I'm having a hard time concentrating as I wrap up this month's newsletter. Fortunately, I had a lot of it already finished, so I will send it pretty much as is.

I just got the news a few hours ago that my Dad passed away this afternoon. That's him on the right with my little grandson, taken just a few weeks ago at 88 years of age. In a lot of ways, this newletter is a result of Dad's influence - and he was always my biggest fan. Due to his influence, my siblings and I were raised on whole grain bread, honey instead of sugar, lots of fresh fruit, and a healthy, balanced diet. It is not exactly the diet I would recommend today, but it gave me an early awareness of how nutrition affects our health and I have been a fascinated student ever since.

I don't believe that death is the end. As Professor Dumbledore told Harry Potter, "To the well organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." What could be more magical?

Have you noticed that life reflects art to some degree? At least, life tends to shift in the direction of whatever we focus on the most. So it makes sense to choose our entertainment with that in mind, as Antonia Dodge discovered when she immersed herself in a marathon of murder mystery films.

From Antonia's Genius Awakening Blog - "I recently read a great description of the subconscious mind. Like fertile soil, it will accept any thought and nourish it. And, much like actual soil doesn’t care what kind of seed is planted – a rose, an apple tree or a weed – our subconscious mind isn’t vetting what we give it, good or bad. It’s not making evaluations. There’s no difference between 'reality' and perception for the subconscious mind. It knows what most of us don’t – there’s no real duality between the two, period. Our perception IS our reality (or, as the old adage states, it defines it for us). For example, if I watch movies for a week where people are being killed senselessly, my subconscious doesn’t know it was just a movie. EVERYTHING in my world is ‘just a movie’ to my subconscious, and at the same time everything is deadly serious."

For some seriously uplifting mind food that your subconscious can use to shift your life in a positive direction, Antonia recommends - http://www.karmatube.org/  There is no charge to sign up and you will have a choice about how often you receive their posts. Their videos are often quite inspiring!

For those with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, modern medicine does not offer much hope, but Donna Gates, of Body Ecology Diet renown is an expert in healing gut issues. She offers some great suggestions for healing this troublesome issue. From Donna Gates' Body Ecology Blog - "For decades, many physicians have considered IBS to be a psychological disorder since symptoms can be aggravated by stress. Irritable bowel syndrome may cause issues like gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, and abdominal pain. IBS sufferers may experience insomnia, anxiety, and depression.

"While the exact cause of IBS remains unknown, medical research links bacterial overgrowth in the small intestine with IBS, often triggered by enzyme deficiency, low stomach acid, and a leaky gut.

"You can find IBS relief by taking these steps to boost your inner ecology:

Here's a fascinating TED talk by ecologist Allan Savory with accompanying article on Dr. Mercola's site. It sure made me question some of my preconceived notions. I have read over and over again that livestock are responsible for a large proportion of greenhouse gasses, and they are when factory farmed, but according to Savory, not when they are allowed to roam in large herds over grassy planes, much as the bison once did in America.

From mercola.com - "According to Savory, we not only can, but indeed MUST, use grazing livestock to address desertification. In his talk, he explains how we can work with nature, at very low cost, to reverse [ ] these problems.

"By some estimates, grazing large herds of livestock on half of the world's barren or semi-barren grasslands could take enough carbon from the atmosphere to bring us back to preindustrial levels.

    "'Nothing offers more hope,' he says.

"Desertification happens when we create too much bare ground. In areas where a high level of humidity is guaranteed, desertification cannot occur. Ground cover allows for trapping of water, preventing the water from evaporating. At present, a staggering two-thirds of the landmass on earth is desertifying."

Will it work?
Apparently it did for thousands of years, but we won't know for sure unless we try it. Savory's solution sounds like the exact opposite of the way we approach modern agriculture, doesn't it? I love to hear about simple and practical solutions for healing our planet, particularly when they are so perfectly aligned with the way nature has kept things in balance. Too bad 40,000 elephants had to be slaughtered to teach us this valuable lesson. Watch the video to see what you think.

Makes you wonder what the BLM is up to with their massive roundups of mustangs and burrows. Let's hope they have all the facts they need to make informed decisions on this important issue.

"Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam
and the deer and the antelope play..."
Pass it on!

Spoiler alert: I'm going to talk about a dramatic episode from Downton Abbey season three.

If you, like millions of others, are hooked on Downton Abbey, you were probably saddened by the death of Lady Sybil from eclampsia during childbirth. She was my favorite character and of course I cried. But even though it is just a TV show and not something to take seriously, the truth is that real women are still dying from this disease every day, at the rate of 63,000 a year worldwide. Another 10,500 babies die from pre-eclampsia in the U.S. alone and an estimated 500,000 worldwide. The really sad thing about this problem is that it can easily be prevented with good nutrition. That's what Dr. Tom Brewer discovered in his clinical practice.

Here's a quote from by Amy V. Haas of midwifery.com that explains it all - "The fact is that research has been done on this subject, but with the exception of folic acid, it stopped somewhere around the 1980s when the focus shifted to drugs as the answer to curing all ills. The research that was done was not widely accepted due to the fact that it could not include clinically controlled studies. It would not show common sense or ethics to starve a group of pregnant women in order to supply a control group. The researchers did the logical thing and used the women's previous diet and circumstances as the control (Brewer 1982). The results were amazing. Dr. Tom Brewer totally eradicated preeclampsia in specific populations where the former rates were upwards of 40 percent. He had the women eat a healthy, varied, well-balanced diet that included high quality foods, adequate protein and complex carbohydrates. He also had them drink water to thirst, salt to taste and avoid drugs. Unfortunately, the National Institutes of Health refused to publish the results because he couldn't do a clinically controlled study."

When Dr. Brewer interviewed his preeclampsia patients, he noticed that all of them had poor diets, particularly low in protein. When he ran his own clinic and improved their nutrition, none of his patients developed preemclampsia, even though other Ob/Gyns were seeing rates as high as 25 percent. He spent much of his life studying the effects of nutrition on pregnancy and promoting a healthy diet, even though the medical establishment refused to acknowledge his work. Once again, the natural solution is still being overlooked simply because drug companies cannot make a profit on good nutrition.