The Law of Assumption

October 26, 2013 | By WakingTimes | 1 Reply

Beverly Blanchard, Contributor
Waking Times

Although there has been a significant amount of emphasis on the Law of Attraction, I believe the Law of Assumption is really the cornerstone in creating your reality. Under the Law of Assumption, the world that you see depends not so much as what is there but the assumptions you make when you look at it. Your assumptions are that which you believe, feel, think and consent to.

All of your experiences are determined by your assumptions and it is how you are using your imagination that is driving these assumptions to create your state of being. For an assumption will build of bridge of incidents that lead inevitably to the fulfillment of your image of your conscious or unconscious desires.

For many of us our thoughts are mechanical and because we are asleep to the power of our imagination, we have a tendency of negating everything and believing that everything outside of ourselves is fact. Our continual negative thinking causes downward emotions and these pessimistic emotions keep us locked into unwanted experiences. Here is a simplistic example. If you believe that people have no manners and are rude, you will usually encounter these types of people throughout the day to validate your assumptions. Someone will step in front of you in line. Someone will not hold the door for you. Someone will bump you on the sidewalk and look at you as if you did something wrong.

When we awaken to the power of our imagination, we can direct our assumptions along a more positive path and in doing so move our emotions in an upward direction. When your emotions are flowing positively, you will discover that your world changes to match your concept of yourself. It does so because the mind arranges an image of all you believe and consent to as true.

In order to work constructively with the Law of Assumption, you have to understand the difference between how the spiritual and physical world work. In the physical or outer world, we have a tendency of saying, ‘this is reality’ or ‘this is how it is’. We know the world through our mental senses and we have a tendency of having a fixed view of it. This objective view will always reflect back to you your inner state of being.

It is through the spiritual level or inner world that you have transforming power. Through the conscious use of your imagination, you can subjectively appropriate your objective reality. In other words, your assumptions places you psychologically where you are not physically and when the inner being knows that state of being it will project it into your reality.

So how do you work with the Law of Assumption? You first have to have a desire or aim in life. Once you have determined what it is you want; you need to go within and clothe your desire in your imagination. Give it all the feelings of reality and play with your imagination until you capture the emotional state of being.

Throughout the day, check in with your status. Ask yourself: Where am I psychologically? Am I riding the desired state of being or am I viewing my world in the negative? Am I keeping the tense? By this I mean, how are you using the words, ‘I am’? Are you in the present moment or are you saying, ‘I will be…” or ‘I am going to…’? Bring yourself constantly back to the moment and allow yourself to appropriate the feelings of the state desired. Do it often. You have the power to rearrange your mind therefore changing your reality. Begin it now.

This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.

The Hawaiian Huna Philosophy

A long time ago, Hawaii was a mystical and magical place. There were shamans called kahunas. These individuals experienced ultimate reality, in which they realized several critical aspects of reality that were later taught to others. In the early 20th century, with the rise of New Thought, there was an individual by the name of Max Long who linked the ancient kahunas to abstract and mystical metaphysics he was contemplating upon. This individual believed the key to Huna is the concept of the ‘ Three Selves’, meaning the unconscious, conscious, and superconscious, which he called the unihipili, the uhane and the aumakua.  Also, the word Huna is a Hawaiian word meaning “secret,” but it also refers to the esoteric wisdom of Polynesia. Below you will see some of this esoteric wisdom that has survived the ages.

The seven huna principles are as follows:

IKE — the world is what you think it is
KALA — there are no limits
MAKIA — energy flows where attention goes
MANA WA — now is the moment of power
ALOHA — to love is to be happy with
MANA — all power comes from within
PONO — effectiveness is the measure of truth

I’d like to go a little deeper into each of these in order to exemplify how powerful these realizations are in the ability to influence consciousness, in all its forms, in a positive way.

IKE — the world is what you think it is

This principle is essentially saying that our consciousness creates our reality. Our perception of reality is subjective and does not necessarily reflect the true objective reality, if such a reality should even exist. If someone thinks the world is full of deception, evil, and hatred, they will only focus their awareness on such matters and become completely blind to anything otherwise that would contradict this perception. Each one of us has the inherent power to transform our reality in any way we see fit. This power has the ability to transform not only one’s self, but all those around them.

