Good Morning.

From Raw Story:

Jan Brewer calls for fewer female candidates: ‘This woman thing has gotten way out of control’

Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) argued on Sunday that too much emphasis has been placed on electing female candidates.

During a discussion on CNN about presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s possible running mates, host Jake Tapper asked Brewer if she would be interested in the job.

“Who made up that list? They didn’t put me on there,” Brewer complained. “Of course, I would be — I would be willing to serve in any capacity that I could be of help with Donald on.”

“Do you think he needs to pick a woman?” Tapper wondered. “Given how bad his numbers are with women.”

“I don’t necessarily think you need to pick a woman,” Brewer insisted. “You know, this woman thing has gotten way out of control I believe.

“And I think it’s been driven by the left,” she remarked. “Because they think that it’s going to bring them over the end. But I think people, when they sit down to vote, they vote for the very best candidate. They want somebody that’s going to represent them.”

*****

Readers: “This woman thing has gotten way out of control…” “….They vote for the very best candidate – they want somebody who is going to represent them.” Hell, all I want to say is this man thing has gotten way out of control. Right? It’s time for a woman to show what she can do.

Actually, no, I have more to say. In my opinion she’s basically saying a man is going to represent a woman better than a woman. Hell no. In all the years of men running this country I cannot agree. I can only run with Brewer’s statement if the woman representing women is Brewer herself  (And a few others that I shall not name – you know the women I’m referring to) because no doubt, she clearly thinks women have their place (In the kitchen, and barefoot and pregnant to name a few), and it isn’t beside a man and certainly not in front of him calling the shots on women’s concerns, issues, and God forbid, their bodies. We’ll leave that up to men to make those decisions.

No thank you, Brewer. Been there done that. It’s a woman’s turn to take a stab at turning this country around. Brewer, if you think this woman thing has gotten way out of control, you haven’t seen nothing yet.  C’mon girls let’s get out of control, and show her and all the other women out there who feel like Brewer, and take our rightful place. The time is now.

Blog me. 

Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.

Gratefully your blog host,

michelle

Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)

If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)

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Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129

Thank you for your loyal support!

All content on this site are property of Michelle Moquin © copyright 2008-2016

“Though she be but little, she be fierce.” – William Shakespeare Midsummer Night’s Dream 

" Politics, god, Life, News, Music, Family, Personal, Travel, Random, Photography, Religion, Aliens, Art, Entertainment, Food, Books, Thoughts, Media, Culture, Love, Sex, Poetry, Prose, Friends, Technology, Humor, Health, Writing, Events, Movies, Sports, Video, Christianity, Atheist, Blogging, History, Work, Education, Business, Fashion, Barack Obama, People, Internet, Relationships, Faith, Photos, Videos, Hillary Clinton, School, Reviews, God, TV, Philosophy, Fun, Science, Environment, Design, The Page, Rants, Pictures, Church, Blog, Nature, Marketing, Television, Democrats, Parenting, Miscellaneous, Current Events, Film, Spirituality, Obama, Musings, Home, Human Rights, Society, Comedy, Me, Random Thoughts, Research, Government, Election 2008, Baseball, Opinion, Recipes, Children, Iraq, Funny, Women, Economics, America, Misc, Commentary, John McCain, Reflections, All, Celebrities, Inspiration, Lifestyle, Theology, Linux, Kids, Games, World, India, Literature, China, Ramblings, Fitness, Money, Review, War, Articles, Economy, Journal, Quotes, NBA, Crime, Anime, Islam, 2008, Stories, Prayer, Diary, Jesus, Buddha, Muslim, Israel, Europe, Links, Marriage, Fiction, American Idol, Software, Leadership, Pop culture, Rants, Video Games, Republicans, Updates, Political, Football, Healing, Blogs, Shopping, USA, Class, Matrix, Course, Work, Web 2.0, My Life, Psychology, Gay, Happiness, Advertising, Field Hockey, Hip-hop, sex, fucking, ass, Soccer, sox"

Happy Sunday!

Readers: How’s this for a Sunday write?

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

It’s one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself.

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.

But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.

Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.

Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.

We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.

WE need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.

Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) is the author of the novel “The Course of Love.”

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

*****

Readers: I think this is a good write. What do you think? I have to admit I’m a romanticist at heart but I am realistic too – I do not expect what was stated: “…that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.” Geez, do people really think that someone perfect exists and can satisfy all? If I thought that I would never have been in any of my past relationships. Nor do I expect to be able to satisfy every need and yearning of my man – Whoa, that’s a lot of pressure.

