Tuesday, October 23, 2012


5 Weird and Frightening Effects of Fracking You May Not Know About.



Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Boule


This article was published in collaboration with GlobalPossibilities.org.


What comes to mind when you think of fracking? Perhaps it’s images of tap water being lit on fire or stories of families suffering health problems after nearby wells are fracked. Indeed, the health and environmental impacts of fracking are being documented, but it’s important to know that fracking is a catalyst for widespread negative consequences. This list includes five effects of fracking you may not have heard about.

1. Methane Geysers
This past June, a methane geyser was found in Pennsylvania’s Tioga County. Yes, a geyser — shooting methane-infused water 30 feet up in the air.

Once the geyser was discovered, the county immediately turned to Shell, which was drilling in three nearby locations. Shell and the Department of Environmental Protection began investigating, and it was correctly suspected that an abandoned well from the 1930s contributed to the problem. Last week, a new report confirmed that Butters well, drilled in 1932, was part of the chain reaction that triggered the geyser. But the main problem was Shell’s fracking, as it displaced methane pockets underground, which then moved into Butters well and shot up to the surface.

Improperly abandoned wells, like Butters well, are hard to uncover, as they were drilled long before permits were required or any kind of records were kept. With as many as 300,000 wells drilled in Pennsylvania over the past 150 years, it’s unknown how many abandoned wells there may be that could be dangerous. For example, the DEP informed Shell of Butters well, but there was no information on whether or not it had been plugged. Meanwhile, regulators don’t require drilling companies to search for, inspect and plug abandon wells.

Though abandoned wells provide an easy pathway for methane to reach the earth’s surface, once displaced by fracking, the harmful gas can also make its way upward through cracks in the ground. Methane is an odorless, flammable gas that can cause breathing problems at high concentrations and is more than 20 times more effective in trapping heat and contributing to global warming than carbon dioxide.

2. Stolen Land
What happens if you’re a land owner who lives on a profitable mineral site, but doesn’t want corporations fracking on your land? Well, apparently, they will maneuver a way to frack your land anyway.

In a new report published last week, Reuters explored oil and gas companies’ nationwide land grab. The report focused on Chesapeake Energy Corporation, which has become the leader in petitioning state agencies when land owners refuse to sign over their land to fracking or oil drilling companies. In Texas, since 2005, Chesapeake had made 1,628 requests to drill on land that owners refuse to lease— nearly twice as many sought by its rival Exxon Mobil — and the state has only rejected five of them.

Chesapeake has made land-leasing one of its top priorities, controlling 15 million acres and spending more than $31 billion to acquire drilling rights. Playing the land grab game allows corporations to attain prospective drilling locations while locking out competition. With such a profitable opportunity, Chesapeake is making sure it’s getting its way by any means necessary. One employee was even caught saying on tape: “If properties don't want to sign, if we have 90 percent secured of the well that we need, we have the power to put these people in the lease without their permission. …We can do whatever we want.”

When it comes to profit, property rights just don’t seem to matter. And a mix of money in politics, as well as a desire for profit, has weakened regulation.

"I don't think the state should be able to take a landowner's rights to generate a profit for a private company," said David Conrad, an Ohio resident who opposes fracking, but will soon have a Chesapeake well under his home.

However, as Reuters reported:
In its petition, Chesapeake told regulators its proposed drilling unit could produce 4.5 million barrels of oil and 3.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas — if the plots of the 49 land owners who didn't lease their property to Chesapeake were included.

If not, Chesapeake said, the unit would be 75 percent less productive and would miss out on an additional $71 million in revenue, according to its application. That math carried the day.

3. Waste-Filled Wine
If you don’t hate fracking already, what if you learned that it can affect wine? Furious? Me too.

Vineyard owners in California are growing increasingly wary of fracking as gas companies begin preliminary operations. Venoco has started exploring Monterey Shale for both oil and gas drilling. Last year, the company filed an application for drilling permits in Monterey County, according to Simon Salinas, a member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, and it already holds hundreds of thousands of acres in the formation, has drilled more than 20 wells and has invested $100 million in oil exploration.

With vineyards and farmlands covering 200,000 acres of Monterey that help make up an $8 billion agricultural business, Salinas told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Anything that can taint our water and food supply could be devastating to our economy.”

Paula Getzelman, a grape-grower in Monterey, said, “If you don't have a good water supply, your land is worthless.”

Besides fears of contaminated water, Salinas also mentioned that when residents realize the fracking process uses millions of gallons of water that they need for their crops, they will be quite upset.

But even if these threats don’t come to fruition, residents are still concerned that fracking will have a negative effect on their marketability. After all, with cities like Napa and Sonoma not too far away, who’s going to want Monterey’s fracking wine?

Across the country, in Brooklyn, NY, a winery with similar fears about fracking in the Marcellus shale, recently hosted an anti-fracking benefit.

The winery stated on its Web site:
The potential for fracking affects Brooklyn Winery, as we source grapes for our wine from a number of vineyards in New York state and many of our wine bar’s seasonal menu items include ingredients grown on upstate farms.

4. Dairy Cows At Risk
Got milk? Maybe not for long. According to research from Penn State University, fracking has been found to reduce dairy production.

The university researchers set out to uncover how fracking in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale region is affecting dairy farming, the state’s top agricultural sector. The researchers examined dairy cow numbers, milk production and fracking activity among various counties in Pennsylvania between 2007 and 2010. They found that counties with 150 or more Marcellus Shale wells saw a 19 percent decrease in dairy cows, while counties with no wells saw only a 1.2 percent decrease. In a similar fashion, milk production in these counties with 150 or more wells declined by an average of 18.5 percent, while counties with no wells had about a 1 percent decline.

This research seems to challenge the popular narrative that farmers use the money they receive from fracking companies through leasing their land to improve their farms. The researchers note that additional research is needed to figure out the exact cause of the decrease of dairy production. One researcher wondered whether farmers were taking the money they received from their leases and going into a new occupation, or if they are being forced out of farming due to fracking’s environmental effects or a decrease in their farm’s marketability.