KALA — there are no limits

In an infinite reality, there is no beginning or end of anything, which signifies the limitless nature of all that is. Anything is possible and self-growth is likewise infinite. There is always a process of be-ing and become-ing. With no limits, anything that is infinitely possible, can happen, is happening, and will happen, in its infinite forms. This is a concept that is simply too magnificent to be able to comprehend by a human brain.

MAKIA — energy flows where attention goes

Where someone focuses their attention, that is where an directed energy stream will go. This is how the healing method of reiki works and how the method of prayer works as well. When someone directs their thoughts towards a particular form of sentient energy, such as a loved one, this additional energy will be either in a positive form or a negative form. Depending whether the thought-forms are malevolent or benevolent, the end-result will be mimicked. Sending positive energy and healing hope will have a beneficial effect. If the contrary is occurring, the opposite will result. This can be magnified to show its effects on global consciousness. If positive thoughts are sent into the global consciousness, then there will be less animosity, hatred, anger, and other malevolent emotions. This was demonstrated to be a reality in the 1987 Harmonic Convergence.

MANA WA — now is the moment of power

The power of ‘now’ is monumental. Existing and living the present moment does away with the stress of thinking about ‘what-if’ scenarios or reliving painful memories in an endless loop. All that is, is, and always will be as such. There will be complete inner peace when someone lives in the ‘now’ moment.

ALOHA — to love is to be happy with

Love is such a powerful state of consciousness. When love is experienced, it is a feeling that requires something to be happy about. It can be a physical manifestation of energy such as a person, tree, etc. or it may be completely subtle and nonphysical such as the love for existence. This requirement of having something else be a part of the love equation, demonstrates the interconnectedness with all that is, in all its varying frequencies and energy forms.

MANA — all power comes from within

The individual is the greatest power plant that exists. The mind is more powerful than it is often given credit for. With the power to create, destroy, restore, shift, and change, anything is truly possible for a person to do. Realizing the inner power that each individual has will empower that person to not only completely control their being, but will give one’s self the opportunity to share this power with others and create mutually beneficial exchange relationships.

PONO — effectiveness is the measure of truth 
How effective something is in creating a positive and beneficial shift or change in someone or something is a good indicator of the genuine nature of something. It will give a better reflection between truth and falsehood, or rather, between truth and the ignorance of truth.

The seven Huna principles are a great introduction to the power of consciousness and should be able to transform one’s daily life into something far more empowering and positive, on many levels. There is such tremendous potential for each individual to make a difference not only in their own lives, but in the lives of each person on the planet. The power is all within you. Express it, with love.

Huge Contradictions in ‘Scientific’ Thinking Revealed: Theory of Evolution in No Way Explains Origins of Life

October 24, 2013 | By WakingTimes | 7 Replies

Mike Adams, Natural News
Waking Times

Ask any scientist where life on our planet came from, and they’ll usually give you a one-word answer: “Evolution.” Immediately thereafter, they will usually give you a condescending look that also implies you’re an idiot for not knowing this “scientific fact” that everyone else has accepted as true.

It turns out, however, that the scientist is suffering from a delusion. Evolution doesn’t even encompass origins of life. Rather, evolution (i.e. “natural selection”) explains a process by which species undergo a process of adaptation, fitness and reproduction in response to environmental, behavioral and sexual influences. No rational person can deny that natural selection is ever-present and happening right now across bacteria, plants, animals and even humans, yet natural selection can only function on pre-existing life forms. It does not give rise to non-existent life.

Darwin, in other words, did not study the “reproduction of rocks” because there is no such thing. He studied animals which were already alive.

Thus, the “Theory of Evolution” utterly fails to address the ORIGIN of where the first life forms came from. How did natural selection have anything to work on in the first place? You can’t “evolve” life forms from dead rocks, after all… unless the evolutionists are now embracing the theory of spontaneous resurrection of dead objects into living organisms.

So the question remains: Where did life ORIGINATE?

Evolutionists prefer to skip over that all-important question. So let us pick up their slack and explore this subject with honest skepticism.

Evolution as a theory of the origin of life is a FAITH, not science

According to scientists, you can never argue with scientists because they uniquely have a monopoly on all knowledge. Their beliefs can never be questioned because they are beyond any need to be validated. “Scientific truth” is true because they say it is, and the faith-based belief that evolution explains the origins of life cannot be questioned either.