Over the years of relationships I have come up with some reasonable needs that are nonnegotiable. Happily I’m all for a dose of pessimism – albeit its usually mixed in with a touch (or more!) of humor (Gotta have that in my relationship!) Can you tell with my writes here? :)

Care to share your two? Blog me. 

Oh…before I sign off, please remember my California peeps, the Presidential Primary Election is coming this June 7th. Don’t forget to send in your vote by mail ballot this Tuesday (If you haven’t already) or visit your local polling place to make sure your vote counts. This goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway…Hillary Clinton for President.

xox

Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.

Gratefully your blog host,

michelle

Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)

If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)

Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:

Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129

Thank you for your loyal support!

All content on this site are property of Michelle Moquin © copyright 2008-2016

“Though she be but little, she be fierce.” – William Shakespeare Midsummer Night’s Dream 

" Politics, god, Life, News, Music, Family, Personal, Travel, Random, Photography, Religion, Aliens, Art, Entertainment, Food, Books, Thoughts, Media, Culture, Love, Sex, Poetry, Prose, Friends, Technology, Humor, Health, Writing, Events, Movies, Sports, Video, Christianity, Atheist, Blogging, History, Work, Education, Business, Fashion, Barack Obama, People, Internet, Relationships, Faith, Photos, Videos, Hillary Clinton, School, Reviews, God, TV, Philosophy, Fun, Science, Environment, Design, The Page, Rants, Pictures, Church, Blog, Nature, Marketing, Television, Democrats, Parenting, Miscellaneous, Current Events, Film, Spirituality, Obama, Musings, Home, Human Rights, Society, Comedy, Me, Random Thoughts, Research, Government, Election 2008, Baseball, Opinion, Recipes, Children, Iraq, Funny, Women, Economics, America, Misc, Commentary, John McCain, Reflections, All, Celebrities, Inspiration, Lifestyle, Theology, Linux, Kids, Games, World, India, Literature, China, Ramblings, Fitness, Money, Review, War, Articles, Economy, Journal, Quotes, NBA, Crime, Anime, Islam, 2008, Stories, Prayer, Diary, Jesus, Buddha, Muslim, Israel, Europe, Links, Marriage, Fiction, American Idol, Software, Leadership, Pop culture, Rants, Video Games, Republicans, Updates, Political, Football, Healing, Blogs, Shopping, USA, Class, Matrix, Course, Work, Web 2.0, My Life, Psychology, Gay, Happiness, Advertising, Field Hockey, Hip-hop, sex, fucking, ass, Soccer, sox"

Good morning,

Since we’re on the subject of health…

From the Huff Po:

Mutant Superbug Has Been Discovered In The U.S.

The infection resists the treatment of last resort, meaning “the medicine cabinet is empty for some patients,” the CDC director said.

Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) bacteria is pictured in this medical illustration provided by the Centre of Disease Control and Prevention.

The woman hadn’t traveled outside the U.S. in the previous five months, according to the report. Doctors treated the infection using another antibiotic, but said they were alarmed by the discovery of the mcr-1 gene inside the U.S.

“The fear is that this could spread to other bacteria and create the bacterium that would be resistant to everything,” Dr. Beth Bell, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told ABC News.

“The more we look at drug resistance, the more concerned we are,” Dr. Tom Frieden, CDC director, said Thursday. “The medicine cabinet is empty for some patients. It is the end of the road for antibiotics unless we act urgently.”

At least 2 million people become infected in the U.S. each year with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to the CDC. Those infections result in at least 23,000 deaths annually.

The Pennsylvania woman’s case, while not deadly, is the first U.S. discovery in a human of bacteria resistant to colistin, a drug held in reserve to treat serious infections that resist another major class of antibiotics called carbapenems. Bacteria that could resist colistin and carbapenems would be unstoppable,according to The New York Times.

In a study last year, the CDC warned that drug-resistant infections would continue to rise. And while the medical community has been anticipating the strain’s arrival, the troubling part is that “this case seems completely home-grown,” according to Dr. Nasia Safdar, an associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Multi-drug-resistant bacteria are found elsewhere in the world, frequently in agriculture. This particular colistin-resistant strain, for instance, was first discovered in people and livestock in China in November 2015. Since then, it has turned up in Europe and Canada. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Thursday it had detected the bacteria in a single sample of a domestic pig’s intestine.

