WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT NON DAIRY CREAMER

Whether it's slightly bad for you or VERY bad for you depends on how much you consume. Either way, this is a bad idea. All the chemicals in creamer aside, non-dairy creamers use oils high in saturated fats (the bad kind) like hydrogenated coconut or cottonseed oil. This is done to improve the taste and texture, and these oils are definitely NOT healthy. Plus, by using a non-dairy creamer, you're getting zero of the vitamins, minerals and other nutritional benefits milk contains.

Also, look at the nutrition information on this creamer. The serving size will be something small, like 1-2 tsp. The amount you'd need to make a milk substitute is WAY higher, and that tiny amount of saturated fat and other junk listed will be greatly multiplied, and that's a bad thing.

Lastly, if you compare the price per weight of non-dairy creamer and milk, you're paying a hell of a lot more for creamer. Unless you are lactose intolerant, there's no logical reason to do this. Even if you are lactose intolerant, there's plenty of healthy milk substitutes based on soy, rice and even lactose-reduced regular milk. All of these are WAY more healthy and digestible than creamer. Another alternative would be buying powdered, dehydrated or condensed (not sweetened condensed) milk. Add water and you have regular milk. But again, all are more expensive than your average jug of milk you can buy at the store, and a whole lot less fresh. They also have preservatives and fillers, like the creamer.

Unless you have a real problem, I'd strongly advise not doing this. You definitely do not want to consume that much hydrogenated oil, and the other binders, fillers, texturizers and other chemicals in creamer, while they not really toxic in the amount you're consuming, aren't a healthy choice, and may be dangerous over long-term use. Actually, many of these chemicals in creamer actually aren't proven safe at for long-term or high-dose consumption. So, you're taking a health risk consuming them in excess, but the hydrogenated oil is likely what will hurt you soonest. That can lead to hypertension (high blood pressure), arterial plaque, heart disease and heart attack. Not worth it!
Source(s):
Physician's desk reference, 2005 ed.
Coffee-mate NDC nutrition labels

THE HARMFUL EFFECTS OF MONOSODIUM GLUTAMATE (MSG)

So here’s some study I have made about HOW BAD MSG IS IN OUR FOODS:

What is MSG?

Glutamate is a natural amino acid found in foods containing protein, like milk, mushroom and fish. Monosodium glutamate (MSG), manufactured with only the sodium salt of glutamate, is DESIGNED TO BE A FLAVOUR ENHANCER and is found in many foods. However, clever labeling practices and deceptions serve to camouflage its presence.
Consider the claim "no added MSG." This claim means that there was no MSG poured into the product—even if it was processed into the product. This is the practice of the glutamate industry and the food producers who use MSG. Why Do This? It's simple: it keeps the money coming in and they don't have to change their formula.

What Harm Is Done?
It is a TOXIC substance. Ingesting MSG too much in your daily foods can lead you to :
1. Weight gain
2. diabetes
3. adrenal gland malfunction
4. seizures
5. high blood pressure
6. stroke
7. other health problem

How To Eliminate Toxin MSG from Your Daily Foods?
• Carefully read products label at the market. Whenever you see it, AVOID the products with MSG in it.
• At restaurants, ask if they serve dishes using MSG.
• Avoid fast foods. Most use MSG in their fries and drinks to enhance the flavour and to GET YOU ADDICTED to their foods.
• Consuming MSG cause swelling of mucus membranes in the GIT. Cleanse your colon regularly to prevent this swelling.

DISCOVER THE KFC "SECRET RECIPE".

Earlier today I was eating a piece of leftover Kentucky Fried Chicken over the kitchen sink when a thought struck me. The Colonel's secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices is highly guarded and the KFC company has a history of being very litigious when it comes to protecting that secret. So, if I could figure out the secret recipe, I could probably stir up a fair amount of shit. Sweet.

How could I figure it out? Well, I don't really have to. I think I could probably make KFC tell me - in a roundabout sort of way. Let me explain:

Let's start by considering what we know about the recipe. The KFC company itself has given us 2 terrific clues:

First, we know the recipe contains only 11 herbs and spices. That fact alone gives us a tremendous advantage when it comes to guessing the recipe. Think about it - if we didn't know how many spices we were looking for then we'd have to consider recipes ranging from 2 ingredients to a zillion ingredients. Thanks KFC!

Second, we know that it contains herbs and spices. That is, not just herbs and not just spices. That fact allows us to reject all recipes that contain only spices or only herbs. The recipe must be some combination of the two. That said, this point also forces us to realise that opinions may vary on what constitutes an herb and what makes a spice, so perhaps this point isn't truly as valuable as it might first appear.

Now we need to consider a bit of history. Colonel Sanders was about 49 years old when he perfected his chicken recipe (I looked it up). Being born in 1890, that puts us around 1939, which is about the end of the Great Depression. We also know that the Colonel created this recipe while he was living in Corbin, Kentucky. From these facts we can, fairly safely, make some assumptions about what herbs and spices would be most commonly available in that area of the country at that time in history. Given that the Depression was just coming to an end and World War II was about it begin, I think it's safe to say that a poor gas station attendant, which Harland was, wasn't importing expensive spices from around the world. Think cheap, local ingredients.

