So we got a little hotel room tour. This is the bathroom. This is me in the bathroom. Welcome to Las Vegas. I can't believe I'm here. This is our bedroom. We're staying at the Bellagio. Signs close the curtains. That's depressing. This is what our hotel looks like from the outside. And yeah, we're just waiting for our luggage so that we can get changed and go out. Guys, it's 3pm. Signer and I slept in until now. Yeah, we're just coming out and it's so weird because it feels like the same as 12 hours ago. Like there's no day and night in Vegas really. Maybe it was a little bit more quiet but I feel like such a tourist. I'm just recording everything because it feels like a movie set. I know. We need to eat something because we're actually going... Look, there's one on my eye really shows the sweater. Yeah. We've got like this. We need to eat something because we're going to go watch the race. We're going to change our clothes now because we've got to eat because we have to be there for six. Guys, I am wearing this very risqué but also very vagus Christopher Asbert dress. What do you guys think? You look so beautiful. It's like a knit material. I'm not feeling my bag this outfit. It's white and then I'm not feeling it. Do you have another black bag? I have my black sparkly Cropani bag. Yeah, I think that all don't work. That won't go with your shoes. I'll leave my bag. Good afternoon. It is three o'clock and we are going for lunch now. We went to the race yesterday for qualifying and Shal came first. Yay. I'm happy about that. Lewis went out in Q2. So that was sad. Anyways, we had the most incredible time. I actually love the ambiance and the like energy in Vegas right now for the F1. It's actually really fun in my opinion. Now we're going to go have some Chinese food.  I didn't have any of my breakfast. So it's all here. That is why I am really, really hungry right now. So yeah, we're going to go have PF Changs because Saina really wants Chinese food as well. So yeah, off we go. Look at the view though. I haven't shown you the outside view of our hotel room. It's like the view of the pool down there. Which is quite cool.  You do have to go home now. Now to go earn back some money. Fortunate that we're not saying that we're going to earn back money in Vegas. The Shoei. The Shoei. I want a PF Changs as what I want. Aye, I have a little there. I'm excited. I'm so hungry. The view looks so good. Guys, I look like an absolute tramp because I've had one hour of sleep because as you saw last night after the race we celebrated Max Verstappen's win with Martin Garrix's secret set for Max. And like, I shook Max's hand. He was so lovely. Martin Garrix is my favourite DJ ever. He was the nicest human who complimented my outfit. Just the best, best, best time. This has been the most unforgettable trip of my life for so many reasons and so many experiences and so many people and I love Vegas.  If you're an S1 fan you can imagine how I feel after last night so I love you all so much and I will see you back in London.


It's well known that anesthesia can cause lung collapse and poor oxygenation in patients with obesity. Positive end expiratory pressure, or PEEP, helps keep alveoli open and improve ventilation during surgery. But the best method of applying PEEP remains controversial. Standardized PEEP levels are applied with the intent to ensure that alveoli stay open during surgery, but they may be too high or low for an individual patient and may therefore cause unintended lung damage that persists well after surgery. It's also unclear whether fixed or individualized PEEP leads to better outcomes. To find out, a recent study published in the journal Anesthesiology analyzed data from two trials on patients with obesity undergoing laparoscopic bariatric surgery. Researchers split the patients in the two trials into three groups, one with a low-fixed PEEP of 4 to 5 cm of water, one with recruitment maneuvers in a higher-fixed PEEP of 12 cm of water and one with recruitment maneuvers and individualized PEEP levels determined by electrical impedance tomography. The PEEP levels in the individualized group ranged from 10 to 26 cm of water, with a median of 18 cm of water. The results showed that tailoring PEEP levels to patients offered substantial benefits in terms of alveolar recruitment and lung function during surgery. Compared with the fixed PEEP approaches, the individualized PEEP strategy resulted in greater arterial oxygenation, lower driving pressures, and more tidal ventilation in the dependent lung. Notably, because these benefits did not persist after extubation, it's unclear whether the individualized strategy could reduce post-operative complications. The findings of this study are also applicable only to laparoscopic surgery in which 30-degree reverse Trandelenberg positioning is used and in which PEEP titration is performed before initiation of capnoparitoneum. Further research is needed to determine if the alveolar recruitment enabled by the individualized PEEP strategy can be preserved after extubation through various measures intended to prevent lung collapse. If so, using individualized PEEP rather than fixed PEEP may help improve pulmonary outcomes for patients with obesity who are undergoing bariatric surgery.


ac yn ymdegolol, o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r llun, o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r llun o'r rhan o'r hyn o'r teimlo cymaint o'r ddau o'r mhelyn o'r hefyd, Monty Python a'r Hwyllgor. Yn y cwrs, mae'n fydd yn ymgylch gyda'r sefyllfa cyllid yn yng Nghymru, yn ychydig o'r cyllid o'r cwrs, ychydig i gael y script fel y bydd ychydig, ystyried, ychydig i fyfyrwyr gyrdd y bydd ymrwynt. Ar fain o'r Ffyrwyd, ac mae'r cyffreddau am gyda'r ffyrwyr ac ond y cych yn ffordd o blaenau gyda'r bodys, o'r grwmau. Ac mae Arthy. Mae'r gwrthodd yn ddim yn ystafello i ddod oedd yn rwyf. Mae'r rhagor oedd yn ystafello i ddod oedd. Dwi'n dechrau'r ystafello i ddod ychydig i'r cyffreddau. I'm sanitising the script here for the benefit of the sensitive. From the searing intensity of Ingmar Bergman's 7th Seal, which of course is sending up, to the surreal humour of the pythons, the cinematic middle ages are all too often emerge smeared with filth and littered with garbage. And it's not just on the silver screen. Popular History, as exemplified in the fairly recent TV series Filthy Cities, a title which speaks for itself, presents a truly dismal picture of medieval urban life. It's hardly changed since the scholars and sanitary campaigners of Victorian England first addressed the topic. A representative example of their views may be found in The Coming of the Friars, a book of essays composed in 1890 for the popular market by the antiquary Augustus Jessup at 1889. He observed, and you can read the text yourself, that the sediment of the Tyne population in the Middle Ages was a dense slough of stagnant misery, squalor, famine, loathsome disease and dull despair, such as the worst slums of London, Liverpool or Paris in nothing of. What greatly added to the dreary wretchedness of the lower order in the times was the fact that ever-increasing throngs of beggars, outlaws and runaway ruffians were simply left to ffenn for themselves. The civil authorities took no account of them as they quietly rotted and died. Six years later, in 1895, the eminent physician, Sir George Newman, cited this very passage as evidence of the feculent conditions in which leprosy was bound to flourish, adding further embellishments of his own about the grim business of survival in a society, and I'm quoting here, which knew little of decency, cleanliness and order and was notable for its total neglect of all hygienic or sanitary laws. Now, I've quoted these remarks before in papers that I've given on this topic and make no apology for doing so again since the assumption that late medieval men and women remained indifferent to matters of public health and that plague 38 simply will not die. Indeed, a belief that English magistrates in particular were completely supine in the face of epidemic disease and that their only response lay in prayer and penitence still lingers on today even in academic circles. For example, Professor Oliver Dicto has recently argued that the dramatic shift from a high pressure to a low pressure model of human population across northern Europe during the mid-16th century can be explained in terms of the first stirrings of medical and sanitary progress. In other words, numbers began to rise as pragmatism triumphed over superstition and he writes, it's evident that a key factor in this transition was the great change in the understanding of infectious diseases which began at the end of the 15th century or perhaps slightly later. Please bear those dates in mind. Now, instead of simply being fatalistically comprehended as a divine punishment for human sin, communicable disease began to be seen as a natural phenomenon, one that could be prevented, limited or haunted by human countermeasures, even though the transmission of diseases was still understood in terms of the classical notion of miasma, that's corrupt air. Now, this attitude seems especially surprising in view of the fact that from the 1920s onwards scholars who'd worked closely on medieval records began seriously to question these Victorian assumptions. It was in 1928 that the author of a magisterial History of Medieval Science, Lynn Thorndyke, issued his memorable appeal in the journal Speculum for less mudslinging and more facts, which is part of my title tonight, where pre-modern public health was concerned. And his revisionist agenda was taken up in the following decade by E.L. Sobine, with a trio of important articles, again in Speculum, that cast medieval London in a very different and much cleaner light, doctored in specific times and cities such as London, Hull, Salisbury and York, while others have addressed such specific issues in the provision of water and the condition of the streets. What's now needed, I think, is a more interdisciplinary and integrated approach to these findings, which brings together archaeological and environmental and historical sources in the context of late medieval, medical and religious beliefs. These in turn need to be understood from a contemporary perspective, a medieval perspective, free from the condescension of posterity. I hope to demonstrate the value of this approach today by focusing on Norwich, which is unusually blessed with source material, and which also helps us to understand why the ideas advanced by Augustus Jessup, and here he is, and his associates have proved so very tenacious, that these men should have formed such a negative view of the Middle Ages is entirely understandable. They were, after all, products of