Skip to main content

Eclipse Glasses, Probiotics for Heart, Muscle Recovery

Are your eclipse glasses fake?

The total solar eclipse over North America is almost here, and Indianapolis is in the "path of totality," meaning the moon will completely block the sun here. A lot of people have gotten special glasses to safely look at the eclipse. But the American Astronomical Society says, "counterfeit and fake eclipse glasses are polluting the marketplace." Some of the counterfeit glasses appear to be safe, the society says, but others are fakes that are no more effective than sunglasses.

One of the counterfeits they describe matches the glasses someone gave me. I don't know where she got them, and she's not someone I'd trust to perform adequate due diligence. I just got over an eye injury and I don't need another one--I'll try the pinhole method instead to see crescents during the eclipse if it's not too cloudy.

Picture from Pexels. 


Heart Centered Probiotic

I started getting scary heart palpitations several years ago, about the time I had a dental implant put in after an accident. At the time, I thought it was a lack of electrolytes, or that it was an effect of the epinephrine (both of which can cause heart palpitations). But it went on too long for either of those things to have been the cause. Someone at Dr. Davis's Inner Circle said that Simple Slumber probiotics helped her atrial fibrillation a lot and Heart Centered helped even more, and I found that fermented Ideal Immunity helped my palpitations. (All of these probiotics are made by Biotiquest.) So I got a bottle of Heart Centered and tried fermenting it, but it didn't work--it contains a yeast called S. boulardii. You can ferment S. boulardii in juice, but apparently not in shredded apples (or maybe I did it wrong). I tossed out the failed fermentation and tried the capsules. Maybe it's a coincidence, but after starting it I've found I can make do with half the magnesium I was taking. My heart feels calmer at night, too.

Bacillus Coagulans Probiotic

Like a lot of people at the Inner Circle, I make yogurt out of three different strains. But after doing several batches using the previous batch as starter, it's not clear how much of each of the strains is left. I began to wonder if any B. coagulans was left in my yogurt I started getting foot pain. B. coagulans helps with muscle recovery among other things, and I don't normally have sore feet. 

CVS doesn't seem to carry this probiotic under their store brand anymore, but they had one from Culturelle that comes unflavored in packets. I'll put one in my next yogurt batch and have one tonight. My feet feel OK (probably from yoga)--it's the afternoon of yard work that has me sore but not feeling as bad as I did four years ago when a few hours' work on my garage left me feeling like I'd been run over. 

Gardening is hard enough work that it seems to help prevent osteoporosis. Back in 2000, researchers were surprised that such a "dainty" activity--digging holes, pulling weeds, pushing a mower--helped women maintain bone mass. Maybe they thought gardening meant picking flowers. But my afternoon was spent uprooting dandelions, then starting a patch of lawn from seed: digging out the sedge that was supposed to be a wonder plant, digging out weedy roots, hand-tilling the soil, and sprinkling topsoil over the seeds. Then I moved some plants around the yard and re-seeded bare spots on the tree lawn (the area between the sidewalk and street) after pulling out more dandelions and weedy little shrubs with foot-long roots and then hand-aerating the soil. Finally, I dug out the weeds on the other side of the driveway. So dainty that I need some muscle recovery!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Black Friday Deals for Good Health

Here are some great Black Friday deals--all ONLINE--that can benefit your health. I've used most of these products and vendors and recommend them. I'm not an affiliate.  Vitamins iHerb.com is having a 25% off Black Friday and Cyber Monday site-wide sale. Vitacost.com is offering $10 off $50, stackable with a variety of other deals. Tried and True Supplements I use: Doctor's Best magnesium ( peach powder , unflavored powder , and tablets ) Country Life kelp tablets Solgar zinc, 22 mg NOW vitamin D, 5,000 IU NOW astaxanthin, 4 mg Jarrow hyaluronic acid, 120 mg Solaray vitamin C tablets, 485 mg Collagen Powder, Dips, Dressings, Mayo and Sauces Primal Kitchen products--all made without added sugar or Frankenfoods--are on sale. If you remember Mark Sisson from the Mark's Daily Apple blog, Primal Kitchen is his company. PrimalKitchen.com  (25% off this week only) iHerb.com  (25% off) Vitacost.com (20% off) I love their vanilla, peanut butter and chocolate-mint collagen pow...
Post a Comment
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...
21 comments
Read more

In Defense of Fast Food

Another modern trend - healthy food should be expensive, not nutrients-dense and preferably exotic, or you would be eating like plebs who live on a dollar McD menu. --Galina L. I don't try to jump over seven-foot hurdles, I look for one-foot hurdles I can step over. --Warren Buffett, pleb who eats at McDonald's Despite all the talk about wild-caught v. farmed, grass-fed v. CAFO and the vilification of fast food, a lot of us plebs benefit simply from carbohydrate restriction. But even though diabetes and obesity are rampant, and carb restriction alone would help millions of people, the impression is out there that you need to eat in a very specific way, far beyond just watching the carbs. Following a low-carb diet is already a high hurdle for many people. If some people want or need to raise the bar for themselves, that's fine with me, but there's no need to turn low-carb into a hurdle that a lot of people can't jump over. Organic produce and grass-fed or p...
17 comments
Read more

Decongestant Ineffective; Vibration Plate Works

A common ingredient in many cold medicines has been shown so ineffective that the FDA recently proposed taking it off the market. The ingredient, phenylephrine, "failed to outperform placebo pills in patients with cold and allergy congestion," say researchers from the University of Florida. "The same researchers also challenged the drug's effectiveness in 2007, but the FDA allowed the products to remain on the market pending additional research," according to CNBC .  Mostly placebos. Photo from Pixabay . I can attest that phenylephrine doesn't work. Before I stopped eating wheat, I constantly had nasal and sinus congestion. I helped keep Sudafed in business when the active ingredient was pseudoephedrine, but I noticed the PE (phenylephrine) variety didn't work at all. The only other decongestants I've found helpful are guaifenesin (Mucinex) and spicy food. Mucinex is expensive because it works! (The cheaper store brands work just as well, though.) Su...
Post a Comment
Read more