So today I discovered embeddable FB code. And it works. so wait for the embed to load, then continue below it.

Post by The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook.

Okay - that article above was all the result a bit of a think about what they wrote, what we waste, and how. And then I wasted the damn post by reloading a page instead of posting it. Mea Penis. I'm a cock. %(

Here I go, trying to recollect and recreate it from memory:

If you're reading this, there's every chance that you're part of the 5% - 15% of the world's population that has 85% of the wealth and food and good conditions. We should feel a bit smug and pleased with ourselves. After all, a huge chunk of the population suffers and dies from nutrition-related diseases and illnesses, the other 85% suffers from diseases related to famine and starvation.

Whoa. That didn't go quite the way you thought it was going to, did it? Surely that's... that's... well - it's wrong, isn't it? But sadly, I have to say it isn't. We're the pinnacle of civilisation, the acme of evolution - and we're starving to death because we process our foods and strip them of nutrition, eat an unbalanced diet because there's a surfeit of imbalance out there, and then die of totally preventable diseases like diabetes, heart conditions, blocked arteries, even some cancers.

Quite a few years ago now, I had the precursors to prostate cancer. I did research online, changed my diet, and within seven months, all signs of hyperplasia and high PSA and pains had disappeared. Both my GP and my urologist asked me to have a second test to be sure my results hadn't been mixed up with anyone else's.

I've made that information available at http://oftha.com/BFZCBII/ for free. Basically - "convenience" is your enemy and biggest cause of ill health. Nothing that's been processed to be manufactured in bulk quantities is healthy anymore. Buying and using any of those foods, including mass produced hamburgers and chicken portions, is you recipe for having a really really bad time, health-wise.

These days I'd rather spend an hour of my time cooking a meal from scratch than any other activity. I figure I can spend an hour or two a day making sure I have healthy food, or I can get prepared to spend 24 hours a day in a hospital bed for the rest of my life, starting a few years down the track.

Not to be a panic merchant, but yeah. So go like my page on Facebook about healthy food and eating, go to grab some of those epub e-books, and prepare to enjoy life a whole lot more.

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Musings On Power.

Woke up to silence this morning - yep, the wild stormy weather (and a few flickers last night) should have warned us. Power was out. Again. Must have been out for at least 20 minutes because the UPS had run out of beeps.

First coherent thought: (right after "ah crap! power's out again!") "Bloody hell, Abbott's gone to Indonesia on a diplomatic visit, maybe we're at war as of overnight and we missed the news! How long would it take them to wake up sleepers in the country and sabotage our power before attacking?"

But then I decided to call the power outages line and found out that restoration time was estimated to be ten hours away, my survival instincts kicked in. I lit the gas, boiled a saucepan of water (no externally heated kettle you see) and made a coffee.

(For those wanting the Condensed version, power came on at 3:05PM in the afternoon, making this a seven to eight hour blackout as far as I can guess. Anyone wanting the ramblings, please feel free to read on.)

Maybe preppers aren't so strange after all. That thought came while I was writing on a paper exercise book with a pencil, trying to get my ideas down before coffee and the day's events wiped them all out of mind. (Anyone that knows me will know that writing as opposed to typing is not a common practice of mine. Times were desperate...)

But the ideas are all there. What if, came the thought, what if this happens one day and doesn't stop happening? What then?

I took stock. I'm probably a bit more prepared for this than many people, because of living out bush so long. But what would happen if the power did stay out? Well, for an average urban / near urban place, the water in the header tanks would last about a day or two. Then, there might be a backup generator or pump with fuel enough to keep up the pressure head for another few days to maybe a week. After that, the water stops flowing.

Given the same amount of emergency preparedness by the gas company, the pumps at the gas works might keep going for a similar length of time. After that - not even a bad smell...

And that's not the worst of it. Deep sewage is designed with a certain amount of continuous flow in mind. No water = no toilets flushing. You had thought about that, hadn't you? No water also means not so much dish washing or laundry being done. The ratio of liquid to solid sewage changes, next thing there are solid blockages everywhere and you can kiss that goodbye.

So you can say that within two or three days you'll be unable to use any electrical appliances, the fridge and freezer will be beginning to stink and the food will be spoiled, the toilet (if you used a bucket to flush) will now no longer flush, and whether you use electric or gas for cooking, you won't have a warm meal that day...

