Natural Way Health Blog

Biomarker 1 – Benefits of good muscle and bone

A strong, toned musculature makes all sorts of wonderful contributions to your overall well-being. A high ratio of muscle to fat on the body:

• causes the metabolism to rise, meaning you can more easily burn body fat and alter your body composition even further in favour of beneficial muscle tissue.
• increases your aerobic capacity-and the health of your whole cardiovascular system-because you have more working muscles -consuming oxygen.
• triggers muscle to use more insulin, thus greatly reducing the chances you’ll ever develop diabetes.
• helps maintain higher levels of the beneficial HDL-cholesterol in your blood.

So how do you get better bones and muscles.

1. Simple exercise – walking is free but invaluable – you don’t need to join a gym and we can all do it
   • cyclic loading of bones is a key antidote to osteoporosis
   • eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables (note not cooked) for calcium
2. Simple strength training with small weights – can of beans is a good place to start
   • sit in a chair watching television and just do simple arm raises – holing the bean can and doing it slowly
   • again sitting – raise the leg horizontal and hold for a count of 5 and gently lower – repeat 10 times
   • remember it is not the size of the weights that’s important but the number of times you repeat it

Swine Flu – Fact from Fiction

Swine Flu is not yet dead but there is a whole lot of miss-information out there that is causing alarm. This article is factual and balanced and well worth a read. Once again my strong message is follow the money – it always exposes the truth – good or bad.

I have two issues with Swine Flu:

• It is flu. Flu is everywhere. Globally there are over 1 billion cases of flu diagnosed each year. Swine or not, flu is an issue for a lot of people.

So is malaria. Over 1 million people die of it each year. Where is the crazy reporting about malaria. Or alcohol related deaths. Or those from smoking.

There were 13.4 alcohol-related deaths per 100,000 in the UK in 2006. This year there are 0.05 swine-flu related deaths per 100,000 in the UK. At the moment you are 278 times more likely to die of an alcohol related disease than swine flu.

Or would we rather head to the pub for a pint and a cigarette and have a chat about it instead?

This ridiculously alarmist reporting of ‘Swine’ flu is causing an obscene amount of worry, Government spending and panic in the general public.

Yes, it might be a problem for a very small number of the population, but how much more productive would it be to focus on prevention?

• The answer seems to be drugs & pumping people full of vaccines and antibiotics. MILLIONS OF PEOPLE HAVE FLU ALL YEAR ROUND. Every year. All the time. Why do we suddenly need to vaccinate everyone?!

Oh, of course, to earn Roche and GlaxoSmithKlein a healthy fat pocket.

Let’s focus on prevention rather than waiting and then drugging. It is really, really easy to give your body everything it needs to successfully fight flu. Swine or not!

Continue Reading…

Spock Had it Right – Live Long and Prosper

We love this article because it shows the power that simple habits, one of which is exercise, have on your long-term health. If you need some of that “practical support” mentioned in the last paragraph, we are happy to help. Our Health Offer was designed to provide this type of support.

Healthy Habits May Give 14 Years

To get an extra 14 years of life, don’t smoke, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise regularly and drink alcohol in moderation.

That is according to a study published Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal.

After tracking more than 20,000 people aged 45 to 79 years in the United Kingdom from about 1993 to 2006, Kay-Tee Khaw of the University of Cambridge and colleagues found that people who adopted these four healthy habits lived an average of 14 years longer than those who didn’t.

“We’ve known for a long time that these behaviours are good things to do, but we’ve never seen these additive benefits before,” said Susan Jebb, head of Nutrition and Health at Britain ’s Medical Research Council. Jebb was not involved in the study.

“Just doing one of these behaviours helps, but every step you make to improve your health seems to have an added benefit,” she said. The benefits were also seen regardless of whether or not people were fat and what social class they came from.

Study participants scored a point each for not smoking, regular physical activity, eating five servings of fruits and vegetables a day and moderate alcohol intake. People who scored four were four times less likely to die than those who scored zero.

Researchers tracked deaths from all causes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer and respiratory diseases.

Participants filled in a health questionnaire and nurses conducted a medical exam at a clinic. The study was largely paid for by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research United Kingdom.

Khaw said that the study should convince people that improving their health does not always require extreme changes to their lifestyles. “We didn’t ask these people to do anything exceptional,” Khaw said. We measured normal behaviors that were entirely feasible within people’s normal, everyday lives.”