When it comes to spreading resistant bacteria, “food-producing animals are of particular concern,” the CDC says. “Antibiotics must be used judiciously in humans and animals because both uses contribute to the emergence, persistence, and spread of resistant bacteria.”

The CDC, Defense Department and Pennsylvania Department of Health are working to identify close contacts of the Pennsylvania woman to determine if others have also been exposed to the bacteria. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf(D) said his administration was taking the discovery “very seriously” and promised to “take necessary actions to prevent mcr-1 from becoming a widespread problem with potentially serious consequences.”

*****

Thoughts?

Blog me.

✌🏽 & ❤

Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.

Gratefully your blog host,

michelle

Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)

If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)

Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:

Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129

Thank you for your loyal support!

All content on this site are property of Michelle Moquin © copyright 2008-2016

“Though she be but little, she be fierce.” – William Shakespeare Midsummer Night’s Dream 

" Politics, god, Life, News, Music, Family, Personal, Travel, Random, Photography, Religion, Aliens, Art, Entertainment, Food, Books, Thoughts, Media, Culture, Love, Sex, Poetry, Prose, Friends, Technology, Humor, Health, Writing, Events, Movies, Sports, Video, Christianity, Atheist, Blogging, History, Work, Education, Business, Fashion, Barack Obama, People, Internet, Relationships, Faith, Photos, Videos, Hillary Clinton, School, Reviews, God, TV, Philosophy, Fun, Science, Environment, Design, The Page, Rants, Pictures, Church, Blog, Nature, Marketing, Television, Democrats, Parenting, Miscellaneous, Current Events, Film, Spirituality, Obama, Musings, Home, Human Rights, Society, Comedy, Me, Random Thoughts, Research, Government, Election 2008, Baseball, Opinion, Recipes, Children, Iraq, Funny, Women, Economics, America, Misc, Commentary, John McCain, Reflections, All, Celebrities, Inspiration, Lifestyle, Theology, Linux, Kids, Games, World, India, Literature, China, Ramblings, Fitness, Money, Review, War, Articles, Economy, Journal, Quotes, NBA, Crime, Anime, Islam, 2008, Stories, Prayer, Diary, Jesus, Buddha, Muslim, Israel, Europe, Links, Marriage, Fiction, American Idol, Software, Leadership, Pop culture, Rants, Video Games, Republicans, Updates, Political, Football, Healing, Blogs, Shopping, USA, Class, Matrix, Course, Work, Web 2.0, My Life, Psychology, Gay, Happiness, Advertising, Field Hockey, Hip-hop, sex, fucking, ass, Soccer, sox"

Good morning!

Readers: We’re heading into a holiday here in America. Which means you’ll possibly be doing things to your body in excess. If you have a sweet tooth you might just reconsider what the sweets are doing to your health as you party into the 3-day weekend and beyond.

Here’s the write:

Sweetened to Death: Exposing Sugar for What It Is

What you don’t know IS hurting you… and I don’t just mean weight problems. I mean chronic disease. I mean a whole generation dying younger than their parents for the first time in modern history.⁽¹⁾ If you were ever looking for a single smoking gun for obesity and health problems, this is it. And you’re about to learn how to dodge the bullet and come out on top.

Poison.

Addictive substance.

Alcohol without the buzz.

Worse than cocaine.

The reason we can’t stop eating.

The culprit behind the chronic disease epidemic of our times.

These are just a few of the things it’s been called.

And that’s not by extremists or fanatics… but by some of the most influential and respected medical experts on the planet.^2,3,4

But you know it as sugar.

And right now, we’re all eating it in unprecedented amounts, often without even knowing it.^5,6

And it’s doing far worse things in our bodies than just making us fat… though it’s definitely doing that, too.

Sugar is killing people. And I’ll prove it in this article.

I’ll show you how it managed to dominate your diet and how unnatural it actually is.

I’ll show you how it behaves in your body like both cocaine and alcohol. (It does this in your children’s bodies, too.)

I’ll also show you how to overcome the need for it. It’s very doable… and very necessary.

And no, this doesn’t mean you can’t have anything sweet. Trust me on this. I’ll explain everything.

Really quickly, though… Before I get down and dirty on sugar, let me address something a few people have asked me about the articles I’ve been writing lately:

April 1973.

