“When the cat and the mouse agree, the grocer is ruined” ~ Persian Proverb

Reading up I found some interesting facts on fat production…here is some of what I found…

“The data is in and it is staggering: Scientists have been using the common food additive Monosodium Glutamate to create fat rats and mice to experiment on. In hundreds of studies produced worldwide over the last thirty years, Monosodium Glutamate has been injected under the skin of day old mice and rats to produce obese rats and mice with a predisposition for diabetes.” [1] 

or

““MSG hides behind 25 or more names, such as Natural Flavouring. ‘MSG is even in your favorite coffee from Tim Horton’s and Starbucks coffee shops! I wondered if there could be an actual chemical causing the massive obesity epidemic, and so did a friend of mine, John Erb.

He was a research assistant at the     University  of     Waterloo in     Ontario   ,  Canada   , and spent years working for the government. He made an amazing discovery while going through scientific journals for a book he was writing called The Slow Poisoning of America.
In hundreds of studies around the world, scientists were creating obese mice and rats to use in diet or diabetes test studies. No strain of rat or mice is naturally obese, so scientists have to create them. They make these creatures morbidly obese by injecting them with MSG when they are first born. The MSG triples the amount of insulin the pancreas creates, causing rats (and perhaps humans) to become obese. They even have a name for the fat rodents they create: ‘MSG-Treated Rats.’”[2]

I got to wondering if there are “MSG- Treated shoppers”. Taking a short look around the ingredients in many products we buy I was appalled to find how much of it has MSG in it. Those are only the products that label it as such!

Fortunately our family does not use a lot of MSG as my wife has a migraine trigger associated with MSG and so reads labels. Yet, the amount of it in the shoppers available marketplace is incredible. We are eliminated from many, many food products as a result of my wife's migraine trigger...and I think that is good!

If MSG is known to produce obesity and diabetes, why use it?

That got me considering how the food manufacturers are forced to work. Let’s think about it for a second or two…  If we were food manufacturers, our objective would be to make money right?

The way we would do it is to get more people to buy our food. If MSG causes us to want to eat more, so much the better right? MSG  used as a flavour enhancer is also a good item to have in the toolkit under these conditions. It was labeled as such by that U.S. Food and Drug Administration which says it is generally recognized as safe (GRAS) and by the European Union as a food additive. Surely that is sufficient?

I wonder if you are aware that the FDA gets the companies to do the research and foot the bill for the research. That was our problem with cigarettes right? Maybe we are having the same problem with MSG?

Possibly it is not the only cause of obesity, but as far as I can find out, to date there is no clear statement from the FDA that MSG does not cause obesity!

Here is a statement that one qualified person made...

"When ingested by human test subjects MSG directly affects the Pancreas stimulating it to triple its standard output of insulin output. This unnatural amount of insulin finds the sugar in the blood and converts it to fat. A few hours after you eat MSG the excess insulin the MSG triggers reduces your blood sugar level so much that you become tired and even hungry again. In animal test subjects this excess insulin leads to hyperinsulinemia: the chronic overproduction of insulin. The pancreas becomes so out of control that the body starts producing killer T cells to shut it down. Is it any wonder why diabetes, obesity and lethargy in our youths are at an all time high? Junk foods, processed foods, even cafeteria foods are now laced with large amounts of exitotoxic glutamates. John Erb reports.

Scientists for the food manufacturers (who provide the information to the FDA) say it doesn’t effect us, but independent studies like the one quoted above overwhelmingly say it does! Do you believe the scientists working for the food industry or those doing independent study? Which group would be likely to be more biased? You decide...

Yet, it is an absolute KNOWN fact that to get a fat mouse you HAVE to stimulate them to get fat (mice are smarter than people in this regard J ) and that injecting them with MSG fattens them!

I guess minimal amounts of MSG consumed will not impact us, however it is perhaps time to read labels, isn't it?

Perhaps it builds up in our body systems? It has a good shelf life! Longer than ours right?

Food manufacturers would likely smile!

MSG is added to increase flavour and these people  tout it as a replacement for salt, so it is “good” for us.

                 Really?

Maybe MSG is a salt replacement, but it appears to be a body fat incrementer as well! Is that healthy? :(

Christians view our bodies slightly differently to the general population! To us it is a gift, given by God for our use for a time and should be taken care of not only for us, but for our Lord God!

Can we say that by pumping ourselves full of false unnatural ingredients to satisfy our taste longings, and at the same time quietly poisoning our health we are doing the right thing?

Personally I don’t think so!

Perhaps we should take time in 2013 to read food labels and find out how much of this strange stuff they add to our foods is actually good for us? For example I have heard it said that aspartame is the crack of dieters. That people using diet drinks build additions to it and that they end up heavier within two years due to the compulsion to have carbohydrates after drinking it that total circumvents what it proclaims! Is this true? Not sure but perhaps we need to find out right?

