Recently, we shared a the post – “5 Easy to Grow Mosquito Repelling Plants” which was very popular. We did some more digging and found even more info on mosquito repellent plants over at Hibiscus And More blog where they have a list of 26 along with 5 tips on ways to discourage the mosquitoes in your yard.

Check out the 26 at the link below…

Gardening And More: Mosquito Repellent Plants

May 13, 2013  |

Photo Credit: Andy Dean Photography/ Shutterstock.com

One of the most effective scare techniques employed to preserve our grotesquely inefficient, overpriced health care system has been to invoke the red peril of “socialized medicine”. Never mind that foreigners in advanced economies fail to recognize the caricatures scaremongers supply, or that Americans who need emergency care while overseas are almost without exception impressed with the caliber of care and astonished by the low (sometimes no) cost to them. After all, Americans live in the best of all possible worlds, and consumer and business freedom are always better.

In fact, business freedom here increasingly means the God-given right to exploit the vulnerability of the public. The example slouching into view is more corporate control over the practice of medicine. And based on the previews, it will make the horrors falsely attributed to socialized medicine look pale.

Two accounts last week bring the issue home. The first came in the Health Care Renewal blog (hat tip Lysa). It’s a reminder of how the current institutional efforts to regiment doctors undermine the caliber of medical care. It has become distressingly common for HMOs and other medical enterprises to have business-school trained managers putting factory-style production parameters on doctor visits. Outside of foreclosure mills, it’s hard to find similar approaches in other professions.

The post describes how a pediatrician, Pauline, who has developed a reputation for treating chronic conditions is at loggerheads with her for-profit practice. The suits don’t like her patient mix. She gets too many tough cases, when they’d rather have basically healthy kids who are there for a cold or ear infection. Mind you, this is only partly a money issue. These visits can be “up coded” so as to get larger insurance/patient payments, but she gets a higher level of patients in less-generous state insurance programs. But some of the pushback is that her practice is perceived as disruptive, since she uses what is perceived as too much of her and staff time, separate and apart from the economics. She’s constantly breaking management’s precious guidelines. One of her turf struggles:

She had set up a visit to see a new medically complex patient and had blocked off 40 minutes, the amount of time she felt she needed to do a good job. The child had a complex genetic disorder, cerebral palsy, and heart, lung, and kidney problems. Both the cardiologist and the nephrologist had called asking her to take this patient. She agreed. After she had scheduled the visit, a manager called her and told her that she was being allowed only 15 minutes to see that patient. After some fruitless discussion with him, Pauline finally said, “Okay, I guess that means that you’ll be seeing the patient instead of me, right?” The shocked voice at the other end of the phone line replied, “What do you mean? I don’t know how to take care of patients.” “That’s exactly my point,” Pauline put in.

Pauline explained that this manager assigned to her office is not even a college graduate. Physicians cannot access the schedule electronically and have no control over scheduling. These functions are controlled by the office manager and (amazingly) by some of the medical assistants who have received some “leadership” training. These medical assistants are even allowed to evaluate the clinical competency and skills of the physicians.

And to add insult to injury, how long did this discussion take? All those minutes the doctor spent fighting with a petty bureaucrat come at the expense of patient care. (Read Full Article)

Sunlight is well-known to provide us vitamin D, but did you know that it kills pain, keeps us alert at night, burns fat and more…

Our biological connection and dependence to the sun is so profound, that the very variation in human skin color from African, melanin-saturated dark skin, to the relatively melanin de-pigmented, Caucasian lighter-skin, is a byproduct of the offspring of our last common ancestor from Africa (as determined by mitochondrial DNA) migrating towards sunlight-impoverished higher latitudes, which began approximately 60,000 years ago. In order to compensate for the lower availability of sunlight, the body rapidly adjusted, essentially requiring the removal of the natural “sunscreen” melanin from the skin, which interferes with vitamin D production; vitamin D, of course, is involved in the regulation of over 2,000 genes, and therefore is more like a hormone, without which our entire genetic infrastructure becomes destabilized.

Below are detailed five noteworthy properties of sunlight exposure:

1) Sunlight Has Pain-Killing (Analgesic) Properties: A 2005 study published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine titled, “The effect of sunlight on postoperative analgesic medication use: a prospective study of patients undergoing spinal surgery,” analyzed patients staying on the bright side of the hospital unit who were exposed to 46% higher-intensity sunlight on average. The patients exposed to an increased intensity of sunlight experienced less perceived stress, marginally less, took 22% less analgesic medication per hour, and had 21% less pain medication costs. [i]

2) Sunlight Burns Fat: A 2011 study published in The Journal of Investigative Dermatology revealed a remarkable fact of metabolism: The exposure of human skin to UV light results in increased subcutaneous fat metabolism. While subcutaneous fat, unlike visceral fat, is not considered a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, it is known that a deficiency of one of sunlight’s best known beneficial byproducts, vitamin D, is associated with greater visceral fat.[ii] Also, there is a solid body of research showing that vitamin D deficiency is linked to obesity, with 9 such studies on our obesity research page.

