Author Archives: Kirsten

Adventures in Iodine

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I’ve hesitated posting about this subject because of all the alt-health things I’ve tried, this may be the one that is a true lightening rod. But I’m going public: since late spring of this year, I’ve been orthosupplementing with iodine.

I didn’t work up the courage to try this overnight. I first heard someone speculate that iodine deficiency might be ubiquitous about four years ago . . . that was from Ingeborg Eibl, a Rochester, New York chiropractor (and btw gifted healer).

Eibl mentioned iodine to me and gave me photocopies of some research papers to read. I looked them over but didn’t take it any further.

What’s changed since then is that the Internet now offers a wealth of information about iodine supplementation.

I started reading.

Most of the information is based on the work of a couple of medical researchers. Guy Abraham is one of them–he’s the driving force behind The Iodine Project, through which thousands of women have been supplementing with iodine to evaluate its ability to protect against breast disease.

Abraham and other pro-Iodiners share a couple of premises. First, that iodine is essential to a broad range of metabolic processes, and second that we’re not getting nearly enough from our diets (no, not even if we’re eating iodized salt).

How broad do I mean by “broad range?”

This broad:

The commonly accepted medical opinion is that iodine’s only role in the body is to help make thyroid hormones. Although this is an extremely important function, Abraham demonstrates that the role of iodine in the body goes far beyond its function of making thyroid hormones. Other possible functions include: helping to regulate moods, preventing cancer (especially in breasts, ovaries, uterus, prostate and thyroid gland), preventing and treating fibrocystic breasts in women, helping to regulate blood pressure, helping to regulate blood sugar and prevent and treat diabetes, and helping to prevent abnormal cardiac rhythms.

Here’s another iodine supplementation website worth perusing. The page I’ve linked presents categories that themselves hyperlinked to pages with additional information, so you can read about Iodine and the breast, heart, immune system, gastrointestinal system, skin (I’ve read elsewhere that 20 percent of the body’s iodine is found in the skin), glandular system, lungs, eyes (“Iodine occurs in large quantities in the ciliary body and lachrymal glands of the eye. It has been related to cataract formation and glaucoma, and is seen as useful in treating eye infections. Iodide has been found to be protective against UVB radiation.”), mouth (“The salivary gland concentrate iodine 20 to 100 times serum levels.”), bones, and blood (“Iodine has been studied as an antioxidant in human blood and has been found to be as powerful as Vitamin C.”).

Unfortunately, although iodine was once touted as a highly beneficial nutrient, its reputation was tarnished in the mid-20th century. Abraham recounts what happened here. A couple of researchers injected rats with iodine, misinterpreted the experiment results, and extrapolated the misinterpretation to humans. Our government, which has never seen a cow pie too small to miss, went right for it, splat: it used the so-called Wolff-Chaikoff effect to help set the official RDA for iodine at a miniscule 150 mcg/day.

To make a bad decision even worse, most of us are probably getting even less Iodine than the RDA. Iodine was once commonly added to bread — it acts as a flour conditioner — but that has declined since the early 1980s (bread makers today often use bromide instead, which is molecularly similar but unfortunately not very good for us. Hell, why mince words, the s**t’s toxic, it’s poisoning us, and we’re exposed to it by far more than in the bread we eat — from pesticide residue to the fire retardants sprayed on our mattresses.)

There’s some iodine in some seafood, and in seaweed, and of course there’s iodized salt — but it’s debatable whether we eat enough iodized salt to maintain optimum iodine levels.

Mainland Japanese, meanwhile, consume considerably more iodine, because they eat quite a bit of seaweed. Abraham uses as his guideline 13 mg/day. Here’s a lower estimate, but at 1.2 mg/day it’s still nearly 10 times the US RDA.

Now. There’s a huge debate going on about all of this. I spent weeks reading arguments on both sides, including a series of articles published by Townsend Letter that pits Abraham and another M.D., David Brownstein, against Alan Gaby, M.D.

And maybe I’m being a damn fool. But in the end, it’s like the witticism that if you have two clocks you never know what time it is, while if you have only one clock you always know. I decided to trust the clock that says we should be eating more iodine than we are.

