A Good Friday Prayer

The Pange Lingua is one of the great prayers of the Catholic Church. There are actually two hymns, one (the Vexilla regis) written by Venantius Fortunatus in honor of a relic of the Cross brought to the Merovingian court in November 569 and sung on Good Friday at the Liturgy of the Cross, the other (the Pange Lingua) written by St. Thomas Aquinas for Corpus Christi and sung on Maundy Thursday as the consecrated Host is taken to the Altar of Repose. The origins of the hymn, Father Hunwicke tells us, lie in the ribald victory songs of Roman soldiers. The lyrics link the cross to the trophy tree, a battlefield tree which victorious Greek and Roman soldiers decorated with the armor of their fallen enemies. The melody was used for the chants of ritual abuse by Caesar’s soldiers during victory processions. The hymn thus honors the full scope of human experience: it mourns the disaster of Good Friday and celebrates the triumph of Easter.

This version, from the album Illumination: Peaceful Gregorian Chants (CD, MP3 download), has become a PHD Holy Week tradition:

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Are We Overly Obsessed with Healthy Eating?

It’s impossible to generalize about this, but readers may be interested in an article in the Boston Globe Magazine by Jenai Engelhard, in which I was quoted:

Is our obsession with healthy eating out of control?

A blessed Advent and Christmas to all our readers

New Hope for Diagnosis of Chronic Infections; and Ancestral Health (Paleo) Survey

A few items have recently come to my attention that may be of interest to Perfect Health Diet readers.

First, my friend Chris Keller on Facebook reports that a new startup, Aperiomics, is offering tests that are capable of identifying 37,000 different infectious pathogens, including bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa.

This is a game-changing diagnostic tool. Infections are one of the leading causes of disease (along with bad diet and lifestyle), yet standard medical practice is unable to diagnose most infections. Many infections are treatable, but it’s not easy to treat something you can’t diagnose. Getting a clear and accurate diagnosis of infections and treating them appropriately, along with healthy diet and lifestyle practices such as those recommended in Perfect Health Diet, holds the promise of curing most diseases.

The test is not cheap, Chris thinks it’s about $1000. But if you have a mysterious health problem, it may well be worth it.

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Second, you may recall that five years ago, Dr. Hamilton Stapell of the Ancestral Health Society and Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York New Paltz organized a movement-wide survey. Results of that survey were published in the Journal of Evolution and Health.

Now Dr. Stapell has a follow-up survey. It aims to:
1) Describe how the size and composition of the ancestral health movement has changed over the past five years.
2) Identify common practices and the most important motivating factors for both starting and quitting a paleo lifestyle.
3) Predict the future trajectory of the ancestral health movement.

Please consider taking 3 to 5 minutes to help Dr. Stapell’s research by completing the Ancestral Health (Paleo) Survey 2018. All responses are anonymous and will be used for scholarly purposes only.






Angiex’s Upcoming Mission on the International Space Station

I think most of you know that the reason we haven’t been posting much the last three years is that Shou-Ching and I launched a biotech company, Angiex, in 2015 with the goal of creating a breakthrough cancer therapy.

Our drug is close to being finalized, and it is performing remarkably well. We have effectively regressed every tumor we’ve tested in rodents. There is good therapeutic margin in both mice and rats, and the drug is well tolerated in monkeys. There’s every reason to be optimistic it will do well in humans. There’s also reason to believe it will effectively treat the most malignant cancers, such as pancreatic cancer and liver cancer. The more aggressive the cancer, the better our drug works.

In the early days of the company, we applied to do an experiment in the US National Laboratory of the International Space Station, and were fortunate to receive funding for the experiment from Boeing and the Center for Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) via the MassChallenge accelerator. We’re pleased to have received terrific support in developing the experiment from CASIS and BioServe Space Technologies. It’s now show time — the experiment is scheduled to launch this Friday, June 29, on SpaceX CRS-15.

CASIS came to our laboratory at LabCentral in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and made a very nice video explaining our experiment and some background about Angiex. We’re excited to share this glimpse at Angiex’s work. Enjoy!