Environmental IDIOTS Block - Wind Power?

Bad words! No <g> rating! You have been warned!

Stories like this one make me so ashamed to be known as "environmentally conscientious."

Their concerns that "400-foot turbines would loom over an adjacent wilderness area" is such a load of shit that I am just about struck speechless.

Really, when people act like total assholes like this I depair, and I think maybe we deserve to go extinct. Would they prefer a nice tail of nuclear fallout from another melted-down power plant "looming over" their precious effing wilderness area?

How about all the other wilderness areas in the world, they should all get placed under pollution stress because these dickheads are worried about one wilderness area being "loomed over?"

Pack of NIMBY assholes, I hope someone shits in your gardens and buries you and your fucking dog in oil sludge and soot and greenhouse wastes!

And to my regular readers, I sincerely apologise - but I hope that just ONE of these people reads this article and gets their head out from up their arse long enough to realise what a pack of pettyfogging shitheads they look like to the rest of the world...

Get More From Your Solar Array!

I've just posted an article to the Zencookbook Dot Com site which is hopefully the first of many, this one concerns an improvement that can be made to most solar array installations to produce a bit more output from both new or existing installations. I've also asked for someone to sponsor me with this and other experiments, so if you can help please contact me.

I've taken the step of just putting the whole idea online because right now, anything that gets more energy out of existing technology and thereby makes it cheaper to own, is desperately needed, and I'd rather see this idea in use than argue and fight with (so far) dozens of stupid company people who should know better but are all too tight-arsed to reach in their pocket and help develop an idea...

So it's public domain for non-commercial use, and if you find it useful maybe you can sponsor me or donate something I can use for further development.

Zencookbook Has A New Home!

After countless dropped-out connections thanks to the total crap Telstra are allowed to serve up and call phone lines in a capital city, I've moved Zencookbook to a hosting service, and while I was at it also changed from the rather ordinary HTML only pages to a a CSS based and hopefully compliant format. That means that only the front page is there as yet, but that's a start... Rest of site is now just a matter of transferrinf text to the new framework.

Jatropha. New fuel crop or regrettable mistake?

Keep an eye on jatropha - if this is half as good as they say, I'd say we'd be fools not to look into places where it can be planted. A lot of our farmers here in Western Australia in the last few years have discovered how much the drought can suck.

I'm not advocating turning a whole property over to jatropha production - again, as for the Mali farmers, food production should not suffer for fuel crop production - but in a drought, a crop that can produce income without needing the guaranteed rainfall might not be a bad idea...

Now for the negatives. Haven't we learned from cane toads and rabbits and tilapia? But apparently the Mali farmers manage to grow it between rows of crops, and that gives hope that it would be controllable. Also, I'm thinking of one other "weed" that I've found a use for.

Growing wild over enormous amounts of the land here are these small yellow melons, which are treated like a weed and which grow pretty much anywhere, unassisted. You can cook them into a pretty flat tasting melon pie, but the real value of them is in the seeds.

See, the seeds are similar to pumpkin seeds, and when dried and roasted, are a snack that seems to be rich in antioxidants and may possibly be an addition to the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook diet. Pumpkin seeds are one suggested food that helps our bodies to reverse cancer, but the seeds have tough outer shells and that means either nasty chewy splintery bits when roasted, or a lot of hard work hulling the seeds before roasting.

The pigmelon seeds have thinner outer coverings. Also, with pumpkins, you need to get the seeds when pumpkin is being processed, or grow pumpkins especially for seed. These pigmelons are pretty much good for nothing else but their seeds, except that the pulp and stems and leaves would make a good return to the soil of organic matter - since you're extracting the seeds, you can be pretty sure the plant won't get away under your crop because there's no seeds to grow from.

So it makes sense to me to grow some of the things that don't need precise rainfall and pH and NPK ratios, during the worst years of drought, and revert to mostly food crops and a bit of "insurance cropping" during the better years. And if demand for these products grows, who knows we may open up a whole new belt for more eco-sensitive farming.

