Handful of Salt – Beautiful Short Story

The old Master instructed the unhappy young lady to put a handful of salt in a glass of water and then to drink it.

“How does it taste?” the Master asked. “Very bad” Said the lady.

The Master then asked the young lady to take another handful of salt and put it in the lake.

The two walked in silence to the nearby lake and when the apprentice swirled his handful of salt into the lake, the old man said, “Now drink from the lake.”

As the water dripped down the young lady’s chin, the Master asked, “How does it taste?” “Good!” remarked the apprentice. “Do you taste the salt?” asked the Master.

“No,” said the young lady.

The Master said, “The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount we taste the ‘pain’ depends on the container we put it into.

So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things….. Stop being a glass. Become a lake

Monkeys for sale!!

Once upon a time in a village, a man announced to
the villagers that he would buy monkeys for Rs 10. The
villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around,
went out to the forest and started catching
them..
The man bought thousands at Rs 10 and as supply started
to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort.
He further announced that he would now buy at
Rs20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and
they started catching monkeys again.
Soon the supply diminished even further and people started
going back to their farms.
The offer rate increased to Rs 25 and the supply of
monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even
see a monkey, let alone catch it!
The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at Rs
50!
However, since he had to go to the city on some business,
his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.
In the absence of the man, the assistant told the
villagers. Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the
man has collected. I will sell them to you at Rs
35 and when the man returns from the city, you can
sell it to him for Rs 50.
" The villagers squeezed up with all their savings and bought
all the monkeys.
Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only
monkeys everywhere!
Welcome to the 'Stock Market'

LATEST CANCER INFORMATION from Johns Hopkins

AFTER YEARS OF TELLING PEOPLE CHEMOTHERAPY IS THE ONLY WAY TO TRY AND ELIMINATE CANCER, JOHNS HOPKINS IS FINALLY STARTING TO TELL YOU THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE WAY …

1. Every person has cancer cells in the body. These cancer cells do not show up in the standard tests until they have multiplied to a few billion. When doctors tell cancer patients that there are no more cancer cells in their bodies after treatment, it just means the tests are unable to detect the cancer cells because they have not reached the detectable size.

2. Cancer cells occur between 6 to more than 10 times in a person's lifetime.

3. When the person's immune system is strong the cancer cells will be destroyed and prevented from multiplying and forming tumors.

4. When a person has cancer it indicates the person has multiple nutritional deficiencies. These could be due to genetic, environmental, food and lifestyle factors.

5. To overcome the multiple nutritional deficiencies, changing diet and including supplements will strengthen the immune system.

6. Chemotherapy involves poisoning the rapidly-growing cancer cells and also destroys rapidly-growing healthy cells in the bone marrow, gastro-intestinal tract etc, and can cause organ damage, like liver, kidneys, heart, lungs etc.

7. Radiation while destroying cancer cells also burns, scars and damages healthy cells, tissues and organs.

8. Initial treatment with chemotherapy and radiation will often reduce tumor size. However prolonged use of chemotherapy and radiation do not result in more tumor destruction.

9. When the body has too much toxic burden from chemotherapy and radiation the immune system is either compromised or destroyed, hence the person can succumb to various kinds of infections and complications.

10. Chemotherapy and radiation can cause cancer cells to mutate and become resistant and difficult to destroy. Surgery can also cause cancer cells to spread to other sites.

11. An effective way to battle cancer is to STARVE the cancer cells by not feeding it with foods it needs to multiple.

What cancer cells feed on:

a. Sugar is a cancer-feeder. By cutting off sugar it cuts off one important food supply to the cancer cells. Note: Sugar substitutes like NutraSweet, Equal, Spoonful, etc are made with Aspartame and it is harmful. A better natural substitute would be Manuka honey or molasses but only in very small amounts. Table salt has a chemical added to make it white in colour. Better alternative is Bragg's aminos or sea salt.

b. Milk causes the body to produce mucus, especially in the gastro-intestinal tract. Cancer feeds on mucus. By cutting off milk and substituting with unsweetened soy milk, cancer cells will starved.

c. Cancer cells thrive in an acid environment. A meat-based diet is acidic and it is best to eat fish, and a little chicken rather than beef or pork. Meat also contains livestock antibiotics, growth hormones and parasites, which are all harmful, especially to people with cancer.

d. A diet made of 80% fresh vegetables and juice, whole grains, seeds, nuts and a little fruits help put the body into an alkaline environment. About 20% can be from cooked food including beans. Fresh vegetable juices provide live enzymes that are easily absorbed and reach down to cellular levels within 15 minutes t o nourish and enhance growth of healthy cells.

To obtain live enzymes for building healthy cells try and drink fresh vegetable juice (most vegetables including bean sprouts) and eat some raw vegetables 2 or 3 times a day. Enzymes are destroyed at temperatures of 104 degrees F (40 degrees C).

e. Avoid coffee, tea, and chocolate, which have high caffeine. Green tea is a better alternative and has cancer-fighting properties. Water--best to drink purified water, or filtered, to avoid known toxins and heavy metals in tap water. Distilled water is acidic, avoid it.

12. Meat protein is difficult to digest and requires a lot of digestive enzymes. Undigested meat remaining in the intestines will become putrified and leads to more toxic buildup.

13. Cancer cell walls have a tough protein covering. By refraining from or eating less meat it frees more enzymes to attack the protein walls of cancer cells and allows the body's killer cells to destroy the cancer cells.

