Archive for the ‘health and fitness’ Category
Pack Right for the Holidays to Avoid the ER
Luggage that’s too big or too heavy can lead to strains or worse
(HealthDay News) — There may be nothing wrong with stuffing your turkey full to bursting, but you might not want to do the same thing with your suitcase as you pack for holiday trips.
More than 53,000 people were treated in 2008 in U.S. hospital emergency rooms, doctors’ offices, clinics and other medical facilities for luggage-related injuries, such as muscle strains, pulls and tears, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
“Lifting and carrying luggage that is too big or heavy for a person’s size and frame can put serious strains on your body,” Dr. Jeffrey A. Fried, an orthopedic surgeon and spokesman for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, said in a news release from the academy. “To minimize any damage to your neck, shoulders and back, it is important to bend at your knees, lift luggage with your leg muscles while tightening your abdominal muscles and avoid twisting and rotating your spine.” Read more…
Tips For Healthy School Lunches
School cafeterias are not always known for their tasty, healthy food; however, many children end up buying their lunch in school anyway. A healthy lunch is essential for your child not only for dietary reasons but also because it can provide a solid basis for improved concentration and memory in class, important facets for optimal learning. If you feel a bit confused about what to pack for your child’s lunch, you are not alone.
Children love those processed, pre-packaged lunch kits you can buy in the deli aisle of your supermarket. While it may be easy for you to purchase these kits, they are not a healthy choice because the food inside is full of food dyes, preservatives, sodium, sugar and a variety of chemicals. Chips and snack cakes are additional foods often found in traditional sack lunches kids take to school that are not healthy either.
You know what is healthy and what is not but the challenge is getting your kids on board with different way of eating. The best way to integrate healthier lunches for school is to involve them in the food selection process so they feel they are in control. There are no specific rules when it comes to choosing what to put in your child’s lunch but you should ensure that dairy, starch, protein, vegetables and fruit are somehow incorporated. The fun part is doing it in a tasty, creative way.
Protein Lunch Options
Protein helps build lean muscle mass and is an important dietary component for your child’s school lunch. Slice last night’s leftover chicken breast and put it in a pita or wrap. Boil a few eggs for a tasty tuna fish salad sandwich. Turkey breast, salmon and even beans are options.
Starchy Choices
Choose starchy foods that also provide the fiber, vitamins and minerals your child needs for energy. White starchy foods like rice, bread, crackers and pasta simply raise blood sugar and make your child feel lethargic half way through the afternoon. Instead, use whole grain breads, rolls or even tortillas for sandwiches or even salads.
Dairy Items
Dairy is perhaps one of the easiest things to include in your child’s healthy school lunch. String cheese, yogurt, cottage cheese with fruit or even lowfat dip with veggies are great dairy choices. Kids can purchase white milk from the school cafeteria as a drink.
Vegetables and Fruits
Kids love dipping their food so why not mix a batch of vegetable and fruit dip for the week? When you use yogurt as your base instead of mayonnaise or sour cream, you not only add a dairy component, it is also healthier than pre-made versions. Carrot sticks, celery, peppers, cucumbers and grape tomatoes are popular vegetables dippers. Grapes, orange slices, apples and bananas are small and portable enough for lunch. Bypass dried fruit, fruit roll-ups or fruit gummies as they tend to be high in sugar and have little nutritional value.
If your child does not purchase milk from the cafeteria, bottled water or natural 100% fruit juice are healthy options for their lunch. If you have plenty of healthy foods for your children to choose from, you can rest assured they will always have a healthy lunch. Chances are their newfound healthy choices will also work their way into other areas of life as well.
Sacramento Chiropractor: If You Want to Avoid Golf Injuries, Be Prepared!
With any sort of sport, injuries are not unusual. The smart thing to do is to find out what injury is inclined to take place in a particular sport and then to do what it takes to avoid it. The truth is, though, that sports injuries can’t always be avoided. Consequently, it’s important to take excellent care of your body to make getting injured less likely, or less traumatic. The most important thing that you can do is to be certain that you have a suitable fitness level prior to beginning to play a sport, such as golf. By perpetuating a healthy lifestyle, keeping your joints mobile and your muscles limber, warming and stretching your body prior to activity, using proper form and good postures during activity, and allowing yourself an appropriate amount of cool down and relaxation time, you will probably keep your body safe from injury.
