February, 2017 - Bettina Network's Blog

Archive for February, 2017

Walnut Oil on Wood Floors

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2017

I have just finished following your instructions and redoing my wood floors.

I am exhausted.  It was an incredible job, but worth every minute because the floors are beautiful.

Having used the OOOO Steel Wool and Spectrum Walnut Oil – tried for the best, no cheap oil on my floors –  and even taking the most expensive oil route it cost less than what I spent on these floors the last time I cleaned and waxed them.

I went over the floor with a damp rag to get off the top dust.  Then, I used the OOOO steel wool, pouring walnut oil on the floor and rubbing it in with the steel wool until all of the dirt and everything else was up.  I then wiped that up with old towels (which I threw away when finished, although my neighbor is trying the same thing and she washed her old towels after using them).  I then poured more Walnut Oil on the floor and wiped it up with a clean towel – and let the floor dry.

My neighbor tried to cut corners and didn’t do this last pouring on of oil and wiping it up with a clean towel so she had a bit of a mess on her hands, because her floor dried sticky and kind of gooey so she had to start over again.  I think that probably had to do with the steel particles from the steel wool still on the floor.

I did not put the furniture and rugs back, but let the floor sit overnight.  The next day, my floor was sort of dry, but still with parts looking wet from the oil so I had to re-wipe the floor with a clean towel.   I did not use more oil, the floor just looked a bit wet and in need of something, so another wiping with a dry, clean towel to help the oil either come up or soak into the floor – and 2 days later the floor is fabulous.  The down side was having to wait two days for the floor to dry – meaning, I could only do one room at a time.  That was fine because the smell from the oil and essential oil of gardenias will be in the house forever as I go from room to room cleaning my floors.  I am exhausted so I won’t try another room for a month or two anyway.

I should note here that my neighbor did it your way by doing a small area of the room at a time.  Which means, when she messed up with the oil and it was sticky she didn’t have her entire room to redo.  She moved the furniture and rugs from only a part of the room and moved the rest of the furniture over while the floor dried.  She was also not exhausted when she finished.  It was just part of her general cleaning – which she does without fail from 10-12 daily five days a week.  I wait for the woman who cleans for me to do all of that work – but she drew the line at kneeling on the floor to do this oiling.

My neighbor is continuing a small part of a room at a time using the same walnut oil to clean and oil her furniture in that part of the room.  I don’t have the methodology and discipline to do that.  I want it all done at once.  But then her house is a lot cleaner than mine.  Don’t know how she does it, but her house is immaculate anytime of the day or night you go over there.  Mine – not so much.  I have to clean before visitors come.  Maybe one day.  And with this new way of cleaning and oiling the floors – I suspect that kind of discipline will come because my biggie was not wanting to touch or be around the normal kind of cleaning stuff that has to be bad for your health.  I was sure they made my family sick with respiratory ailments.  Could be wrong, but the mind works in strange ways.  Even being exhausted after I finished the floor in one room, I was not ‘I’ll never so this again kind of exhausted.’  The smell and feel of the entire house changed with just this one room having its floor oiled and it was exhilarating.

My question – how to I keep these floor looking good?  They look great now, but things do get dusty and dirty over time.  I can’t go through this effort many times a year.  What do you suggest?

Your original suggestion was that this happen once a year.  What do I do in the meantime?

Thanks,

By the way – I love the smell of gardenia’s so I bought essential oil of gardenia and poured a bit into the Walnut Oil bottle when I opened it and my house smells unbelievable.  You were right about the benefit of adding essential oil to the Walnut Oil.  What I especially liked was that even though it took a lot of effort crawling around on hands and knees to do this cleaning because I couldn’t think of any other way to use the OOOO steel wool and even though it took all of the wiping up and around with old towels, the smell and off gases of what I normally used on my floors is not present.  That alone was worth the effort.  I can breathe!