However, we must also take into account the Colonel's military career. He spent a year as "Private Harland Sanders" when he joined the US Army in 1907. How does this apply, you ask? Well, he was stationed in Cuba and may have had access to a variety of herbs and spices that were, until that point, unknown to him. So we can't necessarily restrict our ingredient guesses to typically american southern spices - there's Cuba, and by extension, Spain, to consider as well.

Ok, so enough about selecting the herbs and spices. Let's mark that down as an exercise and set it aside: Determine a list of most-likely recipe ingredients. Now let's look at how to determine the recipe by mixing some technology with the litigious nature of the KFC company.

Step one is the technology. I could easily write a computer application that would take all the ingredients we know of and determine every combination of 11 herbs and spices based on that initial set of ingredients. And therefore, as long as our initial selection of ingredients contains all of the correct 11 herbs and spices, one of the computer generated combinations will be correct. In fact, the only reason for limiting ourselves to the "most likely" ingredients is so our list of possible combinations doesn't get too long. If we wanted, we could just as easily include every known herb and spice.

Alright, so now we have a list of recipes. A LOT of recipes, but the odds are that one of them is correct. Now we just have to make KFC tell us which one it is.

For this next step it would be handy if we were a giant newspaper mogul like Conrad Black (i.e. having access to many newspapers and (allegedly) lacking in moral fibre). We need to take each recipe and publish it in a newspaper, website, or get it on a TV commercial. Each recipe, separately. You see, the KFC company won't care about all the newspaper stories and web pages that talk about recipes that are wrong. But you can be sure they'll point all their lawyers at the newspaper or website or TV commercial that got the right one.

And then we've got it.

Which ever recipe the KFC company is most agitated by must be the correct one, right?

And that's it. That's my plan to learn the secret recipe of the Colonel. I know it sounds a little "out there", but it's completely doable. And if I ever find myself with plenty of time on my hands and the ability to manipulate the content of thousands of newspapers, TV channels and websites, I just might do it.
While I applaud FredPenner's detailed scheme to wrest the Colonel's secret recipe from the hands of the corporate entity that is KFC, the economist in me can't help but notice the futility of his plan. Before I go into the economic rationale behind why his plan won't produce a positive outcome for anyone involved, let's make a few assumptions. The first assumption is that KFC does indeed have a secret recipe (one that is not simply a cheap marketing gimmick), and they are utilizing that secret recipe to somehow differentiate their product from other fried chicken in the market. This secret recipe allows them to create a product that is "better", and allows KFC to artificially increase the price of their chicken over others. The second assumption is that FredPenner's master plan succeeds, and he becomes the only non-KFC-affiliated person on Earth who knows the secret combination of eleven delectable herbs and spices. The third assumption is that FredPenner, KFC, and all other fried chicken makers are rational actors who are looking to improve their own payoff; otherwise, why would FredPenner bother to discover the recipe in the first place?

Now, what can FredPenner do with the Colonel's recipe now that he has it? Unless he's already a chicken-making mogul, the answer is "very little". He can use it to start his own fried chicken restaurant, but without a significant amount of capital, he'd be unable to compete with KFC since the company already has a significant share of the market. KFC can engage in predatory pricing in the short-term to force his fledging chicken enterprise out of business. Poor FredPenner will be worse off than when he started.

FredPenner has another option; he can try to sell the recipe to KFC's main competitor. Without delving too deep into the market share distribution of the fried chicken industry, let's just assume it's Popeyes Chicken and Biscuits. Popeyes can use the recipe to improve its own chicken, but then both Popeyes and KFC would have identical products, or perfect substitutes. Without any real difference between the products, consumers will just purchase whichever one has a lower price, making both firms lose out on profits when they price-cut each other. It's not in Popeye's interest to buy the corporate secret from FredPenner.

FredPenner can choose to release the secret recipe to the public under the belief that finger-lickin' good chicken is a god-given right of humanity. But we're working under the assumption that he's a rational actor looking to maximize his payoffs, and revealing the secret for free won't earn him any tangible benefits. He'll only damage KFC and Popeyes' market shares, but since he's not gaining anything, he's just being vindictive and creating a Pareto inefficient outcome. The best he can do is try to blackmail KFC for money by threatening to release the secret, but if KFC used backwards induction, they'd quickly find that FredPenner has a payoff choice between keeping quiet and gaining nothing, or releasing the secret and facing arrest/litigation for blackmail. KFC would then refuse to give in to his demands since he has nothing to gain but everything to lose. So unless FredPenner derives great satisfaction from being the Che Guevara of the fried chicken industry, his plan to uncover the Colonel's closely guarded secret is a doomed one as far as economics is concerned.