It isn’t simply amateur golfers who get injured. Close to one-third of pro golfers play injured concurrently. The good news is that all-round good health and fitness can decrease how many injuries you may acquire and might possibly deter them totally.
Effective body strength in the muscle zones most utilized when golfing is very important. But, it’s essential to make certain your spine is in proper alignment and that it has good mobility before you set out to build muscle strength. A proficient golf swing hinges on your spine’s capacity to effectually move in a rotational action. Back injuries are the most prevalent kind of injuries experienced by golfers. Your Sacramento chiropractor will establish that your spine is in appropriate alignment and that there is good movement of the vertebrae. Chiropractic management can make a big difference in helping you to prevent back injury.
Once you’re “straightened” it’s time to strengthen. Being prepared for your golf game is essential to safe, injury-free action on the green. Golf stretching and flexibility routines will warm up your muscles and make straining them less likely. Whole body range of motion (ROM) exercises will increase flexibility, relatively speedily, in all regions of the body. In addition, elastic band conditioning offers functional golf range of motion improvements and can advance needed energy in the shoulders, hips and deep muscles of the core. Due to the fact that elastic band training provides the dynamic resistance that regular weight lifting does not, sports professionals, such as your chiropractor, are making them a part of their golf conditioning programs.
In addition to back injuries, a large number of golfers suffer from “Golfer’s Elbow.” Though golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow are almost the same injuries, there is a small difference between them. Whereas the outside of the upper arm is impinged in tennis elbow, golfer’s elbow disturbs the inner arm. Golfer’s elbow, like tennis elbow, can be a reaction to a single intense action, such as (in golf) hitting the mat at the driving range or hitting a hard fairway surface. Although, it generally is produced by repetitive stress from smaller shocks. Moreover, it can come upon those who suddenly start playing too much golf. For instance, if those that generally play golf once or twice a month elect to play in a tournament, they are conceivably at risk for contracting the injury.
Golf makes unique requests of the body. The game is ordinarily longer than the majority of other sports and that can cause fatigue. Poor posture and impeded coordination are frequently the consequences of a fatigued body. Together, these two components can cause an assortment of injuries. In addition, due to repetitive swinging of the golf clubs, the shoulder muscles are susceptible to injury. Just as attention should be given to make certain that your muscles are stretched and warmed up prior to starting your golf game, be sure that you rest your body suitable between games.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is, often, a surprising injury associated with golf. But, as it a condition that occurs due to repetitive stress, many games of golf played over several months constantly may produce this injury. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome can be a an extremely damaging injury causing disability and occasionally necessitating surgery. However, chiropractic treatment and, sometimes the use of a brace will help the condition if a health professional, such as your chiropractor, discovers it at an early stage.
Many golfers seem to feel that injuries are simply an inevitable part of a golfer’s life. However, a healthy, mobile spine, judicious preparation, proper exercise and muscle conditioning, reaching and maintaining a a suitable fitness level, and sensible rest and recuperation after your game is over, can make injuries much less a part of your golfing experience.
Dr. Yong Kim is a chiropractor in Sacramento with over thirteen years of experience helping thousands of patients get out of pain and get their lives back. His office is located at 1707 Professional Drive, Sacramento, CA 95825. He has special training in the area of sports injuries. Dr Kim is himself an avid health enthusiast. For more information go to his website at http://www.sacramentochiropractor.org
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Yong_J_Kim
Hip Condition Can Lead to Arthritis
Increasingly, younger men are experiencing aches and pains which were primarily associated with old age. Physicians at the University of Connecticut (UCONN) Health Center say “young” arthritis is a mounting health concern.
Hip conditions are often attributed to anatomical abnormalities that begin early in life or result from overuse through repetitive motion, as seen in baseball. Femoro-acetabular impingement (FAI), also known as hip impingement, occurs when there is a change in the bony form of the hip joint, resulting in decreased range of motion and pain. Simply put, it is too much friction in the hip joint. It is not uncommon for doctors to misdiagnose hip impingements and dysplasias as growing pains.
But due to recent improved understanding of hip abnormalities, along with advances in diagnostic imaging techniques and minimally invasive surgery, many patients are given new hope for relieving chronic, misdiagnosed hip pain.
