| Monday, June 30, 2003 |  |
| Anti-Social Conduct May Be Linked To Diet | 2 comments |
 30 Jun 2003 @ 06:43This is definitely a good first step to peace of mind and heart. A bit obvious, however advertising firms have done a good job at influencing our diets. Add to that the disconnect most urbanites have to the earth, the education process might have to start with , "Twinkies aren't REAL food." Let's teach the children by example, buy local, visit your farmer's markets. Recently a friend of mine found himself behind bars and it seems that the "system" purposely, with calculation, does all it can to keep those incarcerated emotionally unstable or numb, serving "dead" food and handing out sedatives like candy. Classism and racism at it's finest. Humanitarian sabotage. Though this study is from the UK, I imagine all I said above still applies. Here's a thought, fruit trees, gardens....oh silly me. Anti-Social Conduct May Be Linked To Diet, Says Study By James Meikle The Guardian Wednesday June 26, 2002 Improving the vitamins, minerals and fatty acids in the diets of young offenders appeared to reduce their anti-social behaviour dramatically, according to a Home Office-backed study. Yesterday it prompted calls for further research into the impact of nutrition on crime. Results of trials in one maximum security institution for 18-to 21-year-old men suggested that inmates who took special supplements committed more than a quarter fewer disciplinary offences while serving their sentences than those who were unknowingly simply taking dummy pills. Significant infringements of discipline, including violence, fell by 37%, according to authors of the study, which was organised with the help of the Home Office and prison service. The results will be published soon in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Hugh Montifiore, former bishop of Birmingham and chairman of Natural Justice, the charity behind the study at the young offenders' institution in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, suggested that there was a correlation, if not a direct connection, between the rises in fast food consumption and youth crime. "More and more fast food is being consumed. More and more made-up dishes are sold in supermarkets. School meals are a matter of choice, the less nutritious they [pupils] like best, and there is less and less cooking with proper ingredients. "None of us claims that lack of proper nutrition is the sole cause of anti-social behaviour. But the evidence does show that it is an hitherto unknown major contributor." Bernard Gesch, who led the study while he was at Surrey University, Guildford, said: "The supplements just provided the vitamins, minerals and fatty acids found in a good diet which the inmates should be getting anyway. Yet the improvement in behaviour was huge." It was not necessarily long-lasting, however. Shortly after the experiment ended staff reported that violence against them rose by 40%. Mr Gesch is now a research scientist in physiology at Oxford University as well as director of Natural Justice, which investigates causes of criminal behaviour. His team pointed out nutrients were crucial ingredients in the biochemical processes that produced brain transmitters like seratonin and dopamine, which affect mood. Giving all prisoners an improved diet of micronutrients might cost about £3.5m a year, against an overall prison service budget of nearly £2bn. Mr Gesch added: "This approach needs to be retested, but it looks to be cheap, highly effective and humane." The results might be even better in adolescent children, he suggested. Sir David Ramsbotham, former chief inspector of prisons, said the Home Office should carefully consider the implications of the study. Alan Simpson, Labour MP for Nottingham South, called for other studies to be conducted in schools and hospitals. He said: "We may be sitting on a timebomb which it is entirely within our ability to defuse. If we choose to feed up our kids rather than just bang them up, we may also discover we have found a better way of bringing them up." The government is trying to find ways of changing people's eating behaviour without acting like a nanny state. Healthy eating messages appear to be quite well understood but are far from widely converted into action. More > |
| 20-Year Study Backs Organic Farming | 0 comments |