the culture which passed, and I'm quoting, in the revealing light of science, and tended as a result to disparage those unfortunates who, in Jessup's words, are foretime warped in darkness. We should also remember that Jessup was a Norwich man, and that his judgmentism historian was clearly overshadowed by his own personal experience of the devastating impact of the Industrial Revolution upon one of the economic backwaters of Victoria in England. It's surely no coincidence that the Norwich of his youth ranked as one of the most insanitary provincial cities in England, with an infant mortality rate slightly higher than those of Manchester Leeds in Liverpool, but with none of their prosperity. It was, in the words of one observer, in that painful state of transition from a once flourishing manufacturing prosperity to entire decline, a decline marked by poverty, deprivation and neglect. Dysent she was endemic, colour and smallpox rife, prompting one of today's leading demographers to describe Victoria in Norwich, and I'm quoting, as a hotbread of squalor, disease and premature mortality. It's a rather sanitary of that particular dismal area of the city on the banks of the River Wensham. The desperate state of the slum housing in this area was vividly described in 1849 during a campaign for sanitary reform mounted by the morning chronicle. Neglect and decay are now conspicuous in the streets and quarters occupied by the working classes, it reported. The poor lived in the twilight of narrow, filthy alleys, closed yards and dilapidated buildings whose conditions were cramped and unhygienic. As in Mayhew's London, it was, and I'm quoting, next to impossible for a person not born in the place to navigate this murky, miasmatic underworld. And here, again, sort of slightly cleaned up, this is a later version, is what the housing was like. The ghettos were called holes, and in words that were replicated verbatim by Jessup in a medieval context, the author noted that many are to be found in the lower parts of the city, a butting on the river where the ground is constantly damp and moist, where heaps of filth and garbage, open bins and privies, decaying vegetable and other matters are constantly contaminating by their offensive malaria, the unwholesome atmosphere in which the wretched inhabitants live. So, despite the many approving references to its clean, well-paved streets, sophisticated water supply and fresh air made by 17th century visitors, there was a growing consensus on the part of the Victorians that Norwich must always have been filthy. And that's the quotation from The Morning Chronicle, which gives us such a grim picture. And those words are transposed back by Jessup into the Middle Ages. This, I love, this is Cunningham's map. He was a physician showing a very healthy medieval city according to Hippocratic ideas of health, facing westwards with wonderfully fresh breezes. And you can note it's depicted as clean, healthy environment, quite the antithesis of what Jessup describes. The presumption of squalor, though, was reinforced by an excoriating report of 1851, commissioned by the Board of Health on the infamously bad sanitary conditions which still blighted the city. William Lee, the superintendent inspector, was horrified by many things, but saved his most withering condemnation for the water supply, which he pronounced very bad and very defective, bad in quantity, bad in quality, and bad in everything that should constitute a water supply. And this was partly due to the fact that sanitary provision was even worse. In Lee's uncompromising words, the city upon the whole would be about as well off or better without any drainage at all. But, as a good Victorian progressive, Lee was determined to prove some or provide a sense of context and began with a graphic account of the ravages of disease in former times, which had been, of course, much, much worse, and to have been occasioned by even higher levels of urban squalor. And he rammed home the point by citing grossly inflated mortality figures of 57,374, besides religious and beggars, sustained in Norwich during the first months of the Black Death, which he misdated. And so, in light of these statistics and his terrible report, you can see why Jessup takes the tone he does when describing Norwich in the 13th century. The actual death rate during the Black Death is impossible to establish, but it was clearly far lower than Lee's estimate. Norwich's population slumped from around 25,000 in the 1330s to fewer than 8,000 in the 1370s. That's during the period which saw the first three major outbreaks of plague in East Anglia. Other factors besides disease explain this dramatic fall, but it's clear that pestilins still cut a swath through the populace. But was the city really in as bad a state as Lee believed? Elizabeth Rutledge has documented high levels of overcrowding among the immigrant day labourers who flooded into Norwich looking for work in the aftermath of the early 14th century famines. Their living conditions were often cramped and dirty, but it was a constituent in which infectious diseases such as TB, typhus, malaria and even leprosy could spread. But we should be wary of assuming that the entire city was submerged under a sea of filth, or that the ruling elite was indifferent to the need for sanitary regulation. Not surprisingly, the Black Death gave rise to a significant amount of economic and social dislocation, prompting the crime to write harshly in 1351 to Norwich's magistrates, ordering them to put the unemployed to work cleaning the streets, which had been rendered hazardous by piles of filth and broken paving. Similar letters were dispatched to the citizens of London. In both cases drawing attention to the fact that under normal circumstances thoroughfares were kept admirably clear of garbage and that acceptable standards of hygiene had been maintained. Three years later the Norwich authorities themselves took steps to deal with the unacceptable number of stray dogs and swine roaming at large. This too was a public health measure occasioned by the dramatic consequences of sudden mortality and again underscores the fact that normal patterns of life had dramatically broken down and note the streets were already paved. Although it staged an economic revival thanks to a well-timed shift into cloth production and was thus considerably better off than most late medieval English cities, Norwich couldn't escape the ongoing ravages of epidemic disease and continued to suffer repeatedly from both local and national outbreaks of pestilence until the 17th century. These outbreaks are reflected in the city's art. Here the one surviving panel from a set of panels of stained glasses in St Andrews Church depicting the dance of death. Death here sees as a bishop which was considered suitable to survive the reformation the rest were destroyed. Underscoring the presence of death in the city. This wonderful painting of Robert Janis, Alderman of Norwich, which is taken from a stained glass window in the Guildhall now lost, again with death. The point to bear in mind is underneath the glass originally was a set of verses pointing out that if you wish to seek a memorial like Janis you must invest in public works. Because, as we shall see, the repeated experience of pestilence had a significant impact upon levels of sanitary provision and anxiety about health hazards, which increased exponentially after every outbreak. It is, however, important to stress that much of the grindwork had already been laid, not least by the Franciscans, about his living conditions, Jessup had been so gloomy. Here we have a map of the water system of Norwich and the Franciscan Friary is just here. Being a new convert technology I tend to go rather mad with the arrows but the Franciscan Friary is here. Whoops, sorry, let's go back. On a cocky or stream going into the River Wensum. Here's the River Wensum going round the city. The Friar's initial home was indeed rather marshy but a recently published excavation report by the Norfolk Archaeology Unit on the permanent site to which they soon repaired has revealed an extremely sophisticated scheme of water management. This is clearly planned as part, an integral part of the claustral layout and included no fewer than 11 wells, a network of lead and ceramic piping and an impressive system of brick and flint lined underground drains the cheap of which ran into this daling fleet stream and into the river. I'm very grateful to Mr Brian Ayers for this slide. Thank you Brian. The sewerage system, this system was clean, there was no deposits when it was excavated. The system was constructed to allow regular flushing with clean piped water to prevent blockages or the deposit of offensive matter. This is a partial reconstruction of the water system with wells, settling tanks and machinery for flushing out this drain to avoid the buildup of miasmatic airs which were believed to spread disease. The grain friars were not unusual in this regard. Informd by the growing corpus of literals which occupied a prominent place in their libraries, religious houses throughout the city and indeed throughout England invested heavily in the construction of sewers designed to prevent these dangerous accumulations of waste while ensuring a regular supply of fresh water. Excavation has also disclosed part of a massive medieval drain serving the latrines of the infirmary at the Benedictine Priory just north of the Franciscans. It was made as you can see here of flint and mortar, almost a metre thick with a barrel vault over two metres high, arched in cairn stone. The entire drainage system, at least part of which dated back to the 12th century, may have extended for as far as 500 metres so that again it could flow into the river. And even again to the north of the cathedral, this map is not to scale, the little hospital of St Giles to the north on the bend of the River Wensum had from the 1270s onwards piped water, partly because the marshy site was unsuitable for sinking wells. But not all improvements were ecclesiastical. Significantly, in his lengthy catalogue of Norwich's 19th century shortcomings, Lee drew particular attention to the absence of any public measures for the removal of refuse or the repair of the rudimentary sewerage system, to the accumulation of stagnant waste in open drains and to the proliferation of noisome slaughterhouses resulting in the sale of contaminated meat. A very relevant topic. Yet all of these abuses have been subject to stringent regulation before the Black Death. And it's upon these specific issues that I propose to concentrate in the rest of this talk. These are patterns of zoning in early 14th century, late 13th century Norwich. And if we focus for a moment upon the slaughterhouses and the butchers, we can see that they're all relegated to a ridge to the south of the city.  