Share your ideas to increase quality of life!

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by historicfuture, Nov 3, 2010.

  1. kutthanand Registered Senior Member

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    tangible applications..

    For the best life possible, no matter one's external conditions at the time, seek the perfect means to unlock the potential of peace and happiness inside yourself.
    How? Begin listening on youtube (for example), to Prem Rawat, or go to: TPRF.org
    Don't let anything distract you, and I mean... not anything. Start listening to what this teacher has to say, and take it to heart. This is the best advice anyone, or myself, could ever provide.
     
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  3. historicfuture Registered Member

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    gurus are only worthwhile if you can surpass their wisdom from their teachings and move on to be more wise than they. getting in a deadlock makes you a sheeple.
     
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  5. John99 Banned Banned

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    Well i will be honest with you...i have not used deodorant or shaving cream for over ten years but unfortunately once a month or so i need to use some baking soda under my armpits so i buy some stick type with baking soda. Probably nothing wrong with those things but i save money that way and many times i cant afford shapoo because i buy the good stuff. I tried to make my own conditioner with cooking oil and soap but it just does not work. I used to use plain soap or brown soap for everything includin on my hair till a hair stylist told me i would go bald so i wash my hair once a week...and i think he is right about that. Its funny because i can also shave dry and have on quite a few occasions.
     
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  7. Pinwheel Banned Banned

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    How about nuts and/or seeds.
     
  8. Skeptical Registered Senior Member

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    This is the sciforum. Yet I have seen very little science in this thread.

    Nutrition.
    If you seriously want to find out the best foods, consult a professional nutritionist. Otherwise, check with a nutrition data source, that is based on good science. These are available from a wide range of reputable bodies.
    For Americans (and others), advice you can trust comes from the National Institute of Health. http://health.nih.gov/category/FoodNutritionandMetabolism

    Or you can check out the information from the Mayo Clinic - one of the world's top science based source of good health advice.
    http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/MY00431/DSECTION=healthy-diets

    The general rules of good diet include avoiding too much of certain foods, and trying for maximum variety amongst others.

    The foods to eat in small amounts include saturated fats, processed starch, sugar, or salt.

    The foods to eat in greater quantity, and with maximum practicable variety are high fibre starchy foods, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and animal protein.

    Eating raw foods, like the eggs and fish the OP recommended is just stupid. The human alimentary canal is the shortest and smallest for our body weight of any primate. The reason for that is that we have evolved a small gut after our ancestors started cooking food. Humans are adapted to eating cooked food. If you eat only raw food, you tend to lose weight, since your body cannot absorb the uncooked calories and nutrients. If you are fat, that may be an advantage. However, it is difficult to compensate for the lost nutrients, and a diet of raw food will leave you less healthy.
     
  9. historicfuture Registered Member

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    hello skeptical,

    I can appreciate your limited perspective on the matter of nutrition as it's shared by many, unfortunately the system advocated by your experts and tunnel visioned studies do not work. Diseases are on the rise along with other health problems and abnormalities. Logic takes precedent over studies because studies can only show part of the story, where logic, when used thoroughly, gives a deeper perspective.

    The fact is that you are completely misguided by what you think is science. They used science many years ago to arrive at the conclusion that the earth was flat etc. It can be interpreted to mean something other than the truth. There is simply too many variables in diet to study it in the 2D perspective nutritionists do. You have to think outside the box, and realize that what we adapted to eat over millions of years is our most efficient diet without some kind of technological help. In comparison we are some of the weakest species as a whole in sustained energy and strength to other animals of our kind. It's not because we are inherently weak, it's because of our typical lifestyle and diet. While cooked food and vegetables and nuts and grains can sustain us, they are not our optimal food. They are used by the world over because they can sustain large populations and standing armies of the past, where as fresh ripe fruit cannot be extracted so easily in the alien climates we live in today.

