The Zone Diet Essay -- Health Nutrition Weight Loss

It seems like everywhere you look there is some new diet plan making miraculous promises of weight loss through pills, plans, and formulas. The zone diet is no exception. The zone diet was developed by Dr. Barry Sears in his book," Enter the Zone" which was on the bestseller lists for weeks. The zone promises high energy, weight loss, and no hunger to those willing to follow the simple set of zone rules. It sounds great you say, but does it really work? What is the Zone? The "zone" was first referred to by athletes as a period of maximum performance and energy levels. When things are clicking and every part of our body is working at its best, we say we are "in the zone." When we fall short we experience a loss of performance, more illness, and feel moody and restless. The zone diet helps individuals to stay in the zone, not just trying to hit or miss. Instead of experiencing periodic energy highs and lows, it regulates levels throughout the day, putting the body in a metabolic state of peak efficiency. Much of this energy regulation is controlled by eicosanoids (http://www.coolrunning.com/sponsor/thezone/zone.htm#eicos). These are some of the most important chemical messengers in the body. However, since they perform their cell-to-cell communications very rapidly and in very small concentrations, they have often been overlooked by many researchers. Eicosanoids are completely derived from dietary fat. In addition, they have opposing physiological functions, which can be either good or bad. The good eicosanoids accelerate the use of stored body fat, whereas the bad do the opposite. These levels of eicosanoids can be controlled by what we eat at each meal. For example, high levels of carbohydrates decrease the produ... ...er 4. Gray, J., and Martinovic, A. (I 994). Eicosanoids and essential fatty acid modulation in chronic disease and the chronic fatigue syndrome, Medical Hypotheses, 43(l): 31-42. Harvey, J., Wing, R.,& Mullen, M. (I 993). Effects on food cravings of a very low calorie diet or a balanced, low calorie diet. Appetite, 21(2): 105-15. Kurilla, Michael G. (I 996). Protein Requirements in Humans. Intemet Librwy Shah, M., McGovern, P., French, S. & Baxter J. (1994). Comparison of a low-fat, ad libitum complex-carbohydrate diet with a low-energy diet in moderately obese women. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 59(5): 980-4. Suchner, U., and Senftleben, U. (1994). h=une modulation by polyunsaturated fatty acids during nutritional therapy: interactions with synthesis and effects of eicosanoids. Infusionstherapie und Transfusionsmedzin, 21(3): 167-82.

