A new report argues that all patients getting cancer treatment should be told to do two and a half hours of physical exercise every week. It states that advice to rest and take it easy after treatment is an outdated view.
Research has shown that exercise can reduce the risk of dying from cancer and minimize the side effects of treatment. Exercise is safe during and after most types of cancer treatment.
BBC News reports:
“Getting active, the report says, can help people overcome the effects of cancer and its treatments, such as fatigue and weight gain … Previous research shows that exercising to the recommended levels can reduce the risk of breast cancer recurring by 40 percent. For prostate cancer the risk of dying from the disease is reduced by up to 30 percent. Bowel cancer patients’ risk of dying from the disease can be cut by around 50 percent by doing around six hours of moderate physical activity a week.”
How to cope with the rising cost of electricity, fuel and groceries? If asking for a pay rise is out of the question, let’s look at what else you can do to survive the escalating cost of living.
1. Create a budget
Don’t groan at the mention of ‘budget’ – it really is one of the most effective tools for keeping your finances under control because it helps you to set goals and find ways to meet them.
To put together a budget, make a list of all your fixed monthly expenses (home loan, insurance, utility bills, debt repayments, transportation) and compare it against your income. Use one of the free budget planners on the internet to make the job easier.
2.Track your spending
The process of writing down what you spend over the course of a week or month is a great way to make you more conscious of where it all goes. There are web sites and iPhone apps you can use to plug in an expense as it occurs, effectively updating your budget on the run.
3.Cut Back
When you see your expenses listed in front of you, it often comes as a shock to realize how much money you waste in an average week.
If your outgoings equal more than your income, you need to look at where you can cut back your spending. It’s not as hard as it sounds to cut back on lifestyle ‘wants’ if you look at the big picture of how much you will save over the course of a month, six months or a year.
4.Revise
A budget is of no use if it’s out of date so ensure you revise it once a month and then every three months after that. Revising will help you tighten or loosen up your budget according to your needs, as well as put a stop to any unnecessary costs.
5.Sourcing income
If you look at all your expenses and find there are none you can do without, you might decide that finding other ways to boost your income is a preferable alternative. Be creative and resourceful – many people have made additional income by taking on a second job, setting up an internet business, selling on eBay or buying an investment property.
Derek K. Miller, a Canadian man who blogged about his battle with cancer, has died — but not without leaving a final post-mortem message on his website, penmachine.
The post began, “Here it is. I’m dead,” and went on to say, “In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote — the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.”
According to CNN:
“Miller had written about his physical deterioration, documenting his chest cough, abdominal pain, voice loss, and the emotional toll of wearing diapers and becoming housebound.”
If you want a very real, very sad look into what it’s like to live with, and die from, cancer, take a look through Derek Miller’s blog, which recorded his four-year battle with colorectal cancer, including his struggles with chemo and radiation.
I will warn you, it’s very difficult to read.
Like Diane Sadovnikov, who undertook the unthinkable task of arranging adoptive parents for her own two children for after her death, and Leah Siegel, who tried to pack a lifetime of memories into the two years she had left, Derek Miller is another tragic example of the pain and sorrow that cancer continues to cause to millions of U.S. families.
Even with the latest technology and “advances” in medicine, cancer continues to kill people far before their time. And the current medical paradigm remains essentially clueless about the underlying causes of cancer, along with how to effectively treat them.
As a result, cancer rates are still on the rise and the disease is expected to kill more than 13 million people a year by 2030, almost double the number who died from the disease in 2008. Cancer has now surpassed heart disease as the number one killer of Americans between the ages of 45 and 74. The odds are now very high that you or someone you know has cancer, is dying or has already died from it.
Why Does Modern Medicine Largely Ignore the Underlying Causes of Cancer?
Cancer is, by and large, mostly a man-made disease, the tragic result of humans veering too far off course and avoiding health-sustaining diets and activities, while embracing a highly unnatural sedentary, stress-filled lifestyle with exposure to excess chemicals around every corner.
Among the primary culprits fueling our cancer epidemic are:
| Pesticide- and other chemical exposures |
Processed and artificial foods (plus the chemicals in the packaging) |
Wireless technologies, dirty electricity, and medical diagnostic radiation exposure |
| Pharmaceutical drugs |
Obesity, stress, and poor sleeping habits |
Lack of sunshine exposure and use of sunscreens |
This is clearly not an exhaustive list, as such a list would be exceedingly long. For more specifics on consumer products implicated as contributors to cancer, please review the Cancer Prevention Coalition’s “Dirty Dozen” list.
I strongly believe that cancer rates are escalating because modern medicine is in no way, shape or form addressing these underlying causes of most cancers. Instead, most of the research is directed toward expensive drugs that target late stages of the disease and greatly pad the drug companies’ wallets — but simply do not prevent or “cure” cancer.
If ever there was an area in which an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure it is cancer. I strongly believe that if you are able to work your way up to the advanced health plan, you will virtually eliminate the risk of most cancers.
American Cancer Society Has Reckless, Perhaps Criminal, Record on Cancer Prevention
A lot of people put their faith in the American Cancer Society (ACS) and dutifully participate in its highly publicized National Breast Cancer Awareness Month campaign each year, which includes the widespread promotion of mammography screening.
