Superfoods Fight Swine Flu

As fall approaches and the weather gets colder flu season is expected to be at an all-time high and swine flu is still a danger, although not quite the pandemic as it was originally introduced as at the beginning of the summer. Swine flu—like the regular form of the flu which kills thousands of people per year if left untreated—needs to latch on to a body with a lowered immune system, so stay on top of it with these foods:

Yogurt – You have long heard that probioticsl help assemble the good bacteria in your stomach to keep diseases away and the flu is no different. Full of “live active cultures,” yogurt helps keep your internal systems running on track and make sure the stomach and intestines are free of germs that cause harmful bacteria to grow. A recent study from Europe showed that consuming just 7 ounces of yogurt a day contains just as much nutrition as swallowing the daily amount of probiotic supplements. The recommended dosage is two 6 ounce servings. Yogurt that contains the strain Lactobacillus reuteri, has proved to be most effective, and is currently only found in Stonyfield Farms yogurt sold in the United States.

Garlic – These delightful little power cloves are the perfect compliment to almost any type of food and can be enjoyed raw, baked, sautéed, or thrown into any combination of plates. Garlic has also been known for ages to cure many ailments but is now mostly used to fight bad bacteria as well as infection. Notorious for giving you bad breath, professionals still encourage eating two cloves a day or slice up a few in your meals a couple times a week in order to get their full effect.

Oats and Barley – A farmer’s delight, oats and barley contain a fiber that holds a lot of antimicrobial and antioxidant properties more akin to taking Echinacea. Animals that consume a lot of barley or oats in their diet are less likely to get diseases like the flu and the same goes for humans but these super grains also help speed up the healing process and boost immunity which is needed to prevent a virus like the flu from spreading. Eat one serving per day of oats or barley to attain the daily recommended dosage to keep bugs out of your system.

Chicken Soup – Mom always made chicken soup for you when you were sick…or at least you know television moms did for your two-dimensional companions. Chicken soup is not only chock full of delicious veggies, broth, and tender slow-cooked chicken that makes you feel instantly better, you may think that the “healing” is mainly psychological. In a study of 12 nationwide brands of pre-packaged chicken soups, researchers at the University of Nebraska found that all held the amino acids necessary for blocking the inflamed immunity cells that travel your body and build up in your trachea causing cold and flu symptoms associated with the throat. Salt from the broth helps to thin any mucus membranes that may have accumulated throughout the season and besides being whole meal when you add oyster or saltine crackers, chicken soup is a hearty and scrumptious way to celebrate cold weather. Eat chicken soup whenever you want.

Sweet Potatoes – The sweet and colorful cousin to the popular potato is often overlooked with the exception of adding to the rainbow that is a festive Thanksgiving table. Many people either love or hate sweet potatoes making it harder to incorporate these into more family dinners. Sweet potatoes are the mascots of vitamin A helping to keep your skin soft and healthy, keeping your connective tissue thick and useful. Foods containing beta-carotene help your body turn them into vitamin A which helps protect your body overall. If you detest the sweet potato, other sources of beta-carotene that carry vitamin A are found in other orange tinted foods like carrots and squash.

In order to keep both types of flu at bay, you should be nourishing your body with as much immune support as necessary to keep you healthy throughout the season. Follow these simple food tips to keep your insides in tip top fighting shape.

Mind Over Matter: How Placebo Treatments Can Reduce Real Pain

Placebos, the ubiquitous sugar pills of old, are usually employed in drug trials to determine the effectiveness of a medication. Comparing the responses of both the medication and a placebo allows for the measurement of the efficacy of the treatment. However, in some cases, the placebo actually can have an effect, as is the case in a recent trial where the placebo actually reduced pain signaling in their spinal cord.

Past studies have shown that, inexplicabley, placebos can actually have a positive effect. This new study goes further and suggests that the pain-related placebo effect could work by tapping into the pain-suppressing system that is already in place in the body, one that starts in the brain and then relays down to the spinal cord. Scientists know that when people experience a decrease in their pain from a placebo treatment, certain compounds, called endorphins, are released into their brains. However, they still don’t know exactly how the release of these compounds leads to pain reduction.

One idea is that the endorphins will allow certain parts of the brain to “communicate with an evolutionarily preserved system in the brain stem,” one that will control the pain by inhibiting neural activity in the spinal cord, stated Falk Eippert, who is a researcher from the Department of Systems Neuroscience at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany.

Eippert and his research team tested this hypothesis on a group of 15 volunteers. The study subjects were told they would receive painful heat stimulation on their forearm, and during this simulation, their arms would be treated with one of two creams, one which was an active, pain-reliving cream (lidocaine cream), and the other which was the placebo cream used as the inactive control. In truth, neither one of the creams was active and was not designed in any way to reduce pain.