5. Contaminated Food, Stillborn Calves and Poisoned Animals
Imagine fracking fluid seeping out of your next burger — not appetizing? It may be a reality as more and more livestock are raised near fracking sites. Hundreds of animals have already been affected after coming into contact with fracking fluid. Last year, 28 beef cattle in Pennsylvania were exposed to the fluid. Only three of the 11 calves these cattle gave birth to survived. In Louisiana a few years ago, 16 cows dropped dead after drinking fracking fluid.

As New York Governor Cuomo soon decides whether or not to frack in the state’s economically struggling areas, Rita Yelda of Food & Water Watch recently wrote a commentary urging him to consider fracking’s detrimental effects on food.

She wrote:
New York is a national leader in a variety of agricultural products, and about 25 percent of the state’s land area is used for food production. This space may end up being shared with thousands of air polluting drill rigs, and could also be affected by soil contamination from leaks, flares, explosions, fires and experimental waste disposal methods.

Definitely doesn’t sound delicious.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alyssa Figueroa is an editorial fellow at AlterNet. She is a recent Ithaca College graduate who double-majored in journalism and politics.  

Friday, October 19, 2012

Why Are Americans So Easy to Manipulate and Control?


AlterNet / By Bruce E. Levine


The shopper, the student, the worker, and the voter are all seen by consumerism and behaviorism the same way: passive, conditionable objects.


What a fascinating thing! Total control of a living organism! — psychologist B.F. Skinner
The corporatization of society requires a population that accepts control by authorities, and so when psychologists and psychiatrists began providing techniques that could control people, the corporatocracy embraced mental health professionals.

In psychologist B.F. Skinner’s best-selling book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), he argued that freedom and dignity are illusions that hinder the science of behavior modification, which he claimed could create a better-organized and happier society.

During the height of Skinner’s fame in the 1970s, it was obvious to anti-authoritarians such as Noam Chomsky (“The Case Against B.F. Skinner”) and Lewis Mumord that Skinner’s worldview—a society ruled by benevolent control freaks—was antithetical to democracy. In Skinner’s novel Walden Two (1948), his behaviorist hero states, “We do not take history seriously”; to which Lewis Mumford retorted, “And no wonder: if man knew no history, the Skinners would govern the world, as Skinner himself has modestly proposed in his behaviorist utopia.”

As a psychology student during that era, I remember being embarrassed by the silence of most psychologists about the political ramifications of Skinner and behavior modification.

In the mid-1970s, as an intern on a locked ward in a state psychiatric hospital, I first experienced one of behavior modification’s staple techniques, the “token economy.” And that’s where I also discovered that anti-authoritarians try their best to resist behavior modification. George was a severely depressed anti-authoritarian who refused to talk to staff but, for some reason, chose me to shoot pool with. My boss, a clinical psychologist, spotted my interaction with George, and told me that I should give him a token—a cigarette—to reward his “prosocial behavior.” I fought it, trying to explain that I was 20 and George was 50, and this would be humiliating. But my boss subtly threatened to kick me off the ward. So, I asked George what I should do.

George, fighting the zombifying effects of his heavy medication, grinned and said, “We'll win. Let me have the cigarette.” In full view of staff, George took the cigarette and then placed it into the shirt pocket of another patient, and then looked at the staff shaking his head in contempt.

Unlike Skinner, George was not “beyond freedom and dignity.” Anti-authoritarians such as George—who don’t take seriously the rewards and punishments of control-freak authorities—deprive authoritarian ideologies such as behavior modification from total domination.

Behavior Modification Techniques Excite Authoritarians

If you have taken introductory psychology, you probably have heard of Ivan Pavlov’s “classical conditioning” and B.F. Skinner's “operant conditioning.”

An example of Pavlov's classical conditioning? A dog hears a bell at the same time he receives food; then the bell is sounded without the food and still elicits a salivating dog. Pair a scantily-clad attractive woman with some crappy beer, and condition men to sexually salivate to the sight of the crappy beer and buy it. The advertising industry has been utilizing classical conditioning for quite some time.

Skinner's operant conditioning? Rewards, like money, are “positive reinforcements”; the removal of rewards are “negative reinforcements”; and punishments, such as electric shocks, are labeled in fact as “punishments.” Operant conditioning pervades the classroom, the workplace, and mental health treatment.

Skinner was heavily influenced by the book Behaviorism (1924) by John B. Watson. Watson achieved some fame in the early 1900s by advocating a mechanical, rigid, affectionless manner in child rearing. He confidently asserted that he could take any healthy infant and, given complete control of the infant’s world, train him for any profession. When Watson was in his early forties, he quit university life and began a new career in advertising at J. Walter Thompson.

Behaviorism and consumerism, two ideologies which achieved tremendous power in the twentieth century, are cut from the same cloth. The shopper, the student, the worker, and the voter are all seen by consumerism and behaviorism the same way: passive, conditionable objects.

Who are Easiest to Manipulate?
Those who rise to power in the corporatocracy are control freaks, addicted to the buzz of power over other human beings, and so it is natural for such authorities to have become excited by behavior modification.
Alfie Kohn, in Punished by Rewards (1993), documents with copious research how behavior modification works best on dependent, powerless, infantilized, bored, and institutionalized people. And so for authorities who get a buzz from controlling others, this creates a terrifying incentive to construct a society that creates dependent, powerless, infantilized, bored, and institutionalized people.

Many of the most successful applications of behavior modification have involved laboratory animals, children, or institutionalized adults. According to management theorists Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham in Work Redesign (1980), “Individuals in each of these groups are necessarily dependent on powerful others for many of the things they most want and need, and their behavior usually can be shaped with relative ease.”
Similarly, researcher Paul Thorne reports in the journal International Management (“Fitting Rewards,” 1990) that in order to get people to behave in a particular way, they must be “needy enough so that rewards reinforce the desired behavior.”

