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How Caloric Restriction Contributes to Your Longevity
Of all the things we can do for ourselves to prevent aging problems, cutting calories rates at the top of the game. Recent strides in understanding genetics and the biochemistry of aging has revealed that the best way to add years onto your life expectancy is to restrict calories that put on weight and age the body and mind.
Since most people have a problem with sticking to a highly caloric restricted diet for more than a few ways, further research reveals that intermittent fasting can offer the same results as caloric restriction, but able to complete with less discipline.
With this plan, you can practice fasting for three to five days at a time and the benefits of restricting calories on a daily basis continue – even though it’s not a good method to lose weight.
Most people tend to compensate for the three to five days of fasting by gorging on food after the fast and gain all the weight back. Another plan that seems to have more lasting benefits of weight loss is caloric restriction for five days and then resuming your normal diet plan.
You don’t feel that you’re starving and aren’t uncomfortable – and maintain your normal energy level. Most researchers agree that calories are the single ingredient, which indicates whether a person will live a long life – or not.
If you’re getting the necessary nutrients, caloric restriction can extend your life, help you lose unwanted weight and prevent or slow down some debilitating diseases. A diet designed to provide the nutrients you need to increase longevity will include restricting protein and consuming fat calories.
On day one of the calorie restricted, 5 day diet plan, 1,090 calories are consumed and on days 2 through 5, 725 calories are consumed. So, the diet tends to be mostly fat. Avocados (2 per day) are recommended on this short diet plan.
In studies using middle-aged mice who were given the calorie restricted diet for 4 days, two times per month, lived up to 11% longer than mice who were fed the calorie-restricted diet plan.
Another unexpected advantage of the mice-test was that their cognitive and memory levels were increased and they kept more lean muscle mass and less visceral fat. The mice tended to perform on a higher, more energetic level and had lower fasting blood sugar.
More studies are being conducted to see if a calorie restricted diet can work for humans to increase longevity and help prevent age-related diseases such as arthritis, heart disease, strokes and type-2 diabetes.
Can Tai Chi Slow The Aging Process?
All of us get older; this is just a simple fact of life. However, the aging process can differ from one person to the other. The better we take care of our health, and make healthy lifestyle choices the better the aging process will be.
This is a simple fact that is supported by mountains of scientific research. People who focus on prevention early in life can reap the benefits of being more vital, energetic, and healthier as they face their senior years.
Tai Chi is a form of exercise that can be used at any age and at any fitness level. This exercise began as a form of martial art but has found profound popularity in the modern world as a form of meditative movement that has great healing energy, helps to reduce pain, boost brain power, improve mind wellness, posture and balance. It also makes a great adjunct to medications used to treat the elderly depressed patient.
Can it actually slow the aging process along with its long list of health benefits?
A Recent Study On Aging And Tai Chi
A recent study was published in Cell Transplantation, which looked at the benefits of Tai Chi when it comes to the aging process. The study looked at levels of CD34 cells, which are important cells to many of our body’s organs and cellular metabolism. They knew that the numbers of this type of stem cell were important in aging and decided to see whether Tai Chi affected the number of CD34 cells in the body.
The study involved dividing groups of volunteers who were under the age of 25 at the time of the study. The participants were assigned activities such as brisk walking, Tai Chi, or no exercise program whatsoever. Youthful participants were studied because they renew cells better than older people do and the study was designed to last for one full year. These participants were free of any type of chronic disease and took no medications during the study period.
The Results
The study revealed that those participants who studied and practiced Tai Chi on a regular basis had a much greater number of rejuvenating CD34 cells than those who were in the other two groups.
With more of these stem cells in the system, it was felt that they could offset the cellular death and decline that goes with the aging process.
Researchers were quick to point out that the number of CD34 cells in the body only partially affects aging and that more studies on aging and Tai Chi need to be carried out before it can be determined that Tai Chi actually slows the aging process.
So far, Tai Chi has been found scientifically to help people who suffer from chronic pain syndromes, fibromyalgia and Parkinson’s disease—which is usually a problem affecting the aged population.
It also helps people improve their balance so they fall less, lessen stress, and reduce blood pressure. Besides the elevation in CD34 cells, things like reduced stress, lessened pain, and blood pressure reduction are known to prolong life and to improve the quality of one’s life.
A Chinese Study
Tai Chi is also known to improve memory in all age groups. A group of Chinese researchers looked at elderly people and their memory performance on memory tests. Those participants who took part in Tai Chi at least three times per week were able to do better on various memory tests after just 8 months of practicing Tai Chi.
