Countless Uses for Coconut Oil – The Simple, the Strange, and the Downright Odd Part 2 By Dr. Mercola

Coconut Oil Can Replace Dozens of Beauty and Personal Care Products

One of the best personal care products you'll ever find may be sitting in your kitchen cupboard right now. The video above, featuring HolisticHabits³ blogger and coconut oil aficionado Sarah, recounts many of its beauty uses. The second video includes a recipe making your own coconut oil-based deodorant. A previous article by Delicious Obsessions⁴ also lists no less than 122 creative uses for this household staple, including 21 DIY coconut oil skin care recipes.⁵ For example, coconut oil can be used to replace the following personal care and beauty products.

Makeup remover: Swipe on with a moist cotton ball. Wipe off with clean cotton ball or wet washcloth.

Facial cleanser: Massage a dollop of coconut oil onto face and neck. Wash off with wet washcloth and pat dry.

Body scrub: Mix equal parts coconut oil with organic cane sugar in a glass jar. Use the scrub on dry skin prior to your shower or bath.

Facial scrub: Instead of sugar, mix coconut oil with baking soda, or oatmeal with a dash of cinnamon, for a gentle facial scrub.

Shaving lotion: Apply a thin layer of coconut oil on area to be shaved, and shave as usual. The lauric acid in the coconut oil will also serve as an antiseptic for cuts that result from shaving.

Face and body moisturizer: You can use it either by itself, or add your favorite essential oil. (Make sure you’re using a high quality essential oil that is safe for topical application.) The featured article6 also suggests whipping the coconut oil with an electric mixer to produce a fluffy moisturizer that stays soft and spreadable even in cooler temperatures. When applied topically, coconut oil helps to reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles by helping to keep your connective tissues strong and supple, and aids in exfoliating the outer layer of dead skin cells, making your skin smoother.

Eye cream: Apply a thin layer of coconut oil around your eyes to soften wrinkles and counteract thinning, sagging skin.

Cuticle cream: Simply rub a small amount of coconut oil around your cuticles to soften dry areas.

Deodorant: Applying a small amount of coconut oil directly onto your armpits can help keep odors at bay, courtesy of the oil’s antibacterial properties. If you prefer, you can add a small amount of baking soda, or make a homemade deodorant using coconut oil, baking soda and arrow root powder. For directions, see the second video above. DeliciousObsessions.com also lists additional deodorant recipes using coconut oil as the base.7

Bath soak: Adding coconut oil to your bath can help moisturize dry itchy skin (Make sure to scrub your tub afterward to prevent slipping!). Make sure the water is warmer than 76 degrees Fahrenheit though, otherwise the oil will turn to a solid.

Soap: Coconut oil is one of the base ingredients in many homemade soap recipes, such as this one by NourishingJoy.com8

Lip balm: You can either apply a small amount of coconut oil, as is, or make your own lip balm using coconut oil as one of the base ingredients. You can find all sorts of recipes online, but here’s one by The Liberated Kitchen.9

Toothpaste: Mixed with baking soda, coconut oil can replace your regular toothpaste. The baking soda will gently cleanse while the coconut oil’s antibacterial action may help keep harmful bacteria in check. For recipes using essential oils to spruce up your toothpaste, see DeliciousObsessions.com.10

Insect repellent: Mixing coconut oil with high-quality essential oils may help keep biting insects at bay when applied to exposed skin. Effective choices include: peppermint, lemon balm, rosemary, tea tree oil, neem, citronella (Java Citronella), geraniol, catnip oil (according to one study,11 catnip oil is 10 times more effective than DEET), and/or clear vanilla extract

The Polygraph Test by Tina Erwin

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       What is truth? How is it defined? Can you test for truth mechanically? Can there actually be a truth machine, something that measures whether or not we are truthful when we answer a question?

       Is the truth all relative, based on context? Could you be telling the truth as much as you know it and then the polygraph machine still indicate that you are lying?

       Perhaps that is the issue with the polygraph test. This is the test that law enforcement gives people to determine if the accused person is lying. But it wouldn’t have to be someone accused of any crime, polygraph tests are routinely given as a determiner of employment in law enforcement.

       Polygraph is an interesting word. Poly, from the Latin, meaning many and graph meaning that whatever you find is being projected as data feed on a visual graph is the term given to the truth machine. However, can any machine ever determine what the truth is for any person? We are increasingly living in a “one size fits all” world. This is a world of critical sameness where a ‘norm’ is that same ‘norm’ for every single person. We’re human, we’re each unique: no mechanism can ever take that from us. It’s what makes us such fascinating creatures.

       Which brings us to an alarming statistic: 60% of people who take a polygraph test, fail it.

       We require all law enforcement candidates except, ironically Congress (who is charged with upholding the Constitution of the United States) and TSA of course to take a polygraph test and pass it, but if 60% are going to fail it, does that mean that 60% of the population is lying?