It is also easiest to condition people who dislike what they are doing. Rewards work best for those who are alienated from their work, according to researcher Morton Deutsch (Distributive Justice, 1985). This helps explain why attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-labeled kids perform as well as so-called “normals” on boring schoolwork when paid for it (see Thomas Armstrong’s The Myth of the A.D.D. Child, 1995). Correlatively, Kohn offers research showing that rewards are least effective when people are doing something that isn’t boring.

In a review of the literature on the harmful effects of rewards, researcher Kenneth McGraw concluded that rewards will have a detrimental effect on performance under two conditions: “first, when the task is interesting enough for the subjects that the offer of incentives is a superfluous source of motivation; second, when the solution to the task is open-ended enough that the steps leading to a solution are not immediately obvious.”

Kohn also reports that at least ten studies show rewards work best on simplistic and predictable tasks. How about more demanding ones? In research on preschoolers (working for toys), older children (working for grades) and adults (working for money), all avoided challenging tasks. The bigger the reward, the easier the task that is chosen; while without rewards, human beings are more likely to accept a challenge.
So, there is an insidious incentive for control-freaks in society—be they psychologists, teachers, advertisers, managers, or other authorities who use behavior modification. Specifically, for controllers to experience the most control and gain a “power buzz,” their subjects need to be infantilized, dependent, alienated, and bored.

The Anti-Democratic Nature of Behavior Modification
Behavior modification is fundamentally a means of controlling people and thus for Kohn, “by its nature inimical to democracy, critical questioning, and the free exchange of ideas among equal participants.”
For Skinner, all behavior is externally controlled, and we don’t truly have freedom and choice. Behaviorists see freedom, choice, and intrinsic motivations as illusory, or what Skinner called “phantoms.” Back in the 1970s, Noam Chomsky exposed Skinner’s unscientific view of science, specifically Skinner’s view that science should be prohibited from examining internal states and intrinsic forces.

In democracy, citizens are free to think for themselves and explore, and are motivated by very real—not phantom—intrinsic forces, including curiosity and a desire for justice, community, and solidarity.
What is also scary about behaviorists is that their external controls can destroy intrinsic forces of our humanity that are necessary for a democratic society.

Researcher Mark Lepper was able to diminish young children’s intrinsic joy of drawing with Magic Markers by awarding them personalized certificates for coloring with a Magic Marker. Even a single, one-time reward for doing something enjoyable can kill interest in it for weeks.

Behavior modification can also destroy our intrinsic desire for compassion, which is necessary for a democratic society. Kohn offers several studies showing “children whose parents believe in using rewards to motivate them are less cooperative and generous [children] than their peers.” Children of mothers who relied on tangible rewards were less likely than other children to care and share at home.

How, in a democratic society, do children become ethical and caring adults? They need a history of being cared about, taken seriously, and respected, which they can model and reciprocate.

Today, the mental health profession has gone beyond behavioral technologies of control. It now diagnoses noncompliant toddlers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and pediatric bipolar disorder and attempts to control them with heavily sedating drugs. While Big Pharma directly profits from drug prescribing, the entire corporatocracy benefits from the mental health profession’s legitimization of conditioning and controlling.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bruce E. Levine, a practicing clinical psychologist, writes and speaks about how society, culture, politics and psychology intersect. His latest book is Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite . His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

Friday, October 12, 2012


Body Language And Lies: 21 Signs For Detecting A Liar.



A look at 21 common verbal and body language signs that betray a liar.


Wouldn't you love to be able to detect a liar? Lies are usually easy to spot when you know what signs to look for. A liar betrays him or herself in a number of ways with verbal and body language. By watching for certain body language and by listening for specific spoken signs while a liar tells a tale, you'll be wise to it in no time.

As a disclaimer, none of the verbal and body language signs herein are proof that lies are being told. Verbal and body language can provide signs that you're dealing with a liar, but every listed quirk of verbal and body language also surface in other situations. However, if you suspect you're hearing lies, one of these signs can bolster your doubt; two or more signs can make you confident you're interacting with a liar. Conversely, a lack of these tangible signs doesn't mean the truth is being told. Practiced or gifted liars can flawlessly conceal lies.

21 COMMON VERBAL AND BODY LANGUAGE SIGNS OF A LIAR

1 - Everybody knows a liar avoids eye contact. Even the liar. So, just as often as eye contact is avoided during the telling of lies, a liar often makes prolonged eye contact. The body language can go the traditional way, or the liar may overcompensate to the other extreme when trying to hide the lies.

2 - A liar often subconsciously seeks a symbolic buffer between him or herself and the person being lied to. One of the more prominent body language signs, this usually takes the form of a liar absent-mindedly placing an object between him or herself and the other person.

3 - When someone's body language assumes a defensive position, it can indicate lies. Most commonly, a liar folds his or her arms or legs. A small step or two backwards falls into this category of defensive signs as well.

4 - Lies are easiest to tell when they're not told, per se. Evasive answers and statements (i.e., "Why would I do that?") can indicate the truth is being avoided by a frightened liar. Similarly, incredulous repetition of accusatory questions in lieu of responses can also point to forthcoming lies.

5 - Watch for body language indicating a dry mouth. Commonly, the signs are frequent lip licking, swallowing, or sipping a beverage.

6 - Silence is uncomfortable to a liar. It provides opportunity for the other person to think and detect the lies. A liar tries to fill all pauses, often resulting in pointless or odd conversation and non-sequiturs, both telling signs to look for.

7 - Reserved or stiff body language, as if to avoid drawing attention, is a key sign of lies. Often the liar holds his or her arms, legs, and head rigid. This can even be looked at as a lack of body language.

