“The incidence of cardiovascular disease was 2.4 per 100 person-years in subjects with less than 7.5 hours of sleep and 1.8 per 100 person-years in subjects with longer sleep duration,” wrote Dr. Kazuo Eguchi, of Jichi Medical University in Tochigi, and colleagues.

Those people who have sleep of less than 7.5 hours a day combined with a high blood pressure have greater percentage of having a heart disease compared to those who slept longer.

“In conclusion, shorter duration of sleep is a predictor of incident cardiovascular disease in elderly individuals with hypertension,” particularly when it occurs with elevated night-time blood pressure, the researchers concluded. “Physicians should inquire about sleep duration in the risk assessment of patients with hypertension.”

“Reflecting changing lifestyles, people are getting less sleep in modern societies,” they added. Adequate sleep is essential for preventing health problems such as obesity and diabetes, as well as several risk factors for cardiovascular disease, they said.

To prevent such disease from happening, one must have a regular schedule for exercising combined with a balanced diet and 7.5 hours of sleep.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20081111/hl_hsn/poorsleephypertensionadangerouscombination;_ylt=AvKKE17YtF_7TSmY5j3UNMXVJRIF

FYI, the following items have been recalled due to China ’s milk situation.

This is real.
- M&M’s
- snickers
- Mentos
- yoghurt bottle
- dove chocolate
- oreo wafer sticks,
- monmilk
- dutchlady sterilized milk
- wall’s all natural mango,
- mini poppers ice cream,
- magnum ice c ream,
- moo sandwich ice cream
- mini cornetto, and youcan ice cream.

If you have any of these items in your house, DON’T EAT THEM.

So this household products can help us regulate our sugar level. Would you believe that Vinegar can help us clamp down our sugar level?? Well, it does. While some Carbo foods like Rice, potatoes, pasta, etc. spikes up our sugar level, vinegar will help us regulate it.

The watermelon, on the other hand, is full of lycopene that helps us crush cancer cells. It loaded with water, therefore keeping us Hydrated. Here is the full message from my email.

“

Household Staple That Steadies Blood Sugar

You use it for cooking, cleaning, gardening, and a hundred other household chores. But for your blood sugar?

You bet. Seems vinegar — the tart stuff in tasty vinaigrettes and marinades — may help clamp down on blood sugar spikes from eating starchy carbs like potatoes and pasta.

Keep It Steady

Keeping blood sugar from surging may cut down on diabetes risk in the long run. But stabilizing blood sugar can do good things instantly, too — like stymieing hunger pangs, keeping your energy up, and keeping pounds off. To get the blood sugar benefit of vinegar, try pairing starchy foods with vinegar-based sauces or dressings. Or start a meal with a salad dressed in oil and vinegar.

Reality Check

Of course, a shot of vinegar will only go so far when it comes to keeping your blood sugar steady. To really ward off blood sugar problems, you’ll need to:

Get moving . . . so your body uses blood sugar better. Try this easy-on-the-joints workout.

Load up . . . on low-glycemic-index foods that help keep blood sugar stable. We’re talking high-fiber fruits, veggies, and whole grains. Check out this video on how fiber helps digestive health, too.

Pare down . . . maintaining a healthy weight helps reduce your risk of diabetes.

————————————————————————————————-

Watermelon: 3 Juicy Benefits

A cool wedge of watermelon on a hot summer day? Refreshing, for sure.

But watermelon is more than just a seasonal treat. Here are three great health reasons to dig into this juicy fruit:

It’s loaded with lycopene. Watermelon juice actually gave tomato juice a run for the money in a recent study of lycopene levels. That’s good news for your body, because early research suggests that lycopene may be a cancer crusher.

It can make your skin pretty. Watermelon is loaded with a key compound credited with helping skin’s healing and regenerative processes. Say no more — bring on the melon!

It’s practically calorie-free. With fewer than 50 calories in every cup, watermelon is one smart way to satisfy a sweet tooth. And with a whopping 141 grams of water per cubed cup, watermelon will keep you hydrated, too.

]]> http://www.rensquared.com/2008/08/09/vinegar-or-watermelon-improves-health/feed/ http://www.rensquared.com/2008/08/04/exercise-cures/ http://www.rensquared.com/2008/08/04/exercise-cures/#comments Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:05:19 +0000 admin http://www.rensquared.com/?p=20 This is why exercise is so important. Any diet supplements or food we eat will not be that effective if we don’t exercise. It helps us regulate our blood flow, increase our stamina, sweat out all the dirt inside our body, and decrease the possibility of getting sick. For example, in my experience, I use exercise (basketball) as a stress reliever. I release all my anger and all the negative emotions into it, resulting to a positive note. I feel relaxed after that game and can easily look forward to the next day’s work.

Did you know that walking is also a kind of exercise? Here is an article about exercise curing diabetes and obesity:

“Walking a bit more each day can help people control their Type 2 diabetes but obese people trying to keep weight off may need to exercise harder than they had thought, according to a studies published on Monday.

Simply walking 45 minutes more each day helped people with diabetes use blood sugar better, Michael Trenell of Britain’s Newcastle University and colleagues wrote in the journal Diabetes Care.

“People often find the thought of going to the gym quite daunting, but what we’ve found is that nearly everyone with diabetes is able to become more active through walking,” Trenell said.

The Newcastle team paired 10 Type 2 diabetes patients with people without the condition of similar height, weight and age and asked everybody to walk more than 10,000 steps each day.

Magnetic resonance imaging or MRI scans showed that people who walked 45 minutes more each day burned about 20 percent more fat — increasing the ability of the muscles to store sugar and help control diabetes, the researchers said.

“What is exciting about this study is that it provides an immediate way to help control diabetes without any additional drugs,” Trenell said.