Little do they realize that the ACS is doing precious little to combat cancer at best, and may actually hinder real progress at worst.
In a report titled AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY—More Interested In Accumulating Wealth Than Saving Lives, Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition, plainly lays to bare the many conflicts of interest that hamper the effectiveness of this organization.
For example, the ACS has close financial ties to both makers of mammography equipment and cancer drugs. But that’s just for starters. Other conflicts of interest include ties to, and financial support from, the pesticide-, petrochemical-, biotech-, cosmetics-, and junk food industries—the very industries whose products are the primary contributors to cancer!
Once you realize that these conflicts of interest are there, it becomes quite easy to understand why the ACS never addresses the environmental components of cancer, and why information about avoidable toxic exposures are so conspicuously absent from their National Breast Cancer Awareness campaigns.
The ACS, along with the National Cancer Institute, virtually exclusively focus on cancer research and diagnosis and the chemical treatment of cancer. Preventive strategies, such as avoiding chemical exposures, receive virtually no consideration at all.
Modern-Day Treatments Often Add More Pain and Suffering to Cancer Patients
Drugs, surgery and radiation are typically the primary recommendations offered by conventional physicians to treat cancer, and upon receiving a cancer diagnosis most people are willing to do just about anything to get better. This includes taking outrageously expensive and dangerous medications that offer little, if any, benefit.
One of the most recent glaring examples of this is Avastin, a drug used for metastatic breast cancer. Avastin, which costs about $8,000 a month and is one of the best-selling cancer drugs in the world, is now being phased out in the U.S. due to lack of effectiveness and dangerous side effects.
Chemo is another cancer treatment that frequently does more harm than good, although I doubt we’ll see recommendations changing on its use anytime soon. Despite its reputation as the gold-standard in cancer treatment, chemotherapy has an average 5-year survival success rate of just over 2 percent for all cancers, according to a study published in the journal Clinical Oncology.
Another study, The National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD), found that more than four in 10 patients who received chemotherapy toward the end of life experienced potentially fatal effects. And after reviewing data from over 600 cancer patients who died within 30 days of receiving treatment, it was found that chemotherapy hastened or caused death in 27 percent of those cases.
Chemotherapy drugs are, by their very nature, extremely toxic and typically do not work with your body to modulate and normalize its response to allow the cancer to resolve normally. And, they do absolutely nothing to address the cause of the cancer.
A typical, and potentially deadly, side effect of chemo is the destruction of the rapidly multiplying and dividing cells found in your:
- Bone marrow, which produces blood
- Digestive system
- Reproductive system
- Hair follicles
Natural approaches simply do not have the types of fatal side effects common with conventional cancer treatments because they work by optimizing your body’s own natural healing capacities. If you or a loved one is currently struggling with cancer, I strongly suggest you watch my recent interview with Dr. Nick Gonzalez, a physician focused on alternative cancer treatment using a three-pronged nutritional approach.
But remember it is exponentially easier to prevent cancers than it is to treat them.
3 Must-Know Tips for Cancer Prevention
In the last 30 years the global cancer burden has doubled, and it will likely double again between 2000 and 2020, and nearly triple by 2030—unless people begin to take cancer prevention seriously. We CAN turn this trend around, but to do so the medical community must stop overlooking the methods that can actually have a significant impact.
For an in-depth discussion of cancer prevention tools that deserve your attention, be sure to read The War on Cancer: a Progress Report for Skeptics. I highlighted three advancements that have not yet been accepted by conventional medicine, but are extremely powerful cancer preventive tools nonetheless:
1. Avoid Fructose and Sugar
It’s quite clear that if you want to avoid cancer, or are currently undergoing cancer treatment, you absolutely MUST avoid all forms of sugar — especially fructose — and this is largely due to its relation to insulin resistance.
According to Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, as much as 80 percent of all cancers are “driven by either mutations or environmental factors that work to enhance or mimic the effect of insulin on the incipient tumor cells,” Gary Taubes reports, adding:
“As it was explained to me by Craig Thompson, who has done much of this research and is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the cells of many human cancers come to depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (and related growth factors) also provide the signal, in effect, to do it.
The more insulin, the better they do.
Some cancers develop mutations that serve the purpose of increasing the influence of insulin on the cell; others take advantage of the elevated insulin levels that are common to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Some do both.
Thompson believes that many pre-cancerous cells would never acquire the mutations that turn them into malignant tumors if they weren’t being driven by insulin to take up more and more blood sugar and metabolize it.”
Some cancer centers, such as the Cancer Centers of America, have fully embraced this knowledge and place their patients on strict low-sugar, low-grain diets. But conventional medicine in general has been woefully lax when it comes to highlighting the health dangers of this additive.
As a standard recommendation, I strongly advise keeping your TOTAL fructose consumption below 25 grams per day including fruits.
But for most people it would also be wise to limit your fructose from fruit to 15 grams or less, as you’re virtually guaranteed to consume “hidden” sources of fructose if you drink beverages other than water and eat processed food.
It’s important to include a large variety of techniques in your exercise routine, such as strength training, aerobics, core-building activities, and stretching. Most important of all, however, is to make sure you include high-intensity, burst-type exercise, such as Peak 8.