Links To Articles Of Interest Aug 07

To CFL or not to CFL?:
First, a link to a guide to CFL light bulbs - please note that there are a number of things that can be described a bit more.

CFL lights are Compact Fluorescent Lamps and they combine the humble fluoro tube (a bit coiled in on itself and mangled, but the same, basically) with an electronic circuit which replaces the big metal ballast in a traditional fluoro light fitting. Ballasts, being a winding of wire, had some resistance and lost some energy due to heat, and were prone to buzzing when the core laminations began to separate. The electronics still wastes some energy as heat but is generally less wasteful and not noisy.

CCFL lights are Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps and they include a tiny inverter so that they can operate off 12V. Think of those older 12V powered fluoro light fittings that were so popular as car trouble lights in the late 70's and early 80's - this is them, married to a CFL style lamp.

On the drawback side, the article I reference above mentions that you might save $80 a year on an average household power bill by using CFL light bulbs, and that CFLs cost more to initially purchase, and that may both be true - but there is a far more compelling reason to buy CFL - you are saving pollution which would have been generated by the power station to supply the extra power. That alone make it imperative to switch to CFL or CCFL style lighting.

On the bonus side, using CFLs means you can light up some of the more dimly lit areas of your home and still generate less pollution. Also, CFL light globes are now a LOT cheaper than you think. Shop around, I'll give you an idea or two to start you off:

In Woolworths, a CFL bulb costs around the $5.00 mark, occasionally you may find two to a pack for that price, but in general, Woolworths is a grocery store not an electrical/hardware store. Going to Bunnings I can pay $9.00 for a blister pack of four of the same wattage CFL, and if you go to a discount store you can pick up two packs for $3.00 sometimes.

As the article also states, CFL are a fluorescent tube based light and include some mercury. Better to recycle these and return the mercury to the manufacturing process than let it seep through the water table from the landfill to your water...

BONUS POINTS: If you realise that by buying a solar panel and a gel battery and running CCFL light bulbs outside, you can have a garden lighting system that is as well lit as a fluorescent lighted garden, for no further outlay, no further energy costs, and no further pollution. I've been using this system with a small 300mm X 300mm 4W solar panel and a cheap $20 gel battery for a year, and it lasts well into the wee hours of the morning, I have a little timer on it so it turns on around 8PM and off again at 2AM and it has never let us down. And it has cost $0.00 in electricity or pollution since then.

Buy Fresh, Buy Local:
My second find of the month involves buying local and buying fresh. Don't think "oh, that's a simple concept, why is he bothering?" and dismiss it. This is at one swoop the best thing you can do for your quality of life, and if you don't do it you pretty much deserve what you get.

It's so simple - ask at your corner store, your grocer, your butcher, your supermarket - "Is there a local produce section please?" and if there is, buy whatever you can from there over the shiny offerings from the "national warehouses ensuring that you get the freshest produce ever."

Anything you can do to break the large supermarket chains' holds on produce markets, will result in a better quality of life for you and your family. If your local "SuperHugeMarket" isn't selling those tomatoes that they've had in the chiller room for the last eight months so they can name their own price for tomatoes this season, they will stop doing it. Their price of tomatoes will go up, but your local markets will have reasonably priced - and more importantly, fresh and healthy - tomatoes.

If you can do this, and avoid the trap of preservative-laden or "convenient" produce, you're taking a step towards a healthier life. If you purchase a copy of my Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, you'll be making another.

The Colour of Cancer-Free

Found a "fresh minted" article here that will help with the diet in the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, but it needs a bit of clarification I think. Before you go rushing out and buying everything in sight based on colour... hehehe...

First, this article, as in so many others, barely mentions the words "fresh" nor "natural." Not as in "the kind my supermarket would have you believe but in fact we've stored this stuff for up to a year already and bombarded it with chemicals to keep it looking bright and fresh" but the kind of fresh you get from taking a vegetable that has ripened in the ground, been harvested no more than a few days ago, and brought all nice and cool and crisp to the market where you've taken it home and cooked it within a day sort of fresh and natural.

