Tuesday, November 20, 2012









Benefits of Custard Apple

Custard Apple or Seethaphal is a tropical fruit tree that grows easily. The flesh is white and creamy with a sugary taste. The seeds are black in colour with a shine. The seeds are not consumed for they are slightly poisonous.
Custard apple promotes digestion and is used as a cure for vomiting, diarrhea, dysentery and vertigo. The unripe fruit is dried and powdered and is used as a cure for treating lice. The fruit is high in calorie content but contains minerals like iron, phosphorous, calcium and riboflavin.
Custard apple Nutrition
Custard apples are packed with vitamin C, an antioxidant that can combat the free radicals in the body. The fruit also has vitamin A, which is good for healthy skin, better vision and for healthy hair.
The magnesium in custard apples can protect the heart from cardiac diseases and can relax the muscles.
Custard apples are an excellent source of copper. Copper is a trace mineral that helps are body form hemoglobin. When a woman doesn’t have enough copper in her system, there is an increased risk that her child will be born early.
Other side effects of a copper deficiency include brittle bones and a low white blood cell count. The average person needs about nine hundred micrograms of copper each day. Pregnant women need one thousand micrograms of copper each day, and if she decides to breastfeed she will need approximately thirteen hundred micrograms of copper.
Custard apples are also rich in vitamin B6 and potassium. Custard apples are also rich in copper and have plenty of dietary fiber, which is good for keeping the digestive tract healthy and aids digestion as well prevents constipation. Custard apples have low levels of fat, which is good for health.
It is believed that a paste made with the creamy flesh of the fruit can be used as a balm to treat boils, abscesses and ulcers.
Custard apples can be sun-dried and then ground into a powder, which can treat dysentery and diarrhea. Custard apples also act as coolants, stimulants and expectorants. These fruits are good for treating anemia.
Some people make the fruit into a beverage that can act as a substitute to milk.
Even the bark of the custard apple tree, which contains astringents and tannins, is used in making herbal medicines. The leaves of the tree are supposed to be god for treating cancer and tumors; while the bark can relieve toothaches and gum pain.
Custard apples are a rich source of the Vitamin B6. It is important that you eat a diet that is rich in Vitamin B6 because a deficiency can cause skin problems, an extremely sore tongue, convulsions, depressions, and depression. The older a person gets the greater the chances of a Vitamin B6 deficiency.
Custard apple calories
100 gm of custard apple contains:
Calories: 100
Water: 75.0 g
Fat: 0.6 g
Sugar: 15 gm
Dietary fiber: 3.5 g
Carbohydrate: 23.71 gm
Protein: 1 to 4.3 gm
Iron: 0.7 mg
Calcium: 20 mg
Custard apples are a well-balanced food having protein, fibre, minerals, vitamins, energy and little fat. They are an excellent source of Vitamin C, a good source of dietary fibre, a useful source of Vitamin B6, magnesium and potassium, and with some B2 and complex carbohydrate.
Health tips for Custard apple
There are lots of custard apple benefits and custard apple is consumed in row form. Custard milk shake also tasted good. Custard Apple Benefits are immense. Custard apples do taste well, but they are also good for health. Custard apples are good to have them as part of one’s diet.
Benefits of Custard Apple can be healthy for you and may help you lose weight when included in your diet & exercise plan.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See


Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.

by Michael Finkel
photograph by Steve Pyke
The first thing Daniel Kish does, when I pull up to his tidy gray bungalow in Long Beach, California, is make fun of my driving. “You’re going to leave it that far from the curb?” he asks. He’s standing on his stoop, a good 10 paces from my car. I glance behind me as I walk up to him. I am, indeed, parked about a foot and a half from the curb.
The second thing Kish does, in his living room a few minutes later, is remove his prosthetic eyeballs. He does this casually, like a person taking off a smudged pair of glasses. The prosthetics are thin convex shells, made of acrylic plastic, with light brown irises. A couple of times a day they need to be cleaned. “They get gummy,” he explains. Behind them is mostly scar tissue. He wipes them gently with a white cloth and places them back in.
Kish was born with an aggressive form of cancer called retinoblastoma, which attacks the retinas. To save his life, both of his eyes were removed by the time he was 13 months old. Since his infancy — Kish is now 44 — he has been adapting to his blindness in such remarkable ways that some people have wondered if he’s playing a grand practical joke. But Kish, I can confirm, is completely blind.
He knew my car was poorly parked because he produced a brief, sharp click with his tongue. The sound waves he created traveled at a speed of more than 1,000 feet per second, bounced off every object around him, and returned to his ears at the same rate, though vastly decreased in volume.
But not silent. Kish has trained himself to hear these slight echoes and to interpret their meaning. Standing on his front stoop, he could visualize, with an extraordinary degree of precision, the two pine trees on his front lawn, the curb at the edge of his street, and finally, a bit too far from that curb, my rental car. Kish has given a name to what he does — he calls it “FlashSonar” — but it’s more commonly known by its scientific term, echolocation.
Bats, of course, use echolocation. Beluga whales too. Dolphins. And Daniel Kish. He is so accomplished at echolocation that he’s able to pedal his mountain bike through streets heavy with traffic and on precipitous dirt trails. He climbs trees. He camps out, by himself, deep in the wilderness. He’s lived for weeks at a time in a tiny cabin a two-mile hike from the nearest road. He travels around the globe. He’s a skilled cook, an avid swimmer, a fluid dance partner. Essentially, though in a way that is unfamiliar to nearly any other human being, Kish can see.
This is not enough for him. Kish is seeking — despite a lack of support from every mainstream blind organization in America — nothing less than a profound reordering of the way the world views blind people, and the way blind people view the world. He’s tired of being told that the blind are best served by staying close to home, sticking only to memorized routes, and depending on the unreliable benevolence of the sighted to do anything beyond the most routine of tasks.
Kish preaches complete and unfettered independence, even if the result produces the occasional bloody gash or broken bone. (He once fractured the heel of his left foot after leaping from a rock and has broken a couple of teeth.) He’s regarded by some in the blind community with deep veneration. Others, like a commenter on the National Federation of the Blind’s listserv, consider him “disgraceful” for promoting behavior such as tongue clicking that could be seen as off-putting and abnormal.
Kish and a handful of coworkers run a nonprofit organization called World Access for the Blind, headquartered in Kish’s home. World Access offers training on how to gracefully interact with one’s environment, using echolocation as a primary tool. So far, in the decade it has existed, the organization has introduced more than 500 students to echolocation. Kish is not the first blind person to use echolocation, but he’s the only one to meticulously document it, to break it down into its component parts, and to figure out how to teach it. His dream is to help all sight-impaired people see the world as clearly as he does.
—-

