Give Yourself a Daily 3 Minute "Wake Up" for the New Year!

No "wake up call" involved.....just grab your natural bristle body brush and make dry brushing part of your daily routine! People say they feel more 'alive' when they dry brush, and notice many health improvements to the skin, liver, lymphatic and digestive systems. Here's why ---

The Science

Your skin is one of four avenues of elimination. No other organ is more busy in discharging impurities from the body than the skin. Next in line are both the lungs and the kidneys. Like the lungs, the skin absorbs oxygen and expels carbon dioxide and water vapor, and like the kidneys, it excretes organic and saline matter. The entire surface of the skin is impregnated with millions of sweat glands which is the drainage system whereby the blood, via perspiration, purifies itself of toxic waste which has been collected from the cells.

Blood Circulation

There are approximately 17 sq. feet of skin surface. When tiny capillaries are fully dilated, it presents 6 times the capillary surface are of the lungs. This vast blood mini vessel network is required for:

1) nourishing and oxygenating the skin tissue

2) regulating body heat (the blood is cooled when it moves through the surface capillaries)

3) distillation of waste matter from the blood

4) the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between blood and atmosphere

The skin’s blood vessel network is as crucial as the heart for normal circulation. The vast storage capacity of the skin’s blood vessels enable them to act as blood reservoirs which release or store blood as needed.

Lymph Circulation

The lymph vessels transport excess, toxic fluid away from the intracellular spaces and return it to the bloodstream. Lymph acts as a go-between medium for the transfer of vital materials from the blood to the cells, and for cellular debris from the intracellular environment into the blood. The blood feeds the lymph, and the lymph feeds the cells, making the drainage of intracellular lymph one of the most crucial of all the body functions. The superficial lymph vessels terminate just below the outer layer of skin and inter join freely with the deeper lymphatic vessels. Any blockage at the superficial lymphatic level will result in congestion throughout the lymphatic system. Skin-brushing is an excellent way to stimulate the activity of the entire lymphatic system.

Bio-energy Conduction

“Aliveness” derives from the presence of high-vibratory, vital energy within an organism. This energy, or natural force, which fills the universe is referred to in traditional neuropathology and homeopathy as Vital Force and in Chinese medicine as Chi. Chi is also related to the kidneys.

Chi Defined: Chi is the fundamental energy which sustains life and is present in the vibratory, biological processes of every cell. Chi is the force that animates the metabolic processes which ultimately yield caloric energy. Chi differentiates life from death; it circulates through channels, or meridians, throughout the body. Being an essential matrix for the Chi channels, the skin is a crucial medium for Vital Chi movement. The places at which the various channels and vessels reach the skin’s surface are the pressure points used in acupuncture and acupressure. Aside from the Chi which courses through the channels, a superficial portion of Chi (which the Chinese refer to as Wei Chi or Guardian Chi) flows outside the channels in a non-differentiated layer beneath the skin. The Wei Chi serves as a defensive perimeter protecting against environmental influences such as varying weather conditions, pathogenic microorganisms, pollutants, emotional stresses derived from human interaction and other external challenges.

Now that you know "why", here's "how" --

Let's get started!

• Use a natural (NOT a synthetic) bristle brush with a long handle, so that you are able to reach all areas of your body. Best-case scenario would be one that had a removable head with a strap for your hand.

• Skin brushing should be performed prior to your bath or shower on bare, dry skin with a dry brush (ergo the term "dry" brushing).

• Begin brushing your skin in long sweeping strokes starting from the bottom of your feet upwards, and from the hands towards the shoulders, and on the torso in an upward direction. Always brush towards the heart. Try and brush several (3-5) times in each area, over-lapping as you go.

• Avoid sensitive areas and anywhere the skin is broken.

• Skin brushing should be performed once a day, preferably first thing in the morning. If you are feeling ill, do it twice a day until you feel better.

• After dry brushing your skin, rinse off in the shower. Paavo Airola, author of Swedish Beauty Secrets, recommends alternating temperatures in the shower from hot to cold. This will further invigorate the skin and stimulate blood circulation, bring more blood to the outer layers of the skin.

• After getting out of the shower, towel off vigorously and massage your skin with pure plant oil, such as almond, argan, jojoba, sesame, grapeseed or coconut.

For a thorough lymphatic cleansing, it is suggested to perform skin brushing daily for a minimum of three months. Clean your skin brush using soap and water once a week. After rinsing, dry your skin brush in an open, sunny spot to prevent mildew.

Caution: Do not brush on or over skin rashes, wounds, cuts, infections, poison oak or poison ivy.

