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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!

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