Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby's Total Health Newsletter #76. Week ending 8th May, 2011
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• This week's Quote

1. Me My Friend William, the 10 Year Old Reiki Master
2. Join Me On Mother's Day
3. Why Do Animals Need A Salt Lick And We Don't?
4. It's Not Just Fat; It's Fat AND Stress
5. Who Was Emmet Fox?

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This Week's Quote:

“I had come to suspect, and now felt compelled to acknowledge, that science and the physical world were products of human imagining--that we were not cool observers of that world, but its passionate creators. We were all poets and the world was our metaphor."

--Roger S. Jones, physicist

[see also item 2 and consider joining me on this theme: Sunday 8th My.]

1. Meet My Friend William, a 10 Year Old Reiki Master!

This is William (we call him Wills). He's a fabulous boy. He has got some inner secrets you probably wouldn't guess. For example: he's a fully trained Reiki master!

This is not a gimmick. He had his first client recently, a young girl. She had a sleeping problem. After just one treatment from Wills, she slept like a dream for the first time in over a year! Her mom paid Wills a good rate for a 10-year old. So he's a real pro...

Wills has his own health challenges. He's fighting childhood leukemia! (hence the feeding tube).

But he's doing great. Being trained as a Reiki master (by Simon Hinton) was the turning point for him. After that we got some good nutrition going. We also found that his house was an EM radiation hot bed and advized his folks to get him out of there. This they did.

Wills is now tailing off chemo (the oncologists are bemused and don't quite now what is going on). We are all confident he's through the dark valley now and coming out the other side.

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2. Join Me On Mother's Day

I know, I know; I goofed. I booked a teleclass on Mother's Day! But maybe if you've taken the Old Hen out for a slap up lunch you could dump her in front of the TV and join me in looking forward to a bigger, brighter, more empowered life, using my "Thought Structures".

Thought Structures is a term I have come up with for a wide range of mind components, some of which are common knowledge and others which nobody seems to have noticed before I did.

The topic is a fascinating one: the simplest "thought structure" I could think of was a word; the biggest is a universe. Yes, if you think about it a universe--the allness of everything there is-- is just a thought structure, no more, no less.

But I have some much more practical "thought structures" for you, like my Scale Of Awakening and a four-value logic.

Title: Introducing Thought Structures

Time: Sunday, May 8th at 5:30pm Pacific (8.30 Eastern),

Listening method: Phone + Web Simulcast

To attend, visit: http://InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventID=19541937

Phone Number and Pin
Phone Number: (404) 260-0037
Pin Code: 111804#

If you are not a member of the New Thought Horizons program, you should be. You can read more about it and join here:

http://www.newthoughthorizons.com/join/

See you Sunday!

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3. Why Do Animals Need A Salt Lick and We Don’t?

The low-salt diet is a scientific nonsense that has gripped the medical fraternity for years. We NEED salt. When the weather gets really hot out here in the deserts of the West, guess who are the first to die of heat stroke? Patients on a low salt diet. They go down like flies. Yet the dogma is never questioned.

Doctors go on recommending low salt diets and refuse, absolutely, to keep an open mind on whether this is wise.

You’d probably lose your post if, as a doctor, you suggested caution in this. Well, some individuals have been brave enough to challenge orthodoxy and investigate the truth.

What they found was that lower sodium intake-- as measured by the "gold standard" of 24-hour sodium excretion--was associated with higher cardiovascular mortality. That’s the opposite of what doctors are told.

"What our study basically shows is that it might not be right to impose a general reduction on sodium intake," said senior study author Dr Jan A Staessen (University of Leuven, Belgium). "We are not negating previous studies, and I think sodium restriction is meaningful for patients who already have hypertension and perhaps for patients with heart failure, but there are very few arguments showing that reducing salt intake in the general population would result in substantial benefit."

However the study did also show that salt increases blood pressure slightly. We’ve known that for years (so deal with the cause of hypertension, not using aggressive low salt diets!)

Of course there are the naysayers. “Doesn’t make sense,” says one US expert, adding he suspects, "the bias of the authors.” He, of course, doesn’t have any bias whatever; odd isn’t it?

He even attacks the integrity of the scientists in Belgium, accusing them of  “Trying to create a stir. This is clever, but it's harmful in my view. It's like saying we don't think cigarettes are harmful so we shouldn't do anything about smoking."

It may, of course, be something to do with the fact they are not Americans and therefore can’t be right. But of course the smoking dangers are PROVEN, the benefits of low salt diet are by NO MEANS settled. So he’s just blowing smoke and trying to evoke an unpleasant emotional response, instead of using a scientific argument (he didn’t give one).

The blunt truth is that those in the lowest 33% of salt intake were 50% less likely to die. Or, put more scientifically, mortality was 50% higher in the lowest tertile of sodium excretion (excretors are not retaining sodium, remember).

So Is Everyone Else Wrong?

