by Charly Mann

The holy grail of nutrition and health bars is one that tastes great and is truly good for you. After years of searching, I had come close to concluding that such a bar did not exist, and never would. The problem with 99% of these bars is they contain sugar, which means they are likely to give you an insulin rush that will soon leave you craving more unhealthy food. Sugar is also a leading culprit of obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease. Most of these bars also contain a long list of unnatural ingredients, such as artificial flavoring, sugar alcohols, maltodextrin, preservatives and high fructose corn syrup.

Recently, I was fortunate to discover GNU Flavor & Fiber bars. They contain no sugar or artificial ingredients, and have an incredible 12 grams of fiber, which is half of one's daily requirement, in a single 1.5 ounce bar. More amazingly, these bars taste great, especially the Orange Cranberry flavor. One bar is only 130 calories, which is less than half the 270 calories found in a small Snickers. They are primarily made of whole wheat flour and an array of natural high fiber foods including cranberries, bran, raisins, plums and apples. Their sweetness is derived from pure fruit juice. They taste like the best oatmeal cookie you can imagine.

Unfortunately, these things are not widely available. So, if you cannot find them in your favorite grocery or drug store, you can get them direct from GNU with a nice discount for your first order and quantity purchases.

Their website is:  www.gnufoods.com

by Charly Mann

Every month 75 million women in the United States, and more than one billion around the world, suffer from premenstrual syndrome. PMS was not even identified as a malady until 1931. Though the exact cause of PMS is not known, it is characterized by hormonal changes in women that usually occur during the week prior to menstruation. There are a multitude of symptoms that can be triggered by PMS, but anxiousness, depression, headaches and fatigue are the most common complaints. PMS almost always ends when menstruation begins.

Several studies show that taking a daily 1200-milligram calcium supplement significantly reduces PMS symptoms by almost 50%. (Calcium supplements in liquid form absorb into the body 5 times better then do pills do). In addition, two hours of aerobic exercise a week greatly reduces the severity of PMS.

Calcium has other benefits for your body. It helps keep the weight off. This is because a lack of calcium makes your body thinks you're starving, so you eat much more than you need. Insufficient calcium also greatly increases your chances of developing high blood pressure or heart disease. Finally, getting plenty of calcium protects against colon cancer and even helps to maintain healthy teeth.

by Charly Mann

These are the times that try our financial souls. The current recession is so severe that it must be considered a once-in-a-lifetime event, like the Great Depression of the 1930s. In most economic downturns one can confidently make predictions of an eventual recovery and buy stocks at bargain prices. However, unlike most downturns, the period we are now living through is seeing severe contractions of all the world's economies.

For last ten years the world has been living well beyond its means, and borrowing heavily to finance unsustainable economic growth. Think of a family that makes $100,000 a year, and ten years ago had good credit. Then the family borrowed on their house and racked up credit card debt to live a lifestyle that only someone making twice as much could  afford. Today, that family is several hundred thousand dollars in debt, and their bills exceed their income. This family will not be buying new goods, and will instead probably have to sell their home for less than they paid for it. These people are in a real financial mess, and it will take years for them to dig themselves out of this hole. To pay off their debts, they will have to adjust to a lifestyle that is significantly inferior to that of a normal family making $100,000. This is same state the major world economies are in, and no amount of tax cuts and government spending will make much of a dent in the financial mess.

It will take many years to emerge from this crisis, during which time all the world's economies will continue to be sluggish. Countries that take painful steps to reduce their debt and implement controls to prevent the reckless spending we once had will eventually recover from this calamity. At this time, the country that has the best chance to emerge healthy is China because of their small national debt, highly educated and hard-working labor force, and relatively small social entitlement obligations (social security and health care). For this reason, I believe the stock symbol FXI is a great long-term investment. It is an index fund made up of the twenty-five largest companies in China. It is currently trading for around $25 a share, and I expect it to rise between 80-100% within three years.

by Charly Mann

The latest trend in computers is netbooks, which are very small laptops that weigh less than half as much as conventional laptops. In order to make these machines so small, they have smaller screens (usually 9 or 10 inches), and do not have a built-in CD/DVD drive. Netbooks are ideal for people who are mobile and want to have wireless Internet, as well as the ability to use basic office applications like word processing.