The Origin of Money

The use of money began in the sixth century B.C. in what is now western Turkey, when lumps of gold found in rivers were melted and turned into pieces of uniform size imprinted with a stamp. For almost all of the time since then, the common monetary system has been commodity money, whereby a valuable commodity (typically a metal) is used as a widely accepted medium of exchange. Furthermore, the quantity of money was not under anyone†s control; private agents, following price incentives, took actions that determined the money supply. Today, the prevalent monetary system is that of fiat money, in which the medium of exchange consists of unbacked government liabilities, which are claims to nothing at all. Moreover, governments have usually established a monopoly on the provision of fiat money, and control, or potentially control, its quantity. Fiat money is a very recent development in monetary history; it has only been in use for a few decades at most. Why did this evolution from commodity money to fiat money take place? Is fiat money better suited to the modern economy or was it desirable but impractical in earlier times? Were there forces that naturally and inevitably led to the present system? Fiat money did not appear spontaneously, since government plays a central role in the management of fiat currency. How did govern-ments learn about the possibility and desirability of a fiat currency? Did monetary theorizing play any role in this evolution? In this article, I will argue that the evolution from commodity to fiat money was the result of a long process of evolution and learning. Commodity money systems have certain advantages, in particular in providing a natural anchor for the price level. But they also have certain disadvantages, manifested in particular in the difficulty of providing multiple denominations concurrently. These problems arose early on, in the fourteenth century, in the form of money shortages. Societies tried to overcome these disadvantages, and this led them progressively closer to fiat money, not only in terms of the actual value of the object used as currency, but also in terms of the theoretical understanding of what fiat money is and how to manage it properly. In the process, societies came to envisage the use of coins that were worth less than their market value to replace the smaller denominations that were often in short supply. These coins are very similar to bank notes; they are printed on base metal, rather than paper, but the economics behind their value is the same. What governments learned over time about the provision of small change is thus directly applicable to our modern system of currency. In his A Program for Monetary Stability (1960), Milton Friedman begins with the question: Why should government intervene in monetary and banking questions? He answers by providing a quick history of money, which he describes as a process inevitably leading to a system of fiat money monopolized by the government (p. 8): These, then, are the features of money that justify government intervention: the resource cost of a pure commodity currency and hence its tendency to become partly fiduciary; the peculiar difficulty of enforcing contracts involving promises to pay that serve as medium of exchange and of preventing fraud in respect to them; the technical monopoly character of a pure fiduciary currency which makes essential the setting of some external limit on its amount; and finally, the pervasive character of money which means that the issuance of money has important effect on parties other than those directly involved and gives special importance to the preceding features. †¦ The central tasks for government are also clear: to set an external limit to the amount of money and to prevent counterfeiting, broadly conceived. This article will find much to validate this view. It turns out that the problem of counter-feiting, identified as central by Friedman, provided obstacles that were overcome only when the appropriate technology became available. As technology changed and offered the possibility of implementing a form of fiduciary currency, various incomplete forms of currency systems were tried, with significant effects on the price level. These experiments led to the recognition that quantity limitation was crucial to maintaining the value of the currency. The need for a government monopoly, however, does not emerge from our reading of the historical record, and we will see that the private sector also came up with its own solutions to the problem of small change, thereby presenting alternatives to the monetary arrangements we have adopted.1 Among the desirable features of a monetary system, price stability has long been a priority, as far back as Aristotle†s discussion of money in Ethics. In the words of the seventeenth century Italian monetary theorist Gasparo Antonio Tesauro (1609), money must be â€Å"the measure of all things† (rerum omnium mensura) (p. 633). Aristotle also noted that commodity money, specifically money made of precious metals, was well suited to reach that goal: â€Å"Money, it is true, is liable to the same fluctuation of demand as other commodities, for its purchasing power varies at different times; but it tends to be comparatively constant† (Aristotle, Ethics, 1943 translation). The commodity money system delivers a nominal anchor for the price level. The mechanism by which this takes place can be described in the context of a profit-maximizing mint, which was how coins were produced in the Middle Ages and later.2 Suppose there is a way to convert goods into silver and silver into goods at a constant cost (in ounces of silver per unit of goods), which can be thought of as either the extraction cost of silver and the industrial uses of the metal or the â€Å"world price† of silver in a small country interpretation. Silver is turned into coins by the mint; the mint (which really represents the private sector) also decides when to melt down existing coins. The government†s role is limited to two actions. It specifies how much silver goes into a coin, and it collects a seigniorage tax 3 on all new minting. When the mint is minting new coins, its costs are the cost of the silver content, the seigniorage tax, and the production cost;4 its revenues are the market value of the coins, which is the inverse of the price level. Similarly, when the mint is melting down coins, its costs are the market value of the coins, and its revenues are the value of the silver contained in them. Whether the mint will produce new coins or melt down existing coins will thus depend on how the price level relates to the parameters: silver content of the coins, production costs, and seigniorage rate. The price level cannot be too low (or the purchasing power of the coins too high) or the mint could make unbounded profits by minting new coins and spending them. Similarly, the price level cannot be too high (or the purchasing power of the coins too low), or the mint would make profits by melting down the coins. The absence of arbitrage for the mint places restrictions on the price level, which is contained in an interval determined by the minting point and the melting point

The Natural Nature Of Human Beings - 1693 Words

Human beings became unique as a result of consciousness that is immediately they begun to produce their means of substance, they automatically begun to distinguish themselves from all other things including animals. That is where the mode of production sets in hence the formation of society. There is this natural instinct that exist in human i.e. whenever human beings come together the spirit of leadership or headship automatically permeate either through wealth, religion, age, etc. The mode of production came to existence as a result of what nature has created and that is what led to the process of division of labor which has brought a system or organization in which we see ranks in a society. The system developed to the extent that someone has to be at the top in other to control those at the bottom and also led to the barter system where money were being use in exchange of commodities, (†We now have to grasp the essential connection between private property, greed, the separation of labor, capital and landed property, exchange and competition, value and the devaluation [Entwertung] of man, monopoly and competition, etc. – the connection between this entire system of estrangement [Enifremdung] and the money system.†) This system which finally resulted in a production of commodities or service to mankind has brought the relation to the worker (producer), the commodity (product) and property owner. Each of these three entities are very importa nt to each other, the workerShow MoreRelatedNature Is The Natural Root Of Human Beings Essay2007 Words   |  9 PagesNature From the very beginning, we have took whatever we knew and created certain things that would help us get through life better. We were gifted with brains that allow us to think rather than strength as other creatures. Although the time that we had took to make changes to the world was quite a long time, but it had an enormous impact to the evolution of human beings. Exploration is a good skill which has helped us gather the information from the environment around us. Intelligent is a centralRead MoreThe Natural Law Theory Of Human Nature954 Words   |  4 PagesIt is our human nature that makes us feel great when we get a job and makes us feel horrible for something we steal something. This is because it feels natural for us to feel that we did something right or wrong. 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