Aloha

My new favorite word is. . .

When i first came to Hawaii i was under the impression that aloha meant hello, goodbye, and i love you.

Then one day in class a speaker came and she fights for native rights to Mauna Kea and to stop the destruction of the environment on top of the volcano due to the observatories. One of the main things she talked about was having aloha. The question that kept running through my mind was "how do you have hello, or i love you" i tried to rationalize what i already knew about the word to make it work in my head and it just didn't fit. So in college student way i came home and googled it.

Aloha literally translated into English means a breath of life.
Children learn aloha through the "meaning of its letters"

"Akahai", meaning kindness,
to be expressed with tenderness;

"Lokahi", meaning unity,
to be expressed with harmony;

"Oluolu", meaning agreeable,
to be expressed with pleasantness;

"Haahaa", meaning humility,
to be expressed with modesty;

"Ahonui", meaning patience,
to be expressed with perseverance

think i have come to recognize that to have aloha means many things from compassion, affection, empathy, peace, welcoming, mercy and love. I think Aloha is just one of those words that is almost impossible to define or more accurately translate because it has so many definitions.

Vitamin C

Some people swear by Vitamin C, but what does it do anyway? and what are the recommended dosages?



Vitamins are a category of organic substances that help your body to perform necessary functions. Without vitamins our body's abilities to perform certain functions would be radically decreased. This can cause lots of health problems even leading to death. Vitamins are broken into 2 category's: Water Soluble and Fat Soluble this tells you where your body stores the vitamins. Fat soluble are stored in your body's fat, so your body stores it up for much longer periods of time until it can be used. Water Soluble are stored in your blood stream so will quickly go through your system and pass back out of your system in the form of urine if it is not used.

Vitamin C is also know as Ascorbic Acid, and is organic by definition because it is built off of carbon (dark gray in the model to the right).Vitamin C is good for keeping your tissue in a healthy condition and resisting infection. Vitamin C is essential to your body's ability to make collagen, which is found all over the body from connective tissue in our organs, to cartilage, to connective tissue of our ligaments. A deficiency in Vitamin C can result in a disease called Scurvy, symptoms are: Liver spots, weak gums, looking pale, feeling depressed, partially immobilized, bleeding from mucus membranes, and in advanced stages there are open wounds and loss of teeth. But this disease can be avoided (just avoided, which is still far below the recommended daily intake of 60 mg per day) with as little as 10mg of vitamin c per day, which is pretty easy to achieve.

Vitamin C can be found in a variety of sources:

• oranges
• lemons
• limes
  
• Strawberries
  
• tomatoes
  
• Broccoli
  
• Peaches
• Lettuce
  
• Potatoes
  
• Bell Peppers
• Mango's
• Bananas
  
• Watermelon
• Raspberries
• Grapefruit
  
• Blueberries
• Cranberries
• Pineapples

And Packing companies use vitamin c as a preservative in cases such as:

• Wine
• Cured meats (in this case it also prevents cancer causing bi-products)
• Dog food
• Ready to eat cereal
  
• Frozen Peaches
  
• cosmetic creams