2. Optimize Vitamin D
There’s overwhelming evidence pointing to the fact that vitamin D deficiency plays a crucial role in cancer development. Researchers within this field have estimated that about 30 percent of cancer deaths — which amounts to 2 million worldwide and 200,000 in the United States — could be prevented each year simply by optimizing the vitamin D levels in the general population.
On a personal level, you can decrease your risk of cancer by MORE THAN HALF simply by optimizing your vitamin D levels with sun exposure. And if you are being treated for cancer it is likely that higher blood levels—probably around 80-90 ng/ml—would be beneficial.
If the notion that sun exposure actually prevents cancer is still new to you, I highly recommend you watch my one-hour vitamin D lecture to clear up any confusion. It’s important to understand that the risk of skin cancer from the sun comes only from excessive exposure.
3. Exercise
If you are like most people, when you think of reducing your risk of cancer, exercise doesn’t immediately come to mind. However, there is some fairly compelling evidence that exercise can slash your risk of cancer. One of the primary ways exercise lowers your risk for cancer is by reducing elevated insulin levels, which creates a low sugar environment that discourages the growth and spread of cancer cells.
For example, physically active adults experience about half the incidence of colon cancer as their sedentary counterparts, and women who exercise regularly can reduce their breast cancer risk by 20 to 30 percent compared to those who are inactive.
10 More Ways to Help Keep Cancer Away
Cancer is devastating far too many families and taking many way before their time. It’s time to fight back and take control of your health by following the cancer-preventive lifestyle changes below.
- Get appropriate amounts of animal-based omega-3 fats.
- Get appropriate exercise. One of the primary reasons exercise works is that it drives your insulin levels down. Controlling insulin levels is one of the most powerful ways to reduce your cancer risks.
- Eat according to your nutritional type. The potent anti-cancer effects of this principle are very much underappreciated. When we treat cancer patients in our clinic this is one of the most powerful anti-cancer strategies we have.
- Have a tool to permanently erase the neurological short-circuiting that can activate cancer genes. Even the CDC states that 85 percent of disease is caused by emotions. It is likely that this factor may be more important than all the other physical ones listed here, so make sure this is addressed. My particular favorite tool for this purpose, as you may know, is the Emotional Freedom Technique.
- Only 25 percent of people eat enough vegetables, so by all means eat as many vegetables as you are comfortable with. Ideally, they should be fresh and organic. Cruciferous vegetables in particular have been identified as having potent anti-cancer properties. Remember that carb nutritional types may need up to 300 percent more vegetables than protein nutritional types.
- Maintain an ideal body weight.
- Get enough high-quality sleep.
- Reduce your exposure to environmental toxins like pesticides, household chemical cleaners, synthetic air fresheners and air pollution.
- Reduce your use of cell phones and other wireless technologies, and implement as many safety strategies as possible if/when you cannot avoid their use.
- Boil, poach or steam your foods, rather than frying or charbroiling them. Better yet eat as many of your foods raw as you can.
If you are like most people, when you think of reducing your risk of cancer, exercise doesn’t immediately come to mind. However, there is some fairly compelling evidence that exercise can slash your risk of cancer. One of the primary ways exercise lowers your risk for cancer is by reducing elevated insulin levels, which creates a low sugar environment that discourages the growth and spread of cancer cells.
For example, physically active adults experience about half the incidence of colon cancer as their sedentary counterparts, and women who exercise regularly can reduce their breast cancer risk by 20 to 30 percent compared to those who are inactive.
It’s important to include a large variety of techniques in your exercise routine, such as strength training, aerobics, core-building activities, and stretching. Most important of all, however, is to make sure you include high-intensity, burst-type exercise, such as Peak 8.
These exercises activate your super-fast twitch muscle fibers, which can increase your body’s natural production of human growth hormone.
Posted in Wellness
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Tagged Cancer
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In the book Winning the War on Cancer, author Dr. Mark Sircus discusses sodium bicarbonate, which helps to save countless lives every day. Sodium bicarbonate is the time-honored method to “speed up” the return of the body’s bicarbonate levels to normal.
It is also the least expensive, safest, and perhaps most effective cancer medicine there is.
Sodium bicarbonate delivers a natural form of chemotherapy in a way that effectively kills cancer cells — without the side effects and costs of standard chemotherapy treatments. The only problem with the treatment, according to Sircus, is that it’s too cheap. Since no one is going to make money from it, no one will promote it.
Those that do will be persecuted for it. The trouble with doing new studies on bicarbonate is that they are expensive and no drug company is going to fund a study when they can’t profit from the treatment.
In 2008, over 1.4 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed, and over 1,500 people will die every day from the disease, according to American Cancer Society data. Despite its prevalence as one of the biggest killers in the modern world, conventional medicine remains completely mystified as to how to address this disease.
Their “solution” to cancer lies with three risky and highly invasive procedures: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. The alarming rates of cancer deaths across the world — cancer has a mortality rate of 90 percent, according to Italian oncologist Dr. Tullio Simoncini — speak volumes about the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of these treatments, yet they are still regarded as the gold standard of cancer care.
Undoubtedly, many people turn to conventional treatments like chemotherapy because they think they are the ONLY option. But perhaps people would feel differently if they knew that a full 75 percent of doctors say they’d refuse chemotherapy if they were struck with cancer due to its ineffectiveness and its devastating side effects.