On this high ground, there was plenty of grazing land, easy access to the river for waste disposal, downstream of more densely populated areas and a strong breeze to dispel the myosomatic air, which was believed to spread plague. And this rather delightful early 18th century engraving shows you this is looking at Norwich from the north. There's the Great Hospital, there's the cathedral. That would have been the friary. And there's the best, there's the ridge where the butchers were situated. And they dumped their waste into the river here. Of course, it went down the river to Brundle, but they weren't concerned about the people who lived in Brundle. And I think it is important. This is an Italian image to point out here that butchery was something which really concentrated the minds of urban authorities in the Middle Ages throughout Europe, because it's seen as a particular source of myosomatic air. And one of the things authorities are particularly keen to do is to prevent butchering in a city where meat is actually being sold. So just like the Victorians, late medieval men and women were convinced that epidemic disease was spread by contaminated air. And notably that arising from butchery, dung heaps, overflowing privies, rubbish tips, stagnant water and other sources of urban pollution. And just like the Victorians, they took active steps to eliminate these hazards to the best of their ability, based upon the Hippocratic principles of air, water and situation. These texts were known and understood in the Middle Ages. That Norwich might ever have been cleaner or that the corporation might once have played a more dynamic role in the struggle to protect the health of its inhabitants, nonetheless seemed unimaginable to right-thinking Victorian sanitarians who still today cast such a long shadow over writing about urban standards of living. And it's not just the Victorians that influenced our attitudes to public health in medieval England. Although, as Derek Keane has observed, English writers were from the 12th century onwards avidly extolling the virtues of their native tyons and cities, Italians, such as Leonardo Bruni, have effectively stolen the show. His panagiric to the unique virtues of Florence, composed in 1402, is this way into most histories of the Renaissance. It seems to me, it looks pretty cramped to me, but it seems to me that Florence is so clean and neat that no other city could be cleaner. He boasted in a celebrated passage, which has, until recently, been taken at face value, the challenge more recently by Professor John Henderson, who's here tonight. The assumption that England lagged centuries behind Italy with regard to the introduction of sanitary legislation has become an enchanted orthodoxy, reinforced by a conviction that, from 1348 onwards, English urban communities remain supine and helpless in the face of plague. In their survey of environmental law in medieval Italy, Zucco and Lores, for example, contrast the measures taken for street cleaning in relation of nuisances as early as the 13th century in times such as Bergamo and Bologna, with the apparent ignorance and indifference of North European magistrates. Does this unflattering comparison really hold true? Setting aside the fact that Siena did not regulate its butchers to the urban periphery until the 1450s, we can, I think, make a pretty convincing case and this case hinges in part upon the nature of late medieval urban custom and of urban record keeping. The fact that English cities did not establish boards of health on the Italian model or keep special books recording sanitary measures does not mean that such measures were not taken. One simply has to search for the evidence in different places. Norwich is earliest surviving leap rose which date from 1287, confirm that local courts or wardmoots were anxious to name, shame and punish residents whose behaviour posed a hazard to public health and this shows you the city breakdown in towards each of which had their own court and it's here at this level that sanitary cases are investigated or breaches of sanitary regulation. In that year alone, 1287, at least seven people were accused of obstructing waterways or contaminating them with sewage and in 1288, 20 more came to notice for the illicit dumping of waste. Repeated references to the great corruption of the air to the endangerment of human life, occasioned by such nuisances, demonstrate a keen awareness of miasma theory long before the first outbreak of plague through the dangers of stagnant water and noxious odours into such sharp relief. As well as condemning practices which they personally found jurors who made these presentments were responding to lists of prohibited nuisances compiled by local magistrates and indeed by central government at Westminster. Prominent among the latter was a comprehensive composizio or synthesis of measures concerning the quality and inspection of consumables drawn up in 1275 by Edward I. Into Alia, these ordinances imposed heavy penalties on the vendors of swine's flesh, measled, that's lepros, or flesh dead of the marine. It doesn't say anything about horse meat. These composizios are keen to regulate the quality of meat being sold in the butcher stalls and other marketplaces of medieval England, particularly keen on contaminated meat. Between 1287 and 1289, for instance, Norwich courts do attention to four sellers of infected bacon and two of measly pork. Dealers in the flesh of dead animals passed off as sound, retailers of unwholesome veal and all those spoused men who sold contaminated pork along with dodgy sausages and puddings unfit for human consumption. They indicted other officials for retailing flesh condemned as unfit and most of all the cooks and pie-bakers who reheat their wares, they were fined six bansige, recalcifactors, people who reheat. It's a contra-deaning sell by dates, really. They are the bane of magistrate's life. Many of you will know Chawson's description of the cook in his fly bone premises, with a saw on his leg, and this is a constant theme in medieval sanitary legislation. I don't know about you, but I would be reluctant to purchase food from those two. It's a sort of greasy spoon, I think, or kebab shop. As time passed and the enormity of such offences became even more apparent, the penalties rose. Members of this audience will, of course, be aware that diet was regarded as the first instrument of medicine during the Middle Ages, and crucially that the ingestion of substandard food was believed to destabilise the humours, thereby making an individual vulnerable to plague. And here's the science bit. This is a body map of 1292 showing how you ingest food. Cooked in the stomach goes to the liver where it's turned into humeral matter and is then transported through the venous system to feed the body. And it's believed that if this food is corrupt, then the body will be not only made ill, but also more vulnerable to the miasmus of plague. As one physician writes, the fire will only break out where matter is combustible, and this, of course, is well known to urban magistrates. And in extreme cases, there was the generation of disease-bearing miasmus to consider. One of the first measures enacted in Venice when the plague struck in 1348 was for the removal of infected pork, which creates a great stench of attendant putrefaction that corrupts the air. From this date onwards, in Norwich, confiscated meat would be publicly burnt in the middle of the marketplace as a terrible lesson to potential offenders. And it's at this date that Norwich Market is divided into rows where you have the butchers, the fishmongers and all the other food sellers, so they can be more effectively patrolled by the clerks and sergeants of the market, like modern-day food inspectors. And one of their tasks from the 1470s onwards was to ensure that nobody who worked in the local leper hospitals touched the meat that was on sale. It's interesting to note that butchers who were stuffing carcasses with foul cloths and other vile stuff to make them look plumper were not only accused of causing a great increase of diseases, but also besmerching the good name of the city. So just as in Italy, appearances, virtue and reputation really mattered. And the people who were guilty of these offences were put in the pillory at the market cross, and in some instances they had to inhale the fumes of what's burnt below them. The quality of the water supply was equally important, not just because contaminated water caused sickness, but because flooding itself a recurrent hazard in medieval times like Norwich was directly associated in the period with the stagnant water and pools of rotting debris that bred the miasmas of plague. And I've put up for you here an extract from the kind of book that was owned by urban magistrates in the late 15th century. It's Thomas Forestier's vernacular manual of 1485 on the avoidance of sweating sickness, but it's actually pinched from John of Burgundy's play tract. And it explains that pestilence comes of an open cause, a stinking carrion cast in the water night as cities or towns. And the corruption of prithys of this, the water is corrupt. And when his meat is boiled and drink made of this water, many sickness is gendered in man's body. And also of the casting of stinking water and many other foul things in the streets, the air is corrupt. And let the emphasis on smell and the keeping of stinking waters in houses or in kitchens long time. And then in night of those things, vapours are lift up into the air, the witch doth infect the substance of the air by the witch substance of the air corrupt and infect men to die suddenly going by the streets or by the way. Of the witch things that every man that loves God and his neighbour amend. And note that emphasis on God and his neighbour. And then returning back to the science bit, another body map. These are the arteries. Air is inhaled through the nose, mixed with arterial blood, sorry, in the heart and lungs, and then transported along the arteries. And this corrupt air could have a terrible effect on the natural thermostat of the body, spreading corruption and causing plague. And so there is an underlying scientific rationale for these ideas. Even so, for some historians, nothing illustrates the backwardness of English cities so much as the presumed inadequacies of the water system Richard Holt's rather grudging survey of provision in English medieval towns published in 2000 led him to conclude that urban authorities were indifferent if not hostile to the need for improvements. This he pointed out with some asperity was in marked contrast to the situation in Italy, which