A new study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry shows that children who experience malnutrition exhibit strikingly increased behavioral disorders and aggressive behavior as they grow older. The study looked at children between the ages of eight and 17 years, and found some rather shocking statistics about their behaviors.Children who suffered certain nutritional deficiencies demonstrated a shocking 41% increase in aggression at age eight. At age 17, they demonstrated a 51% increase in violent and antisocial behaviors. And the only difference is their diet. It’s all about the foods they were eating and the nutrients they were missing.What specific nutrients were missing from their diets? Four primary nutrients were tried in the study: Zinc, iron, B vitamins and protein. Malnourished children weren’t getting crucial minerals like zinc and iron, and they weren’t getting the B vitamins they needed to develop healthy nervous systems. And a healthy nervous system is a prerequisite for mental and emotional health and stability.Now let’s talk about these nutrients in a little more detail and explore why these nutritional deficiencies are so widespread. Zinc is perhaps the single most common nutritional deficiency in the American population. Estimates are that more than 80% of the population is deficient in zinc. As a result of that deficiency, people’s immune systems are impaired, they’re not able to resist infectious diseases such as influenza, they’re not able to heal their wounds as quickly and they’re not able to recover from surgical procedures as quickly as they could if they had zinc. It also affects fetal development in pregnant women and impairs neurological function.And yet zinc is cheap! It only costs a few pennies a day to supplement our diets with zinc. In fact, it’s one of the least expensive supplements you can get. But in our country we still have widespread chronic deficiencies. And as we’re seeing in studies like this, our zinc deficiency is leading to – let’s say it bluntly – criminals.Why do we have so many criminals in this country? Because so many of them are raised with nutritional imbalances which then distort their mental function, their mood, their response to stress and their ability to be successful in modern society. At least those are major contributing factors.At the same time we have B-vitamin deficiencies, which is interesting because so many of the popular food products sold in grocery stores all over the country and around the world actually deplete the body of B vitamins. The two most common ingredients in our foods seem to be white flour and sugar. It’s hard to find any product in the grocery store, it seems, that isn’t made with flour or some form of added sugars, whether it’s sucrose, high fructose corn syrup, dextrose or just plain sugar. These two ingredients are both highly refined ingredients, and they tend to strip away nutrients from the bodies of people who consume them. For example, when a person eats a donut, that donut contains both white flour and added sugars, which deplete the body of B vitamins, causing deficiencies. And it is these deficiencies that lead to antisocial behavior, aggressive behavior and ultimately criminal behavior – especially among males.Another dietary factor in these behavioral disorders, it turns out, is a lack of quality protein. People aren’t getting high quality protein because they think the only place to get protein is from beef and red meat, when in fact superfoods like spirulina offer much higher quality protein. Soy and rice proteins are also much higher quality proteins. In fact, there are many plant proteins that are actually healthier proteins for human beings, but are not being adequately consumed by the American population. People tend to turn to meat and milk, and those are in my opinion the worst sources of protein if you wish to maintain long-term health.So we have a population that suffers from widespread nutritional deficiencies – that much we know. But what may surprise you is how we actually deal with these deficiencies. Instead of spending a few dollars a month on nutritional supplements that would prevent these chronic diseases and aggressive behaviors, we end up spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on building new prisons and treating these people with expensive prescriptions and mind-altering drugs. When it comes to children, for example, instead of giving them the food they need to be healthy, which would prevent these diseases and disorders, we dose them on Ritalin, antidepressants and other mind-altering drugs. This is expensive. It also impairs the child’s learning capability while at the same time increasing the child’s risk of violent behavior and suicide.Here we have a nutrient deficiency, most notably the B vitamins, that is causing children to act aggressively and be diagnosed with ADHD. The solution offered by conventional medicine is to dose them with antidepressant drugs that actually promote more aggressive behavior as we’ve seen in recent school killings. What kind of solution is that? It sounds crazy, but it’s exactly the solution being implemented every day, right now, all across the country. Perhaps even with your child. But these kids don’t need drugs; they need vitamins, nutrition and healthy foods.But even if you went to the grocery store for fruits and vegetables and ate them three times a day, you still wouldn’t be getting adequate nutrition. To figure this out for yourself, just do the math. Add up the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) numbers on the labels of all the foods you consume, and you’ll find out that if you’re going to meet the minimum requirements set by the U.S. government for preventing chronic disease, you’re going to have to eat, on average, 10,000 calories a day of grocery store foods. That’s 500% more food than an individual needs if they’re a healthy adult of average weight. It’s impossible to eat that much, even if you try hard. Morgan Spurlock, the creator of the “Supersize Me” documentary, ate nothing but McDonald’s food for 30 days. He stuffed himself with McDonald’s food three times a day and still only managed to eat about 5,000 calories. You would have to double Spurlock’s incredible feat to eat 10,000 calories a day. And only then would you be meeting the minimum requirements for nutrition.And yet, those