It takes approximately 3 minutes to dry brush, and it's worth every second to reduce the environmental toxic burden on the body. Some people feel better in a day or two, but like any well designed program, allow 21-30 days to see and experience changes.

We always suggest journaling all changes to your daily routine and tracking results or changes in health. It's a good idea to keep, track and manage your own health history. After all, who better than you? :-)

Every wish for a happy year of optimized health,

OC

Congress Passes HR 2751 and Shafts Our Farmers

Have people lost their minds?

Seriously.

Whatever shred of that "faith-of-a-child" part of me which would like to believe our government is well-meaning, died this week with the passing of S.510 and HR 2751. That bill is now on it's way to the President to be signed into law.

Here's what it will mean to you:

The US government now will expand it's control over

the entire food industry.

• US farmers will be driven out of business, displacing generations-old business owners and families.

• It is expected that those wanting to enter into the farming business, as well as small local farmers who will grow for local co-ops and farmer's markets will meet with new criteria, making it more difficult to conduct business, resulting in market failures, loss of local food production jobs and a reduced supply of fresh seasonal, locally-grown organic produce. You can expect an increase in locally-grown produce prices.

• The bill may look well-intended, as it's titled the "Food Modernization Safety Act" (it sounds 'safe', right?), but it's not really about protecting us from food-born illness from salmonella and e.coli. And there are other shortcomings associated with it's coming into law.

• This law does not impact growers outside of the US, who are not required to meet S.510 food safety regulations. The US does not inspect international growers and farms.

• There will be an increase of importing produce.

• While farming opportunities will increase in other countries, they will decrease in the US, displacing farmers and their families.

• Many toxic pesticides which have been banned in the US are still legal to use in other countries, and these crops will be imported into the US for our consumption (as if the stuff that's still used here for conventionally grown crops isn't toxic enough!)

Some political candidates have recently lost elections in part due to the fact they outsourced jobs in their past careers. Now our own government is going to outsource our farming?

This will result in a lowered safe food supply.

With their vote, our Congress has taken jobs away from our farmers, and increased production in other countries who still use toxic pesticides which have been banned in the US due to toxicity. This will have an obvious deleterious impact on the food safety and sustainability by driving our small, local organic farmers out of business.

In his recent newsletter, Mike Adams said, "The knowledge of our local farmers who know how to grow, harvest and distribute food is far more valuable to the security of our nation than preventing a relatively small number of people from getting sick from e.coli each year (even if such a trade-off were a simplistic equation, which it isn't). Because if we lose food security, then we become slaves to the big corporate food producers who are attempting to centralize food production and place food, seeds and crops under their absolute control."

Mike also went on to say, "A cynic might even suggest that was the shole purpose of the food safety bill in the first place: To destroy small farmers and centralize food production power in the hands of a few wealthy coporations. Whether that was the intent or not, it is certainly going to be the effect.

What Congress has done with this food safety bill, in effect, is to cripple America's food production know-how and poison the population with far more dangerous pesticide-ridden produce that will now be imported from other countries instead. This bill should have been called the "Mexico Farming Jobs Act" because it's going to shift countless jobs south of the border as farms in the USA realize they simply can't operate under the immense burden of FDA regulatory tyranny."

What's in our future?

Look for the California Cruciferous Cartel. New Jersey will have their 'Mater Mafia. Nebraska will become known as the Nib-Nabbers.

Sheesh...who would ever would have thought there'd be a day when we'd be smuggling broccoli?

OC

source: http://www.naturalnews.com/030808_food_safety_bill_American_farmers.html#ixzz18s01GTbD

The Truth About and History of the So-Called "Food Safety Modernization Act"

LNH NOTE: This article is courtesy of Mike Adams, NaturalNews. We already know that S.510/HR2751 is not about "safety"; now we will learn how it's not "modern", either, as revealed in Mike's compelling report.

••••••••••••••••••••

In arguing for S.510, the "Food Safety Modernization Act," there are all sorts of attorneys, legislators and internet commentators who keep claiming, "The government won't try to control the food production of small farms." They say, "Your backyard garden is safe" and that the feds won't come knocking on your door to control your seeds or foods.

As usual, these pushers of Big Government are utterly ignorant of the history in their own country. Because as you'll learn right here, not only CAN the U.S. government control and dictate to single-family farms what they can grow in their own backyards; the government has already blatantly done so!

In this article, I'll share with you the full and true story of how Big Government has already run rampant over the rights of individuals to grow their own food-- I'll even cite the US Supreme Court decision that "legalized" this tyranny.