I also took it easy, especially at the beginning. Upping iodine can displace other molecules that one might have built up in the body, including the aforementioned bromide, as well as fluoride and mercury. I followed the advice published on this website, including taking the companion nutrients that have been identified as useful to help offset the “side effects” of bumping up iodine levels.

I did experience periods of what I believe to be detoxification. The worse came within a week of starting. The symptoms were uncomfortable (headache primarily, flu-like symptoms) but temporary. I took a break for a couple of days (pulsing, per Breast Cancer Choices) and never experienced those particular symptoms again. More recently I’ve hit a different set of (much milder) symptoms which I believe are caused by the displacement of fluoride and/or bromide in my body. As before, I pulse to give my body a chance to rest and “catch up” on eliminating the offending substances.

Other than these episodes, the experience has been amazing. I feel sooooooo good. It’s hard to describe. I was healthy already; I was a happy gal already. But I can tell there is something very different about how my body runs now. It’s akin to how you feel when you’ve been hungry, and finish a delicious meal. A kind of visceral sense of well-being. I should also report . . . sorry to be vague about this, can’t quite bring myself to discussing certain benefits explicitly . . . my experience bears out the promise of the research on breast health. It’s turned back the clock. How’s that for a benefit.

I would never go so far as to urge this onto other people. The plain fact is that many people should start this under the guidance of an iodine-savvy health care practitioner, particularly people who have existing thyroid conditions or who are sick or whose bodies are more compromised than mine with mercury or other toxins. (Here’s one place to start looking for a practitioner.)

But I would strongly, strongly urge everyone to take the time to look into it for themselves. I believe most of us are iodine deficient, and that one day in the not-too-distant future that will become a widely recognized fact. I believe that we’ll come to understand that a staggering range of systemic imbalances that are overtaking so many people, thinks like obesity and hormonal problems and osteoporosis, will be traced to lack of iodine.

You heard it here.

In the meantime, if this has grabbed your attention, do yourself a favor and start educating yourself. Don’t wait for mainstream medicine to catch up.

cape code vacation :-)

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I fulfilled a promise to my daughter last week with a 5-day trip to Cape Cod.

She’d never been to the ocean before :-)

It was a wonderful trip — very beachy! My daughter learned how to use a boogy board to ride the waves and got to hold a star fish some other kids had caught.

One of the nice things about Cape Cod is how different the beaches are depending on where you go. We sampled three different areas, including the National Seashore on the upper cape — wonderful surf, but cooooold —

Coast Guard Beach, Cape Cod

Leashed dogs allowed outside the lifeguard areas! Hooray! Because every dog needs to learn that if you eat a bunch of beach sand, it’s gonna come back up . . . a little at a time . . . for hours . . . and hours . . . and hours . . .

Sea dog!

We also spent one day on the bay side, where the water was calmer & shallower.

Corporation Beach, Cape Cod

We caught dozens of little hermit crabs :-) All of whom are named “Hermie” btw.

hermit crab

We stayed in South Yarmouth, on a beach that faces the south. The water there was warm enough there for lots of boogey board practice. And our hotel held beach parties at night, with live music . . .

cabana party!

. . . plus kid-friendly activities like night volleyball. Kept my daughter happy while I took pics of this sunset.

Cape Cod sunset

All told, an idyllic summer interlude — and the native Cape Codders, I have to say, are some of the nicest people you’d ever hope to meet. So many little kindnesses they showed us! Thank you guys!

Oh, and thank you Debi for letting us pit stop at your place on our way out — and inviting us to stop back again on our way back, don’t ask me how I managed to miss the exit :-)

Let’s squish the Square

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The economy is teetering. Our food & gas prices are climbing. And, lest we forget, we citizens of New York are the highest taxed in the country.

So how do we want our politicians to spend our tax money?

If you’re a construction worker, you’ll answer: Build Renaissance Square! Because yeah, if that happens, you’ll have a job for, ya know, a few months.

I can understand that. But what comes next?