Yet question it we will! So let’s see how this goes: The entire cosmos starts out as an unimaginably dense point that explodes in an event cosmologists call the Big Bang. All the physical matter we know today has its origins in that event, yet, importantly, there was no life in the Big Bang. No biological organism could have possibly survived Inflation, for starters. And before Inflation, the density of matter would have crushed anything resembling biological life.

According to physicists, the Big Bang itself followed no pre-existing laws of the cosmos. In fact, all physical laws that we know of — gravity, electromagnetism, etc. — came out of the Big Bang. Even the very fabric of reality was created by it (space and time).

The Big Bang is the faith-based miracle of modern science. “Give me one miracle,” they’re fond of saying, “and we can explain everything that follows.”

Except the miracle of the Big Bang itself goes entirely unexplained. How could everything suddenly come from nothing? How could an entire universe come into existence without a cause? These questions are routinely ignored. Instead, we are told that we should believe in the Big Bang as a matter of faith and trust that it is the only exception to the laws of the universe. This is, of course, a matter of faith, not fact.

And what about the origins of life in all this? Today, supposedly 13.8 billion years later, we see life all around us. Logically, somewhere between the Big Bang — where no life existed — and today, life must have appeared.

But how?

Scientists believe in magic

Again, if you ask most scientists about the origins of life, they will blindly and dutifully answer “evolution!” Yet without life already existing, there is nothing to evolve. So where did LIFE come from?

Ultimately, the answer given by scientists is that life spontaneously sprang from lifelessness. Seriously, that’s their real answer. They have more technical-sounding names for it, and there are hundreds of books written on various theories that might explain it, but ultimately, scientists believe in magic. Because “magic” is the only way you can really explain life rising from lifelessness.

So evolution really doesn’t explain the origins of life after all. Magic does. Life arose from lifelessness in exactly the same way the Big Bang suddenly happened without cause: it’s all done by magic! (I guess that makes two miracles, not one, but who’s counting?)

All of a sudden, the idea of a Creator who seeded the Big Bang or seeded the universe with life seems a lot less whacky than the “magical” explanations of many conventional scientists. It is far more feasible that our universe was created by an omniscient, highly-advanced consciousness than it somehow springing into existence for no reason whatsoever.

Atheism, soullessness and permanent death

Conventional scientists, of course, will go through tremendous contortions to try to remove any idea of a designer, engineer or Creator from their worldview. That’s because nearly all of them are devout atheists who also disavow any belief in consciousness, free will, the soul, God or spirituality. According to their own explanations, they themselves are mindless biological robots suffering from the mere delusion of mind created as a kind of artificial projection of mechanistic biological brain function.

See my mini-documentary “The God Within” for a more detailed exploration of this:

The twisted philosophy of many scientists also raises bizarre ethical lapses, such as their belief that killing a lab rat, or a dog, or even another human being is of no ethical consequence since all those creatures are not actually “alive” in any real way. This is why drug companies, vaccine manufacturers and science in general feels no remorse for conducting deadly experiments on children, blacks, prisoners or minorities.

The worst trait of conventional scientists is not merely that they are wildly self-deluded into believing they have no real consciousness; it’s actually the fact that they are simultaneously wildly arrogant, even combative about forcing their twisted beliefs onto others.

Their faith-based beliefs are always described as “facts” while they proclaim other people’s beliefs are “delusions.” You cannot argue with any group of people who are wholly convinced their beliefs are facts because any critical thinking you might invoke is automatically and routinely rejected as a matter of irrational defense.

The vaccine faith test

As an example of this, ask any doctor or pharmacist this question: “Is there such thing as an unsafe vaccine?”

The answer you will be told is a condescending “No!” In the faith-based beliefs of the scientific status quo, no vaccine can ever be harmful by definition. Vaccines are beyond questioning in their belief system, and so the very question of asking if a vaccine could possibly be anything less than 100% safe doesn’t compute. It contradicts their faith, in other words.

It’s like asking a devout Christian whether there might be no God. The question is so contradictory to their belief system that it cannot be processed.

You can test this further by asking a vaccine-pushing doctor, “Is there anything that could be added to a vaccine that would make it unsafe?”

After careful thought, an honest doctor might answer, “Well, sure, there are all sorts of toxins that could be added to a vaccine that would make it unsafe.”

Ask them to name some examples. Sooner or later, they should stumble onto the self-evident answer of “mercury,” a deadly neurotoxin which remains present in many modern vaccines.

Ask the doctor, “Has any safe level of mercury ever been established for injection into a child?”