minimum requirements aren’t enough to experience optimum health; all they do is prevent the most obvious nutritional deficiency diseases such as beriberi, scurvy or even rickets. If you want to get optimum health, you’ve got to supplement your diet through nutritional supplements, or by consuming superfoods like chlorella or spirulina, sprouts, berries and products like The Ultimate Meal or Berry Green. This is the only way you can get adequate nutrition.As we’re now realizing with this study, a huge segment of our childhood population clearly is not getting this nutrition. As a result, we are raising yet another generation of children with behavioral disorders, aggression and problems with the law. Essentially, we are raising tomorrow’s criminals. These are the people that will be put in federal prisons that you and I will have to pay for with our taxpayer dollars. We’re going to have to support them, and it costs a lot of money to support prisoners. Not only do they not produce anything, they don’t pay taxes or contribute to the revenue needed to support society. They actually suck away revenues from society by costing something like $60,000 per year per prisoner on average. They simply waste away without learning new skills that could help them assimilate back into society someday.Now think about it. We could spend a few dollars a month on our children, and give them nutritional supplements that prevent all of this. The choice is this: spend a few dollars a month on supplementing our kids’ nutrition, or let this become a full-blown problem where we have to build more prisons and spend tens of thousands of dollars every year to support them in our federal prison system. Which choice makes more sense? If you were running the country and had to decide where to spend the money, where would it make more sense? Should you spend a couple of dollars a month on nutritional supplements for children and pregnant women, or should you spend $60,000 a year on each and every criminal that is created by nutritional deficiencies?So what’s the solution here? It’s easy. Nutritional supplements should be made available free of charge to the entire population. The government (the taxpayers, actually) should provide free vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients to the population, especially pregnant women and children, so that we can prevent birth defects and behavioral disorders early on. We would save countless dollars down the road. This is something I’ve supported for a long time and I will continue to promote.But of course, nothing is free. American taxpayers would be footing the bill, but it is a wise investment. By spending a few dollars on disease prevention today, we are avoiding the long-term expenditure of a lot more money taking care of a society full of criminals. Nutrition is a great investment, and preventing disease has a big payoff for society. I say we pay close attention to these studies and find ways to provide better nutrition to our children, our expectant mothers and our general population so that we can prevent these diseases before they become problems for society.Copyright 2006 Truth Publishing
The Benefits of Learning How to Program Computers
I still remember the excitement I felt when I wrote my first basic program on the BBC Micro at school. It was a simple four line program that drew a triangle on the screen. In the early 1980s we enjoyed playing games such as Chuckie Egg and the famous Granny’s Garden on the BBC Micro which was the first computer we were introduced to, but the real excitement was getting the computer to perform tasks in the basic programming language. Simple programs that drew shapes or printed text on the screen weren’t exactly ground-breaking but it was enough to wet my appetite for programming and set me on the path to programming games on other computers such as the Spectrum, Atari ST and Amiga.In the good old days of the Spectrum you could buy magazines which feature pre-written games in basic code that you could type into your own Spectrum and hope the program ran okay. This was a great way of learning how code works and what commands do what. Books on basic programming were also released that would take you through the basics of commands and structure, and end up programming an entire game. The satisfaction of making things happen was amazing.So what are the benefits of learning how to program computers? In my personal experience it gives you a sense of achievement to create an entire program from scratch and see it working. Working out how to get the computer to do something is challenging as you try to decide how you are going to do it. The excitement of being able to create your very own game where you make the rules. The joy of other people playing it.Programming is good for the mind as it involves problem solving. For example: how to get multiple sprites moving across the screen and dropping bullets like the famous Space Invaders game. What to do if a player does something unexpected and the game crashes, how to tell the computer how to deal with these unexpected events. I once spent over a week programming a zoom function into an Art Package I wrote which gave me a great feeling of relief when I finally got it working.Programming can also be lots of fun and a great hobby. I met some good friends when I was writing programming tutorials for various Atari ST diskzines in the 1990s who I still hear from to this day. We would send each other disks full of programming tools and routines and look forward to the many programs we could create where we were limited only by our imagination. Our creations were reviewed in the top Amiga and ST magazines of the day which is something we all looked forward to.Finally programming can become a good source of income for you. Creating your own programs can become a reality with the many excellent programming languages available such as App Game Kit which allows you to create software that runs on multiple devices. People always want new software and employers need to find programmers to create it.There are many game creator programs on the market which require no programming at all but I personally find them limiting. If you want to create your own games or application then I highly recommend you get stuck into some good old fashioned coding with one of the popular programming languages on the market today.