8 - A liar gestures and makes expressions deliberately to make lies convincing. With attention to body language, you may notice gestures and expressions are slightly misaligned with the statements. If body language doesn't flow naturally with verbal language, it's being forced--probably for a reason. Such signs also include expressions that appear inauthentic (like a fake smile, notable because it doesn't narrow the eyes or wrinkle facial skin as authentic smiles do).

9 - Lies require thought and attention to detail, especially when told on the spot. Body language indicating excessive thought processes (you can "see the gears turning") can be a telling body language sign of a liar. Also, when someone is trying to recall something that happened, they usually gaze upward; conversely, when someone is pretending to recall something, they usually gaze downward.

10 - One of the more visible signs of lies is sweat. Most commonly, a liar sweats on the forehead and palms. Forehead sweat is the easier to spot. However, watch for body language signs of sweat too: wiping the brow or drying hands on pants, a tablecloth, etc.

11 - Two signs of an adrenaline rush can be indicative of lies. While sweat falls under this category, the two key signs to watch for are a flushed face and dilating pupils. Both together should raise suspicion that you're dealing with a liar.

12 - Excessive gestures are important body language signs indicating lies. In a subconscious effort to enhance believability, a liar emphasizes words with unnaturally pronounced gesturing. Also on a subconscious level, the body language serves to divert attention from the dishonest words and face.

13 - Body language signs indicating nervousness are key to detecting lies. A liar often fidgets. This includes drumming fingers, biting or picking at fingernails, biting lips, twirling hair, and picking at or adjusting clothing. There are too many signs to list, but any similar body language can be taken as signs of lies.

14 - A liar frequently mumbles or speaks in a lowered, monotonous tone, especially at the exact time lies are being uttered. Such modulations in speech are signs that the liar lacks confidence that the lies are believable, or that the liar feels guilty about telling the lies. From a body language standpoint, these signs are often accompanied by a lowered head and slouching shoulders.

15 - Shifting from foot to foot is often the body language of a liar. Similarly, a liar doesn't always keep his or her feet flat on the ground (whether standing or sitting). This falls under signs of the "flight instinct" category, which stems from fear or discomfort--both emotions triggered by telling lies.

16 - A liar usually tries to change the subject from whatever discussion is prompting the lies. Any conversational signs of this desire to move on before the subject is resolved should make you wary of lies.

17 - When you suspect lies, try changing the subject suddenly. Watch for a noticeable, immediate change in the body language of the suspected liar. If the person becomes more relaxed and comfortable, you've just witnessed a telling sign of a liar.

18 - When you notice someone keeping their body somewhat askew, pointed away from you, it may be a body language sign that lies are being told. It's debatable why a liar does this--it could be guilt, a flight instinct, facilitating a lack of eye contact, or any number of other subconscious body language workings.

19 - A liar frequently interrupts lies with throat clearing, small coughs, or sniffles.

20 - Body language that almost seems to be trying to literally conceal lies is often just that. Most often, a liar somehow covers his or her mouth and throat. This can mean touching these parts or holding something up in front of them. Touching other parts of the face is also consistent with the behavior of a liar.

21 - Beware people who use (and overuse) language like "honestly," "believe me," "to tell the truth," etc. They are almost certainly being deceptive.

Watching for these body language signs of a liar can make you incredibly difficult to lie to. With practice, you'll begin to notice them automatically, and detecting a liar will come naturally.

Thursday, October 11, 2012



'I Will Not Be Pleased' -- Your Health and the Nocebo Effect (Part 3).





By 




One key to an entirely new kind of medicine is suggested by the placebo effect. But for this promise to come true, we need to see placebos as part of a holistic system. The placebo effect has already existed for a long time, baffling medical researchers. The fact that a percentage of subjects will always get better when given a dummy drug is real, but the effect is difficult to harness, since it involves deception on the doctor's part. In earlier posts we've covered how the reverse of the placebo effect, known as the nocebo effect, indicates that some subjects also get worse when given a dummy drug.

Put the two effects together, and what you get is a feedback loop that sends positive and negative signals throughout the body. In other words, placebo and nocebo aren't odd, isolated phenomena. They are the tip of an invisible iceberg. To see the whole thing, you must start to reenvision the body itself.

The first step is to see the body as a dynamic process that is fully alive, organic, and intelligent. Outcomes depend on choices, beliefs, expectations, and other events that stream directly from the mind to every cell. Thus, placebo-nocebo is happening all the time. The reason we don't observe them is that the feedback loop that connects mind and body is hugely complex. Hundreds of signals, crisscrossing and often conflicting with one another, create more than one influence. You are the source of every influence; therefore, your body's response to experience is as complex as you are.

Mainstream medicine doesn't yet acknowledge these things. One of the most damaging byproducts of the scientific approach to the human body has been a false sense of determinism. In a machine, the moving parts are interlinked. A series of cause-and-effect is set up, and as the machine operates, each part determines how output follows input. This is true of the simplest machines (push a wheel and it starts spinning) and the most complex (the information you get from a computer depends on the information you put into it). On the same principle, medicine keeps searching for causes that determine effects, whether they be microbes, genes, chemical imbalances, or some other fixed determinant.

The problem is that the body, although is partially resembles a machine, is much more prone to influence than to fixed determination. A few disorders are caused by specific genetic mutations, such as sickle cell anemia, but now we know that genes interact in complex ways that change their output, just as the body interacts in a complex way with germs, sometimes resisting them and sometimes becoming infected. The picture is more confusing than simple cause-and-effect, but on the other hand it is more hopeful, for the simple reason than influences can be altered.

For the promise of preventive medicine to be fulfilled, you have to take responsibility for influencing the dynamic feedback loop that is your body. Even the worst influence, such as smoking, is not determinative. Even the best influence, such as daily exercise, isn't a guarantee. But if you create a matrix of positive influences, the total effect is a state of well-being. Popping a vitamin pill is a tiny event that may or may not benefit you. Well-being is a constant state that creates a benefit every minute of the day. Putting well-being first is the most significant change that everyone can make.