Kish, here biking in Long Beach, preaches total independence. Photo courtesy Daniel Kish
It begins with the lid of a pot. “Stand up,” Kish instructs, then guides me to the center of his living room and ties a blindfold around my head, while mentioning, in a schoolteachery tone, that I should not for an instant think that wearing a blindfold represents the experience of being blind. A blindfold almost always causes someone who can see to feel frightened, confused, and disoriented. Kish is none of these things.
“Now wait here,” he says. Though he was born and raised in Southern California, Kish has an odd, almost foreign-sounding accent — a bouillabaisse of Canadian, British, and relaxed Los Angeleno. He says it’s a result of his many travels. “I’m a natural mimic,” he explains. Kish is 5-foot-7, thin and fit, with an impressive mane of dark brown hair and a meandering winestain birthmark on his left cheek.
I hear him walk into his kitchen, his bare feet padding faintly on the hardwood floor. “I’m very particular about feeling life and air around my feet,” he once wrote in the journal he braille-typed and shared with me. I’m barefoot as well. Kish asked me to remove my shoes, which is one of his many little rules you quickly learn to adopt. Like: He’s Daniel Kish, and anyone who calls him “Dan” more than once may be struck with withering disdain. And don’t disturb him during his sleep time — lately, he’s been sleeping just two hours twice a day, usually from 5 to 7 in the morning and again from 5 to 7 in the evening. He often stays up all night dealing with World Access logistics. He lives alone and does not have a significant other. He plays a lot of Celtic hymnal music.
I listen as Kish opens a cabinet and rummages amid his pots. He returns and stands behind me. “Make a click,” he says.
It’s a terrible click, a sloppy click; what Kish calls a “clucky click.” Kish’s click is a thing of beauty — he snaps the tip of his tongue briefly and firmly against the roof of his mouth, creating a momentary vacuum that pops upon release, a sound very much like pushing the igniter on a gas stove. A team of Spanish scientists recently studied Kish’s click and deemed it acoustically ideal for capturing echoes. A machine, they wrote, could do no better.
My click will work for now. Kish tells me that he’s holding a large glass lid, the top to a Crock-Pot, a few inches in front of me. “Click again,” he says. There’s a distinct echo, a smearing of sound as if I’m standing in my shower. “Now click,” he says. The echo’s gone. “I’ve lifted it up. Can you tell?”
I can, quite clearly. “Click again,” he instructs. “Where is it?” I click; there’s no echo.
“It’s still lifted,” I say.
“Try again,” says Kish. “But move your head, listen to your environment.”
I turn my head to the right and click. Nothing. Then I click to the left. Bingo. “It’s over here,” I say, tilting my head in the direction of the lid.
“Exactly,” says Kish. “Now let’s try it with a pillow.”
There are two reasons echolocation works. The first is that our ears, conveniently, are located on both sides of our head. When there’s a noise off to one side, the sound reaches the closer ear about a millisecond — a thousandth of a second — before it reaches the farther ear. That’s enough of a gap for the auditory cortex of our brain to process the information. It’s rare that we turn the wrong way when someone calls our name. In fact, we’re able to process, with phenomenal accuracy, sounds just a few degrees off-center. Having two ears, like having two eyes, also gives us the auditory equivalent of depth perception. We hear in stereo 3-D. This allows us, using only our ears, to build a detailed map of our surroundings.
The second reason echolocation works is that humans, on average, have excellent hearing. We hear better than we see. Much better. On the light spectrum, human eyes can perceive only a small sliver of all the varieties of light — no ultraviolet, no infrared. Converting this to sound terminology, we can see less than one octave of frequency. We hear a range of 10 octaves.
We can also hear behind us; we can hear around corners. Sight can’t do this. Human hearing is so good that if you have decent hearing, you will never once in your life experience true silence. Even if you sit completely still in a soundproof room, you will detect the beating of your own heart.
—-
Kish does not go around clicking like a madman. He uses his click sparingly and, depending on his location, varies the volume. When he’s outside, he’ll throw a loud click. In good conditions, he can hear a building 1,000 feet away, a tree from 30 feet, a person from six feet. Up close, he can echolocate a one-inch diameter pole. He can tell the difference between a pickup truck, a passenger car, and an SUV. He can locate trail signs in the forest, then run his finger across the engraved letters and determine which path to take. Every house, he explains, has its own acoustic signature.
He can hear the variation between a wall and a bush and a chain-link fence. Bounce a tennis ball off a wall, Kish says, then off a bush. Different response. So too with sound. Given a bit of time, he can echolocate something as small as a golf ball. Sometimes, in a parking garage, he can echolocate the exit faster than a sighted person can find it.
I accompanied Kish on several occasions as he cruised the busy streets of Long Beach. The outside world is an absolute cacophony. Every car, person, dog, stroller, and bicycle makes a sound. So do gusts of wind, bits of blowing garbage, and rustling leaves. Doors open and close. Change jangles. People talk. Then there are the silent obstacles — what Kish calls urban furniture: benches, traffic signs, telephone poles, postal boxes, fire hydrants, light posts, parked vehicles. Kish hears the sonic reflections from his click even in a place teeming with ambient noise. “It’s like recognizing a familiar voice in a crowd,” he says. The load upon his mind is undoubtedly immense. Yet he casually processes everything, constructing and memorizing a mental map of his route, all while maintaining an intricate conversation with me. It’s so extraordinary that it seems to border on the magical.
When we walk into a restaurant — never a simple choice with Kish, since he’s a strict vegan — he makes a much quieter click. Kish describes the images he receives as akin to a brief flick of the lights in a dark room; you get enough essential information — tables here, stairway there, support pillars here — to navigate your way through. “It becomes as ridiculous for blind people to run into a wall as it is for sighted people,” he once wrote in his FlashSonar manual. He strolls casually across the restaurant, making one or two more clicks as we approach our table, then sits down. It’s both smooth and subtle. Kish says that it is rare a sighted person even notices he’s making an unusual noise. Almost all blind people instantly do.
What people do notice about Kish is his long white cane. His blind person’s cane. Using echolocation, Kish could get around without one. For most of his youth, in fact, he never carried a cane, seeking to avoid the stigma attached to it. Now, as he approaches middle age, he’s come to believe that whatever can conveniently provide him with more information about his environment he will use. Echolocation’s chief liability is that it is not good at detecting holes in the ground, or small dropoffs, which a cane can do. There are also some figure-ground issues with echolocation — a park bench can “disappear” when it’s directly in front of a stone wall — and a cane, in essence, increases the length of your arm by as much as five feet.
Kish also keeps aware, during the day, of where the sun is striking him — a good way to determine direction — and how the cracks between sidewalk blocks line up; if you remain steadily perpendicular to them, you’re not veering.
When it’s all put together, says Kish, he has very rich, very detailed pictures in his head.
“In color?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “I’ve never seen color, so there’s no color. It’s more like a sonar, like on the Titanic.”
—-

