Author: Truth & Hammer

While steel and iron often come to mind, it’s actually Aluminum that is the most used and distributed metal on the planet.

When you think about it, it’s everywhere!  You can find it in such everyday household products like cookware, foil, baking soda, cake-mixes, non-dairy creamers, aspirin, flour, deodorant and even water.

Also, common food additives such as E173, E520, E521, E523, E541, E545, E554, E555, E556 and E559 contain aluminum. But did you know that aluminum causes alzheimer’s , dementia, and other serious health problems?

With so much Aluminum in our society, one would think it was established and proven to be harmless, it’s not.  Unlike iron and other metals and minerals, the body does not need or want Aluminum.

Thus, it is a foreign object to our body and we have no mechanism to process it or use it.  So, what happens to the Aluminum we intake?  It, like many other toxic chemicals from plastics and pesticides, gets stored by the body and (sine we can’t process it) builds and accumulates over time.

The kidneys, brain, lungs, liver and thyroid are all susceptible to damage from Aluminum buildup.

Below are the Most Important Reasons to Eliminate  Aluminum From Your Life:

#1.  Aluminum Damages the Central Nervous System

Damage from Aluminum buildup can be seen in both children and adults.  In children, it has been linked to Autism.

Baby’s are often exposed to high levels of Aluminum (when compared to their body size) from drinking water (tap water most often).  Children have also presented with bone and kidney diseases.

In adults, the neurological affects are signs of pre-mature aging, especially cognitively.  The neurological disorders from Aluminum resemble Alzheimer’s.

#2. Brain Damage

Researchers are pointing to high levels of oxidative stress in brain tissue when patients present with high levels of Aluminum.  Since your brain is one of the main places our body stores Aluminum, it tends to be most affected.

The results can be MS, Chronic fatigue, epilepsy, ADD and other cognitive disorders. Aluminum causes alzheimer’s and dementia.

#3. Aluminum Robs the Body of Essential Minerals

Though Aluminum is not needed by the body, magnesium, calcium and iron are.  Unfortunately, Aluminum robs the body of these much-needed substances.  “Trace aluminum levels cross the blood-brain barrier and progressively accumulate in large pyramidal neurons of the hippocampus, cortex, and other brain regions vulnerable in Alzheimer’s disease.

More aluminum enters the brain than leaves, resulting in a net increase in intraneuronal aluminum with advancing age. Aluminum is responsible for two main types of toxic damage in cells.

As a pro-oxidant, aluminum causes oxidative damage both on its own and in synergy with iron.  Aluminum also competes with, and substitutes for, essential metals-primarily Mg2+, iron and Ca2+ ions-in or on proteins and their co-factors.”

#4. Aluminum Can Weaken Bones and Tissues

It is also believed to contribute to osteoporosis.

#5. Aluminum Can Cause Premature Aging

Due to the oxidative stress on cellular DNA.

How to Reduce Aluminum Intake

Since it is the most widely distributed metal on the planet, avoiding it completely will be difficult.  You can greatly reduce your intake by purchasing products free of Aluminum.  Especially products such as cookware, personal hygiene and processed foods.

To help your body reduce Aluminum already consumed, try adding Spirulina to your daily life.  By eating spirulina you will boost your red blood cells and their capacity to transport oxygen.

More oxygen means a more efficient body to detox! I personally take about 10 gr per day that I add to my food.  I mix the Spirulina powder into smoothies, juices, sauces, dips and pretty much anything else.

Spirulina, in addition to helping detox the body of heavy metals, is a great energy booster and loaded with proteins, Amino acids, Vitamins, Minerals and Chlorophyll for helping balance pH levels in the body.

It’s not like other forms of gardening. Here’s why.

Remember that awesome video showing the first three years of a backyard food forest? Even with the slideshow explaining how Dan from Plant Abundance turned a litter-strewn yard into an urban oasis, I have to admit that a Lazivore like me was still intimidated.

