Book Review: “Sweet Poison: How the World’s Most Popular Artificial Sweetener Is Killing Us” By: Janet Starr Hull

Sweet Poison“Sweet Poison: How The World’s Most Popular Artificial Sweetener Is Killing Us- My Story,” By: Janet Starr Hull is a tome that was published in 1999 but is still shockingly relevant today. In this book, the author engagingly recounts how she discovered the deadly dangers of ingesting foods that are plied with toxic artificial ingredients.

When the author; a young, educated, vibrant, exercise enthusiast, and working mom; fell ill, she sought to heal herself and find the culprit behind her sudden sickness. What she discovered was a lesson that the world needs to imbibe and implement.

When the 30-something year old mother and wife, Janet Hull, became overcome with symptoms of: severe mood swings, headaches, insomnia, hair loss, rapid weight gain despite a rigorous workout schedule, heart palpitations, seeing blinding flashing lights due to retinal tearing; she sought medical care. Her physician diagnosed her with Graves’ disease, put her on medications, and told her the solution to her problem would be for her to “kill her thyroid” by irradiating it. This irradiation would involve her taking radioactive pills until her thyroid was rendered “dead.” Then, she would be given medication that she would have to take for the rest of her life. This diagnosis did not sit well with the author. While she took the medication her doctor prescribed to her, she didn’t wan to undergo the drastic process of “killing her thyroid” until she had exhausted seeking other alternatives. What the author found from her search was life-saving and eye-opening.

Thinking back to when her symptoms started to emerge and her corresponding behaviors around that time period, the author recalled that she had begun to add some new snacks to her daily menu. Being a mother of three children under the age of four, an aerobics instructor, and an adjunct professor left the author bereft of time. She thought she was complimenting her on-the-go lifestyle when she began to substitute meals with “fat-free” and “sugar-free” energy snacks. At the same time, she began her habit of downing several diet sodas during the day. Recollecting this routine raised a red flag.

Janet Hull did an experiment. She immediately stopped drinking “sugar-free” diet soda. Lo and behold, her symptoms began to dissipate. Ms. Hull decided to investigate the contents of the diet soda she had become so fond of routinely drinking. What she discovered was revelatory. She found that an ingredient in the beverage was acting as a toxin to her system.

The diet soft drink contained NutraSweet aka Equal (Scientific Name: Aspartame). Her research revealed that aspartame is made up of compounds that can be dangerous and destructive to the human body. In “Sweet Poison,” the author states that aspartame is composed of 50% phenylalanine, 40% aspartic acid, and 10% methyl alcohol. The author reveals that aspartic acid can cause brain damage. Methyl alcohol, also known as wood alcohol, can cause eye problems and turns into embalming fluid when it is heated.

The artificial sweetener is said to have originally been created to be an ulcer medication. However, its U.S. patent was revoked in 1974 when it was found that the compound caused holes in the brains of lab animals. According to my research, Huffington Post states that aspartame was “previously listed by the Pentagon as a biochemical warfare agent.”

Janet Hull states that ingesting aspartame can cause over 92 different severe symptoms that can vary from person to person due to the fact that after being dissolved by the body aspartame’s “toxic by-products can be deposited anywhere [in the body]. Usually in the [body’s] weakest spots. Despite the government being aware of the alleged toxicity of aspartame, they continue to approve its use in food products consumed by their citizens. Because aspartame is said to be at least 180 times sweeter that sugar, it is a cheaper sweetener substitute that sugar can ever be. It all comes down to the money.

I highly recommend that people thoroughly read “Sweet Poison: How The World’s Most Popular Artificial Sweetener Is Killing Us- My Story.” This book will undoubtedly encourage the reader to carefully examine the foods that he or she eats. It will also motivate the reader to seek to implement truly healthy eating habits. Read this book and educate yourself and your family on how to eat in a way that is beneficial to your body. As the saying goes, “food can either be your medicine or your poison.”

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TODAY IS BUY BLACK FRIDAY

PLEASE PASS THIS ON! (EACH ONE TEACH ONE OR TWO!) THIS IS PHASE ONE ON HOW WE CAN HELP TO STRENGTHEN & EMPOWER OUR COMMUNITY:
The 2008 not guilty verdict in the Sean Bell case evoked outrage, emotion, and debate. It is not an anomaly that the police officers involved in the Sean Bell slaying were acquitted of all charges on all counts in State Supreme Court. I could run out of ink printing the names of people who have been victimized by the inaptly named justice system.

The American justice system has been especially terroristic towards the African American community. Many community members can cite historic and personal accounts to prove this. Therefore, it would be foolhardy (at the least) to turn to a system that has methodically oppressed us, and request that they free us. We can only free ourselves through extreme discipline and intelligent planning.

