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Tag: health

Masks After May 11th, 2023?


At the beginning of the Covid pandemic I remember the utterly surreal experience of walking into a bank wearing a mask. It was surreal because no one reacted, I was not immediately confronted by an armed guard, and no one called the police.

Why did it feel surreal to me? Some states and cities in the United States have had laws prohibiting the wearing of face coverings in public. It’s illegal. Some of these laws have been on the books for 150 years. In the U.S.A. I’ve always just assumed that face coverings, masks, burqhas, etc. are illegal unless I learn otherwise. Wearing a mask in a bank is just asking for trouble.

In New York, it’s been illegal since 1845 for a gathering of two or more people in public to wear face coverings. What about the Ku Klux Klan? The KKK arranges for a court to temporarily lift the ban for their demonstrations and then re-instate the ban. Halloween masks are, apparently, ignored. Face coverings have been illegal since 1949 in Alabama. California had stringent anti-mask laws going way back. These laws were struck down by the court after the State of California was sued by Iranian-Americans in 1979. DC prohibits masks in public after 10 PM. There are many other examples.

What’s going to happen when the Covid-19 Emergency Declaration ends on May 11th? We’re still losing 500 people a day to Covid.

Americans Get Half Their Calories From Sugar!


Did you know that today’s average American gets half of his or her calories every day from sugar? It’s true. The average American today consumes 160 pounds of sugar per year. A hundred years ago, this figure was 10 pounds per year. This is great for the sugar companies but must be partly to blame for the explosion in obesity in the U.S.A.

Americans have become sugar addicts. Besides Coke and soda pop that’s loaded with sugar (Coke contains something like 10 teaspoons of sugar per can) read the labels in the fruit juice aisle at the market. Nearly all of them are labeled as “fruit drink” or “fruit cocktail” and are loaded with corn syrup. It’s hard to find a bottle that contains just plain fruit juice. Look at the calories on these fruit “juices”. It’s shocking.

Three years ago I was living in a warm climate and took to drinking lots of “fruit juice”. I thought I was doing myself a favor. After all, it said Vitamin C right on the label. But I noticed that I began to gain weight rapidly. I discussed it with a friend and she asked me to do a complete diet inventory, so I did. I discovered that I was consuming 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day, every day, just in “fruit juice”. I stopped that cold and switched to water. For the next two days, my vision was not quite right. A lifelong diabetic friend explained that this was normal because I stopped the huge constant sugar intake so suddenly. He explained that it would take a couple days for my pancreas to adjust to the new sugar levels. He was right. Since then I have limited my fruit juice intake to only real juices, not spiked with sugar or corn syrup, and about a glass per day. Lots of water and iced tea make up the rest of my fluid intake.

I was a prime example of the statistic I mentioned above. By quitting the “fruit flavored juice” I dropped nearly 20 pounds, back to my normal weight.

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