Original article appeared in https://nytimes.com

Every few months, like clockwork, hundreds of videos promising tips and tricks to “hack” your gut flood TikTok. In March, influencers pushed shots of aloe vera juice: “My digestive system, like my gut health? Never been better,” one gushed in a video with one million likes while tapping on a purple bottle of the drink.

Another, with the username “oliveoilqueen,” advocated drinking extra virgin olive oil every day in a video viewed more than 3.5 million times, claiming that doing so cleared her skin, made her periods less painful and fixed her frequent bloating. Videos tagged with #guttok have garnered nearly 400 million views. They’re crammed with suggestions for cucumber-ginger juices and boiled apples, bone broth in the morning and sludgy sweet potato soups at night.

There’s not enough data to prove whether any of these supposed fixes improve digestive functions, gastrointestinal experts said. Some purported gut-health helpers, like coconut oil, have high fat content that can loosen stool and irritate your stomach, said Beth Czerwony, a registered dietitian with the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Human Nutrition.

Others, such as aloe vera juice, may cause diarrhea in some people. And since the Food and Drug Administration largely does not regulate supplements, gastroenterologists are reluctant to recommend the pills, powders and products promoted by influencers.

“If somebody is claiming to have something that will immediately turn gut health around, you should be skeptical of that,” said Justin Sonnenburg, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford. Instead, his research points to long-term lifestyle habits that can benefit the gut — ones that rarely go viral or make their way to social media acclaim....

Read on here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/well/eat/tiktok-gut-health.html?

Physical Activities and Eating Habits That Can Preserve Your Youthfulness

Regular exercise improves blood circulation in the body. The result of this is that the skin will look radiant and full of life. Research has proven that regular exercise slows the aging process and increases the chance of living a healthier and more energetic life. Medical experts believe that thirty minutes of exercise per day is sufficient to make you live a healthy life.

Your eating habits also contribute to your health and how you age. Consuming some substances can speed up the aging process, while some foods can help slow the process. This chapter will highlight the role of exercise and eating habits that can help you look younger and improve your overall health.

The Role of Exercise in Maintaining Youthfulness

Staying active is one of the most important anti-aging principles you must practice. It helps in maintaining a healthy weight and improves your appearance. Research has proven that vigorous exercise, particularly high-intensity interval training, slows your aging at a cellular level for up to ten years! Amazing, isn’t it? However, there is more.

Regular exercise increases your blood flow and aids the circulation of critical nutrients around your body. More oxygen and other vital nutrients in the right places in your body make you have a youthful appearance. Regular exercise is also essential in maintaining muscle mass and strength, which boasts a ton of health benefits. So, by staying active, you increase your chances of living healthier and longer...

Food Gardening Basics for Beginners

One of the best ways to eat healthy, save money and find some stress relief all at the same time is to start a food garden. You don’t need to have any prior experience with growing food to get started, either.

All you need are some fundamental instructions and a little bit of planning and you’ll be able to grow your own food from seed to plate in no time. Every season, you’ll be able to boost the nutrients you consume and cut back on your spending for pricey produce.

Planning Your Gardening Growing Space

Once you decide that you want to grow your own garden, the first step is to determine what type of garden you’re going to build and where the location will be. Some beginners grow their garden indoors.

This option is chosen for the purpose of saving money, while still having healthy fruits and vegetables to eat. It’s also a choice made because raising an indoor garden can be easier on those who can’t necessarily get around as well physically.

This type of garden can be grown by anyone of any age. When you create an indoor garden, you’ll have some of the same growing needs to consider that you would have if you planted an outdoor garden.

You’ll need to determine a container system. Many indoor gardens are hydroponic ones. This means that soil isn’t used as part of the growing process. By using a hydroponic system, your plants grow quickly, but they do require power to grow. This is not one of the cheapest methods to use for growing an indoor garden.

Some people use an aquaponics system, which works hand in hand to grow plants by using a fish aquarium. Container gardening is something that can be used indoor or outdoor.