Dell, Acer, and HP each have several very popular netbooks. Dell will soon introduce a new netbook model, the Dell Mini 10, which we think will be the best netbook on the market. First, unlike other netbooks, which have a low quality screen display, the Dell Mini 10 has a very sharp (1280x720) resolution with a 10-inch widescreen display, great for displaying HD images and video. The Dell Mini 10 also has two unique features that mobile users will certainly enjoy, GPS and a built in TV tuner.

The Dell Mini 10 also solves some of the more annoying features all netbooks up to this time have had. Netbook keys have been about 20% smaller than those on a normal keyboard, making typing difficult for many people. Dell was able to increase the size of the keys on the Dell Mini 10 by expanding the placement of the keys in an edge-to-edge fashion on the keyboard. Scrolling and using the touchpad of most netbooks has also been a problem for most people, but the Dell Mini 10 incorporates a great multi-touch trackpad that makes scrolling and zooming much easier, and allows you to jump to a home screen or automatically scroll the contents of a page. 

Among the features expected on the Dell Mini 10 are a webcam, 3-in-1 media card reader, 15-pin VGA video connector, audio jacks (line in, and mic), 3 USB (2.0) connections, and a built in Wireless 802.11g Mini card.

The unit will probably weigh less than 2½ lbs and have a battery life of at least five hours. We expect a price of about $600.

by Charly Mann

Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943), a man few people have heard about today, was more responsible than any other human being for our modern world. He was the inventor of AC electric power which allows electricity to come into our homes, businesses, and factories. He is the father of physics and the inventor of radio. He invented florescent lighting, the electric motor, neon lights, and made major contributions to the develpoment of robotics, radar, computer science, ballistics, nuclear physics, and remote control. He was awared over 700 patents for his inventions. He was also an early advocate for the use of solar and geothermal power. By the end of the 19th century he was more famous than the man he had worked for when he invented AC electricity, Thomas Edison.

Tesla had few friends, but Mark Twain was perhaps his closest, and they spent a lot of time together. He became an advocate for women's equality in the early 1920s, and predicted that women would eventually become the dominant sex. He was a vegetarian, believing that plant food was superior to meat for its health and mental benefits. He also thought killing animals was cruel.

By 1915, most of the scientific community considered Tesla a crackpot because of a number of radical ideas he proclaimed. In one, he said the earth could resonate electrically at certain frequencies between 7Hz and the tens of kilohertz. Tesla said he discovered this by observing lightning strikes. The scientific community labeled him a lunatic for this idea. Ten years after Telsa's death, scientists discovered the earth resonated electrically exactly as he claimed. Even more outrageously, Tesla said that one day energy could be sent throughout the world from a single radio transmitter. In the 1980s, scientists proved this idea was also feasible. Finally, the idea that everyone agreed made Tesla a madman was his proposal to build a death ray using a narrow beam of atomic clusters accelerated through a vacuum to shoot down enemy aircraft. In 2002, scientists finally verified this idea would work, but have yet to figure out how it would have the long range Tesla claimed it could have.

Tesla had to spend much of the last 28 years of his life trying to prove in court that he, and not Marconi, was the inventor of radio. (Marconi actually stole 17 of Tesla's patents). This battle soon bankrupted him, and he lived the last twenty-seven years of his life in a run down hotel room in New York. When he was not thinking or working on a new invention, he spent much of his time feeding pigeons. There was a white female pigeon that followed Tesla everywhere. He became very close to that pigeon, and her care became the most important thing in his life. One evening, the pigeon flew through his window onto his bed, and Tesla recognized she was telling him she was dying. He says that before she died the most powerful beam of light he had ever seen came through her eyes almost blinding him. When the pigeon died Tesla said he no longer had the passion to pursue future inventions. Tesla died alone and in debt at age 86 in his two room apartment. A few months later, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Tesla was the sole inventor of radio.

Whatever one believes about the morality of sex and having children out of wedlock, the vast majority of people living in poverty in America are living in single-parent households. Children of unmarried single parents are many times more likely to drop out of school, suffer child abuse, commit suicide, and become hard core drug addicts than children of married parents. Today, almost 81% of children living with an unmarried single mother will live in poverty for the majority of their childhood as opposed to only 12% who live with married parents.