Firs, the team applied the full heat stimulation to the forearms of the subjects that had been treated with the control cream. Next, they tested the so-called “lidocaine” cream. In reality, the research team reduced the heat temperature so the subjects would feel less pain. This was a trick designed to make the volunteers think that the “lidocaine” cream actually had an effect on the pain. Eippert said, “We wanted to induce a belief in the effectiveness of this treatment, the cream, although it doesn’t have an effectiveness, per se.”

Then, the team ran the heat-stimulation again, but this time, they did not reduce the temperature during the “lidocaine” treatment. During this heat stimulation experiment, the team also studied the volunteers with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe their spinal cord response. The fMRI images show the amount of oxygen in the blood, which is considered an indirect measure of the spinal cord’s neural activity.

When the volunteers were given the control cream, they reported they had a lot of pain, and showed strong activity in their pain cord. However, when the volunteers received the so-called “lidocaine” cream, which they thought was the real treatment but was in fact a placebo, they reported to have less pain and showed less activity in their spinal cord. This suggests that “there must be some inhibition [coming] from the brain,” Eippert stated.

The research team believes that the placebo effect works by recruiting the ancient pain-suppressing system. Eippert said, “What we can now show is that, in humans, this system is brought into play by psychological factors such as expectation of pain relief under placebo. It’s not just altered reporting behavior, it’s a very deeply rooted effect.” This could in fact be something very profound.

With only 15 volunteers, this study might seem a little small, but it is in fact a good size for an imaging study, which often utilizes 10 to 20 subjects, stated Eippert. He also noted that the placebo is very robust, so you really do not need too many people to study it. A study that looks at a smaller behavioral effect might need more subjects.

The data from the study was also analyzed in a way that accounted for the small size of the study. Eippert said,” The kind of statistics that we’re using are explicitly taking into account how many subjects we had.” Their results showed that the reduction of the activity in the spinal cord in response to the placebo treatment was statistically significant.

Pregnancies & Sexually Transmitted Diseases on the Rise Among Teens

More teenagers and young adults are having sex, sparking an increase in teen births in both 2006 and 2007, and putting an end to more than a decade of significant decline. In fact, nearly three quarters of a million pregnancies occurred among American females under the age of 20 in 2004 that reversed the downward trend from 1991 to 2004.

To make matters work, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among young Americans are also on the rise. The annual rate of AIDS cases among boys ages 15 to 19 has almost doubled over the past decade, while the number of syphilis diagnoses are up among both teens and young adults. In addition, almost a quarter of teen girls aged 15 to 19 were infected with a human papilomavirus (HPV) from 2003 to 2004, as were almost half of young women between the ages of 20 and 25.

The troubling news comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The report was based on data compiled during the years 2002 through 2007 that was gathered from the National Vital Statistics System, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the National Survey of Family Growth and studies of hundreds of thousands children and young adults ranging in age from 10 to 25.

According to the report, the numbers indicate that the American youth is in need of better sex education that includes emphasis on STD and pregnancy prevention. In the report, the CDC writes, “The data presented in this report indicate that many young persons in the United States engage in sexual risk behavior and experience negative reproductive health outcomes.”

The report found that although more than 80 percent of boys and girls reported having received formal instruction before age 18 on how to say no to sex, among those 18 to 19 years of age, only 49.8 percent of girls and just 35 percent of boys had discussed methods of birth control with a parent. In general, nearly 70 percent of teen girls as well as 66 percent of boys reported receiving instruction on methods of birth control.

Other discoveries included that for boys ages 15 to 17, about 32 percent had engaged in sex compared to thirty percent of girls in the same age range. However, among those ages 18 to 19, almost 65 percent of boys and 71 percent of girls had experienced sex. Disturbingly, nearly 10 percent of young women ranging from 18 to 24 years reported that their first intercourse had been involuntary. About 100,000 females among the age range of 10 to 24 were treated in hospital emergency departments for non-fatal sexual assault injuries during the period between 2004 and 2006.

Among those sexually active teens, infections with the human immune deficiency virus that causes AIDS rose from 1.3 cases per 100,000 in 1997 to 2.5 cases in 2006 among boys aged 15 to 19. The syphilis rates among females aged 15 to 19 increased from 1.5 cases per 100,000 in 2004 to 2.2 cases per 100,000 in 2006 after having significantly declined between 1997 and 2005. Gonorrhea infections rates have leveled off after decreasing for more than two decades. Approximately 1 million American teens and young adults ages 10 to 24 reported contracting chlamydia, gonorrhea or syphilis in 2006, accounting for nearly half of all incident sexually transmitted diseases and 25 percent of the sexually active population.

