Fed up with listening to your spouse or co-workers gossiping away? Leave be, says a new research from University of California Berkeley. Gossip helps to prevent bad behavior, prevent exploitation and reduces stress levels.

self-help guide - diet tips, recipes

Gossiping can also be therapeutic, the volunteers’ heart rates appeared to increase when hearing gossip, but lowered again once they passed on the information to someone else. A problem shared is a problem halved indeed so gossip all you want – it can be healthy for your heart.

An international team of scientists has isolated a natural hormone or chemical messenger in muscle cells that triggers some of the important health benefits of exercise.

The scientists have named it “irisin”, after the Greek messenger goddess, and believe it is a promising candidate for developing drugs to treat diabetes, obesity and maybe even cancer.

Senior author Dr Bruce Spiegelman, from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues, write about their findings in the January 11th online issue of Nature.

A Natural Diet Guide

First author Dr Pontus Bostrom, a postdoctoral fellow who works with Spiegelman in his lab conclude: “Irisin could be therapeutic for human metabolic disease and other disorders that are improved with exercise.”

Heart attacks in women go largely unrecognized 30 to 55 percent of the time and those who miss the warning signs and fail or delay getting help, run the risk of death or grave disability.

Researchers at Binghamton University and SUNY Upstate Medical University have developed an educational program they believe will shorten the time to treatment and ultimately, save lives. Women often don’t have the same kind of chest pains that men generally experience during a heart attack.

A Natural Diet Guide

Also we encourage women especially, those post-menopausal women to change their lifestyles because the decrease in estrogen that occurs in this phase of their lives increases the risk of heart disease.

A natural diet guide is a great tool to use to help you learn how to make food an asset in this new phase of your lives.

Heart failure continues to be the most prevalent reason for acute hospital admission, although it is stubbornly resistant to treatment. Mortality and morbidity rates remain high, despite prognosis for the condition slightly improving by the launch of innovative medical treatments in recent years.

A Natural Diet Guide

However, according to large-scale clinical trials, cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) improves symptoms and reduces mortality among heart failure patients. American and European guidelines now recommend CRT for the treatment and prevention of this condition.

While breakthroughs this CRT is welcomed news, we still need to practice more prevention in North American health care.  If we would begin to build-in preventive care in our health care provision, we would reduce costs by at least 50% or more.  Prevent the disease and we wouldn’t have to treat it, is this too much to ask?

Those interested in making money from this industry will continue to make large sums of money – it would just be shifted to another area of health care.

A study published in the January 4 issue of JAMA shows that U.S. patients who experienced a ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), a certain pattern on an electrocardiogram after a heart attack, were more likely to be readmitted to the hospital at 30 days after the heart attack compared with patients in other countries.

The findings were discovered during a data analysis from over 15 countries, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, and many European nations. Approximately 29 to 38% of all heart attacks are due to ST-segment elevation.  A large number of European nations have some kind of state paid for and/or run health care and their costs are significantly lower than the health care cost in the USA. Perhaps, this aspect of health care should be further examined by US officials.

Menopause is also called “the change of life”. Biologically, this heralds the end of a woman’s reproductive years but it is important to realize that it’s not a death sentence.

self-help guide - diet tips, recipes

It’s the end of ovulating (the ovaries stop producing the hormones estrogen and progesterone) which many think is only important in reproduction. However, these two hormones act on many different organs in the body. There are cells in the vagina, bladder, skin and breasts that all have estrogen receptors which need this hormone to stimulate these receptors for normal cell function. Estrogen is also needed to keep the skin smooth and moist.

Knowing that estrogen is needed not only for a sexual function will allow a woman to understand that this is just a transition to a new phase in her existence on the planet.

Here are some natural tips and tricks, easily available foods that can be added to one’s diet to make this transition smooth and enjoyable:

1. Uncomfortable hot flashes: gotu kola, chasteberry and dong quai relieve hot flashes; make dishes using black beans and tofu and/or soy beans.

