Day: 04/21/2017

Fall in eGFR post renal trasplant.

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Foto: iStock.com/ onurdongel

An Australian group of researchers examined the potential of percentage decline in eGFR as a surrogate for hard outcomes in kidney transplant recipients. Their conclusion: A 30% decline in eGFR between years 1 and 3 after kidney transplant is i) common and ii) strongly associated with risks of subsequent death and death-censored graft failure. The authors now call for percentage decline in eGFR to be used as a surrogate outcome in kidney transplant trials.

The analysis was based on data from the “Australia and New Zealand Dialysis and Transplant Registry”, which includes almost 8,000 transplants performed between 1995 and 2009, amounting to 71,845 patient-years of follow-up, 1,121 graft losses and 1,192 deaths. For these cases, the authors determined the risks of death or death-censored graft failure related to percentage change in eGFR between years 1 and 3 after transplant.

What they found was an association of eGFR decline with exponentially increased risks of graft failure and death: Compared to a stable eGFR, a ≥30% decline in eGFR was associated with a twofold increased risk of subsequent death (hazard ratio, 2.20) and a more than fivefold increased risk of death-censored graft failure (5.14); this ≥30% decline was observed in 10% of patients. In addition, the marker ‘decline in eGFR’ was superior to other surrogates that were investigated, such as acute rejection, doubling of serum creatinine level and eGFR at year 1 or year 2.

A ≥30% decline in eGFR between years 1 and 3 after kidney transplant is a common occurrence and showed a strong association with risks of subsequent death and death–censored graft failure, conclude the authors. Percentage decline in eGFR should therefore be considered as surrogate outcome in kidney transplant trials.

Source: Clayton P. A. et al.: “Relationship between eGFR Decline and Hard Outcomes after Kidney Transplants”, JASN, November 2016.

Another Cancer Curing Doctor Found Shot Dead Directly After SWAT Raid on Clinic

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In recent articles the use of cannabis oil (THC) has been explored in the treatment of seizure, proving with literature that the oil can have a drastic and positive impact on patient quality of life.

Big Pharma companies and ‘sponsored’ medical practitioners would prefer you believe in pixie dust than alternative medicines. In recent times, the demonization of chiropractors has also been spotlighted, with the American Medical Association portraying them as quacks.
The suppression of medical science is a history backdating over decades. Coupled with the oddity of several medical researchers who were on the cusp of medical breakthroughs, meeting with unexpected and sometimes violent deaths, one’s curiosity is piqued, to say the least.
One such medical researcher was the pioneering Dr. Bradsheet, found floating in a river recently, with a gunshot wound to the chest. Dr. Bradsheet was working on a molecule called GcMAF, a little known but potentially groundbreaking cure for cancer, and treatment for HIV and autism.
Autism researcher and vaccine opponent, Dr. Jeff Bradstreet.
GcMAF is a naturally occurring molecule in the body, and has demonstrated its healing properties over multiple studies, with little side effects on the patient. As with all treatments there are pros and cons, but the pros in this instance seem to outweigh chemotherapy for instance, costing less than US$2000 for a full 24-week treatment that is witnessing over 85% success rates, prolonged remissions, cure, and what appears to be a life-long immunity after treatment in a high percentage of cases.
Dr Bradsheet’s death followed a raid on his clinic by the U.S. government confiscating his research on GcMAF and halting his treatment of his patients. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had outlawed its use, calling it an “unapproved drug.” However, in dozens of countries around the world, including Japan, GcMAF is legally practiced and with outstanding results.
GcMAF has been hailed by those who use it as the “universal cancer cure.” The blood product (Globulin component Macrophage Activating Factor) can treat a range of conditions including HIV, autism, and Parkinson’s disease. Where endocannabinoids can be mimicked by the use of THC at a molecular level; the GcMAF works by stimulating the immune system and activating macrophages “so they can destroy cancer cells and other abnormal cells in the body.”
According to a FAQ page of a treatment clinic in Japan, GcMAF can treat the following diseases where there is immune dysfunction or compromise.
 
In a world where cancer and other illness’ are a lucrative business, a potential miracle treatment like GcMAF can be seen as a threat. Laws such as the 1939 Cancer Act in the UK, which makes it illegal to discuss the possibility of curing cancer with your medical provider, become part of the medical world’s monopoly on profiteering from disease. Lives can be saved each year simply by repealing this Act, let alone providing further funding for GcMAF research and THC repeal of prohibition.
Six doctors on the East Coast of Florida were found dead in one month, most in similar circumstances: single gunshot wound. Although some of these cases have presented open and close cases, in the context of the above, too many questions remain unanswered. As for the case of Dr. Bradsheet, his family are calling for answers, most of which are falling on deaf ears.

Slow Down Diet Helps with Weight Management

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Story at-a-glance–

  • Most people eat too fast, which causes stress and cuts you off from your body’s innate intelligence; slowing down the pace at which you eat is an important part of reestablishing this natural connection
  • Stress and fear results in sympathetic nervous system dominance, increased insulin, increased cortisol, and increased stress hormones — all of which deregulates your appetite and makes you eat more
  • Eating a very low-fat diet may prevent weight loss. One of the signs of essential fatty acid deficiency is weight gain or inability to lose weight.

Many people have a problem with their relationship with food. Some overeat, others unde reat, and many struggle with their weight despite doing everything right “on paper.”

“Sonoma State University allowed me to do an independent study for my master’s degree in Eating Psychology. I put an ad in a newspaper that said, ‘Graduate student looking to start Eating Psychology study group.’ That was the beginnings for me of learning on the job.

I had a group of 20 plus people — a handful of anorexics; a handful of some of the most obese people I’d ever seen; a beautiful model who had an eating disorder; and a handful of women in their 50s who looked fine to me but [spent their] life chronically dieting.

That was my beginnings of starting to understand eating psychology, counseling psychology, and coaching psychology. I looked at all the different modalities, started doing clinical practice, and said, ‘OK. What works and what doesn’t?'”

Why Does Dieting Oftentimes Fail?

Gradually, over the course of about 15 years, David developed a number of strategies that effectively address weight, body image, overeating, binge eating, emotional eating, and endless dieting.

The key was to distill the science and psychology down into simple, clear, and straightforward strategies that could empower people to take action and get desired results.

For example, many people diet and exercise yet don’t lose weight. Why is that? Oftentimes there are secondary complaints that can offer clues.

“Maybe they have digestive issues. Maybe they have mood, irritability, or fatigue. Maybe they have dry skin and dry hair. Then I look at their diet and find that they’re eating extremely low-fat.

Now, why are they eating extremely low-fat? They’re [doing it] because they have what I call the ‘toxic nutritional belief’ that ‘fat in food equals fat on my body.’ That’s a piece of nutritional information that they’re practicing, using, and abiding by.”