“If I were to contract cancer, I would never turn to a certain standard for the therapy of this disease. Cancer patients who stay away from these centers have some chance to make it,” said Professor Gorge Mathe.
You may be surprised to learn that, despite its reputation as the go-to cancer treatment, chemotherapy has an average 5-year survival success rate of just over 2 percent for all cancers, according to a study published in the journal Clinical Oncology in December 2004.
“It is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival,” the researchers wrote. “To justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy, a rigorous evaluation of the cost-effectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently required.”
Chemotherapy is a classic example of a cure that is worse than the disease. In fact, many experts now say that cancer patients are more likely to die from cancer treatments than the cancer itself.
“The majority of the cancer patients in this country die because of chemotherapy, which does not cure breast, colon or lung cancer. This has been documented for over a decade and nevertheless doctors still utilize chemotherapy to fight these tumors,” said Dr. Allen Levin, MD, author of The Healing of Cancer.
There Are Safe, Effective Options Available for Treating Cancer
Yet, you probably haven’t heard of them because they’re simple and inexpensive, and therefore lack the backing to get thoroughly researched and publicized. Dr. Simoncini explains:
“In the future — I hope soon — I am convinced that it will be possible to treat and cure any tumor within 15-30 days with either a pill or an injection in the morning and in the evening when there is targeted pharmacological research. But, again, we now have to work with what we have.”
Is he talking about the latest chemo drug? A radical new surgery? A high-dose radiation treatment? Nope, not even close. Dr. Simoncini is referring to sodium bicarbonate, better known as baking soda.
Dr. Simoncini was ousted from the medical community because as an oncologist — a cancer specialist — he refused to use conventional cancer treatment methods, choosing instead to administer sodium bicarbonate..
Dr. Simoncini’s quite amazing experience has shown that 99 percent of breast- and bladder cancer can heal in just six days, entirely without the use of surgery, chemo or radiation, using just a local infiltration device (such as a catheter) to deliver the sodium bicarbonate directly to the infected site in your breast tissue or bladder. You can watch actual before and after footage of the treatment working in this video.
“Sodium bicarbonate is the time honored method to ‘speed up’ the return of the body’s bicarbonate levels to normal. Bicarbonate is inorganic, very alkaline and like other mineral type substances supports an extensive list of biological functions. Sodium bicarbonate happens to be one of our most useful medicines because bicarbonate physiology is fundamental to life and health,” Dr. Sircus writes in Winning the War on Cancer.
Many chemotherapy treatments actually include sodium bicarbonate to help protect patients’ kidneys, heart and nervous system. It’s been said that administering chemotherapy without bicarbonate could possibly kill a patient on the spot. Could it be that while mixing chemo poisons with baking soda, any improvements seen are the result of the baking soda, and not the toxic poisons?
Dr. Sircus certainly thinks so.
“There are no studies separating the effects of bicarbonate from the toxic chemotherapy agents nor will there ever be,” he says.
If you keep an open mind, you will quickly learn that there are numerous ways to support your body in healing that have nothing to do with toxic drugs and surgery, even when it comes to a serious condition like cancer.
Another such approach is Dr. Hamer’s German New Medicine (GNM), which operates under the premise that every disease, including cancer, originates from an unexpected shock experience, and that all disease can be cured by resolving these underlying emotional traumas.
Despite a 95 percent success rate, Dr. Hamer has spent time in prison for refusing to disavow his medical findings and stop treating his patients with his unorthodox techniques, and is currently living in exile, seeking asylum from persecution.
What’s Even Better Than a Safe Treatment?
Prevention.
Relatively simple risk reduction strategies can help you to VIRTUALLY ELIMINATE your cancer risk, and radically improve your chances of recovering from cancer if you currently have it.
You won’t read or hear much about these techniques elsewhere either, because they have not been formally “proven” by conservative researchers. However, were you aware that 85 percent of therapies currently recommended by conventional medicine have never been formally proven either? That’s something to think about. Here are the top tips I recommend:
1. Reduce or eliminate your processed food, sugar and grain carbohydrate intake. Yes, this is even true for whole unprocessed organic grains, as they tend to rapidly break down and drive your insulin and leptin levels up, which is the last thing you need to have happening if you are seeking to resolve a cancer.
2. Control your fasting insulin and leptin levels. This is the end result, and can be easily monitored with the use of simple and relatively inexpensive blood tests.
3. Normalize your ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fats by taking a high-quality krill oil and reducing your intake of most processed vegetable oils.
4. Get regular exercise. One of the primary reasons exercise works is that it drives your insulin levels down. Controlling insulin levels is one of the most powerful ways to reduce your cancer risks.
5. Normalize your vitamin D levels by getting plenty of sunlight exposure and consider careful supplementation when this is not possible. If you take oral vitamin D and have a cancer, it would be very prudent to monitor your vitamin D blood levels regularly.
6. Get regular, good sleep.
7. Eat according to your nutritional type. The potent anti-cancer effects of this principle are very much underappreciated. When we treat cancer patients in our clinic this is one of the most powerful anti-cancer strategies we have.
8. Reduce your exposure to environmental toxins like pesticides, household chemical cleaners, synthetic air fresheners and air pollution.
9. Limit your exposure and provide protection for yourself from radiation produced by cell phones, cell phone towers, base stations and WiFi stations.
