I have always said that the downfall of our society – at least from a nutritional point of view – is when fast food restaurants (feeding troughs, really) instituted the “free refill” policy on soda. Unofficially, of course, you could cite the moment in time when this policy was begun and probably correlate it with the rise of obesity.

With the increase in cancer, diabetes, and other diseases that destroy the quality of life of our bodies, is it any wonder that diet would be the main cause in this? Other countries, it has been shown, do not have the same problems we have and most of it extends from the observation that they eat differently than we do here.

Everything is mixed, processed, over-flavored and designed to be cheap and non-sustainable. Why wouldn’t our bodies reflect this? After all, you are what you eat.

Let’s take a look at this problem under a microscope; let’s consider the culprit of soda and its abundance. I remember as a kid we used to drink soda every now and then but it was usually for a special occasion. Of course, the association of having a good time is what the marketing departments seized upon and now its the opposite – we are drinking soda to have a good time.

But the honeymoon is over. Do you realize what the 2nd ingredient is in, say, Coca-Cola? High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). It’s water, then HFCS.

Studies are starting to show the adverse effects of HFCS. For example, in 2007 an article cited research that the use of HFCS may contribute to the development of diabetes in children.

In the current study, Chi-Tang Ho, Ph.D., conducted chemical tests among 11 different carbonated soft drinks containing HFCS. He found “astonishingly high” levels of reactive carbonyls in those beverages.

Carbonyls are undesirable and highly-reactive compounds associated with “unbound” fructose and glucose molecules are believed to cause tissue damage, said Ho, a professor of food science at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

By contrast, reactive carbonyls are not present in table sugar, whose fructose and glucose components are “bound” and chemically stable, the researcher noted.

Reactive carbonyls also are elevated in the blood of individuals with diabetes and linked to the complications of that disease. Based on the study data, Ho estimates that a single can of soda contains about five times the concentration of reactive carbonyls than the concentration found in the blood of an adult person with diabetes.

It would seem that a consideration, for the rest of the public which does not have diabetes, would be to avoid artificial sweetners of all kinds. I have already brought up the issue of aspartame and its dangers – not just for diabetics but for all who consume aspartame – and HFCS is just another industrial product we need to avoid. I would go as far to say that perhaps regular sugar (cane sugar) could be used by diabetics as long as its fructose and glucose components are bound. In other words, if it is natural, it should be fine for limited use.

There is another consideration: a diet deficient in certain minerals will also contribute to complications of diabetes. Read the following excerpt which discusses the misconception of HFCS as a natural and non-harmful product:

But there’s another reason to avoid HFCS. Consumers may think that because it contains fructose–which they associate with fruit, which is a natural food–that it is healthier than sugar. A team of investigators at the USDA, led by Dr. Meira Field, has discovered that this just ain’t so.

Sucrose is composed of glucose and fructose. When sugar is given to rats in high amounts, the rats develop multiple health problems, especially when the rats were deficient in certain nutrients, such as copper. The researchers wanted to know whether it was the fructose or the glucose moiety that was causing the problems. So they repeated their studies with two groups of rats, one given high amounts of glucose and one given high amounts of fructose. The glucose group was unaffected but the fructose group had disastrous results. The male rats did not reach adulthood. They had anemia, high cholesterol and heart hypertrophy–that means that their hearts enlarged until they exploded. They also had delayed testicular development. Dr. Field explains that fructose in combination with copper deficiency in the growing animal interferes with collagen production. (Copper deficiency, by the way, is widespread in America.) In a nutshell, the little bodies of the rats just fell apart. The females were not so affected, but they were unable to produce live young.

“The medical profession thinks fructose is better for diabetics than sugar,” says Dr. Field, “but every cell in the body can metabolize glucose. However, all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic.”

HFCS contains more fructose than sugar and this fructose is more immediately available because it is not bound up in sucrose. Since the effects of fructose are most severe in the growing organism, we need to think carefully about what kind of sweeteners we give to our children. Fruit juices should be strictly avoided–they are very high in fructose–but so should anything with HFCS.

So, avoiding artificial sweetners, such as HFCS, is not merely enough if you are going to consume sugar. You need to also make sure you are getting the correct amount of certain minerals (copper) in order to properly absorb the sugars.

Fructose occurs naturally in fruits and the article is right – people assume because it contains fructose it is a natural product. This is a fallacy, however. For starters, HFCS is artificially created in a complicated process. This process takes the raw material of corn (a genetically modified product, by the way – see the documentary “King Corn“), makes it into corn starch and by way of adding several enzymes and a distillation process finally arrives at the completed product of HFCS.