The answer, of course, is no. Logically, no vaccine containing mercury can be considered “safe” regardless of the level of mercury it contains. Thus, by merely asking a few direct questions, you can easily get an honest doctor to shatter their own false belief about vaccines — a belief based on the faith-driven delusion that there is no such thing as an unsafe vaccine (no matter what it contains).

If, at any point in this questioning process, you get stonewalled by this person, recognize they are abandoning reason and reverting to their faith in “Scientism.” Scientism is a system of belief in which all creations of pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies and chemical companies are automatically assumed to hold God-like status. They are beyond questioning. They are supreme. They can never be questioned or even validated. In fact, no validated is required nor even desired. Who needs to validate “facts” anyway? Everyone already knows they are true, right?

All drugs are assumed to be safe and effective unless proven otherwise. This is why doctors warn patients that their dietary supplements are “interfering with their medications” and not the other way around. The drugs are assumed to have originated from a higher order, as if they emanate from a place of sacred, divine status: Big Pharma!

Many scientists are incapable of recognizing their own logical fallacies

Many scientists, sadly, do not grasp the chasms in their own belief systems. They are incapable of realizing that many of their own beliefs are based in a system of faith rather than a system of rational thought.

When scientists talk about evolution, they do so from an all-encompassing arrogance that assumes they are correct by default. Anyone daring to debate with them must prove they are wrong, yet they themselves have no obligation to prove they are right. The faith of Scientism requires no proof, only faith. It is assumed correct as a key principle of the religion of Scientism.

This is not unusual in religions. Christianity, for example, assumes God exists and does not need to “prove” it. His existence is accepted as a matter of faith. This is neither right nor wrong; it is characteristic of a belief system that science claims to reject. Yet science follows the exact same pattern.

Even the theory of natural selection based on purely mechanistic genetic inheritance contains enormous gaps in logic and is therefore a matter of faith. For starters, there isn’t enough data storage in the human genome to fully describe the physical and behavioral inheritance of a human being. The massive failure of the Human Genome Project also comes to mind: Here’s a project that promised to solve the riddle of the origins of nearly all disease. Once the human genome was fully decoded, disease would be eliminated from humankind, we were all promised.

These promises are now little more than laughable examples of delusional thinking from a failed Scientism project that mostly yielded bankrupt biotech companies rather than miracle cures.

Most scientists believe all people are mindless robots

Another glaring contradiction among many scientists is their comedic belief that everyone else is a mindless biological robot except themselves!Yes, they alone have intelligent thought based on free will, inspiration and creativity. We should read their books alone, as their books came from original thoughts powered by unique minds.

Yet this very belief contradicts their entire view of everyone else. All “minds” are illusions, they claim, and there is no such thing as consciousness. If you believe what they say, then all the books written by Dawkins, Hawking or other devout Scientism worshippers are, according to their own claims, worthless drivel produced via an “automatic writing” process powered by mindless, soulless chemical reactions housed in a mechanistic mass of neurons floating in a skull. Their books, therefore, utterly lack all meaning and serve no purpose. The words they contain are merely “knee-jerk writings” from humanoid automatons.

How can consciousness have evolved if it serves no purpose?

And there’s another huge contradiction in the scientific community. Most conventional scientists claim that consciousness is an illusion which somehow arose out of natural selection so that individual members of a species could operate under the illusion of free will. Yet, at the same time, they claim this false “mind” has no actual impact on the real world because it is, by definition, an illusion.

So how can an illusory phenomenon drive natural selection and evolution if it has no impact on the real world?

This is a stinging contradiction demonstrating the false beliefs of the materialists (i.e. mainstream scientists). Given enough time and effort, I could name a hundred more obvious contradictions they shamelessly promote as “facts.”

In truth, many scientific “facts” all boil down to “beliefs.”

Today’s twisted “science” is just another kind of religion

Why am I covering all this here on Natural News? Because if we are to move forward as a civilization, we must transcend the silly belief that anything pursued under the flag of modern-day “science” is automatically and factually superior (perhaps even divine) to all other forms of understanding.

Any system of thought which cannot tolerate questions or challenges to its beliefs is no science at all.