    This actually supports my idea. We have not had enough time to evolve an entirely shorter gut since we began cooking food, that is outrageous by any standard. The reason it is so short is because it didn't take a lot of time to digest fruits or scavenged animal food such as eggs or mussels. If you want to pretend that we have been cooking our food long enough to completely change our digestive system when we haven't even had time to evolve a full thick coat of fur since emerging from water, then please direct yourself at the nearest looney bin.

    Also, you're right, humans today are used to eating cooked food, because that's the culture imposed on them today. It also destroys many nutrients and creates harmful compounds. If I ate rice since a baby then I would have a body that's used to rice, just like you can get a tolerance for some poisons, but that doesn't mean that it's my optimal diet.

    A diet of plenty of ripe fruit and raw animal food, preferably pure like egg yolks, will stabilize your weight depending on if it's too high or low, not lose it like you erroneously stated 100% of the time. It doesn't work that way. There is absolutely no long term loss in energy or stamina on this diet I advocate, where there is prominent fatigue in the SAD diet or any cooked food diet amongst the population, as evidenced by the fact that they tend to sleep for 8 hours a night rather than 5.5 like is needed by an adult human who isn't clogging themselves full of carcinogens and waste.
     
  10. Pinwheel Banned Banned

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    Also avoid getting married. It ages you horribly.
     
  11. Raithere plagued by infinities Valued Senior Member

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    Variety, moderation, robust activity (mental, emotional, and physical), fostering communication and personal connections, and not worrying overmuch.

    ~Raithere
     
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I'm surprised that almost everyone who posts on this thread regards "quality of life" from a strictly somatic perspective. Sure, I'm not denying that you need to take care of your body, but this isn't the 15th century. We all know the basics of nutrition, we all have access to vaccines, antibiotics and clean water, we all have the time and resources to exercise and keep ourselves and our homes clean, and probably none of us lives in a war zone. As a result virtually everyone reading this will live to my current age (67), most of us will live into our 80s, and a large percentage into our 90s.

    What about emotional health? How many of us are depressed, and of that group how many don't even know why? (Or worse yet, don't even know they're depressed!) How many don't seem to be able to keep a relationship going and spend much of their life with a broken heart? How many have jobs they hate? How many spend two precious hours every day simply getting to and from that job? How many are kicking themselves for foolish decisions they made in their younger days that now limit them, such as not taking education seriously, or not relocating to accept a fabulous opportunity? How many don't have someone they can confide in? How many don't even have a dog--friend, family and therapist all rolled up into one?

    Isn't emotional health just as big a vector in "quality of life" as somatic health?

    How many of you are so obsessed with somatic health that it detracts from your emotional health? Have you given up foods you love because they're "bad for you?" Have you given up some of your recreational activities, even passive ones like watching TV, in order to do something else that's "good for you?"

    Remember, you can:
    • Eat a low fat diet,
    • Take in plenty of fiber,
    • Avoid desserts and other things you like,
    • Give up alcohol and all other drugs,
    • Go to bed early and get up early to exercise,
    • And dump the friends who encourage you to do the things you're not supposed to do.
    There's no guarantee that this will make your life any longer,

    BUT IT WILL SURE FEEL LIKE IT.
    Well dude if you're eating fruit you're eating fiber! If you eat only fruits, raw eggs and fish, you're getting your day's requirement of fiber in the fruit; it's one of the richest sources of fiber. Dried fruits especially, like figs, dates and raisins--all of which are almost tasty enough to eat like candy--will keep you "a regular fellow" for a week.

    But people who eat a more pleasure-oriented diet can stand to ingest a little extra fiber. In ancient Rome, when the staple of everyone's diet was refined wheat flower, they only needed to visit the little legionnaire's room once a week. Now that is a fiber deficiency. But if you go once every day and it's not a strain, then you're fine. One easy test is to see if at least some of your stool floats. That means it's full of air and that means you've eaten enough fiber.