I didn’t look into what was in the cleaners and waxes I used on my floors and couldn’t believe I have been using something with a kerosene base.  Looking around at the stores, most of the products sold – in the cleaning and waxing line are all mostly kerosene based.  This is what I have been exposing my family to all these years.  I knew the smell was foul – I just got used to it and waited for the smells to dissipate.  Now, I don’t want these smells to dissipate, I want to enjoy the gardenia and walnut smell as long as possible.

What I really love is the way my hands looked and felt after I finished.  I didn’t have to wear rubber gloves because Walnut Oil is good for the skin.  I hadn’t thought of that as a side benefit, but I love it.

Another BTW – the woman who cleans for me has been converted.  Her mother spent her adult life cleaning for others and is now in a wheel chair.  They blame the products her mother used and she, unbeknownst to me, was looking around for something else.  After watching me and standing in the room with its new feel and smell, she decided it was better to clean the floor on hands and knees than to use what we had been using – so she has taken over the floor cleaning and oiling job – and thank goodness.  Not having to wear rubber gloves and seeing my wrinkled hands smooth out after this bit of hard work instead of drying out and feeling awful even with the rubber gloves, convinced her.

Anxiously awaiting your response!

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to:

bettina-network@comcast.net

Makeup? – Never

Saturday, February 11th, 2017

I love best those ‘girlie’ breakfast conversations where everything is laid bare.  Free of all the things one does in the mornings to become the person you want to be – a reflection of all those make-up ads which show you women who are unreachable because their pictures have been blown, photo-shopped, with bumps and lumps removed and skin retouched.

Amazingly, this conversation included a stray male.  What he was doing in the middle of this conversation is unfathomable, but there he was, quite excited to be included in what he thought was going to be women revealing their innermost secrets – and to him.  Normally, he would be expected to smile politely and leave as soon as he could get away without being rude.  This guy loved every minute.

Color took center stage.

I thought I understood what part color played in this makeup business, but this breakfast ‘seminar’ changed that understanding completely.

Even though they were staying at a Bettina Network Hedge School, which is notorious for organic everything – no chemicals in the mix – no artificiality in anything – every woman at the table had on makeup.  All store bought and kept in a makeup case carried wherever they travelled.

What they wanted was re-enforcement that their makeup – as they applied it – looked natural and they did not look “made-up.  For me, that was astounding.  Raised in a family where the last thing in the world you wanted to do was apply make-up to your face and wind up looking like Godzilla’s wife full of pasty stuff on top of even more pasty looking stuff and a face where one could not smile without that makeup breaking into lines and cracking, we were very far apart.  I don’t think I have worn lipstick more than two or three times in life and I am now quite old.  So, there we were with stereotypes, but at two ends of the spectrum, very far apart.  As it turns out I was into as much make-up as everyone else at the table, only a different kind and applied at different times.

If you notice these things – as you age, your skin changes.  If you have light brown skin your face becomes a rather dull looking white with eyebrows that turn white, no matter their natural color when you were young, and that whitish dull skin does you no good.  I was very proud of my light brown skin.  I felt I looked healthier than most because of it.  I certainly didn’t have that so-called “white” skin which dried out and became very wrinkly as one aged, nor did I have that darker brown skin which sagged from maintaining its natural oils even as one grew older.  And here I was, about to reveal that my beautiful light brown skin, with its touch of a pinkish/red/orange color was not entirely natural, no matter how it looked.

When you are young, your face is blotchy with break-outs all over and what you long for is that beautiful even-toned unachievable skin that is advertised in almost every cosmetic ad from the beginning of creation.

The women brought their make-up to the table and we examined it all very closely.  Amazingly, even the expensive stuff looked pretty similar to the stuff that came from CVS, Walgreens, and other such places.  Even more amazing was the ingredients – we could not pronounce any of them when ingredients were on the labels.  We could only conjecture what was in those bottles and jars which did not reveal their ingredients.  We didn’t find any ingredients we knew and when we did they were in minuscule amounts.

When these different ingredients were put on your face, we couldn’t detect differences between the stuff that cost a fortune and the stuff that came from the pharmacy stores.  Thy all seemed to give the same look.  The difference in the make-up on the table was the amount of disposable income different women at the table had to be able to spend on cosmetics.  One spent a couple hundred dollars a month and we gasped, in awe.

