Milk and Calcium for Bone Health

If you want to get more calcium in your diet, there are many foods besides milk and dairy that will help keep your bones strong.

http://www.spine-health.com/wellness/nutrition-diet-weight-loss/sources-calcium-food

Healthier eating habits seen with smaller, more frequent meals

Healthier eating habits seen with smaller, more frequent meals 

Adults who ate multiple small meals had a lower average body mass index and consumed fewer calories than those who had fewer but larger meals, a study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics says. Researchers also found those who ate smaller meals consumed foods with greater nutritional value, while those who had larger meals showed higher caloric intake at night and were more likely to consume alcohol with the evening meal. Reuters

Why eat Organic?

Foods with organic labels are not grown with chemical pesticides, genetically modified or treated with petroleum-based or sewage pesticides. The main reason why people don't is generally because of the higher cost.

So what do I suggest?

Avoid eating organic produce that is more likely to contain a lot of these pesticides, mainly those with high water content such as most leafy greens, melons, celery and berries.As those plants grow, they soak up a lot of water which have the pesticides suspended in them.

Also, produce like apples and tomatoes are so difficult to protect from bugs and fungus that a lot of pesticides are used on them.

On the converse side, anything with a tough skin or hard shell like avocado. navel oranges or coconut are much less likely to contain any pesticides and are much safer to eat.

Because of tough skin, not only do pesticides have difficulty penetrating the skin but insects do too. As a result, farmers don't need to use costly pesticides to protect the crop.

Are You Eating Enough Omega-3 Fatty Acids?

Wellness Tip:

Omega-3 fatty acids are essential nutrients that are not manufactured by the body, but must be ingested through diet. Omega-3s are necessary for blood clotting, cell health support and reduced inflammation. Evidence suggests they prevent cardiovascular disease.

The average western diet is lopsided with Omega-6 fatty acids, which promote inflammation and compete with Omega-3s to metabolize.

Add 8-12 ounces of low-mercury fatty fish (Alaskan wild salmon, light tuna) weekly, plus walnuts, flaxseeds, chia seeds and olive oil—foods high in Omega-3s.

Your heart will thank you for it.

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Check Out More Wellness Tips

· How to Avoid Buying GMO Foods in the Supermarket

· The Trouble With Sugar

· Vegetables: Raw vs. Cooked

· Energizing Superfood Smoothie

Which Vegetables You Should Buy Organic and Which Ones You Can Skip

There are many reasons you should purchase organic products at the grocery store. Foods with a USDA Organic label are not grown with chemical pesticides, genetically modified or treated with sewage or petroleum-based pesticides.

We have the best intentions at the grocery store, but ultimately it comes down to a question of cost. Many families cannot afford to purchase all organic produce. However, you can make good choices that will help you avoid putting pesticides in your body while saving money.

Just about anything with a hard shell or skin will be relatively safe to buy non-organic. The foods you need to look out for when trying to avoid pesticides are those with high water content, such as berries, melons, just about all leafy greens and celery.

Examples of Safe Foods

Onions
You're not the only one crying over onions. Onions are naturally resistant to pests, so big-agriculture companies have no reason to dump excess pesticides on onion crops. There is no evidence that organic onions have more health benefits than traditionally grown onions.

Avocados
These fatty, delicious fruits are great on salads, but they are not on the menu of many insects. The avocado's thick skin helps shield them from bugs, so this crop does not require a lot of pesticides. That skin also prevents any chemicals that are used from getting to the green center we all love to eat.

Coconuts
Coconut oil and water seem like they are at the top of every healthy conscious person's list these days. The good news is this fruit's thick outer shell is virtually impenetrable by pesticides. Several studies have shown that hardly any pesticide residue is found in the majority of coconut products. So, whether you eat the raw fruit, or put coconut oil in your hair, there will likely be no nasty chemicals to deal with!

Go Organic or Go Home

Apples
These fruits are one of the most commonly contaminated non-organic items on grocery store shelves. The reason apples are so heavy with pesticides is that they are so difficult to grow without them. Fungus and pests love them as much as you do because they are soft and rot easily. If you must purchase non-organic apples, you can avoid some of the pesticide residue by removing the peel, but you will also be throwing away valuable nutrients and fiber.

Celery
Celery has one of the highest water contents of all vegetables. It is easy to see why it would contain many pesticides. As the plant grows, it soaks up huge amounts of water. Chemicals are suspended in the water and then end up on your plate.

Tomatoes
Tomatoes are another salad ingredient with high water content and a fragile skin which pesticides have no trouble penetrating. The good news is they are incredibly easy to grow. If you can't find suitable organic tomatoes in your area, all you need is some quality organic seeds and you'll be eating harvesting your own organic bounty in no time.