Discovered by Japanese scientists back in the 1970’s, HFCS was preferred as a sweetner since the importation of sugar became more expensive. Even though the production of HFCS is laborious and expensive, the tariffs on cane sugar may it a more cost effective ingredient that benefits corn production and producers of food products like Coca Cola and Pepsi.

If you are against genetically modified foods then you need to avoid HFCS. If you are against industrial production of food and do not trust it, then you need to avoid HFCS. If you are a diabetic, or perhaps quickly on your way to becoming one, then you need to avoid HFCS. If you are obese, you need to avoid HFCS.

Pretty much everyone needs to avoid this product and the fact that it is widely available means that this poison is being sold to the world at a drastic cost. The world would be better off without it.

You would be surprised at the list of products this artificial sweetner is in. You would also be surprised to learn how it was approved for use in our food supply.

You will probably be surprised most of all to learn about the extensive damage this product does to your body.

George Noory built a show around the topic on Coast to Coast Am. Millions of listeners were exposed to the dangers of this artificial sweetener. Yet, there is a large movement of individuals who have been aware of the dangers.

There are numerous websites out there dedicated to researching and informing people about the dangers of aspartame. Check out this one, too.

What is interesting about the approval process and the business of marketing aspartame is a familiar figure who stands behind the major impetus to obtaining its  approval: Donald Rumsfeld. Frankly, I think Rumsfeld is one of the most evil men alive – but that would be to give him too much credit. He just seems to be absent of a soul.

Read this article which seems to lay out a pretty good introduction to toxic additives, not just aspartame.

Don’t take my word for it though, watch this film to find out some more:

Then follow up with this:

It lit up the night sky. First responders were scrambled but there was much confusion as to the cause of the event. An investigation was demanded. Some described a massive explosion that erupted in the dark night without warning; the blast felt far away while some claimed to have seen a red fire ball making a fast approach towards the plant. Regardless, at 10:25pm on a Thursday night, August 28th to be exact, a tank at the Bayer Crop Science plant in Institute West Virginia exploded.

“The thing that blew up was the least dangerous of the stuff that’s in there,” Mike Dorsey said – chief of homeland security and emergency response for the state of West Virginia.

What else is in the tank, you may be asking. Frightening stuff, actually. At a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India back in 1984, thousands of people were killed due to the outbreak of a chemical known as methyl isocyanate, or MIC. The plant that exploded in West Virginia produces that same chemical – but luckily, that wasn’t the section of the plant that got destroyed. Instead, a pesticide known as methomyl was being produced in that part of the plant. Methomyl is used in the production of a more potent pesticide, Larvin, an insecticide thiodicarb to be exact. What does Larvin do? Well, it is designed to mess with the induction signals of the nervous systems of insects.

Meanwhile, in Germany, there is a pending lawsuit regarding a cover-up of the effects the product Larvin has over its environment. The damage, the suit claims, is wide-ranging and may be responsible for the drastic reduction in bee population in Europe. The company that is being sued? Bayer Crop Science and an arm of the US government that’s sole duty is to protect the US citizen and the environment, the Environmental Protection Agency.

Apparently, Bayer Crop Science conducted their own tests showing their product to have minimal side effects and the EPA rubber stamped its approval. Despite the fact that an incentive is in place for Bayer Crop Science to get the product out to protect its bottom line.

The reason why this is important is because bees are pollinators – their job is not only to supply food for their own colonies, but help spread the seeds of nature and its plant life around its environment. They are the natural stewards of plant life, and this has a drastic effect on our environment and more importantly, our agriculture.

In fact, this is a very strange series of events that could prove to be at best coincidence, and at worst synchronous. While conducting an interview and updating the listeners of Coast to Coast AM about the dwindling honey bee populations, host George Noory broke the news to researcher Linda Moulton Howe about the explosion at the plant – which she had only moments before identified the company involved in the German law suit (Bayer Crop Science).

That law suit was submitted August 13, 2008. The explosion was August 28th, 2008. If there is a pending law suit demanding the data be shown about the true effects of this pesticide – designed to interfere with the nervous system of insects – then the destruction of part of the plant would be an interesting correlation into the situation. Not to mention, the estimate is that the pesticide products for Bayer earn them about $1 billion dollars annually.

Obviously, more investigation is needed here, but this is an interesting story of which the effects truly span the globe.

Further Reading

Honey Bees Not Healthy in US or UK

NRDC Sues EPA for Honey Bee Lab Data

911 Operator Involvement in Blast at Plant

Where’d they go? Something else that needs a bit more research.

