Thanks Giving to Our Best Friend

When this is the time to recall all who have been helping us live well, I take this opportunity to go beyond just humans. It is amazing that our best friend is totally blind, nourishes us day in and day out and we do not care much for it. It is the Earth Worm.

It constantly digs soil, eats dead plant material, mixes air and nutrient in soil and thus a free tiller cum decomposer for us. The end result is a virtuous cycle of more plant materials on that rich soil and more earth worms. As Wikipedia mentions "Richly organic topsoil populations of earthworms are much higher – averaging 500 worms m⁻² and up to 400 gm⁻² – such that, for the 7 billion of us, each person alive today has support of 7 million earthworms."

How can we thank this best friend of mankind (and plant and animals)? By less polluting our soil (and water): by using less of inorganic fertilizers and toxic pesticides and promoting more of organic fertilizers and natural pesticides. So simple but so effective. It will provide us better organic food, richer fertile soil and sustainable world. As someone has pointed out there are trillions of planets, but there is not a known 2nd one livable like our earth. So handle with care this mother earth and cherish its blessings. Before you throw the next toxic waste, think twice, it will come back to us in some form or other. Actually we will have to think even before, while procuring that toxic substance. Before we use chemicals as an option, be it

• those cosmetics we use for our makeup
• paints for walls on houses 
• fertilizers for our garden
• urea for our farmland
• that shiny color on our dress/car
• that sweet aroma on our soap
• that artificial flavor in our noodle

let us remember all those friends and families who have been tortured with painful diseases as its effect and also remember it may be us too.

Barley to fight Diabetes

Please refer to my earlier post: http://saveforus-healthforus.blogspot.in/2009/09/food-choices-to-control-diabetes.html

Often people have asked me what do I use for grain, in place of rice. I use Barley.
Why:
1. Because its glycemic index (how soon sugar goes to blood and how soon it goes out of blood making you hungry) is low. 20 - 30 just half of white rice.
2. Because its glycemic load (how much total sugar) for a serving of 150 gm is 11 just 1/3rd of rice for same 150 gm.
3. Because it is conveniently cooked exactly like rice. We use rice cooker, but with little more water.
After Barley is cooked, leaving the boiling water (rather than draining it), results in Barley soaking the water and getting plump and easier to chew and eat.

The awareness is building up and it is available in Amazon: http://amzn.in/csMTBxw
You have already experimented with Medicines. How about experimenting with food too.

You cannot flush me down the toilet.

Most of things that we use, which are beyond what my Grandma could recognize, involve some or other chemical. For example the shaving lotion, the soap, the AA or AAA batteries, the detergent liquid and powder, the perfumes, nail polish and its remover, lipstick....

When I think how those chemicals end I find all of those are going down the toilet. But are they?

They go to the water stream and then water cycle continues and most of it comes back to my dining table through fish food or apples. So though we forget about these, thinking that nature will recycle it, in reality, nature is not able to recycle/clean at the rate in which we make it dirty (pollute it). So next time we think of going beyond minimal need and buy such a thing, we will need to think how we can finally get rid of it from our system.

We the human beings have concentrated these chemicals through transformations on naturally occurring substances. But we have not thought of ways to reverse it. But given that the whole world, us and all other living beings, (plants and animals) are now distressed, we will have to address this. Just using these and flushing these out is just irresponsible.

Importance of home made yoghurt

I know, a lot of you in US and other cold environments find it convenient to buy Yoghurt. But there is a good reason why you should prepare it at home. The extra effort is worth it. The Yoghurt that you buy in shops, has already gone through a sterilization phase (to kill all good and bad bacterias) so that the product has a good shelf life. Thus you miss the essential probiotics, yogurt being a good natural source of probiotics. If you are wondering why probiotics is important refer to these articles:

Probiotics 101: Go with Your Gut
Probiotic as in Wikipedia

Now if you are wondering how to prepare Yoghurt in a cold place without Yogurt maker then here is my post to help: 
How to ferment stuff in moderately cold climate

Taste of Hydrogenated oil, Transfat, Vanaspati, Dalda you name it.

You may have observed French Fries don't taste that good when made at home. I asked myself what is the difference and met with the same ingredient used in plenty in my childhood. Its the Hydrogenated Oil used as the choice of cooking media for deep-frying.

Details of adverse health effects can be found in wikipedia. In my calculations it is the biggest killer in our generation. It raises the number of heart patients and blood pressure patients and then they suffer from other adverse effects of poor blood flow in the body.