Most likely, a big long morning after. For example, take this article by Mark Yost in the Wall Street Journal. He’s writing about sports stadiums, but what he says is enough to remind you of your worst public project hangover.

Sports economists have long argued that publicly financed stadiums are a waste of taxpayer money. And they have the data to prove it.

Yes, stadiums do create high-paying construction jobs for a year or two. But the vast majority of long-term employment is low-wage concession jobs. A Congressional Research Service study of the Baltimore Ravens stadium found that each job created cost the state $127,000. By comparison, Maryland’s Sunny Day Fund created jobs for about $6,000 each . . .

Then there’s the fact that only a sliver of the tax base really benefits from a sports stadium. And with ticket prices rising rapidly, that group is getting much smaller.

Consider the New York Yankees, who have the highest payroll in baseball and take in more than $300 million a year just from their television network. They’ll move into a new $1 billion stadium next year, about half of which was covered by the taxpayers. Seats behind home plate that cost $250 this year will be ten times that next year. The net result is that very few of the people who paid for the stadium will be able to afford a seat there.

But perhaps the best argument against publicly financed stadiums is straight out of Econ 101: Opportunity cost.

“What else could the city have invested its money in and what kind of a return would it have produced?” said King Banaian, chairman of the St. Cloud State (Minn.) Economics Dept. Despite reams of evidence to the contrary, the District proceeded with what Councilman Kwame Brown calls “the most controversial project in the history of the city.”

It was controversial, he said, because the city had more pressing needs. The city’s schools are in shambles; crime is out of control; and unemployment in distressed neighborhoods, like Southeast, is double the national average, if not higher.

Fortunately, people are raising their voices. In City Newspaper, Mary Anna Towler asks a whole slew of questions about Ren Square that need to be asked.

Was the big theater the best theater for Ren Square? If MCC or SUNY owns the theater, will taxpayers’ money be diverted from education to subsidize the theater?

If there’s not enough money for the theater, should we go ahead with the MCC campus and the bus station?

And: does downtown Rochester need Ren Square? A few years ago, it seemed to be about the only development hope we had. That’s no longer true. Is it a good idea to build Ren Square, taking prime development land out of the private market – and taking that land off the tax roles?

There’s also an excellent comment after the City piece:

It would be good if the transit portion of the project were as closely analysed as the PAC. Shouldn’t we also notice that over $100 million TRANSIT dollars are essentially being squandered in a way that will make the bus system slower, less efficient and much more costly to operate? Ther is no advantage to the city to leave the auditorium theater and sibleys building empty, as the current plan would do.To pursue such a plan in an environment of record gas prices, (not to mention global warming) falls on the spectrum between “sub optimal use of public funds” and “complete insanity”. The bus station is both the achilles heel and fatal flaw since it literally cannot be used by buses. This might explain why no traffic study has been done.

Hopefully the Ren Square cloud will clear in time to save the federal transit funds to use for badly needed transportation projects that actually move people TOWARDS their destination at lower energy and lower cost.

We have already spent $15.8 million on the Renaissance Square project.

Are we going to wake up and say “no more” before it’s too late?

I’ve blogged about Renaissance Square previously here, here, and here.

So who is driving the bus? Really?

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More evidence that our rational self isn’t really the self that’s in charge: as described in a piece by Robert Lee Hotz in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, research suggests that when we “decide” to do something, we’re not really deciding. What we’re really doing is becoming aware of a decision that’s already been made.

In one study, researchers led by John-Dylan Haynes in Berlin monitored “neural currents” in volunteers’ brains (using magnetic resonance imaging) as the volunteers pushed buttons using either their left and right hands. The researchers discovered that they could predict which hand the subjects would use by the neural activity that preceded the button-pushing.

The foundation of this research is the work of
the late Benjamin Libet, who came to similar conclusions.

One way a lot of people respond to these sort of findings is to question whether humans have “free will.” But if you accept the assumption that there is an aspect of the Self that operates more or less independently of the Self with which we generally identify, none of this is the least bit surprising. Of course “Self 2” causes ripples in the brain’s electromagnetic field. They just happen to be ripples beneath the surface of conscious awareness. It doesn’t mean we don’t have “free will.” It may, however, mean that “free will” is a meaningless concept.