At his high school graduation in 1984, Kish was voted "most likely to succeed." Photo courtesy Daniel Kish
Kish can hardly remember a time when he didn’t click. He came to it on his own, intuitively, at age two, about a year after his second eye was removed. Many blind children make noises in order to get feedback — foot stomping, finger snapping, hand clapping, tongue clicking. These behaviors are the beginnings of echolocation, but they’re almost invariably deemed asocial by parents or caretakers and swiftly extinguished. Kish was fortunate that his mother never tried to dissuade him from clicking. “That tongue click was everything to me,” he says.
He has a vivid recollection of sneaking out his bedroom window in the middle of the night, at age two and a half, and climbing over a fence into his neighbor’s yard. “I was in the habit of exploring whatever I sensed around me,” he writes in his journal. He soon wondered what was in the yard of the next house. And the one after that. “I was on the other side of the block before someone discovered me prowling around their backyard and had the police return me home to completely flummoxed parents.”
Kish was born in Montebello, California, into a difficult family situation. His younger brother, Keith, was also born with retinoblastoma — it’s genetic, though neither of Kish’s parents had the disease. Doctors managed to save enough of Keith’s eyesight so that he doesn’t need echolocation. He’s now a middle school English teacher. Kish’s father, who worked as an automobile mechanic, was a physically abusive alcoholic, and his mother left him when Kish was six.
“I was a violent kid,” says Kish. He frequently got into fistfights. “I rarely lost. My strategy consisted of immobilizing opponents before they could hit me too often.” He went to mainstream schools and relied almost exclusively on echolocation to orient himself, though at the time neither he nor his mom had any concept of what he was doing. “There was no one to explain it, there was no one to help me enhance it, and we all just kind of took it for granted,” he says. “My family and friends were like, ‘Yeah, he does this funny click thing and he gets around.’ ” They called it his radar. Navigating new places, he says, was like solving a puzzle.
He rode his bike with wild abandon. “I used to go to the top of a hill and scream ‘Dive bomb!’ and ride down as fast as I could,” he says. This is when he was eight. The neighborhood kids would scatter. “One day I lost control of the bicycle, crashed through these trash cans, and smashed into a metal light pole. It was a violent collision. I had blood all over my face. I picked myself up and went home.”
He was raised with almost no dispensation for his blindness. “My upbringing was all about total self-reliance,” he writes, “of being able to go after anything I desired.” His career interests, as a boy, included policeman, fireman, pilot, and doctor. He was a celebrated singer and voracious consumer of braille books. He could take anything apart and put it back together — a skill he retains. Once, when I was driving Kish to an appointment with a student, the GPS unit in my car stopped working. Kish examined the unit with his hands, instructed me from the passenger seat how to get to the nearest Radio Shack, and told me which part to buy (the jack on the power cord was faulty). He was named “best brain” in middle school and graduated high school with a GPA close to 4.0. He was voted “most likely to succeed.”
He attended the University of California Riverside, then earned two master’s degrees — one in developmental psychology, one in special education. He wrote a thesis on the history and science of human echolocation, and as part of that devised one of the first echolocation training programs. The ability of some blind individuals to perceive objects well before they could touch them was noted as early as 1749 by French philosopher Denis Diderot. He theorized it had something to do with vibrations against the skin of the face. In the early 1800s, a blind man from England named James Holman journeyed around the world — he may have been the most prolific traveler in history up to that point, Magellan and Marco Polo included — relying on the echoes from the click of his cane. Not until the 1940s, in Karl Dallenbach’s lab at Cornell University, was it irrefutably proven that humans could echolocate.
The thesis was the first time Kish really studied what he’d been doing all his life; it was the beginning, as he put it, of “unlocking my own brain.” He then became the first totally blind person in the United States (and likely the world) to be fully certified as an orientation and mobility specialist — that is, someone hired by the visually impaired to learn how to get around.
—-