Let’s read the labels and try to understand what we put into our bodies.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.~ Romans 12:1[3]

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ~ Maya Angelou

As a contorted bundle of emotions, thoughts and activity, we pass through our time finding ourselves sticking with like-minded souls as we go along.
 
That is unless we have a unique path to follow, and who has that?

Ever considered that we are basically a combination of emotions, thoughts and activity?

Some of us balance on one side of this triangle and some on the others.

A few manage to balance within all three perfectly but most of us careen off course frequently, biased to one of those three eternally human aspects of life.

Very few of us cut a clean path through life!

Most of us cannot even consider that there is anything outside this realm of these three pillars, so tightly are we chained to an existence dominated by them.

If this is the case what should we be doing?

Many answers to that puzzle could be batted around the court of world opinion, but I am constrained to truth delivered by someone outside of the impact and influence of these influences.

God himself is my only reasonable model and as I am a Christian. I find the easiest way to understand God’s direction is to see how he modelled life itself as he lived as Jesus, the prime example of accurate living!

How was Jesus emotionally?

Was he emotionally flat, devoid of the influence of this great human motivator?

No!

We read…”Jesus wept”[1] , a very emotional reaction.

We read that he got so angry he made a whip and used it to chase money changers out of God’s temple.

 Here anger an emotion leads to activity! A strong emotion! Mostly we read Jesus loved and cared for others and asked us to do the same.

Jesus was very emotional!

Yet, he controlled that emotion. Never did it run out of control. In each circumstance he channels it to enable him to achieve the exact sequence of actions that he knew to be correct.

Emotions were subject to his thoughts and only then drove his actions!

Emotions out of control are not a Christian attribute!

If we would be like Jesus we have to endeavour to lead lives full of emotional energy, but constrained to flow in eternal paths by the leading of God himself as Holy Spirit and God’s own word (his bible) give us direction as to where we should spend our energy.

Is this something we do effectively?

Probably not!

I know for myself that I fail continually and then have to ask for forgiveness from our loving God. However the more I attempt to allow Holy Spirit to guide me and the more I study God’s word the more effective I find myself at the complicated task of living well.

While it is never easy to live well, it is sure rewarding, and on top of that I have comfort in knowing that in so doing I oil the path of life enabling others to flow past their own sticky circumstances and perhaps also find direction in our tough world with it’s difficult ways.

Want to join me on this journey?

Wisdom is simply knowing good from bad, nourishment from poison, love for the divine. ~- the Ocean Poet Barron Pilgrim

Okay, so we are at the cusp of a New Year! This year is over and we are ready for reflection on the past year and the next year looms in front of us with its expectations and new anticipations.

·         What are we to do?

·         What new resolutions are to be made?

·         Why even make a resolution?

Considering this a Christian, I got to thinking about good and evil, and considering how I squared up against the eternal expectations for last year!  

Now those that aren’t Christians may fail to see the irony of that statement!

Let me explain…as Christians, we are in a continual state of being forgiven by God.

Jesus explained that if we love him, accept he is the son of God, and try and follow the guidelines for loving God, others and ourselves, then no matter what we do, we are forgiven by the God of the universe and our sin is wiped away.

Our sin is gone! It is as far as the East is from the West!

You can see the statement I made about squaring up against eternal expectation is a bit dubious isn’t it?

Logically, every Christian at the end of each year is as totally forgiven as they were during the previous year.

HOWEVER…

·         The trail of destruction and mayhem we leave behind is very real!

·         The ripple effect of our good works is also very real!

James sums up what we need to do to succeed at being good by saying…

If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them. James 4:13-17

We need to look at what we know is good what we should do, and then we should do it!

If we know we should do some good and don’t do it, we, as Christians, cannot say we have done the right thing.

No! God didn’t let us off that one so easily!

James states clearly that failure to do good  is sin (Selfish, ignorant and nasty!).

This brings me to a suggestion for improving this coming year over the current year… all we need to do is to do the good we know we should do!

Isn’t this a simple yet very powerful resolution…

"I will do good when I recognise it for what it is!"

Now that’s a really good, all-encompassing resolution!

 It’s better than a resolution to diet, since, we know that over-eating is gluttony and that is a sin. We know it is good to eat in moderation, so the above resolution encompasses that lesser resolution.

We don’t need to build special resolutions to treat person A or person B better, since we know God wants us to love even our enemies (Matthew :5:43 NIRV -You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵ that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”)

Again the above suggested resolution fills the gap!

Test this above resolution out against some of your resolutions and see if it is not simply a bigger better version of a resolution than the ones you are making.

This proposed resolution is one that improves ourselves, our relationship with God, our relationship with our world, and our relationship with everyone else.

I would like to say it’s my original idea, but it’s not…James had it way before I could have conceived it!