Diabetes affects an estimated 246 million adults worldwide and accounts for 6 percent of all global deaths. Type 2 diabetes accounts for about 90 percent of all diabetes cases and is closely linked to obesity and physical inactivity.

Obesity and diabetes both are growing problems as more developing nations adopt a Western lifestyle, something the International Diabetes Federation estimates will propel the number of people with diabetes to 380 million by 2025.

But current exercise guidelines calling for people to get 150 minutes — 2.5 hours — each week may not be enough to help the obese keep weight off, John Jakicic of the University of Pittsburgh and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

To determine an optimal amount of exercise, the U.S. team enrolled 201 overweight and obese women in a weight loss programme between 1999 and 2003 and assigned them to one of four exercise groups.

After six months, women in all four groups had lost an average of 8 to 10 percent of their weight but many gained it back.

Women assigned to exercise for about an extra hour each day did not gain the weight back, the researchers said. These women were also more likely to stick to healthy diets.

Jakicic recommended that people who want to lose weight and keep it off get at least 4-1/2 hours of exercise a week.

“There is a growing consensus that more exercise may be necessary to enhance long-term weight loss,” Jakicic and colleagues wrote”

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080728/hl_nm/exercise_weight_dc;_ylt=Akoty..aj0eS8udEGp9K0GfVJRIF

“1. Setting a Bright Alarm Clock
The looming glare of your alarm clock can be distracting when trying to sleep. The goal is to have as dark a room as possible. Block the bright numbers with a book or consider buying a small travel clock. Your cell phone alarm may also do the trick.

2. Counting Sheep
When you just can’t fall asleep, it’s useless to stay in bed. If you’ve been trying to fall asleep for more than 30 minutes, the National Sleep Foundation suggests doing something mundane, like balancing a checkbook, reading or watching TV. An activity that demands marginal brainpower will lull your mind. Before you know it, you’ll be crawling back into bed genuinely tired.

3. Exercising Late at Night
Daytime workouts will keep you invigorated for hours. That’s why you don’t want to exercise within three hours of hitting the sack. Intense physical activity raises your body temperature and pumps your energy level—both interrupt a calm transition into sleep.”

source: http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/health/bedtime-habits-that-are-ruining-your-sleep-199441/

More Reviews

RCB Gallery.com

Natural News.com

“Researchers at MIT believe they’ve discovered a new weapon in the battle against tuberculosis: Free cell phone minutes.

For years, doctors have struggled to get some TB patients to take all their medication, which generally involves a six-month regimen of multiple drugs.

Now a student-led group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a way to use cell phones to let patients test themselves. And if the tests show patients are following doctor’s orders, they get rewarded with free minutes.

“We’re piggybacking on one of the bigger rollouts of infrastructure out there, which is wireless technology and telecom technology,” said Jose Gomez-Marquez, one of the project’s leaders.

The system works like this: Patients test their urine using a strip that reveals a numeric code if it detects TB medicine. They then text message the code to their health care provider and get credit toward incentives such as free minutes.

The in-home tests also eliminate the need for health care workers to make several patient-monitoring visits a week, a routine that is often impractical in remote places, Gomez-Marquez said.

Mobile phones are good tools for the project because they are common in the developing world, where it’s often cheaper to erect cell towers than miles of poles and wires, Gomez-Marquez said.

Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of a World Health Organization program to fight TB, called the MIT idea “creative.” But he said personal visits must continue because systems that depend heavily on patient self-reporting have often failed.

“I would think it’s a dangerous game to rely only on incentives,” he said.

In 2006, the most recent year statistics are available, 9.2 million people worldwide were diagnosed with tuberculosis and 1.7 million died.

The disease can be cured with a steady regimen of drugs. But many patients start feeling better and stop taking the medicine too soon. Others abandon the drugs because of side effects such as nausea, fever and rashes.

If the drugs are taken only sporadically, the bacteria build up resistance. The WHO estimates that 5 to 10 percent of TB deaths are patients who stop taking medication properly.

The MIT group — which originally included five students — took on the TB problem in 2007 as part of the university’s annual “IDEAS competition,” which challenges participants to solve various world problems.

Under the TB treatment system used by the WHO, the relationship between the patient and health care worker can get adversarial, said Elizabeth Leshen, an MIT junior working on the project.

“We wanted to do something that takes the health care worker out of the supervisory role and puts him or her back into the patient care role,” she said.

Cell minutes were chosen as an incentive because patients want them and phone companies are willing to give them out, said Gomez-Marquez, who added that other incentives and reporting methods can be tailored to different regions.

A small study of 20 patients in Nicaragua last year indicated the MIT system could work, and a larger study in Pakistan is planned for this summer. The team is trying to raise the $200,000 for a full-scale clinical trial.

The WHO’s Raviglione said the MIT group’s program could be an asset, particularly in developed countries, where people are more familiar with technology. But he said it must be combined with regular visits from health care workers or community leaders who can ensure patients take their medicine.

Before personal visits became routine in the 1990s, death rates from tuberculosis were estimated at 40 to 50 percent, according to the WHO. After officials began making visits as part of a broad strategy to fight TB, that figure dropped to 15 percent.

“Human contact is essential for people who have to take drugs for a long time,” Raviglione said”

Men it was just incentives. I thought it was something like a cool gadget. Well, its still interesting. A simple yet an innovative way of battling not just TB, but other illnesses as well.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080614/ap_on_he_me/med_tuberculosis_cell_phones;_ylt=Ale4SSBeyztjLSzvhC0NrzDVJRIF

Above is our picture during our mountaineering expedition at Mount Daguldol. We had our share of coconuts while taking a break. REFRESHING!!!!