The dangers of plastic, BPA and certain cookware has been known for quite a while now. Plastic especially causes your body to absorb substances that mimic estrogen for your body which is bad for both guys and girls since it unbalances the natural ratio with other hormones like progesterone/Testosterone. BPA and other substances in plastic might explain partially why sperm count for males on average dropped 30% or so from 20 years ago. Wi-fi/cellphones are probably also to blame, and many other things.
From making sure all my pans (skillets) were in stainless steel (or ideally ceramic) to only using glass containers to store leftover foods or my homemade ice cream I thought I had removed all poisonous stuff in my house… But I forgot the most important one! My PLASTIC electric kettle. What an idiot, not only does the inside look rusty but this thing in plastic is being in contact with HOT WATER constantly. The only thing that could be worse I think would be if I put some fat or acid in there which would make it leech even more harmful components…
A lot of media outlets like to sell the idea of “superfoods”. Some of these like kale and spinach are definitely very good to eat on an almost daily basis but for a while I was also eating daily Chia seeds and flax seeds until I found out they are pretty much a waste of time if you eat very little processed foods. Not only are the health benefits a lot weaker than you might expect due to a few reasons (shared below) but also some studies have shown potential side effects. Similarly to my post on are multivitamins good for you, I will try to sum up why some of these “superfoods” under a closer look are actually not that amazing and not worth too much time thinking about or forcing in your diet. Its true they do have a lot of nutrients, but your body cannot take advantage of them as well as you might expect.
I think a lot more people nowadays are aware of vitamin D deficiency symptoms and how most people are actually deficient in this even if they go outside a few hours a day due to having clothes on & not living near the equator (where the sun strikes at an angle that hits your skin the hardest). A study showed that ~46% of UK people aged 45 were deficient in vitamin D (under 40(OH)D nmol/L) during winter & spring months. Finally, if you wear sunscreen your vitamin D production from UVB rays is reduced by ~90% or more! I also have to mention how even those that do supplement in vitamin D probably take too little and how you can find your proper dosage.
Vitamin D is actually not really a vitamin, it’s a hormone that the sun stimulates your body into producing after your skin comes into contact with the sun’s rays and this process actually takes a while (hours) between production and its complete absorption inside our skin. For that reason its important to mention that it might be preferable to NOT go swim/shower after a good 10-30 min exposure of sun if you worry about your vitamin D levels. While this research is not full proof, it does seem that water/showers can wash away vitamin D on our skin before we absorb it so I do mention it for those like me that enjoy reading at the swimming pool everyday for some morning sun.. If you also like to go swim at the same time, you might be hurting your goal of absorbing natural vitamin D.
What does Vitamin D do?
Vitamin D (and magnesium) is one of those vitamins that’s responsible for a LOT of things and makes a huge difference once you are at adequate levels. The biggest? I practically almost never get colds now… And when I do the symptoms are quite mild. This might partly be one of the benefits of vitamin C from the high amount in my diet from all the vegetables I eat but in my friends that do not eat “as well” as me (aka grains/baked goods devoid of vitamins/minerals), they still saw huge improvements from taking vitamin D supplements. The other more well known benefit nowadays is directly related to calcium and bones. Most people have been hammered to death, especially by milk advertisements, how calcium is good for growing tall and strong… The truth is, yes calcium is useful but without other important nutrients such as vitamin D, Magnesium and vitamin K2 it does not work optimally.
By having adequate levels of vitamin D you of course reduce your risk of any of the following vitamin D deficiency symptoms, some of these are taken from webMD:
Increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease
Something that a lot of people think, including me a few years ago, is that multivitamins are great to take. Not only great but they serve as an “insurance policy against any vitamin deficiencies I might have forgot to handle with my diet today”. No, in fact, taking the vitamins multivitamins together in one pill will make it hard for your body to even absorb some other nutrients
It’s an idea that is easy to sell to the public, take this multivitamin once a day and you don’t have to worry about nutrition ever again. But not only do multivitamins probably give you all the benefits you actually need from supplements, they can/will cause you to overdose on others that CAN cause issues. Of course, I’m not gonna repeat obvious reasons such as the mentality some people have of “if I take a multivitamin junk food is ok”, not only is that very harmful, some of these reasons will show you how more of what you do not need (in a multivitamin) can be harmful.
In this post you will find out how to Avoid a hangover & cure it if it’s too late to prevent it with almost 100% efficiency by:
Choosing the proper alcohols to get drunk with
Using cheap supplements that will 100% enable you to avoid hangovers so you can go out during the week and still feel good for work!
Learning how to cure it by choosing the proper foods & extras the next day
For the past year I probably have drank an average of 2 liters of vodka a week. I was going out a lot, traveling etc and it became a massive habit to always drink to get myself social and to stop working (since I work from my computer usually as my “day” job, including in hostels/hotels when out of town). Most people will not drink this much but I wanted to mention this because I tried a LOT of ways to avoid a hangover and tested many different ways before getting my ideal methods described below which enabled me to wake up the next day productive, get a lot of work done and… party again 😛
Something I’ve been trying out during 2012 to reduce my body fat % to under 10 to get a 6 pack is cold showers and baths. This is an idea I got from the 4 hour body book by Tim Ferris.
The two main reason you can lose a lot of weight with cold shower/baths
1) Water “steals” a lot of your body heat at a much faster rate than air, what this means is that your body works harder to increase it’s temperature and maintain it at the normal level when in water. Think about it, calorie is actually “energy”. Your body needs this energy to heat itself up and stay at a consistent healthy body temperature.
2) There is what they call “brown fat cells” or the actual name of brown adipose tissue (BAT) around your neck and surrounding area on top of your back as the picture below shows. These brown fat cells are apparently responsible NOT for fat storage like the well known “white” fat cells but actually for the maintenance of your body’s temperature and they burn a lot of calories to do so. There’s some research all over the place about this but this NYtimes article sums it up.
The dangers of plastic, BPA and certain cookware has been known for quite a while now. Plastic especially causes your body to absorb substances that mimic estrogen for your body which is bad for both guys and girls since it unbalances the natural ratio with other hormones like progesterone/Testosterone. BPA and other substances in plastic might explain partially why sperm count for males on average dropped 30% or so from 20 years ago. Wi-fi/cellphones are probably also to blame, and many other things.