Study looks at cannabis ingredient"s ability to help children"s tumours

British scientists are investigating whether a compound found in cannabis could be used to shrink brain tumours in children.

The study of the effects of cannabidiol (CBD), the non-psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, was prompted by a growing number of parents giving it to children with a brain tumour after buying it online. The lead researcher, Prof Richard Grundy of Nottingham University’s children’s brain tumour centre, said in the last six months there had been a surge in parents administering it without medical advice in the belief it might help.

While no research has been done into how CBD can help children’s brain tumours, some work has been done looking at how cannabis-based molecules can help adult cancer patients. Products containing cannabidiol can be bought online, although recent changes mean companies now require a licence to sell them.

“New ways to treat childhood brain tumours are urgently needed to extend and improve the quality of life in malignant brain tumour patients, so we are excited at the prospect of testing the effect of cannabidiol on brain tumour cells,” said Grundy.

Brain tumours kill more children in the UK than any other type of cancer. Around 1,750 under-18s each year are diagnosed with cancer, of which about 400 are cancers of the brain and spinal cord.

The study, thought to be the first of its kind in the world, will seek to establish whether CBD reduces tumours. The researchers will grow cells from different brain tumours in lab conditions, some with the addition of cannabidiol molecules and others without. They will then compare how the presence of tumour cells differs in both samples through a technique called cell staining. This will help them see how many of the cells are dividing and whether any are dying.

Grundy said: “We expect the cells – brain tumour and normal brain – grown in our standard conditions to be healthy and actively dividing. We expect that normal brain cells grown in cannabidiol will remain healthy. However, we expect the brain tumour cells grown in cannabidiol to stop growing and die.”

Katie Sheen, of the Astro Brain Tumour Fund, which is co-funding the study, said if it proved to be successful CBD could be a gentler, less toxic way of treating cancer than chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

Dr Wai Liu, a research fellow at St George’s University of London, said: “We have performed experiments using CBD in leukaemia and it can deactivate signalling pathways, making cells more responsive to chemotherapy.”

He said some drug companies combined CBD with psychoactive component tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) with positive responses, especially when combined with chemotherapy.

Liu added: “All cells need to communicate and these communications get jammed up, and CBD tries to correct this by restoring them. This ultimately results in these cells being able to undergo cell death.”

“People think that children’s cells are more flexible so there is a possibility that CBD may have a slightly different effect. We will only be able to understand the precise mechanism and value of this treatment when studies like this are done.”

Among those supporting the project are the parents of William Frost, a four-year-old who was diagnosed with a ependymoma brain tumour in 2014 and is being treated at the Nottingham centre. William’s father, Steve, said: “We were told halfway through 2016 that nothing more could be done for William. We couldn’t bear to accept the news and decided to look into alternative treatments.

“We started William on a low-carbohydrate (ketogenic) diet and cannabidiol. Six months later William’s tumour had shrunk by two-thirds. He is slowly improving and attending school part-time.”

Study looks at cannabis ingredient"s ability to help children"s tumours

What Everyone Looks For

Since the earliest of recollections, happiness is the most sought after thing in our lives. So, where do we find “true” happiness?

Most of us can relate to the childhood experience of our parents telling us not to give money to the raggedy looking street person because, “They’ll only use it to buy alcohol”.

These days we could substitute drugs for alcohol, in some cases, but the point is the same. We may naturally feel the inclination to do good for someone, but doing good for them doesn’t necessarily mean that we should give them whatever they want.

We need to know what is actually good for them and ourselves, and what it is that they and we actually need in order to be truly happy and satisfied.

Yes, the person wanting alcohol or drugs may experience a temporary and superficial type of happiness, but most of us know that it is not the real deal. If it were we would not only be giving them money so that they could purchase lots of alcohol or drugs and be so-called “happy”, we would also be drinking and drugging ourselves without restraint so we could also be ‘happy”.

Yes, there are many who do this but they are not generally considered to be very intelligent and any happiness they do experience is artificial, inferior and short-lived.

In this way, it is not difficult to appreciate that there are all kinds of varieties of happiness available to us, and that some are higher and some are lower.

One teaching that often masquerades as a spiritual one is that we should just pick whatever turns us on and just “go for it”. This approach may sound like the liberal and enlightened way to go, but if we consider it for a moment, especially in light of the alcohol and drug examples, we can easily see that it is not the enlightened way to go at all.