My ‘cosmetics’ that morning were Grapeseed Oil, AloeVera Gel and Beta Carotene tablets in oil in a capsule – all organic.  I had a lot more, but I wasn’t going to reveal all in one morning and I certainly was not going to reveal anything bringing me close to a couple hundred dollars spent in one month.  If I spent that kind of money on my face I would be super-thin, because I wouldn’t have money left to spend on food.

The first thing that left the table was the stuff used to take make-up off at night.  With all it was supposed to do, my grape seed oil did better.  The next thing out were the ‘astringents’.  My Aloe Vera Gel was better suited, did not have chemicals or preservatives of any kind, although it did need to be kept in the refrigerator and used quickly.  Not only was it a good astringent, but it also tightened into a mask.

The Bettina Beauty treatment for the face is a Bettina Blog written some time long past, but it is still among the Bettina Network Blogs so I won’t go over it here, but it is necessary to do on a two to three times a week basis to keep your face from sagging, crinkling, becoming pasty white and wrinkly and more. This mornings beauty regimen helps, but does need to be supplemented with other organic treatments.

That Bettina Network Beauty regimen makes all the rest possible.

After we put on the Aloe Vera Gel, we had a few minutes conversation about what it does, allowing it to tighten into a mask.  We then rinsed it off with the requisite ten splashes of water and moved on to the Beta Carotene tablets.

I clipped one to put on my face after it was rinsed of its Aloe Vera Gel and there were gasps all around.  I looked like something out of a cowboy and Indian movie and I was clearly the Indian – very red of skin and  oily of face with the Beta Carotene oil going into my hairline – deliberately.

I should say here that my hairline was showing the grey line around my face where the rest of my hair was beautifully colored, but the hairline was growing in and it was a mixed grey and black, but mostly grey.  My eyebrows were also a mixed grey and black, giving me a rather older look, so they took received an extra rubbing into them of the Beta Carotene capsule.

The women couldn’t wait to get to their bathrooms to put on their department store makeup to go out for the day.  I cleared the dining room and was left with my red face, dirty dishes and the one male person at the table.  He helped me with the dishes, but not before he used the beta carotene on his face.  Looking at him, I saw just how ridiculous I looked, but he was confident this was going to solve his problem.  He wanted instructions for the day on how to handle this, but I had none.  I just go about my day.  Rinse my face with ten splashed each rinse whenever I use the bathroom for other purposes.  So he left declaring he would do the same.

The next morning we all appeared at breakfast.  The women without makeup and their makeup on the table, as we agreed to the morning before.  Me and the one male with no makeup bottles or jars in front of us because we didn’t have any to put there.  And who do you think looked stunning?  The two of us did.  By then, the red had been absorbed into the skin and the constant rinses after having gone to the bathroom several times helped remove the excess Beta Carotene color.  Our skin glowed.

No grey around the face from hair growing out and our eye brows were a beautiful mixed color of dark, medium and lighter brownish red.  And you know, the most delicate and dangerous thing you can do when having your hair dyed or dying it yourself, is trying to match your eyebrow color.  That dye will put your eyes out if it goes to the wrong place and will probably also fool with your ability to see even if it is only absorbed a bit through the skin – which has to be absorbed through a bit of your eyelid to make the eyebrows look great.

I looked 20 years younger – with a face that looked slightly flushed, like younger skin looks when you are excited and the rest a beautiful even color.  The whitish grey look was gone and in its place a bronze look which almost approximated a day in the sun.  I looked very sun-tanned and almost as if I was blushing.  He looked the same.

Our one male person had been concerned about his eyebrows and mustache turning grey, but didn’t know what to do about it – and this was a middle to upper level business executive who felt he needed to keep a fairly young appearance to keep his job.

The women were flabbergasted because the only thing we did that morning was to rinse our faces with the ten splashes of warm water.  I followed my splashes of warm water with ten splashes of cold water just to look a bit more flushed – only that didn’t last.  The Beta Carotene created color lasts about two to three days.  On some people it will last a week through many splashed of water.  No soap, however.  We never use soap, ever, at all.

