromium (remember the movie "Erin Brockovich"?).

The usual target is the lung, though arsenic has a unique association with skin cancers that has been recognized for many years.

4. Wash Your Mouth Out With Soap

In my life that's been an expression which means "Your language is dirty and foul".

But would you literally eat soap?

Well, some people have done! Missionaries who introduced soap to tribes in Africa were surprised to find that the natives considered it a special food treat and would often take a bite and smack their lips! That's why kids will often gobble chunks of it in the bath if you let them.

This isn't as bizarre as it sounds. I'm not talking about anti-septic soap or harsh cleaning soap (like carbolic). Just plain, basic soap.

Plain soap commonly contains quantities of starches, oils, glycerol and even tallow, from beef fat. Providing it hasn't been scented or lye (caustic soda) added, it's quite edible. It's main ingredient is fatty acids, such as stearic acid, which is found in lots of vitamin supplement tablets. Palmitic acid (from palm oil) gave Palmolive soap its name.

Stearic acid is a saturated fat that's mainly from animal products. It's also in some plant foods like chocolate.  It's very stable in storage and during frying.  A relatively large percentage of stearic acid consumed is converted to oleic acid (a monounsaturated fat). Stearic acid is used to form margarines, shortenings, spreads, and as a cream base for baked products. 

Even though stearic acid is a saturated fat, studies have suggested that it has little effect on blood cholesterol levels, because such a high proportion is converted to oleic acid.

There is a lot of exaggeration of it's dangers widespread on the Net. People who consume natural foods rich in stearates do not suffer adverse health effects. In fact consumers of chocolate live longer than average (fact! listen to my recording here).

To get the small quantities in supplement pills into perspective, look at these quantities here in typical foods:

* USDA Agricultural Handbook No. 8
º The Hershey Company

The tiny amount of stearic acid in capsules and tablets amounts to a few milligrams. The amount in a small pat of butter is aprox. 500 mg. Not really to be compared.

Hmmm. I wonder what Neutragena tastes like?

5. Have You Got Rhythm?

Nature is full of rhythms: the rising and setting of the sun, the tides, the ebb and flow of the seasons. Animals hibernate, migrate, rest and renew. Not surprisingly, humans too are subject to rhythms. Also not surprisingly, we ignore them, since we believe we are unique and have risen above Nature.

Not surprisingly then, we are sick and inefficient a great deal of the time!

But rhythms are important, especially in the matter of rest and recovery. The USA is outstanding in being a totally linear society, pushing, relentless, frantic, with no real let up. Most other Western nations are not quite as bad but still suffer from the same ethic.

Women are as bad as men; often more so. What’s the problem here?

It’s even reflected in the language. “Downtime” suggests a negative thing. Yet it should be “uptime”. Better still downtime should be called “build up time” and work called “rundown time”. Then we would have a clearer physiological idea of what we are doing to ourselves.

We need our recovery time to achieve the performance levels we set for ourselves and then never really meet.

The idea of setting alternate productivity and rest cycles was first described by the Greek writer Flavius Philostratus (170- 245 AD?). He wrote Gymnasticus, a training manuals for successful athletes. [incidentally, the words of Philostratus emerge almost unchanged in the erotic love song Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes by Ben Johnson]

The Chinese have always known about ebb and flow; it’s inherent in the Yin and Yang concept. Mornings are Yang, very high energy; evenings are Yin, somewhat slower. Yang is outgoing energy. Yin is inward directed.

Modern science finally got a grasp of this in the form of circadian and ultradian rhythms. We should be paying more attention.

Circadian, as everybody knows, means a daily cycle (circa dies: Latin for about a day). Ultradian means many times a day. There are countless ebb and flow cycles running naturally in our bodies. When we override these we damage ourselves. Relentless driving work means ultimately something will break down (heart attack, incapacity, cancer or some other disaster).

The smart thing to do is not what corporate America thinks, but what Nature thinks: that taking intermittent rests is a good idea! Excessive work without time to recover is ultimately destructive to productivity and therefore very stupid.

I’ve taught for decades what Georgi Lozanov discovered about study success: the ideal unit of time is about one hour, which includes 10 minutes recovery time at the end (50 minutes full engaged, 10 minutes rest and recovery).

The same thing applies in all our lives. You need to get hip and start incorporating it into everything.

Instead of teachers berating kids for being “inattentive”, they should let the child rest and say “take five, Johnny!”

