ToYourHealth

Green Tea Shuts Down Cancer Causing Molecules

Yet more reasons to drink green tea (although black tea is full of different antioxidants and good for you too).
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-08/uorm-gtc080303.php

Researchers found that green tea shuts down a molecule that can cause cancer initiated by tobacco use.

Also, over at Scifiblogmy other blog, I have an item about healthy effects from drinking coffee.

All of these bitter flavinoid-rich plant products, chocolate, coffee, tea, provide a range of antioxidants. The caffeine may not be good for you, but I sure feel better about drinking my coffee and tea and eating chocolate these days (you have to get real semi-sweet chocolate or cocoa -- which I put in my coffee daily-- to get the benefits. Milk chocolate won't do it for you).

Exercise After Work

Working up a sweat during leisure time helps keep arteries healthy. Not much new in that, but here's something interesting:high stress jobs that require a lot of physical activity aren't healthy, apparently because the stress of the job keeps the exercise from being beneficial. Maybe that's why all that walking doesn't calm down postal employees..

Job stress may be missing link between workplace exercise and heart risk

Music Soothes Cancer Pain

Music therapy not only helps lessen pain and nausea for cancer patients, it may even help boost actual healing a new study says.

Music therapy strikes a chord with cancer patients

Pizza Prevents Cancer?

Researchers are saying in a new study of some 8,000 Italians that found folks who regularly chow down on pizza appear to have a decreased risk of several types of gastrointestinal cancers -- particularly of the colon and esophagus, as well as the throat and mouth."


Yahoo! News - Pizza Packs Anti-Cancer Punch:

Heart-Heathly Pizza?

My bet is Pizza Hut will be advertising the health benefits of Pizza in short order, so to speak.

Just one serving a day of tomato-based foods such as pizza or tomato sauce could lower your risk for heart disease by as much as 30 percent, contends a new Harvard study.

Sesso and his colleagues reviewed the diets of approximately 40,000 women from the ongoing Women's Health Study, which was begun 11 years ago to follow women who, at the time, were free from cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Tomato a day

Berry Good for You

I tell people I'm on a blueberry enriched diet. Ever since I read the research in which aged rats fed a "blueberry enriched" diet performed like young rats, I've been eating them fresh, in preserves, and in cereal (thank you Triple Berry). I noticed an improvement in visual acuity and cognitive sharpness.

Nuts and berries and fish are the health diet. The oils in nuts actually improve your cholesterol balance. Berries, particularly the purple and blue ones, but red, too, are loaded with powerful free radical scavenging antioxidants that keep your flesh from rusting. The research says walnuts, almonds, peanuts and peanut butter are all good for you in moderate amounts. Both nuts and berries are loaded with fiber, too. They help clean out your system.

But eating blueberries may even repair mental and physical damage to some extent, say researchers, and hey, as an aging baby boomer, I need all the repair help I can get.

Blueberries: New thrills for those over the hill

An Aspirin a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

Adding to the long list of the benefits of aspirin, researchers have found that it is responsible for reducing toxic bacteria associated with serious infections. A study led by Dartmouth Medical School describes how salicylic acid-produced when the body breaks down aspirin-disrupts the bacteria's ability to adhere to host tissue, reducing the threat of deadly infections.

Other recent research suggests that aspirin can help prevent heart attacks, some cancers, fights gum disease, and reduces the infections that can lead to artery damage, strokes and heart disease, among other benefits.

Careful, though, aspirin causes stomach bleeding and anyone with ulcers or acidic stomachs should avoid it. For some men, even small doses of aspirin are counter productive and do more damage than good, one study says. Always research nutrition research at some reliable information source such as EurekaAlerts.com.

Aspirin could reduce the risk of deadly infections

Fatty Fish Oil Prevents Deadly Heart Rhythms

Fatty fish oils -- Omega 3 fatty acids -- prevent some deadly heart attacks. Researchers found that men who already had heart disease saw a 30 percent reduction in deaths from sudden heart attacks when they ate fatty fish at least twice a week. The fish fatty oils stop deadly heart arrythmias that cause up to half of such sudden heart attack deaths.

This is just one of the more recent findings that suggest eating fatty fish such as salmon, tuna, or sardines twice a week has numerous benefits for your heart, improves your cholesterol balance, brightens your mood, keeps the brain healthy, help rheumatoid arthritis, and slows the progression of kidney disease. Researchers generally say now that diet is the best way to get your Omega 3s, but usually agree that supplements are a good idea.

You can get some of the same benefits from Flax oil and Flax seed, apparently.

Studies documenting these and other benefits of fish oils keep coming out of university and medical labs. I take at least a gram a day, about 3 capsules of the most common sized fish oil supplements. I try to eat fresh salmon twice a week and canned salmon or sardines as well now and then. Salmon does not pick up the mercury that big ocean fish such as tuna and mackerel do. Sardines aren't as high on the food chain and have less mercury than the big fish.

Fish oils in heart cells can block dangerous heart rhythms

By the way, folks, I'm a professional writer and if you're interested in an article on any of these topics or leading edge health coverage, please let me know.

To Your Health

Information has helped keep me healthy. At 55, I've been to a doctor once (recently for an exam) in 15 years.

The object of this blog is to point you to information to help keep you healthy too. It will delve into other areas now and then, but mostly, it's "To Your Health."

Allan Maurer

# posted by Allan Maurer @ 5:57 PM

Nodding makes you confident?

The mind is embodied and our movements affect our thoughts. H'mmmm, he says, nodding his head up and down. Then asks himself, "Does this give me more confidence in what I'm saying?"
Hey, read this University of Ohio researcher on how nodding your head up and down or shaking it back and forth may affect your confidence in your own thoughts.


Nodding Or Shaking Your Head May Even Influence Your Own Thoughts, Study Finds

Get on that bike and pedal...

While we're at the University of Illinois, they're also trying to figure out why exercise helps to both prevent disease or disability and restore health and ability after illness or inactivity.
My title, not theirs:

Just do it

Men want food from Mars, Women Want food from Venus?

Eurkea not only leads me to great health information, it's also good for offbeat items such as this:

"Perhaps men are from Mars and women from Venus, at least in the eating department. When it comes to foods that bring them psychological comfort, men like hearty meals, while women look for snacks that require little or no preparation, though they may cause pangs of guilt."

Here's the research from the University of Illinois:

Comfort Foods