Because, if the fruit or vegetable has been treated to make it keep longer, it's now contaminated with chemicals that are NOT in the human species' diet plan. If it's been stored for any length of time, the active ingredients have lost their potency and you may as well eat coloured starch. And most importantly, if it's out of season, then for most fruits and vegetables we've lost the other great natural healing force, the Pulse. In the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook I mention the Pulse for a range of ingredients and how it's actually a large part of the effectiveness of the diet.

Also note that not all things that are brightly coloured are automatically good for one. The beautiful red colour of Amanitae mushrooms hides a potent toxin that kills flies on contact and can kill a human almost as easily.

Also, bear in mind that the things that give a food the colour and the tart taste are the ingredients we want? Of grapes, it's the skins and seeds (especially the seeds) which give the antioxidant effect, and that is why red wine (which is brewed with the skins and seeds in the vat) is effective while white wine (which is brewed from white grape juice only, no skins or seeds) is not. The old saw that the "goodness is in the skin" of a vegetable is for a large part the truth.

Can I put it any plainer? Old wives' tales had to originate from something. Our ancestors didn't all know how to read and write, but they knew how to pass on observations. The family down the road, that peeled the skins off their vegetables and ate mostly potatoes and very few others, their kids sickened every year. It's as valid an observation as any made by a scientist in their laboratory today, and the way we passed that knowledge on was by repeating it until it stuck and became an old wives' tale...

So if you have any old lore like that, it needs to be preserved. If you leave it in comments here, I will try and collect it inot a coherent and searchable web page every so often. Meanwhile, have a great day, and don't forget to eat your greens, and your reds, and your purples.

Green is the new stupid

No apologies to using a hackneyed paraphrase. This is a hackneyed subject, no matter what. When I first saw the original article appear, my first reaction was "what a pack of eedjits!"

I haven't changed my mind, either. Let's assume, for this scenario, that black backgrounds really do save energy. (They don't on some monitors, by the way.) So how long do you typically spend on the serach engine results page? An hour a day in total? That's under 5% of the day. Assuming that your monitor uses 20% less power on that black screen, that's a saving of 5% of 20% of total power use, or 1% power saving. I could save that by hitting keys slower when working, so that my body doesn't produce as much heat load for the air conditioner to have to move...

Then too, the penetration of LCD monitors means that the backlight stays on at the same level, and switching pixels to black could actually increase power consumption. Also, on some older tube type monitors, clamping the EHT power supply down rather than switching it off can sometimes be used to produce black. Again, those monitors actually use more power when displaying black.

And of course, while the penetration of LCDs is estimated at 75% in the Google blog article, most of those are in a work environment, many home computer users still have tube type monitors. So the work related monitors are at best not going to experience a practical difference displaying black, and besides, most workplaces pretty much discourage keeping a search engine with a black background open instead of a crisp white document, so these will typically spend much less than an hour a day with that page on top, anyway.

And the homes users, they may use a search engine, but only to find new crisp white pages to read and crisp white games to play.

Best way you can save energy with your monitor is to turn it off when not using it.

1918. Hmmm 2018 is not far away.

It killed more people than several world wars, then vanished. The one year outbreak in 1918 - 1919 killed what was initially thought to be 40 million (!!!) to 50 million people but a more recent revision of these numbers says that figure is approximately double what was initially thought. Spanish Flu could very well have been the closest the human race came to a mass extinction event in recorded history. Let me put this into perspective for you. It is now believed that between 80,000,000 and 100,000,000 people lost their lives to that microscopic killer. That's between four and five times the population of Australia...

The Spanish Flu (or "La Grippe" or "Swine Flu" as it was also variously known) was one variant in the dance between predators and prey, and we weren't the predators in that round... That variant is still latent within the structure of today's viruses and can emerge again, and of course there are any number of other variants which could become even more efficient infectors. It produced extreme symptoms that masked their activity and caused the virus to be misdiagnosed by the much lesser medical knowledge of the time, puzzling doctors. One of the killers was the bacterial pneumonic and bronchial illnesses that resulted from the way the virus acted.