All Leafy Vegetables
Again as a result of the high water content, just about all leafy vegetables are likely to contain relatively high levels of pesticides. And since lettuces and spinach are the staple of most healthy salads, best to budget to go organic with these greens.

Don't get me wrong. If you can go organic with all your produce choices, then do it. These tips apply to availability and budget. The good news is as more and more people switch to organic foods, the prices are going down and the selection is increasing.

Hidden Dangers in Everyday Products You Must Know About

You walk down an aisle in the huge supermarket that stocks just about everything imaginable. Your cart already contains food, about which you feel virtuous because you conscientiously read labels to avoid unhealthy additives.

Spying a shampoo brand you saw in a TV ad, you drop the plastic bottle into your cart. The same brand of hair conditioner gets snapped up next. Further along, toothpastes are displayed. A familiar brand that tastes like peppermint goes into the cart. Since you're in the personal products section, you add deodorant, antibacterial hand soap, hand sanitizer, mouthwash, shaving gel, and—from the cleaning supplies section—dish washing detergent. A package of plastic containers will let you nuke your lunches at work. Next…trash bags in the large economy size—what a great buy, so in they go!

What's this? Some of the cosmetics and skin care products are on sale. Great! Here's a moisturizer at a dollar off and skin cleanser with a fifty-cent discount, not to mention makeup base on special for $2 less than usual, and lipstick in a gorgeous shade at a $3 savings. You saved enough money to buy a bottle of sunscreen for skin protection.

Next is the OTC medication section, where you purchase the store brand of topical ointment for that bit of rash on your arm. What's left? Oh, yes…snag your favorite beverage and you're ready for the checkout line.

What a great shopping trip!
Or was it?

You've gotten pretty good about reading food labels, which helps you stay away from a lot of nasty additives that can cause everything from weight gain to insulin resistance to heart disease. But there was no label-reading in the non-food sections, was there? Did you think all those products are pure because some of them have the words “natural" and “gentle" on the packaging? That's where you may have made a huge mistake.

The personal product section of any store is a hotbed of toxic ingredients. You thought you were buying toothpaste, mouthwash, deodorant, and other things you've bought countless times before, but what you were really buying was…triclosan. This is a chemical found in numerous consumer products like the ones you bought today, as well as toys, kitchen utensils, bedding and the insoles of shoes, to name a few.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that this chemical shows up in the urine of seventy-five percent of the U.S population. Their research studies show that triclosan is absorbed through the skin, even at low levels, where it goes into the bloodstream to wreak havoc. Even these low levels can cause thyroid dysfunction. When triclosan gets into the blood of a pregnant woman, it can cause developmental problems in the fetus. Triclosan also interferes with immune system function and opens the door to allergies.

Even more disquieting, triclosan is implicated in the increase of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, or Superbugs. The chemical is not completely removed by waste water treatment plants, so it's been found in waterways, where it kills some forms of aquatic life.

Triclosan is not the only baddie found in the items tossed so casually into your grocery cart. Parabens are cheap synthetic preservatives found in so many products that you will probably find an ingredient ending in “–parabens" (one of six commonly-used forms) on the label of every non-food item you bought.

Parabens were found in the majority of urine samples in a study by the CDC, so it's obvious the chemical in its various forms is easily absorbed by the body. Parabens are linked to disruption of the body's hormone systems and have been detected in breast cancer tumors, proving they not only are absorbed into the body, but can persist in their original form (non-degraded) and accumulate in tumor tissue in the breasts.

Still think you scooped up a bunch of bargains on your shopping trip today? If you begin reading the labels of non-food items as conscientously as you study those found on food packaging, you may avoid these dangerous chemicals that are as bad as, if not worse, than the additives you routinely shun in processed foods

Are there alternatives to the many triclosan-and-parabens-laden products stocked on shelves and available from online vendors? Yes, but they aren't available on a grand scale, and they will undoubtedly cost more because they aren't produced using cheap toxic chemicals. Still, it is possible to find safer alternatives in personal products through an Internet search. One excellent source is the Skin Deep cosmetic and skincare database maintained by the Environmental Working Group.
It's also best to stay away from any product—including cutting boards, shower curtains and toys—designated “antibacterial," even if triclosan isn't listed as an ingredient.
Sadly, tricking consumers is now considered a fair marketing practice.

Suggested Resources
https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/body...
www.ewg.org/skindeep

Most Kids Don’t Eat Three Meals A Day, Study Says

Kids get 42% of their calories from snacks

Eating three square meals a day is the oldest nutrition advice in the book, and some of the most important for staying healthy. But new research shows that children are snacking instead of eating three meals a day on a regular basis, a habit that could be contributing to overweight and obesity and putting them at risk of heart disease later in life.

