Health

Physical, mental, family, and life health are important aspects in life.  You cannot be healthy without being well in all four subject areas. This article takes a look into each section and see how you can be more healthy starting today.

Physical Health

Who doesn’t want to be physically fit?! This is a very important asset to have. So why is physical health so important? Well, for one, it lengthens life expectancy. Live longer! It might be hard to pick up at first, but it is important in the long end. Exercise also makes you feel fantastic. More confidence, and it makes you happy. It is proven to release endorphins that make you happy. So when you’re feeling glum, go exercise. Another very peculiar thing that it does is it lets you sleep better. Most people often complain about sleeping problems, and most of those people are lazy. Exercise regulates your internal clock, and it helps you sleep much better. And last but not least, let’s not forget, it makes you look more attractive! So if you are trying to impress that one special person, why not get in shape and do just that?!

Mental Health

Mental health is very important in everyday life for many reasons. Think clearly, think faster, perform tasks better, makes speech clearer, and it just, on average, makes you sound smarter. This is a type of chain; one sets off the other, and so on. Mentally helps you think of words or sentences faster, get your work or homework done A LOT quicker, and it gives you better word choice to make you sound like a pure genius! Reading, writing and mental games such as chess or checkers all help progress this process. These are all things to exercise your mind with.

Family Health

Whether it’s just your parents or your wife and three children, it’s always good to have a good relationship with your family.Although people say they are cheerful alone, they are never as happy as they are with their family. It is key to true happiness. It is a new kind of love that must be experience. A life is wasted without family, for family is a main ingredient in the hodgepodge we call “living.” They support your decision and they back you 100% on anything, even if you’re wrong. And most importantly, they are always there to cheer you up when no one else is. Family helps you up at your weakest moment.

Life Health

A well-maintained life is very important. Inside you is the spark of true happiness, and the world is your fuel. If you have a healthy life overall, there is nothing you can’t accomplish. You can control so much more than you think. YOU have the power to shape your future any way you want! All that is needed is confidence and willpower.

Conclusion

Exercise to live your life longer and feel better.

Train your mind to be more knowledgeable.

Support your family, because they’re always supporting you.

With all of this you can become everything you’ve ever dreamed of!

Brain Train.

Have you ever felt stupid? Seriously, in any given situation, you jst feel like you’re a complete moron. We all have, unless of course pride gets in the way. What about pride? Do you have enough pride to warrant self-denial? Probably not if that’s true. However, these are, in fact very common. Everyone of us experiences things like this on a daily basis. Yes, even you.

It’s all about brain cells. Until about 10 or so years ago, researchers didn’t actually know the brain created new neurons all the time – this is true, and you can encourage it. The usual “exercise and eat well” blah blah advice is included, but it’s only a portion of the training you can start doing to, literally, get smarter.

Ask yourself this: “If I could see my brain right now, would it have any holes in it?” If you sit down and think about the fact that it is possible, it’s a pretty scary thought. I’m sure we’ve all heard or seen the “this is your brain on drugs” ad campaign of old, where the young woman smashes an egg with a frying pan. Well it hit the nail right on the head.

This is your brain due to various events that may affect or have affected your life:

http://amenclinics.com/bp/atlas/

Doctor Daniel Amen is one of the most experienced and knowledgeable brain doctors today. With 25 years of experience and a passion to informing people on how to heal their brain, rest assured this stuff is solid gold.

I stumbled upon his research when a family member told me about his program on Public Television. I watched the latter hour of his 1 1/2 hour speaking session, and it was brilliant.

To summarize what I saw, I’ll tell you a little about the parts of the brain he talked about.

First in his talk was the prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain deals with things like, judgment, social behavior, personality, reasoning; general emotional type activity. If you’re an awkward or angry person, there’s a chance, not 100%, but still a chance that this part of the brain isn’t getting enough exercise.

Yes. Exercise can heal your brain. It increases blood flow, and we all know how blood is needed throughout the body, so why not boost the travel of it? Attention problems, people with ADD and like issues could have a damaged prefrontal cortex – that has been proven to be taken to a more mild level just with a 15 minute job per day. Procrastination is another related thing to the prefrontal cortex.

Another very interesting thing he mentioned was he mentioned research that flat out showed the advantages of exercise over Zoloft. Not only that, but fish oil, or Omega-3 fatty acids found in salmon and a supplement called Coromega (I take this, I highly recommend it – it’s not gross at all!) does wonders to brain healing. Everyone should definitely be taking Coromega (NOTE: talk to your doctor first).

Second, what is called the cingulate area of the brain, has influence on things like opposition without reason and error detection. Error detection, meaning when someone starts to see all of the negative things in someone or life in general, or they pick out everything that’s wrong. One thing he said is if you know someone like that and you want to get back at them for something, just move something on their desk, they’ll freak out. Of course he was joking about doing that, but it was worth the laugh. Reverse psychology is something that works very well on people with low cingulate activity. He suggested telling the person the opposite of what you want them to do, of course not in an obvious way. Be tactful about it.