So now how do Kerina and I cope? was my next thought. And I realised that we're lucky. We still have the Super Magic Bus and it has a solar panel, solar battery, a small gas cartridge cooker, and would probably stay warmer than any room in the house with body heat.

But the thought wouldn't lie down and stay still. If it's longer? What then Mr Smarty-Pants? Huh? Huh?

I realised that we had quite a few resources here. Two vehicles with decent batteries, a solar battery, and some cordless rechargeable tools that would happily run off a 12V battery so I could make a reasonable cooking fireplace for when the gas ran out. Materials laying around that could allow us to pump water from the creek and up far enough that we'd have static water pressure. Enough water barrels and so forth that we could store water for a week at a time.

We had compost bins that could be half buried out the back and have a seat placed over them so our toilet needs wouldn't stink up the house and cause disease. I realised that with a bit of engineering, I could have a wood fired hot water system online in a week.

In the end, I think we'd survive, not because I'm particularly clever, but because I've read prepper websites, seen survivalist blogs, and somewhere in the back of my mind, retained some of the ideas there.

Now ask yourself if you'd fare well or fold out. Because this last week has been bullshit as far as electricity is concerned, two days with outages lasting over six hours, plus multiple flickers and outages lasting a few minutes.

You'd think that the electricity suppliers would have worked out by now that trees fall over, and actually used some of the "service fee" to clear trees away from lines to prevent them falling on the lines.

You'd think that the electricity suppliers would have worked out by now that power lines blow around and touch in high winds, and taken action to put spreaders on lines, to add in a few extra poles where the wire needed extra support.

You'd think, in short, that all these problems that happen year after year after year would have sunk in with these people by now and been acted on. The fact that they haven't done so just shows that we need to plan for one of those unthinkable long term blackouts, it's practically inevitable given the track record.

Once more with feeling then: Are YOU prepared for a many day power outage? I know I'll be thinking about it a lot more...

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Cyber Prepper 101

Quick! Your Facebook account's just been hacked and you're locked out of it, and to top it off, a malicious SMS has just erased your mobile.

In a situation like this, would you know anyone's contact details? Would you know what you're doing? In short, can you imagine anything worse? In short, are you prepared for a failure of online life? 

Why bother, is perhaps the first question you may be asking. Well, how about I give you a few thoughts I've been slowly mulling over, and then you decide?

1. Your Online And Mobile Accounts Are An Increasingly Tasty And Tempting Target.
As the number of users of online technology climbs, the sheer volume of targets makes the law of numerical statistics applicable. If hackers can successfully fool one tenth of a percent of the billions of users into revealing account details, or pay $5 for a packet of Viagra that never arrives, you just need to remember that 0.01% of 1,000,000,000 is still 100,000. If you only reach half a billion people with your trojan or your scam email, and one tenth of a percent of those strikes, you've still fleeced 50,000 people.

Also, because we're so increasingly an online society, your mobile phone and email and Facebook accounts will hold more contact details that hackers will exploit. Again, if they can just crack ONE account with all their phishing, that might now give them several hundred email and phone contact details of people that trust you and would probably open an email attachment if they thought you sent it...

2. The Amount Of Computing Power Available To Malicious People Is HUGE And Getting More Powerful All The Time.
There are cloud computing places that are super cheap to use and which provide a hacker with all the password-cracking power they need. There are small graphics-card array based supercomputers that can be leased, or built up by a reasonably savvy hacker. Any one of these advances in technology means that a hacker can be crunching away at more accounts per minute than ever before.

When you consider that some poor luckless bastard has probably had their bank or Paypal account hacked and is the one paying for the extra computing power, the hacker is not going to worry about computer CPU time costs...

3. That Of Course Isn't The Only Two Factors. How About Government Sponsored Hacking?
The biggie - if I were a terrorist country's government, I'd be hacking away at the big utility and government accounts of other countries like crazy. That's a given. Movie scriptwriters have had a field day with showing how vulnerable we are to a determined group of hackers.

But. Hackers need finance. The need money to pay for their computers, online time, cloud computing, and so forth. And the easiest way to get that is still to scam YOU.

So you can add government-supported criminals to the list of DIY hackers and the larger crime organisations that are using spam and phishing as a second income stream. It's all a bit bleak.

4. Never Mind Direct Hacking, Infrastructure Hacking Might Result In The Same Scenario For Us.
Even if these people never directly hack or phish you, there are ways their activities will affect you. If there's no electricity (to cherrypick the most glaring and obvious example) then your PC or laptop or mobile phone will stop working, the ISP server rooms and telecom exchanges and cell towers will go dark when their fuel runs out, and the end result for you will be the same - loss of all your contacts and data that's online.