One of them, titled “Association of plasma vitamin D levels with adiposity in Hispanic and African Americans,” and which was published in the journal Anticancer Research in 2005, found that vitamin D levels were inversely associated with adiposity in Hispanics and African-Americans, including abdominal obesity.[iii] The point? Exposure to UVB radiation, which is most abundant two hours on either side of solar noon and responsible for producing vitamin D, may be an essential strategy in burning fat, the natural way.

3) Sunlight via Solar Cycles May Directly Regulate Human Lifespan: Published in 2010 in the journal Medical Hypotheses and titled, “The effect of solar cycles on human lifespan in the 50 United states: variation in light affects the human genome,” researchers review the possibility that solar cycles directly affect the human genome.  According to the researchers:

In the current study we report that those persons conceived and likely born during the peaks (MAX approximately 3 years) of approximately 11-year solar cycles lived an average 1.7 years less than those conceived and likely born during non-peaks (MIN approximately 8 years). Increased energy at solar MAX, albeit relatively a small 0.1% increase from MIN, apparently modifies the human genome/epigenome and engenders changes that predispose to various diseases, thereby shortening lifespan. It is likely that same energy increases beneficial variety in the genome which may enhance adaptability in a changing environment.

Sunlight exposure, therefore, may directly affect the length of our life, and may even accelerate genetic changes that may confer a survival advantage.[iv]

4) Daytime Sunlight Exposure Improves Evening Alertness: A 2012 study published in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience titled, “Effects of prior light exposure on early evening performance, subjective sleepiness, and hormonal secretion,” found that subjects felt significantly more alert at the beginning of the evening after being exposed to 6 hours of mainly daylight exposure, whereas they became sleepier at the end of the evening after artificial light exposure.[v]

5) Sunlight May Convert To Metabolic Energy: If a novel hypothesis published in 2008 in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine is correct,[vi] a longstanding assumption that animals are incapable of utilizing light energy directly is now called into question.  In other words, our skin may contain the equivalent of melanin “solar-panels,” and it may be possible to “ingest” energy, as plants do, directly from the Sun.

Link:  http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/5-amazing-properties-sunlight-youve-never-heard-about

  Wednesday, Apr 2, 2008 10:50 AM UTC

Gregory Benford thinks Al Gore‘s a good guy and all, but he also thinks the star of “An Inconvenient Truth” is a little delusional. Driving a hybrid car, switching your bulbs to compact fluorescents and springing for recycled paper products are all well-meaning strategies in the fight against global warming. But as UC-Irvine physicist Benford sees it, there’s a catch. Those do-gooder actions are not going to be effective enough to turn the temperature tide, and even incremental political changes like reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mining alternative fuel sources are not forward-thinking enough. “I never believed we were going to be able to thwart global warming through carbon restriction,” Benford says. “Carbon restriction requires nations to subvert short- and midterm goals for a long-term goal they’ve read about online, and that’s just not going to work.”

As an alternative, Benford has cooked up a plan that amounts to a manmade Mount Pinatubo eruption. He has proposed shooting trillions of tiny particles of earth into the stratosphere, where they will remain suspended to help blot out incoming solar rays. Dirt is cheap, chemically unreactive and easily crushable, he argues, making it a simple matter to test this strategy on a small scale over the Arctic before total global deployment. This plan might seem a little too sci-fi to take seriously — fittingly, Benford moonlights as a Nebula-winning novelist — but he’s far from the only scientist to lobby for a so-called geoengineering fix.

Researchers all over the world have begun advocating large-scale climate control strategies that sound like something “The Simpsons’” Mr. Burns might endorse, including erecting sun-blocking mirrors in deep space, spraying tiny droplets of sulfur or ocean water into the atmosphere to deflect sunbeams, and seeding the oceans with iron to spur the growth of CO2-sucking phytoplankton. When a panel of scientists addressed the ethical implications of geoengineering at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in February in Boston, it was a clear sign of how far this seemingly out-there field has advanced toward legitimacy. (Read more)

(NaturalNews) A popular cosmetic product since time immemorial, lipstick has long been used by women in many diverse cultures to accentuate their femininity and emanate their own unique expressions of elegance and style to the outside world. But a new study released by the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) School of Public Health raises fresh concerns about the safety of using conventional lipstick products, as many of them were found to contain dangerously high levels of aluminum, cadmium, lead and other toxins.

UCB researchers tested 32 common lipstick and lip gloss products widely sold in stores today and found that many of them are loaded with cadmium, chromium, aluminum and at least five other metals. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives, the findings revealed that women who use such products even at modest levels could be greatly increasing their risk of developing a host of potential health conditions, including gastrointestinal upset, nerve damage, and cancer.