As a community we have been too compliant with leaders who organize ineffective, delayed reactions. The only strategy that can save us in this last hour is one that calls for a collective code of conduct that will be conducive to improving the conditions of our community, and shifting the paradigm of how we are treated by outside entities. The first step of this code of conduct should be based on economics.

The old adage of “money talks,” still reigns true in the new millennium. Any political scientist worth his or her library card will tell you that: “Economic powerlessness equals political powerlessness,” and conversely “economic power equals political power.” This means that if we continue to allow our wealth to be extracted from our community, we will remain impotent.

The power of the collective “Black Dollar” is often discussed. However, that power has been left unchanneled. Today is the day to change that. A one-time boycott is not going to bring long-term change and respect to our community. Our community has launched boycotts before. Our success and ascension will be based on what we consistently do. For this reason, we should initiate “BUY BLACK FRIDAYS.”

BUY BLACK FRIDAYS is a small step towards our community acquiring power via controlling our economics. Every Friday, people who acknowledge the injustice and oppression that the African American community has been consistently subjected to should do one of the following:

Option #1: Spend $0 on Friday
Option #2: Spend no more than $10 on Friday
Option #3: Only Shop at Black Businesses on Friday
[PLEASE NOTE THAT THE ABOVE OPTIONS CAN & SHOULD BE EXERCISED ON A DAILY BASIS. However, we can all at the very least focus on Fridays. This way we can take a collective stand and build our collective discipline. Please remember that this is only Phase 1!].

To the people who are tempted to label “BUY BLACK FRIDAYS” as racist, I say this: In the big scheme of things, this is about right & wrong, justice & injustice. The African American community is a strong, proud community that has endured the brunt of America’s iron fist. We must stop the pounding. I feel that any fair-minded individual will concur, and join in.

ANY business that is privileged to enjoy the support of the African American community MUST return that support.

I thank you in advance for your effort and dedication.

-Elsie Law AKA Starface

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Video Of The Week: Culture, Thanksgiving & Holidays

The lecturers discuss: The definition of culture, the definition of holiday, the 10-song radio rotation list, the co-opting of culture, and social engineering. At the 30-minute mark, Native American, Guy Jones, discusses: Thanksgiving, nations vs. tribes, love and hate, relationships, the capitalist system, and prayer.

[SIDEBAR: Black Love Day & Maafa Recognition Day- Genius!]

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Book Excerpt Of The Week: “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and The Fall of New York” By: Robert A. Caro

“Robert Moses was America’s greatest builder. He was the shaper of the greatest city in the New World.

But what did he build? What was the shape into which he pounded the city?

To build the highways, Moses threw out of their homes 250,000 persons- more people than lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Nashville, or Sacramento. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities themselves, communities that had been lively, friendly places to live, the vital parts of the city that made New York a home to its people.

By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city-destroying dimensions. By making sure that the vast suburbs, rural and empty when he came to power, were filled on a sprawling, low-density development pattern relying primarily on roads instead of mass transportation, he insured that that flood would continue for generations if not centuries, that the New York metropolitan area would be- perhaps forever- an area in which transportation- getting from one place to another- would be an irritating, life-consuming concern for its 14,000,000 residents.

For highways, Moses dispossessed 250,000 persons. For his other projects- Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Fordham, Pratt and Long Island University campuses, a dozen mammoth urban renewal projects- he dispossessed tens of thousands more; there are available no accurate figures on the total number of people evicted from their homes for all Robert Moses public works, but the figure is almost certainly close to half a million; the one detailed study by an outside agency shows that in a ten-year period, 1946 to 1956, the number was 320,000. More significant even than the number of the dispossessed were their characteristics: a disproportionate share of them were Black, Puerto Rican- and poor. He evicted tens of thousands of poor, nonwhite persons for urban renewal projects, and the housing he built to replace the housing he tore down was, to an overwhelming extent, not housing for the poor, but for the rich. The dispossessed, barred from many areas of the city by their color and their poverty, had no place to go but into the already overcrowded slums- or into ‘soft’ borderline areas that then became slums, so that his ‘slum clearance programs’ created new slums as fast as they were clearing the old.

When he built housing for poor people, he built housing bleak, sterile, cheap- expressive of patronizing condescension in every line. And he built it in locations that contributed to the ghettoization of the city, dividing up the city by color and income. And by skewing city expenditures toward revenue-producing services, he prevented the city from reaching out toward its poor and assimilating them, and teaching them how to live in such housing- and the very people for whom he built it reacted with rage and bitterness and ignorance, and defaced it.

He built parks and playgrounds with a lavish hand, but they were parks and playgrounds for the rich and the comfortable. Recreational facilities for the poor he doled out like a miser.