The real solution? Knowledge! We need knowledge so that we may choose our path and our approach to life wisely.

Yoga or spiritual knowledge informs us that there are many levels and kinds of happiness, but spiritual knowledge is the greatest. We may not be fully aware of this, but it is what we all secretly long for and what we really need.

This simple message has spanned all kinds of cultures and has been taught by all kinds of great saints since time immemorial. It is the one ever-fresh constant in a world, which is changing so quickly that we can hardly keep up.

Many of us don’t even bother to try and keep up, not seriously at least, because we have firsthand experience of an old cliché. That being, ‘that for all the great technological advances of the modern age and all the previously unimagined material opulence, which is now available to us as a result of those advances, people in general are not actually happier, satisfied, peaceful, or more relaxed and at ease with themselves and their place in the world, than they previously were’.

They sense that perhaps a serious dose of simple living and high thinking is the real answer to the chaos, quarrel and confusion, which seems to be everywhere, both within and without all of us.

Once a person can learn of his true essence, true position and true function, in the spiritual sense, then and only then can he experience true inner peace and be relatively unaffected by the world around him.

The goal? Be in the world but not of the world!

This is easier than it sounds. There is a simple breathing meditation technique that works well. It is called, Gore – ra – un –ga (spelled phonetically) Breathing. Here’s how it works: Sitting or lying comfortably, begin to take slow deep breaths. As you breathe in, say Gore–ra–un–ga in your mind for the duration of your inhalation, like Gorrrrrr- raaaaaaa –unnnnnn–gaaaaaaaaaaaa.

As you exhale say, Gore-ra-un–ga softly for the duration of the exhalation. Repeat this for 5 or 10 minutes and you will notice that stress is gone and you will be extremely relaxed. This can be done anywhere at anytime. Gauranga means The One With The Golden Effulgence.

Like happiness, everyone is looking for true love. The greatest happiness a person can experience is to love someone and to be loved by them in return. But looking and finding are two different things and at times the finding is found in the most unlikely place. The perfect lover and beloved and therefore the perfection of love are to be found in a harmonious loving relationship with the Supreme Person.

This, then raises a question: If perfect love is to be found in my relationship with the Supreme Person, can I have real love for other living beings? The answer is, yes! You can love another living entity and loving the Supreme Person can bring out real love in you.

When we find spiritual happiness within ourselves and our relationship with the Supreme Person, we will be able to actually experience caring for and loving others. If we love the Supreme Person our love will simultaneously expand to others because everyone is part and parcel of Him. In other words, every living being is His child. As such, loving Him will cause us to love others and to desire their happiness.

In the same way that watering the root of a tree spreads nourishment to every leaf of the tree, by cultivating our love for the Supreme Person, we will begin to love others more. This is the essence of spiritual life.

As our spiritual love grows, we develop greater insight and clarity of vision. We are able to see others for who they really are. Instead of just seeing that person’s body, we see the real person, the eternal spirit soul. We then realize that the body is merely a shirt, if you will, with different labels like male, female, black, white, Jewish, Catholic, American, Hawaiian, etc.

Remember, every person belongs to and is loved by the Supreme Person and needs to love Him to experience real inner peace, satisfaction, happiness and security. When you begin relating in this way, it brings about a change in the relationship.

The development of pure, all-expansive love within the heart satisfies one’s spiritual hunger. Being fully satisfied you no longer “need” another person to fulfill you. So, instead of having a relationship based upon lust where you are thinking: “What can I get from this person”? Your relationship is based upon love where you desire the other person’s happiness. This leads to the true connection with another living being.

Lust can be transformed back into its natural condition of spiritual love through the process of Bhakti yoga – the linking up with the Supreme Person through devotional service to Him.

What would be the initial process to begin some sort of service to Him? Offering things out of love like food and flowers that have a fragrance. Here’s how:

In the ancient Vedic scriptures God tells us to eat only plant-based foods. So, before we eat grains, fruits and vegetables in any form we offer it to Him first. Why? Every action has a reaction. When we partake of plant based foods and we eat the remnants of what was picked, we basically are a part of the killing of those plants. That action creates a karmic reaction. But, by offering those foods to Him first, He will remove the karma from the death of those plants allowing us to eat purified and karma free foods, thereby softening our hearts and redirecting our consciousness to Him first. The ripple effect is unbelievable.