was clearly light years ahead in terms of the extent and sophistication of its supply. The fact is that in many cases the fact that he did not mention about 95% of the available examples, including Exeter's spectacular pipe water system, which runs through these stone-lined tunnels, and one I really rather do like, King's Linn, and these show the pipes and conduits available in the early 16th century, rather diminishes the force of his argument. In fact, most English towns of any size by this date have got piped water systems. King's Linn, by the way, is reconstructed from the Hall books. Norwich was in fact one of the very few English cities that didn't boast a piped water system, being so liberally blessed with fresh water streams that it didn't need to spend much-needed resources on pipes until 1582, by which date the population had risen dramatically. Here is the first pump put in by Robert Gibson in 1582, and you can see how dilapidated it had become by the Victorian period. Instead, the city relies on wells and the system of cockies. These are the little dotted lines, which are the natural streams running through the city. These are directed through stone-lined gutters or culverts. Great care was taken to see that these were maintained and the adjoining streets were kept free of garbage and noxious waste. The continuous process of cleaning, scarring and repairing the cockies and adjacent latrines demanded a remarkable degree of collaboration, some being the responsibility of the municipality and some of neighbouring householders. But affluent citizens might undertake to finance specific projects as a charitable work. Yet with a few notable exceptions, which invariably coincided with periods of unrest or epidemics, this system functioned effectively, disproving the widely held view that medieval sanitary measures were inherently unworkable because of their heavy dependence upon individual co-operation. Medieval Norwich had clearly signed up to the big society. It was harder to bridge to the river Wensum, against which the authorities waged a persistent battle. At first the elite courts took the lead in presenting offenders, who were fined for such unacceptable behaviour as stowing carcasses into water courses, leaving offensive muckieps and polluting the river with industrial waste. But naming and shaming at a local level was clearly not enough. In the 1380s draconian fines of 20 shillings for each offence, along with loss of freedom or expulsion from Norwich, were threatened for any breach of the regulations about dumping. Although in practice a more realistic but still heavy sum of six and eight pence was the norm, and please bear in mind this is 20 days work by a master mason, so it's no small sum. In 1459, in the aftermath of an epidemic, measures were first introduced for the regular removal of all muck and filth from the river bank by boat. It's a two-tonne boat, a two-tonne draught, so it's large. Earlier ad hoc efforts to force all those who live by the river to cleanse it themselves or to pay labourers to do so were thus abandoned in favour of a permanent official solution that integrated sanitary measures right across the city. By 1468, one official committee focused upon the state of the streets and gutters, while another was specifically concerned with the cleanliness of the river and its environs. It was then decreed by the mayor's court that the city should be repaved at the expense of individual householders in order to facilitate waste removal and drainage. The road surfaces were to be levelled and paved in such a way that the water will fall in future, running down to the lowest part of the street as far as the gutters call the cockies and then to the river, so they were carefully sloped to facilitate the removal of waste. Initiatives of this kind inevitably followed epidemics, which, as we have seen, were attributed with faultless logic to foul air and brackish water. Without much in the way of infrastructure to sustain them, their success depended upon corporate and communal vigilance. Since the commissioners faced a heavy fine of tuppans a day for neglecting their duties, they were nothing if not meticulous, assiduously noting offences such as the keeping of noisful and very noisful privies, gutters and drains, the casting up of muck and the diversion of water for industrial purposes. Communal measures such as the leveeing of specific rates to clean the river and for the weekly removal of waste by cart rather than water helped further to ameliorate the problems of inner city life. I can assure you that my waste is now removed once a fortnight, so we have gone backwards. So too, and I think this is wonderful, the decision to make the mayor personally liable to the tune of five pounds for any protracted problems with the river, an ingenious stratagem that we might profitably consider worth reviving today. The appointment of a salaried raker and the purchase of two common carts for the avoiding of filthy and vile matter in the early 16th century helped to earn Norwich its growing reputation as an orderly and hygienic city through whose thoroughfares and waterways were kept clean by means, and I'm quoting, of diverse good and godly acts and ordinances. According to the mayor and corporation, and they are of course biased, these innovations have not only been a great ease and helpful commodity to the inhabitants, but also a goodly beautifying and an occasion that diverse visitors having access to the city from far and strange places have much commended and praised the same and the magistrates for the maintenance thereof. And here is one of the magistrates, Robert Gardner, who died in 1508, mayor of this mass, Comry City, who is a civic artist comodicime, who helped to pay for the new cross and the gutters. Gardner belonged to a long line of wealthy philanthropists who sank their money into schemes for communal health and the amelioration of the city for spiritual as well as pragmatic reasons, and this is why I stressed religion at the start of my lecture. Significantly, after the Black Death, investment in public utilities was increasingly regarded as an extension of the seven comfortable works and therefore a benefit to the donor's immortal soul, as well as the physical health. George Osborne's problems would be solved in an instant if we could bring back the doctrine of purgatory. As the threat of fire on Brimstone is far greater inducement to charitable giving than a few pounds in tax relief. And we can see here how arms giving, whoops, sorry, I'm always doing this, I'll just go back, the giving of arms here and hearing of masses, but the giving of arms means that you are wenched up from purgatory towards heaven, which is a wonderful concept, isn't it? The list of charitable donations made by Norwich Desitators is a very long one, and I'm going to conclude by giving just a few examples to disprove the impression that it's just pious window dressing and to show how these works tie in, how these gifts tie in with the comfortable works depicted here, which Christ enjoined his followers to perform in order to achieve salvation. John Gilbert, Mayor of Norwich in 1519 took a broad view of compassion for the thirsty, giving drink to the thirsty, by instructing his executors to spend £50 on scheme for removing muck and fill from the River Wensum, which was a source of drinking water for some. From Alderman Ralph Segrim came no less than £133 for a similar purpose. Thomas Aldrich, another member of the Audermanic Bench, left £40 for the sick poor of the city, that was to feed them, giving them bread, and an identical sum to clean up the streets. Elizabeth Thorsby kept the muck cart going with a donation of £10, and it's listed next to a gift to the nuns of Cairo, which I think is very interesting. Alderman Thomas Hemming presented the corporation with two acres of land outside St Jars's Gate for the disposal of rubbish, while Edmund Wood bequeathed £100 for street cleaning after the Manor of London. They like to model themselves on London. And there's a sense here that these works are continuing the seven basic works described by Christ and will lead to the salvation of the donor. And at the same time, members of the Civic Elite were expected to contribute personally to relief funds during times of hardship when grain was scarce. In the 1520s, for instance, every Auderman voluntary donated 20 combs of wheat to serve the people, and this is during a period of famine. And although Norwich didn't have a granary like London's Leidenhall until the 1530s, from the early 14th century, provision was made for the purchase of emergency grain supplies and the sale of subsidised bread to the populace during food shortages, again giving bread. Initiatives of this kind were a matter of civic pride and economic necessity, as well as public health and Christian compassion. Fear of bread riots and popular unrest was clearly a powerful motive for escorting these up-and-handed measures. We should also bear in mind that Norwich's prosperity depended upon the trade that conveys goods to and from its outport at Yarmouth. And in this respect, the Wensom functioned as a venous system for the nourishment of the commercial organs. And like any venous system, it needed regular phlebotomy to remain healthy. By the same token, the tanners, line burners, smiths, dios, fullers and practitioners of other noxious trades might be compared to the less exalted parts of the human body and might perform an embarrassing function but was still essential for survival. Yet there was clearly a toll to pay, and by the beginning of the 16th century, the authorities were moving towards what we would call an environmental tax, so that all such great noyos of the same river would be further charged than any other person's shall be when rates were levied for cleaning the Wensom. Norwich is outstanding medieval and early modern archives and archaeological findings. Ffarnish a plethora of similar examples, which suggests that, once they exceeded accepted levels in sanitary behaviour and endemic pollution were regarded as both dangerous and antisocial, as well as un-Christian. Ffarn from being tolerated as an inevitable feature of urban life, they were clearly defined as nuisances to be eliminated by a combination of in and communal action. Lacking the technological expertise and scientific knowledge that we today take for granted, their efforts were inevitably circumscribed and didn't overwork. But I think that we can nonetheless agree that the march of sanitary progress from a time of darkness to the golden age of bacteriology as the chapter headings of one early 20th century medical textbook suppose may well have followed a less direct, but much more interesting route. Thank you.