Public health experts said they hoped the study would inspire governments to introduce policies helping people to adopt these changes.

“This research is an important piece of work which emphasizes how modifying just a few risk factors can add years to your life,” said Dr. Tim Armstrong, a physical activity expert at the World Health Organization.

Experts are unsure if these new findings will actually improve the public’s health.

“What stops people from changing their behavior is not a lack of knowledge,” Jebb said. ”Most people know that things like a good diet matter and that smoking is not good for you,” she said. “We need to work on providing people with much more practical support to help them change.”

How Do You Eat a Rainbow

How are you doing with your daily intake of superfoods?
Are nourishing your body with a variety of these foods each week?

Here is a suggestion that has been helpful for many of us on our health journey:

Enjoy the following article that highlights the benefits of eating the delicious rainbow that nature makes available to us:

In the world of finance, experts advise you to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. When it comes to your diet, a similar rule exists but with this twist: avoid filling your basket with only eggs. Just as with your finances, diversity is the smartest choice around when it comes to choosing the foods that you eat. Applying a diversity strategy to your eating patterns can provide you with easy opportunities to lose pounds, gain years, and enjoy some of the most delicious foods on the planet.

Step inside the major food categories
You probably know all the major players in the nutrition game: vegetables, fruits, grains, dairy, meat-based foods, and fats. Getting an appropriate amount of each major kind of food every day is a good start toward eating a diverse diet. But can you name five different fruits you’ve eaten in the past week? Within each food category is a vast array of nutrient-rich foods, each one containing hundreds of unique substances. The key is to get to know all the different powerful choices within each food category and to introduce these different foods into your diet on a rotating basis. With a little exploration, you can find hundreds of nutritious newcomers to add to your meals and make them more satisfying and more nutritious. Continue Reading…

Weight Training – Wait

Weight training is such an essential component of creating a healthy body. If you combine your cardio with weights, this article explains the most helpful way to do so.

Wait for Weights

Maximize the calorie-burning benefits of your workout by tackling cardiovascular exercise before strength training.

Doing cardio first can help you exercise longer, and thus burn more calories, than you would if you were tired out by weight training first. And finishing your workout with weights helps boost post-workout metabolism — the rate at which your body burns calories after you’re done. The result may be an overall better calorie burn, according to a small study.

Although all types of exercise — cardiovascular, strength, and flexibility — help you burn calories, cardio workouts result in the greatest calorie burn. Because of this, it may be best to do your cardio exercises first while you are fresh. You’re likely to spend more time on aerobic exercise and work out harder if you haven’t tired yourself out by doing other kinds of exercises first.

On the other hand, strength training results in the greatest boost in post-exercise calorie burning. It boosts your metabolism for a longer period of time, helping your body burn more calories after your workout is done.

Ultimately, this means that doing your cardio workout first can help ensure that you achieve the maximum calorie burn from it, and ending your workout with a strength-training session helps ensure your post-exercise metabolism stays high.

Source: www.real-age.com

Exercise – in your head

The mind-body connection is powerful. We saw the following article and knew we wanted to share it.

Awareness about being on your health journey is important. Want to know the easiest way to boost the benefits of your workout: Just think about them.

Sounds crazy, right? But it was true in a study of hotel workers. Just 4 weeks after the room cleaners were educated on how their duties counted toward their exercise needs, they saw a drop in weight and blood pressure — despite no changes in overall activity levels.

Placebo Effect at Work
Changing bed linens, vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing the bathroom floor — it’s not spin class, but it is physical activity. And if you do physically active things with the right mind-set (namely, think “This is good for me. “), it could translate into greater health gains. Just chalk it up to that mind-body connection to which so many other health benefits (like the placebo effect) have been traced.

Think About It
You need only about 30 minutes of exercise daily to meet the surgeon general’s physical activity recommendations. And keep in mind that things like pulling weeds, painting the garage door, and folding laundry count toward that total. And we mean literally keep it in mind. Couldn’t hurt, right?

Source: www.real-age.com

Choose Your Friends Wisely

Are your friends making you fat? Or keeping you slender? According to new research from Harvard and the University of California , San Diego , the short answer on both counts is “yes.”

Appearing in the July 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a study coauthored by Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of UC San Diego suggests that obesity is “socially contagious,” spreading from person to person in a social network.

The study — the first to examine this phenomenon — finds that if one person becomes obese, those closely connected to them have a greater chance of becoming obese themselves. Surprisingly, the greatest effect is seen not among people sharing the same genes or the same household but among friends.