The women left their make-up on the table and used the beta-carotene capsules on their faces.  I don’t know how they faced the day because it takes, generally, putting it on overnight and letting it absorb with a morning rinse before starting out for the day – or – putting it on in the morning and leaving it on all day with several splashes of water rinses throughout the day for the color to become ideal.  It will then last two or three days before you need to reapply the beta carotene, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone.  They thought the results were good enough to make due and get together a new lifestyle routine to accommodate this new make-up regimen.  I would like to have followed their red faces around with a camera as they went about their day, but the dirty dishes were calling.

Whatever they did, the next morning they were all beautiful and ecstatic.  One mentioned the difference in cost between what she used and one capsule of beta-carotene, but I had to remind her that the cost added up to more than that because she did need to do constant upkeep with products like organic Aloe Vera gel, all of the oils we talked about and the Bettina Beauty regimen with Vitamin C, D, etc.  That didn’t matter to her.  Those oils last a couple months and so does the rest of what is needed so she was off to the organic store to supply her make-up case with everything new.

We all wondered how she would get through airport security.  They are accustomed to women’s make-up cases, but not those with oils and organic ingredients which are normally thought of as food. We imagined her being put into detention for days while airport security checked and re-checked her ‘new’ makeup for some new kind of terrorist plot.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to:

bettina-network@comcast.net

Weight Control and Good Health for a Lifetime!

Wednesday, February 1st, 2017

Look around – take a walk – go shopping – to the theatre – symphony – sports event and you will see many, many overweight people.

How on earth did this happen!  My mother’s generation didn’t share this overweightness.  Many in my generation have gaining weight and battling that weight gain as a constant.  In my children’s generation they are taller and heavier except those who border on bulimia or some other eating disorder.  What has happened to all of us? Something radical on this earth and in our environment has changed.

Have you noticed that diet food – diet drinks – exercise and body control programs – an entire industry has grown up and is thriving on your willingness to work hard and sweat even harder while that industry earns substantial amounts of money for either the foods they want to sell you to control your weight or their weight control ideas or body manipulations to feed your dream of  looking as though you are 15 years old again!

It is all a smoke screen!  A way to keep you from realizing the pit you have fallen into and can’t get out. The truth that you need to set you free is obscured and in your very distant past generations, mostly obscured from you by the need to maintain and increase the profit of this new “Health and Fitness Industry”.  That may be what it is called by many, but its goals are anything but.

Most of what you need is not in that Health and Fitness Industry, but in the secrets your past generations took to the grave.  The marketing, with which you were raised,  blinded you so thoroughly you didn’t want to hear what your ancestors had to say nor did you want to carry forward their lifestyles.  You particularly looked down on the knowledge and experience they gained from their lifestyles because you found more relevant the marketing and advertising dreamed up by those probably even younger than you are who were/are busy pumping out pipe dreams to maintain their jobs.

They were trained by experts at creating a new culture and a new lifestyle based on your giving them your money and potential possessions and they giving you the way to a miserable life – whether it be long or short – but profitable to their companies.   Is this what you bought and live by today?

Now, however, everyone around you seems to be calling you back to this glorious past where you will find redemption, salvation, a better life than we have today and at the same time those same people, industries and their marketing/advertising is creating a trap for you so you don’t even know what past you are being called to learn from and buy into.  A mythical, glorious past which actually never existed except in the movies and a scattering of novels.  What used to be sold on the ‘silver screen’ is now being sold as a distorted, pumped up on drugs, reality show which you are being told was the great, glorious past to reach back to, recreate and nirvana will arrive.

They hold out the promise of satisfaction, satiety,  for this something inside that is roiling your gut and telling you something is off and very damaged.  They hold out what looks like the cure to this wrong road you’ve taken.  Their message is full of  pretty pictures or accompanying videos so words alone no longer satisfy and those pretty pictures are characterized as the road to Oz.  But the curtain is seldom let down so you can’t see the wizard behind the screen doing all of this manipulating.