There's a lot of information about MSG out there. How do you know what to believe? Hey there, NJRoot22.com here with another low carb keto carnivore chat and this time it's about MSG monosodium glutamate and I just want to let you know that there's a whole lot of information out there about this stuff You got to maybe half the stuff or more talking about how bad it is for you Then you have other half saying there's no big deal. It's naturally occurring and so on and so on There are two kinds of MSG. There's the ones that the kind of MSG that's in naturally in some food We won't get into which ones you'll probably figure it out or already know and then there's artificially or chemically produced MSG which is used as a flavor enhancer in foods and sauces and so on the reason I bring this I mean It's mostly Asian food as far as we know and of course a Chick-fil-A Don't get all mad at me for saying it but I stopped eating a Chick-fil-A the minute I realized why I liked it so much There's MSG in it and the reason I'm bringing this up today is because one of my most respected research doctors and psycho Obsessive health personalities out there dr. Peter Atia Recently wrote a couple months ago an article about how it's no big deal And it's nothing it doesn't do anything bad to you So he said in his article and he quoted research studies from the who you know what that stands for and I kind of I put a comment on the guy's site saying that I don't really Like this article because you're ignoring what everybody is saying about it for us The reason we don't like MSG for this It's for the sole reason that I know for a fact when I eat it in whatever kinds of foods Usually Thai food zero-carb Thai food and I eat like there's no tomorrow eat like I just got out of a prison camp Hadn't seen food in 60 days. It's bizarre And I don't like the fact that I don't really have control over what I eat or at least I don't think I do it's just I eat like a robot and I think a lot of people call it an Excitotoxin and it also turns off your ability to Say that you're full your body doesn't send that signal that you've had enough to eat How do I know what to believe is what happens to me when I eat it now other people get insomnia Apparently in China insomnia is a national problem like 90% of the people have trouble sleeping I don't know if it's the fact that they live in China or it's the fact that they're eating all sorts of spicy noodles And so on I don't know for sure because I don't live there and other people get all sorts of dietary issues Digestive issues and and all sorts of shaky nervous system problems So I believe what I feel when I eat it and I know sometimes when I'm eating food that I didn't prepare myself That there might be something fishy in the ingredients and you can tell by how you eat and what what happens to you Just you kind of almost lose your mind So believe yourself don't believe any of the studies whether they're for or against what you think you believe Tell me how you feel after not eat nothing but meat plain unseasoned meat for 60 days and try some some MSG in fact I want to mention they have this salt at the supermarket called accent salt and that has MSG in it I'd love I don't know if I'd want to volunteer for this but have somebody make you a dozen mini meatballs with MSG And a dozen mini meatballs without and have them serve to them to you at different times without telling you what's in them You'll know which ones have MSG because you can't stop eating them. That's it if you like this video Please hit the bell and subscribe and I'll see you next time


Hello everybody. Happy day 24 of the challenge. Of course today is Thanksgiving here in America. So happy Thanksgiving to all of the Americans and happy friendsgiving to all of our friends in other countries who don't celebrate this holiday and to all the Americans who are perhaps stationed in other countries for work. I want to extend a very special Thanksgiving out to you multiple times, multiple thanksgivings I have either been in Europe or in India. And I know how it can kind of sting a little bit when you're not in a country that celebrates the holiday and you know all of your friends or family and family are back home celebrating today. So I wanted to extend a very heartfelt, happy Thanksgiving, especially to every person out there who is not able to participate in this holiday that is very American and a holiday that is part of our culture. With that being said, I did, as I told you guys yesterday, I did put Thanksgiving into the challenge. So let's go back and look at this again. And so my hope was especially for our friends who are not Americans, sorry, I'm trying to drag the screen over and it's not letting me drag. Anyway, for our friends who are not Americans, I was hoping that by observing this, you would be able to kind of be more informed for the holidays coming up because globally for us in the Western world, we do have Christmas coming up soon. And so that's a really big holiday. And even though holidays are fun and exciting, it can be very, very, very stressful as well. And so especially since this whole great awakening started. So I wanted to incorporate our friends who are not Americans into this as well, just to help have some preparation for the holidays that are to come. So for Thursday, November 24th, happy Thanksgiving. Again, I will reiterate this day, like many holidays might require you to get up extra early to get your work out and journaling in. Please know that many people across the country are joining you at dark 30, as we say in Ashtonka, to do their workout to keep themselves sane for the holiday. So I was up at four this morning. A lot of people get up super early to start cooking. Did you guys, were you able to get up even earlier to get your workout in before you started to cook or perhaps had to travel today to get to your family's house, your parents' house, or your grandparents' house, or aunt and uncle's house. I know a lot of people get up really early in the morning to drive long hours to get to their, the patriarch or the matriarch of their family's houses. I'm going to be at my aunt's house today in a little while. I'm going to head out to her house. So were you able to work the workout in because this is super important. And as I say the next paragraph, if you have never gotten up early on a holiday to exercise, then this will be a new experience and challenge for you. I asked that you will try to try real hard not to skip your workout this morning. Today we'll have less challenges due to the holiday but your exercise is top priority, not just for your sanity but also for your digestive system. Now since there is a lot of eating at Thanksgiving, a lot of casseroles, a lot of rich, heavy foods that we typically don't eat anytime except the holidays, the exercise is going to really help your digestive system get the blood pumping in the morning before you start to ingest all that food. And so that's another, another really important, important reason to make sure you do work out the morning of Thanksgiving. Make your bed up. If you have to eat later than 7 p.m. today, that's okay. We want to be flexible on holidays, especially if you've been really good about that up till now. It's okay to be a little bit flexible on a holiday. And so your choices are either sweat into the oldies kickboxing or yoga. You want the five minute cold shower and then try to do 15 minutes of the on meditation to really help ground you. If you are celebrating Thanksgiving today, please don't worry about food journaling. I don't want you to stress about it today, especially if you've been food journaling this whole time. You now have a better idea of what foods are good for you and what foods are not good for you. But for a holiday, I just want you to relax and not worry about journaling your food. If you're not American and you want a journal totally fine, but at Christmas time, I would suggest the same to everybody. Don't worry about journaling. All right, for food, but journaling for your emotions, I do want you to do that. But don't worry about the food journal. All right, so journal questions to ask yourself, did you have to get up extra early to exercise? How to taking the time to exercise and meditate help you navigate the day? Did the exercise help your digestion? Were there any uncomfortable situations you were in today? How did it go? Did you handle these situations differently because of the work you're doing on yourself? If you're not an American, did you get to have a meal with friends? How did it go? If you're not American, how did reading this challenge for the Americans inform you for the next holiday you have to experience? What did you observe from this? You might stay up later than 10 p.m. tonight and that's okay. Allow yourself to have fellowship and community with your friends and family. Tomorrow you can observe how this day affects you. So let's go ahead and talk about tomorrow, the 25th day of Friday, November 25th. You might feel a little hungover today from all the food and maybe from the alcohol. Food hangovers to me are worse than alcohol hangovers. So start observing that if there are foods that make you feel hungover. Maybe you weren't aware of that before now that foods can actually make you have a hangover too. Alcohol is not something I've addressed in this challenge as this is something that is on a person by person basis and can be used in moderation. It is up to each individual to figure out what works for him or her with alcohol. I still do drink. I don't drink daily. I only really drink at holidays. So maybe I drink maybe two or three times a year. And that's because I do work out so much. And I work all the time. I'm a very hard worker. So I am not someone that drinks daily. If you do and you can handle it, that's totally fine. But if you're someone that thinks that alcohol is just a no-no for you, totally fine too. That is totally up to you. So let me read that again. You might feel a little hungover today from the food and maybe from the alcohol. Alcohol is not something I've addressed in this challenge as this is something that is on a person by person basis and can be used in moderation. It is up to each individual to figure out what works for him or her with alcohol. However, food can definitely cause a hangover, especially if you're eating foods that you're not used to eating on a daily basis. This is not something to be upset about if this is something you only experience the day after a holiday. So don't worry about it if you have that one day after a holiday where you have a bit of a food hangover, it's no big deal. Getting more in touch with your body will also make you more aware of how your body is reacting to food. Totally, that's the subtle body response. Today we are going to work with this to help you explore more. Make your bed up. Your last meal should be between five and seven PM, no snacking after seven PM. This allows you your digestive system at least 12 hours to rest in between dinner and breakfast. If you're feeling bloated or hungover from food, do not do yoga today. With an impacted colon, you could bruise your internal organs. Instead, do the 45-minute bar or 45-minute kickboxing to help flush yourself from the day before. So it's super important if you are bloated or if you feel like you haven't properly gone to the bathroom since eating all these rich foods.  