Think about the karmic chain of eating flesh foods. Since He will not accept them, anyone that partakes of them undertakes the acceptance of that karmic chain.

Through this process, our hearts and minds are gradually cleansed of self-centeredness, allowing our real nature as a spark of love to glow brightly letting us taste the spiritual love we are longing for. And as this lust is transformed into true love we not only taste this sweet flavor of love, but also its handmaidens like kindness, patience, forgiveness, tolerance, humility, etc. Tasting these qualities finally allows us to taste real happiness as well.

Namaste!

Sources:
www.brainyquote.com
www.anewmode.com
www.tinybuddha.com

When I was a kid, if I were told that I’d be writing a book about diet and nutrition when I was older, let alone having been doing a health related radio show for over 36 years, I would’ve thought that whoever told me that was out of their mind. Living in Newark, New Jersey, my parents and I consumed anything and everything that had a face or a mother except for dead, rotting, pig bodies, although we did eat bacon (as if all the other decomposing flesh bodies were somehow miraculously clean). Going through high school and college it was no different. In fact, my dietary change did not come until I was in my 30′s.

Just to put things in perspective, after I graduated from Weequahic High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job working for a butcher. I was the delivery guy and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness nor awareness, as change never came then despite the horrors I witnessed on an almost daily basis.

After graduating with a degree in accounting from Seton Hall, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was basically a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a “plastic” community would be an understatement.

Livingston and the shallowness finally got to me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear she had to be near her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and split for Colorado.

I was living with a lady in Aspen at the end of 1974, when one day she said, ” let’s become vegetarians”. I have no idea what possessed me to say it, but I said, “okay”! At that point I went to the freezer and took out about $ 100 worth of frozen, dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mother who lived behind us. Well, everything was great for about a week or so, and then the chick split with another guy.

So here I was, a vegetarian for a couple weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or basically how to prepare anything. For about a month, I was getting by on carrot sticks, celery sticks, and yogurt. Fortunately, when I went vegan in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, as I walked around Aspen town, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called, “The Little Kitchen”.

Let me back up just a little bit. It was April of 1975, the snow was melting and the runoff of Ajax Mountain filled the streets full of knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great to ski in, but was a bummer to walk in when the snow was melting.

I was ready to call it quits and I needed a warmer place. I’ll elaborate on that in a minute.

But right now, back to “The Little Kitchen”. Knowing that I was going to leave Aspen and basically a new vegetarian, I needed help. So, I cruised into the restaurant and told them my plight and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. I told them in return I would wash dishes and empty their trash. They then asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.

The owner said to me, “Let’s make a deal. You do our tax return and we’ll feed you as well”. So for the next couple of weeks I was doing their tax return, washing their dishes, emptying the trash, and learning as much as I could.

But, like I said, the mud was getting to me. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was, “Hawaii”. Looking through the book I noticed that in Lahaina, on Maui, there was a little vegetarian restaurant called,” Mr. Natural’s”. I decided right then and there that I would go to Lahaina and work at “Mr. Natural’s.” To make a long story short, that’s exactly what happened.

So, I’m working at “Mr. Natural’s” and learning everything I can about my new dietary lifestyle – it was great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch at about 1 PM and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka’anapali and play volleyball, while somebody stayed behind to prepare dinner.

Since I was the new guy, and didn’t really know how to cook, I never thought that I would be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, one afternoon, that’s exactly what happened; it was my turn. That posed a problem for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.

I was desperate, clueless and basically up the creek without a paddle. Fortunately, there was a friend of mine sitting in the gazebo at the restaurant and I asked him if he knew how to cook. He said the only thing he knew how to cook was enchiladas. He said that his enchiladas were bean-less and dairy-less. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn to do the evening meal.

Well, the guys came back from playing volleyball and I’m asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; the owner wasn’t thrilled. I told him that mine were bean-less and dairy-less. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, “You expected anything less”? It apparently was so good that it was the only item on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu and people would walk around Lahaina broadcasting, ‘enchilada’s at “Natural’s” tonight’. I never had to cook anything else.