In the WSJ piece, Hotz goes on to report other research that suggests that we make better “consumer decisions” (e.g. what car to buy) when we’re distracted.

See? It’s not just about swinging a golf club ;-)

Eye-spotted Ladybug

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I haven’t found one of these since I was a kid . . .

Isn’t it gorgeous?

Eye-spotted Ladybug

Most of the ladybugs we see anymore are non-native species that were imported by the U.S. Dept of Agriculture in the 70s to control agricultural pests.

Sounded like a good idea at the time, but they’ve driven out many of our native species.

The law of unintended consequences.

And look what else I found: Cornell University is asking kids to find and photograph native ladybugs and submit the photos with a little supporting data (date and time seen, location, habitat).

To be able to help the nine spotted ladybug and other ladybug species scientists need to have detailed information on which species are still out there and how many individuals are around. Entomologists at Cornell can identify the different species but there are too few of us to sample in enough places to find the really rare ones. We need you to be our legs, hands and eyes. If you could look for ladybugs and send us pictures of them on Email we can start to gather the information we need. We are very interested in the rare species but any pictures will help us. This is the ultimate summer science project for kids and adults! You can learn, have fun and help save these important species.

The website tells about how a couple of kids found a nine-spotted ladybug in Virginia in 2006 — the first sighting of this species in the Eastern U.S. in 14 years. Isn’t that cool?

And what a great environmental science-based summer activity!

Demon, Daemon, Daimon, Daimonion

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I’ve been thinking more about Tim Gallwey’s book, The Inner Game of Golf, and the implications of what he discovered about executing the golf swing.

Gallwey observed that there are two different “modes” of being that affect a golf swing. One is judgmental, critical, verbal, analytical. The other is kinesthetic and sub- or non-verbal.

It’s always tricky to describe different aspects of the self or psyche or personality. Gallwey was no dummy. He was writing in the 70s for an audience that hadn’t been acclimated to new agey-type material. So it’s no coincidence, I’m sure, that the terminology he coined to describe these two modes was pretty dry: Self 1 and Self 2, respectively.

As simple designations within the context of mastering a golf (or tennis) swing, that terminology works. But what about off the course?

“Self 2” is a mode of being that is gained by intent, trust, and a shift to pure awareness — the same state we try to achieve during certain types of meditation. It’s the mode that we associate with “being in the zone,” where everything just flows effortlessly. There’s a kind of magic to it. Here’s a bit from the book:

Before I address the ball, I look at the situation and let Self 2 pick the target. I see the ball already there and convince Self 1 that the results are already accomplished. You might say that I pretend that the desired results have already occurred. This leaves Self 1 with nothing to be tense about or to doubt. It is the ultimate in the doctrine of the easy — what could be easier than to do something that has already taken place?

Now all that is left is to enjoy hitting the ball. In effect, I say to myself, Now that the ball has already landed where you want it, how would you like to have hit it there? Then I express the quality I want to experience by hitting the ball the way I really want to, allowing Self 2 to express himself to his full limits.

Within the scope of Gallwey’s work, this phenomenon resolves down to body vs. “head.” The body knows how to swing a golf club. The golfer must simply get his head out of the way so that his body can execute the swing unimpeded.

But anyone who’s looked at any of the “self help” literature published in the 40 years since Gallwey’s first Inner Game books will recognize this template. What’s more, it’s been applied — over & over — to activities that have nothing to do with sports. From Joseph Murphy and Neville Goddard up through Esther Hicks and Deepak Chopra, the advice is identical to Gallwey’s golf swing routine: set a goal, picture it accomplished, and then get out of the way and let the path to the goal unfurl.

What’s interesting is the terminology people use to describe “Self 2.” Murphy is one of many who use “subconscious.” Neville Goddard — perhaps reflecting how slippery this terminology becomes — sometimes fell back on metaphor but also used “Imagination,” “The Divine Body,” “the inner body” (in e.g. Awakened Imagination), “consciousness,” and the “I AM” (e.g. The Power of Awareness). Some writers go right to the heady mystery of it and ascribe to it Divinity (“let go and let God”). Others don’t bother with naming it at all, but focus on process.

Mulling all this over the past few days, the term I’m drawn to most, unfortunately, is “daemon.” Unfortunately because a daemon, to inheritors of the Judeo-Christian tradition, is a demon, aka evil disembodied creature best left well alone. Too bad we can’t rescue the word, at least in some form — revert back to how Socrates, for instance, spoke of his daimonion (“little daimon”) in terms of

“a divine or supernatural experience . . . It began in my early childhood — a sort of voice that comes to me; and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on.”

That’s from Plato’s Apology, my Penguin Classics edition I picked up somewhere for two bucks.

Socrates was drawing on an older use of the word, as described here by Wikipedia:

The Proto-Indo-European root *deiwos for god, originally an adjective meaning “celestial” or “bright, shining” has retained this meaning in many related Indo-European languages and cultures (Sanskrit deva, Latin deus, German Tiw, Welsh [Duw],]), but also provided another other common word for demon in Avestan daeva.

In modern Greek, the word daimon (Greek: ??????) has the same meaning as the modern English demon. But in Ancient Greek, ?????? meant “spirit” or “higher self”, much like the Latin genius. This should not, however, be confused with the word genie, which is a false friend or false cognate of genius.

Socrates’ daimonion got him in a world of sh*t, of course, since the Athenians in power were nervous about people following their own little daimons instead of state-recognized gods.

Politics aside, to my thinking, the Socratic notion of daimon gets a little closer to the real nature of Self 2. Self 2 is more than mere body consciousness; it possesses an intelligence that is in many ways superior to that of Self 1, and capabilities that extend beyond mere physical acts. This explains why it comes into play in experiences that involve more than our bodies — that involve events and objects over which we have no direct physical influence. It explains as well its association with our blessings and success — one’s daimon serves as a midwife who delivers blessings into one’s life.

That said, I’m equally impatient with teachings (including a lot of Buddhist literature) that denigrate Self 1. Just because we develop habits of self-criticism that are against our best interests doesn’t mean Self 1 is an obstacle to be overcome or destroyed (!) — we are as wrong to demonize the ego as to demonize the daimon. Both were given to us by the source God, after all. Instead, we should view Self 1 as a kind of personal GPS: it feeds back data we need about where we are and whether our coordinates are to our liking, and identifies conditions that we can use for goal-setting.

The trick is to cultivate a partnership between these two “selves.” Ideally, Self 1 evaluates current coordinates and pinpoints suitable future coordinates. Then Self 2 — the daimon — guides us and executes the actions necessary to move us toward those coordinates.

That’s where the giddiness comes in, of course, because much of what the daimon does is invisible to the ego. So Self 1 has to chill out and trust that its goals will be met even though evidence of that fact might be in scarce supply. Faith as evidence of things unseen and all that.

What Gallwey discovered is that during this stage, we can fall back on simple awareness. This displaces our tendency to over-analyze or engage in constant verbal critiquing — mental activities that inhibit the daimon’s ability to do its work.

None of this gibes with official Christianity, of course, a discrepancy that Philip Pullman has tried to exploit with the His Dark Materials books. Too bad, really — Pullman is no doubt very bright, but a spiritual crank (c.f. his fixation with mischaracterizing the writings of a man who, being dead, can’t defend them. What a waste of fame.) Even without intellects like Pullman’s around to egg things on, however, I suppose it would take some time before we could return “demon/daemon/daimon” to its rightful usage — in fact, if I were a scholar I’d look for evidence that early Christian authorities took their position on demons right from the Athenian playbook. Persuade people to mistrust their inner voice and you make them dependent on your official pronunciations. It’s an old trick but we still fall for it, sorry, Socrates.

Or we keep our work beneath the radar by using terms like “subconscious” or “Self 2” — words that are safe precisely because they don’t evoke the real mystery and power that is there for us to explore — if we dare to trust how close we really are to the divine . . .