And I'm mentioning that because I believe that I've just survived the great great grandchild of that virus. As you may know, here in Western Australia we have had four young lives cut short by the virus and the bacterial infections it engendered, and in Queensland now, another child has lost the fight. And no-one has checked on how many of the older and more infirm have passed on from pneumonic infections this flu season, and how many of those were attributable to this new virus strain. I'm not even a little sure of any of this, because I am not an epidemiologist, but I think it should be investigated by one.

All I have to go on is the fact that I have never had a flu lay me low for over three weeks, almost four weeks in fact. And five children have been killed by a flu. And an unknown number of seniors. It may not be the global pandemic this year that Spanish Flu was back at the start of last century. But it's early days, and certainly the last 20 years have marked an ever increasing virulence...

One last thought: If anyone is a medical person out there, can the blood of person who has fended off a virus be used to produce an antibody that can be grown and used to inoculate those most at risk? Because if so I need to get me to a laboratory.

Killer Soft Drink

A new study about soft drinks has concluded that one soft drink a day will do you harm. Geez I wonder why I am not surprised and neither should you be. Soft drinks all contain additives and preservatives up the wazoo, to stop what's inside from spoiling on the can and leading to a nasty lawsuit when a drink does obvious damage rather than the hidden subtle damage.

Remember the additives? If a soft drink was composed of fruit, water, and carbon dioxide, then I'd say they would be okay in quantities of one a day. But in addition, every soft drink contains additional very processed white sugar or artificial sweetener, and very artificial and unnatural preservatives, colourants, flavourings, modifiers, and, if you're lucky, up to 5% fruit juice. (Which by the way is not guaranteed to be pure fruit juice even if they had trademarked the name "pure fruit juice" because pure fruit juice has to have some form of preservative in it too.)

Of course the soft drink manufacturers immediately struck back with their most powerful weapon, the old "no it doesn't, either, nyah nyah! You can't prove a thing!" ploy. And of course I'm going to believe their research with its vested interest only in selling soft drink - NOT your health - to give me the results that I can trust, as opposed to a whole range of bodies whose research is set up specifically to find out what things are harming my health. But I must be in the minority, because I still see those drinks on the shelves...

The study doesn't actually go far enough for me, there are a few things I'm curious to know. For example, what about soda water drinkers? Are they at greater risk of arterial plaques and heart disease? What about beer? What about microbrewery beers produced without the range of preservatives and additives? Ciders and meads?

Because I'm betting that if you add fizz to something, it will not harm you aside from maybe giving you hiccups, but as soon as you add something whose parent food is a chemical formula, things are gonna get distinctly dangerous.

One last thought. Making all those chemicals costs us heaps in energy and pollution. Processing it all costs a lot in energy and pollution. Drinking it gives you a raft of health problems that are better off avoided. So why?

Quick Easy and Cheap Nut Sheller

A quick trip to Instructables and I found that their design can be made a bit cheaper by using nursery plant pots, or three similar shaped pots in three different sizes. I won't add to the designs, it's easy enough to pick up the idea from that and the second article there, and then instead of "expensive fibreglass mold" substitute the words "cheap plastic plant pot" instead... Also see my comment down the page, explains in a bit more detail.

Also note that you can probably use this to crush the shelled nuts if you adjust the spacing closer. In fact if you get two tapers that are not quite identical you could conceivably mill cracked wheat and possibly adapt the idea to a fairly efficient flour mill too...

Allergy, Additive Be Thy Name

Doctors are finding an increasing number of young children have allergies. Doctors are"puzzled" by that, and sound a warning that in another six to eight years these kids will be rebellious teenagers and into experimenting, and many will die or end up in ER because they will trigger their allergies.

Taking the last point first. No no no - every report I've heard about kids with allergies says that their allergy has whipped them. They ask to make sure before they touch anything edible, and are generally more careful than most adults I know with allergies. What will be putting these kids in ER is something different.