In a series of reports published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the International Journal of Obesity and the European Journal of Nutrition, Aino-Maija Eloranta, a PhD candidate at the Institute of Biomedicine and Physiology at the University of Eastern Finland, and her colleagues followed a group of 512 boys and girls enrolled in the Physical Activity and Nutrition in Children (PANIC) Study. The children, ages 6-8, and their parents reported what the kids ate and drank for four days. The researchers also measured their body mass index, waist circumference, blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose and insulin levels.

MORE: 7 Eating Habits You Should Drop Now

About 45% of the boys and 34% of girls in the study ate all three meals, meaning a majority of them did not. The most-skipped meal was dinner. “That was a surprise,” says Eloranta. “Among older children, adolescents and even adults, breakfast is the one that is skipped.”
Skipping dinner can have major implications for children’s health, she says, since it’s traditionally the most calorie- and nutrient-rich meal, giving growing children the energy they need to develop. In fact, the children who ate three meals a day had smaller waist circumferences and a 63% lower risk of being overweight or obese than those who skipped some of the major meals.

MORE: 5 Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Breakfast

The scientists also found that among all kids, snacks provided as much as 42% of the children’s daily calories. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, says Eloranta, except that most snacks are high in sugar and low in healthy nutrients like fiber. On average, the children consumed more saturated fat (which has been linked to a higher risk of heart disease) and salt and ate less vitamin D, iron and fiber than guidelines recommend.

MORE: Alice Waters: The Fate of Our Nation Rests on School Lunches

Eloranta did find one positive trend: lunch. Because lunch was provided at school, it was lower in sugar and higher in nutrients and healthier fats than the kids’ other meals on average. This suggests that one of the best ways to help children maintain healthy weights and avoid heart problems later might be to give them three meals a day. “Maybe we don’t have to worry about single nutrients or single foods [like sugar or fat] that much,” she says. “When you eat meals, you automatically receive the good nutrients.”

Threadmills for pain relief

One of the most popular types of home exercise equipment is the treadmill, which provides a straightforward, efficient aerobic workout.

For many, treadmills are a good choice to begin a new exercise routine because walking is well tolerated by most individuals regardless of fitness level and for most back conditions.

As strength and endurance are developed, the treadmill can be used for jogging and/or for interval training.

Learn about treadmills for exercise and pain rTelief here. 

Childhood obesity may be prevented through reducing the amount of time kids spend using screen media

http://www.dailyrx.com/childhood-obesity-may-be-prevented-through-reducing-amount-time-kids-spend-using-screen-media

Reduce Screen Time To Trim the Fat

Childhood obesity may be prevented through reducing the amount of time kids spend using screen media

(dailyRx News) Trimming TV time may take childhood obesity down a notch. To help parents and inactive kids take a stand against childhood obesity, public health experts recommended cutting down screen media time among kids.

In a recent report, the Community Preventive Services Task Force (CPSTF) found that reducing the amount of TV and screen media helped lower kids' risk of being overweight and obese. Screen media time is time spent in front of a television, computer or cellphone screen.

Based on a past study, the task force confirmed that childhood obesity was tied to screen media exposure. In this new report, strong evidence supported that limiting screen time was effective in improving youth health and weight status, the task force authors wrote.

Barry Sears, MD, president of the Inflammation Research Foundation in Marblehead, MA, and creator of the Zone diet, told dailyRx News that simply reducing kids’ screen time alone would not be enough to stop childhood obesity. Parents can take other steps to keep their children healthy, he said.

“If the goal is to reduce childhood obesity, then there are more effective measures than simply reducing sedentary screen time," Dr. Sears said. "First and foremost is better meal planning that promotes [fullness] as opposed to hunger."

Dr. Sears continues, "The second is spending more interactive time with the child as opposed to using the computer or TV as a babysitter. Third is getting the child outside the house making it less likely to easily get to the kitchen."

The CPSTF — a group of public health experts formed by the US Department of Health and Human Services — reviewed 49 past studies that focused on the benefits of interventions only limiting screen time (screen-time-only interventions) and those both limiting screen time and adding other health components (screen-time-plus interventions).

Interventions were defined as ways to reduce inactive leisure screen time. They were also designed to help kids change their behavior to maintain low screen time. The CPSTF said this would help kids spend less time in front of the TV or computer in the long run.

The CPSTF noted that interventions could include classroom-based education, family- or friend-based social support, ways to track and monitor screen time, and coaching or counseling sessions.

The data showed that, for screen time watched, screen-time-only interventions reduced about 82 minutes of media per day. Screen-time-plus interventions reduced about 22 minutes per day.

Screen-time-plus interventions helped kids become more physically active. Kids who reduced their screen media time took and average of 130 more steps per day.

Concerning diet, screen-time-only interventions resulted in kids eating about 75 calories fewer per day on average. Screen-time-plus interventions resulted in kids eating about 118 calories fewer per day.