A real-life example of all these decision-making economic concepts can be found in the soda industry, as Coca-Cola employs a similar marketing strategy with its "secret formula" for Coke. In July 2006, PepsiCo cooperated with authorities and Coca-Cola in a sting operation to root out Coca-Cola employees who were planning on selling company secrets for $1.5 million. If the crooks had only consulted me beforehand, or taken basic economics courses, they might have given up their foolhardy ploy and just stuck with their dayjobs.

As an ex-KFC employee, this is yet another disappointment to conclude the list of horror stories I have from my 52 day journey through hell.

The full story of my employment is probably best for another write up, but for now I will point out that I was the one in charge of the 'chicken marinating' process for a short while.

The plain and raw chicken bits came in daily, loaded off a truck. At this point, there was nothing special about it. Every day, some poor bastard had the job of going through each box of chicken (where I was, there were probably 6 boxes a day) and opening it up. Inside each box were 10 loose-mesh bags. The kind you could tear, but not without cutting into your hands far more than you are comfortable with. In each bag was 10 pieces of ice cold chicken. Each box would be dumped into this big round plastic drum (for those of you doing the math, that is 100 bits of chicken at a time) and marinated for 5 minutes on tumble (like a washing machine) with this bagged concoction mixed in with water.

The bag your food is mixed with at a first glance looks like it contains some caustic chemical. It was very plain, black on white writing. On the back are ingredients, but it looks more like an MSDS sheet. The top 2 were salt and MSG (although I can't remember in which order), and the rest of the names (there weren't many more) were indistinguishable. The kind of things on ingredient labels that you would normally just pass off as preservatives, color, and a little extra added carcinogens simply for the manufactures amusement. Certainly nothing you could expect to find from a grocery store.

The real secret to KFC is not in the '11 herbs and spices'. No, to be honest, the secret is what it's cooked in. It's no surprise that the chicken is deep fried, but KFC takes it one step further. Instead of using regular fryer oil (which is unhealthy enough), they used pure shortening. This stuff comes in huge boxes and it is thicker than butter until heated. It is esentially lard. KFC is the greasiest, saltiest thing anyone will ever taste. That is the only secret. But please, eat up. If there is KFC around me, it's all yours. Hungry or not, I won't be sad to see it go.

(Idea: FredPenner,DiscoStan, DarkDigitalDream.)

The Japanese & The Fresh Fish Story

The Japanese have always loved fresh fish. But the water close to Japan has not held many fish for decades. So to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever. The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring the fish. If the return trip took more time, the fish were not fresh. To solve this problem, fish companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer. However, the Japanese could taste the difference between fresh and frozen fish. And they did not like the taste of frozen fish. The frozen fish brought a lower price. So, fishing companies installed fish tanks. They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin. After a little thrashing around, they were tired, dull, and lost their fresh-fish taste. The fishing industry faced an impending crisis!
But today, they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan .

How did they manage? To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks but with a small shark. The fish are challenged and hence are constantly on the move. The challenge they face keeps them alive and fresh!

Have you realized that some of us are also living in a pond but most of the time tired and dull? Basically in our lives, sharks are new challenges to keep us active. If you are steadily conquering challenges, you are happy. Your challenges keep you energized. Don't create success and revel in it in a state of inertia. You have the resources, skills and abilities to make a difference.

Take a Risk, take a chance. Put a shark in your tank and see how far you can really go

MEMBELI SAMBIL MENDERMA UNTUK KLINIK GAZA

AZ-ZAHRAH ISLAMIC MEDICAL CENTRE AKAN MENGADAKAN GERAI JUALAN PELBAGAI JENIS BARANG DAN MAKANAN DENGAN HARGA YANG MURAH DENGAN TUJUAN UNTUK MENDAPATKAN DERMA BAGI MEMBINA SEBUAH KLINIK DI GAZA PADA PENGHUJUNG TAHUN INI.

DATANGLAH BERAMAI-RAMAI MEMBELI SAMBIL MENDERMA.

TARIKH : MULAI 11 MARCH 2009 – AKHIR TAHUN
MASA : 10 AM- 10 PM
TEMPAT : PERKARANGAN PUSAT RAWATAN ISLAM AZ-ZAHRAH,NO 34, MEDAN PUSAT, BANDAR 1, SEK 9, 43650 BANDAR BARU BANGI, SELANGOR.
www.az-zahrah.com.my

(plz forwardkan this msg to all your friends, & niatlah krn Allah..Thank you..)

Abu Hurairah meriwayatkan Rasulullah bersabda “Setiap anggota manusia harus bersedekah setiap hari, mendamaikan orang bersengketa adalah sedekah, menolong seseorang mengangkat barang ke dalam kenderaan adalah sedekah, kata-kata manis adalah sedekah, setiap langkah menuju ke tempat sembahyang adalah sedekah dan menjauhkan bahaya yang mengganggu lalu lintas adalah sedekah”. (Riwayat : Bukhari dan Muslim)
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