Healthy Heart Tips

1. Reduce foods high in saturated fat.
Saturated fat is easily converted into "bad cholesterol" that the risk of coronary heart disease. You must observe. Skin of poultry, red meat / stumbling-myopic and whole milk contain much saturated fat. Expand eating seafood rich in omega-3 and veggies / fruits rich in fiber and vitamins. Choose low-fat milk.

2. Reduce the portion of salt.
If you have high blood pressure, beware of foods containing high salt and MSG. Replace snacks like nuts onions, chips, dried salted bread with low-salt snacks.

3. Take every opportunity to exercise.
Choose the stairs over the elevator. Parking your car further away so you can hike longer. Do some homework helpers handed ordinary, such as mopping floors or washing vehicles. A time afternoon stroll with the family.

4. Control your weight.
Keep your weight to avoid obesity. If you are currently overweight, follow a program that can gradually reduce your weight. Obesity makes you more susceptible to many diseases.

5. Monitor blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
Perform periodic health examination to measure blood pressure and cholesterol levels in your blood. Hypertension is often present without realizing it, so it is often called the "silent killer".

6. Reduce stress.
High stress increases the risk of heart attack. Take time to relax, multiply to get along with others that makes you happy and forget for a moment live load. Rest taste.
 

 

 

 

"Benefits of Drinking Milk To Lower Risk of Breast Cancer"

Benefits of milk is no doubt. Almost all of the nutrients contained in milk of good quality. Protein and fat milk has a high ketecernaan properties. Vitamin and mineral content of milk is also relatively complete.
Milk can be consumed in various forms. There is nothing fresh or processed form, such as milk powder or condensed milk.Humans also consume milk from milk-containing food products, such as cheese, ice cream, and yogurt.
However, there are still differences of opinion about the consumption of this milk. There are groups who claim that the consumption of milk every day is not good for health, especially vascular diseases such as narrowing of blood vessels. The argument is, milk increases blood cholesterol levels are a risk factor for heart disease. Second, a positive relationship between average milk production per capita with deaths from heart disease in some countries.
Other groups supporting the role of milk at a reduced risk of various degenerative diseases, like heart disease, hypertension, and cancer. Recent studies in Norway to support it.
Hjartäker together with colleagues from the Institute of Community Medicine, University of Tromso, Norway, through its publication in the International Journal of Cancer, show that consuming three or more glasses of milk every day can reduce the risk of breast cancer in premenopausal women.
Through the Norwegian cohort study Women and Cancer Study, they studied 48,844 women for six years and two months.Consumption of milk is measured by sending the form to the respondent a history of food consumption. During this period, the team Hjartäker found 317 cases of breast cancer patients.
It turned out that the consumption of milk since childhood negatively associated with the incidence of breast cancer when they were aged 34-39 years (premenopausal). That means that the consumption of milk since childhood may reduce the risk of breast cancer.
Consumption of milk in adulthood also reduces the risk of breast cancer after corrected by hormonal factors, body mass index, physical activity, and alcohol consumption. Women who do not consume milk run the risk of breast cancer two times greater than women who consumed milk 3 cups or more of milk every day.

Crying Is Healthy, Even for Tough Football Players

Everyone needs a good cry now and then — even football players.

College football players who think it's OK to cry, say, after losing a big game, have higher self-esteem than those tough-guy players who say tears are a no-no, a new study shows. The researchers also found that players who show physical affection toward their teammates are happier.

The researchers studied how gender stereotypes about crying affect football players, and how their beliefs regarding emotion on the field influence other aspects of their lives.



Participants included 150 college football players from two universities, one in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division II and the other in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. The participants had an average age of 19 and were mostly white.

The students read a scenario about a football player named Jack who cries after a game, with participants reading one of four twists to the story: Jack just tears up after losing the game; he tears up after winning the game; he sobs after losing the game; or he sobs after winning the game.

Students tended to think tearing up after losing a game was typical and appropriate for a football player. However, they didn't accept sobbing as an appropriate reaction in the losing situation. The players also said they would be more likely to tear up than sob if they were in Jack's place.