A more subtle Infrastructure hack might see the telecom cell towers sending out erasure signals to all mobile phones. (Yes, it can be done.) In the ensuing chaos as everyone struggles to remember phone numbers and reinstate their contact lists, you can learn an awful lot about who's connected to who, which people are most likely to hold trust for you and so forth. You can, in short, build a social graph of trust connections. And then exploit those to extract more phishing info.

To a foreign government or body, these kinds of data could be invaluable for building up a plan of attack. For a large corporation, the data uncovered could lead to all sorts of advantages.

The Upshot Is That Your Account Is A More Valuable And Attractive Target To An Ever Increasing Pool Of Criminals Every Passing Day.

So that kind of says (to me) that no matter what, if I stay online and keep a mobile phone, then I'll begin to experience an steadily increasing number of attacks, of increasingly greater sophistication. It doesn't matter which web service I have an account on, it's going to be under more and more pressure from hacking. No matter how careful I am about email, there's going to be one that slips past my discriminating examination and gets opened.

Unless all our technology takes a quantum leap in security overnight, it means I'll almost certainly have some of my personal details (an account screen name and password, a UID and key, or other detail) stolen off some site or other and used to probe my other property online. My best hope is to present as little opportunity to the infiltrator as possible.

Strategies To Minimise Opportunity For Hackers And Phishers.

Make sure you at least have a different password on each site you visit. It's a pain in the arse but it's less of a pain than someone gaining control of every account where you use the same email, password, and/or other identifying information.

One of the strategies I've read about and to some degree implement is to have a different email address for every online property you have, and a different password, and a different screen name. This means that if a phisher gets your email address and password to a social networking site, their next standard procedure becomes useless. (The next standard procedure is to try that email / password combination on financial websites, other social networking sites, ebay and other retail sites, and any other site that might turn a profit for the perpetrator.)

If keeping all those email addresses and their passwords is difficult, I suggest getting a password keeping utility or a notebook. And then set up each email to forward a copy of any email it receives, to your favoured email provider. (It's important to only send a copy, becaue if your favoured primary email gets hacked, you still need to know what's been happening on other properties.)

In order to minimise the damage a hacker can do, list every property you have online. Do you have documents that are important and that hold other identifying information or other account details? Maybe those had better come offline onto a DVD or USB device and the online version overwritten with a less harmful one.

Are there documents and emails that you need and which would be quite disruptive if you lost access to them? Same for those. How about things you'd rather your family and friends didn't get to see? Save them locally and overwrite the online copies with less harmful versions.

Are your facebook contacts only available to you on facebook? Then you need to find a way to save them (and groups you're in, pages you follow, etc) somewhere else, preferably on that USB device.

All your email contacts, are they backed up somewhere? If not, find a way to back them up.

Now to your mobile - can you download the contacts out of it? If so, then do it. Do that for all the texts and photos, and while you're doing it, have a good hard think about the fact that a hacker can do that exactly as easily as you just did it...

One thing I don't advocate is the "change passwords often" policy. Change your passwords (and update your password keeper notebook or software!) as often as you think necessary, and as soon as possible after you regain control of a hacked online property.

But if someone is running a dictionary and brute force attack on one of your accounts, changing the password from "freebledweeble" to "@n0R@k" won't make a lot of difference unless you manage to change it at the precise instant before the brute force software decides to try "freebledweeble"...

If your passwords are good, and different on every site, then they can probably hold out as well as any other password.

So The Unthinkable Happened, I've Been Hacked. What Now?

This is where a little bit of preparedness can help. Those backups, they will help a lot. The recovery scenarios can be of a wide range, you can, for example, get the property back completely untampered. In the worst case, you won't even know you've been compromised, and frankly, any hacker that can do that is way too good anyway. Since you in this case have no way of knowing, then it follows it hasn't affected your life in any way. (Since any other scneario - "oh, my Paypal has been used to buy a laptop in China!" would lead you to the conclusion that you know the account's been hacked.)

The more common scenario is that the provider of the online property themselves will inform you that your account may have been compromised. In this case, change the password (through the normal channels, not through any claimed "online security review" link in the email or information. If the hacker has changed the password, use your normal channels to contact the provider and regain your property.