“This is a relatively new diagnosis or a new evolution of arthritis that we didn’t know occurred, “ said Dr. Michael Meneghini, an orthopedic surgeon at UCONN Health Center. “And we’re now recognizing arthritis years before it happens in a pre-arthritic state if you will.“
Dr. Meneghini said he’s seeing men in their early twenties come in with symptoms. “The patients will present with pain some times flexing their hip—sometimes going up and down stairs—sometimes squatting down playing with their kids. Those kinds of activities they’ll notice they’ll get pain in their groin or pain in the outside of their hip.“
Unfortunately, a young patient with persistent hip pain who is not properly diagnosed and treated may face early arthritis and eventually require a total hip replacement.
However, new options have been identified by hip specialists to slow or reverse the progression of degenerative hip disease. This results in their patients returning to their normal activities and, in some cases, reducing the need for more extensive surgeries.
“In the past few years, the understanding of hip structural abnormalities has increased, allowing specialists to better identify underlying hip conditions that previously went unrecognized and to more accurately diagnose hip problems,” said Douglas E. Padgett, M.D., chief of the Hip Service and co-director of the newly formed Center for Hip Pain and Preservation at Hospital for Special Surgery. “Health insurance companies also now readily recognize the value of hip preservation procedures and, depending on one’s coverage, reimburse their cost.
3 Different Nutritional Needs in Men and Women
Men and women have different body types and biological needs so it stands to reason that their dietary requirements for the best health possible would be different too. Women tend to have a preoccupation with their diet and losing weight so there are far more resources for them to tap in regards to nutrition but men also need resources that recognize their dietary differences and how they compare to women.
There are specific health concerns that are more bothersome for men than women and vice versa. Women are more prone to breast cancer and osteoporosis, although men can get them too. Along these lines, men may develop prostate trouble whereas women obviously wouldn’t because they do not have the same sexual organs. Gender differences often can mean differences in health and diet issues.
3 Common Nutritional Needs
Here are 3 important nutritional needs and how they are different in men and women:
1. Iron – This mineral is vital to blood health in general and when you do not get enough through food and supplements, you can develop anemia. Anemia fosters fatigue, inhibits memory and disrupts the ability to concentrate successfully. Women are more likely to have lower iron levels in their blood. Iron supplements are sometimes necessary for women or even boosting intake of green leafy vegetables like spinach.
Hormones and menstruation are the two main reasons why some women struggle with maintaining sufficient iron levels. While men do have anemia problems, it is not as prevalent because they do not need as much iron as women do. Up until the mid-teen’s, both boys and girls have similar iron requirements – about 7 to 11 milligrams a day. From mid-teen’s to middle age, females require 15 to 18 milligrams of iron a day while males need about 8 to 11 milligrams. During pregnancy, women need almost twice the amount of iron – up to 28 milligrams for normal fetal development.
2. Fiber – Fiber is important for digestive health, serving as a natural “scrub brush” for the intestines. As fiber digests and passes through the intestines, it serves as scrubber, removing bits of undigested food as well as fat and cholesterol. Hemorrhoids are a common problem for both men and women who do not get enough fiber in their diets.
Because men are typically larger than women and more vulnerable to particular diseases, they require more fiber to stay regular. Men also need more calories than women generally so they must eat more to get the energy they need to get through the day. Typical fiber requirements are 35 to 50 grams for men and 20 to 25 grams for women, depending on physical fitness levels and age.
3. Calcium – The building block for healthy, strong bones, calcium is essential also for maintaining blood pressure. Both men and women require calcium, although women do need a bit more than men. Osteoporosis risk is quite high for women, thus the reason why they need more in their diets, both through food and supplements. When diet alone cannot provide enough calcium, women should take supplements to avoid the risk of slow healing for broken bones and for a healthy heart.
When men get too much calcium in their diet, they are prone to prostate cancer so typically supplements are not needed. Up until about age 25, both men and women need about 1,200 to 1,500 milligrams of calcium a day. After that, unless a woman is in menopause, pregnant or breastfeeding, women need about 1,200 milligrams a day while men only need about 1,000 milligrams daily. Pregnant and menopausal women should average 1,500 milligrams a day.