Reducing screen time among kids improved their health, the CPSTF said.

“Behavioral screen time interventions were found to be effective among children aged 13 years and younger,” the task force wrote.

The CPSTF noted, though, that only children ages 13 and younger were included in this review. They recommended that future reviews also study the effects of reducing screen time among middle and high school students, as well as adults.

This study has not yet been published but is available in The Guide to Community Preventive Services.

The authors disclosed no funding sources or conflicts of interest.

Why You Should Care About Bees (For Your Health)

Bees are essential to the plant foods we eat. In the U.S. alone, industrious bees annually help pollinate crops worth more than $200 billion. Pollination is the main job they perform for humans. Raw honey is the main product they produce.

What is “raw" honey? Isn't all honey the same—a sweet sticky substance made by bees that you add to your tea or drizzle into a bowl of cereal?

Wrong! Raw organic honey (preferably from a local source) offers so many benefits, it's quite likely honeybees are more helpful to humans than any other insect. That's why it's crucial to discover the reason for the mysterious large-scale deaths of honeybees in the U.S. and Europe during the past six years and stop the trend.

Making honey is another important honeybee craft, one that takes incredible beehive teamwork. Producing a single pound of raw honey takes the effort of approximately 60,000 honeybees, altogether traveling up to 55,000 miles and extracting pollen from more than two million flowers!

Raw honey has been used for millennia as a food. It's rich in nutrients, containing 22 amino acids, 27 minerals and a whopping 5,000 live enzymes. Nature's “super food," honey strengthens the immune system, boosts healthy digestion, fights disease, and helps eliminate allergies.

You can garner all these benefits from one daily spoonful in your tea or spread on a slice of toast. That single nutrient-rich spoonful (unlike refined sugar, which has no nutrients) provides four grams of fructose, or fruit sugar. If you're healthy and not advised by your doctor to avoid all sweeteners, you should be able to eat honey in moderation and profit from its healthy qualities. Count your total daily fructose grams and stay below 25, including honey and any fruits you eat.

When you have a cold or sore throat, swallow one-half teaspoon of raw honey to coat your throat and lessen irritation. Stir one teaspoon of raw honey into a pot of very hot water, cover your head and the pot with a towel and breathe in the steam to unblock your sinuses. Honey works as well to soothe coughs as the OTC cough medicine ingredient dextromethorphan.

Allergy to honey is almost non-existent; however, raw honey poses a risk for infants. The Centers for Disease Control recommends that you never feed honey to a baby less than one year of age.

Clostridium botulinum spores may be present in raw honey. Children older than one year and healthy adults have fully-developed digestive systems that inhibit the spores from flourishing. Infants less than one year of age do not, making them vulnerable to a rare, serious disease that causes varying degrees of paralysis.

Honey has numerous topical uses as well as internal ones. Its natural antiseptic and antibacterial properties are useful for treating wounds and burns more effectively and with less pain or side effects than traditional medical treatments. It reduces swelling, prevents infection and promotes healing.

Clinical trials proved that Manuka honey, a dark honey made with pollen from the medicinal Manuka bush in New Zealand, can wipe out more than 250 strains of bacteria, including such resistant types as MRSA and other staph varieties. While Manuka contains some as-yet-unknown factor that other types of honey don't have, research shows that other raw (unprocessed) honey also helps heal wounds.

Bees, Jerry! Bees!

Raw honey is additionally a natural beauty product that was used as far back as Cleopatra's era, when the queen of Egypt took milk-and-honey baths to soften her skin. It's added to many popular beauty products today: as an anti-aging skin care ingredient, a deep conditioner for dry hair, a skin moisturizer, and others.

In order to do these things, honey must be raw -- unprocessed. Processed honey from the grocery store does not provide these health benefits because (at the very least) it has been heated and filtered. This processing destroys honey's natural nutrients and enzymes. A full 75% of the commercial honey sold in top American supermarkets—including those brands labeled “natural" (an unregulated term that has no real meaning on food labels)—is imported from China and is so highly processed that it retains none of its beneficial properties or even any pollen.

Your best source for raw, unprocessed honey is a local beekeeper. Often, local raw honey is sold at farmers markets, co-ops or health food stores. (A teaspoonful of local honey every day beginning two months before the start of allergy season can prepare your immune system to fight regional allergens.) If you don't have access to local raw honey, your next best bet is a store such as Trader Joe's or Whole Foods Market that sells certified organic 100% pure raw honey.

Don't be put off by raw honey's crystallization or dark specks. It's far superior to honey that's treated with heat to remain smooth, liquid and appealing. Go for the raw!

Selected Sources
http://www.cdc.gov/nczved/divisions/dfbmd/diseases...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/12013... “Honey could be Effective at Treating and Preventing Wound Infections," January 31, 2013. Source: Society for General Microbiology.