10. Avoid frying or charbroiling your food. Boil, poach or steam your foods instead.
11. Have a tool to permanently reprogram the neurological short-circuiting that can activate cancer genes. Even the CDC states that 85 percent of disease is caused by emotions. It is likely that this factor may be more important than all the other physical ones listed here, so make sure this is addressed. One of the best approaches and my particular favorite tool, as you may know, is theEmotional Freedom Technique (EFT).
12. Eat at least one-third of your food raw. Personally my goal is 85% raw and I am usually able to achieve that.
Posted in Wellness
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Tagged cancer cure
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 Warren Buffett never flies in a private jet — even though he owns the largest private jet company. He also lives in a small three-bedroom house he bought 50 years ago, and keeps himself occupied by playing online bridge.
It is refreshing, and inspiring, to hear of a man with all the wealth in the world who still believes that happiness lies not with riches but within yourself.
You, too, may become immensely happier by integrating some of the following wisdom into your own life.
Secret #1: Happiness comes from within.
“In my adult business life I have never had to make a choice of trading between professional and personal. I tap-dance to work, and when I get there it’s tremendous fun.” — Warren Buffett
If you do what you love and love what you do, you’ll naturally be productive.
Secret #2: Find happiness in simple pleasures.
“I have simple pleasures. I play bridge online for 12 hours a week.” — Warren Buffett
You can also learn to be happy with the simple pleasures of playing cards with friends, playing with your children or taking a walk in the wilderness.
Secret #3: Live a simple life.
“I just naturally want to do things that make sense. In my personal life too, I don’t care what other rich people are doing. I don’t want a 405 foot boat just because someone else has a 400 foot boat.” — Warren Buffett
Secret #4: Think Simply.
“I want to be able to explain my mistakes. This means I do only the things I completely understand.” — Warren Buffett
If you apply this rule in your life, you can develop clarity and sanity in your thoughts. Life is about simple yet profound choices.
Secret #5: Invest Simply.
“The best way to own common stocks is through an index fund.” — Warren Buffett
Often, the simplest route will bring you the most riches, and the most happiness.
Secret #6: Have a mentor in life.
“I was lucky to have the right heroes. Tell me who your heroes are and I’ll tell you how you’ll turn out to be. The qualities of the one you admire are the traits that you, with a little practice, can make your own, and that, if practiced, will become habit-forming.” — Warren Buffett
Having a mentor is as important as having a purpose in your life, but having a wrong mentor is as devastating as having a wrong purpose in your life. The mentor has to be someone you can trust. You’ll find that person in your inner circle if you think hard enough.
Secret #7: Making money isn’t the backbone of your guiding purpose; making money is the by-product of your guiding purpose.
“If you’re doing something you love, you’re more likely to put your all into it, and that generally equates to making money.” — Warren Buffett
Money should never become the object and end all of your motivation.
Posted in Personal Growth
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Tagged Warren
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According to a new study, people whose surnames start with letters late in the alphabet may be the fastest to buy. What could possibly explain this weird phenomenon, which the study authors dubbed “the last-name effect”? The research didn’t provide a definitive reason, but the authors offer an intriguing theory. Since America’s obsession with alphabetical order often forces the Z’s to the back of the line in childhood, they suffer. They were always the last to get lunch in the cafeteria — sorry, Young, the other kids bought all the chocolate milk again — and had to beg for the teacher’s attention from the back of the classroom. So later in life, when the Z’s — and even onetime Z’s who became A’s through marriage — see an item they really like for sale or are offered a deal, they jump on it, afraid that supplies won’t last. The chocolate milk is finally in front of them. So they grab it.
“For years, simply because of your name, you’ve received inequitable treatment,” says Kurt Carlson, an assistant professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and a co-author of the paper, which is to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research. “So when you get to exercise control, you seize on opportunity. It’s a coping strategy, and over time it becomes a natural way to respond.”
Carlson and Jacqueline Conard, an assistant professor at the Massey Graduate School of Business at Belmont University, uncovered the last-name effect through four different experiments. In the first one, MBA students received offers via e-mail for four free tickets to a women’s basketball game but were told the overall supply was limited. The average response time for people with names beginning with one of the last nine letters of the alphabet, R through Z, was 19.38 minutes. Those with names starting with one of the first nine letters, A through I, replied in 25.08 minutes — a statistically significant difference.
For the second experiment, 280 adults with an average age of 39.1 responded to an e-mail invitation to fill out an online survey. In exchange, they were told, they had a 1 in 500 chance of winning $500 in a drawing. (In fact, since only 280 people responded, the odds were much better.) Again, people with surnames closer to the end of the alphabet responded faster to the offer. The results didn’t differ by gender, and the researchers also found that people whose current surnames were at the beginning of the alphabet but whose childhood surnames had been closer to the end also responded to the offer more quickly. In other words, Zimmermans who married Addisons and changed their names were still coping with their lousy place in past lines.
These two experiments have a relatively obvious shortcoming: people who responded more slowly to the e-mail offers could have just been checking their accounts less frequently. A third experiment addressed that issue by giving everyone a deal simultaneously. At the end of a college wine-evaluation class, the instructor told the attendees they’d get $5 and a bottle of wine if they participated in a 45-min. study a few days later. As expected, students with late-in-the-alphabet names were more likely to accept the offer, and they did so faster than the others.