    BTW, if you're going to eat a lot of fish you need to study up on it. Many marine and riparian organisms are at the top of the food chain, either predators who eat other organisms or scavengers and detritivores who eat the waste and corpses of other organisms. They tend to have large concentrations of mercury and other water pollutants in their bodies. Yeah I know the Japanese have the highest life expectancy on earth and they eat fish three times a day, but they also have the highest rate of smoking and do you want to emulate that too? Apparently speaking English is what makes us so unhealthy.
    Insomnia is usually caused by psychological issues, not organic ones, and the best person to help you is a psychotherapist. (Not a psychiatrist, they're M.D.s so they might give up and write you a prescription.)

    But one of the environmental things that actually does affect sleep is the need for a certain amount of solar-spectrum light every day. That recalibrates our circadian rhythm and keeps us on schedule. If you don't (or can't) spend about half an hour in the sun every day, then see to it that you have these new solar-spectrum fluorescent twisty-tubes in your light sockets at home. Of course you have to turn them off three or four hours before bedtime or you're body will think it's too early to fall sleep.

    Your eating cycle will have an effect too. Nutritionists usually tell you to eat your biggest meals during the day and have a light dinner. I suppose that works for most people but we're all different. If I eat a big lunch I fall asleep at my desk in the afternoon. I eat a good breakfast, a tiny lunch, a huge dinner and then snack all evening and it really helps me sleep soundly.

    Having one of my dogs snuggle up to me in bed really brings me peace too. And you probably don't want to watch a high-adrenaline movie full of explosions and car chases right before bed.

    One of the things I discovered many years ago was that I was trying to sleep too much. I took that "eight hour" thing seriously, and it's really only applicable to teenagers--ironically the people who are least likely to get it since they're all on three sports teams, learning two musical instruments, taking A.P. classes and have to be at school at 7am.

    I started going to bed an hour and a half later (I was about 35 at the time) and fell right asleep, and felt much better the next day. I don't know how old you are, but at 30 I needed about 7 hours of sleep, 6 hours at 40, and now I often just get 4.

    It's not that your body doesn't need the extra time to regenerate all those dead cells. But as you get older it loses the ability to do it, so there's no point in lying there doing nothing!

    As for posture problems... Well surprisingly often that is a symptom of a psychological problem too. People who are not proud enough of themselves, or not confident that they will say or do the right thing, or afraid of their boss/parent/teacher/spouse/cool kids in school, often slump to make themselves shorter and less likely to be seen.

    But it can just as easily be a bad habit. In another thread I mentioned "muscle memory." We don't consciously control every little motion our bodies make, that would be too slow and too complicated. So as we perform repetitive tasks we create synapses in the neurons in our brain stem--the primitive lower-animal portion of our brain down at the base of the skull--and it takes over most of the control.

    So if you get into a bad habit, you may have programmed your brain stem to do all the wrong things. The only way to fix that is to reprogram it. Make the proper motions, slowly, until gradually you can do them faster because you've got those rewired neurons doing most of the work. A good hatha yoga class might be a great resource for this, and not too expensive because they're everywhere. Obviously a physical therapist would also be a good idea, but they cost a lot more, unless you've got great health insurance that will cover 80% of it.

    But if you're already aware of the fact that your posture is wrong, try working on it by yourself until you get motivated to try out a class or a therapist. Can you move your body parts into the correct position, and hold them there while you count to 20, or 40, or 60...? You're retraining your brain stem by doing that. Rather than a lot of reps, set a timer and do it once or twice every couple of hours, sending a reminder to your brain stem. Setting the timer will accomplish the other goal of helping you remain conscious of your bad posture, so you will start thinking about it and fixing it throughout the day.

    Good luck!
     