First, to what's causing the ever increasing allergies, asthmas, type 2 diabetes, and other illnesses. I will crusade against this to my dying day, and I will tell you why it's bad, then tell you what it is, and then you can go to my zencookbook site and grab the free version of the e-book.

The thing that causes these illnesses is bad because: It takes millenia for the human species as a whole to adapt to particular foods. So in Europe, alcohol has been a part of the diet for 8,000 to 10,000 years in some form. And sometime in the recent past, Europeans have developed a gene that allows them to resist alcohol's effects more than say an Asian person. That's not to say that one day a person just became resistant - it took generation after generation of people dying from alcohol and thus failing to pass on their nonresistant genes before this happened.

Our bodies today are what the diets of 5,000 to 10,000 years ago made them into, lean mean WHOLEFOOD digesting machines. And as we've denatured our food and introduced additives we have been seeing increasing incidences of a range of illnesses. Cancers? Almost unheard of in the past. Diabetes mellitus? Oh yes a rare condition, poor unlucky souls that get it. Allergies? What, pray tell, might those be? We did have one boy in the village once, young Mongol, who perished in a most unpleasant way after drinking cow's milk but we aren't sure if that was the cause or not.

If you buy my book (which of course I recommend, natch) there's a listing of the additives and their effects on the human system. Sobering reading, around one third are outlawed in some countries, around half are not good for us in general, and the other half is the half that's least useful (and therefore least used) in modern food preparation and preservation.

Manufacturers need to stabilise food so it doesn't go off and result in a lawsuit. They need to colour and texture and flavour it so that today's flavour-driven buyers will find it appealing.

And you'll find that with the rise of every illness, there's a corresponding rise in the use of the relevant additive... Cancers increasing - a doctor whose children I know had made the connection almost 100 years ago that where white sugar and white bread went, so went cancer. I've noticed that when some additives became approved for food use and water use, the incidence if Type II Diabetes rose several years later...

"Yes," you can say, "our species adapted to new foods over a long time, but only because someone ate those foods and kept eating them."

And you'd be right, except that you're missing out the most important part of the equation: Of those earlier generations, those that first ate a particular item of food, died. So if you want to become a statistic today so that your great great great great great grandchildren won't get cancer from Exxx, you go right ahead.

But for those of us who want very much to not become a genetic statistic, it's far better to avoid that nasty stuff and let future generations grow up not resistant to Exxx...

Lastly, what will be putting those kids in ER. Think about the safe limit for additive Exxx - what is considered a "safe" dose? Well you can bet that Manufacturer A will make sure they don't use too much more than the "safe limit" in their product. And Manufacturer B also won't exceed the fabled "safe" dose. Nor Manufacturer C, and D and E and F. But you, who are going to eat the products from all six manufacturers in the course of your day, you still accumulated a dose six times more than the accepted safe limit of that additive... Now mix in a couple of bad tablets at a nightclub, and suddenly the real reason kidswill be at risk is a bit more obvious.

Why doctors are publicly lying about being "puzzled" when in fact they all have these same figures and statistics and are trained to put two and two together and comeup with Exxx? Who knows, but at least you can know better, and start reading labels for additives as if your life depended on it.

Because, you know, it just might...

Medieval Queen Of The Kitchen

Sabrina Welserin is a countrywoman of mine - she hails possibly from Germany, or more likely (to judge from her recipes) from Austria actually as I recognise some ingredients that weren't so well known outside Austria.

She's an unusual woman - in the 16th Century, she's educated, which places her in one of the larger households, she's a consummate cook, which makes her the lady of the house, and she thinks in pretty grand scale, because who would cook six chickens to "... lay them next to the other roasted meats ..." for just a humble forester and his family?

So you can safely say that this book is one of scant handfuls of cookbooks that made it through centuries to us, and is a snapshot of how life was. I note that food is important to Frau Welserin, was obviously important in the lives of her and the people around her, and they had quite sophisticated recipes. (A lot of these recipes is assumed to be known to the reader, one because it was a way to keep the commoners and non-cooks out, and secondly because it was laborious and expensive to commit every detail to paper.)