The problem with believing and following this myth is that lack of dietary fat may actually be part of why you can’t lose weight. One of the signs of essential fatty acid deficiency is weight gain or inability to lose weight.

This seems counter intuitive to many, but the proof is in the pudding, as the saying goes, and if you’re not losing weight even though you’ve cut out nearly all fat, then perhaps it’s time to reassess your belief system.

“Then I have to do what I call an intellectual intervention,” says. “This is my opportunity to deliver information… and let them know that ‘here is where your belief is impacting the goal that you want.’

[I’ll tell them] ‘let’s do an experiment because you’ve been doing it this way for a dozen years. So now we’re going to include more healthy essential fats in your diet for the next several weeks. Then we’re going to see how you feel.'”

More often than not, adding healthy fats back into your diet will result in more regular bowel movements, an increased sense of well-being, improved appetite control, and, eventually, weight loss.

Reconnecting to Your Body’s Innate Intelligence

Part of the challenge, David notes, is that most people have lost their connection to body intelligence. “There’s a brilliant wisdom that’s activated once we start to clean up our diet and eat healthier food,” he says.

Most people also eat too fast, and this too cuts you off from your body’s innate intelligence, so slowing down the pace at which you eat is a very important part of reestablishing this natural connection.

If you’re a fast eater, you’re not paying attention to the food you’re eating, and you’re missing what scientists call the cephalic phase digestive response (CPDR).

Cephalic phase digestive response is a fancy term for taste, pleasure, aroma, and satisfaction, including the visual stimulus of your meal. Researchers estimate about 40 to 60 percent of your digestive and assimilative power at any meal comes from this “head phase” of digestion.

“In other words, you look at a food and your mouth starts to water,” David explains. “You think of a food and your stomach starts to churn. That’s digestion beginning in the mind. When we are not paying attention to the meal, our natural appetite is deregulated. On top of that, eating very fast puts your body in a stress state.”

Stress Effectively Hinders Weight Loss

When you put your body in a stress state, you have sympathetic nervous system dominance, increased insulin, increased cortisol, and increased stress hormones.

Not only will this deregulate your appetite, you’re also going to eat more, because when your brain doesn’t have enough time to sense the taste, aroma, and pleasure from the food, it keeps signaling that hunger has not been satisfied.

You’ve undoubtedly experienced this at some point: You quickly gorge on a huge meal, but when you’re finished, your belly is distended yet you still feel the urge to eat more. At the heart of this problem is eating too quickly, which causes stress. As David explains:

“I want to steer people towards more soulful eating,” David says. “Be present. Feel good about what you’re doing. Get pleasure from that meal. Taste it. Stress is arguably one of the most common causative or contributing factors to just about any disease, condition, or symptom we know of.

When I can start to help a person slow down with their meal and get in a relationship with their food, first and foremost, what’s happening is they’re stepping into parasympathetic nervous system dominance.

If you take five to 10 long, slow deep breaths before a meal, or five to 10 long, slow deep breaths before anything you do, you are training your system to drop into the physiologic relaxation response. When I can help somebody drop into that place, magic starts to happen. People start to go, ‘Oh my goodness, I paid attention to my meal. I was present and I slowed down. I’m not overeating anymore.'”

In David’s experience, a person’s problem with overeating or binge eating can disappear within days when they get into right relationship with food and life, which means being present to it. Being present and mindful can actually affect your physiology in a very direct and profound way.

So if you typically reserve five minutes for breakfast, make that 15 or 20 minutes. If you’re taking 10 minutes for lunch, take 30, 40, or better yet, as much as an hour or an hour and a half, which is common practice in many European countries.

Approaching Food from a Place of Inspiration Rather than Fear

Many people also suffer from what David calls a “high fact diet,” meaning they have amassed a great deal of nutritional information, but they don’t have the expertise to determine fact from fiction, and thus they get inundated with minutia and overwhelmed by contradictions. “From that place, they can easily go into breakdown. They can easily go into ‘Oh, screw it. I don’t know what to do,'” he says.

Others eat very healthy foods, but are motivated to do so not because of the health benefits they get, but because they fear they’ll end up diseased or dead if they don’t. You might think that the end result would be the same, regardless of the motivation driving their food choices, but doing anything from a place of fear can set you up for failure.

“Start to notice… ‘What are the thoughts that are serving you and what are the thoughts that aren’t serving you?’ Living in a constant state of ‘I’m no good, I’m not eating the right diet, I know I’m supposed to eat paleo but I didn’t do it perfectly so now I have to punish myself,’ [will cause] people to quit a great nutritional program because they made one little mix up!

I’ve helped so many people who were following a healthy diet out of fear. Follow a healthy diet out of inspiration. What do you want to do when you’re healthy? Who do you want to be when you’re really healthy, when you have all this energy, and when you have the perfect weight?”

The strategy David recommends here is to turn eating into a meditative act; to slow down, and become aware — of your food, and of how your body responds to the food.

“It becomes a meditation of ‘What am I thinking about when I eat? Am I present? Am I tasting the food? What does this food taste like? Am I full? Do I need to eat more?’ Then it becomes a meditation after the meal. I ask people to check in 20 or 30 minutes later. ‘How’s your body feeling now? Are you noticing anything? Are your sinuses clogged?’ They might say, ‘Yeah, I’m noticing I have a little head congestion.’ Does that connect to what I ate then in terms of how I’m feeling right now?’ It’s all about awareness. It’s all about questioning.”

Why Intermittent Fasting Might Not Work for Some People

Most people who seek to lose weight are insulin resistant, and in over 35 years of experience in clinical medicine, I’ve not discovered a more effective intervention than intermittent fasting, where you skip either breakfast or dinner, thereby restricting your eating to a narrower window of time each day. Restricting your calories to a six to eight hour window is a powerful intervention that will jumpstart your metabolic systems to start burning fat for fuel.

David agrees, but notes that many people who skip meals from a fear-based place with the intention to cut calories often still fail to lose weight.

“I’ve seen hundreds of these clients,” he says, adding that, “there is a huge subset of people who have been taught that weight loss is calories in and calories out, period. From that understanding, they are trying to limit their number of calories. Oftentimes that is done from a place of fear and anxiety, i.e. ‘stress.’

And one of the factors that creates weight loss resistance is the constant state of stress that we live under. Because if you’re not losing weight on a weight loss strategy where you’re undereating for years, that creates stress and upset. To me, that low-level and that chronically elevated insulin and cortisol impacts the body and the sympathetic nervous system.”

In essence, what’s happening in such a situation is that even though skipping meals should improve your ability to lose weight, the fear and stress overrides the process by upregulating your sympathetic nervous system. Also, from a stand point of bio-circadian nutrition, some people find it easier to lose weight when they’re eating the bulk of their calories in the first half of the day as opposed to the latter part, so maybe you’d do better eating breakfast and skipping dinner (or vice versa).