Kish teaching echolocation. Photo courtesy Daniel Kish
It was never Kish’s goal to run a foundation dedicated to the blind. He planned to be a psychologist. But he could not ignore the fact that few blind people enjoyed anything close to his freedom of movement, and he had grown weary of society’s attitude toward the blind. “I am belittled, patronized, disrespected, invaded, restricted, and presumed weak, vulnerable, or otherwise incapacitated,” he wrote in his journal. It still drives him crazy when he’s congratulated for simply crossing the street or preparing dinner.
In a letter he posted on his website a few years ago, Kish responded to a public school program in New Jersey called Kindness Beats Blindness, in which hundreds of middle school students were blindfolded while others led them around, to develop sympathy for the blind. “I have felt beaten and pummeled by many things,” he wrote, “misplaced kindness foremost among them.” When I asked Kish about the letter he said, “I have a reputation for being a pain in the ass.” One of his closest friends sometimes refers to him as “the bridge burner.”
Young people, says Kish, are especially hard-hit. “Most blind kids hear a lot of negative talk. ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t move. No, here, let me help you.’ The message you get, if you’re blind, is you’re intellectually deficient, you’re emotionally deficient, you’re in all ways deficient.” A few sighted people have commented to Kish that they’d rather be dead than blind.
So in 2001 he started World Access for the Blind. One of its missions is to counter every no that blind people hear. Blindness, Kish says, should be understood — by both the blind and the sighted — as nothing more than an inconvenience. “Most of my life,” he writes, “I never even thought of myself as blind. In fact, I saw myself as smarter, more agile, stronger, and generally more capable than most other boys my age.”
World Access operates on what Kish calls “an annual budget of silliness” — less than $200,000 a year. (Kish himself makes only “a survival wage.”) He depends on the “blind vine,” the chattery network of the visually impaired, to spread the word. When a potential student, or a parent of a student, agrees to hire World Access, either Kish or one of three other World Access teachers — all blind or visually impaired — will pay a visit, whether it’s on the other side of Los Angeles or the other side of the world.
Lessons can consist of private meetings a few times a month, or an intensive week of training for students farther afield. He’s visited a group of blind students in northern Mexico three times and traveled to Scotland eight times. In all, Kish has taught in 14 countries, including Armenia, South Africa, Switzerland, and Ukraine. Blind students or organizations in more than a dozen other nations, from Afghanistan to Guatemala, are now on his waiting list. The chief focus of World Access classes is setting students on the path to complete autonomy. Echolocation is an essential element of what Kish terms “a holistic approach” that also includes lessons on comfortable social interactions, confident self-image, and nonvisual conversational cues (a head turn can be noted by the sound of hair swishing; arm gestures by the whisper of skin brushing against clothing; the shift of someone’s body by the creaking of furniture).
World Access doesn’t turn anyone away for lack of resources. But there are a couple of reasons why the organization hasn’t trained more students. The first is Kish’s general ethos about how blind children should be raised. “Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster,” he writes. “Pain is part of the price of freedom.” This attitude is not wildly popular, especially in a safety-first nation like the United States. Also, echolocation is not easy to master. Kish compares it with piano lessons — anyone can learn basics; very few will make it to Carnegie Hall. Only about 10 percent of the people who learn echolocation, he admits, find their abilities immediately enriched.
And then there is resistance from mainstream organizations. The National Federation of the Blind, the largest blind organization in America, does not endorse Kish’s work. “Let’s just say he’s unique,” says John Paré, the federation’s executive director for strategic initiatives, clearly straining to be polite. Paré believes that for most people, echolocation is not worth the tremendous effort required to grasp it. “We urge people to learn how to use a long white cane,” he says. According to Kish, a colleague once overheard members of the federation refer to him as Clicker Boy. “The blindness field is firmly based in tradition and dogma and is very slow to evolve,” says Kish. “It’s been traditionally dominated by sighted people who feel the need to tell blind people what to do.”
The same afternoon I first visit Kish, I also meet Brian Bushway and Juan Ruiz. Bushway became blind at age 14 due to a genetic condition known as optic nerve atrophy and was introduced to Kish soon after. Ruiz was born blind and was one of Kish’s first students; Kish began working with him while preparing his echolocation thesis. They both told me, individually, that Kish’s teaching transformed them, allowing them to feel at peace with their blindness and at one with the world.
Bushway and Ruiz are now in their late 20s and have become instructors with World Access. They often hang out at Kish’s home, forming a foul-mouthed and funny little gang. (Bushway: “You know why echolocators get all the girls? ’Cause they’re skilled with their tongues and comfortable in the dark.”) They’ve become so adept at echolocation that, in many ways, they have surpassed their teacher — at least in terms of fearlessness, sociability, and willingness to run into poles. They’re the next generation of echolocators, ready to take Kish’s work and see how far they can push it.
————————————————————————-—-
If you happen to be blind and want to live a bold, stereotype-smashing life, there will be blood. I witness this firsthand when I spend a day mountain biking with Bushway and Ruiz. (Kish, acceding to the realities of near–middle age, stays home.) We ride on a roller-coastery ridgetop trail in the Santa Ana Mountains, above the town of Mission Viejo. Clipped to the rear fork of each of our bikes is a plastic zip tie, attached so that the end flicks through our spokes, creating a constant snapping sound that lets Bushway and Ruiz know where the other bikes are. But to determine where the trail is going, and where the bushes and rocks and fence posts and trees are, the boys rely on echolocation.
Bushway is a fearless biker. He often flies down the dirt trail in aerodynamic form, hands off the brakes, clicking as fast and as loud as he can. “Your brain is on overload,” he says to me during a water break. “You feel like you can hear every bush, every tree. Your body is hyperaware.” I try and warn them when the trail presents a serious consequence, like a long drop-off on one side or a cactus jutting out. But mostly I’m just along for the ride. It’s difficult to believe, even though it’s happening right in front of me. It’s incredible.
And then, suddenly, it’s not. When I look behind me and see that Ruiz has drifted back, I stop and wait for him. I’m just standing there, silently, and before I realize what’s happening, he is bearing down on me. I shout, and he pulls the brakes, but it’s too late. He smashes into me and crushes his left hand between his handlebar and the back of my seat post. He falls off his bike and rolls about in pain, clutching his hand. There’s a trickle of blood, though nothing seems broken. I feel terrible, but Ruiz says it’s his fault — he should have echolocated my bike, even if I wasn’t moving. We finish the ride, with Ruiz using only one hand.
The next day I join Kish and Bushway as they teach Sebastian Mancipe, who is 15 and has been working with World Access for three years. When he started, he rarely came out of his bedroom. He had little interaction with the outside world. He developed infant glaucoma and was blind by age three months. His parents moved from Colombia to the United States to give him a chance at a better life. His mother, Viviana, saw a brief appearance by Kish on the Ripley’s Believe It or Not television show, and soon hired World Access to work with Sebastian.
He now rides a skateboard. He ice-skates. He’s popular at school, stocked with friends and a busy social life. I follow as Kish and Bushway stroll around Sebastian’s neighborhood, in a busy section of Burbank. He’d obviously mastered the echolocation basics — the pot lid, the pillow, general shapes. Kish and Bushway encourage him to push his skills further. “A tree,” says Kish, clicking a couple of times, “is like a bush on a pole.” They walk on. “A tree without a bush on top is probably a telephone pole.” They pass a parking lot. “A large object that starts out low at one end, rises in the middle, and drops off again at the other end — that’s a parked car.”
Back at home, I ask Sebastian’s mother about the impact World Access has had on her son. “It was an awakening,” she says. “He believes he can do anything. To see Sebastian as a normal child…” She can’t complete the sentence before the tears come.
—-
The longer the waiting list for his services grows, the more conflicted Kish feels. He knows what he’s doing is important. But what he really wants, as more people clamor for his time, as the frequent-flier miles add up, is to hand over the reins of World Access and run away from it all.
He’s essentially a loner. “My constitution,” he says, “is that of Grizzly Adams.” In 2003 he purchased a 12-foot by 12-foot cabin deep in the Angeles National Forest. It was built in 1916; he paid $10,000 for it. To get there he’d take a taxi to the end of the road and hike in. “My only company,” he wrote in his journal at the time, “is a small family of mice.” He explored the wilderness. “I taught myself how to negotiate tricky, winding trails with sharp switchbacks, how to cross rushing streams on slippery stones. I’ve gone for miles and days without meeting another soul.”
He was once asked by a colleague what he thought the biggest problem was with being blind. “My biggest barrier is people,” he answered. “Especially sighted people.” He has never once in his life had a girlfriend or, for that matter, a boyfriend. When I ask him, via e-mail, to explain why, his response is three words: “Lack of interest.”
Two tragedies, nearly 20 years apart, have bookended his adult life. The first was the death of his dog, a black lab named Whiska. This was in 1990. She was run over by a car while Kish was walking with her. Kish has always blamed himself for the accident. “I loved Whiska with an intensity that completely distorted my better judgment,” he wrote. “I spoiled her rotten and took over her job. She forgot to watch for traffic, because I’d always done that for her.” He had nightmares for a year after the accident. “The chain’s just dangling and there’s no dog. I’ll never forget that moment.” Not long after, he got another dog, but soon started traveling and gave him away. That was his last pet.
The second tragedy occurred in January 2007 when his cabin burned down. He’d had a wood-burning stove installed, and the wrong materials were used for the chimney. The fire was fast-moving and horrific — “my last memories of my cabin are the ominous crackle and rumble of advancing flames” — and Kish had no idea if it would engulf the entire canyon, incinerating him as well. The disaster haunts him; he keeps a chunk of melted glass from the cabin in his home in Long Beach. “A piece of my own heart has gone up in flames,” he wrote. He plans to one day return to the woods, perhaps permanently. “I find people,” he says, “to be incredibly draining.”
—-
Kish has an idea. Beyond the pot lid and the pillow, beyond the mission of World Access, there is something he has been quietly working on for more than a decade. If his wish is fulfilled — if someone else takes over World Access and he’s able to escape from life’s perpetual rush hour — it may prove to be his true legacy. What Kish envisions is the next leap in human echolocation. His idea is to become more like a bat.
Bats are the best. Some can fly in complete darkness, navigating around thousands of other bats while nabbing insects one millimeter wide. Bats have evolved, over millions of years, to possess the ideal mouth shape and the perfect ear rotation for echolocation. They can perceive high-frequency sound waves, beyond the range of human hearing — waves that are densely packed together, whose echoes give precise detail.
There is evidence that humans could be that good. Bats have tiny brains. Just the auditory cortex of a human brain is many times larger than the entire brain of a bat. This means that humans can likely process more complex auditory information than bats. What we’ll require, to make up for bats’ evolutionary head start, is a little artificial boost.
Actually, two boosts. We need a way to create batlike sound waves, and we need to be able to hear those waves. In pursuit of these goals, Kish has spent time in New Zealand with Leslie Kay, who worked on underwater sonar for the British Navy during the Cold War. For nearly 50 years, Kay tinkered with ideas for helping the blind to see with sound. He eventually introduced, after many weeks of consultation with Kish, a product called the K-Sonar, a flashlight-size machine that attaches to a blind person’s cane and emits ultrasonic pulses. The pulses are then digitally translated into tones humans can hear, through earphones. “Flowers actually sound soft,” says Kish. “Stones sound hard and crisp. It pretty much represents the physical environment as music.” The problem is range: The K-Sonar can detect a postage stamp from 15 feet, but not the side of a barn from 30 feet.
If money were no object, Kish believes that blind people could essentially mimic bats within five years. A next generation of K-Sonar, using the input from a global consortium of scientists that Kish has been corresponding with, should have a nearly limitless range. Our hearing, Kish says, can be increased tenfold through surgical augmentation — basically, inner-ear microphone implants. Combine the two and it’s possible that the blind will be able to take up tennis. Kish figures it would require $15 million to prove whether or not his idea is feasible. He fears he’ll never get the opportunity.
“It’s virtually impossible to gather funding for experimental devices for the blind,” he says. “The blind population is seen as a lost cause.” Kish’s patience is running thin. He is still reaching out to scientists and studying scholarly journals and pondering ways to conjure the money. But more and more these days, he finds himself daydreaming about rebuilding his cabin and devoting himself to playing music, to writing. Let the new crop of echolocators take over the research and the networking and the panhandling. So for the foreseeable future, at least, Kish will continue to click in his usual way. And the sighted world will continue to not notice.
This article originally appeared in the March 2011 issue of Men’s Journal.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

