Love is the Heart Rescue

People are suckers for love. This is why pounding-heart lovers will rush into movie theaters tomorrow to see the heartfelt melodrama Slumdog Millionaire. Why not get more inspiration for love?

Love has profound impact on us. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate and an Israeli psychologist, wrote about what got him into the fascinating field of psychology. When German Nazis occupied France in 1940s, Kahneman and his family lived in Paris. During the wartime, Jews were required to wear the Star of David and had to obey a 6p.m. curfew. “I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others – the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.” (Kahneman, D. 2003. Maps of bounded rationality: A perspective on intuitive judgment and choice) Kahneman’s childhood Nazi experience presented tender loving nature of human beings when the boy least expected it. This particular incident of love display opened his mind to the “complimented and interesting” subject of psychology.

Love is at the heart of human world. No one can deny that people innately embrace the fundamental essence of human nature - love. We live for love, fight for love, and die for love. We compose poetry, write novels and produce movies to spread love. Globalization and civilization help us evolve into a special kind of race that not only reaches tangible goods like food and shelter, but also cultivates spiritual assets like love. Unfortunately, the very people who created love have been too busy to care for it. Current global financial crisis not only alarms business entities and policymakers to develop economic resolutions, it also serves as a wakeup call for global citizens. It urges us to analyze the underlying causes for the calamity and take a closer look at love. Did we jeopardize our well-being by stress, depression and OCD after succeeding at work and failing at home? Did financial and materialistic rewards drive us far away from nurturing love? Were we so involved in acquiring tangible assets that we overlooked the fact that the life’s gemstone is love instead of its filigree like vacation homes and private jets? Is now the time for us to rebound from financial deprivation as well as soul deficiency?

We all know that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. (CDC’s Heart Disease Facts and Statistics 2009) It is already heartbreaking to know that over 650,000 Americans died of heart disease each year, but it is more heart rending that few know love can really heals the physical heart. Loving relationships promotes better health, happiness and longevity, especially in times of severe downturns. When Dorbert Nerum’s team at the University of Houston conducted a research on the correlation between a high cholesterol diet and heart attack, they came across unanticipated health miracle brought by love. They fed experimental rabbits with the high cholesterol diet that guaranteed to elevate cholesterol level in the rabbits. Consequently, there was a build-up of plaque in rabbits’ arteries. This blocked blood flow and caused heart disease. The surprising finding was that one group of rabbits developed a lower cholesterol level and a smaller arterial plaque volume than expected. It took a while for the befuddled team to discover that a lab assistant’s extra care stopped the rabbits from suffering heart problems. After feeding the rabbits, the lab assistant took them out of the cage, talked to them, played with them and petted them. All these loving activities reduced the risk for heart disease by a very significant percentage, 60 percent! If a simple act of petting could prevent the rabbits from getting heart disease, think about how many lives we can save by doing little things to share love with people around us.

More and more scientific studies have shown that small changes in lifestyles lead to significant improvements in one’s health and well-being. However, love, the most powerful and the most effective intervention, has not been prescribed enough by health practitioners. Love has a stronger impact on the quality of life and development of diseases. It extends emotional transformation to physical restoration. Dr. Candace Pert conducted a famous research on the bio-chemistry of emotions to demonstrate how the emotions are connected to the body. She finds that receptors sit on the surface of body cells, and specialized cells like neurons have millions of the receptors surrounding them. These receptors scan, sense and receive chemical substances known as peptides. These peptides deliver emotional messages to the receptors. The emotional messages elicit bio-chemical reactions within the cells, and have positive or negative effect on cell’s growth and development. Dr. Pert advances the theory of body-mind connection through the evidence of chemical alternation at molecular level. Her finding coincides with the philosophy of Dr. Yongshu Yang, a revolutionary doctor in integrative medicine in China. Dr. Yang has treated thousands of patients through a mind-body approach since 1970s. Her clinical experience confirms that the body has self-healing ability or “natural medicine.” Proper emotional release and positive attitudes restore body’s healing mechanism. An angry individual has angry cells that attack and damage each other. A loving person has happy cells that attract and nourish each other. Dr. Yang discovers that people with anger suppression have greater risks for inflammation in all kinds of body cells, cardiovascular diseases and circulatory malfunction. On the contrary, people with positive and loving attitudes develop less inflammatory conditions and usually have a longer lifespan.

If the best doctor resides inside our mind, why not get involved with love to provide the natural pharmacopeias to others and ourselves? Love is both from the heart and for the heart.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Dieters Gone Wild!

Do you really want to lose weight?

Have you tried all the diet methods out there?
If yes, think again. Are you sure you have tried the goldfish diet?
If no, wait to get enlightened by a CNN's report on fascinating diet schemes over the last century.

What you're about to read is beyond ordinary thinking and practice, and for information only. Make sure that you consult with your physician on what the healthiest way is to lose weight.


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Sleeping Beauty and worm diets -- thinning through history

By Linda Rodriguez

(MENTAL FLOSS) -- Most of the world seems to think that America invented obesity sometime in the last century, but the truth is, fat has always been a part of life (witness Hatshepsut, one of the great ancient Egyptian queens who reigned in the 15th century BC -- despite her svelte sarcophagus, modern archeologists believe that she was pretty obese and may have suffered from diabetes).

So it stands to reason that dieting has been around just as long.

Some historians credit William the Conqueror with starting the first fad diet. Having grown too fat to ride his horse, William went on a liquid diet in 1087 -- or, rather, a liquor diet, since all he did was drink booze.