    Last edited: Nov 5, 2010
  13. Skeptical Registered Senior Member

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    To historicfuture

    I hate to have say this to you, dude, but you appear to have a strange view of science. You said :

    "The fact is that you are completely misguided by what you think is science. They used science many years ago to arrive at the conclusion that the earth was flat etc"

    The idea of the Earth being flat had nothing to do with science. It was people who could think in a scientific way who destroyed that concept and replaced it with the modern view. The first person to really hit that idea on the head was an ancient Greek scientist, Eratosthenes, who used excellent scientific methods to actually estimate the size of the Earth.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

    You also said :

    "There is simply too many variables in diet to study it in the 2D perspective nutritionists do. You have to think outside the box, and realize that what we adapted to eat over millions of years is our most efficient diet without some kind of technological help."


    So you want to replace proven empirical study with supposition? In other words, use superstition instead of science. That is a great thing to suggest on a science forum. For a start, we do not know exactly what our forebears ate, making that suggestion a bit moot. However, we know from observing modern hunter/getherer societies that they ate a hell of a large variety of foods. Roots, leaves, fruits, berries, nuts, insects, eggs, fish, red meat, meat from birds etc. Variety is the key.

    You also said :

    "If you want to pretend that we have been cooking our food long enough to completely change our digestive system when we haven't even had time to evolve a full thick coat of fur since emerging from water, then please direct yourself at the nearest looney bin."

    Cooking appears to have begun nearly 2 million years ago, when our species did not exist. Our ancestor species back then was Homo erectus. 2 millions years is quite long enough to evolve a shorter gut in response to having cooked food. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/08/990810064914.htm

    Evolve a full coat of fur? Evidence appears to suggest the reverse. Pre-humans had a full coat of fur, and we evolved the thinner coat we now have. In fact, strangely, we still have more hair per square centimetre than chimps do. The hairs are just thinner and shorter. Since we already have the hair, if there was a major evolutionary reason to evolve a full coat, it would happen really quickly.

    Sadly, your diet recommendations are simply wrong. Nutrition is a science, and one that has been actively researching to discover the optimal diet for a hell of a long time. Your ideas are not based on research and are incorrect.
     
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    We have the remains of plenty of middens to give us a fairly accurate idea of what our ancestors ate, even ancestral species. Starting with the invention of the first stone tools several million years ago, there's been a steady increase in the amount of meat in the diet. Our earliest ancestors were herbivores who augmented their diet with small animals they could catch, just like our closest relatives today. But flint knives gave them the ability to become scavengers, scraping the meat off the bones left behind by predators. More protein allowed them to grow larger brains, resulting in even better tools, and eventually they became the only predatory species of ape, with forebrains large enough to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior. They evolved from gatherers to hunter-gatherers, and at that point their diet was about what you describe.

    Roots and leaves became a smaller part of the diet as our intestines shrank from chimpanzee-size to their modern size and we lost the ability to digest a grazer's diet.
    Where did you find that? Everything I've read says that when hominids encountered a fire they would happily use it for cooking, but they didn't figure out how to tame fire until a couple of hundred thousand years ago, at which point cooking became standard for food preparation. This saved us about three hours a day of chewing up enough raw meat to get a day's protein ration. It also allowed us to eat grains, a good source of calories and a decent source of protein if the amino acids are balanced with those from nuts or seeds--but impossible to eat raw. We could also now eat roots and tubers, excellent sources of calories. The Agricultural Revolution would have been pointless without controlled fire, because we couldn't have digested all that wheat, rice, corn, legumes and potatoes.

    The Smithsonian's new Hall of Human Origins has an extensive array of exhibits that go into considerable detail on these points. I spent half a day there and will still have to go back to finish it all.
    The impetus for the shorter gut was a more meat-intensive diet, and that started longer ago than two million years.

    Cooking grains doesn't make them easier to eat, it makes it possible to eat them at all. The reason ruminants became the dominant grazers when they did was the evolution of grass. Without that compound stomach and the gigantic bacterial culture it hosts, it's virtually impossible to digest the grasses--leaves, seeds, any part of them.
     
  15. Skeptical Registered Senior Member

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  16. Stoniphi obscurely fossiliferous Valued Senior Member

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    I also enjoy Science Daily.