A year later the restaurant closed, and somehow I gravitated to a little health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone I was an accountant and basically relegated myself to being the truck driver. The guys who were running the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many of the islands. I told them that if they could organize and form one company they could probably lock in the State. That’s when they found out I was an accountant and “Down to Earth” was born. “Down to Earth” became the largest natural food store chain in the islands, and I was their Chief Financial Officer and co-manager of their biggest store for 13 years.

In 1981, I started to do a weekly radio show to try and expose people to a vegetarian diet and get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to not compromise my honesty. One bit of a hassle was the fact that I was forced to get a Masters Degree in Nutrition to shut up all the MD’s that would call in asking for my credentials.

My doing this radio show enabled me, through endless research, to see the corruption that existed within the big food industries, the big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industries and the government agencies. This information, unconscionable as it is, enabled me to realize how broken our health system is. This will be covered more in depth in the Introduction and throughout the book and when you finish the book you will see this clearly and it will hopefully inspire you to make changes.

I left Down to Earth in 1989, got nationally certified as a sports injury massage therapist and started traveling the world with a bunch of guys that were making a martial arts movie. After doing that for about four years I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii’s premier fitness clubs. It was there I met the love of my life who I have been with since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. She said,” If you want to be with me you’ve got to stop working on naked women”. So, I went back into accounting and was the Chief Financial Officer of a large construction company for many years.

Going back to my Newark days when I was an infant, I had no idea what a “chicken” or “egg” or “fish” or “pig” or “cow” was. My dietary blueprint was thrust upon me by my parents as theirs was thrust upon them by their parents. It was by the grace of God that I was able to put things in their proper perspective and improve my health and elevate my consciousness.

The road that I started walking down in 1975 has finally led me to the point of writing my book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Hopefully, the information contained herein will be enlightening, motivating, and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices. Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course to follow. I am hoping that by the grace of the many friends and personalities I have encountered along my path, you will have a better perspective of what road is the best road for you to travel on, not only for your health but your consciousness as well.

Last but not least: after being vaccinated as a kid I developed asthma, which plagued me all of my life. In 2007 I got exposed to the organic sulfur crystals, which got rid of my asthma in 3 days and has not come back in over 10 years. That, being the tip of the iceberg, has helped people reverse stage 4 cancers, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraine headaches, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis, and more. Also, because of the detoxification effects by the release of oxygen that permeates and heals all the cells in the body, it removes parasites, radiation, fluoride, free radicals, and all the other crap that is thrust upon us in the environment by Big Business.

For more, please view www.healthtalkhawaii.com and www.asanediet.com.

Namaste!

What Everyone Looks For

Francis Crick Institute: cathedral of science "looks better from 1,000 ft"

Appearing on London’s King’s Cross horizon like an upturned beetle, with its row of metal chimneys protruding like little pairs of legs from the fattened silver belly of its roof, the Francis Crick Institute cuts a strange silhouette. As its dichroic-coated glass fins shimmer with rainbow iridescence in the late summer sun, it could be one of the specimens under the electron microscope buried in the bowels of this new £700m biomedical research facility.

“It looks better from 1,000 ft,” says Sir Paul Nurse, the jovial Nobel prize-winning director of the country’s new flagship research centre, the largest such hub in Europe, now charged with furthering our understanding of the fundamental biology of human health. “You can’t really see it properly from the ground.”

Some passersby might wish that were true. Walking the streets of Somers Town, one of the most deprived wards in the UK, it’s hard to miss the 1,000,000 sq ft pile, signalled from all directions by the great aluminium slug that slithers across its rooftop and the orange tiled walls that loom above the streets.

Almost 10 years in the making, the Crick is an ocean-liner of medical research that will soon hold 1,500 scientists tackling the roots of everything from cancer and HIV to tuberculosis and neurodegenerative diseases.

Better from the sky? Francis Crick Institute. Photograph: Wellcome Images

It is the product of a landmark partnership between the UK’s three largest funders of biomedical research (the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust) and three of its leading universities (University College London, Imperial College London and King’s College London), bringing different disciplines together under one big, bulbous roof. With three Nobel prize winners on its staff, expectations for groundbreaking discoveries are high; but does the architecture live up to the cutting-edge science?

Filling a four-acre site directly behind Colin St John Wilson’s British Library and George Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras hotel, the building joins a huddle of brick behemoths, and is evidently trying its best to fit in. Clad in terracotta tiles, it echoes the warm orange hues of its neighbours, while the curving aluminium roof is a nod to the station’s barrel-vaulted Victorian train shed. Yet it misses the mark on both counts, lacking either the confidence or elegance of its forebears.