A Brief Biography of Jean Piaget

A Brief Biography of Jean Piaget

Text and images provided courtesy of the Archives Jean Piaget
Piaget
 
Jean Piaget
 
Jean Piaget
 
Jean Piaget
 
Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

[just a dot]Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel (Switzerland) on August 9, 1896. He died in Geneva on September 16, 1980. He was the oldest child of Arthur Piaget, professor of medieval literature at the University, and of Rebecca Jackson. At age 11, while he was a pupil at Neuchâtel Latin high school, he wrote a short notice on an albino sparrow. This short paper is generally considered as the start of a brilliant scientific career made of over sixty books and several hundred articles. [just a dot]His interest for mollusks was developed during his late adolescence to the point that he became a well-known malacologist by finishing school. He published many papers in the field that remained of interest for him all along his life.
[just a dot]After high school graduation, he studied natural sciences at the University of Neuchâtel where he obtained a Ph.D. During this period, he published two philosophical essays which he considered as "adolescence work" but were important for the general orientation of his thinking.
[just a dot]After a semester spent at the University of Zürich where he developed an interest for psychoanalysis, he left Switzerland for France. He spent one year working at the Ecole de la rue de la Grange-aux-Belles a boys' institution created by Alfred Binet and then directed by De Simon who had developed with Binet a test for the measurement of intelligence. There, he standardized Burt's test of intelligence and did his first experimental studies of the growing mind.
[just a dot]In 1921, he became director of studies at the J.-J. Rousseau Institute in Geneva at the request of Sir Ed. Claparède and P. Bovet.
[just a dot]In 1923, he and Valentine Châtenay were married. The couple had three children, Jacqueline, Lucienne and Laurent whose intellectual development from infancy to language was studied by Piaget.
[just a dot]Successively or simultaneously, Piaget occupied several chairs: psychology, sociology and history of science at Neuchâtel from 1925 to 1929; history of scientific thinking at Geneva from 1929 to 1939; the International Bureau of Education from 1929 to 1967; psychology and sociology at Lausanne from 1938 to 1951; sociology at Geneva from 1939 to 1952, then genetic and experimental psychology from 1940 to 1971. He was, reportedly, the only Swiss to be invited at the Sorbonne from 1952 to 1963. In 1955, he created and directed until his death the International Center for Genetic Epistemology.
[just a dot]His researches in developmental psychology and genetic epistemology had one unique goal: how does knowledge grow? His answer is that the growth of knowledge is a progressive construction of logically embedded structures superseding one another by a process of inclusion of lower less powerful logical means into higher and more powerful ones up to adulthood. Therefore, children's logic and modes of thinking are initially entirely different from those of adults.
[just a dot]Piaget's oeuvre is known all over the world and is still an inspiration in fields like psychology, sociology, education, epistemology, economics and law as witnessed in the annual catalogues of the Jean Piaget Archives. He was awarded numerous prizes and honorary degrees all over the world.