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    Actual science has shown us that the muscle cell telemeres in runners who average 50 miles a week or more stop shortening with each cell division. Folks who do not exercise that much lose telemere length with each cell division until cell failure and death. This effect has the practical result of slowing the aging process in many ways.

    If you eat a healthy, balanced diet and exercise regularly you will slash your chances of developing conditions like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, vascular dementia, heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes and a host of others.

    While raw eggs can indeed be a great source of some nutrients, they can also be a great source for salmonella and E Coli which can kill you quite dead. Painfully.
     
  17. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I have seen many accounts of evidence for the use of fire going back well beyond 200,000 years, but this is the first one to assert that it was controlled fire, a technology that could shape our evolution the way flint knives did. I'll stay tuned for more data.
    I may have already posted this remark on this thread, but: You can go to bed early and get up early, spend an hour or two every day exercising, give up alcohol, all other drugs and all sedentary activities, and eat a perfect caveman's diet. It may or may not make your life any longer, but it will sure feel like it.

    The purpose of life is not merely to prolong itself!
    Every risk must be analyzed in order to live life rationally. What are the benefits of raw eggs (both for nutrition and pleasure, such as the delight of homemade eggnog and mayonnaise), and what is the probability of contracting a terminal case of salmonella or E. coli poisoning from those eggs?

    Wikipedia says that 142,000 Americans (.05% of the population) get salmonella infections from raw chicken eggs each year, and 30 of them die from it. That means the odds of dying from it if you've got it are only 1 in 4500, and the odds of any American dying from eating a raw egg are comparable to a fatal bee sting--a risk that absolutely no one worries about.

    Wikipedia does not list Escherichia coli as one of the five leading causes of death by food-borne infections. This means it kills fewer than 100 of us per year, and there's no telling how few of those hundred deaths were contracted from raw eggs. Since E. coli is, almost literally, everywhere, I doubt that it's even a two-digit number, so most raw egg deaths are almost surely due to salmonella--and you have to be amazingly unlucky to be one of them.
     
  18. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Here are my ideas [fwtaw]

    1. Call up a teacher you admired in school or university and take him or her out for lunch. You'd be surprised how wonderful it feels to get together.

    2. Get yourself a dog or a cat. Animals enrich your life and add so much joy to it.

    3. Take time out to walk in your neighborhood at least once a week, get to know a neighbor or two. Take cookies or cakes with you. Look around and enjoy the scenery. I saw a white kite flying smoothly down before me last week while walking in one of the streets behind the house. It was so glorious

    4. Learn something new. Anything, like how to grow vegetables in a pot, how to draw a portrait, how to shoot a great picture, how to dance ballroom

    5. Go for a concert or a play - splurge once in a while and go for the good ones

    6. Fulfill a wish. Try and find out something that will make a family member or a friend really happy and do it for them. It has to be something they have wanted for some time.

    7. Spend an evening cooking with friends. Make sure there is lots of wine and music handy

    8. Take some time off and spend it by yourself. Solitude can be really enriching if you take the time to enjoy your own company

    9. Read to someone else. A child, a parent, a friend. Read something they will enjoy.

    10. Treat yourself. Go out shopping or traveling and make yourself feel good. My idea of something good is travelling to some place I've never been.
     
  19. SilentLi89 Registered Senior Member

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    That only applies to women. Men who are married live longer than men who are not they are also happier and healthier even if their marriage is terrible. Being married does not really seem to improve a woman's quality of life unless she is very happily married. Women are just as well off whether they marry or not. Most older women seem to prefer being alone. Friends, family, pets, and television give them all the company they require.

    I personally think doing things that make you happy are the secret to increased quality of life. Love, laugh, play...
     
  20. jmpet Valued Senior Member

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    Learn to be at peace with the world.
     
  21. Mr MacGillivray Banned Banned

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    Get rid of assholes.
     
  22. Gremmie "Happiness is a warm gun" Valued Senior Member

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    Work less, but earn more..
     
  23. Pinwheel Banned Banned

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    Give away all your possessions. To me.
     

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