Senator George McGovern was presiding over the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. This was the Committee’s first meeting on diet and disease.⁷

However, just a couple of years prior, he’d retired to write a controversial book titled Pure White and Deadly: The Problem of Sugar.⁹ In it, he proposed that sugar — not fat — caused obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.¹⁰ This flew right in the face of the popular low-fat diet advice of the time.^11,12

After Yudkin explained his sugar theory to the Committee, Senator McGovern, in utter disbelief, asked:

Yudkin responded in his usual polite, precise manner:

Yudkin went on to insist that cutting dietary fat was not the answer to the growing public health concerns. But McGovern, unable to accept this, responded:

And after the hearing, things went straight downhill for Yudkin. He was shut out of international nutrition conferences, and several prominent scientists who supported the the low-fat theory publicly blasted him.¹⁴

One of these scientists was Ancel Keys, the most famous nutritionist in America. He published a scathing critique of Yudkin, calling his research “propaganda.”¹⁵

Scientists everywhere then began to distance themselves from Yudkin and his theories. Almost overnight, he went from being England’s premier nutritionist to being a complete outsider.¹⁶

After all, he’d contradicted the establishment. Right or wrong, he had to pay the price. And no one else wanted to end up like him.

Sheldon Reiser, another prominent nutritionist of the day, later recalled:

By the time Yudkin died in 1995, his book was out of print, and he had faded largely into obscurity.¹⁸

Meanwhile, the low-fat diet advice of Keys and his colleagues became mainstream and was treated as gospel, giving rise to dangerous U.S. Government health recommendations.¹⁹

The food industry responded with sugary low-fat and fat-free foods. The American public responded with growing waistlines and declining health.^{20,21,22,23,24}

In fact, it wasn’t until 36 years later that everyone finally started to realize that Yudkin had been right all along. And it was largely thanks to a prominent endocrinologist named Robert Lustig.^25,26,27

And this brings us to…

May 2009.

Professor Robert Lustig was just over a half an hour into a lecture on sugar at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). A charming public speaker, he’d gotten a few laughs from the crowd over the past 30 minutes. But now, the lecture hall was dead silent.²⁸

UCSF was one of the top-ranked medical schools in the world.²⁹ And Lustig, its star pediatric endocrinologist, had just steamrolled over the past 30 years of undisputed nutrition guidelines. He was going against the grain with a vengeance.³⁰

-Dr. Robert Lustig on Keys’ Seven Countries Study

You see, most nutrition advice had been based on Ancel Keys’ legendary Seven Countries Study — the one that landed him on the cover of Time Magazine.³¹ And Lustig had just spent the past several minutes pointing out flaw after flaw in that study’s science.

And this was only a third of the way in. The lecture was almost 90 minutes long. Lustig was just getting warmed up.

He spent the next hour using a mountain of research to thoroughly make the case for sugar being most damaging toxin of our time.

Two months later, UCSF posted a video of the lecture on YouTube, and it promptly went viral. To date, it has more than 6.4 million views.³²

Lustig had clearly struck a nerve. People were tired of being fat and sick. The nutrition advice they’d gotten their whole lives hadn’t been working at all.

In the aftermath, several New York Times bestsellers emerged highlighting the dangers of sugar.^33,34,35 Articles on the topic appeared in multiple newspapers and journals.^36,37,38,39 News programs like 60 Minutes did stories on it.⁴⁰

book — Pure White and Deadly — was re-released to a more welcoming public.⁴¹ After all, Lustig had made several references to it in the lecture.⁴²

The tides had finally shifted. Sugar — in all its forms, including high-fructose corn syrup — was now being called out for the poison it was.

And on that note, it’s about time we got into the nitty-gritty of sugar’s toxicity.

Natural?

Lately, I’ve heard many people say, “Cane sugar is natural. How can it be poisonous?”

Red kidney beans are natural, too. Yet, as the FDA’s own Bad Bug Book points out, eating just five of them raw can land you in the hospital.⁴³

Natural doesn’t mean healthy. Most toxins are natural. Cyanide is perfectly natural.

And I should also point out that sugar manufacturing starts with this:

…and ends with this:

What’s natural about a man-made process that turns dirty sticks into sweet, paper-white, granulated crystals?