The researchers compared scores on memory tests between Tai Chi practitioners and those that did not practice Tai Chi and discovered a significant difference in the brain’s ability to memorize things between the two groups.
Memory problems are another problem affecting the aged population so Tai Chi may be able to help this population have a better quality of life when they practice Tai Chi.
Parkinson’s disease patients, who are for the most part elderly, showed improvements in balance and coordination when they studied Tai Chi and practiced it regularly; they had fewer falls, which could have potentially led to hip and wrist fractures, some of which can lead to an early death.
Bottom Line
Tai Chi has a long list of health benefits, and supports and promotes mind, body, and spiritual wellbeing. It can be incorporated into any regular fitness routine that also includes aerobic and strength training workouts to yield a well-rounded and highly diverse training program that can support health, wellness, and better aging.
In various ways, Tai Chi appears to result in a longer life, and a better quality of life than if the individual didn’t practice Tai Chi. Further studies are necessary to see if there are other ways that Tai Chi can extend life and quality of life.
Mindful Living Can Help Slow Down the Aging Process
From the time that you’re born, your body begins to age. Some people end up aging faster than others. Some people know that the key to slowing down the aging process is found in mindful living.
When you practice mindful living, you not only add years to your life, but you live a better quality of life as well. Scientific studies have shown that there’s a direct link between the emotional health of a person and his or her physical health.
When someone experiences negative emotions such as ones fueled by stress, it can speed up aging because it has a negative effect within the body. When you practice mindfulness, you can slow down the aging process because you’re fighting back against the causes of aging.
Inside your body, you have DNA that act as caps on the end of your cells. These caps are called telomeres. These are needed to help your cells continually divide. As time passes, these telomeres would gradually lose their length and the result would then be cell death.
You can prevent the shortening of the telomeres by practicing mindful living. The connection between mindfulness and the length of telomeres rests in an enzyme known as telomerase.
This enzyme is responsible for keeping the telomeres at a healthy length. One of the key factors that can impact the length of the telomeres is stress. When you have stress, it damages your cells and can lead to cell death.
There are many health conditions that can be linked with the telomeres once they begin to shorten. Among these are heart disease and some types of cancers. When you have stress, especially if you have a lot of it, this will cause the telomere length to shorten faster.
But, you can change that by learning how to live mindfully. When you live mindfully, you can defeat the stress that’s causing so many negative reactions within your body. You can learn how to do mindful exercises that can boost the grown of the telomeres.
When you practice mindful living, you focus on the present and you don’t practice self negativity and you don’t judge what you think or feel. What mindfulness does is it boosts the amount of telomerase that’s present in your body.
You learn how to stop the cycle of negative emotion and thoughts that tie in to stress. Mindfulness also boosts positive thoughts and emotions which are linked to physical well being and the aging process is slowed.
Mindful living will allow you to have better concentration, gain self control and allow you to have more compassion for yourself and toward others.
Building a Case for Nutritional Supplements
Building a Case for Nutritional Supplements
It’s true that ideally, we should be getting the essential nutrients we need from food. An organic-based diet that includes plenty of fruits and vegetables should be enough to keep us healthy. Unfortunately, for the overwhelming majority of us, it’s not.
Sure, relying exclusively on food may keep you from developing vitamin deficiencies, but a dietary approach alone is not going to come close to optimizing your health.
In this post, we’ll look at just a few of the reasons we believe supplementing your diet with vitamins and minerals is a smart move. If you’re on the fence about whether or not you should be taking supplements yourself, this post is for you.
Reason #1: Poor Soil Conditions Equal Less Nutritious Food
Dr. Bernard Jensen was a world-renowned clinical nutritionist who once said that a tomato today is not the same as a tomato from 100 years ago. What he was referring to is the poor conditions of our soil in this day and age.
The first U.S. soil surveys were completed in the 1920s. They all concluded that our soil was depleted of key nutrients like nitrates and carbonates. These soil nutrients are necessary for the growth of healthy crops and ultimately, nutrient-dense food. And that was way back in the 1920s.
So what’s been done since then to improve the conditions of our soil? Well, not much. In the 1930s and 40s, following the Great Dust Bowl, farmers planted soy to reinvigorate top soil. This helped to some extent but certainly not to the degree needed.
Since then, farmers have had to incorporate chemicals into the soil to rapidly improve growth potential. And while this may help to grow crops, it doesn’t necessarily grow healthy crops. The natural conclusion then would be to look toward organically grown fruits and vegetables.