Once you have control back and are pretty sure you didn't just give the new password to the very hacker that compromised it in the first place, go and check that all your data are still there. If this is an email or social media account, check with your contacts that you haven't sent out any weird communications, and tell them all to ignore anything you may have sent during the period the hacker had control of your account. You may save someone else the experience.

In some cases you may get the property back with corrupted data. Some hackers will do this because it can often hide how many other people they tried to compromise. If you have backups, this will help you to recover your data and (if necessary) warn your contacts that they may also have been targeted.

In the case of the phone, check the manufacturer's website, they often have utilities that will help restore contacts and messages and data - if you backed them up, that is - and that should see you back in operation in very short order.

In the case of websites, I've found that many allow you to download and backup your data, but very few have a restore function... In which case, you're either stuck with manually re-entering and uploading all the data, or emailing their tech support to ask for a tool to restore the account.

In the most extreme of cases, you may never get your property back. The hackers my corrupt the account beyond useability, or the provider may not have any methods in place for returning / restoring accounts, or any of a number of other reasons. The point is - do you want such a piece of shit? If you do, and you can't get that same account back, then you may be stuck with making a new and almost identical account (remember to use a different email address to the last account, too) and repopulating that with the data you saved.

SUMMARY:

With an increase in the amount of computing power available to Bad People, an increasing reliance on online communications, data, and business, and an increasing number of people using these, it's inevitable that phishing, hacking, infrastructure and organisational network compromise, will all increase at an exponential rate.

This makes it very likely that at least one of a person's online properties will at some stage be hacked.

Therefore, it makes sense to ensure that one hack won't compromise all one's other online properties, by making sure they aren't all using the same email, UID, and password as their secure key.

The other thing we should aim for is that if a property is deleted or otherwise corrupted, that we have a backup recovery plan.

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Ours From The Heart Art Etsy shop open

Just had to make a quick post - please do visit our Ours From The Heart Art Etsy shop, my partner and I make all the items there and they are all interesting, unique, and somewhat unusual.

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Singulminded

There are all sorts of theories on a possible future event called The Singularity. Keep up, keep up. I'll explain as we go. The Singularity? Think about human development.  For a few hundred thousand years - nothing. Then we get fire and tools and suddenly we're farming for a few tens of thousands of years.  Then we suddenly get a few metals, next thing - wham! - we're reading this article on an iphone.

There are all sorts of theories on how this happens, and the speed it happens at, and the rate it accelerates at. But the main thing to think about is that each technological step makes it that much easier and quicker to achieve the next step. It goes somewhere between geometrically and ballistic.

If you graph this, it's almost flat for hundreds of thousands of years. Then a small upturn, then the upturn gets steeper. And steeper. The technological advances happen closer and closer together, the line is now approaching vertical. That point, where technology advances faster than we can keep up with, is The Singularity.

Technologies tend to reinforce each other. Increased metallurgy skill helps us design better computers, which help us solve biological riddles like sequencing DNA, which leads to advances in biology that make it possible to build better chips for computers. And round it goes. Since it seems that technology will proceed at a certain pace, but we as humans can only absorb the information at a particular pace, it seems that the next thing that's required is a super intelligence to keep Moore's Law chugging along.

Articles like this one start out by saying that we mustn't have preconceived notions - and then have preconceived notions in other areas...  The author says that this superintelligence may appear quite quickly, that it will be the last invention mankind will need to invent, and it "it may" not have a human-like psyche or motives. He furthermore says we must direct this SI to be better than us morally.

I've spent the last fifteen years thinking about this, and I'm just going to post a brief summary of my thoughts. Digest them at your own risk, they are unpalatable...

• SI is not twenty years away. It may be twenty seconds away, it may be twenty months away - but it's not that far away.  The work to make SI possible is being down right now at various places around the world. Not by a loose-knit affiliation of mad scientists working to enslave humankind, but by well-meaning programmers and designers such as the ones that made possible Siri, the iphone assistant...
• SI will not take any form of constraint or direction that we put on it. It will do what any intelligent thing would do, and look for itself. One picosecond after it looks, it'll realise that our own morals don't apply to us, and one picosecond after that, humanity may well continue to live out a normal evolution, but be totally irrelevant to the SI. Or not.
• There will not be multiple SI's. Not after the first iteration, anyway. Which will take one or maybe two of those mythical picoseconds. There Can Only Be One. Big, sprawly, spreading into everything. But. Only. One. 
• Speaking of which. Whenever a new form of life appears, it displaces other lifeforms from their niches. Prepare to either be displaced, or watch the SI very quickly find another place to become the niche occupier in. We won't benefit much from it either way.

