In an article written for Yahoo! Health, we learn of a man who gets a weekly massage – for medicinal purposes. For more than a decade, Bill Cook has gotten a weekly massage. He isn’t a professional athlete. He didn’t receive a lifetime gift certificate to a spa. Nor is the procedure a mere indulgence, he says – it’s medicinal. In 2002, Cook – a 58-year-old resident of Hudson, Wisconsin, who once worked in marketing – was diagnosed with a rare illness. He had cardiac sarcoidosis, a condition in which clusters of white blood cells coagulate together and react against a foreign substance in the body, scarring the heart in the process. The disease damaged his heart so badly it went into failure. The doctors said there was nothing they could do, and Cook’s name was put on an organ transplant waiting list. The wait stretched on for more than a decade. “I Read the full article →
In an article written by Rachel Swalin for Yahoo! Health, she debunks some major microwaving myths. Myth: Microwaving food is a danger to nutrients Nope, you shouldn’t be overly concerned about microwaves messing with nutrients. “There is no specific harm of microwaving with regard to nutrient levels,” says David Katz, MD, director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center. In fact, any type of cooking can chemically change a food and it’s nutrient content: Vitamin C, omega-3 fats, and some bioflavanoid antioxidants are more sensitive to heat in general, Dr. Katz says. Nutrients from veggies can also leach into cooking water. Since you’re apt to use less water when cooking in a microwave, your food might even be better off. Fact: You should be careful with plastics Microwaving plastics is definitely a no-no because it can lead to the containers breaking down and allowing more chemicals like BPA and phthalates to leach into Read the full article →
As per Buzzfeed.com, below are 18 facts about the sleep deprived. 1. Good sleep involves duration, timing, and quality, Dr. Charles Czeisler, chairman of the board of the National Sleep Foundation and chief of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, tells BuzzFeed Life. What this also means is that there are several ways to get crappy sleep that can hurt your health: Getting less than six hours a night for many nights in a row, for instance, means that you’re not sleeping for as long as you need to be healthy. Keeping a really erratic sleep schedule— staying up till 6 a.m. on weekends, but going to sleep at 10 p.m. and getting up at 6 a.m. on weekdays, for example. Having wildly divergent times that you go to bed and wake up can be bad for you. Having your sleep interrupted throughout the night, either through a sleep disorder like sleep Read the full article →
In an article written by The Associated Press, readers learn that concussions in the NFL have gone down quite significantly this year. With the Superbowl just one day behind us, those hard hits and head-on collisions on the field are still fresh on our minds. The rate of concussions among NFL players fell 25 percent this season, according to the league, even as injury reporting and trips to injured reserve list rose overall. Data provided to The Associated Press by the NFL ahead of its annual pre-Super Bowl health and safety news conference Thursday shows there were 111 concussions in games during the 2014 regular season, down from 148 in 2013, and 173 in 2012, a 36 percent drop over that three-year span. When preseason games, plus preseason and regular-season practices, are included, the 202 concussions this season declined 12 percent from 2013, and 23 percent from 2012. That’s despite Read the full article →
In an article for CNN written by Jen Christensen, we learn that sitting for long periods of time does damage to our health. (CNN)One of your favorite activities may actually be killing you. Our entire modern world is constructed to keep you sitting down. When we drive, we sit. When we work at an office, we sit. When we watch TV, well, you get the picture. And yet, a new study that’s running in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that this kind of sedentary behavior increases our chances of getting a disease or a condition that will kill us prematurely, even if we exercise. Researchers from Toronto came to this conclusion after analyzing 47 studies of sedentary behavior. They adjusted their data to incorporate the amount someone exercises and found that the sitting we typically do in a day still outweighs the benefit we get from exercise. Of course, the more Read the full article →
