Herbal Home remedies

A study presented at a recent American Heart Association Conference (www.americanheart.org) has found that candy in wrappers might help indulgers eat less as opposed to eating unwrapped candies.  Researchers found that people who ate candies and kept the wrappers in plain sight ate only about half as many as those who did not.

Lead author Brian Wansink (author of Mindless Eating, www.mindlesseating.org) says, “Having a visual reminder of how much [you eat], keeps you honest and eating less.  Your stomach can’t count, but your eyes can when they see the empty wrappers.”

It also helps to keep the candy in a less convenient location as opposed to a more convenient location, Wansink says.  So for instance, in the office, you wouldn’t want to keep the candy on your desk where it’s easy to get to.  Move it at least 5 or 10 feet away so that you have to get up and walk for your treats.

Not sleeping well can lead to problems, especially for older adults, research has found.  Depression, attention and memory problems, excessive daytime sleepiness and nighttime falls can all occur as a result of poor nighttime sleeping.  According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, some of the more common sleep disorders in older adults include:

• Insomnia, which affects almost half of adults 60 and older.
• Obstructive sleep apnea, which can elevate the risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease and cognitive problems.  Snoring, a symptom of OSA, is a very common condition affecting nearly 40 percent of adults, and is more common in older people.
• Restless legs syndrome, which can cause people to jerk and kick their legs every 20 to 40 seconds during sleep, is evident in almost 40 percent of older adults.

Follow these tips to get a better night’s sleep:

• Establish a routine sleep schedule.
• Avoid using the bed for anything other than sleep and intimacy.
• Avoid substances that disturb your sleep, like alcohol or caffeine.
• Avoid daytime naps.  If you must take a nap, limit the time to less than one hour and no later than 3 p.m.
• Stick to rituals that help you relax each night before going to bed.  This can include things like a warm bath, a light snack or a few minutes of reading.
• Don’t take your worries to bed.  Bedtime is a time to relax, not to hash out the stresses of the day.
• If you can’t fall asleep, leave your bedroom and engage in a quiet activity.  Return to bed only when you are tired.
• Keep your bedroom dark, quiet and a little on the cool side.

Cases of esophageal cancer (adenocarcinoma) in the U.S. have risen in recent decades from 300,000 cases in 1973 to 2.1 million in 2001 at age-adjusted rates. A new study published in The American Journal of Gastroenterology shows that these rates in the U.S. closely mirrored trends of increased carbohydrate intake and obesity from 1973-2001.

The study illustrates what may be a public heath concern as the composition of U.S. diets changes and total carbohydrate and refined carbohydrate intakes increase. Obesity is a risk factor for a number of types of cancer, and a diet that includes a high percentage of calories from refined carbohydrates is a common contributor to obesity. Carbohydrates were also unique in that no other studied nutrients were found to correlate with esophageal cancer rates.

The causes of esophageal cancer remain largely unknown. Despite recent advances in therapy, esophageal cancer has a poor prognosis. The five-year rate of survival for esophageal cancer remains below 20 percent and is the eighth-leading cause of cancer related death in American men.

"If we can reverse the trends in refined carbohydrate intake and obesity in the U.S., we may be able to reduce the occurence rate of esophageal cancer," says Dr. Li Li, senior author of the study.


Posted by: Evelyn    Source

Husband see, husband do, and vice versa, a study has found.  Researchers say that if one spouse adopts a new health behavior, if one the other is likely to do the same.  So if one spouse exercises, quits smoking or drinking, or gets a flu shot, the other spouse is likely to follow suit.

Yale University researchers, who looked at data from more than 6,000 individuals and their spouses from the Health and Retirement Study, conducted the study.  The changes in health habits were most noticeable when it came to smoking and drinking, often spurred by outside cues, and patient-directed preventive behavior, such as a doctor’s referral to get a flu shot, researchers say.

Smokers were five times more likely to quit smoking if their spouse quit, when controlling for other relevant factors.  Drinkers were also five times more likely to quit drinking alcohol if their partner didn’t drink.  The good news is that the health of a family can be enhanced by the behavior of a spouse, but the opposite can also be true: A spouse can mirror destructive behaviors as well.  These facts should be considered in trying to help families reach optimal levels of health.

Want to lose weight" It might help to pour that diet soda down the drain. Scientists have laboratory evidence that the widespread use of no-calorie sweeteners may actually make it harder for people to control their intake and body weight. The findings are reported in the recent issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

Psychology experts at Purdue Universitys Ingestive Behavior Research Center reported that relative to rats that ate yogurt sweetened with glucose (a simple sugar with 15 calories/teaspoon, the same as table sugar), rats given yogurt sweetened with zero-calorie saccharin later consumed more calories, gained more weight, put on more body fat, and didnt make up for it by cutting back later, all at levels of statistical significance.

Authors Susan Swithers, PhD, and Terry Davidson, PhD, surmised that by breaking the correlation between a sweet sensation and high-calorie food, the use of saccharin changes the bodys ability to regulate intake. That change depends on experience. Problems with self-regulation might explain in part why obesity has risen in parallel with the use of artificial sweeteners. It also might explain why, says Swithers, scientific consensus on human use of artificial sweeteners is inconclusive, with various studies finding evidence of weight loss, weight gain or little effect. Because people may have different experiences with artificial and natural sweeteners, human studies that dont take into account previous consumption may produce a variety of outcomes.

Three different experiments explored whether saccharin changed lab animals ability to regulate their intake, using different assessments the most obvious being caloric intake, weight gain, and compensating by cutting back.

The experimenters also measured changes in core body temperature, a physiological assessment. Normally when we prepare to eat, the metabolic engine revs up. However, rats that had been trained to respond using saccharin (which broke the link between sweetness and calories), relative to rats trained on glucose, showed a smaller rise in core body temperate after eating a novel, sweet-tasting, high-calorie meal. The authors think this blunted response both led to overeating and made it harder to burn off sweet-tasting calories.

The data clearly indicate that consuming a food sweetened with no-calorie saccharin can lead to greater body-weight gain and adiposity than would consuming the same food sweetened with a higher-calorie sugar, the authors wrote.

The authors acknowledge that this outcome may seem counterintuitive and might not come as welcome news to human clinical scientists and health-care practitioners, who have long recommended low- or no-calorie sweeteners. Whats more, the data come from rats, not humans. However, they noted that their findings match emerging evidence that people who drink more diet drinks are at higher risk for obesity and metabolic syndrome, a collection of medical problems such as abdominal fat, hypertension and insulin resistance that put people who are at risk for heart disease and diabetes.

Why would a sugar substitute backfire" Swithers and Davidson wrote that sweet foods provide a salient orosensory stimulus that strongly predicts someone is about to take in a lot of calories. Ingestive and digestive reflexes gear up for that intake but when false sweetness isnt followed by lots of calories, the system gets confused. Thus, people may eat more or expend less energy than they otherwise would.

The good news, Swithers says, is that people can still count calories to regulate intake and body weight. However, she sympathizes with the dieters lament that counting calories requires more conscious effort than consuming low-calorie foods.

Swithers adds that based on the labs hypothesis, other artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, sucralose and acesulfame K, which also taste sweet but do not predict the delivery of calories, could have similar effects. Finally, eventhough the results are consistent with the idea that humans would show similar effects, human study is mandatory for further demonstration.


Posted by: Evelyn    Source