Although we believe that organic produce would be a healthier choice in terms of pesticides, it doesn’t ensure that you’ll be eating nutrient-rich food. Why? Because organic soil is just as devoid of nutrients as chemically treated soil is.
The bottom line is this: Poor soil produces poor crops, and poor crops produce nutrient-depleted food…
Original story link is https://blog.lef.org/2011/10/building-case-for-nutritional.html
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How Serious Are You About Life Extension?
How Serious Are You About Life Extension?
We all want to know how to live longer and there are complete industries that revolving around the concept of “life extension”. But is it really possible for a person to extend their life by decades and, if so, how?
There are two thoughts on the life extension concept. The first is ‘how do we live as long as we possibly can?’ from a personal viewpoint. We all want to live past our eighties and if possible far into our nineties. The second is that people want to know how we can reach our biological potential – there are those that suggest that it is possible to live a normal, healthy life well into our hundreds.
To achieve either of these we need to first learn how to slow down the aging process. This means that we need to learn how to delay our physical cells becoming old and damaged and how to ensure that the new cells that are created in their place are as strong as the originals.
Nutrition
We get the building blocks for these new cells from the foods that we eat. This means that by eating certain foods we can expect to be healthier for longer. The obvious examples here are your vegetable and fruit food groups.
The other side of the coin is that there are also foods that cause cell damage and that by consuming these we are actually speeding up the aging process. Examples of these types of foods include those high in fat, refined carbohydrates and refined sugars.
Apart from the food that we eat there is also a fine balance to the amounts that we eat. Eating too much leads to health issues that can shorten our lifespan, just as eating too little can cause malnutrition and disease.
Exercise
Exercise is an essential part of the life extension process. We need to exercise to get our blood moving through our bodies so that it can carry all the essential nutrients to all the parts that need them. Exercise improves our muscular, cardiovascular, circulation and immune systems. This helps us to ward off any damage to our cells by viruses, injury and helps to balance out our hormones and prevent obesity.
Supplements
Sometimes we need a bit of help to get all the nutrients that we need, particularly with those that the body can not make itself. As we age our bodies become depleted of many of these nutrients, so as a part of a life extension plan supplementing these building blocks and nutrients can assist with the prevention of damage to the existing cells and provide the essential ingredients for the rebuilding of healthy cells.
No matter how hard we try, our organs do simply become too old to do the work that they once did for us, but this may not always mean the end of our life. With research into stem cells it is already possible to regrow organs. Who is to say that patients in the future simply do not replace that parts that are failing – much like we replace the parts of a car when they fail?
Cryogenics and nanotechnology that were once reserved for science fiction and horror movies are also technologies that are beginning to be taken quite seriously. Despite advances in these areas I wouldn’t pin your hopes on being able to have a conversation with your great great grandchildren 100 years from now just yet.
You best chance for life extension is to look at where you can improve on your current lifestyle and making the necessary changes. By simply altering your diet or taking up gentle exercise you could even add years to your life expectancy.
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Top 10 Causes of Premature Aging
Getting older is simply part of living. However, you might have things in your life that are actually causing your body’s aging process to speed up. So you end up looking and feeling older than you really are.
A study performed on biological markers showed that there was more aging in people who suffered from certain conditions. To prevent premature aging, you need to avoid these top ten causes.
#1 – Drinking Other Liquids in Place of Water
Did you know that there’s something called lifestyle-induced aging? This means that what you do or don’t do can cause your body to age earlier than it should. You might be in your thirties or forties, but the age of your biological markers can be a decade or more older.
One of the ways that you can induce aging is by not drinking enough water. With all of the admonitions to drink between six and eight glasses of water daily, it can be easy to start turning a deaf ear toward the advice.
Everyone knows that water is a necessary part of keeping the organs healthy and is needed to help keep your skin moist. But it turns out there’s a valid aging reason that you need the water.
When you don’t get enough water – and instead, you replace that liquid intake with other fluids such as caffeinated coffee or sodas, you can cause premature aging.
That’s because caffeine has the same effect on the body that a diuretic does. It forces the body to get rid of water. You end up with organs not being able to function properly as well as dry, sagging skin.
When you lack the right water intake, you end up dehydrated. Most people believe that if they reach that point, they’d feel thirst, but you often don’t feel thirst with dehydration until it’s pretty well established.
#2 – A Lack of Sleep
You know that when you don’t get enough sleep, you don’t feel like you’re at your best. You might even be aware of all of the studies that talk about how you don’t perform as well at home or at your job on less than the optimal amount of sleep your body needs.
Not getting enough sleep speeds up the aging process. When you don’t get enough sleep, it can cause anxiety, and depression as well. When you lose sleep, the body experiences a surge of cortisol, which is the stress hormone.
