Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn’t Honey | Food Safety News
So don’t think you are getting all the health benefits of the real deal with a bargain purchase…
Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn’t HoneyUltra-filtering Removes Pollen, Hides Honey OriginsBy Andrew Schneider | November 7, 2011More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn’t exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for Food Safety News.The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled “honey.”The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world’s food safety agencies.The food safety divisions of the World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others also have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources.honey-without-pollen-food-safety-news1.jpgIn the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration says that any product that’s been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn’t honey. However, the FDA isn’t checking honey sold here to see if it contains pollen.
via Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn’t Honey | Food Safety News.
Reliability Of Birth Memory: Observations from Mother and Child Pairs in Hypnosis | Birth Psychology
More food for thought:
For almost a century clinicians have encountered birth memories and wondered if they were real memories or creative fantasies. Empirical studies have revealed both the fallibility and validity of human memory. In this study a side-by-side comparison was made of birth memories obtained in hypnosis from ten children (ages 9 to 23) who had no conscious memories of birth, and their mothers who claimed they had never shared details of the birth with them. Their independent reports were found to be coherent with each other, to contain a wealth of appropriate and accurate facts, and to match exactly at many points. A variety of human errors were also found in reports but serious contradictions/fantasies were rare. Accuracies and inaccuracies are illustrated and discussed and the need for caution noted. Birth memories appear to be real memories and contain valuable information about birth from the baby’s point of view.
via Reliability Of Birth Memory: Observations from Mother and Child Pairs in Hypnosis | Birth Psychology.
For Susan and Jackie
Still gathering information and opinions…
Babies are learning their native language before birth. This is made possible by the development of hearing as early as 16 weeks gestational age. A mother’s voice reaches the uterus with very little distortion as the sound waves pass directly through her body. Acoustic spectroscopy, which makes possible elaborately detailed portraits of sound similar to fingerprints, has documented prenatal learning of the mother tongue. By 27 weeks of gestation, the cry of a baby already contains some of the speech features, rhythms, and voice characteristics of its mother. Newborn reactions to language are based on the sounds heard in utero: French babies prefer to look at persons speaking French while Russian babies prefer to watch people speaking Russian.
via Prenatal Memory and Learning | Birth Psychology.
Prenatal Memory and Learning | Birth Psychology
More research on birth memories and beyond:
Traumatic events in neonatal intensive care are indelibly imprinted in memory and intrude on adult life, often in the form of fear. Edward, who was born prematurely and entered the NICU at 29 weeks, learned to fear the sound and sight of adhesive tape. He learned this from the experience of having sections of his skin accidentally pulled off during removal of monitor pads. When he was a young man, he still feared adhesive tape.
Babies can learn their mother’s emotional state. Experiments in Australia revealed that unborn babies were participating in the emotional upset of their mothers watching a disturbing 20-minute segment of a Hollywood movie. When briefly re-exposed to this film up to three months after birth, they still showed recognition of the earlier experience. Studies of a thousand babies whose mothers had experienced various degrees of depression during pregnancy themselves displayed depression at birth and in proportion to the depression scores of their mothers.
An important message of these diverse findings is that memory and learning seem to be a natural part of being human, including the first nine months in the womb and the years of infancy, defined as the time before speech. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that life in the womb is extremely active and interactive and the womb is, in fact, a classroom.
via Prenatal Memory and Learning | Birth Psychology.
Can You Have Body Memories from Your Birth?
Can we really remember our own birth?
Is it possible to remember being born?
The hippocampus is a brain structure thought to be crucially involved in the formation of memory for facts and events. At birth and in early childhood this structure is not fully grown, and so memory of birth is unlikely. What’s interesting is that the brain structure for emotional memory, the amygdala, is mature in infancy – the outcome of these two facts being that an emotionally significant event during infancy may affect the way a child behaves later in life despite them not being able to remember the actual event.
via Is it possible to remember being born? | Notes and Queries | guardian.co.uk.
I was researching this today after a very interesting session. I do know that touch triggers memories and that the body stores things in strange and mysterious ways. It happens in massage all the time no matter what the client’s belief system is. Touch very often releases tears and memories that the person had thought were long ago dealt with or forgotten.
What do you remember or think about this?
Happy Mother’s Day
A massage for Mom is a great gift.
Online gift certificates available on my website.
On energy, matter, obligation and genetic engineering
A little something I found interesting…
VANDANA SHIVA: …there’s a very simple lesson that Krishna gives. That you do not measure the fruit of your action. You have to measure your obligation of action. You have to find out what’s the right thing to do. That is your duty. Whether you win or lose is not the issue.
The obligation to do the right thing, for me, you know, I’ve grown up as an ecologist in a major level, from my very childhood. And for me, the diversity of species, their intrinsic value, their integrity is vital. The rights of our farmers to be able to have seed, the most fundamental source of livelihood in a poor country.
Eighty percent of the food of the world is even, today, produced by those small farmers of the kind that we have in India. Our small farmers are feeding 1.2 billion Indians. We forget the scale of what smallness means multiplied many times. Because we’ve got used to the dinosaur mentality. We only see the big. We forget that dinosaurs go extinct.
BILL MOYERS: You have obviously seen things differently. Because you studied nuclear physics, right?
VANDANA SHIVA: I studied nuclear physics. But I also studied quantum theory. My thesis was on non-separability and non-locality in quantum theory.
BILL MOYERS: Which means?