Seratonin levels was something he emphasized when talking about the cingulate functions. If you recall my article on sleep when I joined The Underground, I talked about seratonin. When it gets dark, seratonin is released in our brains, causing us to get tired. If you force yourself to stay up, there’s a good chance you’re dealing damage to your cingulate. That is to say, you don’t necessarily have to go to bed when it gets dark out. Also, exercise majorly boosts seratonin levels. Work hard and rest well!

What about food and diet? Absolutely important! He listed 10 things that you can fit very easily into your diet, none of this crazy stuff from special markets and organic food stores – every day regular stuff. I didn’t catch the whole list, but I got most of it. Number one in my opinion was the green tea. While he said caffeine actually is not good for your brain, he said to drink green tea – obviously caffeine free is better than the caffeinated, though both are very good for you. It provides you with energy, and relaxation of focus, so he said it’s like a perfect supplement! Which I agree. My suggestion is, carry a few sticks of honey with you to give it some flavor.

Also on the list were oranges, avocados, spinach, red bell peppers and of course fish oil, found in salmon especially. Most of us probably eat something from this list quite often – though you shouldn’t over do it either. “Everything in moderation.” Balance is vital. He said that red bell peppers actually have a significant amount of vitamin C over oranges, if I recall correctly, and are much healthier for you than green peppers, which is sometimes more common in restaurants and fast food.

He also talked about another area of the brain, but I missed that section. I plan to re-watch it sometime and pick up what I didn’t see, but until then keep this information dear to you, because if you do feel you suffer from any thing like depression, bad attention span, personality issues like anger or awkwardness, you should definitely implement some of these steps. Of course, make sure that you talk to your doctor before taking or eating things you haven’t taken before. I’m personally allergic to avocados, even though I love guacamole.

Finally, it’s very important that you note:

THIS IS ALL FOR GENERAL INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY. Get a medical exam if you feel something needs to be done. Also:

SUFFERING FROM THE MENTIONED ISSUES DOES NOT MEAN YOU HAVE BRAIN DAMAGE. It certainly can’t hurt to take at least some of these steps to improve your brain health though.

Either way, don’t do drugs, get good sleep, get exercise, but most importantly:

Take care.

[ Source: http://amenclinics.com/ ]

P.S.: My apologies for all the head and brain cliche, I seemed to let them get aHEAD of me…..

God speed, and Best wishes.

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Are Plastic Baby Bottles Harmful?

Interesting article from the TIME website. Here it is below:

If a new report is to be believed, an entire generation of children has grown up drinking a toxic chemical from their earliest months: bisphenol A. A consortium of North American environmental and health groups released a paper Thursday showing that many major-brand baby bottles leach bisphenol A, and is now calling for a moratorium on the use of the compound — used to make polycarbonate plastic — in food and beverage containers.

Researchers tested 19 baby bottles purchased in nine U.S. states and Canada. Bottle brands included Avent, Dr. Brown, Evenflo, Disney, Gerber and Playtex. When the bottles were heated to 175 degrees F (80 degrees C), every one of them leached bisphenol A at about 5 to 7 parts per billion. The report also suggested that because of the chemical makeup of bisphenol A, it may leach more in fatty or acidic liquids, such as milk or apple juice, than in water.

It’s a parent’s nightmare. But before you panic, consider this: U.S. and E.U. health and environment authorities still stand behind polycarbonate plastic, putting the safe level of daily bisphenol A exposure at more than 25 times the levels found in baby bottles. (The Canadian agency, Health Canada, is currently reviewing its bisphenol A policy; conclusions are due in May.)

So who’s right? Opponents of bisphenol A say official safety figures are far too high, given what the chemical, which mimics the hormone estrogen in the body, does in animals. In the lab, even low exposure levels — adjusted for body weight — have been linked to a variety of sex-hormone-imbalance effects, including breast and prostate cancer, early puberty, miscarriage, low sperm count, and immune-system changes. Critics also claim that in developing infants, such sex-hormone effects may come into play at exposure levels far below what health authorities have deemed safe for adults. “The reproductive system is developing, the brain is developing, the immune system is developing,” David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, told a news conference Thursday on behalf of the environmental agencies. Knowing that, he said, it is “absolutely obscene” to expose infants to the compound. Legislation has been proposed in several U.S. states to limit or ban the use bisphenol A. And a handful of stores, including Whole Foods and Patagonia, have yanked polycarbonate bottles from their shelves.

Still, the scientific establishment disagrees. In a 2006 summary explaining its review of bisphenol A safety, the European Food Safety Authority argued that animal trials of the chemical simply don’t tell us very much about humans. For one thing, when humans ingest the compound, it’s quickly excreted through the urine; when rats and mice eat it, it’s released into the bloodstream and remains in the body much longer — with much more time to throw off the body’s sex-hormone balance, causing nasty effects.