If a person you consider a friend becomes obese, the researchers found, your own chances of becoming obese go up 57 percent. Among mutual friends, the effect is even stronger, with chances increasing 171 percent.

Christakis and Fowler also looked at the influence of siblings, spouses and neighbors. Among siblings, if one becomes obese, the likelihood for the other to become obese increases 40 percent; among spouses, 37 percent. There was no effect among neighbors, unless they were also friends.

The researchers analyzed data over a period of 32 years for 12,067 adults, who underwent repeated medical assessments as part of the Framingham Heart Study. They were able to map a densely interconnected social network of the study’s subjects by using the tracking sheets (which had previously been archived in a basement) that recorded not only the subjects’ family members but also unrelated friends who could be expected to find them in a few years.

The network map took two years to assemble and includes information on the participants’ body-mass index. Among the first things the researchers noticed was that, consistent with other studies finding an obesity epidemic in the U.S. , the whole network grew heavier over time.

Also immediately apparent were distinct clusters of thin and heavy individuals. Statistical analysis revealed that this clustering could not be attributed solely to the selective formation of ties among people of comparable weights.

“It’s not that obese or non-obese people simply find other similar people to hang out with,” said Christakis, a physician and a professor in Harvard Medical School ’s department of health care policy. “Rather, there is a direct, causal relationship.”

Further analysis also suggested that people’s influence on each other’s obesity status could not be put down just to similarities in lifestyle and environment, to, for example, people eating the same foods together or engaging in the same physical activities. Not only do siblings and spouses have less influence than friends, but also geography doesn’t play a role. The striking impact of friends seems to be independent of whether or not the friends live in the same region.

“When we looked at the effect of distance, we found that your friend who’s 500 miles away has just as much impact on your obesity as [one] next door,” said Fowler, an associate professor of political science at UC San Diego and an expert in social networks.

In part because the study also identifies a larger effect among people of the same sex, the researchers believe that people affect not only each other’s behaviors but also, more subtly, norms.

“What appears to be happening is that a person becoming obese most likely causes a change of norms about what counts as an appropriate body size. People come to think that it is okay to be bigger since those around them are bigger, and this sensibility spreads,” said Christakis.

“This is about people’s ideas about their bodies and their health,” Fowler said. “Consciously or unconsciously, people look to others when they are deciding how much to eat, how much to exercise and how much weight is too much.”

“Social effects, I think, are much stronger than people before realized. There’s been an intensive effort to find genes that are responsible for obesity and physical processes that are responsible for obesity and what our paper suggests is that you really should spend time looking at the social side of life as well,” said Fowler.

The policy implications of the study, the researchers say, are profound. The social-network effects extend three degrees of separation — to your friends’ friends’ friends — so any public-health intervention aimed at reducing obesity should consider this in its cost-benefit analysis.

“When we help one person lose weight, we’re not just helping one person, we’re helping many,” Fowler said. “And that needs to be taken into account by policy analysts and also by politicians who are trying to decide what the best measures are for making society healthier.”

“It’s important to remember,” Fowler said, “that we’ve not only shown that obesity is contagious but that thinness is contagious.”

10 Things To Protect Your Health

There are so many ideas and products touted to improve your health that the whole picture is confused. So I started thinking what are the top 10 free things you can do to protect or improve your health?

1. breathe clean air -
2. drink clean water
3. eat food closest to the way nature made it – avoid processing at all costs
4. walk a mile every day
5. grow your own food
6. get 8 hours of sleep a night
7. take at least one day a week off from work
8. avoid pharmaceutical drugs unless absolutely essential
9. spend time with someone you love – even your pet
10. try and do something beneficial for someone else every day

OK – all those things are either free or very low cost and all contribute to your health – everything else is a bonus or an add-on.

Plant Extracts

There is a huge surge in the interest in standardised plant extracts as food supplements. One of the biggest questions people often ask is why are they standardised? The simple reason being that just extracting the essence of a plant does not bring the sort of quality that both regulators are requiring and customers are demanding.

For example in a recent study into Ginkgo Biloba over 100 samples from different suppliers were tested for the active ingredient against the label amount and it produced a worrying picture. Some had 400% more than was stated on the label and sadly some had none. Now you might think that 400% is good value but in fact 400% might be harmful and it might be a waste of money.

So check out your supplements to see if they are standardised – if not caveat emptor – or buyer beware.