I'll be going through this and a few other recipe books from the early Centuries and seeing how well some of these recipes adapt to Body Friendly and modern cooking styles. Will be interesting, and recipes will be on TEdAMENU blog.

Read more Medieval recipe books and information here.

These Do Grow On Trees!

http://thesecomefromtrees.blogspot.com/ - good message but how about printing up your own? I'm all for conservation and ecological responsibility but I don't see how charging for stickers benefits the environment, whereas each person who wants to campaign printing their own, will spread the activism.

I'll see about some artwork for stickers that doesn't tread all over the copyright above and post it here.

Please remember if you do print your own stickers that the paper you print them on also comes from trees and be sparing with yours. And there are dozens of places where such stickers come in handy other than just paper towel rolls:

• Try placing a sticker wherever there's a street stand giving away free advertising papers or real estate sheets, anything people will tend to pick up from boredom.
• Your work's photocopier and the cabinet where the paper is kept.
• Ditto, for the office printer.

That's only a few more places where these stickers would help, you will find more as you go about your daily routine.

Go get 'em!

Two Zen Things.

These two links here and here just have to be in here...

Species

Interesting reading, Charles Darwin's letters. He was both a dandy and a very astute thinker when he put his mind to it.

I find that I enjoyed reading those and will enjoy finding other Darwin letters online - yes I'll now be going to search for them.

For instance, I had a blue-eyed white tom cat - who was deaf. Darwin was very keen of observation to have picked that conection up before Mendel made his far more detailed studies which confirmed this and other genetic rules.

And, you know, history might have been quite different if Darwin hadn't written his book, so it's probably a good thing for us today.

Minus The Additives, Please!

In the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, I have been pointing out the perils of the additives, and I keep finding articles like this one which find more and more things wrong with the "E" vitamins.

It's not surprising to see the modern childhood epidemic of such symptoms. We're allowing food manufacturers to conduct experiments in chemical tolerance on us and our children. The sad thing is that we will all pay for that, one way or another.

As I found out, our metabolisms have evolved over the millenia (five to ten thousand years, certainly) to make peak use of natural whole foods. Nowhere in our history until the last few hundred years have chemical preservatives additives colourings and flavourings entered our food chain, and it will take another five to ten thousand years before the first humans adapted to such chemicals will appear.

For us, right here and right now, these things are poisons. Nothing more and nothing less. You buy something that has preservatives to prevent natural spoilage, irritants to bring out natural colour, artificial colouring to augment the natural colour, and six different "agents" to prevent sticking caking clotting setting and slumping- and you have a cocktail that is almost guaranteed to throw your body into disarray.

Now look at everything you eat in a week. Take a note of only the additive chemicals, and add the amounts of each up. I almost guarantee that if you have an aveage suburbanite diet you will find that you are having more than the recommended amount of over half of those chemicals.

The scary thing is that each manufacturer makes the decision on how much of each additive to use, based on their product alone. After all, if you buy the competition's foodstuffs as well, then what have they to lose? If you come down with a case of poisoning, they can blame the opposition...

But if you read the ingredients on the label, remember that manufacturers aren't required to list all of them. It's a bit of a voluntary / legal / notsolegal grey area, and of many additives, manufacturers aren't required to inform you if the quantity is below a certain percentage. That means that while one manufacturer might tell you about the E614 they use, while three others won't.

Individually, those amounts may not be worth worrying about - but add upthe E614 in everything you eat during the week - admitted in the label or not - and you may come to a worrying result...

A Very Nice Appliance

Okay this is a very good appliance, it's pricey but as it replaces a dozen kitchen appliances I find it on the whole to be quite reasonable.

Read the review for what it can do, it's really very impressive.

Yahoo Serious Would Be Stoked!

CANBERRA, Australia - Scientists and Australian beer maker Foster's are teaming up to generate clean energy from brewery waste water — by using sugar-consuming bacteria.