Are You on a Sumo Diet?

Dr. Lee Know’s book “Life – The Epic Story of Our Mitochondria,” really brought home the importance of meal timing for me. Most people eat their biggest meal at night, which could be a massive mistake because your mitochondria — the powerhouses inside your cells — are responsible for “burning” the fuel your body consumes and converting into usable energy.

When you add fuel close before bedtime — a time when you actually need the least amount of energy — you end up generating metabolic complications, caused by free radicals and an excess of electrons produced in the process.

In a nutshell, late-night eating tends to generate excess free radicals, which promotes DNA damage that contributes to chronic degenerative diseases and promotes accelerated aging. To avoid this, stop eating at least three hours before bedtime. David also notes that, according to the concept of bio-circadian nutrition, your ability to metabolize food is related to your body temperature.

Your body temperature is highest right around solar noon, and that’s when your body is metabolically operating at peak efficiency, burning the most calories. Moreover, he says that:

“Historically, the one place I could find that this was being put to use was in the traditional sumo wrestler community. You ask yourself, ‘How did all those Japanese guys get so big?’ As it turns out, back in the 1400s and 1500s when they didn’t have cookies and ice cream, they were eating more food than their average countrymen, and they would wake themselves up in the middle of the night and eat the bulk of their food when everybody else was sleeping.

The sumo community, the sumo wrestlers, discovered that if we want to gain massive amounts of weight, just eat it all in the middle of the night! So if you’re eating the bulk of your calories late at night, you’re on the sumo diet. This is a very simple piece of nutrition information, which is so crucial and so key.”

Exercise, but Choose Something You Love

David often recommends yoga, especially to people who have been eating right and exercising yet still fail to lose weight. Part of the problem here, he says, again goes back to stress — in this case, engaging in exercise you hate, or feeling that exercise is a form of punishment for eating or punishment for being overweight. By doing something you can’t stand, you enter into sympathetic nervous system dominance, which cancels out many of the benefits of exercise.

He noticed that simply by switching to a form of exercise they found enjoyable was enough to provoke a shift, allowing them to start losing weight.

“When you put people on exercise that they love, or movement that they love, something happens. They get happy. They get more in love with their body. They get more present. People who are weight loss-resistant will start to lose weight finally. So that’s an observation. I believe that it has to do with, once again, the person’s kind of metabolic posture, the state that their nervous system is in. If you’re doing exercise you can’t stand, you’re probably going to be locked in sympathetic nervous system dominance,” he says.

Minding Your Posture While Eating

David has also found that when it comes to addressing overeating, binge eating, emotional eating, and endless dieting, your posture can play a role. Are you sitting up straight when eating, or are you slouched over your plate? People who slouch while eating tend to eat more quickly, but it also affects how you relate to your food. David xplains:

“We have a different relationship with food when we’re upright. First of all, there’s more of a sense of dignity. There’s a sense of authority. When I’m slouched, I’m more energetically collapsed. This posture has an emotional kind of texture to it and the texture tends to be one more of subservience, defeat, or I’m making myself small. [Sitting upright makes] people feel more empowered and more dignified about their own self, their own body, and their relationship with food.

Also, when sitting upright, it will make breathing easier. It will make the breath more full. The breathing pattern of relaxation is regular, rhythmic, and deeper. The breathing pattern of distress response is arrhythmic, shallow, and infrequent. If you’re hunched over, you will breathe more as if you’re in sympathetic nervous system dominance. You’re going to be breathing shallower. When you’re upright, when your chest is expanded, you can breathe more regular, rhythmic, and deep.

Just adopting the breathing pattern of parasympathetic nervous system dominance will put you in that place in less than two minutes easily, which will then put you in the optimum state of digestion and assimilation. It will put you in the optimum state of being aware of your own appetite. So, one simple shift in the body can be very profound.

Also, when we start to become more erect, what we’re doing is we are changing our personality. We are really stepping into our own personal growth program where we’re claiming a sense of empowerment. Yes, it is good, structurally. But it’s good for who we are as human beings inside as well.”

If You’re Stuck, Go Back to the Basics

The more I study and the more I learn, the more I realize how simple it is. Health and weight loss are not nearly as complicated as we’ve been led to believe. It comes down to understanding and applying some very basic principles, because your body was actually designed to stay healthy. It wants to be healthy. It does not want to be diseased or to rely on medications. Once you give your body what it needs, it will go into self-repair mode and heal quite efficiently.

Besides a healthy diet and physical activity that you enjoy, the ability to self-reflect and grow may also play a more important role than most people suspect.

“There’s a subset of people who, until they do work on their self, they don’t get the body to shift where it naturally needs to go. What I’m saying is, in my observation, there’s a connection, oftentimes, between personal growth and metabolic potential. I like to use the formula: personal power equals metabolic power. Meaning, as I become the person that I’m meant to be; as I do work on self; as I become better in my character, and as I look at what life is trying to teach me, how do I learn my lessons? How do I become a better person?

How do I fulfill my mission in the world? How do I deliver my gifts? As I do that, I’ve noticed that my body has the best chance to step into its metabolic potential. Do I need to eat all the right foods? Of course I do. But as I’m stepping into my personal potential, I naturally gravitate towards the information, the kinds of foods, or the kinds of practices that serve me. That, I think, is a missing piece in the conversation around weight, or even the conversation around health in general.”

By Dr. Mercola

Many people have a problem with their relationship with food. Some overeat, others unde reat, and many struggle with their weight despite doing everything right “on paper.”

“Sonoma State University allowed me to do an independent study for my master’s degree in Eating Psychology. I put an ad in a newspaper that said, ‘Graduate student looking to start Eating Psychology study group.’ That was the beginnings for me of learning on the job.

I had a group of 20 plus people — a handful of anorexics; a handful of some of the most obese people I’d ever seen; a beautiful model who had an eating disorder; and a handful of women in their 50s who looked fine to me but [spent their] life chronically dieting.

That was my beginnings of starting to understand eating psychology, counseling psychology, and coaching psychology. I looked at all the different modalities, started doing clinical practice, and said, ‘OK. What works and what doesn’t?'”

Why Does Dieting Oftentimes Fail?

Gradually, over the course of about 15 years, David developed a number of strategies that effectively address weight, body image, overeating, binge eating, emotional eating, and endless dieting.

The key was to distill the science and psychology down into simple, clear, and straightforward strategies that could empower people to take action and get desired results.

For example, many people diet and exercise yet don’t lose weight. Why is that? Oftentimes there are secondary complaints that can offer clues.

“Maybe they have digestive issues. Maybe they have mood, irritability, or fatigue. Maybe they have dry skin and dry hair. Then I look at their diet and find that they’re eating extremely low-fat.

