Make you Fink on Friday

I used to buy fruit juice, I used to drink Coca Cola and other softdrinks and soda, I used to make cordial…

But then I discovered some facts about the ingredients used in all these drinks, ugly facts.

They have shit in them like aspartame, sucralose and high fructose corn syrup instead of suger. All of the above are pure poison!

So I switched to water, good old tap water. For a fizzy beverage sparkling mineral water became my drink.

But water can be boring…

So, spice it up a little.

fruit infused water

Image: Flux and Flow

Some interesting recipes to spice up your water. Homemade is better than commercial poison. Use your fruit and vege, scrapes can be used too. For example, when I have pineapple, the skin goes to make pineapple water.

Check out Flux and Flow for more ideas.

Update

Parents are warned to steer clear of sugar-filled ‘healthy’ drinks

Parents’ efforts on healthy eating ‘undermined’ by marketing campaigns and lack of government interest

Many ‘healthy’ drinks for children contain nearly as much sugar as Coca-Cola. Photograph: Melissa Lomax Speelman/Getty Images/Flickr RF

Nutritionists and health campaigners are calling on parents to avoid supposedly “healthy” fruit drinks during the hot summer – asking them to give thirsty children plain water or milk instead.

The calls come as new health research puts sugary drinks, and particularly the fructose in them, at the heart of the “diabesity” epidemic affecting young people in Britain. Some 67 health charities, medical royal colleges and public health bodies are asking the government to consider a health tax on sugary drinks, along the lines of those already successfully introduced in France and four other European countries.

Read more

Opinion…

And the governments are just not interested; too much money to lose in corporate donations.

Change the World Wednesday – 31st Jul

Well, this week has been kind of rough.

Apart from the cold that has devastated Brazil for the last week and destroyed many crops that have already had an impact on the market. Milk has shot up in price, from R$2.70/lt to R$3.30/lt because cattle feed has gone up in price. I ask myself, why don’t they feed the cows on grass? Grass doesn’t go up in price.

The major upset this week, was the unexpected death of Lixo, my cat. He was poisoned, along with the neighbour’s fox terrier. You can read my post RIP, my Friend for the full story.

Lixo was AWOL for three days, then on Saturday, I heard the news.

My little furball rubbish (Lixo is Portuguese for rubbish) has been recycled. He is buried along with Herbie under a small palm tree that my neighbour grew from seed in the praça he loved so much.

It was with tears that I cleaned up Kitty Korner for the last time.

I remain hopeful; all my cats have come from the street, so it won’t be long before another comes along, that I can repurpose.

Click on the banner for the full post

This week’s CTWW, is about the Tar sands oil pipeline, an important issue, not only for the USA, but globally.

Have you heard about the Tar Sands Oil Pipeline? It not only threatens wildlife and natural habitat, it threatens drinking water. While it directly affects Canada and the United States, it sets a dangerous precedent worldwide … that the use of fossil fuel is acceptable. Let’s raise our voices and let the world know that we not only want to stop the Tar Sands Oil Pipeline but we want sustainable, environmentally-safe energy. Please sign this Petition (appropriate worldwide).

 

OR …

Choose any of the petitions found HERE (or choose a cause specific to your area) and take action.

 

OR …

Contact your public officials via letter, email or phone regarding your environmental concerns.

Because of the anonymity I maintain on the net, I will not be signing petitions, but I will spread the word and urge all my readers.

My reason for anonymity is not cowardice, for those of you who have known my blogs over the years will be aware that because I am outspoken in many areas; an attempt to be anonymous is a case of self preservation. My blogs have already been wiped once, and I don’t want to lose all my work again. Just because I am in Brazil, doesn’t mean that I am immune from NSA; it turns out that Brazil has the highest rate of eavesdropping by NSA in Latin America, and Brazilians are not at all happy about this.

The world is changing, and it is not for the better.

Satireday on Eco-Crap

Make you Fink on Friday

We think we can outsmart nature.

But we are wrong, so terribly wrong. Nature wins every time. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about floods, erosion or even the smallest things like cockroaches.

Yes, that ghastly insect we all love to hate.

They make women scream, men stamp on them at every turn, we poison them and try to eradicate them, but they are still with us; and Mother Nature is making sure they will be with of us for a long long time yet.

Cockroaches lose their ‘sweet tooth’ to evade traps

Dr Coby Schal: The cockroaches spit out the glucose “like a baby rejects spinach”

A strain of cockroaches in Europe has evolved to outsmart the sugar traps used to eradicate them.

