Chocolate Milk good for you?

So let me get this straight… scientific studies are now showing that chocolate milk is as good as any sports drink? A report from Indiana University is reported in saying:

The small group of fit athletes who took part in the study were asked to work out strenuously on a stationery bicycle, then drink low-fat chocolate milk, a fluid-replacement drink like Gatorade and a carbohydrate replacement drink like Endurox R4. A few hours later, they were asked to cycle again until they reached exhaustion.

The test was repeated three times—once with each kind of drink—and the data showed that the cyclists were able to go between 49 and 54 percent longer on the second stint after drinking chocolate milk than when they drank the carbohydrate drink. The difference between the milk and the fluid-replacement drink was not significant.

“My way of explaining it is, there’s really nothing magic about the powder in a can that you mix with water,” cycling coach Scott Saifer said of the carbohydrate drink. “It’s water, carbs, proteins, maybe minerals and electrolytes. What’s in chocolate milk? The same thing. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be as good for recovery as a carb drink.”

I suppose that makes sense. It also makes perfect sense in my memory to when I was in high school and attending “Bob Knight Basketball Camp” at Indiana U. in the early 90’s. Me and a high school teammate had a deep craving for chocolate milk. In one of our first experiences with college cafeteria’s, we repeatedly hit the chocolate milk machine after hours of workouts. Now I guess I know why. Well, it is cheaper than sugary sports drinks like Gatorade and Powerade.

Thanksgiving Book Review: Mayflower

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
by Nathaniel Philbrick

 

Philbrick has done nearly an impossible task for today’s popular history reader. He has written an excellent story that avoids the pitfalls of historical revisionism in the American academy and presents the story of the Plymouth colony in its context, while at least considering why this particular colony became the American family myth, in a sense, the Romulus and Remus story of the American republic, nearly 400 years later.

 

While the title is Mayflower, only a fraction of the book’s nearly 500 pages deal with the actual voyage by the Puritan Separatists, originally from the north of England and their new found, “Stranger” friends aboard the world’s most famous cargo ship. Philbrick has done some original research into the life and culture of the Pilgrim Separatists in their native villages near Scrooby, England. The book can be divided into two halves: the background, departure and settlement of the original Pilgrim Separatists and then he fast forwards a generation to the 1670’s in New England and the terrible native vs. English and native ‘friends’ struggle known as King Phillip’s War. Philbrick’s thesis is that while the Pilgrim Separatists are unique in American and even world history for their devotion and plan for resettlement of their break away Reformed sect into North America, it was the contact and intermingling with the native American tribes that kept the new settlers from breaking up further and insulating themselves into even more narrower Reformed, religious communities.

Philbrick does an excellent job of explaining just how difficult and nearly insurmountable the original settlement into Plymouth colony was and the immediate necessity of establishing alliances with one native tribe over another. The tension of creating that famous ‘city on the hill’, the safe Christian English community with a frontier, cross-cultural interaction with groups like the Massoait and coastal New England tribes is really what is best presented in this book. The first “Thanksgiving”, really a harvest festival, with the local tribe that the Pigrim Separatists had formed the most successful alliance, is presented without a hint of the mythology that later surrounded them in the mid-1800’s. And, great pains are taken to show Pilgrims as a people living constantly in coram deo, in the presence of God.

Rather than telling the chronological story of the growing Plymouth colony, the 1670’s 18 month King Phillip’s War with part of the local tribe that originally befriended the Pilgrim’s, is contrasted with the first contact in the 1620’s as a way to show how past small relational actions taken early on, later exploded in deadly enemies and some alliances. The hero that Phibrick chooses to highlight, Pilgrim grandchild, Benjamin Church, essentially a militia special forces officer, embodied how the small colony related to each other and the native tribes, in trust, war and part understanding.

Church’s development from Indian hunter, to reconciling agent, acts as a personfication of Philbrick’s thesis of his book.

The Epilogue and prologue are useful for entering and ushering out the reader into the drastically different world of the 17th century. The book has very useful maps, illustrations and does a great job of showing how the Pilgrim story has been reinterpreted over the centuries, and how the myths and realities of the Pilgrim story are often stronger than is realised today.

Thanksgiving 2006

Thanksgiving 2006 

This is the most American of days, yet oddly disconnected from the government, day to day life or even a day that plays much of an official religious culture in the nation. The rest of the planet will go about their business today, and aside from some globalized cities or places with financial dealings with America, the rest of the world will be oblivious to the large, unavoidable mass of tradition, familial activity, feastings, travel and connectedness that this provides. Other than Christmas, no other day is as romanticized, and sentimentalized as this one.