Now, why are they eating extremely low-fat? They’re [doing it] because they have what I call the ‘toxic nutritional belief’ that ‘fat in food equals fat on my body.’ That’s a piece of nutritional information that they’re practicing, using, and abiding by.”

The problem with believing and following this myth is that lack of dietary fat may actually be part of why you can’t lose weight. One of the signs of essential fatty acid deficiency is weight gain or inability to lose weight.

This seems counter intuitive to many, but the proof is in the pudding, as the saying goes, and if you’re not losing weight even though you’ve cut out nearly all fat, then perhaps it’s time to reassess your belief system.

“Then I have to do what I call an intellectual intervention,” says. “This is my opportunity to deliver information… and let them know that ‘here is where your belief is impacting the goal that you want.’

[I’ll tell them] ‘let’s do an experiment because you’ve been doing it this way for a dozen years. So now we’re going to include more healthy essential fats in your diet for the next several weeks. Then we’re going to see how you feel.'”

More often than not, adding healthy fats back into your diet will result in more regular bowel movements, an increased sense of well-being, improved appetite control, and, eventually, weight loss.

Reconnecting to Your Body’s Innate Intelligence

Part of the challenge, David notes, is that most people have lost their connection to body intelligence. “There’s a brilliant wisdom that’s activated once we start to clean up our diet and eat healthier food,” he says.

Most people also eat too fast, and this too cuts you off from your body’s innate intelligence, so slowing down the pace at which you eat is a very important part of reestablishing this natural connection.

If you’re a fast eater, you’re not paying attention to the food you’re eating, and you’re missing what scientists call the cephalic phase digestive response (CPDR).

Cephalic phase digestive response is a fancy term for taste, pleasure, aroma, and satisfaction, including the visual stimulus of your meal. Researchers estimate about 40 to 60 percent of your digestive and assimilative power at any meal comes from this “head phase” of digestion.

“In other words, you look at a food and your mouth starts to water,” David explains. “You think of a food and your stomach starts to churn. That’s digestion beginning in the mind. When we are not paying attention to the meal, our natural appetite is deregulated. On top of that, eating very fast puts your body in a stress state.”

Stress Effectively Hinders Weight Loss

When you put your body in a stress state, you have sympathetic nervous system dominance, increased insulin, increased cortisol, and increased stress hormones.

Not only will this deregulate your appetite, you’re also going to eat more, because when your brain doesn’t have enough time to sense the taste, aroma, and pleasure from the food, it keeps signaling that hunger has not been satisfied.

You’ve undoubtedly experienced this at some point: You quickly gorge on a huge meal, but when you’re finished, your belly is distended yet you still feel the urge to eat more. At the heart of this problem is eating too quickly, which causes stress. As David explains:

“I want to steer people towards more soulful eating,” David says. “Be present. Feel good about what you’re doing. Get pleasure from that meal. Taste it. Stress is arguably one of the most common causative or contributing factors to just about any disease, condition, or symptom we know of.

When I can start to help a person slow down with their meal and get in a relationship with their food, first and foremost, what’s happening is they’re stepping into parasympathetic nervous system dominance.

If you take five to 10 long, slow deep breaths before a meal, or five to 10 long, slow deep breaths before anything you do, you are training your system to drop into the physiologic relaxation response. When I can help somebody drop into that place, magic starts to happen. People start to go, ‘Oh my goodness, I paid attention to my meal. I was present and I slowed down. I’m not overeating anymore.'”

In David’s experience, a person’s problem with overeating or binge eating can disappear within days when they get into right relationship with food and life, which means being present to it. Being present and mindful can actually affect your physiology in a very direct and profound way.

So if you typically reserve five minutes for breakfast, make that 15 or 20 minutes. If you’re taking 10 minutes for lunch, take 30, 40, or better yet, as much as an hour or an hour and a half, which is common practice in many European countries.

Approaching Food from a Place of Inspiration Rather than Fear

Many people also suffer from what David calls a “high fact diet,” meaning they have amassed a great deal of nutritional information, but they don’t have the expertise to determine fact from fiction, and thus they get inundated with minutia and overwhelmed by contradictions. “From that place, they can easily go into breakdown. They can easily go into ‘Oh, screw it. I don’t know what to do,'” he says.

Others eat very healthy foods, but are motivated to do so not because of the health benefits they get, but because they fear they’ll end up diseased or dead if they don’t. You might think that the end result would be the same, regardless of the motivation driving their food choices, but doing anything from a place of fear can set you up for failure.

“Start to notice… ‘What are the thoughts that are serving you and what are the thoughts that aren’t serving you?’ Living in a constant state of ‘I’m no good, I’m not eating the right diet, I know I’m supposed to eat paleo but I didn’t do it perfectly so now I have to punish myself,’ [will cause] people to quit a great nutritional program because they made one little mix up!

I’ve helped so many people who were following a healthy diet out of fear. Follow a healthy diet out of inspiration. What do you want to do when you’re healthy? Who do you want to be when you’re really healthy, when you have all this energy, and when you have the perfect weight?”

The strategy David recommends here is to turn eating into a meditative act; to slow down, and become aware — of your food, and of how your body responds to the food.

“It becomes a meditation of ‘What am I thinking about when I eat? Am I present? Am I tasting the food? What does this food taste like? Am I full? Do I need to eat more?’ Then it becomes a meditation after the meal. I ask people to check in 20 or 30 minutes later. ‘How’s your body feeling now? Are you noticing anything? Are your sinuses clogged?’ They might say, ‘Yeah, I’m noticing I have a little head congestion.’ Does that connect to what I ate then in terms of how I’m feeling right now?’ It’s all about awareness. It’s all about questioning.”

Why Intermittent Fasting Might Not Work for Some People

Most people who seek to lose weight are insulin resistant, and in over 35 years of experience in clinical medicine, I’ve not discovered a more effective intervention than intermittent fasting, where you skip either breakfast or dinner, thereby restricting your eating to a narrower window of time each day. Restricting your calories to a six to eight hour window is a powerful intervention that will jumpstart your metabolic systems to start burning fat for fuel.

David agrees, but notes that many people who skip meals from a fear-based place with the intention to cut calories often still fail to lose weight.

“I’ve seen hundreds of these clients,” he says, adding that, “there is a huge subset of people who have been taught that weight loss is calories in and calories out, period. From that understanding, they are trying to limit their number of calories. Oftentimes that is done from a place of fear and anxiety, i.e. ‘stress.’

And one of the factors that creates weight loss resistance is the constant state of stress that we live under. Because if you’re not losing weight on a weight loss strategy where you’re undereating for years, that creates stress and upset. To me, that low-level and that chronically elevated insulin and cortisol impacts the body and the sympathetic nervous system.”