2. Vaginal dryness/itching: open a vitamin E capsule and apply the oil. For itching: inserting a tampon with 3-4 drops of tea tree oil for up to 3-hours will give immediate relief.
3. Breast tenderness: use 500-1000 milligrams of evening primrose oil for one month – this is a natural estrogen promoter.

4. Avoid salt: use onions, garlic, celery and lemon juice to flavor food. Make salads from a wide variety of greens (dandelion, mustard, beet, turnip, chicory greens, kale, Swiss chard,) to meet all your mineral needs; especially, the heart-healthy minerals magnesium, potassium and calcium.

5. Dryness and aging of the skin: drink 2-quarts of steamed distilled water daily to help prevent drying of the skin and mucous membranes. In winter, it helps to sleep with a vaporizer in your room, add a few drops of lavender (good to relieve stress).

6. Natural estrogen promoters: brew fennel and raspberry iced tea to replace soda drinks.

Finally, avoid stress or use yoga, relaxation techniques and/or exercise to effectively manage it. Mother nature has given us a powerful weapon – food to use to ease some of the symptoms that plague us. It can be one of the tools used to help give us that quality of life as our life expectancy increases.

A new anti-inflammatory drug used by patients with type 2 diabetes improved their kidney function during a year-long study involving researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center.

self-help guide - diet tips, recipes

The study findings, reported in today’s New England Journal of Medicine, mark the first time a drug therapy has led to improved kidney function for patients with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease.

Previous studies have identified drugs that slowed the deterioration of kidney function, said Dr. Robert Toto, director of the Houston J. and Florence A.

Diabetic patients would be well advised to consume healthy amounts of garlic and ginger as both are natural anti-inflammatory with the added benefit of keeping your blood thin for improved peripheral circulation and reduced heart disease.

An estimated 350 million people in the world have diabetes, according to a major new international study published Online First by The Lancet.

The study shows that diabetes prevalence has risen (in many cases sharply), or at best remained unchanged, in virtually every part of the world during the past three decades.

self-help guide - diet tips, recipes

The Article authors are Professor Majid Ezzati, Imperial College London, UK, and Dr Goodarz Danaei, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA, and colleagues. Patients with diabetes have inadequate blood sugar control.

This is a shame when a simple food addition could help to prevent the onset of adult Type 2 diabetes.  A daily dose of bay leaf tea would also control blood sugar levels in the blood.  In certain parts of the world, people are too ready to embrace North American lifestyles and abandon their tried, tested and proven natural ways of living.

There is a heavy penalty to be paid for so-called progress in the developing world.  In the island of Barbados, someone loses a limb everyday from complications due to diabetes – this was unheard a decade ago. The population there is well educated and have assumed desk jobs that have no exercise components but they have not stopped eating the food they ate when everyone did some type of manual job that required all kinds of daily exercise.

The number of people with diabetes worldwide is estimated to have risen by about 133% to approximately 350 million, researchers from Imperial College London and Harvard School of Public Health report in the medical journal The Lancet.

self-help guide - diet tips, recipes

The authors explain that the main reason for this rise has been longer life spans – people today live longer and diabetes risk increases with age. However, obesity and overweight are also factors that have contributed considerably.

Personally, I think the rise is due to drastic increases in the sugar content of our food, especially processed cereals, pop, bread and other staples in our diet.  Why should a 12-ounce can of pop have the 40-grams of sugar?

If these numbers were dissected by ethnicity and regions, one would see that the largest concentration is in the poorest parts of the world.  Therefore, these figures and this rise has a socio-economic component that cannot be ignored, if we are to do anything to reverse them.

#tweetyourdiettips: If you have Type 2 diabetes add 1/4 tsp cinnamon daily to your diet to improve blood glucose.

self-help guide - diet tips, recipes

#tweetyourdiet-tips: A study by the American Diabetes Association of people with type 2 diabetes found that as little as 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon daily added to the diet is enough to reduce blood glucose levels.

After 40-days, cinnamon consumed in amounts of 1, 3 or 6 grams daily reduced serum glucose 18-29%, triglyceride 23-30% and cholesterol 7-27% thus proving that adding cinnamon to your diet, if you are diabetic can significantly reduce the risk factors associated with diabetes (care) and heart disease.