To enhance your own success at whatever you do, divide your day into short bites. An hour is ideal and make sure you incorporate a recovery of 10 minutes, when you do NOTHING related to your current activity.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz cite an interesting example in their book The Power Of Full Engagement. In 1998 the US Army carried out a study in productivity. They had two teams of soldiers firing shells. One team were told to keep firing, non-stop; the others were told to take regular naps. The measure of success was how many shells landed on target.

On the first day, the group firing continuously scored more hits; not surprisingly, since they fired more shells overall. But on the second day, the group which had short naps went into the lead and stayed there for the rest of the experiment. The continuous shooters simply began to tire and made more and more mistakes because of their fatigue.

The lesson is simple: there are short-term gains by working intensely. But these gains always evaporate in the longer haul. Recovery time is NOT time wasted. It’s valuable!

Remember our lives are a long haul; what matters is the long term, over a span of decades, not what we do today, this afternoon, now!

6. You Guys Are Hot!

Now I know what you want! Absolutely rock bottom bargains. I can tell that from the response to my unusual CD-ROM offer!

For those of you who have just joined us, let me fill you in quickly. I made a big blunder a few weeks back. I asked for reproduction of the "Cancer Alternatives" audio CDs and unfortunately, due to a mis-communication, the company that does the printing and burning thought we wanted CD-ROMs, so that's what we got.

But there were lots of sold sets for normal CDs, the kind that play in your ordinary hi-fi and car stereo (CD-ROMs will only play on a computer). We had to re-do the run, just to be able to deliver what we promised.

That left us with shelves of CD-ROM sets; 7 hours of good audios with me discussing scores of cancer alternative therapies.

So I decided to sell them off at just $19.95, a considerable bargain, by any definition - especially to a list of subscribers who know a little about computers and how to play CD-ROMs.

Even so, I wasn't quite prepared for the shockwave. Our shopping cart blew up with sales and in 26 hours we'd sold all of them! I was flabbergasted. I've heard Internet marketers boast of this and always took it with a pinch of salt!

The trouble is the sales kept pouring in after we'd sold out. We have some more to print: again, just so everybody got what they asked for (it seems rather petty just to say "Sorry" and offer a refund). But I stopped the sales process as quick as I could.

Then I hit on yet another idea, which was to offer the recordings as MP3 downloads. This is cheaper still, for the bargain price hunter. I knocked off another dollar ($18.95) and buyers save on shipping. There's nothing to ship. So that's all you pay.

If downloads are good with you (exactly the same recordings, MP3 files, exactly the same as on the CD-ROMs). Go grab set now. Be warned, I'm not going to leave it up long, becasue that will affect sales of the CDs on my "Cancer Confidential" site.

click here or click the image

What's In A Word?

Kidnapping and hostage taking has been with us a long time. Early tales refer to the kidnapping of Abram's nephew (Lot), Julius Caesar and the romantic English king Richard Lionheart (Robin Hood's beloved King Richard).

In medieval times, knights displayed their heraldry prominently for, among other reasons, the hope that they would have a higher market value and thus be kidnapped and ransomed, rather than killed.

In the 17th century, children were stolen from their families for "export" to the American colonies as servants and slaves.

Hence the term: "kid" meaning child and "nab", meaning to snatch. If you say kidnabbing at normal speed, it sounds clearly like kidnapping.

And so the term was born!

The Quote:

"The consequence of living our lives as warp speed is that we rarely take time to reflect on what we value most deeply or to keep these priorities front and center. Most of us spend more time reacting to immediate crises and responding to expectations from others than we do making considered choices guided by what matters most [to us]."

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, The Power Of Full Engagement.

So, that's all for this week!

Be well; find the sacred in all you do, otherwise don't do it!

Prof.

Sign up here if you want to receive "Letter From Serendipity" on a regular basis Email address:  I do not spam and do not sell or lend email addresses. Unsubscribing is easy.

This publication is copyright of Keith Scott-Mumby © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Disclaimer

All content within this information letter is commentary or opinion and is protected under Free Speech laws in all the civilized world. The information herein is provided for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional advice of any kind.

In no event shall Professor Scott-Mumby be liable for any consequential damages arising out of any use of, or reliance on any content or materials contained herein, neither shall Professor Scott-Mumby be liable for any content of any external internet sites listed and services listed.

Always consult your own licensed medical practitioner if you are in any way concerned about your health. You must satisfy yourself of the validity of the professional qualifications of any health care provider you contact as a result of this newsletter.