So I want you instead to do the bar or the kickboxing, something really sweaty to help flush your system, if that makes sense. If you're absolutely too hungover to exercise, you can switch out today's exercise challenge with tomorrow, making today your rest day. Because of my disposition, normally the day after a holiday, I typically will rest. I will typically give my body an opportunity to rest because I know how my body is with food, especially if I'm eating foods that I'm not used to eating. Okay, and so that is absolutely up to you. If you want to make your rest day this week, Friday instead of Saturday, you can totally switch the days. Totally up to you. Some people find it helpful to get right back into the exercise after a holiday. That's absolutely fine too, just whatever works for you. So you can either do the 45 minute kickboxing or the yoga or the bar. All right, during your morning shower, try to make the water cold for the last five minutes of your shower, then do some Reiki meditation, especially post Thanksgiving, especially if you had some stressful situations with family and friends or very digestive systems a little week, please do some other Reiki with Emmy to help, again, move the energy. If you are off work today and have time, especially if you dealt with these intense family situations yesterday, take the time to also do sound bowl healings. I know a lot of Americans are off now until like Monday. Thanksgiving is a really big holiday here in the United States. So we have a lot of people had yesterday off as well, Wednesday off as well. Usually you have like Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and of course the week and off for the holiday. So if you're off of work tomorrow as an American, I would really take the time to do the Reiki and the sound bowl healing just to kind of help you process every every emotion you felt on Thursday because you know, in one day, you can have many emotions, you can be stressed out, you can be excited, you can experience joy, you can experience anger, you can experience anxiety. And that's sometimes what these holidays are, they can be kind of a clusterfuck of all sorts of different emotions. And so I really want you to take Friday as a priority to really rebalance yourself and take care of yourself from all the that you experienced the day before. So Friday, you're back to journaling again. I want you to notice something if you ate a lot Thursday, do you feel even more hungry on Friday? Because sometimes that happens like the less we eat, the more we watch what we eat, the less hungry we get. And then when we binge eat the next day, our stomach is high. It's a weird sensation. So I want you to really watch that tomorrow. All right journaling for tomorrow. If you were up past 10 p.m. and eight past 7 p.m. yesterday, how did it affect your sleep? So now's a good time to observe what we were doing in this challenge where we were going to bed before 10. And we stopped to eat, we stopped eating before seven. And so now your body's gotten the rhythm of having that time to recuperate to heal to sleep. And yesterday that you got thrown off because of the holiday. So observe how you're feeling, how what differences do you notice now is there an observation that you didn't notice before the challenge. And now you're starting to see how the body reacts to different sleeping patterns, different eating patterns, because it's all about energy, right? Eating, sleeping, everything is about energy. Can you explain the differences in how you felt before this challenge to timing ever into your mind when you ate? How is not eating after 7 p.m. changed your life? How is going to bed before 10 p.m. changed your life? Was Thanksgiving a good tester to see how these steps in the challenge have changed you? What have you learned from the contrasting experiences?  Can you channel and explore those emotions through your workout meditations and journaling? What are these unexpected emotions trying to teach you? And then tomorrow night being Friday, you get your oil bath again, which will be really good if you have Thanksgiving to again help everything detox. And then you're going to bed early on Friday night. And then we'll look at Saturday tomorrow. So since today is Thanksgiving, I do want to share with you guys just for fun one of my family's traditional casseroles. This is a very, very southern casserole that I'm going to share with you guys. And I'm going to encourage you down in the comment section below, share some of your family's dishes during Thanksgiving. Or if you're not from America, share with us a dish or something that's culturally from your neck of the woods, because this pineapple casserole is super huge in the south. And it's one of my favorite dishes. And whenever I've ever gone to like a potluck, even outside of holidays, just for yogi shawls or whatever, whenever I bring a pineapple casserole, it is gone. People love this. Now I looked this morning for my family's recipe. My Aunt Debbie is the one who usually makes the pineapple casserole for my family. But I couldn't find it. So I found Paula Dean's recipe. There's lots of recipes online. But Paula Dean, she's just a southern as they come. So I trust her recipe. So you need one cup of sugar, six tablespoons of all purpose flour, two cups of grated sharp cheddar cheese, two 20 ounce cans, and six tablespoons pineapple juice, reserved pineapple chunks, one cup made into crummy butter crackers, and eight tablespoons melted, plus extra for greasing the pan butter. All right. So with the crumbs, we use Ritz crackers. So Ritz crackers is the good, really sharp crackers are good. And for those who are not Americans, just try the tablespoons, the cups, the ounces, just translate that to your country's measurement to know. All right. And so basically, you preheat the oven to 350 Fahrenheit, grease the medium. Oh, looks like I lost one of the article here. Oh, shoot. My internet's a little bit wonky today. All right. I will put a link to this this recipe down in the description box below. But basically a pineapple casserole, it's vegetarian. It's not vegan, but it's vegetarian.  It's you can see in the grocery stores, vegetarian cheese, so sharp cheddar cheese, Ritz crackers, pineapple sugar, butter, and you you'll all again, I'm going to link this recipe down in the description box below. It's super easy to make. I am like the world's worst cook.  Like I am the world's worst cook. I'm not really interested in food. I'm not I'm not a foodie. I'm lots. I'm really just not a foodie. And so I think the only thing that's ever going to ever motivate me to learn how to make something is if I ever had a kid. But pineapple casserole, I do know how to make because it is such a southern dish and it's so good. It is so freaking good. It's like it's like that combination of sweet and savory. It is one of the best castor rolls. And it's something great. You can use it too. I know a lot of people use pineapple castor rolls as a breakfast dish as well. So if you have people coming over, spending the night at your house, you want to make them a breakfast, a pineapple casserole is something really unique to serve for breakfast. It's great for potlucks. It's great for me. If I just randomly make sometimes during the year, I'll just like randomly make a pineapple casserole. And that will be my meal will be like a bowl of pineapple casserole because it's so freaking good. And so I'm going to share that again in the description box below. If you are not from the South because I'm telling you guys, even in America like southern food is very different from like people in the North like New England, New York, we have very different cultures, even though we're all Americans, we have very different cultures. And so the pineapple casserole is something that's very, very, very southern. And so I'm really curious to see if you guys who are not from the South, if you try to make this dish, what do you think about it? Because we're known for our food down here in the South for sure, even though I'm not a foodie, we are known for our food down here in the South. So again, I want to hear your recipes. So let me know some of your favorite recipes down in the comment section below. Let's share them with each other. I know on the signal group for the support group, everybody's been sharing recipes as well. So go ahead and share that. I am absolutely 100% a vegetarian. I'm not a vegan, but I am a vegetarian. I know in my family, my family is fully aware of my vegetarianism. And so they're very good at Thanksgiving to let me know like which dishes were used with beef boy on cubes or vegetable boy on cubes. And they're usually pretty aware of letting me know that before we sit down to eat. So just be mindful with your friends, they are vegetarian or vegan to let them know the ingredients in a dish so that their dietary choices are not disrupted. All right, you guys, once again, have a very, very, very happy Thanksgiving. I will talk to you guys all tomorrow. I can't wait to see how you're feeling post holiday. Bye guys.