The researchers concluded from their findings, “The sexual and reproductive health of America's young persons remains an important public health concern,” and also noted, “Earlier progress appears to be slowing and perhaps reversing."

Breast Cancer Prevention for Young Women: EARLY Act and HALO Test

On the heels of October’s National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, legislators are often looking for ways to beat the cancer before it has a chance to take over the patient’s body…with awareness. Capitol Hill was recently the host of a congressional reception as a move to garner attention for the EARLY Act, an attempt to spread breast cancer information and prevention to young women.

Although breast cancer affects men and women alike—with 35,000 cases affecting women under the age of 50—most people think they do not have to worry about breast cancer until well into middle age, which is why testing for breast cancer among young adults has never been a priority, until now. NeoMatrix and its Chair of the Clinical Advisory Panel is taking the forefront on the campaign to get the EARLY Act into effect and is dedicated to providing information and resources about the HALO Breast Pap Test.

Kathryn Tunstall, NeoMatrix’s Chair, has battled cancer twice and took a leadership role in this cause by creating the EARLY Act website and explaining why early detection is crucial to living cancer-free: “I was able to survive and thrive after breast cancer, thanks to excellent care and advances in detection and treatment.” Tunstall continued by saying that both of these websites offer resources needed to keep young women out of the danger zone, “If young women know their breast cancer risk and demand proper screening, this will ultimately change the equation of breast cancer. We can reduce the terrible toll this disease takes on women and families.”

The EARLY Act strives to fund education ($9 million over 5 years) for women under the age of 45 on the importance of testing, breast cancer risks, and regular screenings. This act would also help young women in need who are already diagnosed. National breast cancer organizations like the Susan G. Komen Foundation as well as a huge following in the House of Representatives and the Senate has helped the EARLY Act become reality.

President of the American Society of Breast Disease, Dr. Gail Lebovic, sees the high volume of support as a good sign, “During my time as a breast surgeon, we have seen advances in breast cancer risk assessment such as HALO, in detection through digital mammography, and in the development of much better surgical treatments and breast reconstruction. The EARLY Act would make many more women aware of these advances and how they can benefit from them….I can’t imagine why anyone would be against this legislation.”

The HALO Breast Pap Test, is an alternative form of testing breast cancer risk, has a low-cost and is a lot less uncomfortable than a standard mammogram—even though they are still recommended by doctors. With 70 percent of women being diagnosed with breast cancer after having no identifiable risk factors and one out of every 8 women contracting breast cancer in their lifetime, now is the time for better, safer, and more accurate tests for earlier detection. At five minutes total test time, this noninvasive test determines a patient’s risk for developing the disease over time by using heated massaging breast cups to collect nipple fluid. HALO is safe and can be repeated over and over again with no side effects. By helping to find smaller, low-stage tumors, HALO could be the angel to breast cancer’s devil. As the first completely automated testing device, HALO may revolutionize the way doctors, patients, and families look at breast cancer detection and how women look at their breasts.

Check out the information on the EARLY Act and HALO for yourself and be hopeful that early detection and new, exciting technology could be the stepping stones to a cure keeping breast cancer off our chests for good.

Second Wave of H1N1 Flu Underway

It’s a subject you’ve already heard a great deal about, and one that won’t be going away anytime soon—the H1N1 flu virus. Widespread flu activity is already being reported in 37 states, virtually all due to H1N1. Across the nation, flu-related doctor visits, hospitalizations and deaths are increasing and are higher than expected for this time of year. From August 30 to October 3, there were 3,874 laboratory-confirmed influenza associated hospitalizations, 240 laboratory-confirmed influenza associated deaths, 12,384 pneumonia and influenza syndrome-based hospitalizations and 1,544 pneumonia and influenza syndrome deaths reported to the CDC. The agency is also reporting 19 influenza-associated pediatric deaths in the past week; 16 of which were associated with H1N1 virus infection and three with influenza A virus for which subtype was undetermined.

As the number of H1N1 flu cases continues to rise, government health officials continue to urge the public to consider getting vaccinated against both swine flu and seasonal flu. “Unfortunately we are seeing more illness, more hospitalizations, and more deaths,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a recent H1N1 briefing. “We are now up to 76 children having died” from swine flu this year; many more already, she said, than the typical toll from influenza in years past.

At the briefing, Schuchat also addressed concerns she knows exist about the new vaccine. “Some people have reservations, they aren’t really sure about this vaccine,” she said. But a recent Associated Press-GfK poll suggests that a large majority of Americans have concerns about the vaccine. The AP poll, conducted October 1-5, found 72 percent of those surveyed are worried about side effects, although more than half say that wouldn’t stop them from getting the vaccine to protect their kids from the new flu. And 38 percent of parents said they were unlikely to give permission for their kids to be vaccinated at school.