14. Some supplements build up the immune system (IP6, Flor-ssence, Essiac, anti-oxidants, vitamins, minerals, EFAs etc.) to enable the body's own killer cells to destroy cancer cells. Other supplements like vitamin E are known to cause apoptosis, or programmed cell death, the body's normal method of disposing of damaged, unwanted, or unneeded cells.

15. Cancer is a disease of the mind, body, and spirit. A proactive and positive spirit will help the cancer warrior be a survivor.

Anger, unforgiving and bitterness put the body into a stressful and acidic environment. Learn to have a loving and forgiving spirit. Learn to relax and enjoy life.

16. Cancer cells cannot thrive in an oxygenated environment. Exercising daily, and deep breathing help to get more oxygen down to the cellular level. Oxygen therapy is another means employed to destroy cancer cells.

Altered Gut Microbes Key to Bypass Success

human patients and animals changed after gastric bypass—becoming more like the microbiota in lean individuals. The new study set out to determine if those changes were caused by the surgery itself or by the subsequent weight loss. Image: iStockphoto

Changes in the population of microbial organisms in the gastrointestinal tract may underlie some of the benefits of gastric bypass surgery, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital have reported.

In the March 27 issue of Science Translational Medicine, the investigators described experiments in mice, finding that previously observed post-bypass alterations in the microbial population (also called the microbiota) are caused by the surgery itself, not by weight loss. Transferring samples of the changed microbiota to mice raised in sterile conditions induced weight loss in those animals without surgery.

“Previous research has shown that the gut microbiota of obese individuals—both mice and humans—are different from those of lean individuals and that transferring samples of obesity-associated microbiota into germ-free mice causes increased weight and body fat,” said Lee Kaplan, HMS associate professor of medicine and director of the Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition Institute at Mass General.

Kaplan is a co-corresponding author of the current paper.

“Our study suggests that the specific effects of gastric bypass on the microbiota contribute to its ability to cause weight loss and that finding ways to manipulate microbial populations to mimic those effects could become a valuable new tool to address obesity,” Kaplan said.

Getting the skinny on microbiota
Researchers have known for several years that gastric bypass causes changes that go far beyond limiting the amount of food that can be consumed. Individuals trying to lose weight through dieting alone usually experience increased hunger, less satisfaction after eating, greater desire for high-fat and high carbohydrate food and metabolic changes that conserve weight. In contrast, patients who have had gastric bypass surgery report feeling less hungry and more satisfied after eating, are more interested in eating low-calorie foods and expend greater amounts of energy after eating. They also show changes in the levels of hormones associated with appetite and hunger.

While previous studies showed that the gastrointestinal microbiota of human patients and animals changed after gastric bypass—becoming more like the microbiota in lean individuals—it was not clear if those changes were caused by the surgery itself or by the subsequent weight loss. The current study was designed to give a clearer picture of exactly how the microbiota change after bypass surgery, whether those changes are caused by the surgery itself and how they might contribute to the benefits of the procedure.

To do this, the investigators studied three groups of mice, all of which were obese from consuming a high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet at the outset of the study. One group was treated with a version of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, the most common gastric-bypass  procedure. The other two groups received sham operations in which a portion of the gastrointestinal tract was separated and then reconnected. One of the sham groups continued to receive the high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, while the other group was fed a reduced-calorie diet designed to induce weight loss.

Bypassing bypass surgery?
A week after the procedure, the bypass mice showed significant changes in their gastrointestinal microbial population, with an increase in bacterial groups usually seen in lean individuals and a drop in those commonly associated with obesity. By three weeks after the surgery, the bypass mice had lost around 30 percent of their body weight.

Minimal change was seen in the gut microbiota of animals receiving the sham procedure, even though those on a restricted diet lost the same amount of weight as those that had the bypass procedure. Precise measurements of several metabolic factors revealed that the bypass mice were expending more energy than the sham-treated mice without any change in activity levels.

To determine more precisely the effects of bypass-associated microbial changes, the investigators transferred samples of the gastrointestinal contents from each of the three groups into lean mice with germ-free gastrointestinal systems. Two weeks later, the animals receiving samples from bypass mice had lost a significant amount of weight, while those receiving samples from the sham-treated mice—including those that had lost weight through dietary restriction—had no change in weight.

Exactly how changes in gastrointestinal microbiota induce weight loss is a key question that needs to be investigated in future studies. But observed differences in the proportions of a particular group of nutrients—short-chain fatty acids—in the gastrointestinal contents of the animals, suggested that the different ways specific groups of microbes process certain foods could lead to significant changes in overall metabolism, particularly since short-chain fatty acids are known to have a role in metabolic regulation.

“We need to learn a good deal more about the mechanism by which a microbial population changed by gastric bypass exerts its effects—including whether it contributes to the improvement in diabetes and other metabolic disorders we see in patients having the procedure—and then we need to learn if we can produce these effects, either the microbial changes or the associated metabolic changes, without surgery,” Kaplan explained. “The ability to achieve even some of these effects without surgery would give us an entirely new way to treat the critical problem of obesity, one that could help patients unable or unwilling to have surgery.”

Peter Turnbaugh of the Harvard University Center for Systems Biology is co-corresponding author of the Science Translational Medicine report and Alice Liou, HMS Research Fellow in Medicine at the Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition Institute at Mass General, is the lead author.

The study was supported by National Institutes of Health grants DK088661, P50 GM068763, F32 DK095561, and P30DK034854 and by Ethicon Surgical Care.

Adapted from a Mass General news release.