Breakthroughs Today

There is one good way ensure that eating sweet orange will not cause stomach hyperacidity. And there is one reason more...   ONLY recently did I learn that my mother had been wondering why each time she saw me eating sweet oranges, I ate the whole segment—juice and all—instead of extracting just the juice alone and throwing away the pulp with the peel.   The reason why I do that is a fruit of observation (pun intended). I noticed that the flesh is somewhat alkaline in the presence of its bitter taste, compared to the acidic (sharp) taste of the juice. While of better composition than synthetic juice, fresh raw juice can still stimulate unwanted reactions in the stomach of those who are sensitive to it. And for many years I have avoided eating sweet oranges for that reason. Of course that’s before I noticed the alkaline character of the orange flesh.   Recently I read three studies from early 2000s (2004, 2005 and 2007) revealing that there is more to eating citrus flesh

ONE of the few important sideshows in the final days of the Lord before His Passion was the death of Judas Iscariot. He was a man who had chosen life when he followed the Master and later chose a tragic way of escaping the demands of his conscience.   Science, including health science, however, has no definition of the term “conscience.” Psychoanalysis equates it with the superego, the evaluator of the ego (segment of personality that reality dominates) against an ideal standard.   Mental health sciences do have an equivalent of the phrase: “disturbed conscience.”   And that is guilt, a remorseful awareness of having done something wrong, or violated a moral standard. Psychoanalysis describes it as a feeling of tension between the ego and the superego. A healthy dose of guilt is good. It... [ READ MORE ] This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 17 April 2013.

Can eating less make you fatter? Find out how it can.   LEWIS Carroll (1832-1898) reflected in his poem Through the Looking Glass the common presumption on how obesity develops in a person over eating. The concept is as simple as basic mathematics: the more you eat, the more you get fat.   Thus, meal skipping becomes a logical way to go. Since those in active work cannot afford a full day skip, workers often skip breakfast more commonly than lunch or supper.   A recent study that Monika Arora of Health Related Information Dissemination Amongst Youth and colleagues conducted in New Delhi, India, seemed to suggest that the opposite is true. The results published in BMC Public Health (October 2012) reported that more children who regularly skip breakfast get more obese (22.9 percent) than those who breakfast daily (14.6 percent) or only sometimes (15.2 percent). And apparently these were significant only among boys than among girls. Such results seem to contradict what app

  Even a gift can get overused to its destruction.   BIBLICAL wisdom contends that any gift unused will cease to be. Clinical experience, however, observed that frequently used gifts, while they may not disappear, can be so strained that these will eventually become unusable. In fact, these can be plagued with disease of overuse, so that further use of it can be dangerous to the person’s health.   This observation has particular relevance among those who use their voice as their work instruments: singers, fitness club instructors, salespeople, telemarketing operators, receptionists, actors, teachers and more.   A more recent study on 4,495 primary and secondary school teachers in Salvador City in Brazil confirmed earlier studies that frequent use of their voice in line with their chosen professional work can lead to diseases in the vocal folds. These voice disorders usually persist (unless treated) at least 15 days to years after diagnoses, and include such conditi

The application of shellac is wide-ranging than most people think it is. And one of those applications is as glaze on fruits and vegetables sold in your fruit stands and grocery stores.   “IT'S easy for Americans,” says former US Sen. Christopher Dodd, “to forget that the food they eat doesn’t magically appear on a supermarket shelf.” That may also be true for Filipinos.   While the use of shellac in pharmaceutical products may have ebbed in the last few decades, its use in food, particularly as a protective coating for fruits and vegetables, has not. Its use has the specific advantage of extending shelf life, which is critical in ensuring that they are sold before they start to get overripe.   The previous article (“Glaze of the lac bug”) noted that shellac is a natural form of plastic. On apples, for example, this “wax” coating increases the resistance of the skin from gaseous diffusion, particularly oxygen, which speeds up the ripening process.   It was mentio

AMERICAN poet William Carlos Williams wrote: “Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.”   Many Filipinos may not know how a snow glaze looks like; but one common glaze that Filipinos are familiar with can be seen in furniture. And we call that glaze “shellac.”   What most Filipinos, even those who have actually seen a snow glaze, may not know is this: the glaze of shellac has been fairly used in pharmaceutical products. The flakes come from the resin that the female Laccifer bug (Kerria lacca or just lac) secrete on trees in the forests of India, Thailand and Burma (now Mynmar). It takes about 100,000 lac bugs to make 500 grams of shellac flakes.   Shellac is a natural bioadhesive, chemically similar to the synthetic polymers we call “plastic.” In a sense, shellac is a natural form of plastic. And it is used as a glazing agent on tablets and capsules. It contains denatured alcohol, which dissolves the 20-51 percent shellac compo

A lot of advancements in diagnostic technology have visited our century. These new means of diagnoses have brought hope particularly to poor communities where neglected tropical diseases run amok, ignored both by the health authorities tasked by the people to protect them and the profit-oriented pharmaceuticals whose manufacturing capabilities generation of effective drugs against these disease are highly dependent. Neurocystercosis is merely one of these many neglected diseases.   WHAT happened to Cebu City Traffic Operations Management chief Sylvan “Jack” Jakosalem can be one of those few things in our lives that is a choice away, and the impact changes its direction completely.   Neurocystercosis (NCC), an infection of the central nervous system (CNS), which arises from unwittingly ingesting uncooked food that is contaminated with the larvae of tapeworm Taenia solium, can cause irreparable damage to the CNS part involved. The CNS is composed of the brain, spinal cord, and