The truth is that it’s an extensive operation that involves multiple rounds of high-temperature treatment, evaporation, filtering, and spinning.⁴⁴ Not to mention, industrial chemicals like sulfur dioxide are bubbled through the sugar to bleach it.⁴⁵

Long story short: You won’t find this stuff anywhere in nature.

And yet you’re likely eating it at every meal.

However, as bad as this all sounds, simply being unnatural isn’t what makes sugar so harmful. You’re about to find out what is, though. Read on.

The devil’s in the details.

I’ll get right to it. There’s one thing above all else that makes sugar poisonous. And that thing is fructose.

You see, sugar, otherwise known as sucrose, is 50% glucose and 50% fructose. Fructose is the sweetest part of sugar. It’s the thing that makes your favorite candy irresistible.⁴⁶

And it’s not just in sucrose. Fructose is highly present in high-fructose corn syrup (55%), agave syrup/nectar (84%), honey (50%), and any other syrup/added sugar you can think of.^47,48,49

And why is fructose so bad?

Well, unlike glucose, which is mostly broken down by insulin, fructose is 100% processed by the liver. This is very similar to how alcohol behaves in the body.^50,51 In the process, the following things happen:

• Fat deposits in your liver increase, which ultimately leads to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.⁵² (Hint: It’s essentially the same effect as alcoholic liver disease.⁵³)

• Insulin resistance increases, which makes your pancreas start producing way too much insulin. This shortchanges your brain’s ability to read signals that you’re full, causing you to overeat.^54,55 It also leads to Type II Diabetes.⁵⁶

• The insulin resistance elevates insulin-like growth factor (IGF), which can dramatically increase your risk for multiple types of cancer.⁵⁷

• The fats in your blood rise out of proportion, skyrocketing VLDL — the worst cholesterol in human nutrition. This condition is known as dyslipidemia, and it’s a MAJOR marker for heart disease.^58,59,60

• Uric acid, a byproduct of fructose metabolism, rises in your blood. This cranks up your blood pressure (hypertension). It also increases your risk for developing gout.⁶¹

And here’s something that will really shock you…

30% of the fructose you consume becomes fat in your body.^62,63

Yep, you read that right. 30%. And that’s compared to around 2% of glucose (think potatoes and rice) turning into fat.^64,65

So, take a look at that sugar cube next time you want to drop it into your coffee. You can actually see the portion of it that will become fat inside you.

And there’s another feature of fructose that makes all of this much, much worse…

Sweet Cocaine?

Perhaps the most insidious part about sugar is how hard it is to stop eating it. Sugar is, in fact, genuinely addictive.^66,67

And much of this addictiveness has to do with reward signals in your brain — specifically, the sweet reward, which is supplied directly by fructose.^68,69

The effect is so powerful that scientists in France, the U.S., and Canada have observed cocaine-addicted rats demonstrating a clear preference for the sweet reward over the cocaine they were addicted to.^70,71,72

And it doesn’t stop there. Fructose actually reprograms your body to overdose on sweet food.

You see, fructose messes up two things your brain uses to regulate your eating:⁷³

1. It blinds your brain to leptin, the hormone that makes you feel full.
2. It fails to stop ghrelin, the hormone that makes you feel hungry.

This brutal 1-2 punch turns you into an unstoppable eating machine. Combine this with the drug-level addictiveness of the sweet reward, and you have a serious problem on your hands.

To experience this effect in the real world, eat your fill of raw vegetables. When you feel like you can’t eat anymore, grab a piece of your favorite chocolate or candy and put it in your mouth. Chances are, you’ll reach for seconds.

In fact, if you’re anything like me, your eyes probably dilated at the thought of tasting that candy just now. Perhaps you even considered going and getting some.

Now you know why you can’t stop eating.

And now you know that what you can’t stop eating is a toxin.

And it gets even worse…

It’s everywhere you turn.

The absolute worst part about sugar (and the fructose it carries) is that food manufacturers put it in so much of what you eat. Here’s a few of the less obvious things that have added sugar in one form or another:

Sneaky Sugar Foods:

Beef jerky hides a surprising amount of sugar.

Bread
Beef Jerky
Yogurt
Pasta Sauces
Barbecue Sauces
Pretty Much ANY Sauces
Salad Dressings
Canned Soup
Peanut Butter
Coleslaw
Ketchup
Dried Fruits
Canned Fruits
Smoothies
Instant Oatmeal
Granola
Anything labeled “lowfat” or “fat free”
Anything processed

And then, there’s the matter of what we drink, which is one of the main ways we’re getting way too much fructose.