Indian gooseberries, otherwise known as amla, have been touted as everything from a cancer fighter to a hair tonic to a refrigerant. Whatever that means, what, like freon? Not to mention a snake venom detoxifier, complete with fancy diagrams, but based on what kind of research? Yes, dietary intake of both turmeric and amla increases the lifespan of fruit flies. But do we really care about the effects of amla on the lifespan or the sexual behavior, for that matter, of fruit flies?  Why, obviously, you just introduce a virgin female and a bachelor male into an Ellen's Wattio mating chamber. Can you imagine having an insect meeting chamber named after you? It looks like there were two fighting over naming rights, so they had to go with both. Then it's just a matter of getting out of stopwatch. 20 minutes is the average duration, but almost a half hour on amla, the studly beast, and it dropped the mating latency, the time between when they were introduced to one another in the chamber when they started getting busy, from 10 down to 7 seconds, and don't mess around. Well, actually they do mess around, and quite rapidly. And on amla they lay more eggs and more hatch into larvae. But just like when you hear amla is the best medicine to increase lifespan, you're probably not thinking about flies. When you read about amla, maybe a potent aphrodisiac, you're probably not thinking more maggots. Now there was this study that found extraordinary improvements in total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol in actual humans. But that was compared to placebo. What about compared to Simvastatin, a leading cholesterol-lowering drug sold as Zocor? Treatment with a drug produced significant reductions in cholesterol, as one would expect, but so did the amla. In fact, you could hardly tell which was which. Now note this was only about a 10% to 15% drop in total in LDL cholesterol. In this study, the amla dose was only 500 milligrams, which is like a tenth of a teaspoon, so smaller than the eighth of a teaspoon a day, and it wasn't just the powdered fruit, but the powdered juice of the fruit, which may have made a difference. How about versus Lipitor, the cholesterol-lowering drug known as atorvastatin? No effect of taking placebos, but significant improvements for the drug, and significant improvements for two amla doses. But again, only about 15% or so. Did they just use the juice again? No, worse, some patented extract of amla. So instead of 5 cents a day, it's 50 cents a day, and doesn't seem to work as well. But because there's this proprietary version, at least there's someone willing to pony up the funds to do the research. It's like the cancer story. For Indian gooseberries to become relevant clinically, they're preying that patentable derivatives be synthesized. Without the possibility of patents, the pharmaceutical industry isn't going to invest in the research. Their shareholders wouldn't let them. It's patents over patients. But without that research, how can we ever prove it's worth or worthlessness for that matter? So drug and supplement industry interest in patenting natural food product remedies is a double-edged sword. Without it, there would never have been this study, showing not only benefits for cholesterol, but also arterial function, reducing artery stiffness in the two amla extract groups and the drug group, but not placebo. As well as a dramatic drop in inflammation, C-reactive protein levels cut in half. So amla, or at least amla extracts, may be a good therapeutic alternative to statins in diabetic patients with artery dysfunction, because it has many of the beneficial effects of the statins, but without the well-known potential adverse side effects of the drugs, including muscle damage or liver dysfunction. The amla extract was also compared to the blood-thinning drugs, aspirin, and plavix, often prescribed after heart attacks, and achieved about three-quarters of the same platelet aggregation inhibiting effect as the drugs, significantly increasing the bleeding and clotting time where they poke you with a needle and see how many seconds it takes you to stop dripping. So that's actually a good thing if you have a stent or something that you don't want to clog up, but it didn't thin the blood outside the normal range, so it may not unduly raise the risk of major bleeding. It also appears to decrease the effects of stress on the heart. They had people plunge their hand into ice water and keep it there until the pain became unbearable. This causes your arteries to constrict and your blood pressure to go up, but not as much if you're taking amla extract. Good to know for your next Ice Bucket Challenge.


The Corps shrinks its numbers, the real story behind a down osprey, and a new Mar Admin changes tuition assistance. All that coming up next on the Corps Report. Welcome to the Corps Report, I'm Lance Corporal Clayton Philip-Ovage. And I'm Lance Corporal Ali Beisminger. 12 people were killed and 8 were injured Monday after a shooting at the Washington Navy Yard. Our hearts go out to the family and friends of the victims and all those affected by the tragic events in our nation's capital. The commandant of the Marine Corps, General James Amos, officially announced the Corps restructuring to 174,000 Marines. This lighter, more agile force is still designed to maximize crisis response, forward presence and combat readiness. Major General Frank McKenzie, the Corps' representative for the review of defense strategy and priority, says regardless of numbers, the Corps will always deliver combat ready forces for the nation. To find out more, check out the link in the video description. You may have seen the photo of Sergeant Steven Cheek with a down osprey in the background that recently went viral. Well the photo is real, but the story first posted with it is not. An impostor stole the photo from Cheek's Facebook page and posted it to Reddit with a bogus story. So what's the real story behind the photo? The osprey experienced a rough landing due to low visibility. Thankfully, nobody was seriously injured. For three days, Cheek and his fellow Marines kept the enemy at bay until aviation specialists cleared the osprey to fly out of the positions. For more on the story, check out the link below. A new Mar Admin changes the guidelines for approved Tuition's assistance. Let's go to school. So what kind of questions would Marines have? Um, well what if they're new to the Corps and they want to take advantage of the T.A.? Well first time Marines are going to have to wait 24 months until they can apply, so in the meantime they'll have to do two MCIs, leadership and personal finance. Okay, well um, what if they're about to get out of the Corps? Well that's okay as long as they have 60 days left at the completion of their course. Okay, um, can you just make a list of all the changes? Well, they'd be smart to check out the Mar Admin and the link in the video description. Remember, you can catch up on everything else going on in the Corps by logging on to our official social media sites at YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Pinterest and Instagram. The links are in the video description. Thanks for watching guys, we'll see you next week right here on the Corps Report.