What Are The Greatest Changes In Shopping In Your Lifetime
What are the greatest changes in shopping in your lifetime? So asked my 9 year old grandson.
As I thought of the question the local Green Grocer came to mind. Because that is what the greatest change in shopping in my lifetime is.
That was the first place to start with the question of what are the greatest changes in shopping in your lifetime.
Our local green grocer was the most important change in shopping in my lifetime. Beside him was our butcher, a hairdresser and a chemist.
Looking back, we were well catered for as we had quite a few in our suburb. And yes, the greatest changes in shopping in my lifetime were with the small family owned businesses.
Entertainment While Shopping Has Changed
Buying butter was an entertainment in itself.
My sister and I often had to go to a favourite family grocer close by. We were always polite as we asked for a pound or two of butter and other small items.
Out came a big block of wet butter wrapped in grease-proof paper. Brought from the back of the shop, placed on a huge counter top and included two grooved pates.
That was a big change in our shopping in my lifetime… you don’t come across butter bashing nowadays.
Our old friendly Mr. Mahon with the moustache, would cut a square of butter. Lift it to another piece of greaseproof paper with his pates. On it went to the weighing scales, a bit sliced off or added here and there.
Our old grocer would then bash it with gusto, turning it over and over. Upside down and sideways it went, so that it had grooves from the pates, splashes going everywhere, including our faces.
My sister and I thought this was great fun and it always cracked us up. We loved it, as we loved Mahon’s, on the corner, our very favourite grocery shop.
Grocery Shopping
Further afield, we often had to go to another of my mother’s favourite, not so local, green grocer’s. Mr. McKessie, ( spelt phonetically) would take our list, gather the groceries and put them all in a big cardboard box.
And because we were good customers he always delivered them to our house free of charge. But he wasn’t nearly as much fun as old Mr. Mahon. Even so, he was a nice man.
All Things Fresh
So there were very many common services such as home deliveries like:
• Farm eggs
• Fresh vegetables
• Cow’s milk
• Freshly baked bread
• Coal for our open fires
Delivery Services
A man used to come to our house a couple of times a week with farm fresh eggs.
Another used to come every day with fresh vegetables, although my father loved growing his own.
Our milk, topped with beautiful cream, was delivered to our doorstep every single morning.
Unbelievably, come think of it now, our bread came to us in a huge van driven by our “bread-man” named Jerry who became a family friend.
My parents always invited Jerry and his wife to their parties, and there were many during the summer months. Kids and adults all thoroughly enjoyed these times. Alcohol was never included, my parents were teetotallers. Lemonade was a treat, with home made sandwiches and cakes.
The coal-man was another who delivered bags of coal for our open fires. I can still see his sooty face under his tweed cap but I can’t remember his name. We knew them all by name but most of them escape me now.
Mr. Higgins, a service man from the Hoover Company always came to our house to replace our old vacuum cleaner with an updated model.
Our insurance company even sent a man to collect the weekly premium.
People then only paid for their shopping with cash. This in itself has been a huge change in shopping in my lifetime.
In some department stores there was a system whereby the money from the cash registers was transported in a small cylinder on a moving wire track to the central office.
Some Of The Bigger Changes
Some of the bigger changes in shopping were the opening of supermarkets.
• Supermarkets replaced many individual smaller grocery shops. Cash and bank cheques have given way to credit and key cards.
• Internet shopping… the latest trend, but in many minds, doing more harm, to book shops.
• Not many written shopping lists, because mobile phones have taken over.
On a more optimistic note, I hear that book shops are popular again after a decline.
Personal Service Has Most Definitely Changed
So, no one really has to leave home, to purchase almost anything, technology makes it so easy to do online.
And we have a much bigger range of products now, to choose from, and credit cards have given us the greatest ease of payment.
We have longer shopping hours, and weekend shopping. But we have lost the personal service that we oldies had taken for granted and also appreciated.
Because of their frenetic lifestyles, I have heard people say they find shopping very stressful, that is grocery shopping. I’m sure it is when you have to dash home and cook dinner after a days work. I often think there has to be a better, less stressful way.
My mother had the best of both worlds, in the services she had at her disposal. With a full time job looking after 9 people, 7 children plus her and my dad, she was very lucky. Lucky too that she did not have 2 jobs.