American scientists found that the mutant cockroaches had a “reorganised” sense of taste, making them perceive the glucose used to coat poisoned bait not as sweet but rather as bitter.

A North Carolina State University team tested the theory by giving cockroaches a choice of jam or peanut butter.

They then analysed the insects’ taste receptors, similar to our taste buds.

Researchers from the same team first noticed 20 years ago that some pest controllers were failing to eradicate cockroaches from properties, because the insects were simply refusing to eat the bait.

Dr Coby Schal explained in the journal Science that this new study had revealed the “neural mechanism” behind this refusal.

Jam v peanut butter

In the first part of the experiment, the researchers offered the hungry cockroaches a choice of two foods – peanut butter or glucose-rich jam [known as jelly is the US].

“The jelly contains lots of glucose and the peanut butter has a much smaller amount,” explained Dr Schal.

“You can see the mutant cockroaches taste the jelly and jump back – they’re repulsed and they swarm over the peanut butter.”

In the second part of the experiment, the team was able to find out exactly why the cockroaches were so repulsed.

The scientists immobilised the cockroaches and used tiny electrodes to record the activity of taste receptors – cells that respond to flavour that are “housed” in microscopic hairs on the insects’ mouthparts

“The cells that normally respond to bitter compounds were responding to glucose in these [mutant] cockroaches,” said Dr Schal.

“So they’re perceiving glucose to be a bitter compound.

“The sweet-responding cell does also fire, but the bitter compound actually inhibits it – so the end result is that bitterness overrides sweetness.”

Highly magnified footage of these experiments clearly shows a glucose-averse cockroach reacting to a dose of the sugar.

“It behaves like a baby that rejects spinach,” explained Dr Schal.

“It shakes its head and refuses to imbibe that liquid, at the end, you can see the [glucose] on the side of the head of the cockroach that has refused it.”

Read more

So, we’re not about to be rid of these horrid creatures anytime soon.

Mother Nature is winning the battle.

 

How Gullible Are We?

A student at Eagle Rock Junior High won first prize at the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair, April 26. He was attempting to show how conditioned we have become to alarmists practicing junk science and spreading fear of everything in our environment. In his project he urged people to sign a petition demanding strict control or total elimination of the chemical “dihydrogen monoxide.”

And for plenty of good reasons, since:

1. it can cause excessive sweating and vomiting
2. it is a major component in acid rain
3. it can cause severe burns in its gaseous state
4. accidental inhalation can kill you
5. it contributes to erosion
6. it decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes
7. it has been found in tumors of terminal cancer patients

He asked 50 people if they supported a ban of the chemical.

• Forty-three (43) said yes,
• six (6) were undecided,
• and only one (1) knew that the chemical was water.

The title of his prize winning project was, “How Gullible Are We?”

He feels the conclusion is obvious.

Source: Global One TV

The Idea has been Mothballed

Uh, wrong mothballs, duh!

Ever thought about the origin of that saying?

It means: Put into storage, or not used.

Mothballs… I remember mothballs, my grandmother’s house smelled of them, my Aunt Louie’s house reeked of them. The smell of mothballs was an integral part of my childhood.

My mother had mothballs in the linen cupboard and in the chest where she kept winter clothes in the summer and vice versa.

As a budding chemist I knew that mothballs were naphthalene at the age of 13; I had a jar of naphthalene flakes in my laboratory, although I never figured out a use for them, but I had a lot of chemicals like that. I never became a chemist, I dropped out of high school and was considered too dumb because I didn’t pass the end of year exam. Geez, four lousy points is the difference between being dumb and being smart, but that’s another story.

Naphthalene aka Mothballs are poison. Did you know that? I did, but used frugally in the home they don’t present a problem; used to excess, they are.

You want to find out more information on mothballs, try here and here.

Did you know there was a safe natural alternative to mothballs?

There is you know…

Aromatic Cedar Chips

Cedar chips. You can get cedar chips cheaply, they are often used as ground cover in gardens.

Simply make a small muslin bag to hold small cedar chips and hang in your closet, or wherever.

If you want a variation, add a couple of sprigs of lavender for extra pong.

Much safer for the family and pets.

You can buy aesthetically pleasing cedar balls and blocks commercially, but why the extra expense?

Note: A link to this post is in the Apothecary