Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Meetings coming up

We have a jam packed schedule for the rest of the school year

February 7 - Meet the Judge, Columbia River Crossings and Crime Report [this was the agenda for the cancelled meeting]

March 21 - General Meeting

April 18 - Special Bridgeton Path meeting with Parks and Rec.

April 21 - Spring clean up - volunteers are always welcome...it's actually a fun day

May 16 - General meeting

June 20 -Special Bridgeton Path meeting with Parks and Rec.

I'll post notices as each meeting is upcoming

Meetings take place at the Columbia School - Marine Drive and Bridgeton Rds

Friday, January 26, 2007

Vitamins

For those who have been regular readers of my blogs, or know me, you know I prefer "real" food to products with unpronounceable names in them....It's why I have been taking a daily vitamin that is food based - and not one "made" in a lab with who-knows-what in it.

I was alerted to an article about vitamins - which you can read it here

In short it's an article about food-based vitamins v. synthetic ones and contained information I was not aware of concerning the synthetics and the idea of talking in terms of milligrams.

It's worth a read if you take vitamins.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Thursday, January 11, 2007

January Neighborhood Meeting

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

7 PM @ Columbia School, 716 NE Marine Drive

AGENDA

· Meet The Judge!

Special guest Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Dick Baldwin.
Judge Baldwin will discuss preserving Oregon’s fair and impartial court system. Q & A session encouraged.

· Columbia River Crossing Task Force Update.

Representatives of the Columbia River Crossing Task Force (New I-5 Bridge) will be on hand to show us the newest design proposals. This project is proceeding quickly and the final design for the new I-5 bridge may be chosen as soon as this Fall. The new I-5 bridge will definitely have a major impact on our neighborhood. This is your opportunity to have a say on how the new bridge will look.

·Crime report from Officer Mike Leonard and introduction to Mary Tompkins, our new Crime Prevention Coordinator.

Columbia River Crossing updates

The Columbia river Crossing Project is doing a few open houses so we can learn about the bridge and transit alternatives proposed for in-depth study.

January 17, 2007
5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Battle Ground Police Department
507 SW 1st St.
Battle Ground, WA

Saturday, January 20, 2007
9:30 a.m. - 1 p.m.
Lincoln Elementary School
4200 Daniels St., Vancouver

Thursday, January 25, 2007
4:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Oregon Association of Minority Entrepreneurs (OAME)
4134 N Vancouver Ave., Portland

Tuesday, January 30, 2007
6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
12050 N. Jantzen Dr., Portland
(next to the former Zupan's on Hayden Island)

Visit the website for more information
www.columbiarivercrossing.org

Monday, January 01, 2007

Happy Healthy New Year

As we roll into 2007, I am re-posting an article I wrote about health.

Healthy living for the 21st Century

When we were young we heard what are called "old wives tales" about health and food...We rolled our eyes and looked at our mothers as if they were aliens...Now we are learning that our mothers were correct.

Maybe they knew what Hippocrates said:

"Leave your drugs in the chemist's pot if you can heal the patient with food."
"Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food."

Or maybe they read Maimonides:
"Let nothing which can be treated by diet be treated by other means."

Or maybe they knew this Chinese proverb:
“He that takes medicine and neglects diet, wastes the skill of the physician.”

Whatever knowledge they had - those old wives - our parents and grandparents - they seemed to know a lot about nutrition.

My mother was adverse to seeing a physician unless absolutely necessary - something I took note of as she lived to 95. She believed in eating well and letting one's body take care of itself. She fed us well and grew most of the vegetables we ate. But - and it's a big BUT.... the soil was in better shape when I was a kid.... and that was in New York City!

Today we have depleted the soil and no matter how organic our food - it is missing what it used to have way back when - and what is missing are many essential nutrients. The environment is more toxic than it was, food is more processed, and it is usually picked before it is ripe and very often cooked to death.

If the soil and environment have worsened, is there anything we can do to grow older better? Yes - we can supplement our diets with glyconutritional products.

“Glyconutritional products will play a leading role in the 21st century's emerging wellness industry. The driving determinant will be the growing realization that optimal cell-to-cell communication is one of the most critical functions of the life process and is fundamental to immune system health."

And if our cells do a better job of talking to one another, who knows what they can start talking about! So listen to your body now - it talks to you and tells you what it needs - and it can do a lot more communicating if given the appropriate equipment.

Newer equipment

I'm a skier so let me use a ski analogy. Skiing can be tiring and it's even more so with older bodies and older equipment. When I first skied we had leather boots with laces and very heavy long skis with heavy bindings. But I was a lot younger then - in my 20's and I hardly noticed how tiring it was - it was too much fun. As I aged - into my 50's - I began to think there had to be a solution to all the work the skiing knees do and I fell in love with what were called shaped skis or parabolic skis. I was the first I knew to buy a pair and it made all the difference for my body. The skis do the work! I'm into a newer shorter pair these days and will continue to monitor newer models of skis as it makes more sense to let the equipment do the bulk of the hard work.

At the same time I learned of the new ski equipment, I also came across new inner body equipment - glyconutrients. For sports fans, think of glyconutrients as the nutritional version of shaped skis, lightweight bikes or titanium softball bats. It's all about that new equipment helping us do what we do better and to doing it as we age.

The ingredients in glyconutrients are not "new" - they have been around probably forever and used to be found in our daily food - but no more. The ingredients have been re-discovered and combined into products; products that protect and nourish our cells and regulate our organs and organ systems.

Way back when we were in school the up-to-date science of the time was adequate for then but it was missing a lot of information we now know about. I know from my own field of Developmental Psychology that advances in technology lead to advances in developmental knowledge. The same is true of all sciences, including glycobiology. In this new field, over 20,000 articles have been written in a few short years. Why so many and why so fast? "This breakthrough discovery exposed the missing link that has the scientific community, health researchers, and pharmaceutical companies scrambling to get up to speed on this incredible science. "

Science and medicine have long tried to break the code by which the cells of the body communicate with one another in order for its complex functions to occur. Just as biochemistry is the chemistry of life, this mysterious code is the language of life. For years, scientists focused on proteins as the primary communication molecules. Early in this century however, a theoretical mathematician at the Weisman Institute calculated the number of molecular configurations possible with protein molecules and the number of known chemical command signals needed to run the body. She concluded that there were not enough protein configurations possible to supply all the messages. Another code was required - a sugar code.

Of the 200 monosaccharides [sugars] that occur naturally in plants, eight are known to be components used in cell-to-cell communication. These eight sugars are glucose, fucose, mannose, galactose, xylose, N-acetylglucosamine, N- acetylgalactosamine and N-acetylneuraminic acid. Only two of these, glucose and galactose, are commonly found in the foods we eat. The others need to be put into our bodies in the form of nutritional supplements.

Glyconutritional products will play a leading role in the 21st century's wellness industry. The driving determinant will be the growing realization that optimal cell-to-cell communication is an important function for the life process and is fundamental to immune system health. And - it is what will allow us to be healthier as we age.