What surprises is that it is not yet been banned in totality. Its still available in packaged foods in California. Even if you are trying to buy a cooking Oil for deep-frying at my local Costco at Sunnyvale the only one available was partially hydrogenated.

So next time you take a bite of Doughnut or eat that nice cake or munch those Mixtures be careful about what you are eating. Also note that even though a packaged label states trans_fat per serving is 0 gm it may very well be 0.499 gm per serving, as they are allowed to do rounding. For you though a poison is a poison. The available replacement of trans_fat seems to be Palm Oil, which is solid at room temperature, though it has been found out that Palm oil is not a good vegetable oil to be used in cooking (because palm oil results in adverse changes in the blood concentrations of LDL and apolipoprotein B just as transfat does).

So try to cook and eat fresh, rather than those 6 month old packaged foods, tasting like fresh, using the ingredients unsafe for you.

Further faqs and details.

You can google "transfat consumption in world" to see: http://www.tfx.org.uk/page297.html
They have been repeatedly called the “low hanging fruit” in global prevention of cardiovascular disease.

http://www.tfx.org.uk/ has some good details too.

Unless we ban it in totality the Poison my come back to our dinner table, in one form or other, as it is a cheap tasty preservative.

Probability theory and your last medical test result

Here is a probability problem based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem

Suppose you were tested for colon cancer and the test results are positive. Then what is the probability of your actually having colon cancer. You asked for data about accuracy of the test and here are they:

1. The test gives 10% false positive. i.e. Take a population of 100 healthy people, still the test will tell 10 have cancer.
2. The test gives 1% false negative i.e. Take a population of 100 confirmed colon cancer cases, still the test will tell 1 has no cancer.
3. The population to which you belong to has .1% probability of colon cancer i.e. 1 in 1000 has colon cancer.

The simple answer in your mind says that you have 90% chance of having cancer, because 10% false positive, i.e. 90% true positive. But that is not the case. To understand:

1. Let's say you take a population of 100000.
2. Then with 0.1% probability 100 had cancer and the test detected 99 of them as having cancer.
3. Also the test detected falsely 10% of all healthy i.e. 10% of 99900 as having cancer, i.e. 9990 as having cancer falsely.
4. So total population of cancer +ve by this test is 9990 + 99 = 10089 out of which 99 actually have cancer 
5. Now you belong to this group of having cancer and so your probability is 99 / 10089 i.e. 0.98%age i.e. roughly 1 in 100 chance.

Now what do you do after cancer detection. The Doctor says go for a 2nd test to make sure. Now consider the 2nd test is independent of the first one. Then if it detects +ve again then the joint probability of both detecting false cancer is, .99 * .99 = 0.98 i.e. chance improves to 2 in 100. Will you do 100 tests now! Also consider the 2nd test may not be totally uncorrelated to the first test. Then it will not even confirm to 2 in 100.

So next time a test result comes +ve, don't panic. The Doctor is not a statistician. Cool down and try to find a way to confirm either way.     

Why pumpkin is good for diabetic persons.

I came across this interesting post.

Glycemic Index: Do You Really Understand It?

For example it explains why Pumpkin is good for diabetic persons. Its a rare combination which can satisfy the normal sugar crave of diabetic  person without increasing glucose level.

The Glycemic Load

The GL gives people the ability to measure both the type and the amount of carbohydrate in food, giving an indication on how it acts on their blood sugar. The GI is great, but it doesn’t take into account the fact that some foods have a lot more carbohydrate in them than others. A good example is pumpkin. It has a GI of 75, which is very high. A typical 80-gram serving of pumpkin (which is just a few pieces) contains 4-grams of carbohydrate.

So to get the GL…you multiply the GI by the amount of Carbohydrate in the serving, and divide it by 100.

(75*4)/100 = 3

That is a very low GL. You would have to eat a truckload of pumpkin for it to have any effect at all on your blood sugar.

To Add to it from wikipedia about Pumpkin:
"

Phytochemical research

Preliminary research indicates that phytochemicals found in pumpkin may favorably affect insulin and glucose levels in laboratory diabetes models.^[27] Two compounds isolated from pumpkin paste and then fed daily to diabetic rats over six weeks, trigonelline and nicotinic acid, caused significant reductions in blood glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides, indicating improvement in the diabetic condition.^[28]

^"