Yes! As the authors of this new study point out, previous studies on which recommendations to lower sodium intake are based "are all short-term, controlled intervention trials, in which there are reductions in blood pressure in hypertensive patients and a small decrease in BP in normal volunteers" with sodium reduction, and "these studies have been extrapolated to the population as a whole."

"The assumption that lower salt intake would in the long run lower blood pressure, to our knowledge, has not yet been confirmed in longitudinal population-based studies," says Dr. Staessen.

Far from being a toss off study by fools, as our American “expert” claims, this was a comprehensive evaluation of the problem, investigating 3681 patients spanning five European populations, with a long term follow-up. In other words, this was the real deal.

I will mention that this study does NOT encourage the use of excessive sodium, as is so prevalent in the manufactured death foods, of the USA in particular. Avoid adulterated food at all costs.

I should also point out that animals go to a lot of trouble to get extra salt. They journey long distances to “salt licks”. Why would they do that if salt was bad?

And I used to recommend a lot of potassium salt, instead of normal sodium chloride. But it’s worthless as a table salt; you can’t taste it! (I used it to balance electrolytes, not to reduce sodium)

If you really want to get your blood pressure down, go on an allergy exclusion diet and find out what foods send up your blood pressure. It’s over 90% effective. I tell you how to do it in my book “Diet Wise”.

[REFERENCE: May 4, 2011 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.]

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4. It’s Not Just Fat; It’s Fat AND Stress

According to a study published in the journal Obesity (Aug 2009), monkeys fed an American diet get fat -- but those under chronic stress put on much more belly fat.

I did a double take on that. It seems counter-intuitive. Fat is just fat—calories—right? What has stress got to do with it?

Well, apparently the stressed monkeys (lower on the social pecking order) not only put on more fat but it was the deadly belly fat. That’s far more serious from the point of view of blocked arteries, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and heart disease.

In previous studies, socially stressed monkeys—those at the bottom of the pecking order in a monkey colony—get  blocked arteries far faster than other monkeys fed the same high-fat diet. That’s reasonable. In human terms, this is reflected by the famous “Whitehall Study”, where workers lower in the civil service hierarchy die sooner.

But why do stressed monkeys get more belly fat?

Over a two-year period, the researchers collected a vast array of data on stressed and unstressed female cynomolgus monkeys. They used a CT scan to detect visceral fat -- abdominal fat that often (but not always) protrudes as a "beer belly" on the outside. On the inside, it wraps around the organs.

Even compared to other monkeys with the same body mass index and weight, CT scans showed that the stressed monkeys had a great deal more belly fat. And when the researchers looked at the animals' arteries, they found plaque clogging the arteries of the stressed monkeys.

During the years of the study, the low-status monkeys had high levels of a stress hormone called cortisol. Over time, high cortisol levels cause belly fat to accumulate. It also makes individual fat cells get larger.

This is basically "sick fat". Your fat cells are getting bigger and your fat tissue is getting bigger and neither the cells nor the tissues work as well as they should. The fat is sick.

End of gender difference: All of the monkeys in the study were female. One way monkeys are like humans is that females are less likely to get heart disease than males. Yet stressed female monkeys that put on belly fat are at least as likely to get heart disease as are male monkeys.

And in fact this may even be a worse disease for women than men, because they get complications and die faster when they have heart disease.

The researchers found that the stressed monkeys had abnormal menstrual cycles. Compared to the unstressed monkeys, they were much less likely to ovulate. This was linked to abdominal fat -- but not to body mass index or other kinds of fat.

Something else that wasn’t discussed, but I’d like to point out that no ovulation means less (or no) estrogen. That could speed osteoporosis in a post-menopausal woman.

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5. Who Was Emmet Fox?

He was an American author and lecturer, very influential in the years before WW2. He died in 1951. Fox wrote some of the most beautiful words ever written, which I quote often:

http://www.letterfromserendipity.com/serendipity36.htm#fox

Recently I picked up a copy of one of his books in a library sale (Make Your Life Worthwhile). He seems very on the ball with medical matters, as well as religious and spiritual writings.

Here's his piece on smiles!

Most people think that the simplest things in life are the most important, or, if you prefer, that the most important things in life are found to be the simplest. This is a very profound discovery. What is more important to us than breathing, for instance?--yet we seldom give it a thought--fresh air doesn't cost a penny--and if deprived of air we die in a few minutes.

Another simple thing which is of great moment is a smile. A smile costs nothing in money, time, or effort, but it is literally true that it can be of supreme importance on one's life. A smile affects your whole body from the skin right in to the skeleton, including all blood vessels, nerves and muscles. It affects the functioning of every organ. It influences every gland. I repeat--and this is literally true--you cannot smile without affecting your whole body favorably. Even one smile often relaxes quite a number of muscles, and when the thing becomes a habit you can easily see how the effect will mount up. Last year's smiles are paying you dividends today.

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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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