In essence, what’s happening in such a situation is that even though skipping meals should improve your ability to lose weight, the fear and stress overrides the process by upregulating your sympathetic nervous system. Also, from a stand point of bio-circadian nutrition, some people find it easier to lose weight when they’re eating the bulk of their calories in the first half of the day as opposed to the latter part, so maybe you’d do better eating breakfast and skipping dinner (or vice versa).

Are You on a Sumo Diet?

Dr. Lee Know’s book “Life – The Epic Story of Our Mitochondria,” really brought home the importance of meal timing for me. Most people eat their biggest meal at night, which could be a massive mistake because your mitochondria — the powerhouses inside your cells — are responsible for “burning” the fuel your body consumes and converting into usable energy.

When you add fuel close before bedtime — a time when you actually need the least amount of energy — you end up generating metabolic complications, caused by free radicals and an excess of electrons produced in the process.

In a nutshell, late-night eating tends to generate excess free radicals, which promotes DNA damage that contributes to chronic degenerative diseases and promotes accelerated aging. To avoid this, stop eating at least three hours before bedtime. David also notes that, according to the concept of bio-circadian nutrition, your ability to metabolize food is related to your body temperature.

Your body temperature is highest right around solar noon, and that’s when your body is metabolically operating at peak efficiency, burning the most calories. Moreover, he says that:

“Historically, the one place I could find that this was being put to use was in the traditional sumo wrestler community. You ask yourself, ‘How did all those Japanese guys get so big?’ As it turns out, back in the 1400s and 1500s when they didn’t have cookies and ice cream, they were eating more food than their average countrymen, and they would wake themselves up in the middle of the night and eat the bulk of their food when everybody else was sleeping.

The sumo community, the sumo wrestlers, discovered that if we want to gain massive amounts of weight, just eat it all in the middle of the night! So if you’re eating the bulk of your calories late at night, you’re on the sumo diet. This is a very simple piece of nutrition information, which is so crucial and so key.”

Exercise, but Choose Something You Love

David often recommends yoga, especially to people who have been eating right and exercising yet still fail to lose weight. Part of the problem here, he says, again goes back to stress — in this case, engaging in exercise you hate, or feeling that exercise is a form of punishment for eating or punishment for being overweight. By doing something you can’t stand, you enter into sympathetic nervous system dominance, which cancels out many of the benefits of exercise.

He noticed that simply by switching to a form of exercise they found enjoyable was enough to provoke a shift, allowing them to start losing weight.

“When you put people on exercise that they love, or movement that they love, something happens. They get happy. They get more in love with their body. They get more present. People who are weight loss-resistant will start to lose weight finally. So that’s an observation. I believe that it has to do with, once again, the person’s kind of metabolic posture, the state that their nervous system is in. If you’re doing exercise you can’t stand, you’re probably going to be locked in sympathetic nervous system dominance,” he says.

Minding Your Posture While Eating

David has also found that when it comes to addressing overeating, binge eating, emotional eating, and endless dieting, your posture can play a role. Are you sitting up straight when eating, or are you slouched over your plate? People who slouch while eating tend to eat more quickly, but it also affects how you relate to your food. David xplains:

“We have a different relationship with food when we’re upright. First of all, there’s more of a sense of dignity. There’s a sense of authority. When I’m slouched, I’m more energetically collapsed. This posture has an emotional kind of texture to it and the texture tends to be one more of subservience, defeat, or I’m making myself small. [Sitting upright makes] people feel more empowered and more dignified about their own self, their own body, and their relationship with food.

Also, when sitting upright, it will make breathing easier. It will make the breath more full. The breathing pattern of relaxation is regular, rhythmic, and deeper. The breathing pattern of distress response is arrhythmic, shallow, and infrequent. If you’re hunched over, you will breathe more as if you’re in sympathetic nervous system dominance. You’re going to be breathing shallower. When you’re upright, when your chest is expanded, you can breathe more regular, rhythmic, and deep.

Just adopting the breathing pattern of parasympathetic nervous system dominance will put you in that place in less than two minutes easily, which will then put you in the optimum state of digestion and assimilation. It will put you in the optimum state of being aware of your own appetite. So, one simple shift in the body can be very profound.

Also, when we start to become more erect, what we’re doing is we are changing our personality. We are really stepping into our own personal growth program where we’re claiming a sense of empowerment. Yes, it is good, structurally. But it’s good for who we are as human beings inside as well.”

If You’re Stuck, Go Back to the Basics

The more I study and the more I learn, the more I realize how simple it is. Health and weight loss are not nearly as complicated as we’ve been led to believe. It comes down to understanding and applying some very basic principles, because your body was actually designed to stay healthy. It wants to be healthy. It does not want to be diseased or to rely on medications. Once you give your body what it needs, it will go into self-repair mode and heal quite efficiently.

Besides a healthy diet and physical activity that you enjoy, the ability to self-reflect and grow may also play a more important role than most people suspect.

“There’s a subset of people who, until they do work on their self, they don’t get the body to shift where it naturally needs to go. What I’m saying is, in my observation, there’s a connection, oftentimes, between personal growth and metabolic potential. I like to use the formula: personal power equals metabolic power. Meaning, as I become the person that I’m meant to be; as I do work on self; as I become better in my character, and as I look at what life is trying to teach me, how do I learn my lessons? How do I become a better person?

How do I fulfill my mission in the world? How do I deliver my gifts? As I do that, I’ve noticed that my body has the best chance to step into its metabolic potential. Do I need to eat all the right foods? Of course I do. But as I’m stepping into my personal potential, I naturally gravitate towards the information, the kinds of foods, or the kinds of practices that serve me. That, I think, is a missing piece in the conversation around weight, or even the conversation around health in general.”

Source:mercola.com

The History of Earth Day.

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Each year, Earth Day—April 22—marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.

The height of counterculture in the United States, 1970 brought the death of Jimi Hendrix, the last Beatles album, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” War raged in Vietnam and students nationwide overwhelmingly opposed it.

At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. “Environment” was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news.

Although mainstream America largely remained oblivious to environmental concerns, the stage had been set for change by the publication of Rachel Carson’s New York Times bestseller Silent Spring in 1962.  The book represented a watershed moment, selling more than 500,000 copies in 24 countries, and beginning to raise public awareness and concern for living organisms, the environment and links between pollution and public health.

Earth Day 1970 gave voice to that emerging consciousness, channeling the energy of the anti-war protest movement and putting environmental concerns on the front page.

The Idea

The idea for a national day to focus on the environment came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, he realized that if he could infuse that energy with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution, it would force environmental protection onto the national political agenda. Senator Nelson announced the idea for a “national teach-in on the environment” to the national media; persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair; and recruited Denis Hayes from Harvard as national coordinator. Hayes built a national staff of 85 to promote events across the land. April 22, falling between Spring Break and Final Exams, was selected as the date.

On April 22,1970, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.

Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting support from Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, city slickers and farmers, tycoons and labor leaders. By the end of that year, the first Earth Day had led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. “It was a gamble,” Gaylord recalled, “but it worked.”

As 1990 approached, a group of environmental leaders asked Denis Hayes to organize another big campaign. This time, Earth Day went global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries and lifting environmental issues onto the world stage. Earth Day 1990 gave a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and helped pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. It also prompted President Bill Clinton to award Senator Nelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1995)—the highest honor given to civilians in the United States—for his role as Earth Day founder.

Earth Day Today

As the millennium approached, Hayes agreed to spearhead another campaign, this time focused on global warming and a push for clean energy. With 5,000 environmental groups in a record 184 countries reaching out to hundreds of millions of people, Earth Day 2000 combined the big-picture feistiness of the first Earth Day with the international grassroots activism of Earth Day 1990. Earth Day 2000 used the power of the Internet to organize activists, but also featured a drum chain that traveled from village to village in Gabon, Africa. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC for a First Amendment Rally. Earth Day 2000 sent world leaders the loud and clear message that citizens around the world wanted quick and decisive action on global warming and clean energy.

Much like 1970, Earth Day 2010 came at a time of great challenge for the environmental community. Climate change deniers, well-funded oil lobbyists, reticent politicians, a disinterested public, and a divided environmental community all contributed to the narrative—cynicism versus activism. Despite these challenges, Earth Day prevailed and Earth Day Network reestablished Earth Day as a relevant, powerful focal point. Earth Day Network brought 250,000 people to the National Mall for a Climate Rally, launched the world’s largest environmental service project—A Billion Acts of Green®–introduced a global tree planting initiative that has since grown into The Canopy Project, and engaged 22,000 partners in 192 countries in observing Earth Day.

Earth Day had reached into its current status as the largest secular observance in the world, celebrated by more than a billion people every year, and a day of action that changes human behavior and provokes policy changes.

Today, the fight for a clean environment continues with increasing urgency, as the ravages of climate change become more manifest every day. We invite you to be a part of Earth Day and help write many more chapters—struggles and victories—into the Earth Day book.

2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day. In honor of this milestone, Earth Day Network is launching an ambitious set of goals to shape the future of 21st century environmentalism.

The year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. We must seize this moment to inspire global actions that safeguard the earth against the unprecedented challenges of the 21st century.

In the four years leading up to 2020, Earth Day Network will launch a series of bold, thematic initiatives to galvanize unparalleled global collaboration.

Earth Day 2016’s theme was Trees for the Earth. That year we set the ambitious goal of planting 7.8 billion trees – one for every person on the planet – by Earth Day 2020.

The theme for Earth Day 2017 is Environmental and Climate Literacy. Before we can solve the dire environmental threats facing us in the 21st century, we must build a global citizenry knowledgeable in environmental science and fluent in local and global ecological issues.

For Earth Day 2017 we’re launching toolkits to give schools, colleges, and community groups across the world the resources to hold their own teach-ins for Environmental and Climate Literacy or other Earth Day events.

Source:http://www.earthday.org

Kangaroo care worldwide: The human incubator.

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Imagine a baby kangaroo, warm and snug as a bug in a rug in its pouch. This is the model for so-called “kangaroo mother care” (KMC). The key component of KMC is placing the infant in direct skin-to-skin contact with the mother on the mother’s chest (where the body is warmest), in an upright position underneath her clothes. How long the infant stays in that position is variable; the aim is for more than 18 hours a day, but this may differ depending on the stability of the infant and what other care he or she requires. In addition, KMC includes support for exclusive and early breast milk provision, a timely discharge from hospital and the appropriate follow-up care, but these components show significant global differences (1).
It started in Colombia

The first country to develop and scientifically investigate KMC for low-birth weight (LBW) infants was Colombia, approximately 30 years ago. Emerging evidence from the first studies on this subject pointed to benefits in regards to morbidity and mortality, so the South American country soon filed KMC under “good alternative to incubator care” and implemented the method in national guidelines.

Since then, the benefits have been corroborated by studies worldwide.

  • Three Cochrane meta-analyses have investigated KMC in LBW infants (in 2000, 2014 and 2016)
  • The 2014 study included 18 trials of continuous KMC initiated before postnatal day ten in infants with a birth weight < 2,500 g. It showed a significantly reduced mortality at discharge / 40-41 weeks (RR 0.60) and a decreased incidence of healthcare-related sepsis (0.45) and hypothermia (0.34), compared to conventional neonatal care, as well as some benefits regarding infant growth, breastfeeding and mother-infant attachment (2).
  • The 2016 analysis included 21 studies and investigated KMC in LBW infants after and before stabilization and in relatively stable LBW infants. In addition to the benefits of the 2014 paper, KMC was associated with an increase in weight, length and head circumference gain (mean difference 4.1 g/d, 0.21 cm/week and 0.14cm/week, respectively) (3).
  • These meta-analyses also demonstrated that KMC promotes colonization with maternal flora and is associated with lower rates of sepsis, necrotizing enterocolitis and pneumonia.
  • Several studies have shown improved motor development due to KMC, with infants scoring higher on Bayle motor scales at six, twelve, and 24 months than infants without KMC (4).
  • A 16-year follow-up of preterm infants who had been under 24/7 KMC from the time they came off oxygen support until an age of 28 days showed that these children had a similar brain motor connectivity as term-born infants and a better motor development than preterm infants without KMC (5).
  • A US-American study demonstrated that preterm babies had significantly fewer oxygen desaturation events and fewer bradycardia events per hour during KMC time versus time spent in an incubator (6).

According to a report on “Prematurity Treatment and Management”, achieving universal KMC coverage could potentially save an estimated 450,000 preterm newborns annually (7). In the light of these numbers, it would seem safe to assume that KMC would be catching on worldwide – but far from it: The current global coverage of KMC is less than one percent. This means a lot of work for a multi-stakeholder group of newborn health advocates who have proposed a worldwide goal of 50 percent coverage of KMC by the year 2020 (8).

So what is the current situation with KMC in various parts of the globe?

KMC in Africa

According to a 2014 World Health Organization (WHO) report, “Fulfilling the Health Agenda for Women and Children”, 44 percent of developing countries worldwide now have national policies in place that recommend KMC in facilities for LBW or preterm newborns, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mali and Malawi (9). However, in many cases the implementation is still limited, due to incomplete dissemination of KMC guidelines, inadequate financial resources, shortage of trained healthcare workers and poor availability of basic supplies, says a US-American report (10).

KMC in Asia

A recent report investigated KMC uptake and service coverage in India, Indonesia and the Philippines. The report suggests that progress is slow in these countries. Even though pioneers of KMC introduced it as early as the 1990s and even managed to establish it in a few individual hospitals, the idea failed to spread further in most areas. According to the report, there was an only “patchy uptake and expansion of KMC services” between the late 1990s and 2012 (11).