Yet few of us do. We pursue health and happiness in a haphazard, fitful way, for which we pay a high price when negative influences gain the upper hand over time. What are we doing in the meantime? Where is our main focus, if not on well-being? The answer isn't a mystery. People spend vast amounts of time focusing on work, relationships, distractions, escapism, and repressing stress, toxic memories, psychological blocks, and warning signals from their bodies. Well-being doesn't deny work and relationships. Prevention has gotten a bad name for being no fun. The emphasis on risk factors has made health seem like a gamble, with the body as a potential enemy.

To make your body an ally should be your goal, which means including it in your pursuit of well-being. Begin by looking at the menu of good and bad influences, and then decide how to maximize the good and minimize the bad ones. The list of positive influences is very long but worth examining, because it extends so much further than the seeming drudgery of "doing what's good for you."


Good influences:
  • Social closeness, love, bonding

  • Healthy, balanced diet

  • Lack of toxins in the diet

  • Good sleep every night

  • Moderate exercise

  • Not smoking

  • Using alcohol in moderation

  • Satisfying work

  • Play time

  • Self-aware activities like meditation and self-reflection

  • Stress reduction

  • Healing old psychological wounds

  • Forgiveness and compassion

  • Inspiration from poetry, scriptures, and other sources of wisdom

  • Learning new things

  • Making peace with yourself

  • Devotion to a selfless cause

  • Higher vision of life

  • Letting go of excessive control

  • Self-reliance and high self-esteem

  • Tuning in to your body

  • Not forcing or straining

  • Empathy, taking other people's feelings seriously

  • Contact with nature

  • Feeling safe

  • Learning to give and receive

  • Gratitude, expressing appreciation

  • Music, dance, the visual arts

  • Being with children

  • Innocence, openness, a lack of cynicism

  • Not being judgmental

  • Seeing the future with hope

  • Optimism

  • Taking quiet time every day

  • Giving up perfectionism

  • Practicing non-violence

  • Dealing with sources of anxiety and depression

  • Developing resilient emotions, the ability to bounce back

  • Personal growth

  • Service

  • Learning simply to be

No one is asking you to be a saint or even to tick off as many boxes as you can. The point is to expand your sense of well-being, showing you all the dimensions of life that send signals to your body. One could easily call all of these positive influences a kind of placebo, because you expect to be pleased. As for the menu of bad influences, rather than compile a separate list, it's enough simply to reverse everything on the positive list. All forms of toxicity, including toxic emotions, along with inertia, habit, lack of self-awareness, denial, avoidance, and close-mindedness would head the list.

Well-being will be taken more seriously when it becomes synonymous with fulfillment. A fulfilled life requires conscious attention. It includes many goals: developing a mature self, facing your demons, learning to value higher experiences, pursuing personal growth, and more. Whatever your full-time job is, the full-time purpose of your life is to find fulfillment. If you do, there is no better way to have a healthy body.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
deepakchopra com

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

'I Will Not Be Pleased' -- Your Health and the Nocebo Effect.

By Deepak Chopra, Author, 'Spiritual Solutions'; founder, The Chopra Foundation

For decades the placebo effect has existed basically as a nuisance, so far as the medical profession is concerned. Some people benefit from being given a sugar pill instead of an actual drug. This remarkable result cannot be marketed, however. It doesn't fall within the ethics of medicine to prescribe fake drugs. Therefore, a doctor in practice, whose training has drummed into him that "real" medicine means drugs and surgery, will shrug off the placebo effect as psychosomatic, or "It's all in your head."

This attitude shuts down a fascinating possibility, that a patient's expectations plays a major role in being well or getting sick.

The placebo effect is real medicine, because it triggers the body's healing system. One could argue that this is the best medicine, in fact, since a.) drugs do not trigger the healing system and b.) the placebo effect has no side effects. Staying well means that the body is taking care of itself -- and you -- through a feedback loop of chemical messages. Circulating throughout the bloodstream, lymphatic system, and central nervous system, chemical messages are crucial to the healing system, because they keep every cell in communication with every other.

Like it or not, every thought, decision, and action influences this feedback loop. The "or not" is important. Unwittingly, we damage the body's natural state of health with negative input. The fact that this input comes from the brain means that thoughts, moods, and expectations, however intangible, get translated into chemical messages just as surely as molecules of aspirin or glucose. You and I bear the responsibility of sending positive messages to our cells as opposed to negative ones.

This is a prelude to an overview of the nocebo effect that recently appeared in the New York Times. The placebo effect, which is based on a person's positive expectation, has been widely studied. Its opposite, the nocebo effect, has not. But clearly, a negative expectation can be powerful. Subjects who volunteer for drug trials sometimes drop out, for example, because the side effects of the new drug are too severe. This is true even when the side effects are being induced by a sugar pill and not a real drug. To quote from the Times article:

We found that 11 percent of people in fibromyalgia drug trials who were taking fake medication dropped out of the studies because of side effects like dizziness or nausea ... The discontinuation rates because of side effects in placebo groups in migraine or tension drug trials were as much as 5 percent.

If these percentages seem rather low, consider the following remarkable finding: A study on lactose intolerance took a group of subjects who complained of intestinal problems caused by lactose, the sugar found in milk. Some of these people had been diagnosed with lactose intolerance; others only suspected that they had it. When asked to take lactose by the experimenters, "44 percent of people with known lactose intolerance and 26 percent of those without lactose intolerance complained of gastrointestinal symptoms" -- and yet all had actually been given glucose, which doesn't do harm to the intestines.

The two authors of the Times article, Paul Enck and Winfried Häuser, are German professors of psychology and psychosomatic medicine respectively, and their overview covered 31 studies in the nocebo effect. The most telling case they refer to was a patient who took 26 placebo antidepressants in a suicide attempt and had his blood pressure fall "perilously" low, as would happen overdosing on real antidepressants. What makes this case so telling is that it demonstrates that the body can turn any mental intention into its chemical correlation.