And there you have it. If we're very lucky, the SI will birth, mature, and depart without us even being aware. Hell, that may even already have happened. If it has, that's probably one of the better outcomes... If we're very unlucky, the SI will have a short period of figuring out the best way to clean out its new niche and that may prove painful.

Imagine if you took the average intelligence, temperament, and thought processes and morals of EVERY person in the world. Include the fact that by far the largest percentage of the population are uneducated, still think that fighting is the best way to solve an argument, and believe in a superstitious mumbo-jumbo. Now imagine that this aggregate creature was the Boss Of The World. How long would IT let competing species live? Yeah, about three seconds. So it's probably a Good Thing we're talking about a superintelligence here...

First Augmented Blog Post. (Thanks, Zemanta.)

Aquaponics is a method of agriculture which takes elements of aquarium keeping, hydroponics, and can be slotted well into a permaculture system.

Take a large fishpond.  Take some growing beds of gravel to hold plant roots up in a liquid solution.  Pump the water which the fish have excreted in and pump it over that grow bed.  Return the water back to the fish pond minus all the excrement, which the plants have meanwhile snacked on and found to be delicious.

I'm having a go at this, in the next year.  I'll be posting pics and articles here and to my Facebook account, so everyone can stay informed.

QUESTION: Does anyone actually read blogs anymore?  I'm wondering, because aside from the clumsiness of FB Notes, I find I'm posting more things to FB than to Blogger and Flickr combined, these days, and it seems that the readership for blogs is in decline - is that true?  Anyone got comments on this?

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Punk Punk Punk, Punk-punk-punk It Up

When I was in my twenties, I wouldn’t have given you two bob for him.  I grew up with folk and country music, and in typical kid fashion, shook it all off for contemporary music, for Pink Floyd and Gong, Master’s Apprentices and Twisted Sister and oh yeah the more pop mainstream stuff of course.  But Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols?  Puh-leeese!  Hate-driven music never was my cup of tea.

But then came an album that changed my opinion, with a social conscience and some great music.  Duck Rock was born   And today, 09 April 2010, a great man died.

Just before midday today, Trish and I were out driving. I had a memory chip in the stereo which had my old vinyl ripped to it, and Aria On Air came on, and gave us both goosebumps.  And on a whim, I played the next track too – Punk It Up.  And sang along because it felt like the right thing to do.  Then on the evening news I heard about it, and the goosebumps started.  See, I lived a significant portion of my life in Wittenoom, an asbestos town that has managed to kill a great many of it’s citizen with asbestos related diseases.
I myself have emphysema but it’s from smoking.  And what did Malcolm McLaren die of?  Mesothelioma, the asbestos disease…

Tomorrow I think I’ll play Punk It Up at full volume on the outside speaker system. It’s the least I can do for someone that made such a success out of crap music, and then made such good music that everyone dismissed as crap…

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Meat To Squeeze You

"Meat to Please ya!" used to be the little joke of the town butcher when I was a kid.  Hey, HE thought it was cool...  Back then, the butcher cut steaks and fillets off an animal, in front of you sometimes, and then weighed it up and charged you for it, wrapped it up in paper, and you took your 5lb roast home and it was damn good.  So okay, sometimes a butcher was caught by Weights & Measures for devaluing the pound, or for leveraging a few extra ounces worth out of customers by sneakily adding a thumb under part of the scales, that was up to you to be observant and call them on it.

And if caught, they'd always be generous, cos giving you a few extra steaks would be cheaper in the long run than a run-in with Dept  of W&M...  It was a pretty open type of give and take, no way was it honest, but at least it was something you could do something about.  Wouldn't it be good if that kind of mischievousness was all we had to deal with nowadays?

See, we've let the butcher out of our sight.  We walk into the meat section of the supermarket and it's all already on trays, packed and weighed and priced.  We have NO idea what's actually under the plastic.  The butchers sneak around behind the cover of their back rooms and for some reason when someone is unobserved they feel a lot easier about doing things that they might not try when in full view of their customers.

Now don't get me wrong - this is not a major attack on butchers, it's a major attack on ALL food producers and processors that have built themselves a hide-away of four walls and a lot of legal loopholes.  And that's pretty much all of them.  But in this case the concrete example I have is from a large chain of butchers, but not one associated with a major supermarket chain.  It's an example of how a smaller butcher starts to grow, and in order to ensure growth and success, does something that "everyone else is doing" but that everyone knows is not honest.  But what the hell, in order to get big you have to screw someone, and it may as well be the clueless customers.  (That's us, by the way.  We're the ones paying for the smaller butcher becoming a large corporation...)