Sodas, for example, are loaded with fructose. And fruit juice has even more fructose than sodas.⁷⁴ Both drinks are bad news. And do you like to sweeten your coffee? How about your tea? Do you like flavored waters?

Thanks to the food industry’s penchant for feeding us sugar, fructose is coming at us from all angles.

You see, for most of our existence, we consumed 16-20 grams of fructose per day. Most of that came from whole fresh fruits. However, we’re now consuming 85-100 grams per day.⁷⁵

And most of that has happened in the last 30-40 years.⁷⁶ Is it any wonder we’re having so many health problems?

(Click here to share this with others on Facebook while you keep reading!)

So, what do I do?

You’ve stayed with me through the bad news, so here’s the good news:

While the problem is complicated, the solution is not.

Lustig made key suggestions I agree with in his presentation, and I’ve added some of my own. Here’s the combined list:⁷⁷

1) Cut out sugary drinks. This includes fruit juice.

This will remove a HUGE amount of fructose from your diet. If you do nothing else, do this. And avoid sugar in your coffee and tea. If you must sweeten it, use stevia. Drink water (regular, unflavored) more than anything else.

2) When you eat carbs, eat them with fiber.

3) When you’ve eaten, wait 20 minutes before going back for seconds.

4) For every minute you spend watching videos/movies/shows, exercise for one minute.

• Decreases stress and cortisol release, helping to keep you from stress-eating and storing fat.
• Speeds up metabolism. Basically, you burn off the sugar before it can turn into fat.
• Reduces insulin resistance, and all the problems that come with it.

5) Drink MORE water. PLAIN water.

And there you have it. The truth about sugar, and how to deal with it.

I urge you to start acting on these steps today. But don’t worry… You don’t have to do the whole list on the first day.

Many people incorporate these 7 steps one at a time. Take your time, and pay attention to how you feel. And don’t forget to congratulate yourself on your progress!

And as always, I hope you’ve found this enlightening. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. And if you’ve found this information helpful…

Don’t forget to share it with your friends and family!

So…what do you think of sugar now?

Blog me.

Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.

Gratefully your blog host,

michelle

Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)

If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)

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All content on this site are property of Michelle Moquin © copyright 2008-2016

“Though she be but little, she be fierce.” – William Shakespeare Midsummer Night’s Dream 

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Hey, Everyone,

From Newswire.com

UN Say United States Must Pay Compensation For Slavery

A UN panel of experts has issued a vividly horrific account of the plight black people have suffered in the United States, urging American authorities to establish a body that would be responsible for making reparations to the descendants of Africans who were brought to the US and sold into slavery. 

Vice News reports:

Speaking at a press conference in Washington, DC, three members of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent said that Congress should pass the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, a bill that Michigan Representative John Conyers last introduced in 2015.

Mireille Fanon Mendes-France, the working group chair and a French human rights expert, told VICE News that the US hadn’t properly addressed the legacy of enslavement or adequately provided necessary redress for those who are descended from Africans forcibly resettled in bondage.

“It’s been absolutely insufficient,” she remarked. “They are excluded, they are invisible. There is structural racism and structural discrimination, and they face that because of the pigmentation of their skin.”

Mendes-France, the daughter of the Martinique-born writer and leading black intellectual Franz Fanon, clarified that she is not in favor individual payments, as the idea of reparations is often presented in America. She applauded efforts in the Caribbean to sue the British government for centuries of slavery, and recommended that reparations in the US be funneled through the financing and “full implementation of special programs based on education, socioeconomic, and environmental rights.”

Mendes-France and fellow working group members Sabelo Gumedze of South Africa and Ricardo A. Sunga III of the Philippines spoke in the US capitol after an 11-day tour of the country, with additional stops in Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Jackson, Mississippi. The panel, staffed with different experts, last visited the US in 2010.

Though the group will not release a full report of its findings until a Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva in September, each member read from a lengthy preliminary statement that touched on mass incarceration, police brutality, lack of housing, and the US government’s failure to ratify a number of international human rights treaties.

“Despite substantial changes since the end of the enforcement of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the domination of one group over another continues to negatively impact the civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights of African-Americans today,” said the group’s preliminary report. “The persistent gap in almost all the human development indicators, such as life expectancy, income and wealth, level of education and even food security… reflects the level of structural discrimination that creates de facto barriers for people of African descent to fully exercise their human rights.”