It has simply two requirements:

1. Be thankful for something outside of yourself
2. Feast on a traditional meal, preferably with family, friends and the downtrodden

That’s it, and for good or ill that is all there is to it. Yes, most certainly, there is deep history to this day. Dr. Mark Roberts has an excellent concise history of the day, here.  Of course the first Thanksgiving in 1621 was nothing of the sort. It was a plain harvest festival between two groups of people that could not be more different in any age: an indigenous, disease ravaged and politically fractured tribe on the edge of the world and a group of early modern English villagers, whose religious devotion and doctrine would have made today’s most notable fundamentalist Christians look like libertines. And the Thanksgiving part? For the Pilgrim Separatists, they had days of small “t” thanksgiving about as often as today’s people go out to eat or go and buy expensive coffee. They lived in plainly, Coram Deo, in the presence of God, they knew no other way to live. Just a few score of wandering souls, who succeeded in establishing a community to their liking, and hopefully pleasing to the Reformed Faith, and along the way making massive mistakes. A day of feasting and activity in place of real thanksgiving? Not them.

This is not the day to celebrate the founding of a ‘Christian nation’, for the land the Pilgrim Separatists were fleeing from was as officially a Christian nation as there ever had been. Nor is it the day for raw gluttony. I stand second to no one in enjoying the traditional meal. In fact, I’ll be blessed to enjoy two of them this holiday. It is a day to celebrate, in the best theological term, common grace, that is the celebration of all material and spiritual blessings given to all men by their Creator.  Virtually every family, mine on included, will have hard blessings to recall from the past year. And everyone of us can remember the even more hard blessings of others we know, directly or indirectly. Yet in the midst of that, because of it, we are called, culturally, and by the cloud of witnesses beginning nearly 400 years ago, to stop and give thanks to the other, to the One, and at times to others, outside of ourselves. It is hard and not to be passed over lightly.

In just 24 hours, as is nearly completely custom, the day will be wiped clean of a mention of turkey, pilgrims and family and we will be headlong into the mass-appeal Christmas shopping season. It is at once the hardest and best time of the year. I am not sure you can experience it without deeply imbibing what Thanksgiving has to offer, even if you pass quickly over the small “t” thanksgiving.

Catherine Claire offers three reminders as we rush headlong into the traditional Holiday season:

1. Provision: Moses warns the Israelites not to mistake their bounty as the fruit of their own hands, but rather see it clearly as the gracious gift of God (Dt. 8:10-16)
2. Contentment: the joy of the Christian life is contentment, “Godliness with contentment is great gain,” a phrase never popular in any era, but needed
3. Anticipation: For even the most well-off of us, financially, physically and relationally, this can be a hard time of year. The passover that Jesus celebrated with his disciples was a meal of thanksgiving, a feast of remembrance and anticipation. Even a dark time of year and life can hold anticipation for the great feast to come.

In many ways, this is my favorite day of the year. It begins six weeks of family, friends, feasting, activity that are unparelled the rest of the year. But I think it can also be a day that begins quiet reflection of gratitude for what has been and what will be done, along with a struggle with the hunger in the soul. It’s a good day to be thankful, to rightfully desire more and be content with what we have.

Wealth Management

How wealthy are you? That is subjective, isn’t? Life can always be better financially for just about everyone. The gaining of wealth, the management of it and using it for our goals, which often include getting more wealth is probably the great obsession of human life, in all sorts of facets.

But how wealthy are you? In the late 1600’s, King Louis XIV, The Sun King, of France, was thought to be the pinnacle of wealth in the world. France’s monarchy was much more dictatorial than other neighboring nations. He did not have to go through parliaments to aquire his wealth. He just asked for it. Yet today, in 2006, my standard of living as a middle class, American, graduate student is higher in many, many ways than Louis XIV. I do not need to hire servants or maintain vast estates to get the latest in food and clothing, even moderately priced items. The resources available to me are vast, mind boggling so, compared to not only most of human history, but to the overwhelming majority of people alive today, over 6 billion.

According to the site, Global Rich List, I am in the top 1% of the world’s wealthy. And while I really, really doubt that I will ever read my name in Forbes list of the world’s most wealthy, my comparison of the rest of the planet, I’m already there, along with most Americans and Canadians. Take the quiz yourself. If you’re online, reading a blog, I’m fairly certain what section of the bell curve you are hanging out in: Global Rich List.

Joe Carter said a few days ago, “Most of our economic problems are caused because we serve mammon rather than God. I certainly don’t know anyone who has put themselves in such financial straits because they were overly concerned with helping the needy.”

Look, most people in America are far, far wealthier, than the rich young ruler Jesus encountered in Luke 18. While we certainly all want more wealth, and probably all could better manage our wealth. Yet the excess wealth of the America middle class could fee the poor on earth several times over. Excess consumerism is our problem.

Looking for some ways to help? Think of these the next time you buy something that “you deserve”:$8 could buy you 15 organic apples OR 25 fruit trees for farmers in Honduras to grow and sell fruit at their local market.

$30 could buy you an TV series DVD Boxset OR a First Aid kit for a village in Haiti.

$73 could buy you a new mobile phone OR a new mobile health clinic to care for AIDS orphans in Uganda.

$2400 could buy you a second generation High Definition TV OR schooling for an entire generation of school children in an Angolan village.