That’s why I was delighted to see that Dan just posted a new video explaining the simple principles behind his method of gardening. Here’s a summary:

2. Layering is central to everything: The most basic premise behind any food forest is the idea that we can maximize our yield if we learn to use all layers of the garden—using the vertical space above and below ground to cram in a much larger harvest than if we only rely on what grows at ground level. By using root crops, ground cover crops, herbaceous plants, shrubs, small trees, canopy trees and vines, Dan is able to more efficiently take advantage of all the space available to him.

3. Symbiosis doesn’t necessarily mean self-sustaining: Dan points out that he’s growing in a small urban yard, and manages the land accordingly. While a multi-acre food forest might be—by both necessity and design—largely hands off, Dan has to regularly prune back his trees and perform other management in order to maintain an optimal yield. He could let it go and it would probably still thrive, but his yield wouldn’t be quite so large nor so diverse.

4. Understanding sunlight is crucial: The downside of layering your plants is that you now have to manage which plants shade what. (This is one of the main concerns folks have about vertical farms too.) So first understanding how sun falls on your property, and then designing your garden with spacing in mind, is critical to success. As Dan showed in his first three years video, though, it’s OK for some plants to eventually get shaded out. You just need to plan for that—perhaps planting more annuals in the early years, until your shrubs, small trees and canopies really start to mature.

Obviously, there’s more to all this than these four simple principles—and as someone who has dabbled and failed at much of what’s here, I am still in awe of what Dan has achieved. but this seems like a useful primer for anyone interested in giving this a go. Check out Plant Abundance for more great videos.

This updated article was originally published in 2017.

A quiet revolution has begun in the Devon town of Buckfastleigh. Its compact high street, functional-looking industrial estate and population of 3,300 suggest a place modestly getting on with business. But, while it may go unnoticed by those whooshing past on the A38, or tourists at nearby Buckfast Abbey, there is something happening in Buckfastleigh.

That something is a radical reinvention of the way that power works at a local level, based on a kind of politics that has nothing to do with the traditional party system. And it is authored not in a Whitehall ministry, but in towns, villages and neighbourhoods – where it is having a real impact on some of the services people most care about.

Pam Barrett is a 50-year-old civil servant who has lived in the town for 12 years and talks with a mixture of breathless passion and fearsome expertise. Her political biography begins with the local outdoor pool and park, for which she managed to bring in about £300,000 of outside funding – including big donations from Sport England. Saving the pool from closure – and upgrading it and the park – may sound like the most local of issues, but it broadens into a story centred on one key subject: 10 years of cuts, and what austerity has done to a town with high levels of what politicians call social exclusion.

“It felt to me as if we had a properly depressed town,” she says. “The carpet factory here had closed, and loads of people had lost their jobs. All our services were cut. Our buses have been hacked right back and the fares are through the roof. And when the district council said it was going to close the pool, the town council’s view was just: ‘Oh gosh – there goes another thing.’

“I was furious that we were left here with nothing. It takes an anger to do what we have done.”

By 2015, Barrett had joined a loosely affiliated group of local people trying to parry the worst of the cuts – but, she says, they repeatedly hit a wall of obstruction and resistance, not least at Buckfastleigh’s town council. “It was almost as if [they were saying]: ‘This is none of your business,’” she says. There were 12 seats on the council, but there had not been an election for at least 20 years. In that year’s local elections, they challenged the incumbents with the Buckfastleigh Independent Group (BIG).

Promising to make the council more open and inclusive, and to concentrate on solving the town’s problems, nine BIG candidates were elected, meaning they gained control of the council. They increased the local council tax precept (the small share of council tax that goes to town and parish councils), so people in the highest council-tax band paid nearly £2 a week. And they built up an impressive list of achievements: a new Citizens Advice bureau on Friday mornings, floodlights for the football pitch, a new “town ranger” (“Kind of an outdoor caretaker,” says Barrett) and a school-holiday activity service for local young people called Hello Summer – all things woven into people’s everyday lives.

