Nuts are nature’s way of showing us that good things come in small packages. These bite-size nutritional powerhouses are packed with heart-healthy fats, protein, vitamins and minerals.

Here’s a look at the pros and cons of different nuts, as well as the best and worst products on supermarket shelves today. Of course, you can get too much of these good things: Nuts are high in fat and calories, so while a handful can hold you over until dinner, a few more handfuls can ruin your appetite altogether. And although nuts are a healthy choice by themselves, they’ll quickly become detrimental to any diet when paired with sugary or salty toppings or mixes.

Read more.

By Molly Rauch, MCAF

We know that autism is on the rise, and as parents, we are frustrated. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one out of every 88 children in the US has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. This is an increase of 78 percent since 2002.

What is driving this? Genes evolve far too slowly to account for the drastic rise in this disorder. A prime suspect: ENVIRONMENTAL EXPOSURES.

Yesterday, environmental health experts Philip Landrigan and Luca Lambertini, both of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, published a list of ten widely distributed chemicals already suspected of causing neurodevelopmental disorders, or brain problems, in children.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/top-10-toxins-suspected-of-causing-autism.html#ixzz1u1iAG8HU

A new, organic fertilizer created in France’s Averyon region utilizes a specially developed strain of fungus to speed up organic decomposition without any of the harmful side-effects of chemical fertilizer. Already in use by 5,000 of France’s 350,000 farmers and becoming a hot item on the international market, it just may step up to challenge the global dominance of chemical fertilizers.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/new-fertilizer-revolutionizes-french-agriculture.html#ixzz1u1hNbili

Forget Red Bull, Monster, Rock Star, and the other so-called “Energy Drinks” that line the refrigerators at every convenience store these days. Not only are they loaded with stimulants, most are usually packed with artificial ingredients and sweeteners. If you’re looking to be the rock star with the enormous gut and bad teeth, the high fructose corn syrup found in many energy drinks, is sure to help.

One of my Facebook fans, Kate Morgan, asked me to provide a healthier energy drink option. (Connect with me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/drmichellecook). So here’s my solution: Super Fat-Busting Green Tea Lemonade. Not just any green tea lemonade will do though. I’ve included my recipe at the end of this blog for my—a sneak preview from my upcoming weight loss book. I created this recipe because I couldn’t stand the taste of green tea but wanted to reap the health benefits of drinking it. My Super Fat-Busting Green Tea Lemonade takes minutes to prepare, is all-natural, super healing, and delicious!

Keep reading to learn how green tea slashes belly fat by 77%…

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/super-energy-drink-slashes-belly-fat-by-77.html#ixzz1u1fMa3P5

The cheetah-cam was placed in an enclosure at the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre, in Limpopo, and went live from around midday on Wednesday.

The mother has since given birth to three cubs.

“We [will] follow them [the cubs] through their various stages at the centre, until their hopeful re-introduction into the wild,” said Africam.com spokesperson Paul Penzhorn.

Read and watch.

Dreams can give us comfort, helping those who remain alive to know that they are not really separated from their loved ones who die. They can also help to prepare us for their death. They can be a valuable source of guidance and encouragement.

Precognitive dreams, visitation dreams, and telepathic dreams awaken us to the reality of existence beyond the physical body. It is one thing to believe that there is an afterlife; it is another to taste the experience. People who have had near death experiences report a sense of peace, comfort and bliss, absence of pain, and a feeling of compassionate love on the “other side.” People who experience dream visitations from deceased loved ones report similar feelings.

Through dream states, we can aid one another and communicate with one another in ways beyond the reach of our (sometimes limited) conscious mind and brain. People who are aware of these “psi” dreams experience the profound realization that there is much more to us than we can see, touch, taste, feel, and hear with our physical senses.

When we start examining the emotional conditioning that has created those misperceptions, it is often surprising how much of our life’s story is simply the result of negative self-talk.

And when we buy into this self-talk, it can be very difficult to grow and to discover our true natures.  We will be able to accomplish no more than we believe we are – or could potentially be – capable of.  Combating these misconceptions is challenging and requires an open mind.  Even if we do not feel we are capable of accomplishing a particular dream or goal, it is important to try to open up enough space in our minds for the possibility that maybe – just maybe – it could all work out.  If we believe in the possibility, then we can give ourselves permission to try.  And even if we fail, what is important is the attempt.  Failure shows us that we can survive disappointment and live to try another day.

Argentina’s farmers cannot roll back climate change -– but with a new biotech advance which allows crops to survive in hot, dry climes, they may not need to. One team has found that transferring a sunflower gene into cereal crops like corn and soy can help them to survive longer without water, and even make them more productive. The discovery is being touted as Argentina’s next genetically modified “miracle” — for better and for worse. Richard Beatson via Flickr.

A blind Golden Retriever named Tanner was experiencing regular seizures, and when struck by them would lose control of his bowels. A blind dog with this kind of problem obviously would not be as adoptable as a sighted one without the cleanup, so to speak. However, at the Woodland West Animal Hospital, the blind retriever encountered a young black lab named Blair. The connection resulted in a symbiosis – a mutually beneficial friendship that so far has changed both of their lives.

