Will you get a heart attack if you have high cholesterol or LDL cholesterol?
High cholesterol, according to new research, is not even a very predictive risk factor for heart attacks!

Why not?

• A new American study has shown that nearly 75 percent of patients hospitalized for a heart attack had normal cholesterol levels that did not indicate that they were at high risk for a cardiovascular event.

Almost 75 percent of heart attack patients fell within recommended targets for “bad” LDL cholesterol, (more…)

As an artist I’m going to paint you a picture with three colours relating to aspects of my life.
Summarizing my life I’d say I’m a passionate person with a strong faith and have a desire to live life to the full. I have a real love of colour and my art slogan is ‘adding colour to your life.’ Someone once said “at every era of his existence and his history, the human being has associated colour with his joys, his actions and his pleasures.”
My first brushstroke is GREEN. It represents my sprouting, or growing years. I had loving parents and an older brother Wayne (who is also a professional artist). We had the same interests in sport and art. (more…)

“It is the still small voice that the soul heeds; not the deafening blasts of doom.”
- William Dean Howell
Often, it seems, we come upon a problem that takes all our strength to even begin to figure how to solve it.
As time goes on, it appears that every problem we encounter becomes more difficult than the previous one. How can we proceed when it appears that the world is crashing all around?
What choices do we make? Where do we go for help? How do we cope? What road do we choose? Obviously, Yogi Berra’s statement, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it” does not bring us great comfort (more…)

Research shows the refined sugar helps cancer cells proliferate
By Maggie Fox
WASHINGTON — Pancreatic tumor cells use fructose to divide and proliferate, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that challenges the common wisdom that all sugars are the same.
Tumor cells fed both glucose and fructose used the two sugars in two different ways, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.
They said their finding, published in the journal Cancer Research, may help explain other studies that have (more…)

1:42 PM Tuesday Jul 20, 2010
Air fresheners and some cleaning products increase the risk of breast cancer, a study suggests.

Women who regularly used a combination of cleaning products were twice as likely to have breast cancer as other healthy women, US scientists found. The strongest link was between cancer and air fresheners and mould and mildew removers.

Increased incidence of cancer was also linked to insect repellents. (more…)

4:00 AM Tuesday Jul 20, 2010

New Zealand researchers have established that vitamin C can help to block the growth of cancer cells – an important experimental finding they expect could be quickly adopted into cancer treatment.

The role of vitamin C in cancer treatment has been controversial for decades, with contradictory findings from various studies. In an international review of 20 human trials of vitamin C and other “anti-oxidant” supplements, the influential Cochrane Collaboration found no convincing evidence that they could prevent (more…)

One prevailing counterfeit of humility is self-deprecation, or thinking you have little or no value. But as Ken Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale wrote:
“People with humility don’t think less of themselves; they just think of themselves less.”
Pride leads you to compare yourself to others and to derive your self-worth from things outside of yourself.
When you’re humble, you’re only concerned with your own progress relative to yourself–not to other people.
True humility flows from having the proper allegiance to a Higher Power; no (more…)

I’ve written previously on the importance of identifying your values through conscious introspection.
But not only is it important to identify your values, but you must also prioritize them.
In the classic movie “Chariots of Fire,” the protagonist Eric Little had three values: his religion, his love for his country, and his love for running. He was clear and solid with those values.
He had also prioritized them. How do we know that? If you remember in the story line, it came time for him to run in the Olympics, and he wanted to run, and he wanted to represent his country, and he had to run (more…)

A friend introduced me to green smoothies about 3 months ago and I’ve been having them twice a day. You mix fruit and vegetables (not root vegetables) with water in a blender for a delicious, nutritious drink. It has amazing health benefits. check it out at http://greensmoothiesblog.com/green-smoothie-retreat/

My husband and I have just returned from an Advanced Leadership Seminar with Klemmer Associates in Tweed Heads, Australia. It was one of those opportunities that came our way that we are thankful we grabbed. It would have been easy to have let it slip by and we could have made lots of genuine excuses for not going but I’m so thankful we made the decision to go. It was five days and nights of intensive life changing training. Although I had to break out of my comfort zone and face some of my fears the results will last with me for a lifetime. I remember years ago an interview with ex missionaries who were in their 90’s and they were asked what they would do differently if they had their life over again and they all said they would take more risks. (more…)