For your amusement and explorations, some useful questions you can ask Scientism followers to quickly exposed their false beliefs include:

• Is there such thing as an unsafe vaccine? Or are all vaccines automatically safe by definition?
• Do you beat your dog? If animals have no souls and no consciousness, then do you agree it is of no ethical consequence to torture dolphins and elephants? What about primates? Cats? Neighbors?
• If free will does not exist, then no one can be held responsible for their actions. All actions are, by definition, “automatic” and of no fault of the person because there cannot be any “choice” in an unconscious brain. If you believe this, then do you also support freeing all murderers and rapists from prison because they are not responsible for their actions? What purpose does punishment serve if violent criminals have no “choice” because they have no free will?
• If the human genome doesn’t contain enough information to describe a complete human form, then how is inheritance purely mechanistic?
• If consciousness is an illusion, by what mechanism does the brain create this illusion? And for what purpose? What evolutionary advantage could this serve if the “illusion of consciousness” cannot have any “real” impact on behavior? By definition, natural selection should de-emphasize useless brain functions. So how did consciousness survive for so long?
• If natural selection can only function on pre-existing life forms, where did the first life come from? How did it arise? (Magic?)
• What caused the Big Bang? If nothing caused it, how do you explain a universe governed by “laws” which, itself, sprang into existence by not following laws?
• If the laws of the universe came into existence during the Big Bang, and if other parallel universes might have different constants governing variations of the physical laws we know and understand, how does our universe “remember” its selected laws? Can physical constants change? Can the speed of light change? Does it vary in a repeatable pattern?

… and so on. With questions like these, it is a simple matter to expose conventional Scientism believers as incompetent thinkers.

It’s time to dethrone the High Priests of Scientism

If we are to move forward as a civilization we must dethrone the high priests of Scientism and get back to a process of real science where questions are welcomed, humility is restored, and discovery, not arrogance, reigns supreme.

This is the process I embrace here at Natural News, and it is why millions of readers across the world now turn to Natural News instead of arrogant science publications like Scientific American, a faith-based Scientism magazine that now functions as little more than a corporate sellout propaganda “Bible” for believers. Any publication that says people should not know what’s in their food (GMO labeling) is, of course, not engaged in real science because real science is the pursuit of knowledge, not the burying of facts for corporate interests. No legitimate science would want the public to be denied knowledge.

Bottom line? Modern-day “science” is riddled with enormous contradictions and knowledge gaps. The most devout followers of this “science” define themselves as meaningless, mindless biological robots living out purposeless lives. They all believe that murder, rape and even child molestation have no ethical considerations whatsoever because no one is responsible for their own actions due to free will being “an illusion” as they explain it. Jerry Sandusky is ethically equivalent to Mother Theresa, according to the soulless beliefs of modern-day science.

These Scientism followers will never acknowledge any gaps in their own knowledge, as they believe they are uniquely gifted with a divine, irrefutable truth which cannot be questioned and need never be validated. No evidence is required to support their core faiths such as “mercury in dental fillings is harmless” or “chemotherapy saves lives.” All pronouncements of drug companies, biotech firms and chemical companies are automatically accepted as The Word of God in that they are all-knowing, all-powerful and never to be questioned.

To succeed as a civilization, we must collectively recognize the fallibility of this faith-based system of false belief and return to a process of true discovery that transcends the failures of modern-day science.

And don’t even get me started on the rise of killer robots and artificial intelligence. That’s another case where the arrogance and delusional thinking of modern-day science may quite literally result in the apocalyptic, permanent destruction of humankind.

For further reading for those who dare to question the false beliefs of Scientism

Essential knowledge for all:

Science Set Free: 10 New Paths to Discovery by Rupert Sheldrake

Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities by Dean Radin

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

About the Author

Mike Adams (aka the “Health Ranger“) is the founding editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet’s No. 1 natural health news website, now reaching 7 million unique readers a month.

With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software. Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com, a massive research resource now featuring over 10 million scientific studies.

In addition to being the co-star of the popular GAIAM TV series called Secrets to Health, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories.

In 2013, Adams created the Natural News Forensic Food Laboratory, a research lab that analyzes common foods and supplements, reporting the results to the public. He is well known for his incredibly popular consumer activism video blowing the lid on fake blueberries used throughout the food supply. He has also exposed “strange fibers” found in Chicken McNuggets, fake academic credentials of so-called health “gurus,” dangerous “detox” products imported as battery acid and sold for oral consumption, fake acai berry scams, the California raw milk raids, the vaccine research fraud revealed by industry whistleblowers and many other topics.