Abraham Harold Maslow

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e0/Abraham_Maslow.jpg/220px-Abraham_Maslow.jpg
Abraham Harold Maslow (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970) was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of self-actualization.[2] Maslow was a psychology professor at Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research and Columbia University. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms."[3]

Abraham Maslow Quotes

"For any man of good will, there is work to be done here, effective, virtuous, satisfying work which can give rich meaning to one's own life and to others"

Metamotivation

Maslow used the term metamotivation to describe self actualized people who are driven by innate forces beyond their basic needs, so that they may explore and reach their full human potential.[37]

B-values

In studying accounts of peak experiences, Maslow identified a manner of thought he called "Being-cognition" (or "B-cognition", which is holistic and accepting, as opposed to the evaluative "Deficiency-cognition" or "D-cognition") and values he called "Being-values".[38] He listed the B-values as:
  • Wholeness (unity; integration; tendency to one-ness; interconnectedness; simplicity; organization; structure; dichotomy-transcendence; order);
  • Perfection (necessity; just-right-ness; just-so-ness; inevitability; suitability; justice; completeness; "oughtness");
  • Completion (ending; finality; justice; "it's finished"; fulfillment; finis and telos; destiny; fate);
  • Justice (fairness; orderliness; lawfulness; "oughtness");
  • Aliveness (process; non-deadness; spontaneity; self-regulation; full-functioning);
  • Richness (differentiation, complexity; intricacy);
  • Simplicity (honesty; nakedness; essentiality; abstract, essential, skeletal structure);
  • Beauty (rightness; form; aliveness; simplicity; richness; wholeness; perfection; completion; uniqueness; honesty);
  • Goodness (rightness; desirability; oughtness; justice; benevolence; honesty);
  • Uniqueness (idiosyncrasy; individuality; non-comparability; novelty);
  • Effortlessness (ease; lack of strain, striving or difficulty; grace; perfect, beautiful functioning);
  • Playfulness (fun; joy; amusement; gaiety; humor; exuberance; effortlessness);
  • Truth (honesty; reality; nakedness; simplicity; richness; oughtness; beauty; pure, clean and unadulterated; completeness; essentiality).
  • Self-sufficiency (autonomy; independence; not-needing-other-than-itself-in-order-to-be-itself; self-determining; environment-transcendence; separateness; living by its own laws).

    Hierarchy of Needs

A visual aid was created to explain his theory, which was called the Hierarchy of Needs, is a pyramid depicting the levels of human needs, psychological and physical. When a human being ascends the steps of the pyramid he reaches self-actualization.
  • At the bottom of the pyramid are the “Basic needs or Physiological needs” of a human being: food, water, sleep and sex.
  • The next level is “Safety Needs: Security, Order, and Stability.” These two steps are important to the physical survival of the person. Once individuals have basic nutrition, shelter and safety, they attempt to accomplish more.
  • The third level of need is “Love and Belonging,” which are psychological needs; when individuals have taken care of themselves physically, they are ready to share themselves with others, such as with family and friends.
  • The fourth level is achieved when individuals feel comfortable with what they have accomplished. This is the “Esteem” level, the need to be competent and recognized, such as through status and level of success.
  • Then there is the “Cognitive” level, where individuals intellectually stimulate themselves and explore.
  • After that is the “Aesthetic” level, which is the need for harmony, order and beauty.[32]
  • At the top of the pyramid, “Need for Self-actualization,” occurs when individuals reach a state of harmony and understanding because they have achieved their full potential.[33] Once a person has reached the self-actualization state they focus on themselves and try to build their own image. They may look at this in terms of feelings such as self-confidence or by accomplishing a set goal.[34]
The first four levels are known as 'Deficit needs' or 'D-needs'. This means that if you don't have enough of one of those 4 needs, you'll have the feeling to get it. But when you do get them then you feel content. These needs alone are not motivating.[35]
Maslow wrote that there are certain conditions that must be fulfilled in order for the basic needs to be satisfied. For example, freedom of speech, freedom to express oneself, and freedom to seek new information[36] are a few of the prerequisites. Any blockages of these freedoms could prevent the satisfaction of the basic needs.
File:Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.svg

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Linus Carl Pauling





Linus Carl Pauling (February 28, 1901 – August 19, 1994)[1] was an American chemistbiochemistpeace activist, author, and educator. He was one of the most influential chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists of the 20th century.[2][3][4] Pauling was one of the founders of the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology.
Pauling is the only person to be awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, one of only four individuals to have won more than one (Marie CurieJohn Bardeen and Frederick Sanger are the others) and one of only two people awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields (the Chemistry and Peace prizes), the other being Marie Curie (the Chemistry and Physics prizes). 

VITAMIN C AND CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE


VITAMIN C AND CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASEA Personal Viewpoint by Alan Spencer and Andrew W. Saul