The key to the placebo effect is that the patient expects a good outcome, while in the nocebo effect the expectation is of a bad outcome: I will be pleased versus I will not be pleased. Set aside the medical implications. We make judgments about all of our experiences every day, expecting them to turn out well or badly. Does this point to a holistic placebo versus nocebo effect? We'll explore that possibility in the next post.

Mainstream medicine has uncovered the placebo effect and discounted it at the same time. But more and more it appears that a patient's expectations, beliefs, and personality are important in the outcome of an illness. By extension, they are also important is preserving health. In the first post devoted to this topic, I cited new research on the opposite of the placebo effect, known as the "nocebo effect," in which negative expectations produce bad results. In drug trials, patients who are given dummy pills can have either positive or negative outcomes despite the fact that the fake drug is chemically inert.

If you're a researcher running such a trial, you'd simply discount the placebo-nocebo effect as "statistical margin of error." Nothing counts except the real drug and how it affects your subjects. But in real life, outside controlled experimental conditions, the implications spread much wider.

The body operates as a vast feedback loop, with each of 50 trillion cells sending and receiving messages all the time. To be understood, a message must be written in chemical form. The vast majority of messages are coded as brain chemicals that enter the bloodstream, along with minute electrical impulses generated in brain, heart, and muscles. When you delve into the structure of brain cells, the source of these electrochemical impulses, you find that genes must be activated to produce them. The picture becomes incredibly complicated -- imagine the body as a biological Internet with trillions of computers and just in the brain alone up to a quadrillion connections -- but the upshot is clear-cut. What you think, do, and say influences your body.

Two obvious correlates follow. The first is that holistic medicine is the only approach that attempts to consider the entire feedback loop, since conventional medical training is all about bits and pieces. The second is that the input that runs the body's feedback loop matches the output. Since the body is not a thing but a dynamic process of information exchange, the familiar cliché from the computer world, "garbage in, garbage out," applies.

It is up to you to keep the messages that course through your body positive instead of negative. No other duty in life is as important or vital to your health and well-being.
The proof lies in some new assumptions that are promising to overturn our conventional approach to illness and wellness:

  • Positive lifestyle changes in diet, exercise, and stress management actually cause your genes to alter their output. They are activated in life-enhancing ways.
  • Meditation seems to affect the production of the enzyme telomerase, which in turn builds telomeres, the end points of each chromosome. The fraying of telomeres is associated with aging; keeping telomeres intact is associated with the health and youthfulness of your genes.

  • It appears that fat isn't as neutral, chemically speaking, as was always assumed. Fat cells send out hormonal signals that appear to have deleterious effects, particularly in triggering inflammation.

  • Inflammation is being associated more and more with illness on every front, including cancer and heart disease. Inflammation is an imbalanced state, the opposite of homeostasis, the body's normal state of dynamic balance.

  • Diseases don't begin when symptoms first appear. In almost every chronic illness that sets in after childhood, there are precursors in cellular structure or genes that extend back to childhood, infancy, or even the womb. In other words, the feedback loop is processing input and output every second of your life, with long-term consequences.

  • Genes are rarely the determinative cause of disease. Far more often they make you susceptible to illness. What determines whether this susceptibility turns into full-blown illness is complex. But it's worth expanding on.


In the next post I'll cover how susceptibility works and what you can do to minimize its effects. What we've seen in this post is that holistic prevention isn't an alternative to something else. You are either preventing or not preventing illness all the time. There is no such thing as benign neglect. The feedback loop is inescapable. Rather than considering that a threat, we can create a new model of well-being that gives you much more control over your health for life. Ultimately, the feedback loop that embraces mind and body is the basis for a quantum leap in health for everyone.

To be continued
deepakchopra com

Thursday, October 4, 2012

5 Reasons Your Couch (and Your TV) Can Be Dangerous.



5 Reasons Your Couch (and Your TV) Can Be Dangerous



by 



We’ve grown accustomed to taking note about what it’s inside our food, about the chemicals used on it, about the conditions animals (if you eat animals) are raised in. But how many of us pay as much attention to the furniture we sit and sleep on and that our children play around?

Americans are as likely to be killed by their furniture as by terrorism, according to a 2011 report from the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Here are five reasons why.

1. To many of us, a couch is a refuge, that comfy spot to sink into after a long day. But lurking in many of our couches are potentially carcinogenic flame retardant chemicals, including one that has been banned for years in children’s sleepwear, Tris.

In 1976, Arlene Blum and Bruce Ames published an article in Science that reported that commonly-used flame retardants were mutagens and likely to be carcinogenic. As a New York Times magazine article recounts, manufacturers switched to another flame retardant, chlorinated Tris (TCEP, tris (2-carboxyethyl) phosphine). Blum and Ames found that it too was a mutagen and therefore potentially carcinogenic as well. Tris was also taken out from children’s sleepwear. (I still remember my childhood despair when my favorite Tris-filled pajamas were removed from my drawers).

For some 30 years, Blum embarked on a “storied career as a mountaineer,” becoming the first woman to attempt to scale Mt. Everest. But six years ago, she discovered that Tris is used in almost all upholstered furniture.

2. The foam in upholstered furniture is highly flammable and therefore treated with high concentrations of Tris.
In accordance with a 1975 regulation (Technical Bulletin 117) from a California agency, the Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation, furniture must be able to not ignite for 12 seconds when exposed to a small flame. Large quantities of flame retardants must therefore be added to comply with TB 117.
80 percent of the home furniture in the U.S. and most of the office furniture is made in accordance with TB 117 because, due to California’s size, it is “impractical for furniture makers to keep separate inventories for different markets.”