In an attempt to break up the building’s bulk, the architects have employed a multitude of different claddings, using fins and grids and faceted walls of glazing, but the pick’n’mix collage only calls attention to the building’s heft. The roof – designed to hide the three-storey technical plant needed to keep the labs chugging along – looks like the swooping canopy of an airport terminal, cut and pasted on to a cluster of generic office blocks.

The Crick was nominated for this year’s Carbuncle Cup award for Britain’s worst building. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

The resulting dog’s dinner was perhaps inevitable, given the project’s convoluted gestation. The original design competition was won by HOK, a vast firm with US headquarters, who concocted a faceted-glass object similar style in to lumpen Siemens Crystal in London’s Royal Docks. Their proposals were met with fierce opposition from Camden’s planners, who had earmarked the site for affordable housing (a plan that was overturned by central government pressure). Camden had a more sober scheme in mind, preferring a costume of masonry to glass – something more akin to the exemplary, if rather beige, King’s Cross Central development nearby.

Keen to ease the project through the system, the client brought on PLP – architects of the monstrous 22 Bishopsgate Tower proposal – to dress the great hulk in planner-friendly clothing. The outcome is neither fish nor fowl, neither faceted crystal nor background filler, but something that tries to be both at once: a portly scientist stuffed into an ill-fitting suit and crowned with a shouty hat. It’s no surprise that it was recently nominated for the Carbuncle Cup, the annual award for the country’s worst building.

For all its exterior clumsiness, complete with a ground floor that reveals little of what’s going on inside, the building seems to be more successfully configured within. As you enter the complex, it quickly becomes clear why some science wags have nicknamed it Sir Paul’s Cathedral, after Nurse. A soaring nave-like atrium extends the full 200-metre length of the building, rising 50 metres past the three main levels of laboratories, crossed halfway by transepts and bridges, and opening up views between the teams of researchers busying away at their benches.

The Crick is Europe’s biggest biomedical research institute. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

“Discovery without boundaries is our tagline,” says Nurse, “so we didn’t want any physical barriers between our 120 labs. It’s all about open-plan, collaborative working and direct sightlines, in an environment that I hope will encourage a sort of gentle anarchy.”

In other hands, this building could have had the thrill of the Pompidou Centre in Paris

Scientists who have moved here from the usual siloed university departments appear delighted at their newfound world of transparency and chance encounters. “I hardly ever met my research partner before,” says Nick Luscombe, whose work focuses on the computational crunching of genomic data. “But now I wave to him every morning across the bridge and we can instantly share our test results.” Further moments of gentle anarchy are encouraged with lots of break-out spaces and an open staircase (not a double helix, alas), although the designers could have tried harder to make these areas more inviting.

While the labs are well configured, the clunky hand of the HOK-PLP partnership is never far away. A big white blob squats at the bottom of the atrium like an invasive tumour, housing the 450-seat auditorium, while the public “gallery” area feels like an afterthought, occupying a corner of leftover space on the ground floor. The cacophony of materials continues, with chequerboards of wooden veneer in three different shades, whiteboard surfaces for passing boffins to jot down their brainwaves and acoustic panels bolted on to every soffit.

Things are more successful in the working guts of the building. On the uppermost floor, the huge ventilation ducts finally break out from their plasterboard hiding places and shoot up through the roof, with the majesty of a ship’s engine room. It’s a moment that makes you realise that, in other hands, this building could have had the thrill of the Pompidou Centre, in Paris. It could have celebrated the astonishing fact that this 12-storey building (a third of which is underground) weighs the same as a 25-storey tower block and expels enough air to fill an Olympic swimming pool every 10 seconds.

The building will no doubt serve the Crick’s founding purposes just fine, but it could have been so much more. Compare it with the Stirling prize-winning Sainsbury Laboratory in Cambridge and the difference is striking: the clunks cannot be excused as the inevitabilities of a working science lab.

“Sometimes in Britain we do amazing things, almost by accident,” says Nurse, referring to the miraculous foundation of the Crick. Except in this case, the accidental fumbling of the design process didn’t quite work out as hoped.

Francis Crick Institute: cathedral of science "looks better from 1,000 ft"