Fiber, calcium and iron are just a few of many nutrients that can greatly differ in requirements for men and women. The best thing you can do to ensure you are getting the proper level of nutrients is to have blood tests each year with your annual physical. Simple dietary changes can make a huge difference in your health.
Paying someone to make me sore? It’s worth every penny
My left calf stings a little with each step, and the muscles on the front of my shoulders refuse to let me reach behind my head.
But I love it.
I’m still sore from my workout from two days ago, a session with my personal trainer. The sessions have been a mix of weights and plyometrics training, designed to increase speed, power and agility (picture at left is a girl performing a box jump, one of the exercises I do).
He’s been careful never to push me so hard that I start to feel ill, which I respect. I’ve had trainers who operated with the philosophy that their job was to get me sick. That’s a good way to lose me as a client. I expect the workouts to make me sore, not make me pay.
I’ve been working with this new trainer once a week for about six weeks, and I’m just starting to see some results in my arms and shoulders.
Paying someone to make me sore? Absolutely. It’s worth every penny.
Homeopathy And The Law Of Healing
Homeopathy is a form of holistic healing. It believes not in treating symptoms but in treating the individual as a whole.
Homeopathy aims to deal with the actual cause of a disease and not just the outward symptoms.
Homeopathy believes in the natural law of healing. This states that healing occurs from inside to outside, from the important organs to less important organs and from the top to the bottom. Simply put, it means that unless the person is treated from the inside a disease or an ailment cannot be cured.
Just because the outward symptoms of a disease have been cured it does not mean that the disease has been cured. It is like trying to remove a weed by stripping its leaves. The leaves will simply come back.
Only when the weed is pulled out from its roots, can it be eliminated permanently. Once the roots of a disease or ailment are healed or removed, one can expect to be permanently cured.
Homeopathy does not aim at treating the ailment or the disease. It believes in trying to bring about a balance in the forces inside the body. A balanced body will heal itself faster and better.
Fruit juice: Soda in disguise?
But I didn’t realize there was an entire movement out there by researchers to dispel that widely-accepted belief.
“[Juice] is pretty much the same as sugar water. … There’s no need for any juice at all,” a researcher says in this story. Read on:
By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
To many people, it’s a health food. To others, it’s simply soda in disguise.
That virtuous glass of juice is feeling the squeeze as doctors, scientists and public health authorities step up their efforts to reduce the nation’s girth.
It’s an awkward issue for the schools that peddle juice in their cafeterias and vending machines. It’s uncomfortable for advocates of a junk food tax, who say they can’t afford to target juice and alienate its legions of fans. It’s confusing for consumers who think they’re doing something good when they chug their morning OJ, sip a 22-ounce smoothie or pack a box of apple juice in their child’s lunch.
The inconvenient truth is that 100 percent fruit juice poses the same obesity-related health risks as Coke, Pepsi and other widely vilified beverages.
With so much focus on the outsized role that sugary drinks play in the country’s collective weight gain — and the accompanying rise in conditions including diabetes, heart disease and cancer — it’s time juice lost its wholesome image, some experts say.
“It’s pretty much the same as sugar water,” said Dr. Charles Billington, an appetite researcher at the University of Minnesota. In the modern diet, he said, “There’s no need for any juice at all.”
A glass of juice concentrates all the sugar from multiple pieces of fruit. Ounce per ounce, it contains more calories than soda, although it tends to be consumed in smaller servings. A cup of orange juice has 112 calories, apple juice has 114 and grape juice packs 152, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The same amount of Coke has 97 calories, and Pepsi has 100.
And just like soft drinks, juice is rich in fructose — the simple sugar that does the most to make food sweet.
University of California, Davis scientist Kimber Stanhope has found that consuming high levels of fructose increases risk factors for heart disease and Type 2 diabetes because it is converted into fat by the liver more readily than glucose. Her studies suggest that it doesn’t matter whether the fructose comes from soda or juice.
“Both are going to promote equal weight gain,” she said, adding that she’s perplexed by the fixation on the evils of sugar-sweetened beverages: “Why are they the only culprit?”
Juice is a relatively recent addition to the human diet. For thousands of years, people ate fruit and drank mostly water.