Learn more:

http://www.naturalnews.com/030799_food_freedom_Wickard_vs_Filburn.html#ixzz18lgpxVYg

Feds order farmer to destroy his own wheat crops:

The shocking revelations of Wickard vs Filburn

How the tyrants came after a farmer named Roscoe Filburn

It all starts with a farmer named Roscoe Filburn, a modest farmer who grew wheat in his own back yard in order to feed his chickens.

One day, a U.S. government official showed up at his farm. Noting that Filburn was growing a lot of wheat, this government official determined that Filburn was growing too much wheat and ordered Filburn to destroy his wheat crops and pay a large fine to the federal government.

The year was 1940, you see. And through a highly protectionist policy, the federal government had decided to artificially drive up the prices of wheat by limiting the amount of wheat that could be grown on any given acre. This is all part of Big Government's "infinite wisdom" of trying to somehow improve prosperity by destroying food and impairing economic productivity. (Be wary any time the government says it's going to "solve problems" for you.)

The federal government, of course, claims authority over all commerce (even when such claims are blatantly in violation of the limitations placed upon government by the Constitution). But Roscoe Filburn wasn't selling his wheat to anyone. Thus, he was not engaged in interstate commerce. He wasn't growing wheat as something to use for commerce at all, in fact. He was simply growing wheat in his back yard and feeding it to his chickens. That's not commerce. That's just growing your own food.

But get this: The government insisted he pay a fine and destroy his wheat, so Filburn took the government to court, arguing that the federal government had no right to tell a man to destroy his food crops just because they wanted to protect some sort of artificially high prices in the wheat market.

This case eventually went to the US Supreme Court. It's now known as Wickard v. Filburn, and it is one of the most famous US Supreme Court decisions ever rendered because it represents a gross expansion of the tyranny of the federal government.

The US Supreme Court sided with government tyranny

The US Supreme Court, you see, ruled that Roscoe Filburn's wheat could be regulated and destroyed by the federal government simply because Roscoe's wheat production might reduce the amount of wheat he bought from other wheat producers and therefore could impact interstate trade.

Now stay with me on this, because this is a really, really important point to understand.

The federal government claimed authority under the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution (Article 1, Section 8), even though the Commerce Clause was originally written primarily to prevent states from erecting tariffs, not to allow the federal government to control interstate trade. But thanks to the twisted interpretation of the government -- and believe me, the government will twist every interpretation it can in an effort to assert more power over the population -- the feds claimed that Filburn's growing of his own wheat effectively reducedinterstate commerce in wheat. Therefore, they reasoned, they could regulate his backyard wheat production (and order him to destroy his wheat).

Because of this US Supreme Court decision in 1942, it now means the federal government can order you to halt food production in your own back yard by arguing that when you grow your own food, the amount of food you purchase from other food providers is reduced, meaning that your food production impacts interstate trade and therefore can be fully controlled by the federal government.

In other words, the federal government claims the authority right now -- even without the Food Safety Modernization Act -- to knock on your door and order you at gunpoint to destroy all the food in your garden, your greenhouse or your farm. They can order you to destroy all seeds in your possession and all food harvested from your own garden. And they can do all this with the full protection of U.S. law by simply citing the precedent set in Wickard v. Filburn in 1942 as ruled by the US Supreme Court.

Why the naysayers will probably starve
Still think you have the right to grow your own food? I've heard all sorts of naysayers claiming that S.510 -- the Food Safety Modernization Act -- is no threat to small growers and family farms. They say the fears about S.510 are overblown and that the government can't possibly shut down your backyard gardens or small, local vegetable farms. They say this with the kind of smug certainty you might typically hear from a doctor who thinks he knows everything about human health (but who actually knows nothing about nutrition).

These naysayers tend to operate out of an assumption that Big Government will never take away their rights and freedoms and that expanding the reach of agencies such as the TSA, FDA, DEA and FTC with even more power and more armed agents is a good thing because the government always takes care of the people. We need more protection from e.coli, they argue, so let's unleash 4,000 armed FDA agents instead to protect us from bacteria. (But who will protect us from the FDA?)

What these ignorant naysayers don't understand is that government is constantly trying to expand its power to the point of tyranny. As a current example of this, look at what just happened with Chavez in Venezuela. He has now been granted what are essentially dictatorial powers over the country (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/18/AR2010121802933.html). Chavez is now the King of Venezuela, and whatever he says is now law. Venezuelan citizens are now slaves to his tyranny, and they must follow his orders or be executed.