“Lipstick and lip gloss are of special concern because when they are not being blotted on tissue or left as kiss marks, they are ingested or absorbed, bit by bit, by the individual wearing them,” explains a UCB press release about the study. “Using acceptable daily intakes derived from this study, average use of some lipsticks and lip glosses would result in excessive exposure to chromium, a carcinogen linked to stomach ulcers.”

Most conventional beauty products contain a multitude of toxins at varying levels of the 32 products tested, researchers found that 24 of them, or 75 percent, also contained lead, which is known to cause brain, cellular, and DNA damage. Since no level of lead exposure is considered safe for young children, this discovery is particularly concerning as many younger girls use lipstick with their friends when they play dress up and other childhood games.

“I believe that the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) should pay attention to this,” says Sa Liu, author of the study and researchers in environmental health sciences at UCB. “Our study was small, using lip products that had been identified by young Asian women in Oakland, Calif. But, the lipsticks and lip glosses in our study are common brands available in stores everywhere. Based upon our findings, a larger, more thorough survey of lip products – and cosmetics in general – is warranted.”

The FDA actually did conduct its own investigation back in late 2011 on lead in lipstick and found that every single sample among 400 collected contained lead. A shocking 380, or 95 percent, of the lipstick samples tested contained levels of lead at more than 0.1 parts per million (ppm), which is higher than the maximum level permitted in candy bars. But in typical FDA fashion, the agency largely discounted its own findings, declaring at the time that lead levels are “very low and [do] not pose safety concerns.”

“Some of the toxic metals are occurring at levels that could possibly have an effect in the long term,” says UCB professor S. Katharine Hammond, who helped lead the new study. “It’s the levels that matter.”

Sources for this article include:

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/05/02/toxic-metals-in-lipstick/
http://www.usatoday.com
http://www.naturalnews.com/035027_lipstick_lead_FDA.html

All content posted on this site is commentary or opinion and is protected under Free Speech. Truth Publishing LLC takes sole responsibility for all content.

(NaturalNews) Organic farmers have yet another environmental hazard to contend with, this time compliments of the U.S. government in the form of chemtrails. A mess of toxic chemicals, these harmful sprays pollute the soil, water and air while compromising the health of humans, animals and plants. And now Monsanto has developed seeds that will weather the effect of the sprays, creating a tidy profit for the corporation while organics suffer. If this poisoning continues, true organic farming may become impossible in the not so distant future.

Chemtrail cocktail
Geoengineering hides behind the claim of arresting global warming through atmospheric spraying of arsenic, aerosol, aluminum, barium, depleted uranium and substantial amounts of mercury.

There’s only one problem – what goes up, must come down. These chemicals are seriously polluting our waterways and soil while seeping into crops and contaminating livestock, not to mention changing the weather patterns. Plants are especially sensitive to the soil degradation that occurs with chemtrail spraying, creating serious issues concerning our food supply. Enter Monsanto with a lucrative ‘solution.’  (Read Full Article)

May 5, 2013
By Paul Foy, Associated Press

AP Photo/Courtesy Vic Bachman

In this early April 2013 photo provided by Ogden beekeeper Vic Bachman, Bachman, left, and partner Nate Hall prepare to remove a 12-foot-long beehive from an A-frame cabin in Eden, Utah. It was the biggest beehive the Utah beekeepers have ever removed, containing about 60,000 honeybees.

By Paul Foy, Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY — It was the biggest beehive that that Ogden beekeeper Vic Bachman has ever removed — a dozen feet long, packed inside the eve of a cabin in Ogden Valley.

“We figure we got 15 pounds of bees out of there,” said Bachman, who said that converts to about 60,000 honeybees.

Bachman was called to the A-frame cabin last month in Eden, Utah. Taking apart a panel that hid roof rafters, he had no idea he would find honeycombs packed 12 feet long, 4 feet wide and 16 inches deep. (Read Full Article)

“Planning a garden starts with choosing what you love to eat,” says Farmer John Fendley of the Sustainable Seed Company. “Your garden is the ultimate grocery store because it’s convenient and tailored to your taste. But there are a multitude of other benefits to gardening such as saving money, eating healthier foods and burning calories.”

Farmer John suggests starting with these 10 simple vegetables to grow from seeds for beginners to have success in the garden:

1. Beets
2. Radishes

3. Peas
4. Swiss Chard

5. Beans
6. Lettuce

7. Spinach
8. Tomatoes

9. Cucumber
10. Basil

The selection available online for unique and delicious heirloom vegetables far surpasses anything found in supermarkets.  And when you begin to harvest and enjoy nature’s bounty, you’ll be well pleased at the money you save, and the amazing food you grew from seed.  So check out the estimated last spring frost in your area, and start your seeds…you’ll be very happy you did.

Link: http://www.greenchildmagazine.com/the-10-easiest-vegetables-to-grow-from-seeds/