3. Flame retardants don’t stay in foam and can get into our bodies. From the New York Times magazine:
High concentrations have been found in the bodies of creatures as geographically diverse as salmon, peregrine falcons, cats, whales, polar bears and Tasmanian devils. Most disturbingly, a recent study of toddlers in the United States conducted by researchers at Duke University found flame retardants in the blood of every child they tested. The chemicals are associated with an assortment of health concerns, including antisocial behavior, impaired fertility, decreased birth weight, diabetes, memory loss, undescended testicles, lowered levels of male hormones and hyperthyroidism.

Blum herself got rid of all flame-retardant containing furniture in 2007, after her cat, Midnight, began losing weight. Midnight was diagnosed with feline hyperthyroidism; Blum wondered if there might be a connection with the disease and Penta, a flame retardant banned since 2004 that she found in high concentrations in Midnight’s blood. She got rid of her old couch as she suspected that flame retardants might be combining with the dust in her house; sure enough, the Penta levels in her household dust dropped to low levels afterwards.

Other studies have found that toddlers, who are more likely to put things into their mouths and play on the floor, have three times the level of flame retardants in their blood than their parents and that the chemicals can be passed via the placenta and breast milk from mother to child.

4. Other deadly chemicals are in our furniture. Formaldehyde, labeled a “known carcinogen” by the World Health Organization, is found in furniture made from pressed wood including particleboard, some plywood and medium density fiberboard, as Jennifer Grayson writes on the Huffington Post. A resin containing formaldehyde is used to bond the tiny pieces of wood together.

Furniture giant IKEA found itself mired in a controversy in the 1980s and 1990s after reports about formaldehyde in its products and has sought to minimize the chemical’s use, as well as that of lead. President Obama has since signed the 2010 Formaldehyde Standards for Composite Wood Products Act into law, to help protect consumers from formaldehyde exposure.

5. Beware of falling TV sets. A 2011 report from the Consumer Product Safety Commission found that, between 2008 and 2010, 43,400 injuries involving furniture required emergency room visits. Between 2000 and 2010, 293 fatalities occurred due to falling furniture, with 176 of those deaths resulting from televisions falling on people. More than half of injuries from falling furniture happened to children and 71 percent happened in private residences.

The solution is simple: make sure your appliances are securely stationed, especially if you have young children who don’t understand that grabbing at the dancing animals on a screen could be dangerous.
California legislators have been working to change the state’s flammability standards. Under California governor Jerry Brown, the Bureau of Home Furnishings has been charged to revise TB 117 so that chemical flame retardants are no longer mandated.

As Blum discovered, the chemical industry is lobbying fiercely against these efforts but she’s certainly up to fighting them, noting that “Mountaineers are famous for their stamina.” Flame retardants are also embedded in building insulation and electronics and Blum plans to continue to work to eliminate chemicals from these.
We may be able to make our couches safer, but there’s a lot more work to be done to make our households simply safe.


Is Alzheimers Just Another Form of Diabetes? How Our Diet May Be Destroying Our Brains.










There is a strong and growing body of evidence showing a link between the dreaded disease and our high sugar consumption.
When you raise the subject of over-eating and obesity, you often see people at their worst. The comment threads discussing these issues reveal a legion of bullies, who appear to delight in other people’s problems.
When alcoholism and drug addiction are discussed, the tone tends to be sympathetic. When obesity is discussed, the conversation is dominated by mockery and blame, though the evidence suggests that it can be driven by similar forms of addiction (citations 1,2,3,4). I suspect that much of this mockery is a coded form of snobbery: the strong association between poor diets and poverty allows people to use this issue as a cipher for something else they want to say, which is less socially acceptable.

But this problem belongs to all of us. Even if you can detach yourself from the suffering caused by diseases arising from bad diets, you will carry the cost, as a growing proportion of the health budget will be used to address them. The cost – measured in both human suffering and money – could be far greater than we imagined. A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer’s is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it. They call it diabetes type 3.

New Scientist carried this story on its cover this September(5): since then I’ve been sitting in the library trying to discover whether it stands up. I’ve now read dozens of papers on the subject, testing my cognitive powers to the limit as I’ve tried to get to grips with brain chemistry. While the story is by no means complete, the evidence so far is compelling.

Around 35 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease worldwide(6); current projections, based on the rate at which the population ages, suggest that this will rise to 100 million by 2050(7). But if, as many scientists now believe, it is caused largely by the brain’s impaired response to insulin, the numbers could rise much further. In the US, the percentage of the population with diabetes type 2, which is strongly linked to obesity, has almost trebled in 30 years(8). If Alzheimer’s, or “diabetes type 3”, goes the same way, the potential for human suffering is incalculable.

Insulin is the hormone which prompts the liver, muscles and fat to absorb sugar from the blood. Diabetes 2 is caused by excessive blood glucose, resulting either from a deficiency of insulin produced by the pancreas, or resistance to its signals by the organs which would usually take up the glucose.

The association between Alzheimer’s and diabetes 2 is long-established: type 2 sufferers are two to three times more likely to be struck by this dementia than the general population(9). There are also associations between Alzheimer’s and obesity(10) and Alzheimer’s and metabolic syndrome (a complex of diet-related pathologies)(11).

Researchers first proposed that Alzheimer’s was another form of diabetes in 2005. The authors of the original paper investigated the brains of 54 corpses, 28 of which belonged to people who had died of the disease(12). They found that the levels of both insulin and insulin-like growth factors in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients were sharply reduced by comparison to those in the brains of people who had died of other causes. Levels were lowest in the parts of the brain most affected by the disease.

Their work led them to conclude that insulin and insulin-like growth factor are produced not only in the pancreas but also in the brain. Insulin in the brain has a host of functions: as well as glucose metabolism, it helps to regulate the transmission of signals from one nerve cell to another, and affects their growth, plasticity and survival(13,14).

Experiments conducted since then appear to support the link between diet and dementia(15,16,17,18), and researchers have begun to propose potential mechanisms. In common with all brain chemistry, these tend to be fantastically complex, involving, among other impacts, inflammation, stress caused by oxidation, the accumulation of one kind of brain protein and the transformation of another(19,20,21,22). I would need the next six pages of this paper even to begin to explain them, and would doubtless get it wrong (if you’re interested, please follow the links on my website).