Under normal circumstances, this stress hormone is healthy and enables you to deal with situations, but a steady influx of this hormone actually causes your body to slow down the production of collagen.
Since collagen is necessary for healthy looking skin, your skin will begin to show the effects of this lack of collagen, caused by not getting enough sleep. Your skin begins sagging.
Plus, the extra cortisol causes internal premature aging as well. You’ll also develop lines and dark circles under your eyes. Besides the extra cortisol, you’ll experience a lack of growth hormone when you lose sleep. You need this growth hormone to keep your bones from becoming weak.
#3 – Bad Habits Cause Premature Aging
Not only can certain bad habits cause problems with the health of your organs and lead to life-threatening conditions, but they can also lead to premature aging. Smoking can cause a host of health problems that can shorten your life.
But it accelerates aging because it triggers the aging process within your body. It kicks enzymes into high gear that work against your appearance and health. That means that you’ll develop wrinkles, lines, bags and sagging skin.
The cause behind the sagging skin occurs because smoking works to inhibit the production of collagen – plus, nicotine thins the skin, which impacts how smooth the skin appears to look.
Not only is smoking a habit that can cause premature aging, but so is drinking alcohol. Besides causing liver damage, drinking alcohol speeds up aging. When you drink, the ingredients in alcohol destroys cells that your body normally uses in the detoxification process.
These toxins make your body age faster. Plus, alcohol can cause you to become dehydrated. As if that’s not enough, many drinks are packed with sugar, which leads to cell damage.
Drinking also causes changes in how your body is able to handle the blood circulation. This causes your body to age prematurely inside as well as out. One of the outward changes you’ll see from this impacted blood flow is the development of spider veins on your legs.
#4 – Stress Causes Premature Aging
Everyone on the planet is familiar with the effects of stress. There can be small stressors that you have to deal with on a day by day basis. These don’t last long and usually don’t cause a lot of harm to the body.
But on the other hand, there can be major stressors, which can lead to premature aging. Your body has DNA strands. These strands have ends on them known as telomeres.
These are what protect your DNA strands. It’s instrumental in enabling your cells to be able to divide. When cells can no longer divide, they die. In healthy bodies, these telomeres have a longer length.
In unhealthy bodies, the length is short. These telomeres can be shortened by stress, which can lead to premature aging, disease and even death. There are studies that link shortened telomeres to work stress, emotional stress, and chronic anxiety or worry.
If you’re under a lot of stress, to prevent premature aging, you’ll want to take steps to deal with this and eliminate it from your life as soon as possible. Use some self nurturing and counseling if you have to – whatever works to stave off the aging process.
Read on to learn more about Ridding Yourself of Chronic Stress
#5 – Low BMI Is Linked to Premature Aging
With so many articles focused on making sure you have a low BMI to stave off weight-related diseases, it can be easy to think that having a low BMI is a good thing.
That’s wrong. The leading cause of a low BMI is not carrying the right amount of weight for your body’s frame. While it might be tempting to think that the thinner a person is, the better it will be for their overall health, that’s simply not true.
A too-low BMI can lead to premature aging. What you need is a healthy range BMI, not one that’s considered too low. When you have a low BMI, it impacts the body’s soft tissue by causing a loss of it.
When this happens, your collagen production slows down and you’ll develop sagging skin and wrinkles at a younger age than someone would that has a healthy BMI range.
It’s not all about appearances, either. A BMI that’s considered too low can weaken the immune system as well as cause anemia. It can also lead to low levels of energy.
#6 – Your Diet Can Lead to Premature Aging
You’ve heard the phrase, “You are what you eat” – but what you might not realize is that what you eat can lead to premature aging. Eating healthy gives you more benefits than simply keeping your weight at a healthy level.
When you eat right, you can stave off premature aging. When you don’t, you can hasten the aging process and some foods will bring it on faster than other foods. Whenever your body has an inflammation issue, you don’t feel well and you don’t look well.
Inflammation impacts the body because it can make you appear to be older than you are. Some types of foods are worse than others. You might have heard that you should keep the sugar-laden foods to a minimum, but there’s a good reason for that other than weight gain.
High carbohydrate foods – even foods that aren’t considered junk foods – cause a break down in the body’s ability to produce collagen. Without the right collagen production, you can see the effects of premature aging on your skin.
But inside the body, your diet can lead to premature aging among your organs. You can develop a fatty liver, which is directly tied to the kinds of foods that you eat.