Let me lift the curtain for you – just a little.  To strip the curtain away entirely is something you are going to have to do for yourselves.  Unfortunately, it has been turned into a lifelong search and you are very devoid of the mentors who could shorten the search and reward your efforts when you hit a success spot.

Over the past couple generations we have put in place a modern lifestyle which started with our need to work constantly to be able to afford more, even though we were using so many new inventions that cut our work load in half.   We haven’t been able to get off that rodent’s wheel long enough to see if it really was generating the ‘more/better’ it promised.  Most of us are afraid to stop because the bleak future pictured by doing that is something we can’t stand to allow ourselves to imagine.

So let’s take this one thing at a time:

starting with – Our food supply and food habits.  That alone has taken books, videos and endless self-help sessions to describe and to either mislead us or to help us understand what is and what has happened.  The story that starts with once upon a time ends with corporate farms using chemicals and other substances which destroy our bodies a tiny little bit at a time so we can’t identify or point to that as one of the reasons for our current dilemma. The marketing and advertising has us in a constant ongoing argument with each other which both sides lose, because in this great information sharing age, the crucial information is kept locked up and very seldom shared.

Just a couple for instances:

Flour – that which was the staff of life for our forbears and was in many breads and other dishes is something we are warned against today and which has developed around it and trying to take its place – a new industry – gluten free – because so many are now allergic to what sustained life in their past generations.  And gluten-free is a much more lucrative end result of processing than is flour, which is now depicted as the enemy of health in so many characterizations and advertisements.  One little dirty secret = it is substantially more profitable.

How could that be?  Who did this thing?  The one substance which you could practically live off of alone is now claimed as our bodies enemy.  If you are not allergic to it, then certainly you know it makes you fat!

Flour as a profit center is what happened and the machinery went into high gear to figure out how to make ever more money giving even less to the general populations:   Farmers were encouraged to put all kind of chemicals on their wheat and to experiment with new kinds of wheat developed because, thereby,  much more could be grown on a small plot of land and even beyond that – large corporate farms popped up, quietly destroying the farmer.   The substantially increased profit to be made on land growing this ever new kind of wheat was too much for some to pass over and certainly was not to be shared with the non-corporate types.  And so ‘crush them’ was the mantra of the day and it was successful.

Greed called those susceptible, into the flour business, to press as much money out of it as possible giving to the populace whatever smokescreen and story board was necessary to hide the real reasons for that substantial profit increase from something as basic as wheat.  And along came the hiding  and holding back and creating myths for the populace (us).  The wizard was very busy with all of this going on behind the screen.

The best place to start to tell this part of the story is at the end of the processing line – the point at which flour has been robbed of everything that gave us life and all of that replaced with that which takes life and good health away from us.  The large silos in which the “finished” flour was put to be held until it could be packaged harbor many ugly secrets.  Predictably, those silos were infested with bugs and our new kind of logic said bugs needed to be killed with pesticides and that happened.  None of the silos escaped.

There was no way to get the dead bugs out of the silos so let the flour stay until the bugs deteriorated.  No one would ever ask what those black specks were in the bags of flour, if the bags and the marketing were such as to make the flour more convenient to buy and prettier to look at with the mythical story about how much ‘cheaper’ it was.  And the bonus – something light brown or a dark ivory was made very white!  The background color of this ‘revolution’.

There was no way to get the pesticides out of the flour because it just became one with the ground grain.  So the department, in the United States, which kept the public’s food supply safe just issued a proclamation which said there was not enough pesticide in the flour so it wasn’t worth demanding that the pesticides be removed – that would be too costly – nor was there enough to warrant a note on the packaged flour letting the consumer know the product they were buying was tainted.

And so, the flour moved off the shelves into our homes where it wrecked havoc with our health without most of us knowing why we were developing these low levels of something that made us feel not quite up to par;  some of us becoming quite ill with allergies; some of us succumbing to viruses and various bacteria much easier and more frequently than in the past.

….And so another industry sprung up to address that and to take us further down the rabbit hole and those addressing that issue further up the profit margin generator.

