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“In all directions of Dvaraka City, wherever one would turn his eyes he would find green parks and gardens, each of them filled with trees and plants laden with fruits and flowers. Because there were so many nice trees of fruits and flowers, all the sweetly chirping birds and buzzing bumblebees joined together to make sweet vibrations. The city of Dvaraka thus fully displayed all opulences. “

Krishna Book 90:  Summary Description of Lord Krsna’s Pastimes

Living Near Green Lowers Anxiety, Depression Rates, Study Finds

By Kristen Hallam

Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) — People living near gardens, parks and other green spaces have lower rates of anxiety, depression and poor physical health than those living in urban areas, Dutch researchers found.

I found the TIME Magazine article Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin, by John Cloud, informative and useful in shattering some commonly-held myths, which also devotees might implicitly accepts as facts.

Among the essential messages distilled by the author—a committed (self-defined) "gym-rat"—is the notion that "fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain." How could that be? Simple: After strenuous workouts people get hungry and eat more calories than what they loose; plus they tend to reward themselves with foods they would have avoided if they did not exercise; plus the fatigue accumulated tends to make them more reticent to perform more physical work during the rest of the day.

This letter was sent to me by a friend, a reaction to the report of the road accidents following this year's Gaura-purnima festival. It wasn't really meant for publication, but it's very relevant for devotees everywhere, so I'll publish it here without disclosing the author's name.

Reading about the recent road accidents here makes me very sad. At the same time I know that road safety is not being ignored in India only, but all over ISKCON, including Germany. At least here materialists are often more responsible than devotees in this regard; HH Bir Krishna Maharaja writes about this on his website www.bkgoswami.com.

Only recently did I travel with devotees by car when I noticed that I was the only one using a seat belt. Everyone else, including driver and co-driver, didn't—in spite of snow and ice on the road, and the fact that German law imposes heavy fines on those caught without seat belt.

by Bir Krishna Das Maharaja

I mentioned that I would write about living longer in the present body. In order to understand this topic one has to understand the larger topic of how the material energy affects the bodies and minds of devotees, whether or not they are aware of it, or even in denial of it.

If we had the siddhis that yogis have, such as laghima, becoming light enough to float on a sunbeam, or mahima, becoming very big or heavy—and I am not talking about getting fat—or prapti, being able to reach out and grab something from a distant locale, we could definitely ignore certain aspects of the material nature. But since we don't have these siddhis, it behooves us to be aware of how the material nature affects our bodies.

It is amazing to me how devotees are oftentimes in denial of this: in our diet, sleeping habits, use of spiritual paraphernalia, eating habits, safety procedures, etc.

Welcome to your new vending machine!

Jeremy Page, Delhi

Does your Pepsi lack pep? Is your Coke not the real thing? India's Hindu nationalist movement apparently has the answer: a new soft drink made from cow urine.

www.foodmatters.tv

You've got to break a sweat every day. When your body temperature goes up enough to break a sweat the T cell production in your blood increases by a factor of 15-20. This boosts your immune system function. This is why you get a fever when your body is under attack. If you do this proactively you can avoid sickness, and more easily shake it off when it does get you.

REGULAR exercise can reduce a woman's risk of cancer, but the benefits may slip away if she gets too little sleep.
The study involving 5968 women in the US state of Maryland confirmed previous findings that people who do regular physical activity are less likely to develop cancer.

But when the researchers looked at the women ages 18 to 65 who were in the upper half in terms of the amount of physical exercise they got per week, they found that sleep appeared to play an important role in cancer risk.

This is an interesting article found on the BBC news on the effects of diet on health, especially the western diet and it’s affects on the heart which remains one of the biggest killers here in the UK:

Western diet raises heart risk

So we can understand that our efforts to bring high quality vegatarian food to the whole world in the shape of Krishna Prasadam has many good effects, so to everyone keep up this valuable work.