Gas prices are now coming down and there is a lawsuit out there pending concerning collusion and possible price gouging. The problem isn’t necessarily the fact that we are “addicted” to foreign oil, the problem is that we are living within a dangerous paradigm of control where those that control the flow of oil form an elite class at the top of the pyramid of all societies. That is, the part at the top right beneath the international banking cartels.

Yet, the spirit of innovation – even in today’s drastically dumbed down America – lives on. There are those who are pushing for innovation and are looking for alternatives. These individuals need to be supported and celebrated – and protected. Surely, there are forces that wish to preserve the current system of things and will stop at nothing to do so. That brings us to our first story – Stan Meyer.

Watch this documentary on Stan Meyer’s work.

Stan Meyer seems to be the main catalyst behind this.

Stan Meyer died suddenly in 1998 after sipping on a drink at a restaurant. Conspiracy theories abound and point to those interests who would benefit from his death and the suppression of his technological developments.

The fact is, Meyer was able to find an efficient way to harvest hydrogen from water. There are patents on his inventions, but since his death 10 years ago there seems to have been little movement in this regard. His brother continues his work but it isn’t the same. You can download his notes via a .zip file here.

Then there is this – a couple of interesting break throughs from one man: John Kanzius.

I believe diabetes type 2 is diet induced. I believe that it is something that CAN be changed and cured for good.

I am looking into the Tree of Life program (their website needs work!) but here is a trailer for a video that they helped produce called “Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days”. This is a way to defeat diabetes.

I am type 2 diabetic. Let me say that again, I am type 2 diabetic. I am saying that not to affirm the identity to myself, but rather to acknowledge that something is wrong and that I have to change it. I believe that I arrived here as the result of my choices which I made in life. I believe my poor eating habits are the sole reason for the way my body is failing to metabolize food.

You are what you eat. Plain, simple. Truth is like that – direct. The emotion we bring to it, the attachment, is the obstacle in getting over it. We make it hard on ourselves to overcome the difficulties in our life only because we attach ourselves to the identity we construct. We invest in our edifaces, we are like Pygmalion always falling in love with our creation. We obsess over our mask and believe it to be our real self.

Such is the challenge when confronted with a disease like type 2 diabetes. People will feel sorry for you and try to comfort you and you will also give in to that and believe it to. It’s not your fault, just something happened to you which you had no control over. Nothing, in actuality, is further from the truth. You did have control and in fact, you lost it because you chose to give it up.

Naked, cold yet true. That’s Truth. So, why am I blathering on? Because if I am going to change, I must take it upon myself to make the change. I must get serious and admit there is something wrong and not blindly turn away and roll over. You need to head straight towards the wreck; you need to walk directly into that storm. You will emerge on the other side, but you first must make that step towards the danger.

Here is where it gets deep: such an act defies your instincts. Such an act feels unnatural. But when you consider that the creation you have tied your identity to wants to survive – in fact, it is fighting to stay alive and exert its dominance over you – you realize that you aren’t the one that faces obliteration, but rather the old self. The self, the creation, that needs change, that has overstepped its bounds and is now destroying your life – the very thing you created in your lab but were too lazy to protect yourself from – now has to be shut down and destroyed so you can get back to what you once were.

So, there is hope. For type 2 diabetics the only thing keeping you from a cure is your excuses. It is simply your old self fighting to stay alive and keep you in the current coma you are in. If you can realize it, stand up and dare to fight back you can and will beat it. There is a path. There is a way. There is hope: but it is not easy. And the price to pay is great for you will be killing your current self to recover what you want to be, what you promised yourself you would be.

The path is being forged. All you must do is dare to walk it. In terms of type 2, that means cutting out your sugar intake, cutting out your ingestion of animal-based products and instead turning towards plant based diet selections. You must exercise more – not become a gym rat or anything, just exercise.

Now that we have crossed this bridge and pointed the finger toward the mirror, lets see hope. I will be updating this blog in order to give myself and anyone else out there some inspiration, hope, and information.

Wanna look like Leonidas? Well, here is your chance. Men’s Health put this article together detailing the workout to get the Spartans looking like, well, Spartans. Without the help of a healot or the experience of the egoge, of course.

This is of great interest to me. The level of existence as it is, as a vibration of energy is both reflective of ancient mystical thought and modern science. The two seem to merge and are in agreement – which is a way of getting double confirmation.

The possibilities beyond this revelation are boundless. As we search for new energy sources, we have to realize that all things consist of energy and vibration – although the frequencies are at different rates.

These three short films demonstrate the Chakra system, or the Human Energy Field (HEF). One modern school which stresses this doctrine is the Barbara Brennan School of Healing.

Part I

Part II

Part III