Milk – Another one of those ‘basic for life’ foods that we all eat or drink that has added to this horrendous lifestyle we are living.  We have become so accustomed to the problems with milk and other foods, we have simply adjusted and move on.  It is becoming unpatriotic to question.

Many of us are horrified if we have to drink “Whole Milk” – as though this would poison our system.  We have come to believe most assuredly that would put more weight on us and probably fool with our fat/cholesterol count and from that would come hardening of the arteries or high blood pressure or something equally awful.  Some science I remember from a small child doesn’t exist in the public mind anymore – “drink your milk, you need milk fat and milk protein in your system at the same time. ” And that is Whole Milk.  The other kinds of milk simply lowers your health and increases the corporate profit.

But, what if ‘whole’ milk was not the culprit, but the growth hormones fed to the cows producing the milk was at fault.  The growth hormones which apparently move from cow to human and cause our bodies to react by being tricked into believing the one ounce of food we just ate was really four ounces so where we want our cows to become fatter on less so our profits would be more, what really doesn’t matter to those so trapped in that profit center is the fact that they are passing that little tricked-out and chemicalized out food to the rest of us as we get just as fat as the cows and for the same reason.  Doesn’t matter if it is ‘whole’ milk or the other kind with the fat taken out.

What if problems occur because, while the cow needs to be heavier with more pounds per cow on less food per cow to increase profits, humans need to be lighter with fewer pounds per human to be healthier.  So – what to do —

Develop,  to address this problem –  a very large health industry to compensate for the health and wellness problems caused humans by this and other such food developments.  And so it should be and so it is.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg!

You should get the message by now so do your research and you will be appalled at what you find.  Some have already discovered much of this and adjusted their lifestyle and diets accordingly, but not even close to a majority of us.

Food has been turned into a political topic to maintain its outlandish growth into the nether regions, those where you can legitimately ask if this is really food when it is mostly chemicals and instead of working together for the health of all we are arguing pro and con totally ignoring reality and facts in our arguments – especially the most popular ones.  Listening to the arguments one would think some of us are not human, but our bodies have some other kind of existence.

The real culprit comes into play in our everyday lives and how we have incorporated meals into this growingly outlandish lifestyle.  Out of the food industry has come the processed food industry and the fast food industry – all detrimental to our health.

Once upon a time, meals were a family community event.  Well, that’s gone by the board.  Meals are now a catch when you can thing and mostly made up of the fast foods and/or the processed foods found everywhere.

And in-between those very unsatisfying fast food meals are the fast food and sugar or salt loaded snacks.  Today, however, it is increasingly salt and sugar in the same food product because it was recently found that combining the two makes for a quicker and more substantial addiction.  Hungry between meals?  There are thousands of snacks you can pick up to get from one “meal” to the next – competing for the title of “I can damage this body quicker than you can”.

I could go into other food groups in addition to milk and flour, but you have to do something!  So I will leave that to those interested.

Alternatives?  What did our ancestors do!

Soup:  Was a ‘go to’ dish.  Not the soup one makes with individual ingredients like pumpkin soup or butternut squash soup or, etc.  But the soup, kept on the back of the stove, constantly hot so if anyone was hungry between meals you went for a bowl of soup.  You simply found a soup bowl, ladled out as much as you felt you wanted to eat and enjoyed a very filling, satisfying and nutrient rich ‘snack’ that kept you satiated between meals and did not add extra pounds or lower your immune system making you susceptible to whatever came along.  A side benefit from this ‘family soup pot’ was the fact that if company dropped by unexpectedly you had something very lovely and elegant to serve them and in an instant.  Set the table, ladle out the soup and enjoy your visitors.

Everything was put into that soup.  Vegetables left over – instead of letting them spoil they were cut up and put into the soup.  Meat-turkey-chicken-venison, whatever,  left over from some dish or other or was not being used as quickly in another dish as expected because time to use it had run out – that was added to the soup.  It was constantly adjusted with different spices to make it something really special, very filling and incredibly nutritious to keep you in good health.

Custards and puddings were constantly being made.  Left over rice went to make rice pudding as did bread that was beginning to go stale.  As was ——etc.