Milton’s use of Christian tradition is enlightening. I highly recommend him, even if you choose another path.   He urges us to think about questions and issues that concern us still.

This is the Preface to my Milton study, Perversions, Originals, and Redemptions in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

PREFACE

In his epic Paradise Lost,Milton employs, extends, and deepens the typological scheme that he believes embodied in, and known by a close comparison of, the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. The seeds of typology were contained in various Old Testament comparisons of God and his city and its covenant-abiding members versus the non-covenant abiding ways of the wicked, typified byEgypt and, even more, byBabylon. Typology was further elaborated upon, and nailed to a Christian center, in the writings of St. Paul, and to a lesser degree those of St. John, and expanded by certain church Fathers, especially St. Augustine, the first and foremost framer of sign theory and the most elaborate discoverer of Christian typology in the West. Like Augustine,Milton believed that knowledge of the typology and sign theory that God himself established and embodied everywhere is crucial, not merely decorative. It goes directly to the mind as well as the emotions of the reader enabled by grace and study to be fit, though few.

Without reading properly God’s signs, true wisdom cannot be had. Nor can a genuine, hard-won self that grows out of grace, faith, and right actions based on diligent study and passing the tests presented to them that show them approved of God. WhileMiltonis dubious about the possibilities of a redeemed community composed of such individuals on earth, he affirms that without proper reading of God’s signs and, therefore, understanding and embodiment of his ways, a true and righteous community can never begin to grow on earth as in Heaven.

Regardless of whether one is Protestant or Roman Catholic, for the Christian of every sort typology and semiotics show forth God’s eternal ways and truths, his essential beauty, goodness, and proportion. Words, above all else, embody this system, words which function like Christ, the Word, who by his Incarnation makes visible the invisible actions, words, and things of God.

In his attempt to justify God’s ways—ways eternally embedded in language, endorsed by Christ, who is eternally the Word made flesh, and embodied in the universe of his epic—Milton, like Augustine, returns to Genesis because it records the earthly beginnings, as well as the seeds of the end, of humanity’s pilgrim journey. At that time, all that shares true being will again be caught up in God, their author, their maker—their Poet. For as Ephesians 2.10 argues, the Christian is God’s workmanship. God’s handiwork will become, ever more literally, through the many expanding and contracting rings of meaning, God’s carmen, his poem, his universe, ultimately the very embodiment of himself and his ways.

Then, and only then, will God’s people, few as they may be, fully understand and make evident that a true sense of self is gained not by separation from Heavenly communion, from the spiritual center that gives all else meaning, but rather by remaining within it, for it signifies God’s eternal covenant. Once fallen, separated from God and proper understanding of him and the ways and signs that point always to him, we realize—that is make real—only through grace, inspiration, and hard work, just as we should not mistake the Son for the Father—still God—or the Spirit for either of them—that we become ever more ourselves by tuning ourselves as fit singers of God’s song mysteriously within him and of him forever. Earthly time, chronos, is thus caught up in the eternity of kairos. Fit readers remember—thus embody in themselves, and for God—this spiraling motion inwards and upwards in conversion, through the function of properly inspired memory, reading rightly always God’s signs, which are everywhere. Finally, if faithful to study to show themselves approved of God, making choices patterned upon those in the Godhead, embodying the Word within, they too will enjoy, and truly participate in, the beatific vision, having moved properly from sight to insight, from earthly time to eternity, where all is present.

Significantly,Miltonchooses not to end his major works on—or even show us—the rather broad-brushed beatific visions favored by Medieval writers like Dante. While still a Christian affirming the all-encompassing import of communion, firmly connected to his historical roots,Miltonis also a product of Renaissance and Protestant individualism. He paints individuals in carefully delineated strokes who are somewhere in the process of gaining a deep and abiding—genuine—self, whether on earth or in heaven—and within God himself, the center of everything. There all has begun, for all has been created from God’s very self. And there in him all will end.

Because Christianity deemed the Hebrew scriptures the Old Testament, which are then fulfilled and rightly understood in the Christian writings of the New Testament, I have used these traditional terms in this book. Christian writers very early began distorting Hebrew beliefs and texts to fit their political and theological agenda. The Christian scriptures contain seeds of anti-semitism, for they paint the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ day as opposers of God, especially God incarnate in Jesus the Messiah (a blasphemous twisting of the Jewish concept of messiah, who could be anyone anointed by God for a specific task; nor would God in some manner stoop to take on flesh and become human, even dying for humanity).

Although Christian typology embodies the essential distortions of the Christian faith—so that one can say that Christianity is related to Judaism (with other influences), but it is not merely completed Judaism, as many present-day Christians seem apt to think—typology was historically important, for it evidences the ways in which the Christian West conceived reality. By ignoring typology, or refusing to see its presence—and the belief that God, and even, more that Christ, is the center of all, for without faith in Christ, and accompanying good works, there can be no salvation—we do not dispatch the anti-semitism and exclusivism that Christianity has too often encouraged. Only by acknowledging these negative aspects of the faith, and dealing with them in a sensible manner, can we move to something better, more ecumenical and humane.

Thomas Ramey Watson

Denver,Colorado

30 May 2006