To make all this possible, they made huge changes to the way the town council operates. For a start, its activities are chronicled on Facebook. People who are not elected councillors are free to join in with the monthly agenda at council meetings. “For the first time, we are able to say: ‘We have this amount of money and this is where it goes,’” says the councillor Andy Stokes, who is also Buckfastleigh’s mayor.

Barrett also has plans to widen the bounds of what the council can do. Similar new political groupings have materialised in a handful of nearby towns and villages. This, she says, will lead to sharing resources, so that vitally important but expensive services – health and safety provisions or child protection – can be shared. She thinks that would open the way to a model of running everything from youth services to buses.

Buckfastleigh is not alone. This kind of local uprising has started to occur all over the country. At the May local elections in England, one of the most noticeable changes was the huge increase in the number of independent councillors elected to local authorities, whose numbers increased nearly threefold. Tangled up in that is the proliferation of organised groups, such as BIG, that reject traditional party labels and seek control of the lowest tier of government – town and parish councils – where creative possibilities have tended to be lost in a sea of protocol and tradition.

Councils at this very local level may be associated with parks, allotments, bus shelters and litter bins. But, thanks to the Localism Act 2011, they can – in theory, at least – do whatever they like, within the limits of the law.

Many of the people inspired by this growing mood of local assertiveness are looking to one town that stands as the crucible of this new movement: Frome, in Somerset (my adopted home town), where a group called Independents for Frome took power in 2011, kicking out the Tories and Liberal Democrats to take all 17 seats on the town council. The group has since introduced a new town hall, a publicly funded food bank, electric charge points for cars and a vehicle-sharing scheme. The group’s modus operandi was turned into a manual for radically changing communities, written by the council’s one-time leader Peter Macfadyen, and titled Flatpack Democracy. Some 4,500 copies have been distributed; a sequel will be published this year.

Macfadyen reckons there are between 15 and 20 town and parish councils being run along the lines of the Frome model, “with a non-confrontational way of working and a participatory approach to democracy”. They include a large number in the south-west, places in Yorkshire and County Durham, and even New Zealand. Another 20 similar groupings, he says, have taken seats, but are yet to assume local power.

Why does he think the idea is spreading so fast? “Every other system of so-called democracy is now totally dysfunctional and non-representative,” he says. “And with Brexit, and what’s happening in central government, that is bound to have an impact downwards; people thinking: ‘My voice is not being heard in any way.’”

We’re passionate about our environment and we know what the issues are, and how to sort the problems out

Down the road from Buckfastleigh is Dartmouth, a picturesque place on the Dart estuary, which attracts thousands of tourists. But beyond the half-timbered buildings clustered around the harbour is a community laid low by cuts, whose problems are worsened by the fact that Dartmouth is too big to be a village, but not sizeable enough to merit many of its own public services.

In May’s town council elections, 11 of its 16 seats were won by the new Dartmouth Initiative Group (DIG). Its most vocal representative is Dawn Shepherd, who moved there from Wolverhampton 15 years ago. Her journey to public office began when she started the local food bank. “There’s a lot of poverty here,” she says. “And, on top of that, where we are is like an island. We have no jobcentre, so it is £6 each time on the bus. Having to go somewhere else for everything adds to the poverty.”

The new political grouping was mentored by Pam Barrett from Buckfastleigh. “We didn’t understand how the process worked. The only access we had was going to the council meetings and having 15 minutes to put questions to the mayor,” says Shepherd. “Pam told us that we could make a difference; nothing was set in stone. We could run the council.”

While the makeup of the old town council was disproportionately male, 10 of DIG’s candidates were women. This diversity extends to the group’s mixture of party politics. As with all the independents I meet, they insist that orthodox party divides have no relevance to politics at the most local level. “If you look at our 16 candidates, we have got leftwing people and we have got a supporter of the Brexit party,” says another DIG councillor, Ged Yardy. “We have not been elected on the basis of our previous politics. Party politics is not in the room.”