But in the early 1900s, citrus growers in Florida were harvesting more oranges than they could sell. Then they had an epiphany: Promote juice.
“You consume more oranges if you drink them than if you eat them whole,” said Alissa Hamilton, author of the book “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice.”
The U.S. Army was instrumental in turning orange juice into a commercial product.
It originally served a powdered lemonade to ensure soldiers got enough vitamin C, but it tasted “like battery acid,” Hamilton said. So, during World War II, the Army commissioned scientists to invent a system for freezing OJ in a concentrated form. The patent wound up with Minute Maid, which sold cans of frozen juice concentrate in grocery stores.
Body builder Jack LaLanne and other health gurus touted juice as a natural medicine, and decades of advertising helped secure its place at the breakfast table. Today, about half of all Americans consume juice regularly, according to NPD Group, a market research outfit.
The Juice Products Association emphasizes the value of the vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients in juice — especially when so many American eat so little fresh produce.
“If someone can add a glass of fruit juice at breakfast, that’s an important addition to the diet,” said Sarah Wally, a dietitian for the trade group.
But scientists increasingly are questioning whether the benefits outweigh the sugar and calories that come with them. “The upside of juice consumption is so infinitesimal compared to the downside that we shouldn’t even be having this discussion,” said Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Several researchers have linked juice to more healthful diets and lower weights. But many experts say the data simply reflect a correlation between juice and healthful diets.
“Kids who drink more juice are more likely to be eating breakfast, and kids who eat breakfast tend to weigh less than kids who don’t,” said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.
“Having apple juice and eating an apple are not the same,” said Billington, the University of Minnesota appetite researcher.
Antibiotic overuse threatens modern medicine: experts
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By Kate Kelland
LONDON (Reuters) – Overuse of antibiotics in Europe is building widespread resistance and threatening to halt vital medical treatments such as hip replacements, intensive care for premature babies and cancer therapies, health experts say.
Dominique Monnet of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control's (ECDC) scientific advice unit said the "whole span of modern medicine" is under threat because bugs are become resistant to antibiotics, rendering the drugs useless.
"If this wave of antibiotic resistance gets over us, we will not be able to do organ transplants, hip replacements, cancer chemotherapy, intensive care and neonatal care for premature babies," he told reporters at a briefing.
Antibiotics are needed in all these treatments to prevent bacterial infection. But drug-resistant bacteria are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide, marked by the rise of superbugs such as methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus (MRSA).
Such infections kill about 25,000 people a year in Europe and around 19,000 in the United States. On top of the risks to future treatments, Monnet said the costs of antibiotic resistance were already hurting — and may hit healthcare budgets across the European Union yet harder if the problem is not addressed.
The six most common multi-drug-resistant bacteria — often referred to as superbugs — cause around 400,000 infections a year in Europe, killing around 25,000 people and using 2.5 million hospital days a year.
The ECDC, which monitors and advises on disease in EU, calculates that with a hospital day costing an average of 366 euros ($548), superbug infections are already sucking up 900 million euros a year in extra hospital costs, and a further 600 million euros a year in lost productivity.
"Across the European Union the number of patients infected by resistant bacteria is increasing and that antibiotic resistance is a major threat to public health," the ECDC said.
Britain's government was criticized by a parliamentary committee on Tuesday for failing to tackle the majority of hospital-acquired infections by narrowing its focus to two high profile ones — MRSA and Clostridium difficult.
The ECDC is planning an "antibiotic awareness" campaign on November 18 to urge doctors to stop overprescribing antibiotics.
Patients demanding antibiotics for viral infections often are not aware that they will not work, it said, but doctors are and should stop giving in to pressure.
Sarah Earnshaw of the ECDC's communications unit, pointed to a 2002 survey that showed 60 percent of patients do not know that antibiotics do not work against viruses like flu and colds.
"Patients often demand antibiotics," she said. And doctors often think, she said, that giving in is a quicker way to deal with demanding patients than persuading them otherwise.
TM Time Out for Coronary Heart Disease Patients?
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the Institutes of Health, will fund a one million dollar joint study by the Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management Research Institute and Columbia University Medical Center to determine whether the stress-reducing Transcendental Meditation technique (TM) can help patients with coronary heart disease avoid future heart attacks and strokes.
Maharishi University of Management