In a final experiment, researchers asked 41 undergraduate students to imagine a scenario in which they needed a backpack, then saw a bookstore sign offering the item at 20% off “while supplies last.” But, the students were told, they did not have their wallet, and it would take 15 minutes to fetch it and return to buy the backpack. The late-in-the-alphabet students were more likely to say they found the discount appealing and that they’d run home to close the deal.
The results are provocative, but come on: Isn’t it a stretch to posit that one’s place in a grammar-school lunch line has any impact on adult behavior? Perhaps not, at least according to my own utterly unscientific surveys. I grabbed a TIME staff list and started scanning the Z’s. I found one Paul Zelinski, 59, a production director for TIME and Sports Illustrated for Kids. Zelinski says he spent many days in the back of the class as a student in Brooklyn Catholic schools. “In grammar school, I didn’t mind, because there was this girl next to me who was cute,” says Zelinski. “But in high school, it stunk. I couldn’t see over the taller guys in front of me.”
Upon hearing an explanation of the last-name effect, Zelinski said it made perfect sense. He’s always looking to close a deal quickly. He recently bought a car on the Internet; instead of haggling forever, he got what he considered a fair price, made the purchase and moved on.
Zelinski still frets about being in the back. In early January, he attended college football’s national championship game in Arizona, where he stood near a railing for two hours to guarantee a good view of the Auburn pep rally. He also says he gets to New York Giants games early, at 8 a.m., to tailgate, because he fears that the prime spots will run out. “I don’t know if that has to do with being Zelinski or being Polish,” he says. “I might have to go into therapy next week to find out.”
What do the lucky ones at the front of the line think? Do they, in fact, inquire about things more slowly than poor souls named Zelinski? I scanned the contact list in my cell phone. Since I don’t have a direct line to Hank Aaron or former New York Mets relief pitcher Don Aase, my first entry is Henry Abbott, the excellent basketball writer who runs the TrueHoop blog at ESPN.com. “I totally fit this theory,” says Abbott, 36. “My wife calls me the researcher. I don’t get dazzled by the first deal. I just finished scanning 30 websites for a stupid muzzle for my dog.”
Does he buy the last-name effect? “Maybe,” he says. “I can understand that if my name began with a Z, I’d be sick of waiting. I do have a feeling that if I miss a deal, there are going to be other good deals.” Three days later, Abbott e-mailed me a note: “Found myself thinking about this story several times since we talked. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense.”
The last-name effect has very practical implications. Companies, especially those pitching limited-time offers, should first mail out those promotions to consumers with surnames that fall deeper in the alphabet. Shoppers with these names should be more aware of their tendencies. Does it really make sense for me to buy this item? Or is alphabet angst at play?
As for teachers, the takeaway is clear. “There may be no great alternatives to alphabetical order,” says Carlson. “But flip it around every now and then. That’s a reasonable way to balance things out.”
(Source:By SEAN GREGORY Jan. 28, 2011, www.time.com)
Posted in Articles
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Tagged money, shopping
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On the site linked below, you can listen to an interview with Dr. Karl Maret. Dr. Maret is the president of the Dove Health Alliance, a nonprofit foundation that focuses on the creation and promotion of global research and education networks in Energy Medicine.
Dr. Maret trained in both electrical and biomedical engineering before his medical studies. He has recently begun educating physician groups specifically on the biological impacts of communication technologies, such as cell phones and wireless technologies.
According to Electromagnetic Health, in this interview, Maret discusses:
“… the biological effects of electromagnetic fields. He offers especially valuable perspective given he has both an extensive medical background and a background in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering.”
According to a new study, electromagnetic radiation from cellular phones may affect bone strength. Men who wear their cell phone on the right side of their belts were found to have reduced bone mineral content and bone mineral density in the right hip.
Researchers measured the bone strength at the left and right hip in two groups of healthy men, half of whom did not use cell phones and half of whom carried their cell phone in a belt pouch on the right side. Their hip bones were assessed using a test called dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry.
According to Newswise:
“… [M]en who did not use cell phones had higher [bone mineral content] in the right femoral neck (near the top of the thigh bone) … The cell phone users also had reduced [bone mineral density] and [bone mineral content] at the right trochanter — an area at the outside top of the thigh bone, close to where the phone would be worn on the belt.”
Additionally, a separate U.S. government funded study by Nora Volkow et al published in JAMA unsettled many people when it reported that using a cell phone could alter brain activity, and do so at non-thermal levels of microwave radiation, levels which have long been argued by industry and regulatory bodies do not have enough intensity to create biological effects.
The report did not conclude whether the changes in glucose levels resulted in any negative, long-term health effect, but it had many people wondering what they can do to protect themselves, and also whether they can trust regulatory bodies setting exposure guidelines.
Dr. Michael Kundi, at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, commented:
“Since a brain tumor utilizes excessive amounts of glucose, changes in glucose utilization may be a key mechanism to support tumor growth.”
The study’s authors advise cell phone users to keep their phone at a distance by putting them on speaker mode or using a wired headset whenever possible. Even holding your phone farther away from your ear can make a difference, as the intensity of radiation diminishes sharply with distance.