       Polygraph tests are forbidden in court, because of an odd anomaly: a truthful person can fail it and a deceitful person can pass it. This has been proven over and over. Why? Because a pathological liar has no conscience and one truth or lie is no different from another. This type of liar has no feeling about the lie. However a truthful person can be telling the truth and yet there is a part of him or her that worries that they haven’t either fully understood the question and may be answering it wrongly or there is something in their past that may be haunting them that they are not aware of at that moment. This will then be reflected on the machine as a huge spike indicating that the person is having an emotional reaction to the question.

       An emotional reaction is all that the machine registers. It cannot be inside of the person’s mind. Can you tell the truth and yet not have it be the truth? Let’s look at this example:  If someone asks if you have ever stolen something. How do you answer that question?

       You are an honest person, so you say no but the machine registers a negative reaction. Now you are flooded with guilt. What could be the reason you failed that question? Perhaps it is how your subconscious interprets the question, something to which you have no conscious control.

·      If you have ever ‘stolen’ a kiss, is that stealing?

·      If you shoplifted something as a teenager, but you made restitution, is that stealing?

·      When someone eats grapes in a grocery store and never pays for them, is that stealing?

·      If you put coins in the parking meter for a stranger, are you stealing revenue the city might have received from the ticket or are you helping a hapless, hurried out-of-change person?

·      What if your parent accused you of stealing something as a child even though you were wrongly accused. What if that parent labeled you a thief and that cruel emotional sticker stuck with you?

·      What if you had a relationship with someone but never married the person and he or she accused you of robbing them of the ‘best years of their life?’ Is that stealing?

·      What if someone accuses you of ‘stealing their time?’

       How will any of these situations be reflected on a emotionless machine as a human being wrestles with the whole ‘emotional truth for them’ concept? If the person is extremely honest, then their struggle to be completely honest as he or she sifts back through time, emotion and experience will be, ironically, honestly reflected as a conflict on a machine. Perhaps this is why polygraph tests are never admissible in court, because when you tell the truth of a situation to the best of your ability, you do not have to reveal the emotional struggle you endure in the process.

       Polygraphs will never be completely accurate, because we all have theme and variation in our lives. The truth that lives within us is obviously relative to who we are, the experiences we have endured and the way we each see ourselves. Therefore, no machine can ever accurately measure the human mind much less the human heart or conscience.

Countless Uses for Coconut Oil – The Simple, the Strange, and the Downright Odd Part 1 By Dr. Mercola

Coconut oil has been a dietary and beauty staple for millennia. It’s a powerful destroyer of all kinds of microbes, from viruses to bacteria to protozoa, many of which can be harmful, and provides your body with high-quality fat that is critical for optimal health.

Around 50 percent of the fat in coconut oil is lauric acid, which is rarely found in nature. In fact, coconut oil contains the most lauric acid of any substance on Earth.

Your body converts lauric acid into monolaurin, a monoglyceride that can actually destroy lipid-coated viruses such as HIV and herpes, influenza, measles, gram-negative bacteria, and protozoa such as giardia lamblia.

This is undoubtedly part of what makes it so medicinally useful—both when taken internally and applied externally.

Coconut oil is comprised of medium chain fatty acids (MCFAs) that are easily digested and readily cross cell membranes. MCFAs are immediately converted by your liver into energy rather than being stored as fat. This is in part why I recommend coconut oil as an ideal replacement for non-vegetable carbohydrates.

Coconut oil is easy on your digestive system and does not produce an insulin spike in your bloodstream, so for a quick energy boost, you could simply eat a spoonful of coconut oil, or add it to your food. In the video above, I also share my recipe for a scrumptious yet healthful chocolate treat, courtesy of the healthy fat from coconut oil.

To get more coconut oil into your diet, you can add it to your tea or coffee, in lieu of a sweetener. It will also help improve absorption of fat-soluble vitamins, so taking a spoonful of coconut oil along with your daily vitamins may help boost their effectiveness.

Coconut oil is ideal for all sorts of cooking and baking, as it can withstand higher temperatures without being damaged like many other oils (olive oil, for example, should not be used for cooking for this reason).

Furthermore, coconut oil does not go rancid, which is a huge boon when you’re making homemade concoctions. Coconut oil that has been kept at room temperature for a year has been tested for rancidity, and showed no evidence of it. Since you would expect the small percentage of unsaturated oils naturally contained in coconut oil to become rancid, it seems that the other (saturated) oils have a powerful antioxidant effect.

General Health Benefits of Coconut Oil

In all, coconut oil offers a truly impressive array of health benefits when included in your daily diet. In addition to its antimicrobial properties, coconut oil is beneficial for:

Promoting heart health	Supporting proper thyroid function
Promoting healthy brain function	Strengthening your immune system
Providing an excellent “fuel” for your body and supporting a strong metabolism that can aid in weight loss	Maintaining healthy and youthful looking skin

While coconut oil is an ideal food for fostering health and beauty from the inside out, it also has a staggering number of other uses, from topical beauty applications to first aid treatments, to general household cleaning.^{1, 2} Once you’re done reading through this article, you’ll probably be inspired to stock up for all eventualities! 

Stay tuned for Part 2!