Plenty of research still needs to be done. But if the current indications are correct, Alzheimer’s disease could be another catastrophic impact of the junk food industry, and the worst discovered so far. Our governments, as they are in the face of all our major crises, appear to be incapable of responding.

In this country as in many others, the government’s answer to the multiple disasters caused by the consumption of too much sugar and fat is to call on both companies and consumers to regulate themselves. Before he was replaced by someone even worse, the former health secretary, Andrew Lansley, handed much of the responsibility for improving the nation’s diet to food and drinks companies: a strategy that would work only if they volunteered to abandon much of their business(23,24).

A scarcely-regulated food industry can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals which would otherwise prompt people to stop eating(25). It can bombard both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we discovered yesterday) use the freedoms granted to academy schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now banned from sale in maintained schools(26). It can kill the only effective system (the traffic light label) for informing people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating the products it sells. This is class war: a war against the poor fought by the executive class in government and industry.

We cannot yet state unequivocally that poor diet is a leading cause of Alzheimer’s disease, though we can say that the evidence is strong and growing. But if ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, here it is. It’s not as if we lose anything by eating less rubbish. Averting a possible epidemic of this devastating disease means taking on the bullies: those who mock people for their pathologies and those who spread the pathologies by peddling a lethal diet.

References:
1. Caroline Davis et al, 2011. Evidence that ‘food addiction’ is a valid phenotype of obesity. Appetite Vol. 57, pp711–717. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2011.08.017
2. Paul J. Kenny, November 2011. Common cellular and molecular mechanisms in obesity and drug addiction. Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 12, pp 638-651. doi:10.1038/nrn3105
3. Joseph Frascella et al, 2010. Shared brain vulnerabilities open the way for nonsubstance addictions: Carving addiction
at a new joint? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1187, pp294–315.
doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.05420.x
4. Ashley N. Gearhardt et al, 2010. Can food be addictive? Public health and policy implications. Addiction, 106, 1208–1212. ad. d_3301 1208..1212
doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2010.03301.x
5. Bijal Trivedi, 1st September 2012. Eat Your Way to Dementia. New Scientist.
6. Sónia C. Correia et al, 2011. Insulin-resistant brain state: The culprit in sporadic Alzheimer’s disease? Ageing Research Reviews Vol. 10, 264–273. doi:10.1016/j.arr.2011.01.001
7. Fabio Copped`e et al, 2012. Nutrition and Dementia. Current Gerontology and Geriatrics Research, Vol. 2012, pp1-3.
doi:10.1155/2012/926082
8. See the graph in Bijal Trivedi, 1st September 2012. Eat Your Way to Dementia. New Scientist.
9. Johanna Zemva and Markus Schubert, September 2011. Central Insulin and Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1 Signaling – Implications for Diabetes Associated Dementia. Current Diabetes Reviews, Vol.7, No.5, pp356-366. doi.org/10.2174/157339911797415594
10. Eg Weili Xu et al, 2011. Midlife overweight and obesity increase late life dementia risk: a population-based twin study. Neurology, Vol. 76, no. 18, pp.1568–1574.
11. M. Vanhanen et al, 2006. Association of metabolic syndrome with Alzheimer disease: A population-based study. Neurology, vol. 67, pp.843–847.
12. Eric Steen et al, 2005. Impaired insulin and insulin-like growth factor expression and signaling mechanisms in Alzheimer’s disease – is this type 3 diabetes?.
Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Vol. 7, pp.63–80.
13. Konrad Talbot et al, 2012. Demonstrated brain insulin resistance in Alzheimer’s disease patients is associated with IGF-1 resistance, IRS-1 dysregulation, and cognitive decline. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Vol.122, No.4, pp.1316–1338. doi:10.1172/JCI59903.
14. Naoki Yamamoto et al, 2012. Brain insulin resistance accelerates Aβ fibrillogenesis by inducing GM1 ganglioside clustering in the presynaptic membranes. Journal of Neurochemistry, Vol. 121, 619–628. doi: 10.1111/j.1471-4159.2012.07668.x
15. Eg:
Wei-Qin Zhao and Matthew Townsend, 2009. Insulin resistance and amyloidogenesis as common molecular foundation for type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, Vol.1792, pp.482–496. doi.org/10.1016/j.bbadis.2008.10.014,
16. Sónia C. Correia et al, 2011. Insulin-resistant brain state: The culprit in sporadic Alzheimer’s disease? Ageing Research Reviews Vol. 10, 264–273. doi:10.1016/j.arr.2011.01.001
17. T. Ohara et al, 2011. Glucose tolerance status and risk of dementia in the community, the Hisayama study. Neurology, Vol. 77, pp.1126–1134.
18. Karen Neumann et al, 2008. Insulin resistance and Alzheimer’s disease: molecular links & clinical implications. Current Alzheimer Research, Vol.5, no.5, pp438–447.
19. Eg: Lap Ho et al, 2012. Insulin Receptor Expression and Activity in the Brains of
Nondiabetic Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease Cases. International Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Volume 2012. doi:10.1155/2012/321280
20. Suzanne M. de la Monte, 2012. Contributions of Brain Insulin Resistance and Deficiency in Amyloid-Related Neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s Disease. Drugs, Vol. 72, no.1, pp. 49-66. doi: 10.2165/11597760
21. Ying Liu et al, 2011. Deficient brain insulin signalling pathway in Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes. Journal of Pathology, Vol. 225, pp.54–62. doi: 0.1002/path.2912
22. Konrad Talbot et al, 2012. Demonstrated brain insulin resistance in Alzheimer’s disease patients is associated with IGF-1 resistance, IRS-1 dysregulation, and cognitive decline. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Vol.122, No.4, pp.1316–1338. doi:10.1172/JCI59903.
George Monbiot is the author Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning