Biohacking & HealthSpan

Hi there to everyone in OptimOZ Land! Well the Bulldogs have just won an amazing Grand Final…against the odds. Winning four games in which they were the under dogs….pardon the pun. Doesn’t that give you hope for us mere mortals to rise above and be extraordinary? The power of the mind is an amazing beautiful thing. If only we could get out of our own way and trust ourselves and our own ability. We are truly capable of anything. What the Bulldogs achieved we can also, albeit on a smaller scale…I’m not anticipating 99,000 people at the MCG watching me!

In conservation, they talk about leaving a smaller footprint. In life, for our relationships, and for our legacy we really need to be leaving a larger footprint! A footprint of amazing experiences, learning, exploration, education, culture, personal challenge and growth. Anais Nin said, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” I love that quote, it’s spot on. I’m not talking about jumping out of the trenches facing gunfire courage, or standing firm against a marauding tiger courage, I’m talking about having the courage to calculate risks and then take them. To control as much as you can in your life, rather than have your reaction to a situation control you.

What is ghee? Ghee is a class of clarified butter that is caramelized to give it a unique nutty flavour. Although the term clarified butter is often used interchangeably with ghee, ghee and clarified butter are not the same: Clarified butter is made by heating unsalted butter on gentle, low heat until all the water in the butter vaporizes. After all the water disappears, milk solids comprising of whey protein and casein rise to the top and are skimmed off. This melted butter, that is then removed from the heat and strained, is clarified butter. Ghee is made by continuing to heat the clarified butter until the color of the liquid changes from light yellow to deep gold due to the process of caramelisation. At this point, any remaining milk solids and other impurities will clump and sink to the bottom of the pan. The ghee is then removed from the heat and strained before storing. Brown butter is another class of clarified butter that is cooked even longer than ghee and is unstrained. Traditionally, ghee is made with unsalted butter that is churned from cultured cream. Cultured butter is made from cream that has been inoculated with strains of lactic acid bacteria. Ghee can also be made with regular unsalted butter, called sweet cream butter, that is available in stores. Ghee is normally not made from salted butter, but flavoured infusions are increasingly common. Ghee made from butter from grass-fed cows has a superior nutritional profile: Favourable omega 3:6 ratio Higher levels of Vitamins A,K, E CLAs

Imagine you sign up to a university experiment and are subjected to the next two protocols: You must immerse your hand in very cold water (14ºC) for a duration of sixty seconds. You must immerse your hand in very cold water (14ºC) for a duration of sixty seconds, followed by thirty seconds more, during which the water temperature is gradually raised to a point where it is still painfully cold, but noticeably less (15ºC). After you tried both, the researcher asks you to repeat one of the two, at your choice. Which one would you chose? If you are anything like the participants from the original 1993 experience, there is a 69% chance that you would choose the second option (after which you would be informed that there is no need to actually repeat it).

Hello to everyone in Optimoz Land! Nurse Extraordinaire here! Well I have done it! FINALLY completed and passed all my modules in the Diploma of Bioresonance and Energy Medicine. I have actually purchased the machine called “The Professional” and am now saving to get to Athens to do a practicum with a Russian doctor who is an expert in this field….then look out Australia! It’s all about energy people…my mission is to keep you OUT of hospital (except for emergencies!) Just read an amazing book called Earthing…I would highly recommend this book for anyone who wears synthetic shoes, works in offices, sleeps in a beds off the ground,  lives in a high rise apartment or multi-story building, uses a computer, ipad, iphone etc….basically the whole lot of us! I have mentioned energy and electrons before. We all consume our awesome high fat, low carb (brain octane as well for me!) diet to gain energy….it’s all about the electrons from that food that “charges” us so to speak. Believe it or not, we human beings are just like batteries. We need to “charge” ourselves with electrons…because so much of today’s lifestyle has taken us away from the best source of electrons on this planet…the earth. The ground. Grass, sand, dirt.

A placebo is a fake treatment, a medical intervention that does not contain any physically or pharmacologically active substances with a direct ability to induce therapeutic effects. Yet, its effect is real. When you’re told that something is going to produce a specific effect on you, even though it does not really have the ability to do so, it is highly likely that you will feel it. And that is the reason why clinical trials use placebos as a control to accurately determine the efficacy of a drug.  

With more people around the world turning to vegetarian and vegan diets, it’s important to understand both the health risks and benefits of following these diets (12). We appreciate the ethics. However, abstaining from meat and to a lesser extent, dairy, is a cause for concern because people may not be replacing vitamins and minerals that animal foods provide. Modern society have embraced animals as our primary source of vitamin D, vitamin B12, omega-3 essential fatty acids, protein and bioavailable iron, Research suggests vegans and vegetarians are at an increased risk for these deficiencies (1). Let’s take a look at each of these in detail to see if there’s a real risk and more importantly, solutions:   Vitamin D Vitamin D is important for immune function, muscle contractions, and bone health. Vitamin D is primarily found in fish oil with smaller amounts in egg yolk, beef liver and cheese (3). We also synthesise vitamin D from sun exposure, but this depends on the amount of skin exposed, the time of day, where you are living and skin tone. For example, it only takes 15 minutes of sun exposure for very fair to medium fair skin tones to get their recommended daily dose of vitamin D, whereas medium to dark skin tones may need up to 2 hours of sun exposure (14). Many of us cannot achieve this daily recommendation from the sun alone and must consume dietary sources of vitamin D or supplements (2). Vegans are at a greater risk for deficiency and should try to consume mushrooms treated with ultraviolet light and fortified juice, almond, and rice milk (15). Vitamin D supplements come in D2 or D3 forms. D3 supplements are off limits for vegans because they are made from fish oil or from lanolin, which is made from sheep’s wool. D2 supplements are made from yeast or plants, and is the form found in most vegan and vegetarian supplements. However, research suggests D3 supplements may be more efficacious than D2 for increasing vitamin D levels (17). Luckily, scientists found a way to make a vitamin D3 supplement from a plant source called lichen, which is now available for purchase (16).

Hello to everyone in OptimOZ Bulletproof Land! Nurse Extraordinaire here! Long time no write. Nearly finished my Diploma in Bioresonance & Energy medicine which has blown my mind and made me realise how little I truly learned about the body in my nurse training all those years ago. You know learning is a life long thing. It never stops. And the more I learn, the more I realise I want to know. It’s all about energy people! We all are energy beings. It’s way below cellular level. And the very first place it must start is ultimately with how we treat our physical body. This affects us at a subatomic particle level.

In the last article, I explained what flow is and why it can be such a positive state. In this second part, I will summarise the best practical techniques to promote it, drawn from the works of psychology theory and research. These include a myriad of ways in which to structure the external environment as well as one’s inner world.  

Our modern lifestyles are slowly killing us: by overeating and being excessively sedentary, we might have brought upon ourselves an epidemic in metabolic diseases. Our body is not optimized for these modern ways of life and we can’t change that overnight, nor even in the course of a few generations. Evolution is slow. Throughout evolution, the survival of humans may have greatly depended on the constraints of needing to acquire food. Food deprivation was most likely one of the biggest energetic and evolutionary challenges to our bodies - it is likely that many of our ancestors could only acquire food during daytime, having to fast for long hours; it is also likely that long periods of food scarcity were common. So, those who were able to endure in these conditions ended up being favoured by evolution. The fact that our bodies store fat as a backup long-term, high-energy source, and that we can survive relying solely on it for a fair amount of time, is an indication of how human evolution prepared us (and maybe even optimized us) to go through periods of fasting.