The United States is moving in precisely the same direction. First, power gets stripped away from the People little by little. Then it gets concentrated in the hands of a few regulatory agencies who write their own laws and who stay in power year after year because none of their officials are elected. (Think the FDA commissioner is elected by the people? Think again…) And then, over time, a few powerful individuals concentrate power from those agencies into their own hands. Before long, the country is run by a handful of power-crazed tyrants who disregard all freedoms and rights of the People.

This is precisely what the FDA is doing with the Food Safety Modernization Act. Backed by yet more funding and a new army of agents, plus the Supreme Court ruling that says the federal government can order you to destroy the food you're growing in your own back yard, the FDA can now pillage the countryside, going from farm to farm and house to house, burning fields and ordering the citizenry to destroy their plants, seeds and crops. This is exactly what they've been doing to raw milk producers and food coops, by the way (http://www.naturalnews.com/030136_Rawesome_foods_raid.html).

That is no exaggeration. It is a documented "legal" precedent established in Wickard vs Filburn, and it can be used at any moment to destroy the ability of people to grow their own food, thereby making these people totally dependent on dead processed food (which is always FDA approved if it's dead, of course) made in food factories that churn out nutritional deficiencies and death.

What will you eat when the government destroys your local food supply?
You see, under the argument that your backyard garden "impacts interstate commerce," the federal government can order you to simply spray Roundup on your entire garden in order to kill it.

What will you eat then? When the GMO crops suffer a mass catastrophic failure, and the monocultured wheat dies from a global viral infection called ug99 "rust"

(http://theemergencyfoodsupply.com/archives/ug99-will-wheat-rust-cause-a-catastrophic-global-famine), what will you eat?

If the government has its way, you won't eat at all. You'll starve to death under the "protection" of the food safety thugs at the FDA who don't believe any "live" food is safe in the first place (hence their war against raw milk).

Those people who have the foresight to grow their own gardens and protect their food sources from the tyranny of the federal government may actually have a chance at surviving. The rest will simply starve while waiting in government food lines where the feds hand out nutritionally worthless cheese and other depleted processed foods that Sesame Street absurdly thinks are "superfoods" (http://www.naturalnews.com/030626_muppets_Sesame_Street.html).

Big Government declares war on the local food movement

Make no mistake, folks: the government is attempting to destroy the local food movement. They are trying to wipe out small, organic farms that compete with corporate agribiz in the same way the FDA has long plotted to destroy natural health supplement companies who compete with Big Pharma.

It's all about wiping out the little guys and protecting the monopoly markets of the largest and most influential corporations that are poisoning the earth and destroying your health. As Wickard vs Filburn clearly demonstrated, the government does not believe you have any natural right or Constitutional right to grow your own food. In fact, the government believes it has the right to order you to destroy your food at the time of its choosing.

Don't think this could happen to you? Filburn didn't either. The idea that his own government would show up at his door and order him to burn his field of wheat was simply unimaginable. Similarly, the idea that the FDA would tear across the countryside wiping out small family farms is unimaginable to many Americans today. But that's only because they don't know their own history and they put far too much faith in the flimsy idea that the government somehow, in some way, respects the rights and freedoms of the People.

The obvious falsehood of that idea is evident in the way we are all being treated by the TSA. Who would have thought, just two years ago, that we'd be subjected to government-enforced molestation at the hands of airport security screeners? That idea seems unthinkable at the time, much like the idea that the FDA could seize your garden seeds or order you to destroy your greenhouse crops. Yet such actions are already within the claimed power of the federal government… merely waiting to be invoked at the time of their choosing.

Traitors to freedom

All those who voted for S.510 -- which includes the entire U.S. Senate, Republicans and Democrats alike -- are traitors to the freedoms upon which America was founded. They have thrust our food supply into the hands of tyrants who are just waiting to exercise their control and "authority" over as many people as possible.

Five years ago, I joked that people might one day be arrested for smuggling broccoli across state lines. Today, that joke has become a sad reality. The mere act of growing food and selling it to your neighbor without government permission is about to become a criminal act. And no, small farms are not "exempt" from S.510. They must provide financial information and apply to the FDA to be granted exemption status. That sounds a lot like slaves begging for mercy from the king, doesn't it?

Keep the big picture in mind as you consider all this: When teens are poisoned by the aspartame in diet soda, the FDA does nothing. When children are given cancer by the sodium nitrite in hot dogs, the FDA does nothing. When countless thousands of Americans suffer heart attacks and cardiovascular disease each year from the partially-hydrogenated oils used throughout the food supply, the FDA does nothing. But when you grow fresh produce in your own back yard and carry it to your local farmer's market to sell it without government permission, you will be arrested by the FDA as a criminal.

Shame on all those who supported this bill. May history have mercy on their souls for the suffering and injustices they have unleashed upon us all.