According to the New York Times:
“Many cellphones emit the most radiation when they initially establish contact with the cell tower, making their ‘digital handshake.’ To reduce exposure it’s best to wait until after your call has been connected to put your cellphone next to your ear.
During the ensuing conversation, it’s advisable to tilt the phone away from your ear when you are talking and only bring it in close to your ear when you are listening … radiation is ‘significantly less when a cellphone is receiving signals than when it is transmitting.’”
In addition, texting instead of talking might be safer.
And if the Volkow study demonstrating increased glucose levels in the brain from cell phone radiation raised major concerns about cell phone safety around the globe, stunning new research from China is following on its heels, waking up people further to the evident very serious risks from cell phones.
The recent study, by Duan Y, et al , “Correlation between cellular phone use and epithelial parotid gland malignancies,” published in the International Journal of Oral and Maxofacial Surgery, showed a dose-response relationship between cell phone use and parotid gland tumors, and as much as a 3,000% increased risk of parotid gland tumors with greater than 2.5 hours of cell phone use per day.
See ElectromagneticHealth.org post, “Important New Chinese Study Connecting Cell Phone Use with Parotid Gland Tumors,” and coverage by Microwave News, “Chinese Put Cancer of the Parotid Gland on Center Stage.”
“The authors found general indications of a dose–response relationship between cellular phone use and parotid gland malignancy.
In particular, duration of use prior to diagnosis, average daily number of calls, average daily duration of cellular phone usage, number of calls since first use, and total time of usage were positively associated with parotid gland malignancy.”
Brain tumor analyst L. Lloyd Morgan, B.S., who was lead author of the landmark report, “Cellphones and Brain Tumors: 15 Reasons for Concern,” says the risks of parotid gland tumors found in the Duan Y, et al parotid gland study were “as large, perhaps larger, than the risk of lung cancer from smoking.”
Camilla Rees of www.ElectromagneticHealth.org says:
“It is not surprising we have never seen the full data set from the 13-country Interphone study, especially the data on parotid gland tumors and acoustic neuromas, tumors closest to where a cell phone is held against the head, despite the fact that the study was completed over six years ago.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the part of the World Health Organization responsible for the Interphone study, is planning to soon draw conclusions on risk of cancer from RF from cell phones based only on the 50% of Interphone results they have released to date,
Global scientists and activists are now actively protesting this decision and insisting it be held off until the full Interphone data set is released. The Duan Y, et al parotid gland study very strongly reemphasizes we must gain access to the full dataset of the Interphone study, and subject it to independent analysis.”
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios, delivered a truly inspirational commencement address to some 5,000 Stanford University graduates. Without further adieu, his message:
“I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The First Story is About Connecting the Dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.
Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: ‘We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?’ They said: ‘Of course.’ My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition.
After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.
Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My Second Story is About Love and Loss.
I was lucky–I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation–the Macintosh–a year earlier, and I had just turned 30.
And then I got fired.
How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down–that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.
I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me–I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
Fired From Apple
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My Third Story is About Death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’
It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Diagnosed With Cancer
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer.
I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.
My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.
I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.
And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.
This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue.
It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’ It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.”
Millionaires are more optimistic about the economy but unlike the rest of us, they don’t blow their whole paycheck on videogames and Little Debbie snack cakes.
Instead, they keep their eye on the prize: Keeping their money — and making more.
A recent survey of wealthy Americans revealed what millionaires plan to do with their money this year.
Their priorities are still to pay down debt and save money: The average millionaire household saved over $39,000 last year, and plans to save the same or more this year, according to a recent survey by Spectrem Group.
But they’re also ready to increase their bets on the recovery: Forty-five percent plan on increasing the amount they have invested in the stock market, the survey showed. The biggest area they plan to invest in is technology (58 percent), followed by the pharmaceutical industry (48 percent) and health care (47 percent).
And the gold rush isn’t over: Forty-one percent said they plan to invest in gold and 24 percent were considering other precious metals.
They may be poising themselves to cash in as the economy grows but they maintain the discipline of monks: Eight-one percent said they don’t believe the recession is over and just two percent consider themselves “aggressive” investors.
That discipline not only applies to how they spend their money but how they live their life and how they navigate business.
Millionaires only have 24 hours in a day, just like the rest of us. What separates them from us is time management. While the rest of us go home and flop on the couch in front of the TV, the wealthy are reading and doing things that contribute to their success.
As a teenager in Seattle, Bill Gates used to sneak out of his house at night and on the weekends to go down to the computer lab. He was doing real-time computer programming by eighth grade. He didn’t spend his high school years watching television and dreaming of studying computer science in college, he spent it actually working on computers. Knowing that, it makes more sense that he dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft [MSFT 25.428 -0.462 (-1.78%) ] — he was just a guy ahead of schedule!
Apple [AAPL 346.69 -5.78 (-1.64%) ] founder Steve Jobs, in his commencement address to Stanford University in 2005, explained his daily ritual to make sure there isn’t any grass growing under his feet:
“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” (Watch the speech in this YouTube video.)
Another highly effective habit of the wealthy is that they are decisive.
One of Berkshire Hathaway [BRKA 127565.00 -1509.00 (-1.17%) ] CEO Warren Buffett’s business tenets is “Never Suck Your Thumb.” That means that, at a certain point, you’ve got to stop thinking — and start acting.
