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.

Processed Foods

Best thing you can do for your diet and health is stop eating processed foods, which is about 85% of what you find in a typical supermarket.

Food companies are not interested in your health; they are interested in making money off of you with highly palatable but unhealthy processed foods.

Instead, learn how to cook with whole foods — real food, not crazy chemicals.

Get Healthy

Finland

Finland, another victim of the proxy war in Ukraine. They estimate there are 4000 pending bankruptcies in Finland. Why? The country’s economy, it turns out, was highly dependent on trade with Russia. All of that came to an end with the proxy war and the push to include Finland into NATO. All those Finish industries tied to that trade in any way are broke and going under. The general mood in Finland is now desperation.

Russian Majorities

My Healthy Chocolate Cake

The challenge I put to myself was to make a chocolate cake that was actually health-promoting. I use organic rolled oats instead of wheat four. I don’t add any sugar but sweeten with stevia, which has zero calories. The chocolate is from 100 percent pure cacao powder.

I’ve discovered that the chocolate taste is enhanced with blueberries. But what makes this chocolate cake really health promoting is the dandelion powder, which is full of minerals and vitamins but neutral in taste. Dandelion like kale is one of the most nutritious foods on the planet.

Another version of this is to replace the blueberries with cinnamon. Cinnamon and chocolate also enhance each other. I can also add crushed walnuts and/or add almond powder.

So these are chocolate cakes that have virtually no sugar but are very sweet, and are packed with vitamins, minerals, and good fats. One version is chocolate/blueberry, the other is chocolate/cinnamon.

Coffee

Muscle Loss

People should really think about muscle loss as early as age 30 when serious muscle loss begins. You prevent it then by doing resistance training with weights, and eating adequate amounts of both protein and collagen. But most people are unaware that aerobic exercise isn’t enough to prevent muscle loss, so they don’t start the resistance training, if at all, until they are older and have already sustained serious sarcopenia. Don’t be that person.

Old Age

Applaud Fake News

If you have truly free press, which is so important to have, you are going to have serious fake news. Fakes news — that is, exaggerated claims that bear little resemblance to reality but play to the views of a particular audience — is what you can expect if the press is truly free, because through this mechanism, the reporter gains further support from the targeted audience that shares the bias the report is supporting.

So, ironically, although we may lament the fact that the press is peddling anything but truth with fake news, that there is substantial fake news is encouraging in that it proves the press is truly free.

You get the same kind of ironic twist with free speech. You see the unfortunate slogan that “Hate speech is not free speech.” Actually, the opposite is true. If you do permit hate speech, then that shows you truly have free speech. Any impingement of free speech means you don’t have it.

Civil War in America