Blogs of Note - Yvonne Foong

I want to take some time in promoting a site in which you can actually help out a person in need. She is Yvonne Foong, a very intelligent and hardworking person. Unfortunately, she has been combatting health difficulties in recent years as she faces a rare sickness making losing her eyesight currently. Tumours growth makes her living difficult and hard to determine which day she might have to drop down. Below is an excerpt of her conditions:

When she was only 16, doctors diagnosed her with a rare genetic disorder called Neurofibromatosis Type 2. Curious schoolteachers and friends could only observe, as the former ballet dancer, figure skater, karate fighter and Soprano in the school choir suffered sudden health deteriorations that robbed her bodily capabilities.

In her thirteenth year when the first symptoms arise, Yvonne became deaf in the right ear, and soon had difficulty balancing. The unexpected turn of events were strange and unbelievable. In the next three years, Yvonne suffered in silence, swallowing the ill-fate in a gulp and roughed through tough times alone, when no one paid serious attention to her pleas for medical attention.

To date, Yvonne has undergone 1 spine and 3 brain surgeries. The first two were done at Kuala Lumpur General Hospital where she suffered the consequences of reckless and ill-informed doctors. Besides that, the lack of experience among local doctors proved unhelpful in treating tumours caused by Neurofibromatosis Type 2.

As such, Yvonne is determined to seek medical treatment abroad. Her life took another twist upon meeting a kind Neurotologist named Dr. Rick A. Friedman, who did her third surgery for free. The opportunity broadened Yvonne’s perspective towards the world of medicine, and her life became hopeful once again.

The fourth surgery, which was to remove another brain tumour that robbed her residual hearing in 2005, was successfully done by Dr. Friedman in Los Angeles. For this surgery, Yvonne together with her friends and kind members of the public raised the cost by selling t-shirts and accessories, and by organising various fundraising events. The first 10 months of selling, giving speeches, appearing in newspapers and magazines, and dealing with stress was not easy, but for a better quality of life, the effort was definitely worthwhile.

Please help spread the word for her if you can. For readers in China, and if your family members can help her in anything, please do so. Her medical bills are very expensive and hard to upkeep. Every few months, she need to source out 5000-6000 Malaysian ringgit in order to do any surgery. You can help her by reading up on her. She does some fund raising on her own to pay for her own bills. You can buy off the things she auctioned off online. Read up her blog to find out how you can do it. Her recent corsett from Russia really looks wonderful!

Guess what fruit is in abundance and cheap in Shanghai now?

Tangerine! I see Lots of them by the road stalls and vendors, in super markets like Carrefour, Wallmart, Emart and all!

They are going for a price like RMB 1.50 per 500 grams currently. Its a good deal. Big harvest from nearby I guess. Eat and enjoy. However, there is a saying in Chinese, don't eat too much. This fruit can be a little heaty.

You can cook good and delicious meals using Tangerine. It mixes well with pork and beef as a side dish. I seen it as side dish in fusion cuisine onboard Lufthansa Airlines. And for the health conscious and cancer patients, read below.

quoted from China Daily:

Tangerine peel could help in the fight against certain cancers. Human cancer cells, which contain an enzyme called P450 CYP1B1, were destroyed by a compound contained in tangerine peel, Salvestrol Q40, scientists at Leicester School of Pharmacy found.

The findings may offer a new approach to uncovering a treatment for cancers such as breast, lung, prostrate and ovarian cancer, the scientists said. Medicinal chemist Dr. Hoon L. Tan said: "It is very exciting to find a compound in food that can target cancers specifically. "Salvestrols may offer a new mechanism of dietary anti-cancer action

Healthy diet with My Fitness Pal

Are you a health conscious person? Do you need help in getting your ideal weight to look good, feel good and know you live good in good health? There is this website that does the perfect job in monitoring everything so for you. It offers you insight into doing the right thing to ensure you watch your diet and calories properly. Sounds too good? Take a look at MyFitnessPal.

MyFitnessPal is not just a normal mentoring program who gives you the ordinary "what to do so i can grow thin" sutra. It grows with you, track your eating habits and lifestyles to help you achieve your desired weight. They have an easy to use calorie counter system which digest and help you meet your requirements.

A food diary ensures giving you the correct amount of calorie intake. It helps you keep track of what you are eating and suggest the best ways to eat good. It has a fun database of recipes in which you can look into for healthy eating, making your lifestyle enjoyable as you maintain your diet for the everyday refreshing lifestyle of fit living.

What I like best about MyFitnessPal is the free membership. Registering with them only helps build a good portfolio in which they help you better. On the website you can find thousands of recipes for your ideal eating, you can even upload your own recipes and eating habits, exercising tips, message boards and more.

Start your healthy living and feel yourself reborn now :)

*sponsored

The truth about dead chickens

A recent article from CSR Asia by Jacqui Dixon reported that thousands of dead chickens reared in compact chicken farms in China might end up in our human food chain, meaning we somehow or another, we might be eating something that might have consume the dead chickens.

Below is the article from the site:

" Any idea what happens to the thousands of dead chickens that don’t survive battery farming conditions every year? 80 per cent of their carcasses land up in the human food change according to Professor Gaoming Jiang in his article featured on Chinadialogue last week. Details of the study are limited but the findings are quite shocking. China consumes 4.7 billion chickens a year but the very unnatural living conditions are causing thousands of chickens to die each year, despite efforts to keep them alive. And of course, sick and dead chickens are much cheaper than relatively healthy ones which means they land up in sausages or at street stores selling roast chicken. Carcasses should be incinerated on the farm, but in China this option seems to be regarded as too costly. In the long-term eating chickens in China will become much more costly to our health. Gaoming Jiang wrote a rather controversial article last year on how China could improve its farming practices."

I was shocked when I read the article and finally understand why chen-cai-mei wanted to buy fresh chickens killed on site to bring home for cooking. I bet that majority of the people are not aware of the dangers they are involved in as a consumer. The worst part is I cannot imagine such dead chickens being exported out of China to neighbouring countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore! Imagine those people with no ethics package up this dead and maybe sick chickens, process them in some screw know where factories in some undisclosed suburbs, and sell them to us in South-East Asia as some 1SGD Taiwan Sausage! F*ck Man, the more I think about it, the more shivers I feel tinkling down my spine.

I already feel bad enough that I can splurge like most expats here, who can easily go to some Japanese Fusion Restraunt over the weekend to social network with some English wanna be Locals. Eating cheap food on the streets for some cheap 5Rmb per meal does not mean that the source should be from some unknown source of dead carcass. This is as bad as the Fermented TOFU that was created with human faeces somewhere in Shenzhen.

I think I should eat lesser outside, and cook more meals to ensure I will peacefully graduate from my studies here in Shanghai. -broods-