For decades, to advance his own purposes, he systematically defeated every attempt to create the master plan that might have enabled the city to develop on a rational, logical, unified pattern- defeated it until, when it was finally adopted, it was too late for it to do much good.” -From, “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and The Fall of New York” By: Robert A. Caro

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TODAY IS BUY BLACK FRIDAY

PLEASE PASS THIS ON! (EACH ONE TEACH ONE OR TWO!) THIS IS PHASE ONE ON HOW WE CAN HELP TO STRENGTHEN & EMPOWER OUR COMMUNITY:
The 2008 not guilty verdict in the Sean Bell case evoked outrage, emotion, and debate. It is not an anomaly that the police officers involved in the Sean Bell slaying were acquitted of all charges on all counts in State Supreme Court. I could run out of ink printing the names of people who have been victimized by the inaptly named justice system.

The American justice system has been especially terroristic towards the African American community. Many community members can cite historic and personal accounts to prove this. Therefore, it would be foolhardy (at the least) to turn to a system that has methodically oppressed us, and request that they free us. We can only free ourselves through extreme discipline and intelligent planning.

As a community we have been too compliant with leaders who organize ineffective, delayed reactions. The only strategy that can save us in this last hour is one that calls for a collective code of conduct that will be conducive to improving the conditions of our community, and shifting the paradigm of how we are treated by outside entities. The first step of this code of conduct should be based on economics.

The old adage of “money talks,” still reigns true in the new millennium. Any political scientist worth his or her library card will tell you that: “Economic powerlessness equals political powerlessness,” and conversely “economic power equals political power.” This means that if we continue to allow our wealth to be extracted from our community, we will remain impotent.

The power of the collective “Black Dollar” is often discussed. However, that power has been left unchanneled. Today is the day to change that. A one-time boycott is not going to bring long-term change and respect to our community. Our community has launched boycotts before. Our success and ascension will be based on what we consistently do. For this reason, we should initiate “BUY BLACK FRIDAYS.”

BUY BLACK FRIDAYS is a small step towards our community acquiring power via controlling our economics. Every Friday, people who acknowledge the injustice and oppression that the African American community has been consistently subjected to should do one of the following:

Option #1: Spend $0 on Friday
Option #2: Spend no more than $10 on Friday
Option #3: Only Shop at Black Businesses on Friday
[PLEASE NOTE THAT THE ABOVE OPTIONS CAN & SHOULD BE EXERCISED ON A DAILY BASIS. However, we can all at the very least focus on Fridays. This way we can take a collective stand and build our collective discipline. Please remember that this is only Phase 1!].

To the people who are tempted to label “BUY BLACK FRIDAYS” as racist, I say this: In the big scheme of things, this is about right & wrong, justice & injustice. The African American community is a strong, proud community that has endured the brunt of America’s iron fist. We must stop the pounding. I feel that any fair-minded individual will concur, and join in.

ANY business that is privileged to enjoy the support of the African American community MUST return that support.

I thank you in advance for your effort and dedication.

-Elsie Law AKA Starface

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How Films Make Puppets Out Of Film Watchers

Puppet On A String“You will now start to notice how, over the sense, what the really great artists- the people who make us laugh and cry and wonder; the people who fill our world with color and dark stories that can fill us with fear and provoke us to action; the people who fill the world with music that moves us- have actually been doing is creating strong, clear rhythms that our breathing can join in on. They are geniuses at provoking us to breathe in partners that strongly influence our feelings, and so our per acceptation of the world, going back to the very first shamanic performers.

For example, watch a great film, but turn off the sound. Can you instantly see how you start to breathe along with the actors? That is the film’s route to your feelings, by having good actors who communicate in a way that allows the audience to join in on the feel. The actors are no longer actually having the feelings they created for you and captured on film- but you are! They are not creating the emotion right now- you are doing it for them! Their work is inspirational: They breathe, you copy, and the legacy is that which you feel.

Notice that as the film cuts from shot to shot, you are you are also breathing along with that rhythm- and this is creating tension and feeling in your body. This is the artistry of the film editor. He influences and persuades you with the rhythm of the cut, provoking you to think and feel with the film and the stars acting in it in a certain manner and with definite feelings often preplanned by the film’s director. As the radical psychiatrist, expert on the mass psychology of fascism and early architect of Gestalt therapy- which concentrates on the therapeutic experience of the present, Wilhelm Reich recognized and stated ‘Emotional and physical states can be altered by changing the breathing pattern.’

To experience this further, now turn up the sound and see how the music, the score of the film, with its own rhythm, conspires (as the word suggests, con, meaning ‘with,’ and spire, meaning ‘breath’) with all the other artistry in the film. The music binds together the rhythm of the actors and the rhythm of the picture with sound so that there is no doubt as to the feelings that are being promoted to the audience. You conspire along with it all as well, as you respond by having similar feelings within you. The film is not the feeling- it is simply the instruction manual for how you get to it. It is the map to the feeling. It is not the message; the message happens in you. Great filmmaking is nonverbal influence and persuasion at some of its very best.” -From, “Winning Body Language” By: Mark Bowden

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