 30 Jun 2003 @ 06:1320-Year Study Backs Organic Farming By Fred Pearce New Scientist The world's longest running experiment in comparing organic and conventional farming side-by-side has pronounced chemical-free farming a success. "We have shown that organic farming is efficient, saves energy, maintains biodiversity and keeps soils healthy for future generations," says Paul Mader of the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture in Frick, Switzerland, which carried out the 21-year study. Although crop yields on organic plots in the experiment were on average 20 per cent lower than those on conventional plots, the ecological and efficiency gains more than made up for it, Mader says. Soils nourished with manure were more fertile and produced more crops for a given input of nitrogen or other fertiliser. "The input of nutrients like nitrogen were as much as 50 per cent lower, so overall the organic system was more efficient," he told New Scientist. Not all crops did equally well. Potato yields on organic plots were only 60 per cent of those on conventional plots. But organic winter wheat achieved 90 per cent, and grasses fed on manure did just as well as those fed on fertiliser. Mader argues that the biggest bonus is the improved quality of the soil under organic cultivation, which should ensure good crops for decades to come. Earthworms and fungi Organic soils had up to three times as many earthworms, twice as many insects and 40 per cent more mycorrhizal fungi colonising plant roots. Soils microbes went into overdrive, transforming organic material into new plant biomass faster than microbes in conventional plots. More predictably perhaps, organic plots contained up to 10 times as many weed species as conventional plots sprayed with herbicides. "Under European conditions, we can clearly grow our food with much less chemical input than we do now," says Mader. "But of course a 20 per cent yield reduction in a country like India would have fatal consequences." However, in practice, where poor farmers cannot afford expensive agrochemicals, switching to organic methods boost yields, he says: "Last year I visited a project in India, the Maikaal Project near Indore, where more than a thousand farmers are growing food organically -- and increasing their yields compared to neighbouring conventional farmers." Jules Pretty, director of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex, who recently completed a global study of organic farming, said the findings confirmed his conclusion that "organic farming is more efficient and in many circumstances can increase yields for farmers". |
| Got The Giggles? Join The Club | 0 comments |
 30 Jun 2003 @ 06:08Got The Giggles? Join The Club} By Eric Trump New York Times July 27, 2002 On Jan. 30, 1962, at Kashasha village near Lake Victoria in what is now Tanzania, three schoolgirls got the giggles. Tears rolling down their cheeks, they couldn't stop laughing or keep their contagion of chuckles from spreading to almost half the other girls at their boarding school. Some fits were lasting minutes, others hours, some up to 16 days, until exasperated administrators closed the school five months later. Afflicted girls were sent home to their villages around Lake Victoria, where they duly infected more children and young adults with their "sickness." Before the epidemic finally relented, in 1964, it forced the temporary closing of more than 14 schools, all because of unstoppable laughter. What was so funny no one ever discovered, but the mirth gathered a momentum that caught hundreds of unsuspecting villagers in its riptide. At the time, it was considered a pathology to be quarantined and quashed. But today, this unmoored laughter is celebrated in over 1,000 laughter clubs worldwide as a therapy to reduce stress, lower blood pressure, strengthen the immune system and perhaps even lead to world peace. The first club began with Dr. Madan Kataria, known as the Giggling Guru, in Bombay. In 1995, having read about the health benefits of hasya (laughing) yoga, he gathered a few friends in a park where they told jokes to one another. But over time the jokes fell flat or got smutty, so Dr. Kataria developed a catalog of comical expressions and sounds that he and his confreres used to stimulate and simulate laughter. The guiding principle was that while humor can fail to produce the expulsion of air and muscle contractions known as laughter, forced laughter always works because it transcends thought. Dr. Kataria's trick worked. His most famous stance, the lion laugh (eyes bulging, voice roaring and hands pawing the air), got even the most world-weary laughing. His group grew, meeting regularly to force laughter into the morning air. By 1998, it was a movement, with 12,000 people gathering at a Bombay racetrack to celebrate the first World Laughter Day, a day that this year was celebrated here and in India on May 5. Since then, laughter clubs have been erupting all over the world. They were introduced to America through Dr. Kataria's friend Steve Wilson of Columbus, Ohio, a self-described "joyologist" and former psychologist who trains club leaders and was a co-founder of the World Laughter Tour Inc., a clearinghouse for what participants call the American laughter movement. Naturally the group has a Web site ([link]) directing the curious to local chapters or "a Certified Laughter Leader in your area." "The human spirit always comes back to laughter," said Mr. Wilson, who is also known as the Cheerman of the Bored. "Misery loves company, but laughter loves it more. It's a sign of health and perseverance. We've got 5,000 years of proof." Human beings, of course, have been laughing a long time. Robert Provine, a behavioral neurobiologist at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, believes that the first laugh rang out about six million years ago, when hominids first stood upright, a position that allowed for respiratory control and freed the lungs and larynx to laugh. Laughter developed, he writes in "Laughter: A Scientific Investigation" ([link]), before language, and was the result not of jest, but of fear, giddiness, disappointment -- a passing mammoth. Mr. Provine, who has recorded hundreds of episodes of people laughing, says that some 90 percent of our laughter is not the direct result of a specific joke. Laughter has been the subject of serious speculation for a long time. Plato was wary of the sound's effect on the republic's guardians and wanted it censored. Aristotle argued for moderation: excess laughter was for "buffoons." By the Renaissance, laughter studies had emerged. In the 17th century, Hobbes supported the superiority theory, which held that laughter was a "sudden glory that arises" when we realize how great we are compared to everyone else. (Perhaps that's what behind the gleeful mirth of the evil genius in the old James Bond films.) Later, Kant and Schopenhauer thought laughter arose from incongruity, that is, when events don't conform to expectations (30 clowns emerge from a tiny car). And third, the relief theory, best elucidated by Freud, says that we laugh to release pent-up energy. Recall that passing mammoth. These theories aside, laughter's health benefits have been touted for centuries. Norman Cousins's 1979 book, "Anatomy of an Illness" ([link]), describes beating cancer with "Candid Camera" episodes and Marx Brothers films; the Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that at Auschwitz laughter was "another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation"; and the seventh-century Zen monks Kanzan and Jittoku believed in laughter as the path to inner peace. For Stephan Wischerth, a certified laughter club leader in New York, no one needs a reason or a theory to laugh. Each week, he leads a handful of men and women in laughter at Healing Works Midtown Manhattan, a center that offers free holistic programs to low-income people. "I'm not making anyone laugh," Mr. Wischerth explained. "We're not laughing at -- we're just laughing. We're giving each other license to laugh without embarrassment." After breathing and stretching exercises, followed by the laughter movement's mantra, "Ho-Ho-Ha-Ha-Ha," Mr. Wischert is ready to begin. "Have you had a vowel movement today?" he asks, bending low and then stretching up in a moan that ends in a shriek-laugh, his face resembling the "before" photo of an Ex-lax commercial. The three others -- a registered nurse, an outreach worker, a minister -- follow suit with bulging veins and red faces. The room fills with the groan of vowels stretching into laughter. More exercises follow: the opera laugh, the chicken laugh, the subway laugh. The "Why Me?" laugh begins as a parody of misery and weeping, but the falsetto repetition of this threadbare query demonstrates, after about 45 seconds, that William Blake was right: "Excess of sorrow laughs." Still, Mr. Provine, the behavioral neurobiologist, says there is little scientific evidence that laughter is good for you. "The presumed health benefits are few and far between," he said. Rather, laughter may be a side effect of good health. "Laughter is about relationships," he said. "It may not be laughter that is healthy, but the environment -- the friends and family -- that lead to laughter. Laughter probably doesn't make us live longer, but if you like it, go for it." Laugh clubbers are. Mr. Wilson dreams of the day when he'll lead the United Nations in a lion laugh for peace, and Dr. Kataria wants to see the Olympics begin with a laugh. Laughter is certainly more democratic now than it was back in Voltaire's day, when aristocrats went to the local asylum and taunted the inmates to get some kicks. |
| Temporary Temples | 1 comment |
 30 Jun 2003 @ 05:36Temporary Temples A crop circle resource. More > |