The experimental technology was unveiled Wednesday by scientists at Australia's University of Queensland, which was given a $115,000 state government grant to install a microbial fuel cell at a Foster's Group brewery near Brisbane, the capital of Queensland state.

Now here's an energy source that is about as Australian as you can get, as desirable as you can get, and takes care of a bunch of pressing Australian problems.

As we know, our beer is made from beer, we are experiencing a drought, and we are trying to find ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The cell mentioned is perfect, if it does all that it claims. It digests the beer making wastes, produces 2000 watts of electricity, and the byproduct is clean water.

If the 2Kw is enough to actually power the device with some left over, that means it can also power the fridge that will hold the beers and cold water - dunno what you'd do with all that cold water though. Ah maybe the dog will appreciate it...

Also - only $115,000? Ah yeah I forgot John Bonsai Howard is serious about this isn't he? Come on Australian Government, put some DECENT money towards clean energy research!

Warming Warming...

Gauging people's reactions and opinions is never easy - take this article in the NZ Herald:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/feature/story.cfm?c_id=1501154&objectid=10429662

But the believers and skeptics among the readership are about balanced. El Nino happens because of GW, other effects too. And even if other planets are warming up, don't worry about them, *OUR* planet is the one to worry about!

Body Friendly Zen Cookbook Rocks!

I went to see my doctor today almost two years after developing signs of incipient prostate cancer. My diet book rocks, and I rule!

(for anyone who's just tuned in, there's more history and an E-Book at the Zencookbook Dot Com site - I had really poor results on a certain blood test two years ago, worse news on a biopsy, and then rather than let a surgeon near my precious bits with a scalpel or a doctor kill me with chemotherapy, I designed and used this diet - adn nothing else - and the results speak for themselves...)

Okay - results are far better than expected:

09-06-2005 ePSA 4.6
For anyone unfamiliar with PSA it's an antigen in the blood produced in response to a variety of prostate ailments ranging from Benign Prostate Enlargement to more sinister things. In most cases the change of PSA level indicates a problem more than the actual level, but at my age then (48 years old) that was quite high.

??-08-2005 60% Hyperplasia
My urologist scheduled a biopsy and over half the samples showed hyperplasic cells. There are two kinds, and mine was not benign...

I spoke to the urologist about the alternatives and he suggested that certain foods had been shown to be helpful in some cases of prostate cancer treatment. As he never gave me any exact figures or foods to work from, I developed the diet and used myself as the lab rat, and so after seven months I had what I thought was a useable diet. It took another month before I could do another blood test but:

05-04-2006 ePSA 0.8
This is around the level of PSA a healthy 25 year old would have. My urologist was pleased, my GP was worried that I might have received some false readings, and I was over the moon as you can imagine. No sharp knife near my goolies, no chemicals to ruin my body chemistry - and this is a very easy to use diet - you can apply much of it to your current lifestyle!

I have also submitted the manuscript to a researcher at CSIRO for testing and this is due to occur this year. I expect a lot of good and interesting things to be discovered about the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook Diet...

19-04-2007 ePSA 1.0
One year later and the diet is now pretty much a proven in my view. I am at the low to normal end of the spectrum for my age group, and recurrence is not likely.

Over the intervening year I've had some sales of the book, and so far all results have been encouraging. Two women who used it for various "down there" cancers have reported lowering of counts, but both elected to also take surgery and/or chemotherapy so these results are not yet conclusive for me. But promising. Very promising.

And lastly, there are a whole range of illnesses caused by cell inflammation and this diet will help in all of them - ranging from the slower forms of cancers to urinary tract inflammations, type 2 diabetes, and arteriosclerosis which is the precursor for most heart attacks.

So there are some good reasons why you should get interested and pass this on to as many people as you know. One, this diet can be used in moderate amounts to prevent most of these illnesses and stop them developing. Two, it can help in so many illnesses to put the body into a better state for fighting the illness, thus improving your recovery. Three, it can reduce or even reverse some of the slow cancers and arterial plaques. And four, it gives you a healthy understanding of why some foods heal and some foods harm so your general diet habits will improve.