You can use window boxes, pots, planters, or baskets. You can use barrels, plastic containers and more. Nearly anything can be used as long as it has a proper drainage system.

You can create a tower garden in order to grow plants. This means that you’re growing things vertically rather than horizontally. This allows you to grow more plants in less space, so it’s a great idea for things like small apartment patios or other homes with limited room to grow a garden.

You can even grow a tower garden in a corner of your kitchen if you want to have it inside rather than outside. Raised bed gardening is where you plant things in areas built up over your soil. ...

7 simple tips for a healthier diet-Introduction

Carb cycling, Paleo, Keto, Atkins, intermittent fasting, Mediterranean diet… These are just a drop in the bucket when it comes to eating plans and diets. All of them claim to help you lose weight but more importantly, they claim to be healthy nutritional solutions that instill good, lifelong eating habits.

This is not true, as anyone who has tried one of these eating plans will tell you. Diets don’t last long enough to instill lasting habits. In addition, we have negative associations with them related to deprivation, calorie cutting, and hunger. These associations will not help our brains adopt good habits.

Finally, diets don't last forever. Once we've shed the pounds and stopped dieting, we go back to our old eating habits and gradually gain back the weight. What's worse, dieting can actually create very unhealthy eating habits such as binge eating, cravings, and an obsession with dieting, where a person jumps from one diet to the next.

This is why the weight-loss and nutrition market is a booming industry that rakes in billions every year. People are jumping from one "revolutionary" eating plan to the next in search of the perfect one that will transform their lives....

6 Tips for Building a Better Body Image

Everywhere you look, body positivity is now the message being delivered. Whether it’s a Dove commercial or an episode of the Bachelor, everyone says the right thing. Accept your body as it is, stop comparing yourself to others, and love the body you have. That’s a lot simpler said than done, but with practice, you can love your body a lot more than you do now.

Change What You Can and Want To

If there are things about your body that you don’t like that are possible to change, it’s okay to change them. That doesn’t mean you don’t love yourself or that you have a poor self-image. However, do examine your reasons for doing anything, especially if it requires you to risk your life, such as with plastic surgery.

Learn to Dress for Your Body Type

Learning to dress according to body-type is likely one of the best ways to fix your body image problems. Most people just have no idea how to dress for their body type. Today you can find plenty of YouTube stars exploring how different types of clothing looks on them. You can also watch old episodes of ‘What Not to Wear’ to explore this idea.

Don’t Compare Yourself to Other People

For some people looking at Instagram, stars can cause them to suffer from low self-esteem, and it will damage their body image. If you feel bad after looking at people on Instagram or in magazines, you should stop looking at these images. They are not real. People are highly edited and highly made up and is not a good example of what real people look like. Go to your local big-box store to get a better idea of what real people look like.

Compare Yourself to Others

This may seem contradictory, but this is an important distinction to make. Sometimes you may have a seriously unrealistic idea of what a particular part of your body should look like. You can find a good sample of breasts, vaginas, hips, bellies, and more right online and discover that you are normal even as you are different.

Clean Up and Organize Your Environment

Amazingly, sometimes our body image tends to suffer due to our surroundings. Keep your environment organized and cleaned up, and your self-image, including your body image, will improve with your environment.


Become Health Focused

When you want to improve anything about your body, always put your health first. Everyone has a different shape, and that is a good thing, but as long as you’re eating enough calories and nutrition and moving every day, you’ll be healthy. Health itself is an excellent motivator for you to feel good about yourself.

Body positivity doesn’t mean that you should ignore your health. It does mean that you should accept the body that you were given by improving it, making it as healthy as you can, and living your life with joy.

Carrying the Burden of Your Past Into Your Future

When you focus on the past, this is known as having emotional baggage. Everyone has stuff come up about their past, but it’s when you focus on it and let it fester that it can cause problems in your present life.