So far, the human data on bisphenol A have been “really inconclusive,” says Antonia Calafat, a research chemist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, citing a lack of big quality studies testing the chemical’s effects in humans. In order to prove definitively that bisphenol A is not harmful to people, researchers would need to conduct large, lengthy trials, such as those that finally concluded that thimerosal-containing vaccines do not cause autism in children. That would require rounding up a control group of participants with very little exposure to bisphenol A — no small feat. Calafat’s recent findings showed that, among roughly 2,500 Americans tested in 2003 and 2004, more than 95% already had traces of bisphenol A in their urine. Alternatively, researchers could test how higher-than-average doses of bisphenol A affects people. Again, a likely dead end. “As a scientist it would be pretty much unethical to do that study knowing what [bisphenol A] does in animal studies,” says Laura Vandenberg, a post-doc fellow at Harvard Medical School who researches bisphenol A, and is a critic of its use.

The obvious solution may seem to be, when in doubt, ban it. If there’s a chance that bisphenol A hurts kids, then why run the risk? Certainly, parents have little interest in waiting for scientific evidence when they think their children’s health is in danger. Hence, the many state legislators who want to limit bisphenol A’s use now. But without evidence, anything could be considered potentially harmful. Right now, U.S. and E.U. health and environment authorities still believe the best evidence supports continued use of regular polycarbonate baby bottles.

Polycarbonate plastic is used for a reason: It’s useful. Hard, shatterproof, lightweight and clear, it’s in a huge range of products from water bottles and food storage containers, to lenses in eyeglasses and car headlights, CDs and DVDs, and even bulletproof glass. “Whether you realize it or not, you use it in your life every day,” says Steven Hentges, head of the polycarbonate group at the industry lobby organization American Chemistry Council. There are, of course, alternatives to polycarbonates, like glass and other plastics. And for the growing number of consumers opposed to bisphenol A, there’s no shortage of online resources to help find them.

Source

Real Patient Charts.

ACTUAL SENTENCES FOUND IN PATIENTS CHARTS:
1. She has no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night.
2. Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.
3. On the second day, the knee was better, and on the third day it disappeared.
4. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed.
5. The patient has been depressed since she began seeing me in 1983.
6. Discharge status: Alive but without my permission.
7. Healthy appearing decrepit 69 year old male, mentally alert but forgetful.
8. The patient refused autopsy.
9. The patient has no previous history of suicides.
10. Patient has left white blood cells at another hospital.
11. Patient’s medical history has been remarkably insig-nificant with only a 40 pound weight gain in the past three days.
12. Patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch.
13. Between you and me, we ought to be able to get this lady pregnant.
14. Since she can’t get pregnant with her husband, I thought you might like to work her up.
15. She is numb from her toes down.
16. While in ER, she was examined, x-rated and sent home.
17. The skin was moist and dry.
18. Occasional, constant infrequent headaches.
19. Patient was alert and unresponsive.
20. She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce.
21. I saw your patient today,who is still under our car for physical therapy.
22. The lab test indicated abnormal lover function.
23. The patient was to have a bowel resection. However, he took a job as a stock broker instead.
24. Skin: somewhat pale but present.
25. The pelvic exam will be done later on the floor.
26. Patient was seen in consultation by Dr. Blank, who felt we should sit on the abdomen and I agree.
27. Large brown stool ambulating in hall.
28. Patient has two teenage children, but no other abnormalities

[ Source : anonymous, but not me of course ]

God speed and Best wishes.

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Vitamin D deficiency linked to heart illness and cancer.

All of us at the Underground here, writers and readers are geeks, nerds, techies and so on, and probably don’t get nearly as much sunlight as we should. Lack of sunlight leads to vitamin D deficiency which can lead to various serious diseases and conditions.

Recent and strong studies by top research groups have found various facts regarding this topic, such as people living in about the top one-third of the earth don’t get as much sunlight as they should. As noted in the source article:

“Whitcomb said the study bolsters the idea that people living in Wisconsin and other northern latitude areas should be supplementing their diet with vitamin D pills from October through March.”

My own personal suggestion is get a portable handheld device, such as PSP or an MP3 player to encourage yourself to go outside. If you’re the business type take your Blackberry or PocketPC and get some work done while walking around your neighborhood at noon. I have a hacked PSP and can access my computer and all media via WiFi at a hotspot for example at the local beach.

“The researchers found that survival from various internal cancers improved with greater amounts of sun exposure.

“It’s at least a 30 percent reduction” in mortality, said senior author Richard Setlow, a biophysicist with the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. “It depends on the cancer.”

Most of the work on the study was done in Norway.”

Of course don’t get too much sunlight, be careful on choice of sun block and check regularly for sunspots and melanoma like marks on your body. The sooner you catch them the less complications arise.

[ Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online ]

God speed and Best wishes.

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