“I would say there is moderate concern about the safety of it (H1N1 vaccine),” says Wally Ghurabi, DO, chief of emergency services at Santa Monica-UCLA and Orthopedic Hospital in California and a member of the H1N1 Steering Committee for the University of California Los Angeles. He says “someone always brings up Guillain-Barre,” a neurological condition that was linked with a previous swine flu vaccine manufactured in 1976. However, experts argue that the link was not clear and point out that vaccine production has greatly improved since then, as has testing for contaminants, which may have explained the link. Ghurabi’s advice is for patients to weigh the pros and cons, taking their risk into account. For instance, “if you are caring for a two-month old baby or are pregnant, you are in a high risk group,” he says.

But federal officials say the H1N1 vaccine is made the same way as seasonal flu vaccines that have been used for years. “This isn’t a new vaccine,” Schuchat said. “The vaccine is being manufactured exactly the same way as the seasonal flu vaccine. It is basically a vaccine made against the H1N1 instead of the seasonal viruses (expected to circulate in the upcoming season). Based on everything we know now, we are expecting a good safety record for H1N1.”

The federal government has purchased 250 million doses of the 2009 H1N1 vaccine at a cost of $2 billion, and as of Friday 3.7 million doses have been ordered by states and the District of Columbia, according to Schuchat. She says in all, 6.8 million doses are now available and production is continuing, but exactly when the H1N1 vaccine will be available in a given community is hard to predict. The CDC has recommended that certain at-risk populations, including pregnant women, health care providers and individuals with underlying chronic medical conditions such as asthma, receive the new H1N1 vaccine as a priority before the general population.

What are the health reasons for wearing pantyhose?

Many people say they wear pantyhose for health reasons. I wear hose several days a week. Hose does make my legs feel better and feel less tired and less sore at the end of the day but why? Why are pantyhose "healthy"?

ANSWER:
Pantyhose are tight around the legs and helps to apply pressure to assist the veins in pushing blood up the legs. Thus improving blood circulation in the legs. Hence legs feel less tired, achy. For better effect, wear support pantyhose. Important thing is to get the right size ... too small would mean it is too tight and may not help in the blood circulation.

I wear support pantyhose with control top everyday ... my legs feels great, not only look great (smooth with even tan).

http://pantyhose-legwear-fashion.blogspot.com/

ANSWER:

Adding on to what has already been written here, lymphatic flow is also improved to a degree, not as much as a massage, but a good replication. Good lymphatic flow is essential to healthy legs.

ANSWER:

There good for tired aching legs caused from alot of standing up,they also help prevent and provide relief from vericous veins,they also promote better blood circulation,(recomended for diabetics)they also recomend you wear them when flying for circulatory reasons.

ANSWER:

Pantyhose ( the ones with a little extra support ) help support the blood vessels in the legs to prevent their breakdown causing varicose veins .

ANSWER:

Pantyhose are indeed medicinal items. You can find more about this item specified here: http://www.myhealth-forum.com/

ANSWER:

Most of them have been covered already but I have a male friend who gets relief from RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome) when he wears support type pantyhose.

ANSWER:

I should not wear mine: guys are always hurting their necks.

Easy Orgasm for Women with Positive Body Image

Women who feel more positively about their genitals find it easier to orgasm and are more likely to engage in sexual health promoting behaviours, finds a new study.

They are more likely to undergo regular gynecological exams or perform vulvar self-examinations.

"These are important findings about body image," said Debby Herbenick, associate director of the Centre for Sexual Health Promotion in the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation.

"Our culture often portrays women's genitals as dirty and in need of cleaning and grooming. Some women may have had greater exposure to such negative messages or may be more susceptible to their impact," she added.

During the study, Herbenick and colleagues created a scale for measuring men's and women's attitudes toward women's genitals.

Such a scale, she wrote in the study, could be useful in sex therapy, in medical settings to help better understand decision-making that goes into gynecological care and treatment, and in health education settings involving women and their sexual health.

The study found that men had more positive attitudes about women's genitals than women.

"Women are often more critical about their own bodies-and other women's bodies-than men are," said Herbenick.

"What we found in this study is that men generally feel positive about a variety of aspects of women's genitals including how they look, smell, taste and feel," she added.

Herbenick said that parents might consider how they can help their daughters to feel more positively about their bodies, such as by teaching them accurate names for their body parts, including their genitals (e.g., "vulva" rather than "down there") and responding in supportive ways to their self-exploration.

"Rather than saying, 'don't touch down there-it's dirty,' parents might let their children know that it's OK for them to touch their genitals, but in private spaces such as their own bedroom or the bathroom," Herbenick added.

The study appears in International Journal of Sexual Health.