(OMNS, June 22, 2010) Linus Pauling was aware that studies of the animal kingdom showed that most animals have the ability to manufacture vitamin C in their bodies. Humans cannot. Furthermore, on average, mammals make 5,400mg daily when adjusted for body weight, and make more (often considerably more) when under stress or ill. This is about 100 times as much as the 50mg we get from a typical modern diet. It prompts the question, why do animals make so much vitamin C, and what purpose does it serve in the body.
A small number of animals which are known to share our inability to make vitamin C include the apes, the guinea pig, the fruit bat, and some birds, all of which will normally get a lot of vitamin C from their food. If you deprive a guinea pig of vitamin C it soon develops a form of cardiovascular disease (damage to its arteries showing within a few weeks). Similarly, studies of genetically modified mice have shown that if you switch off the gene that enables a mouse to produce vitamin C it will also soon show signs of heart disease. Re-introduction of a high vitamin C diet enables the damage to be reversed. While heart disease is rare in the animal kingdom, it is becoming a problem for apes in zoos where their diets are perhaps not as rich in vitamin C as when they are in the wild.
Collagen
A very important function of vitamin C in the body is its role in the production of collagen. Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body, and forms into fibres which are stronger than iron wire of comparable size. These fibres provide strength and stability to all body tissues, including the arteries. Vitamin C is absolutely essential for the production and repair of collagen, and is destroyed during the process, so a regular supply of vitamin C is necessary to maintain the strength of body tissues. Severe deficiency of vitamin C causes the total breakdown of body tissue witnessed in scurvy. Linus Pauling believed that whilst humans normally obtain sufficient vitamin C to prevent full-blown scurvy, we do not consume enough to maintain the strength of the walls of the arteries. He suggested that of all the structural tissues in the body, the walls of the arteries around the heart are subject to the greatest continual stress. Every time the heart beats the arteries are flattened and stretched, and this has been likened to standing on a garden hose thousands of times a day. Many tiny cracks and lesions develop and the artery walls become inflamed.
Dr. Pauling believed that in the presence of adequate supplies of vitamin C this damage can be readily repaired and heart disease is avoided. However, in the absence of adequate levels of vitamin C, the body attempts to repair the arteries using alternative materials: cholesterol and other fatty substances, which attach to the artery wall. (1-8)
Cholesterol and Lipoprotein (a), Lp(a)
The most abundant amino acids (protein building blocks) in collagen are lysine and proline, and when collagen strands are damaged lysine and proline become exposed. A special kind of cholesterol, lipoprotein(a), is attracted to lysine and proline and will attach itself to the exposed damaged collagen strands. It is an attempt by the body to repair damage to the collagen of the artery walls in the absence of adequate levels of vitamin C. Unfortunately the repair is not ideal and over many years repeated deposits can cause the artery to become narrow and inflamed. Heart attack or stroke is likely to follow (usually caused by a clot forming at the site of the narrowed artery, or by a piece of plaque breaking off and blocking a smaller vessel downstream). When vitamin C levels are low, the body manufactures more cholesterol, especially Lp(a). Conversely, when vitamin C levels are high the body makes less cholesterol.
If high blood cholesterol were the primary cause of heart disease, all bears and other hibernating animals would have become extinct long ago. They naturally have high cholesterol levels. One reason bears are still with us is simple: they produce large amounts of vitamin C in their bodies, which stabilises the artery walls, and there is therefore no tendency to develop cholesterol deposits or plaque.
Keeping healthy
The low levels of vitamin C that are available through diet are inadequate to prevent many people developing arterial plaques, and over time this may result in cardiovascular disease. Post mortem examinations showed that 77% of young American soldiers killed in the Korean war (average age 22) already had well-advanced atherosclerosis (heart disease), and post mortem studies from the Vietnam war gave similar results. Heart disease is not just a disease of the elderly, although it does not usually become life threatening until later in life.
How can we prevent it? Pauling believed that once we start taking high levels of vitamin C, the disease process is halted, or at least slowed, as Lp(a) cholesterol is no longer needed as a repair material. He also believed that when we take adequate levels of vitamin C, existing arterial plaques may start to be removed from the arteries. He found that the removal of plaques is more rapid if the amino acid lysine is taken along with vitamin C. Lysine appears to attach to the Lp(a) in existing plaque deposits and helps to loosen them. Linus Pauling recommended at least 3000mg of vitamin C per day as a preventive dose, and significantly higher levels of both vitamin C and lysine for the treatment of existing heart disease. Dosage is a key factor: low doses are ineffective.
Retention in the body
Another important point is that a single dose of vitamin C is not retained in the body for very long. This fact has been used for a long time by those who do not support the use of high doses of vitamin C as evidence that the body does not need and cannot use large doses. After a single large dose of vitamin C, the blood level quite soon returns to a low level. A lot is excreted, the high blood level only remaining for a few hours.
The key factor here is that the body is not designed to function with just a single large dose of vitamin C once a day. Animals are able to manufacture vitamin C in their bodies and do so continuously throughout the day. They have an enzyme which converts glucose to vitamin C, and each day they produce on the order of a hundred times more vitamin C than we are able to get from even a good diet. When animals are ill they manufacture even more, perhaps thousands of times more than we can get from our diet.
How much should we take?
For people who are essentially fit and well, the Vitamin C Foundation recommends perhaps 3,000mg of vitamin C per day, taken in divided doses as 500mg every four hours, as a protection against the development of heart disease. The problem with even this protective dose is that taking a tablet every four hours is not something that many people would want to adopt as part of their daily routine. But there is good evidence to suggest that this level of intake will help maintain the strength of the arteries and prevent the build up of cholesterol plaques. If everybody were to do this, perhaps heart disease would become a largely a thing of the past (as might many other chronic diseases).
When treating illness, "bowel tolerance" is the indicator of dosage level that should be used. This means taking just under the level of vitamin C (in divided doses) that results in loose stools. Everyone is different. Note that while a few 1,000mg doses a day might make you loose when you are fit and well, your "bowel tolerance" might increase to ten or even a hundred times this when very ill. So, for illness, the levels suggested by the Vitamin C Foundation are 6,000mg to 18,000mg of vitamin C per day (or up to bowel tolerance) plus 2,000mg to 6,000mg of lysine. These vitamin C levels may seem high, but are perhaps not particularly large when compared with levels seen in the animal kingdom. A substantial amount of lysine may be obtained from diet. For example, one may obtain 3,000 to 4,000 milligrams of lysine from about can and a half of beans. Supplementation reduces the need to consume that much.
Controversy
"Even though some physicians had observed forty or fifty years ago that amounts of vitamin C a hundred to a thousand times larger (than the RDA) have value in controlling various diseases, the medical profession and most scientists ignored this evidence." (Linus Pauling, How to Live Longer and Feel Better)
In medical circles, Pauling's recommendations remain controversial. However, his theory seems reasonable, and the implications are so significant that some major scientific trials should have been undertaken to assess it. This has not happened. Supporters of high-dose vitamin C have had their applications for research funding denied repeatedly, and have had to be content with carrying out small scale research projects and case studies. These have been very positive. Over the past fifteen years, Pauling therapy advocates have received hundreds of reports from heart patients who have self administered the therapy. It is reported that these people typically recover within 30 days, and the majority experience significant relief within as little as a week or two. In 1994, Linus Pauling wrote, "I think we can get almost complete control of cardiovascular disease, heart attacks and strokes by the proper use of vitamin C and lysine. It can prevent cardiovascular disease and even cure it. If you are at risk of heart disease, or if there is a history of heart disease in your family, if your father or other members of the family died of a heart attack or stroke or whatever, or if you have a mild heart attack yourself, then you had better be taking vitamin C and lysine."