KMC in Europe

A Spanish study compared the policies and practices regarding parental involvement and the kangaroo care position in eight European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK). It found that holding babies in the kangaroo position is widespread in these countries; most have reclining chairs or a dedicated room for KMC (with Italy and Spain having the least). However, in the UK, France, Italy and Spain, many units have restrictions in place regarding frequency (KMC not routinely offered, only sometimes, only at the parents’ request) as well as clinical conditions that prevent the use of KMC, such as mechanical ventilation and the presence of umbilical lines. Also, in these countries, fathers are routinely offered KMC less frequently than mothers (12).

Generally, implementation in western countries has been slow, due to ready access to incubators and technology.

Mark the date: May 15

Since 2011, “Kangaroo Care Awareness Day” has been observed worldwide on May 15. This day aims to increase awareness and to enhance practice of kangaroo care in neonatal intensive care units, post-partum units, labor and delivery wards, and any hospital unit that has babies up to three months of age.
Sources:

  1. Chan GJ et al, Glob Health 2016;6:010701
  2. Conde-Agudelo A et al, Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2014;4(4):CD002771
  3. Conde-Agudelo A et al, Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2016;23(8):CD002771
  4. Barradas J et al J Pediatr (Rio J). 2006;82:475–480.
  5. Schneider C et al, Acta Paediatr. 2012;101:1045–1053.
  6. Mitchell AJ et al, J Neonatal Perinatal Med 2013;6:243-249
  7. Furdon SA, Prematurity Treatment and Management,
  8. http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/975909-treatment
  9. Engmann C et al, Lancet 2013;382:e26-7.
  10. http://www.countdown2015mnch.org/documents/2014Report/Countdown_to_2015-Fulfilling%20the%20Health_Agenda_for_Women_and_Children-The_2014_Report-Conference_Draft.pdf
  11. Vesel L et al, BMC Pregnancy Childbirth. 2015; 15(Suppl 2): S5.
  12. Bergh AM et al, BMC Int Health Hum Rights 2016;16:4
  13. Pallás-Alonso CR et al, Pediatr Crit Care Med 2012;13:568-577

Mindfulness meditation helps women but not men, first study suggests

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Mindfulness does not help men, a new study has shown
Mindfulness does not help men, a new study has shown 

Mindfulness does not help men, the first study to look at the gender divide in meditation suggests.

Although recent research has shown that mindfulness meditation, the practice of directing attention to present sensations and feelings, can be beneficial, nobody has checked whether the results were the same for both sexes.

But when Brown University broke down results they found a clear difference for men and women. While practising significantly helped women overcome a downcast mood, it actually made men feel slightly worse than before they began.

 “That was the surprising part,”said Dr Willoughby Britton, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behaviour and of behavioural and social sciences.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a widespread phenomenon that researchers hadn’t bothered to investigate.”

Students meditate in the lab component of their coursework
Students meditate in the lab component of their coursework

The study followed 41 male and 36 female students over the course of a full, 12-week academic class on mindfulness traditions which included three one hour-long meditation labs a week.

Over that time the average student had engaged in more than 41 hours of meditation in class and outside.

But while women’s moods improved by an average of 11.6 points over the trial, the average mood of men got slightly worse.

The researchers believe that the traditional way in which men and women deal with emotional distress could be behind the disparity.

“The mechanisms are highly speculative at this point, but stereotypically, women ruminate and men distract,” added Dr Briton.

“So for people that tend to be willing to confront or expose themselves or turn toward the difficult, mindfulness is made for improving that. For people who have been largely turning their attention away from the difficult, to suddenly bring all their attention to their difficulties can be somewhat counterproductive.

 “While facing one’s difficulties and feeling one’s emotions may seem to be universally beneficial, it does not take into account that there may be different cultural expectations for men and women around emotionality.”

Dr Brown said since conducting the study she has found the same gender divide in two other published studies, and will shortly publish new details on her findings.

Source: Frontiers in Psychology.

Dow Chemical Donates $1 Million to Trump, Asks Administration to Ignore Pesticide Study.

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The fact that C.E.O. Andrew Liveris is a close adviser to Donald Trump can’t hurt.

Donald Trump and Andrew Liveris, who apparently can’t get enough of each other.

Chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and malathion are a group of pesticides that are a big money-maker for Dow Chemical, with the company selling approximately 5 million pounds of chlorpyrifos in the U.S. each year, according to the Associated Press. Dow Chemical, however, has a small problem on its hands, and it’s not the fact that the pesticide was “originally derived from a nerve gas developed by Nazi Germany,” per the AP, though that’s certainly not great for marketing materials. In this case, it’s the fact that studies by federal scientists have found that chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and malathion are harmful to almost 1,800 “critically threatened or endangered species.” Historically, groups like the Environmental Protection Agency would want to avoid killing frogs, fish, birds, mammals, and plants, which is why the regulator and two others that it works with to enforce the Endangered Species Act are reportedly “close to issuing findings expected to result in new limits on how and where the highly toxic pesticides can be used,” the AP reports.

Luckily for Dow, the E.P.A. is now run by climate-change skeptic and general enemy of living things Scott Pruitt, who last month said he would reverse “an Obama-era effort to bar the use of Dow’s chlorpyrifos pesticide on food after recent peer-reviewed studies found that even tiny levels of exposure could hinder the development of children’s brains.” Plus, Dow Chemical C.E.O. Andrew Liveris is good buddies with President Donald Trump. So, you can see how the company, which the AP reports also spent $13.6 million on lobbying last year, might feel like it is in the clear.

According to the AP, lawyers representing Dow and two other companies that manufacture the pesticides in question (known as organophosphates) have sent letters to the heads of the E.P.A, the Department of Commerce, and the Fish and Wildlife Service, asking them to “set aside” the results of the studies, claiming that they are “fundamentally flawed.” Not surprisingly, the scientists hired by Dow “to produce a lengthy rebuttal to the government studies” have come up with diverging results.

In addition to Pruitt’s long history of, per the AP, aligning “himself in legal disputes with the interests of executives and corporations,” Dow has another reason to be hopeful the government will conveniently ignore any lingering concerns about killing off entire species: Andrew Liveris is a close adviser to Donald Trump who was literally standing next to the president in February when he signed an executive order “mandating the creation of task forces at federal agencies to roll back government regulations.”

Dow also donated $1 million to underwrite Trump’s inaugural festivities, the AP reports, but God help the person who dares to wonder aloud if the check was some sort of an attempt to curry favor with the administration. As Rachelle Schikorra, Dow’s director of public affairs, told the AP, any such suggestion is “completely off the mark.”

Source:http://www.vanityfair.com

Déjà vu Is a Neurological Phenomenon Scientists Claim.