In his 1989 annual report, Buffett explained how he learned the thumb-sucking lesson the hard way: “It’s no sin to miss a great opportunity outside one’s area of competence. But I have passed on a couple of really big purchases that were served up to me on a platter and that I was fully capable of understanding. For Berkshire’s shareholders, myself included, the cost of this thumb-sucking has been huge.”
At a certain point, you just have to ask yourself: How’s that couch working out for you?
Great Video of Steve Jobs
If one Austrian’s quirky idea catches on, wine tastings could soon sound like this: Is that some Mozart in my glass? A hint of Haydn, maybe?
Convinced that music is a key ingredient for a good bottle of red or white, Markus Bachmann has invented a special speaker that exposes fermenting grape juice to classical, jazz or electronic tunes. The sound waves, he claims, positively influence the maturing process and produce a better tasting wine.
The eyebrow-raising technique is the latest in a slew of weird ways to make wine, some of which also have a melodic touch.
Take Portuguese winery Jose Maria da Fonseca that plays classical music in its century old Adega da Mata barrel hall where it ages its well-known Periquita label wines. Or French company Henri Maire that has sent thousands of bottles of red wine sailing around the world in ships to be jostled by waves. Then there’s Austrian Rainer Christ, who swears by full moon grape harvesting, saying it makes his wine more complex and gives it a longer shelf life.
Scientists scoff at such methods, calling them at best harmless, at worst cynical marketing ploys.
Werner Gruber, a University of Vienna physicist and member of a group known as the Science Busters, which aims to debunk false scientific claims, rejected Bachmann’s idea as “rubbish”.
“Yeast, fungi, don’t have opinions,” Gruber said. “They really don’t care if AC/DC, Madonna or Mozart is played to them.”
Bachmann is undeterred by such criticism, insisting his invention will be the next big thing in winemaking.
But the 44-year-old who managed bars and restaurants for about a decade and also worked for an air conditioning company, is highly protective of his sound-infusing gadget, refusing to have the small, baby blue UFO-shaped object filmed or photographed.
He jokingly calls it a “swimming saucer” and only divulges this much: it weighs 1.4 kilograms and is inserted directly into the fermenting grape juice to stimulate the yeast.
“The wines get more fruity, they get mature earlier,” the former French horn player said in a recent interview. “All the tastes, flavours stand alone much better.”
Bachmann theorises that the sound waves emanating from his speaker move yeast particles around and, among other things, cause them to eat up greater amounts of sugar, resulting in a wine that has a lower overall sugar content.
“There’s an absolute scientific basis for it,” Bachmann said.
Florian Bauer, professor of wine biotechnology at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, said sound waves, including ultrasounds, have an impact on molecules in liquids or solids and that may accelerate chemical processes. But he said he’s not aware of any established science that music makes wine better.
“Will it improve wine? As always with wine, sometimes, possibly yes, mostly, probably not,” Bauer said.
Bachmann has teamed up with six Austrian wine growers and an initial 31,000 litres of so-called Sonor Wines, priced at about 19 to 25 euros ($A26 – $A34), will go on sale soon. They include a 2010 pinot blanc infused with Mozart’s 41st Symphony and a 2010 zweigelt exposed to a selection of arias.
Franz-Michael Mayer, a winemaker who works with Bachmann, played a sampling of waltzes and polkas performed by the renowned Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra into his semillon wine for about three weeks.
“I get the sense it tastes different, good,” the softly spoken Mayer said as he relished a sip of the golden liquid in a centuries-old wine cellar. “I’m so convinced that I’m ready to continue next year.”
Other wine growers, such as Christ, aren’t interested for now but are open to seeing how the idea develops.
“I think it needs to be looked into for another few years, maybe also backed up more scientifically, but it’s definitely an exciting project that one should stick with,” said the 35-year-old, who faced scepticism of his own when he first began his full moon grape harvest more than a decade ago.
“Time will tell if there’s really something to it,” he said of Bachmann’s idea. “If it turns out not to have a lasting positive effect, at least it was a nice try.”
Some drink producers have been using music for a while.
Hector Vasquez of the Mexican Los Danzantes distillery makes mezcal – an alcoholic drink made from maguey plants – to both classical and folkloric tunes. He says he can’t be sure any of it works, but is confident it doesn’t do any harm.
“I can’t promise that this method, that these beliefs, work but we’re turning it into a good method and I’m sure that in the three years we have been doing it, it hasn’t hurt the fermentation process,” said Vasquez, adding his personal favourites are compositions by Schubert, Chopin and sometime Rachmaninoff.
Then there’s South Africa’s DeMorgenzon winery that plays Baroque music 24 hours a day to its vines and wines through speakers that are strategically placed in its vineyard and cellar.
Regardless of who’s right, the notion appealed to couples enjoying the sun on a recent afternoon in Grinzing, a quaint neighbourhood known for its wine inns on the fringes of the Austrian capital.
“Why not?” asked Massimo Montorfano, visiting from the Italian city of Milan and who says he’s heard of a winemaker in his homeland’s Veneto region who ages wine by storing it under water in a lagoon.
“Where can I try it?” echoed Ernst Knauer, a confectioner. “As a Viennese, I’m open to all wines.”
(Source: March 2, 2011 and thanks to the jounos at SMH)
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