It would be easy to think of the new wave of independently run town and parish councils as something of a non-urban trend – but there is at least one shining exception. Queen’s Park in west London sits on the outer edge of the City of Westminster, and has a population of about 13,000. Almost a decade ago, a group of residents began to work towards making their area the first part of London to have a parish council in 80 years.

Two years later, their idea won a local referendum – and, in 2014, the first elections for its 12 seats were held. Although insiders are quick to point out that starting a council from scratch has hardly been a breeze, the informal grouping of people (none of whom has a party label) now in charge of an annual budget of about £150,000 have an array of achievements to their name. They include funding a youth centre blighted by cuts, bringing a disused park back into use, starting new annual festivals and creating a befriending project to support isolated and lonely older people.

Ray Lancashire, 54, has been a Queen’s Park councillor for just over a year. Since the age of 10, he has lived on the Mozart estate, where any ideas of the city of Westminster being synonymous with wealth and privilege give way to a much more complex reality. His path to holding public office was defined by his work on air pollution, which local surveys have found to be well above legal limits.

Westminster council, he says, tends to understand pollution in terms of “main roads and trunk roads”, rather than “areas that don’t have high traffic, but are still really affected”. (The council says that it focuses air quality monitoring on “roads that we know are pollution hotspots, as this has the biggest knock-on effect”.) Queen’s Park’s grassroots councillors are now doing in-depth pollution studies, blazing a trail for temporary car-free “play streets” and pushing the authorities to take drastic action. “We are at ground level,” he says. “We’re passionate about our environment and we know what the issues are, and how to sort the problems out. And we’re enthusiastic. That’s why our council is important.”

Perhaps the most unlikely example of the new local democracy is in Alderley Edge in Cheshire. The de facto capital of the north-west’s footballer belt – at various times, the home of Posh and Becks, Cristiano Ronaldo and Peter Crouch – is a remarkably affluent place: on the day I visit, the Barnardo’s charity shop is selling a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes for £150, while Marie Curie has an Alexander McQueen dress for £200. Local people regularly complain about super-rich football stars parking on double yellow lines because they think that the fines are chump change. But recently, even here there were rising complaints about the state of the public realm.

These complaints led to the rise of Alderley Edge First, whose tagline is “people before party”. On a hot Tuesday afternoon, I meet three of their prime movers in the local Caffè Nero: Mike Dudley-Jones, Geoff Hall and Rachael Grantham, whose family has run a grocery business here going back five generations. “When you came to Alderley Edge not so long ago,” says Dudley-Jones, “it was shaky at the edges: weeds in the pavement; the whole thing just looked run down. A one-horse town. And there was no one saying: ‘It doesn’t need to be like this.’”

Alderley is traditionally, solidly Tory – its MP is the Tory leadership hopeful Esther McVey. Until 2015, the Conservatives held all nine seats on its parish council, most of which had long been uncontested. But that May, a near miracle happened. Alderley Edge First won every single one. Since then, its councillors have radically upgraded the local park, completed work on the village’s trouble-plagued new health centre, saved allotments the old parish council wanted to turn into a car park, kept the local library open for an extra afternoon every week and made good on their pledge to spruce up the place – self-watering flower installations pepper the main street.

When I mention party politics, all three members bristle. “It’s so irrelevant at this level,” says Grantham. “For me, it’s a realisation that normal people want to make a difference in their areas. There is a real feeling of people saying: ‘We can make a real difference in our patch.’ That is snowballing.”

Four years ago, as well as aiming at control of the parish council, Alderley Edge First also put up a candidate for Cheshire East council, the big local authority until recently run by the Tories, and dogged by allegations of misconduct, some of which are being investigated by the police. Against formidable odds, Craig Browne – who also sits on the parish council – beat the Tories; after being re-elected a month ago, he became Cheshire East’s deputy leader. Something very striking, he says, now lurks among the champagne, expensive shoes and international hotshots: a revived sense of community spirit. “It was always there, but it was latent,” he says. “What we have done is encourage it. If people see councillors who are prepared to get their hands dirty, they think: ‘If they’re doing it, I’ll do it as well.’ That has been the biggest change.”