Learning how to roast Delicata and Spaghetti squash. I’ve never eaten either one before.
Author: Henry Barnard
I am a voracious reader and also enjoy writing. I often have a very different point of view than the popular one. I do see value in debate, and thought it might add to the public debate on controversial issues if I were to express my contrarian opinions. I also started keeping my poems recently (I've written little pieces my whole adult life but never kept any); and I've been a photographer now for over 25 years. So I will be adding an occasional poem and hopefully interesting photograph to the blog along the way, just to spice things up.
Gut Health
If you don’t eat enough soluble fiber, the gut bacteria — starved — will start to eat the lining of the intestines. That’s the beginning of leaky gut and other intestinal issues.
Vegan Cooks
So many really brilliant vegan youtubers. I regularly follow about 5 of them and have learned a lot from each. These people are just so clever and imaginative with food. Here is the latest genius vegan cook I’ve been following. Does these simple but very healthy and original meals:
My Philosophy
Deal with it or it will deal with you.
Letting Go
To live at peace with yourself, you have to learn to let go of issues that bother you, especially the ones you can’t do anything about. Just let them go. Just let them go.
Fiber and Your Health
The cause for poor health produced by the American diet is pretty clear. Most Americans do not eat enough fiber to satisfy even the minimum requirement, even though the American standard is set very low at 38 grams per day for men and 25 grams for women (aboriginal communities can eat up to 100 grams of fiber — personally, I think the standard for men should be 75 to 100 grams per day).
What happens when you don’t get an adequate amount of fiber from a diverse group of plant foods is that you undermine the good bacteria in the gut. These bacteria produce the metabolites or short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) that help to maintain the lining or barrier of the intestines as well as the blood/brain barrier of the brain.
If those SCFA are not produced in adequate amounts, this leads to the leaky gut syndrome in the intestines and permeability in the brain’s blood/brain barrier. Once this happens, you get toxins, pathogens, etc. escaping into the blood vessels from the intestines and into the brain through the blood/brain barrier, leading to widespread inflammation and ultimately, if chronic, various autoimmune diseases.
It all starts with inadequate fiber in the diet. That’s the underlying cause. There is no mystery to it. (Note: Using fiber powder is by no means an equivalent substitute for getting your fiber from actual plant foods.)
Anti-Inflammation Cocktail
Powders: turmeric, black pepper, ginger, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon. Mix a teaspoon into your black coffee in the morning.
Motivation
Motivation is at best a fickle friend.
“Demons”
Reading an interesting book Fast This Way by Dave Asprey. It’s about fasting but more than that — about overcoming whatever is holding you down. His life turned around when he went to a Shaman and ended up doing a 4-day water fast in a cave in New Mexico. One of his demons he confronted was a perennial sense of loneliness that began in childhood. Interested in what he has to say about technique in confronting one’s demons — just how to do that.
One of my demons that has always plagued me — social anxiety, a feeling of dread when in social situations like parties. That’s one of the many things I’d like to finally get past. I think it is probably a completely irrational fear that I need to finally confront and overcome instead of letting it dominate. Of course, I have many other “demons”.
An interesting point he makes relative to fasting is the difference between craving and real hunger. A lot of our poor eating habits today are driven much more by the former than the latter. Craving is very much a purely psychological reaction, whereas hunger is physical.
Avoiding Nuclear War
Taiwan solution…
The world glides silently toward nuclear war over Taiwan. The unthinkable has reality precisely because everyone dismisses it as unthinkable, yet China is adamant about Taiwan, as the US is adamant about its defense.
But nuclear war over Taiwan is not in anyone’s interest – not China’s or the US or Taiwan. It would mean the end of our civilization and a new dark-ages for mankind.
So what is to be done? How can this inevitable war and tragedy be avoided? The answer lies in the type of diplomacy exercised by the British over the control of Hong Kong — a gradual lending of hegemony to China as the dominant power over a number of years.
An administrative unit is set up over Taiwan that consists of 5 votes. Initially, 4 votes are controlled by Taiwanese and 1 vote by the Chinese. But, it is agreed at the onset, that…
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Henry's Views 