It can also hold you back from enjoying your future life. Emotional baggage can stem from events that happened to you - such as from being in an abusive relationship, from physical or emotional traumas such as a car wreck, or from carrying a burden you shouldn’t be carrying – like guilt.

When you hold onto the burdens of your past, it affects how you live your life now as well as how you’ll live in the future. It can become your identity because you get stuck in a certain pattern that was created by a past event.

 Whatever it is that you experienced then colors how you behave with others, how you handle your day-to-day life, how you process thoughts and what your beliefs are today.

People carry the burden of the past because they’ve never healed the emotional blow that stemmed from the situation.

The hurt they felt back then is still there just under the surface. It might be something that’s steeped in anger or anxiety. Or it could be that you’re stuck in feelings of grief or sadness.

When you carrying a burden like this, it can make you feel like you never left that time in your life. Your emotions will feel as raw now when you think about it as they did back then.

Not only can it weigh on your emotions today when you focus on the past, but it can also hurt you physically. You can develop things like insomnia, chronic stress, stomachaches, elevated blood pressure and more.

In order to leave the past where it belongs, you have to heal. That means you must unload that baggage so you can move on. You should keep in mind that you can’t heal from what you don’t name.

So when it comes to the past, you have to look at it and uncover the pain that’s keeping you tethered to that event, person or whatever it is. Write out the things that bother you now about the past and why they bother you.

It can be helpful to take this list and speak out loud or write a letter that you eventually destroy to the past situation or to the person who wounded you. As you read out the words, picture them releasing into the air, taking the connected emotion with it until it dissipates.

Accept whatever you went through without assigning blame to yourself or someone else. This is a step toward letting it go. It doesn’t mean that someone else isn’t to blame. It doesn’t mean that it didn’t bother you emotionally.

It means that you’re recognizing that the past has had enough of your life already and you’re through with that. Once you identify what happened and what kind of emotional reaction it caused you, you find peace by loving yourself through it.

Be compassionate toward yourself. Forgive the pain of the past. Forgive your mistakes. Unpack the burden of your past by practicing self-help techniques if needed to help heal from past triggers.

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Put an Emphasis on a Good Night’s Sleep to Perform Better at Work and Enjoy Life More

A good night’s sleep is crucial to maintaining a healthy mind and body. Not getting enough sleep will not only damage your physical health, but it’ll also damage your mental health.

When you lack a decent amount of rest, it takes a toll on your body. Not getting enough sleep can weaken your immune system, put you in danger while driving to work, cause you to have high blood pressure, put you at risk for getting diabetes, cause unhealthy weight gain, give you higher chances of having a stroke, and can even increase your chance of getting some kinds of cancer.

Your mental health also suffers when you’re always drowsy. Lacking proper rest will wreck your ability to think straight, making your work life so much harder than it needs to be.

It also makes you more likely to not be able to remember crucial details that you might need in order to write a paper or give a good presentation during a meeting. Without sleep, your mood also decreases and can make you anxious, depressed, and more likely to get annoyed easier.

If you constantly aren’t getting enough sleep, you can develop long-term anxiety, depression, and even paranoia. Not getting enough sleep affects your work life by making you unable to concentrate.

This means you’ll forget everything you heard in any meetings you went to, which will stunt your ability to get your work done in a way that meets your boss or clients’ expectations.

Sometimes it’s difficult to naturally get yourself back on a good schedule, especially if you have to stay up late for work or your family. However, there are some things that you can do during the day to help ensure that when your head hits the pillow, you won’t be restless and you’ll be able to get a full, good night’s sleep.

Try to not drink or eat anything with caffeine in it past noon, stick to your same work schedule on weekends and holidays to make sure you don’t get off track, don’t go on your phone or computer before bed, and try to spend about an hour or so before bed doing relaxing activities like reading, taking a nice bath, or even doing some meditation.

Getting a good night’s sleep will not only benefit your ability to be a stronger worker, but it will also keep you healthy both mentally and physically. Try different methods to see what works for you in order to be able to go to bed at a normal hour depending on when you need to wake up for work.