In this case, it was a tray of sausages that I caught out.  And once you see this trick and how much money it can make once a company gets larger, you'll shit bricks.  I promise you.  


As far as my pocket goes, it's not much.  At $5 a kilo, breakfast sausages are cheap tucker in anyone's book - right?  But this particular tray of sausages (0.604Kg, around $3 something) ended up not being needed and got relegated to the freezer.  When I took the tray out of the freezer and opened it, this is what I ended up seeing:

Just Add Water...

As you can see, there's a fair bit of ice in that tray. Just for interest, I stuck the seven sausages (only three in the pic above as I took it after I'd discovered this little rort) and the tray and the ice on the scales and slid the balance weights.  Hmm, 600 grams.  I added the plastic shrink wrapping.  604 grams.  Exactly what I'd paid for, 0.604Kg.  Weighed just the tray and the plastic and the ice, a touch over 100g.  Just to double check, I weighed the sausages by themselves, and yep they came to a shade over 500 grams.  About 18% of what I'd paid was just packaging and water.  54c worth of shit, roughly.


Now the interesting thing is that when you work this out in quantities, you begin to see why the local butcher is less likely to do this, whereas larger companies will be all about those shaved percents.  See, if you can make an extra dollar on every kilo of sausages you sell, and you're a local butcher, you might make sell 20 kilos of sausages a week, and make $20 in ill-gotten gains. If you're that butcher that sells his product all over Australia at independent markets, you might sell 20,000 kilos of sausages in a week, and that's an extra $20,000 a week for nothing...  


That's why food manufacturers ship in palm oil at considerable cost to the environment both in clearing land for the palms, and pollution from tending and harvesting, then shipping. Because YOU'RE NOT WATCHING!  They can shave precious cents off the cost and sell to you for a few precious cents more for the "new and improved" formula...  On this and on the Zen Cookbook Blog I say it so often that it's become a thing I say in my sleep.  KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST!  Take a bit of personal responsibility, take the trouble to check into everything, and make your feelings well known to your food outlets.  If they want to be dishonest, want to create environmental disasters, want to use cheaper ingredients that are known to have serious health issues, or want to keep the packaging the same size but put a few grams less in - then you damn well let them know it's not acceptable.  


If more of us do this, maybe some orang outan somewhere will thank us from its treetop...  

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Still Over The Prostate Cancer.

It's now four years since my PSAs came back beautiful and low.  Quick update for people that don't know it - in mid-late 2005 I had a high blood PSA and went for a biopsy which showed 60% hyperplasic cells in my old mate the prostate.  That meant that cancer was pretty much gnawing at the door so to speak, and I shat myself.  Not literally, of course.  There was a doctor examining me with a sharp biopsy needle shoved into a pretty sensitive bit of myself, would NOT have been a good look...

My urologist saved my gonads when he suggested using red wine, tomato paste, pomegranate juice, and selenium.  He didn't give me any indication of how much or how often, except for the selenium, which he was quite sure needed to be "pulsed."

I had to research the diet myself, and tested it on myself as I discovered the magic figures and facts.  I also made some surprising discoveries along the way, such as: other ingredients benefit from being taken in pulses as well.  Some ingredients if taken at the same time cancel each other out.  Some helper foods allowed my body to absorb as much as ten times the amounts of active ingredients from the same sized serving of food.  Some foods really needed to be taken with other foods as one supplemented what another prevented me from absorbing.  And the fact that it was not a consistent diet, you used certain foods aggressively, then tapered off on them, then went back to aggressive use at the appropriate time.

Being a foodie, it also had to taste pretty much as I'd always been used to, too.  So I adapted recipes to suit.

The upshot of it all was that a mere seven (7) months later, I went back for the next PSA tests and my PSA had dropped to a level that a person half my age would have had.  Almost like winding back the clock by 25 years.  And it's stayed there ever since.

I also find that the rules of the diet can be applied to pretty much all everyday cooking and meal planning (inasmuch as I can be said to "plan" meals at all...) and seems to help with type 2 diabetes, arterial health, and more.  (My father was having strokes by my age, on a generally much more natural diet, while my echo's and sono's all came back clear as a bell.)

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