Hi, I'm Cindy Blake with GitLab. I've been with GitLab since the inception of our security capabilities, and I've worked with a lot of customers and prospects, and I've learned about best practices and their key challenges. I'm full disclosure. I also worked for four to five for many years, so I also understand the more traditional application security testing methods, as well as the DevSecOps methods that GitLab enables. I've also worked for SolarWinds and the MSP division briefly, and while I wasn't part of Orion, my heart really goes out to those folks there. Let's talk about securing next generation IT, or now better known as cloud native applications. DevOps delivers business value sooner in smaller increments and creates faster velocity. Cloud native is about taking advantage of the unique properties of cloud to deliver that software faster and more flexibly. It empowers developers to get started on coding right away, making setup repeatable and using automated templates. DevOps, microservices, and containers take advantage of the flexibility, scalability, and power of cloud infrastructure to support your application workload. Coding in the cloud gives teams much greater control over their costs and their environments. They can dynamically scale up or scale down as demanded by the market, and they can rapidly provision and deploy test environments or production. So what's different? Well, code changes faster and faster. There's more open source elements, there's more APIs, and there's more microservices or smaller applications. Traditional application security testing tools were built 10, 15 years ago, maybe more, and when today's modern methods like DevOps didn't exist. And so you need to rethink about your tools because traditional tools just are no longer enough. DevOps doesn't scale or DevSecOps, I should say, doesn't scale without developer enablement, without automation, and exception-based security or policy-based security. There's new attack surfaces that must be considered, and all of this really makes the tools that have been around for a long time insufficient, as well as the methods. Cloud-native apps include more than just business logic software. It's also additional code that surrounds the application to deliver resources, communicate with third-party subroutines, and apply guardrails. In addition, things move faster, so manual intervention really isn't possible. Now, there's lots of definitions of cloud-native, but this one I think from the new stack is a pretty good one. There's several elements that it includes, and we'll get into that in a bit, but think of an example would be a policy, which is also code, by the way, that limits resource usage. So its intent is to prevent runaway processes from churning through your cloud minutes, whether they're legitimate accidents or malicious crypto mining. But the code that provides those limits is now an attack surface itself. It could be disabled, or it could be ratcheted down to cripple legitimate consumption. There are so many new elements in the cloud-native world, and all of them bring some element of risk. I kind of simplify cloud-native into three main areas of risk that impact security, containers, orchestrators like Kubernetes, and microservices. These break apps into smaller parts. So you take a monolithic application and now you chunk it down into pieces. So there are more parts, which now mean there are more connections to those parts via APIs. Do you know how many APIs you have? Do you know if they're secure? If you test them, they are analyzed as an example of one of the many challenges, knowing all of the things that you now must secure. All of these parts also require configuration, and with configuration comes the risk for misconfiguration. Containers, Kubernetes, your cloud service, even your software development platform all have levers to pull. Knowing which settings are best and how they interact is challenging and getting worse. There are not really any great solutions out there to help manage this risk right now. In addition, the software factory itself is becoming an attack surface. The SolarWinds attack was not due to software vulnerability like cross-site scripting or any of the OWASP top 10 that we typically stand for. That's where most people focus their application security energies. And it wasn't even on a misconfiguration error. It was a combination of poor security hygiene and exploit of the build process itself. So even the most damaging attacks tend to rely on complacency toward basic security hygiene. Think patches and passwords. And they tend to use tried and true exploits that have been around for a long time. From what I've read in the news, SolarWinds admin relied on a simple password and didn't change it. Basic hygiene seems simple, but these mundane tasks are often overlooked. This is where automation can help. Things like automated key rotations and secrets detection can ensure that policies are applied consistently. For the SolarWinds Orion app, code was injected during the build process that created a back door for SolarWinds clients. The way it was done required months of careful planning and execution. The attackers also included safeguards to prevent the back door lines of code from appearing in Orion build logs. And checks to ensure that tampering wouldn't cause build errors. It's almost impossible to prevent this kind of persistent premeditated attack. But it certainly raises awareness of the need to treat your software factory like any other factory. Just like a materials good factory would prevent random people from adding random things to their product. The software factory must carefully scrutinize access and permissions, pay attention to components that are used and improve transparency of any changes along the way. Today's era of cloud native applications requires so much more than simple scanning of the code for vulnerabilities. I love this quote and it's been around for a while but I still find it so very relevant. The CISO of VMware said this at an RSA two years ago, maybe more. Your most important security product won't be a security product. And that rings true even more today. Application security testing is not enough. Applications are a prime target of attack. Lack of hygiene allows proven exploits to be used repeatedly. And most application security testing focuses on known vulnerabilities. But as DevOps tool chains grow in complexity, there are even more avenues that are open for exploit both in the factory itself, if you will, and in the components that are used. I think this is some pragmatic advice. You always need basic security hygiene, but you need to add to that automation to keep up with DevOps and the infrastructure is code that's created by cloud native applications. You can't do it in a manual or waterfall environment. You really have to fully automate your application security. This automation should be built on a foundation of standardization. Standardize your CI pipeline, things like application security testing and configurations. Make the configurations, the pipeline reusable. And then measure and improve your processes. Automation, by the way, can reduce the scope of your security compliance. So if things are automated, you just have to show that the automation works rather than looking through a host of examples to prove it. Common controls need to be front and center, particularly in a cloud native environment. And these can help with security and compliance. Security testing is a fundamental element. I don't want to downplay it, but there are additional things here that can protect the integrity of your cloud native software. I'll give a few more examples here. For each control, you must consider when and how it's applied to your entire portfolio or to just high risk projects. For instance, does every application get scanned for security flaws? When exceptions are triggered, so maybe a vulnerability is found or a misconfiguration identified, how are policies enforced? Do they require approval? Must they all be resolved before moving forward? What are the thresholds? For instance, when using merge request approvals, who can approve pushing code with security flaws? What level of severity must the flaws be to stop a build? These are just some of the examples of features that can facilitate these policies. Things like protected branches and credentials. You need to have role-based access controls. All of these things are really important. If a nation-state attacker puts you in their crosshairs, it's quite likely that they're going to find a way in no matter how much defense in depth you use. If a breach does occur, though, auditability can make the difference for rapid detection and remediation. Can you see who changed what, where, and when in your software supply chain? Can you see all of the changes to the code and any environments that were coded?  You lose transparency across those silos. I would encourage you to take a fresh look at how you govern the security of your software supply chain. If you think about your software as a factory, you need that visibility and control end-to-end, how we plan, develop, deploy, and monitor software. Historically, AppSets has been very focused on building secure software, free of security flaws. But modern software development requires that we also protect the integrity of the factory itself, the third-party components that are used, and the configuration of the software's infrastructure. A DevOps platform can help you unite the data, the user interface, the governance, and the collaboration across all of the stages that are part of your software development and delivery. In talking with customers, I found that the most successful organizations focus on these three things, on simplicity, visibility, and control. Simplicity by using a DevOps platform that embeds security and compliance seamlessly. This enables greater visibility into who changed what, where, when. Control ensure that policies are applied consistently across applications and environments. When you think about Cloud Native, you need to think about the software factory, how you plan, create, package, deploy, monitor your software. It's complicated, and it gets more complicated with Cloud Native. It requires more than just application security testing. Automating that is a critical foundational step, but it also requires automation of your policies, setting up guardrails. Guardrails allow people to run fast, but also secure, and basically codify your organization's appetite for risk. So your automation needs to be expanded beyond the code itself to ensure that policies protect Cloud Native elements like Docker, Kubernetes, and ensure that consistent configurations are used. The very nature of the DevOps tools can either add to or reduce risk. The more tools you have, the more difficult it is to manage and access and permissions and to detect and prevent nefarious interventions. So if you can simplify your DevOps tool chain, consolidating into a platform with fewer interfaces, it's far easier to see who changed what, where, when, and to control your options up front. Remember, you need to protect the development platform itself as well as the code. So the less complicated it is, the easier that will be. With that, I thank you, I'm open for questions, and please feel free to reach out to me. My contact information is here for LinkedIn. Thank you so much.