The three experts roundly criticized what they called a lack of gun control and the passage of stand-your-ground laws in several states, saying that they demonstrated how “the state is also not acting with due diligence to protect the rights of African-American communities.”

Citing the killings by police of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, Oscar Grant, and Marlon Brown — among others — the panel added that they were “concerned about the alarming levels of police brutality and excessive use of lethal force by law enforcement officials committed with impunity.”

The working group said it was unacceptable that there remained no “national system to track killings committed by law enforcement officials.”

Among its recommendations, the working group said that Washington should allow the independent monitoring of jails and prisons in the US and consider inviting the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as well as a separate working group focused on arbitrary detention, to evaluate conditions at detention facilities.

The preliminary report recognized several initiatives undertaken nationally since 2010, including a recent executive order aimed at reducing the number of federal prisoners that are kept in solitary confinement. It also highlighted the work of a congressional task force determining that punitive mandatory sentences for drug crimes led to prison overcrowding. The group also noted that the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration’s healthcare overhaul, had allowed 2.3 million black people to obtain health insurance.

But the panel added that “despite the positive measures… the Working Group is extremely concerned about the human rights situation of African-Americans.” Despite pushback against mandatory minimum sentencing, the group said that the war on drugs has led “to mass incarceration that is compared to enslavement, due to exploitation and dehumanization of African-Americans.”

The preliminary report highlighted pollution and other environmental concerns — including the ongoing scandal over lead contamination in Flint, Michigan’s water supply — which the experts said disproportionately affect minority communities across the country.

As it did in 2010, the panel also heavily censured US states that prevent individuals from voting based on their criminal histories, and those that have in recent years implemented stringent voter-ID laws. According to the Sentencing Project, 5.85 million Americans cannot cast ballots due to felony convictions, including one out of every 13 blacks.

“Especially considering that people of African descent are being targeted for racial profiling and disproportionate sentencing, in our view the right to vote is so important that it must be guaranteed to everyone,” Sunga said.

Sunga added that he was particularly concerned about policing in schools, where “children are being charged with misdemeanors… leading to the school-to-prison pipeline, this vicious cycle.”

“That actually creates the conditions, recreates the current situation, and we’d certainly like to have that matter addressed,” he said.

Several activists who had spoken with the working group this year or during past visits were present in Washington on Friday. Michael Scott, the CEO of Equity Matters, a nonprofit in Baltimore that promotes access to healthcare, said that the experts had this year inquired about the gap between existing policies aimed at curbing discrimination and their enforcement.

“There are many laws on the books, like affirmative fair housing, that do not get enforced,” he said.

The working group noted that because the US has failed to ratify so many international human rights treaties — among them those concerning the rights of women and children and a protocol of the Convention Against Torture that allows for international inspection — “African-Americans do not have the possibility to bring their cases or individual complaints to regional and international bodies when they have exhausted all domestic remedies at the state and federal level, as they are not party to the protocols which would allow them to bring complaints.”

“Furthermore, international human rights treaties cannot be invoked in national courts as there is no enabling legislation,” the group added.

Also in attendance was Baltimore attorney and activist Stephanie Franklin.

“People see us as very different,” she said of black people in the US. “They see us as not facing the same issues. But we are. It’s poverty, healthcare issues, cultural issues, housing issues, environmental justice issues, reproductive justice issues — clearly, criminal justice issues. It runs the gamut.”

“Now the question is what is the US government going to do with the recommendations,” she added, “and how we as activists of civil society are going to hold the US accountable for all the human rights violations that are happening to black people in this country.”

 *****

Readers: Of course there is no national system to track how many thugs with guns have killed OTWs. Now, why would they want to track that? Because the numbers would be staggering and a pattern would be visible. It should be unacceptable and something needs to be done about it.

Hooray for Obamacare. It has given so much to so many people. And more still needs to happen.

Mass incarceration = Modern day enslavement.

Lots more to say here. Your turn. Blog me.

Peace out. 

Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.

Gratefully your blog host,

michelle

Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)

If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)

Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:

Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129

Thank you for your loyal support!

All content on this site are property of Michelle Moquin © copyright 2008-2016

“Though she be but little, she be fierce.” – William Shakespeare Midsummer Night’s Dream 

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