References:
 (1) Rath M, Pauling L. Immunological evidence for the accumulation of lipoprotein(a) in the atherosclerotic lesion of the hypoascorbemic guinea pig. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1990 Dec;87(23):9388-90. PMID: 2147514. Free full text download: http://www.pnas.org/content/87/23/9388.full.pdf
(2) Rath M, Pauling L. Hypothesis: lipoprotein(a) is a surrogate for ascorbate. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1990 Aug;87(16):6204-7. [Erratum in: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 1991 Dec 5;88(24):11588.] PMID: 2143582. Free full text download: http://www.pnas.org/content/87/16/6204.full.pdf
(3) Rath M, Pauling L. Solution To the Puzzle of Human Cardiovascular Disease: Its Primary Cause Is Ascorbate Deficiency Leading to the Deposition of Lipoprotein(a) and Fibrinogen/Fibrin in the Vascular Wall. J Orthomolecular Med, Vol 6, 3&4th Quarters, 1991, p 125. Free full text download:http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/1991/pdf/1991-v06n03&04-p125.pdf
(4) Pauling L, Rath M. An Orthomolecular Theory of Human Health and Disease. J Orthomolecular Med, Vol 6, 3&4th Quarters, 1991, p 135. Free full text download:http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/1991/pdf/1991-v06n03&04-p135.pdf
(5) Rath M, Pauling L. Apoprotein(a) Is An Adhesive Protein. J Orthomolecular Med, Vol 6, 3&4th Quarters, 1991, p 139. Free full text download: http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/1991/pdf/1991-v06n03&04-p139.pdf
(6) Rath M, Pauling L. Case Report: Lysine/Ascorbate Related Amelioration of Angina Pectoris. J Orthomolecular Med, Vol 6, 3&4th Quarters, 1991, p 144. Free full text download:http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/1991/pdf/1991-v06n03&04-p144.pdf
(7) Rath M, Pauling L. A Unified theory of Human Cardiovascular Disease Leading the Way To the Abolition of This Diseases As A Cause for Human Mortality. J Orthomolecular Med, Vol 7, First Quarter 1992, p 5. Free full text download: http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/1992/pdf/1992-v07n01-p005.pdf
(8) Rath M, Pauling L. Plasmin-induced Proteolysis and the Role of Apoprotein(a), Lysine and Synthetic Lysine Analogs. J Orthomolecular Med, Vol 7, First Quarter 1992, p 17. Free full text download:http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/1992/pdf/1992-v07n01-p017.pdf
For More Information:
Fonorow O. Practicing Medicine Without a License? The Story of the Linus Pauling Therapy for Heart Disease. 2008. Lulu.com. ISBN-10: 1435712935; ISBN-13: 978-1435712935. Reviewed in J Orthomolecular Med, 2009. Vol 24, No 1, p 51-5.
Hickey S and Roberts H. Ascorbate: The Science of Vitamin C. 2004. ISBN-10: 1411607244; ISBN-13: 978-1411607248. Lulu.com. This book contains 575 references, and is reviewed athttp://www.doctoryourself.com/ascorbate.html
Hickey S, Saul AW. Vitamin C: The Real Story. Laguna Beach, CA: Basic Health Publications, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-59120-223-3. This book contains 387 references, and is reviewed athttp://www.doctoryourself.com/realstory.html
Levy TE. Stop America's #1 Killer: Reversible vitamin deficiency found to be the origin of all coronary heart disease. 2006. ISBN-10: 0977952002; ISBN-13: 978-0977952007. (Dr. Levy is a board-certified cardiologist.) Reviewed in J Orthomolecular Med, 2006. Vol 21, No 3, p 177-178. This book contains 60 pages of references. To download the review: http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/2006/pdf/2006-v21n03-p175.pdf
Pauling L. How to Live Longer and Feel Better (Revised edition). Oregon State University Press, 2006. ISBN-10: 0870710966; ISBN-13: 978-0870710964. Reviewed in J Orthomolecular Med, 2006. Vol 21, No 3, p 175-177. To download the review: http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/2006/pdf/2006-v21n03-p175.pdf
On the Web:
The Vitamin C Foundation http://www.vitamincfoundation.org
AscorbateWeb, a historical compendium of 20th-Century medical and scientific literature demonstrating the efficacy of vitamin C. http://www.seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/
Putting the "C" in Cure: Quantity and frequency are the keys to ascorbate therapy.http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v05n11.shtml
RDA for Vitamin C is 10% of USDA Standard for Guinea Pigs.http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v06n08.shtml

Nutritional Medicine is Orthomolecular Medicine
Orthomolecular medicine uses safe, effective nutritional therapy to fight illness. For more information:http://www.orthomolecular.org
The peer-reviewed Orthomolecular Medicine News Service is a non-profit and non-commercial informational resource.

Editorial Review Board:
Ralph K. Campbell, M.D. (USA)
Carolyn Dean, M.D., N.D. (Canada)
Damien Downing, M.D. (United Kingdom)
Michael Ellis, M.D. (Australia)
Michael Gonzalez, D.Sc., Ph.D. (Puerto Rico)
Steve Hickey, Ph.D. (United Kingdom)
James A. Jackson, Ph.D. (USA)
Bo H. Jonsson, M.D., Ph.D. (Sweden)
Thomas Levy, M.D., J.D. (USA)
Jorge R. Miranda-Massari, Pharm.D. (Puerto Rico)
Erik Paterson, M.D. (Canada)
Gert E. Shuitemaker, Ph.D. (Netherlands)
Andrew W. Saul, Ph.D. (USA), Editor and contact person. Email: omns@orthomolecular.org

Lemon, raw, without peel : nutrition Facts

Lemon, raw, without peel
Nutritional value per 100 g (3.5 oz)
Energy121 kJ (29 kcal)
Carbohydrates9.32 g
Sugars2.50 g
Dietary fiber2.8 g
Fat0.30 g
Protein1.10 g
Thiamine (vit. B1)0.040 mg (3%)
Riboflavin (vit. B2)0.020 mg (2%)
Niacin (vit. B3)0.100 mg (1%)
Pantothenic acid (B5)0.190 mg (4%)
Vitamin B60.080 mg (6%)
Folate (vit. B9)11 μg (3%)
Vitamin C53.0 mg (64%)
Calcium26 mg (3%)
Iron0.60 mg (5%)
Magnesium8 mg (2%)
Phosphorus16 mg (2%)
Potassium138 mg (3%)
Zinc0.06 mg (1%)
Percentages are relative to
US recommendations for adults.
Source: USDA Nutrient Database

A bee on a Meyer lemon flower