odds 'n' ends

SUNSHINE, SAD & VITAMIN D

My recent post on Solar Breathing and SAD actually received some hits, so I'm inspired to write more about things I've found that have helped me 'get the victory' over this disorder. 

VITAMIN D - 'tablet sunshine' brings in that extra sunshine, and is also necessary to protect our aging bones from osteoporosis.  Vitamin D3 from cholacalciferol is the variety needed by post-menospausal women.  Dr. Donald Yance cautions us to take Vitamin D only during winter months.  I've found that 400 IU daily is quite enough, when taken along with fish oils and calcium - my personal recipe for post-menopausal verve.

Here is more from Donald Yance, an alternative health care cancer specialist, on the perks of Vitamin D:

"Vitamin D helps to prevent colon and breast cancers.  It is theorized that vitamin D binds iwth calcium and reduces the turnover rate of the cells that line the colon.  Cells that don't turn over are very resistant to carcinogens. 

"Vitamin D has an inhibitory effect of episomes, submicroscopic circular DNA molecules that carry amplified oncogenes as well as amplified drug-resistant genes.  Vitamin D3 is reported to inhibit the incorporation of of messages at chromosomal sites, thereby providing a strategy that might make some episomes more susceptible to elimination.

"Vitamin D may have the ability to inhibit the proliferative activity of hormones, such as estrogen in breast cancer, and has been shown to suppress breast and prostate cancer growth.  Sunlight exposure, which leads to an increased level of vitamin D, correlates with a a reduced   risk of breast cancer.  I usually recommend small amounts of vitamin D (400 to 1000 IU) for those people without sunlight exposure, especially during the winter.  I also occasionally recommend cod liver oil during winter months as a source of Vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids.  Vitamin D deficiency is very common in the elderly and in people who live in parts of the world with little sunlight; it is also one of the major contributing factors to osteoporosis."  He also recommends it for prostate cancer.

Yance's book, 'Herbal Medicine Healing and Cancer' can be purchased here.

social security rant

This is my own personal social security quiz:

1) Did you your parents pay your way through college?

2) Have your parents ever bought you a new car?

3) Do your relatives give you stocks for your birthday, Christmas or Chanukkah?

If you answered 'no' to any of these questions, then the proposed social security reform is not going to benefit you.  You are going to give up money you could have relied on in your old age, to line the pockets of others who already have more than you do. 

Don't let them take your old age social security away from you. 
I recall a story my father told about his early days in this country, back around 1920, when he was 21 years old.  We no longer remember how it was when the elderly poor lived this way in our country.  He was new to the US, and amazed to find two elderly ladies, widows, a mother (age: 80's) and daughter (age: 60's) who were freezing to death in a shed.  He gave them some money, and brought them some firewood, and then he shipped out.  It bothered him his whole life that two old women could be left to freeze to death like that.

Social security is the government's pledge that this isn't going to happen.  Those who will be easily ripped off, or unable to invest wisely, or who have nothing to fall back on if 'fail-safe' investments in fact fail (think Enron), are best protected by the government. 

Letting the government take the full responsibility for social security is known to have worked; let's not change that part of it.  Those who know what they're doing with investments probably would make out slightly better if they can take their 'social security' and invest it, but what about the rest?  Social security isn't for the rich, or for those who already 'have.'  It's for the people who don't. 

Do we really want what we're creating at present?  A society of the very rich and the very poor?  I don't think we really do, but we don't seem to understand how we are, in fact, creating just that. This proposed social security reform is, in my opinion, another nail in the coffin of the American way of life, and to democracy.  What's the use to bringing democracy to Iraq, if we aren't protecting it here?

Rant over, for now.