Adams has also helped defend the rights of home gardeners and protect the medical freedom rights of parents. Adams is widely recognized to have made a remarkable global impact on issues like GMOs, vaccines, nutrition therapies, human consciousness.

In addition to his activism, Adams is an accomplished musician who has released ten popular songs covering a variety of activism topics.

Click here to read a more detailed bio on Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, at HealthRanger.com.

9 principles of healthy eating - What Can We Learn From How Grandma and Grandpa Used To Eat?

October 25, 2013 | By WakingTimes | Reply

Image: Flickr – Pink Sherbert

Natasha Longo, Prevent Disease
Waking Times

Every successive generation seems to be getting sicker, with more illness and disability. This despite government claims that the science of diet has mostly improved from just 50 years ago. These claims are far from the reality the modern world and its population experiences. Our grandparents used to make their own butter, cook with lard, fry their foods, drink full cream milk and they still looked so healthy while living so heartily. How did they do it? For starters they ate less, but their food was also healthier. Today we cut carbs, remove fat, cook less, eat more, consume genetically modified, artificially sweetened, processed foods and spend most of our time sitting. See the difference?

The trend becomes unmistakable once fat intake increases for a population. Once that number passes 30%: countries with higher average fat intake have the longest life expectancies. Fat intake has been transformed in modern day to low fat or no fat, high sugar and processed carbohydrates.

Grandfather-of-12 John Golding, who runs a family farm outside Grafton in northern New South Wales, says food was scarce when he was growing up.

“We ate less for sure because the food had to go around a big family. There were seven or nine kids in every family so you didn’t eat much at all. There were no ‘seconds’,” he said.

“We didn’t overeat and you’d restrict your bread intake because otherwise you’d run out.

“It was all healthy food. We always had a huge vegetable garden so we had cauliflowers growing in the winter time.”

In Unhappy Meals, a piece for The New York Times Magazine, best-selling author Michael Pollan says we can all cut back.

Science Says Calorie Restriction Increases Life Span

“The scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. ‘Calorie restriction’ has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention,” he said.

“Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practices a principle they called ‘Hara Hachi Bu’: eat until you are 80 percent full.”

Organisms from yeast to rodents to humans all benefit from cutting calories. In less complex organisms, restricting calories can double or even triple lifespan. In studies, animals on calorie restriction diets die at an advanced age without any diseases normally related to aging. In contrast, among animals on a standard diet, the great majority (94 percent) develop and die of one or more chronic diseases such as cancer or heart disease.

According to the results of two previous studies, reducing calories activates the silenced information regulator genes, which prolongs cell life.

Processed Foods A Culprit

John says he and his wife Ollie, who does most of the cooking, rarely ate processed food.

“We didn’t have any packaged stuff at all,” he said. “When Dad bought this farm after the war, we’d milk two or three cows so you’d make your butter and custards.

“We were reared also on fried scones. We loved fried scones. Instead of baking the scones, we’d fry ‘em. They were beautiful just with butter.

In Six Rules For Eating Wisely, a piece for TIME magazine, Pollan says we shouldn’t eat anything our great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

“Imagine how baffled your ancestors would be in a modern supermarket … (most items) aren’t foods – quite – they’re food products,” he said.

“History suggests you might want to wait a few decades or so before adding such novelties to your diet, the substitution of margarine for butter being the classic case in point.

Their promise was that margarine would prevent disease. People around the globe questioned this advice, especially those who have valued butter for its life-sustaining properties for millennia. Today we know that butter is light years healthier than margarine ever could be.

“My mother used to predict ‘they’ would eventually discover that butter was better for you. She was right: the trans-fatty margarine is killing us. Eat food, not food products.”

John, 79, eats everything but grew up on staples of rice, rolled oats and potatoes.

“When mum was rearing the five of us while dad was at the war she fed us on a lot of rice because that was cheap. I loved boiled rice with a bit of sugar on it, but now I don’t have sugar,” he said.

Pollan says the western diet has shifted radically from whole to refined foods, complex to simple carbohydrates, leaves to seeds and from food culture to food science.

Food Culture Is Not What It Used To Be 

Governments here and abroad have been cautioning the public for decades on the dangers of high fat diets. Their claims based on “their science” concluded that it was best to avoid fat because of its extra calories – and saturated fats raise the risk of heart disease. This low-fat mantra has been questioned for years by clinicians and nutritional scientists – not least because it has failed to halt the obesity epidemic. The fact is, high-fat diets lower blood sugar, improve blood lipids, and reduce obesity.