VANDANA SHIVA: Which basically means everything is connected. Because the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution gave us a very mechanistic idea of the universe. First, we were told “Nature is dead. There’s no living Earth. How can you even imagine the Earth lives? How can other species– they’re just inferior creatures of God. And you’ve got to have man’s empire over God, over the Earth.”The idea that everything is this hard matter, unrelated to each other is still guiding a lot of science. And genetic engineering is based on that hard matter, genes in isolation, you know? Genes determine everything. There’s a master molecule that gives orders. Old patriarchal stuff. genetic engineering
via Vandana Shiva On The Problem With Genetically Modified Seeds |.
Soil Depeletion Leads to Malnutrition and Disease?
Food for Thought…
“In the United States and throughout the world much of the world’s inventory of arable topsoil has been lost due to erosion, overuse of inorganic nitrogen fertilizers, and other farming practices that leave the soil depleted. The depletion of soil nutrients and soil microorganisms contributes to soil erosion and the loss of arable topsoil. The Earth is losing arable topsoil at a rate of 75 to 100 GT. per year. If soil loss continues at present rates, it is estimated that there is only another 48 years of topsoil left.
There’s nothing in my bowl!
In the United States soil is eroding at a rate that is ten times faster than the rate at which it is being replenished. The rate of soil erosion is much faster in other parts of the world such as Africa, India and China where erosion rates are 30 to 40 times faster than the rate of replenishment.
In areas of Africa the combination of soil depletion and soil erosion has lead to the prediction of plummeting crop yields.
Food grown in nutrient deficient soil lacks the nutrients needed to keep people healthy.Studies reveal that the nutritional values in food have declined significantly over the past 70 years. The declines in the nutritional values in food have been attributed to mineral depletion of the soil, loss of soil microorganisms along with changes in plant varieties.
Without adequate nutrition from food, we become susceptible to disease. Simply stated … a lack of nutrients leads to malnutrition … malnutrition leads to disease. Wellness stems from eating nutrient rich, flavorful food. A critical need exists to provide assurance of the nutritional values in the food we eat.“
- There’s nothing in my bowl! Depleted soil leads to depleted nutrients. Can we be starving and ill while fat and well fed?
Read about this from a source not full of advertisements!
Animal Totem Spider: Irving is Irvina
This is a bit of the lore I found on my spider-in-residence. It has been a lengthy association we have had since there has been a spider in the same spot for three years, as our photos have shown. I didn’t think they could live so long but apparently they can overwinter occasionally. More likely, this is just a good spot and the generations have moved in. also, Irving is now Irvina. Apparently only the females weave the magical webs, so grandmother spider is in the house!
I felt I should see what gifts spiders bring since we are watching it and looking at its web everyday as we pass. So here is one interpretation that I like:
Spider Woman
Spider Totems
Spiders are very delicate creatures that play an important role in the myths and lore of many peoples as the teacher of balance between the past and future, the physical and spiritual.
To the Native Americans, Spider is Grandmother, the link to the past and future. In India it’s associated with Maya, the weaver of illusions.
With its gentle strength, Spider spins together the threads of life with intricate webs.
Spider knows that the past affects the future and vise versa. It calls us to make use of our creativity and weave our dreams into our destiny.
For many Native Americans, “spider woman” stories are important creation mythologies. One of the common feature of those are wisdom symbolized with spiders’ webs (for example, she taught the human how to weave). Also generally accepted are the ideas that her “thread” connects the human world and the world of spirits or the “above world” and the “below world”. Spider Woman also weaves the “relationship” of the Web of Life and all beings.
via Animal Totem Spider.
Now, I am also being told that this is Tim’s spider so I will give credit where due. Tim’s photos and wacky comments can be found here on Facebook.
Furrow Orb Weaver Spider
We have a new little creature at our home. Actually he* is not new but has lived here at least three years in the same spot, spinning huge oval webs each night which tend to disappear by morning. He reminds me of Penelope, weaving the shroud of Laertes by day and unraveling it each night. And he is huge!
I wanted to make sure there was no poison or deadly venom involved with our newest tenant. Not to fear–the only venomous spider in Massachusetts is the black widow (which I have seen on occasion but is clearly not this fellow.) So here is what I found on a spider-friendly website from Sutton, Massachusetts:
This is our friend. Photo by Tim Waite
Furrow Orb Weaver Spider
I love orb weaver spiders. Known as Araneidae, these are the “Charlotte’s Web” type of spiders which make big, spiral shaped webs and sit in the center of them. To me they are the classic type of spider, the type that stories are written about, the ones people feel are friendly and helpful.
The Furrow group of orb weavers are in the Larinioides genus. They have tan bodies with dark brown and tan striped legs. On their backs is a lovely pattern which involves a wavy edged darker brown center and lighter tan outsides. There are black dots along this pattern. The head is a darker brown, almost burgundy, with white hairs.
Not only are furrow spiders quiet, but I would even call them “scared”. If you even hint at touching one, they curl up as if they’re dead. I’ve seen this happen with three different types of orb weaver spiders. I always worry that I’ve hurt them somehow! They are just playing dead so you do not bother them. I’ve also noted that the orb weavers like dusk hours. If you find them during daylight they are extremely shy and often asleep.
This spider shown hangs on a gorgeous web by our mailbox. It is part of the Larinioides cornutus species. In these photos it was sleeping in its nook under the mailbox. Later, in the evening when it’s dark, it comes out to sit in the center of its web.
via Furrow Orb Weaver Spider – Spiders in Sutton Massachusetts.
*He has been named Irving, but I believe that he may be “she” since the females tend to be slightly larger in this species and I really can’t imagine a larger spider than this. On the other hand, after three years we haven’t seen any baby Irvings.
…Now on to what the lore is involving spiders…
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