The story might be apocryphal -- William, still fat, actually died after falling from his horse and there was no word on whether he was drunk at the time -- but it's a good one, and it sets the tone for the next 1000+ years of dieting.

Throughout history, people have been looking for some kind of magic that will allow one to eat and live as one pleases, but still look emaciatedly gorgeous. And they've come up with some pretty dubious theories that somehow took hold in the public consciousness and became fads. Here are a few of our favorites.

Location, location, location

"The Causes and Effects of Corpulence" was a treatise penned in 1727 by one Thomas Short, in which he observed that larger people were more likely to live near swampy areas. His advice? Fat people should move to more arid climes.

Improbable side effects

The namesake of the graham cracker -- ironically now an integral part of that deliciously fattening treat, the 'smore -- was a Presbyterian minister who claimed that overeating could not only make you fat, it could make you lecherous, too. In the 1830s, Sylvester Graham ran health retreats for like-minded parishioners featuring a strict meat-free, incredibly bland diet.

Chew yourself thin

Horace Fletcher, a turn of the century San Francisco art dealer, became known as the Great Masticator after he claimed he lost more than 40 pounds by chewing his food until it was essentially liquefied and spitting out all the bits that weren't.

Fletcher's scheme became incredibly popular -- novelist Henry James and industry titan John D. Rockefeller were reportedly fans, as was John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg, of the cereal fame, was a health nut who ran a sanitarium in Michigan, where he encouraged his visitors to "Fletcherize" with a little song he wrote called "Chew Chew." Mental Floss: How cereal transformed American culture

The parasite diet

In the early part of the 20th century, the weight loss industry allegedly found a tiny little helper in the form of a tiny little parasite -- the noble tapeworm. According to product advertisements of the day, tapeworms were being sold in pill form as a weight loss tool.

While whether or not those pills actually contained a real live tapeworm is certainly debatable, however, there is evidence that jockeys, who frequently needed to lose a lot of weight fast, would try to induce tapeworms. Another favorite weight loss tool of the Lilliputian equestrians: Burying themselves in piles of horse manure, which acted as a kind of natural sauna.

Introducing the calorie

In 1918, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters introduced a new word to the world lexicon --"calorie" (may she be forever cursed for it). Peters' book, "Diet and Health, With a Key to Calories," which helpfully included a phonetic spelling of the word "calorie," as so many people were unfamiliar with it, sold more than 2 million copies and established calorie-counting as the framework of a good health.

This diet regime wasn't particularly dubious, but it did lend a potentially dangerous new tool to those looking for a way to quantify and reduce their food intake. Case in point: The Scarsdale Diet of 1979, a strict 700-calorie a day diet that works -- because you're starving. Mental Floss: Quiz: Which item has more calories?

The goldfish diet

OK, this one wasn't so much about weight loss as it was fame gain, but in 1939, it was a fad that swept the nation. Like most good things, it all started with a bet -- a Harvard University undergrad won $10 after swallowing an innocent fishy. The story spread from there, prompting a countrywide goldfish slaughter.

Goldfish swallowing became so popular that not only were pet stores running out of the indigestible comestibles, but the New York Times published warnings from doctors that swallowing goldfish, which are known to carry tapeworms and other parasites, could be very harmful to one's health.

The nicotine diet

By the middle of the 20th century, dieting had become such a major economic, social and cultural force in the Western world that cigarette companies, not wanting to miss the money boat, jumped on board promoting cigarettes as a weight-loss tool. It's a belief that persists today -- ask any supermodel.

The master cleanse

In the 1940s, nutrition guru Stanley Burroughs created the Master Cleanse, a fast during which the dieter subsists solely on a mixture of cayenne pepper, fresh-squeezed lemon juice, maple syrup and water.

The Master Cleanse is still popular today, especially among anorexics and aspiring anorexics, despite the fact that most nutritionists and doctors say that "detoxing" is a nonsensical and potentially harmful idea.

The Sleeping Beauty diet

Then there's the Sleeping Beauty Diet, a regime that allows the dieter to literally sleep off the pounds while under heavy sedation for several days. Elvis was reportedly a fan of that one, right about the time when he was having a little trouble squeezing into those trademark white jump suits, as was a character in the landmark beach read, "Valley of the Dolls." Mental Floss: 7 simple rules for how to take a nap

The monotony diets

The 20th century also brought us back to a concept allegedly pioneered by William the Conqueror -- the single food or drink diet. There's the Grapefruit Diet, which alleges that eating a lot of grapefruit and drinking a lot of grapefruit juice, in conjunction, of course, with a very low-calorie diet, is the way to weigh less; the Cabbage Soup Diet, which is said to cause serious gas with a side of nausea; the Popcorn Diet, which is pretty much undercut by all the tasty things one puts on popcorn to make it palatable; and the Chocolate Diet, which, though tempting, is just plain silliness.

Memorable dieting paraphernalia

And let's not forget about the gadgets that went along with these suspect food fads, like the Vision-Dieter Glasses, which made food look unappealing, or the Mini-Fork system, which encouraged people to eat smaller portions by supplying them with -- you guessed it -- smaller forks.

Or how about slimming soaps, popular in the 1930s, which promised dieters that they could just wash the fat away? And then there's the perennially popular vibrating machine, which promised to melt off pounds by a few minutes of intense body vibration -- and which is actually enjoying a comeback now at gadgetry stores like Brookstone.