The study also showed that the group that read a story in which Jack sobs after losing a game asserted that his reaction was more typical among football players than the group that read a story in which Jack sobs after his team won the game.

"In 2009, the news media disparaged University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow for crying on the sidelines after losing a big game, even labeling him Tim 'Tearbow,'" study researcher Y. Joel Wong, a psychologist at Indiana University-Bloomington, said in a statement.

In a second experiment, 153 football players, who were also mostly white and had an average age of 19, answered questions regarding whether they felt pressured by society to act powerful and competitive while displaying little emotion and affection in front of other men.

The researchers also questioned the subjects about their overall life satisfaction and the ways in which they expressed emotions on and off the field. The experiment's results showed that football players do feel pressure to conform to gender roles when it comes to expressing emotion, but also found that players who were never showed affection toward their teammates were less satisfied with their lives.

Overall, college football players who "are emotionally expressive are more likely to have a mental edge on and off the field," said study researcher Jesse Steinfeldt, who is also a psychologist at the university.

The findings may also speak to the aforementioned incident in which Tebow was ridiculed for crying on the sidelines after losing a big game. [Read: Touchy-Feely NBA Teams More Likely to Win]

"The college football players in our study who believed Jack's crying was appropriate had higher self-esteem," Wong said. "In contrast, players who believed Jack's crying was inappropriate yet felt they would likely cry in Jack's situation had lower self-esteem."

source:livescience

Healthy diet may reduce risk of birth defects

Women run a lower risk of having babies with certain birth defects if they eat a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains during their childbearing years, a new study suggests.

Women who followed healthy Mediterranean-style diets in the year before pregnancy were up to one-half as likely as those who ate diets high in meat, fat, and sugar to have a baby with anencephaly, a neural-tube defect that blocks the development of the brain and tends to result in miscarriage.

Compared with fat- and sugar-heavy diets, healthier diets -- which included plenty of folate, iron, and calcium -- were also associated with up to a one-third lower risk of cleft lip, a one-quarter lower risk of cleft palate, and a one-fifth lower risk of spina bifida, another neural-tube defect.

The defects covered in the study are very rare overall, occurring in less than 0.1% of all births. They have become less common since the 1990s, when government health officials led a campaign to increase folic-acid intake among pregnant women through supplements and fortified grain products.

Deficiencies in folic acid -- the synthetic form of folate, a B vitamin -- have been linked to both neural-tube defects and cleft lip and palate. Carmichael and her colleagues took into account whether the women in the study were taking folic acid, which suggests that a healthy diet provides protection against birth defects over and above that provided by folic acid.

Women of childbearing age should, however, still take folic-acid supplements, says Gail Harrison, Ph.D., a professor of community health services at the UCLA School of Public Health, in Los Angeles.

Most research on diet and birth defects has focused on single nutrients, such as vitamins A and B12 (in addition to folate). Carmichael and her colleagues took a different approach by looking at overall diet quality -- a method that has become common in cancer and heart-disease research.

The researchers collected detailed questionnaires about the women's diets in the year before they became pregnant, and used that data to score their diet quality on two indexes, one modeled on the U.S. Department of Agriculture dietary guidelines and another based on the Mediterranean diet. Both indexes considered fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and "good" fats to be healthy, and saturated fats and sweets to be unhealthy.

Across the board, women with the healthiest diets were far less likely to have had children with birth defects than the women with the poorest-quality diets. High scores on both indexes were associated with a reduced risk of defects, although the association was stronger for the USDA score.

Seventy-eight percent of the women took supplements containing folic acid during early pregnancy, but higher-quality diets were protective regardless of whether the women took folic acid.

The study authors and other experts strongly recommend that pregnant women continue taking folic-acid supplements.7 tips for a healthy pregnancy

"We have evolved to eat food. We have not evolved to eat supplements," says Jacobs, who cowrote an editorial accompanying the study. "If you would like to be healthy, the better way to do that is by getting what you need from food rather than isolated compounds."