Breads were used even when stale.  All one had to do was to pass the bread under the faucet to wet it a bit and then put it in the oven to heat.  The result was bread that tasted as though it was freshly baked and just out of the oven.  Today, we throw away stale bread and rice and other grains instead of reusing them and keeping them in the refrigerator for their next use – that is, those of us who still eat such things.  Or we keep them in the refrigerator, expecting to use them, but once we finally remember them when going through the refrigerator, we find them full of mold.

Cakes were baked from scratch.  They can be baked today and just as quickly as those from the box – tasting far better and with more nutrition.  The boxed cakes give you nothing.  The freshly baked cakes are a dream.  For a recipe – try the 1-2-3-4 cake.  Easy recipe to remember.  With a mixer it takes less than 15 minutes to put together ready for baking.  Make enough for more than one cake – use the stale left overs to make custards more interesting.

So many recipes are available for quick and nutritious foods – made from scratch.  But even our cookbooks have been compromised.  When I see one which says take a can of…… out it goes in the trash.

Looking for the old cookbooks is difficult because they have been so cast aside.  I find mostly the file boxes in which someone has filed recipes they had from grandparents, aunts, uncles, old friends who brought food stuff for the sick and shut in, including the recipe they used to create the dish they brought.  That doesn’t happen so much anymore – can’t when you’ve stopped at a quick food store to pick up something on the fly.

We could go into the cosmetics industry, the environment, and more – but the clouds start to form and those with vested interests become interested in us and we like to travel under the radar.

Life can be really simple because that even goes to how you clean your house and the substances you use with which you clean.  Our mantra is simple – don’t use anything to clean with that you would not eat.  Well, not as a snack, but you get the message.  And don’t put anything on your skin you would not put in your stomach.  It winds up in your bloodstream in seconds.

All of that marketing and advertising on which we have been raised is hard to undo and get out of our minds.  We have given top priority and attention to what which is put out for the purposes of selling a product – the mythical world – rather than anything factual about that product.  And far too often, that which our family and older friends have tried to teach us gets thrown out with the dirty wash water.

Our conditioning is almost complete – except for the cracks in the wall that a few have been trying to widen to let back in the flood of information that has to be kept out if our current – modern – lifestyle is to be kept and built upon.  That lifestyle is a building built on sand.  What you need for yourselves and your family is a building with a strong foundation.  The story of the three pigs comes to mind.  Each built a house on something different and the storms came or was it the fox who huffed and puffed and blew all of the pigs houses down except the one who built on that solid foundation.

The same goes for all of us as we build our lives and try to pass along the lessons we’ve learned to our children.  Hopefully, something happens which gets them to listen.  I’ve given up on that and have written many notes for them to read after I die.  That isn’t a sure thing either – because most of your belongings are given away or thrown away after death so some other way has to be found.  Libraries were one way, but the internet has sounded their death knell – so the search goes on.

In the meantime, I realize this topic needs a book not an article so let me stop here and leave the rest of this up to you.  Hopefully, you will walk the path that puts you in good health and those around you in a wonderfully supportive environment.

The one great discovery I’ve had is that walking that path gets rid of simple things like a cold.  We haven’t had colds in over five years.  They are not normal, as we have come to accept, but an indication that something in your life and in the lives of your family members who come down with colds and other such temporary illnesses has a cause that can be eradicated if you change your lifestyle.

All of these such illnesses were unheard of two generations ago.  The movement to build a huge and lucrative health industry, which depends upon regular outbreaks of bad health, has grown very quickly.  Such outbreaks are necessary for that industry  to grow, expand, and constantly see increased profits. New viruses and other infectious agents have to multiply and get stronger for the health industry to continue on its upward path and we have not disappointed.

It is not an industry that is working to put itself out of business by helping the populace in its move towards better health.  When we notice that hospitals have become profit centers with stock holders and all the other trappings which require regular profits and substantial increases in profit each quarter and year over year, we realize our health is being preyed on directly as is our food supply indirectly.

Your feedback and/or new information is always appreciated.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

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