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Have you ever experienced déjà vu? If so, you are among the 60-70% of the population who has. The majority of those who report déjà vu are between the ages 15 and 25. I’m a complete rationalist who believes that every phenomenon, no matter how strange or supernatural it appears, has a scientific reason behind it. Even so, I’ve met several people and walked into a few situations where, though I had never been there before or met the person before, I suddenly felt awash in a bizarre familiarity. This transcendental sensation can shake beliefs such as mine right to their very core.

Article Image

But I wasn’t ready to denounce science yet. And I’m glad. Because it turns out, there is a rational explanation. Though some radical notions have in the past been connected to this strange feeling, such as déjà vu being a momentarily aligning with a past life or another you in a parallel universe, or as my editor suggests—a glitch in the matrix, scientists now believe it has a neurological basis.

Unfortunately, the feeling is here one minute and gone the next, making it difficult to study. Even so, there are quite a few theories on what causes it. One traditional hypothesis, posited by psychiatrists, is mismatched brain signals. For a second it feels as though we are transported to a moment in the past and we mistake it for the present. This may be why it’s been associated with the idea of reincarnation.

Another theory is that déjà vu is our brain trying to piece together a situation on limited information. A third states that it is a misfiring in the parts of the brain that recall memory and decipher sensory input. Sensory information, rather than taking the proper channels, leaks out of the short-term memory and into the long-term one. In this way, current experiences seem to be connected to the past. Some studies even suggest that familiar geometric shapes give us a sense of knowing something about a place that is, in reality, totally unfamiliar to us.

Instead of a glitch in the matrix, déjà vu may just be a glitch in our memory.  

Since we are completely aware of everything that’s going on when we experience déjà vu, this suggests that every part of the brain need not participate for the sensation to take place. Psychologist Anne M. Cleary at Colorado State University, in a study in 2008, found that déjà vu followed patterns we associate with memory, specifically recognition memory. This is the kind that gets us to understand that we are confronting something that we’ve seen or experienced before. If you’ve ever recognized a landmark, a friend from across the room, or a song on the stereo, you’ve experienced recognition memory.

Familiarity-based recognition is associated with it. Here, we have that feeling of familiarity, but we can’t quite place where we’ve seen this person, place, or thing. For instance, you recognize someone across the street, but can’t remember their name or where you know them from. Prof. Cleary conducted several studies which found that déjà vu is a form of familiarity-based recognition. Her work suggests that our memory stores items in fragments. When there is a certain overlap between old and new experiences, we have strong feelings about the connection, which we interpret as déjà vu.

Recent studies looking at epileptic patients made impressive breakthroughs in our understanding of the phenomenon. Epileptics with certain intractable conditions require electrodes to be placed inside their brains in order to locate the source of their seizures. During this procedure, some neurologists have had patients experience déjà vu. They soon discovered that the phenomenon takes place in the medial temporal lobe, which is responsible for memory. The electrodes are usually placed within the rhinal cortex—the most important piece of which is the hippocampus, the structure responsible for long-term memory formation. French scientists have found that firing current into this cortex can trigger an episode of déjà vu.

Location of the amygdala and the hippocampus. 

The French study, published in the journal Clinical Neurophysiology,measured EEG wave patterns from patients with epilepsy who experienced déjà vu through electrical stimulation. The areas of the brain they examined included the amygdala, which is responsible for emotion and the hippocampus. Researchers found that electrical patterns, emanating from rhinal cortices and the amygdala or the hippocampus, caused déjà vu to occur. These neuroscientists believe that some sort of electrical phenomenon in the medial temporal lobe activates the memory in such a way that it causes déjà vu to occur.

Stranger still, scientists in the UK have actually found patients who experience “chronic déjà vu.” In this case, experts identified four senior citizens who encounter the feeling on a consistent basis. What is the impact of such a phenomenon? It made them feel as if they were clairvoyant. All four refused to go to the doctor, believing they already knew what the physician would say, and avoided watching the news, thinking they already knew the outcome. That’s because each time they took part in either activity that was the result they came to.

Each individual experienced some type of problem with the temporal lobe of their brain. The circuits in that area were in a sense stuck in the “on” position. It just goes to show that when we don’t know the reason for a phenomenon or sensation, our mind assigns a meaning to it. But that isn’t necessarily the correct one. And even though knowing the neurological basis of déjà vu may evaporate the supernatural awe surrounding it, understanding the phenomenon better puts a scientific mind, like mine, at ease.

source:http://bigthink.com

Upcoming solar flares could wreak havoc on Earth

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A giant fissure has opened across the sun and is spewing rapid solar winds toward our planet.

A combination of three images of the sun at different temperatures. The dark areas are the coronal holes, places where very little radiation is emitted, yet are the main source of solar wind particles.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory got wind of the massive hole Friday morning.

This coronal hole is a vast region where the sun’s magnetic field tears apart, allowing solar wind to escape.

 Super-charged solar winds flowing from the sun’s atmosphere are expected to reach Earth on April 23 or 24.

According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this could whip up a “moderately strong” geomagnetic storm.

These kinds of storms are behind the beautiful natural phenomenon the Northern Lights.

But a storm of this magnitude could have an effect on power grids and navigation systems across the Earth’s surface.

G2 storms affect plane and military radio systems, spacecraft operations, and could trigger voltage alarms or cause equipment damage in power systems.

Modal Trigger
Solar flares being flung from the sun’s atmosphere earlier this month

Scientists are growing increasingly concerned over the effect a solar explosion, flare or storm could have on humanity.

Our growing dependence on technology puts humans at a greater risk if power grids, planes and satellites stop working.

US President Barack Obama was forced to issue a chilling warning to the nation in preparation for devastating space storms earlier this year.

He said: “Extreme space weather events — those that could significantly degrade critical infrastructure — could disable large portions of the electrical power grid, resulting in cascading failures that would affect key services such as water supply, health care, and transportation.

“Space weather has the potential to simultaneously affect and disrupt health and safety across entire continents.”

Source: http://nypost.com

Volvo will launch its first all-electric car in 2019 to take on Tesla – here’s everything we know.

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Volvo is looking to China for the future of its electric cars.

The carmaker said Wednesday that it plans to produce its first fully electric car in China and will export it around the world.

The Swedish automaker, which is owned by the Chinese company Geely, is making a big bet on electric vehicles.

In 2015, Volvo launched its XC90, which was its first vehicle with a hybrid powertrain. And in April 2016, the company vowed that it would sell one million electrified cars by 2025.

Volvo’s first fully electric car is slated to go into production in 2019. Here’s everything we know about the car so far.

Read more. URL:http://www.businessinsider.in/Volvo-will-launch-its-first-all-electric-car-in-2019-to-take-on-Tesla-heres-everything-we-know/articleshow/58270671.cms