Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby's Total Health Newsletter #49. Week ending May 9th, 2010 Please feel free to forward this to friends who might be interested in reading it.
“There are four questions of value in life... What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for, and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.”
- Johnny Depp, actor
1. Oldest French Cookery Book!
Eat your heart out Julia Childs! You were beaten to your French cookery book by around 1450 years!
I have on my desk a copy of De Observatione Ciborum ("On The Observance Of Foods") by a writer called Anthimus, who was a Byzantine physician at the court of the Ostrogoth king of the Franks... Theodoric the Great.
Jacques Pepin or Jamie Oliver it is not. But it's fascinating to get an idea of what was regarded as a good meal all those centuries ago. Obviously there were no sandwiches or burgers and fries, so we may consider their diet broadly more healthy than the modern Western diet.
With a son who is a master chef and more than a passing interest in foods because of my own career involvement in nutrition, I was naturally very curious what this book would reveal.
Yet I have to say, it was mainly disappointing. I have a running translation (meaning Latin on the left and English on the right-hand pages) but there are no real pearls. Some surprises though: like eating sow's udders (fried and boiled) and sow's uterus, the latter which he describes as "extremely good but only when boiled": uulua porcina et ipsa optima est, sed elixa.
I had hoped there would be some good health tips from the old days but nothing of note. He warns against fried pig's liver, saying it is not good for either sick or healthy people! He'd never heard of B12, of course, or the condition pernicious anemia, which killed a lot of women till it was discovered that B12 was not being absrobed because of the lack of a stomach factor. Liver was (and is) still the best source of B12.
For eating geese and pheasants, he says the breast meat is good but the hind parts are not because they are prepared by force feeding. Sounds as if they may have had a degree of battery farming, like we do today, breeding fowl that are too weak to stand and get even more fat through lack of exercise before they are slaughtered.
Apparently, rice is good for dysentry (not a lot of people know that, to use Michael Caine's catch phrase!) Anthimus recommends draining the rice after boiling and adding goat's milk. I approve of that: he would have cured a lot of diseases caused by cow's milk allergy!
What about recipes? There are some. For example cooking peacocks and cranes (storks). He used coriander a lot (cilantro in America).
My favorite was finding that warm milk and bread was around then ("pobs", see serendipity35). It's not a healthy dish but I got it when sick. Anthimus too, my colleague from way back when, says it's great when you are sick.
2.
Hard Copies of "How To Survive In A World Without Antibiotics" and "Cancer Confidential" Now Available.
We are constantly being asked if hard (print) copy versions are available for my eBooks. We have always tried to resist this because it doesn't pay. We could not charge enough to make it worth the time, printing out and binding a book and then taking it to the post office. Even when we set a price where we lose money on the deal, it still makes us come over as greedy, charging too much, and I don't want that.
However the demand has been very persistent. So to save Vivien's time and energy, I have set up printing with our fulfillment company. The first book available is "Cancer Confidential". For the moment there is a special offer running, where we will cover the cost of shipping.
If you wanted a spiral-bound print copy of this book ($49), please go here:
Second one to come along was "How To Survive In A World Without Antibiotics". You can get that here (also $49): World Without Antibiotics
No shipping costs on this one either, at least for a short while.
3. Long Life And Life Expectancy
[notes from my upcoming eBook "Anti-Aging Outside The Box"]
Man is a remarkably long-lived animal. If we examine other mammalian species and multiply their average life expectancy by heart rate, it works out that most species get the same few million beats and then it is curtains! But man has several times this number (over 2 billion).
The longest lived mammals appear to be whales and some species are now known to survive over two centuries. There seems no reason, logically, why we cannot do the same. The oldest reasonably well-documented case of extreme old age in humans was Dr Li-Ching-Yun, who lived in Western China. His obituary appeared in the New York Times 8th May 1933 and The Times on May 6th. His age was given as 256 and reading about this case was supposedly what inspired James Hilton to write his Shangri-La classic Lost Horizon.
Records exist which show Li-Ching-Yun was born in 1677 and he was sent official certificates by the Chinese government at 150, 200 and 250 years, so there is a fair degree of certainty this was correct. At the astonishing age of 250 he lectured medical students in Beijing on the art of living and long and healthy life.
Dr. Li’s reported formula was “Keep a quiet heart; sit like a tortoise; sleep like a dog”. This accords well with modern anti-aging science which says avoid stress, avoid inflammatory over-exertion and sleep at least 8 hours! Maybe there was surprise wisdom in the 60s maxim “Drop out. Take it easy! Chill out!” It may be significant that the most noticeably long-lived societies, like the Hunzas in the Himalayas, the Georgians in what used to be the USSR and the Vilcabambans in Ecuador are all non-industrial societies with little reason to rush and strive.
If you want to live longer and chill out more, make sure your heart rate slows down. Mine's between 58 and 64 normally, way below the "average" of 72 beats per minute. To get your pulse rate down low you MUST eliminate stressor foods. Swallowing foods that stress your body leads to a continuous overactive heart beat.
To learn how to eliminate stressor foods is easy: I already wrote a book for you about it, called "Diet Wise". Before that (1950s) Arthur F. Coca MD wrote a great text called "The Pulse Test". It showed the world how to eliminate allergy foods and poorly tolerated foods (which stress the body) by simply counting heart rate after eating sample foods.
His technique was slightly flawed but I added my knowledge and I show you how to get past the phenomenon of refractory foods (the ones that are bad but don't react overtly when you test them). Coca didn't know about this "hidden allergy" effect.
Get a copy of Diet Wise book here. If you've got one already and your pulse is still over 75, read it again! You missed some improtant life-saving data!
4. What's Wrong With Middle Class Kids? Nothing!
I like to read (out loud) to my wife Vivien. She loves the privilege, as you would expect. In the first few months we were together, I read her the entire 3 novels of the "Lord Of The Rings" trilogy, cover to cover, as we drove to and from London city center, every morning and evening.
I choose pretty eclectic and unusual titles (of course!) One I'm reading to her now is actually a kids book; it's called "Coot Club" by Arthur Ransome. It's about a bunch of kids sailing on the waterways of East Anglia (eastern England) and was written in 1934.
What's wrong with that? Well, apparently there is a backlash against stories which feature "privileged" kids (left wingers strike again at other peoples' freedom and choices). This is political correctness gone wrong. It implies that middle class kids are somehow inferior and less entitled to be kids and have fun than working class kids, just because their parents have worked hard and been successful in life! Say, what? Middle class kids have just as many rights as working class kids.
Now, thanks to the fools that choose books for libraries, kids are no longer allowed to read classic stories like this, which have sustained generations of youngsters with excitement and adventure. Coot Club is a lovely book and I doubt would excite envy from working class kids. Anyway, I'm jealous of the Coot Club myself, while reading it, and I don't see any harm in that!
5.
A View From On High, Worth A Hymn!
I sound a bit out of breath. Well it was a pretty steep hillside!
6. What's In A Word?
Maladroit
Clumsy, incapable, unskilled, awkward, inept.
To really grasp this one in full you need the French.
Adroit, meaning deft, capable, is actually the French a droit (to the right). It comes from the belief that right-handed people have skills that lefties don't. In fact the French word gauche (on the left) has come into our langauge, meaning somebody inept, awkward, shy, maladroit. That's because they are left-handers (southpaw).
So: a droit or adroit, right-handed and smart. Maladroit, somebody who isn't so gifted, not necessarily because they are left-handed. The reference to the use of either hand has been lost over the centuries.
So, that's all for this week!
Be well; find the sacred in all you do, otherwise don't do it!
Prof.
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