“The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition,” he said.

“Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating.

“You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat.”

Our grandparents also didn’t spend all day stuck at a desk or hours at night on the couch. They performed manual jobs and rode their horses everywhere at full gallop.

Food intolerances were unheard of back then and no-one, least of all John, feared carbs.

They also didn’t deprive themselves.

Despite becoming a fast food nation, John says his diet has improved with age.

“Our diet’s changed a little bit. We don’t eat fat or drippin’,” he said.

“The problem these days is fast food. Bloody McDonald’s.

“If people are getting big and fat, I don’t know why they keep eating. I can stand behind people (in line for meals) on a cruise and know what they’re going to order – greasy fish and chips.

“If you want to give up something, I think it’s easy. Well it’s easy for me – it’s just determination.”

Here’s to that.

Pollan’s nine principles of healthy eating:

1. Eat food… Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was healthier than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number – or that contain high-fructose corn syrup. None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

5. Pay more, eat less. There’s no escaping the fact that better food – measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) – costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves … By eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less” energy dense” than the other things you might eat.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases.

About the Author

Natasha Longo has a master’s degree in nutrition and is a certified fitness and nutritional counselor. She has consulted on public health policy and procurement in Canada, Australia, Spain, Ireland, England and Germany.

Sources:
aspetjournals.org
news.com.au
preventdisease.com
wustl.edu

Let Go of Who You Are to Become What You Might Be

October 25, 2013 | By WakingTimes | Reply

Paul Lenda, Guest
Waking Times

We all have dreams, hopes, and aspirations. Most of these are left to the confines of our minds, acting only as seemingly-unattainable realities that are nice to think about in order to escape the daily reality we find ourselves in, day after day. It doesn’t have to be this way.

We as humans have the incredible, unbridled will that can be the driving force for attaining the most amazing dreams, hopes, and aspirations we come up with. Combine this will with the courage to transform our thoughts into realities and an unstoppable determination to actualize those thoughts, and you now have the mental framework laid out which will allow you to live your dreams.

As humans we have relatively short lifespans and as we grow older and begin to feel the side effects of aging we tend to reflect more and more on our past and the things we’ve managed to accomplish or have experienced. This self-reflection can lead to great sadness and depression if we look back and see regretfully that we didn’t chase our dreams (usually because of the fear of the great unknown), or we have regrets about things we did that we never reacted to with actions that could undo those regretful decisions.

It doesn’t have to be this way… it doesn’t have to be this way at all. Why settle for anything less than the life you imagined for yourself? If you look around you and see that others have attained what you wish you had, then this shows you that you can create the same reality for yourself. As long as what you dream for yourself is possible within the confines of the 3D reality we as human beings experience on a daily basis, then the only obstacle between you and living the life you imagine for yourself is your mind. As the Kala, Makia, and Mana principles in the ancient Hawaiian Huna Philosophy state:

There are no limits… Energy flows where attention goes… All power comes from within.

There are no limits to the mind except those that we acknowledge, as Napoleon Hill had once said. When we realize the barrier to living our lives in the way that we feel would make us content and happy is our very own mind (and more specifically, the structure-process of illusion created by the human mind called the ego) then once we become aware of this, we can say “To hell with these self-imposed limits, I want to live my dreams and chase away the doubts!”

Yes, it really is that simple. To change your mindset is the most critical and most important step in actualizing your dreams. The rest will follow but you need to establish a welcoming environment within your mind for those dreams so that they can eventually become dreams no more, but expressions of your actual life. In the words of Lao Tzu, “when I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”

Why settle for anything less than that which brings you incredible bliss, joy, ecstasy, and happiness? You shouldn’t have to. This is your life, this is your time to shine. If you see yourself living a life that is but a shadow of what you dream your life was like, then the time to change is now. Change your state of mind and the rest will sure follow.

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and your discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.” -Patanjali

About the Author

Paul Lenda is a conscious evolution guide, author of The Creation of a Consciousness Shift, and co-founder of SHIFT>, a social community focused on anchoring in the new paradigm and assisting the positive transformation of humanity. With the drive to be aware of and experience the wider horizon of Reality, Paul has developed an extensive background in the spiritual and transformative elements of life; one that is both knowledge and experienced-based. Visit his website www.shift.is, follow him on Twitter or visit the Shift Facebook community.

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