A diet that’s high in carbs and low in protein can lead to premature aging. So can fad diets, crash diets, yo-yo diets and diets that are seemingly healthy, but call for you to extremely limit one of the food groups.
#7 – Being a Couch Potato Leads to Premature Aging
When your lifestyle is mostly sedentary, your risk of premature aging doubles. There’s more to exercise that helping to ke
There’s more to it than making sure that your muscles and bones can remain strong. Exercise can help keep diseases at bay that can be caused by an unhealthy weight or a sedentary lifestyle.
But one of the top reasons that exercise can prevent premature aging is because exercise protects your telomeres. When your telomeres become shortened, it means that your cells can’t divide as often as they would normally be able to.
This lack of division causes aging due to the death of the cells. What exercise does is strengthen the telomere, which has a preventative, anti-aging result. When you engage in regular exercise, not only are you helping prevent cell death (which is linked to premature aging), but you’re reaping all of the other benefits as well.
You’ll be improving your blood circulation and helping prevent the development of certain heart disease and other conditions that are linked to a lack of exercise. Plus, you’ll boost your immune system and help stave off inflammations that can cause premature aging.
#8 – Depression is Linked to Premature Aging
There are times that everyone can experience periods of feeling down. But usually, these periods don’t last. In someone like that, depression usually doesn’t cause premature aging.
However, when you’re dealing with chronic bouts of feeling down or have been diagnosed with depression, this is tied to premature aging. Depression can cause the body’s cells to age faster, which can then cause inflammation and other health problems.
People who experience depression can develop health issues that you would normally only see in people who were much older. These issues can include cognitive problems, cardiovascular disease, weakened bone strength, tremors and muscle weakness.
Another reason that depression can cause premature aging (besides faster aging cells) is that it can cause the length of the telomeres to shorten. To prevent this, you can engage in actions that boost your telomerase level, which work to protect you from premature aging.
The top three ways to boost this level is through regular exercise, eating a healthy diet and learning how to manage anything that might be causing you a lot of stress that becomes chronic, and turns into a depression situation.
#9 – The Sun Causes Premature Aging
There are lotions and makeup on the market today that claim to give you sun protection. However, many of these products fall far short of protecting your skin from premature aging from sun exposure.
That’s because most of these products don’t contain enough of the preventative ingredients against damage. Being in the sun can cause sagging skin, fine lines, and wrinkles.
When you’re out in the sun, when there’s a bright glare, you automatically squint. This produces the wrinkles and lines as well as the sagging around your eyes. If you have to squint outdoors, wear sunglasses – even in the winter – especially if you live in an area that gets snow.
The sun can damage your skin and cause premature aging even in the cold months. The sun causes damage to the collagen and hastens premature aging of the skin.
But it can also cause a breakdown in the cells that lead to the development of skin cancers. Exposure to the sun’s rays can give your skin a dry, weathered appearance.
If you’ve ever noticed people who practice years of tanning, you’ll see that their skin tends to make them look a lot older than they really are. This is a direct result of the sun hastening the aging process.
#10 – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Premature Aging
PTSD can be caused by either physical or mental stress. This can develop because of having experienced a physical or emotional trauma personally or having seen a trauma occur.
There are many reasons that PTSD can develop. Events such as being robbed, being physically assaulted, experiencing a car accident or a major event such as fire can cause PTSD.
The underlying cause of PTSD in any event that triggers it is a massive stressor or a series of stress long term. Your brain can only handle so much trauma at once. Your body can experience such an amount of stress at any given time that it can be an overload.
When you have PTSD, you can experience, depression, insomnia, have a higher inflammatory marker and have telomeres with shorter lengths. How long or how short your telomeres are is directly linked to accelerated aging.
Studies done on PTSD and premature aging found that besides shorter telomeres and higher inflammatory markers, that there was also a link between diseases that are normally associated with people who were much older.
These diseases included heart disease, intestinal problems, cognitive ability and even dementia. People who struggle with PTSD were shown to have higher mortality rates due to the premature aging process.
Aging is going to take place for all of us. But there are many things we can do to inhibit the speed at which it occurs. Some of that is physical, such as applying sunscreen – but a lot of it is a mindset and mental fortitude that you also have to work on achieving so that you live a peaceful life and age at a slower pace.
Must-Have Medical Screenings as You Grow Older
Must-Have Medical Screenings as You Grow Older
As you grow older, you should begin looking into medical screenings that are considered must-haves for your age group. Those who are over fifty years old have to pay closer attention to blood pressure, cholesterol, and a large amount of other important functions for your body.
Although some of these screenings may not be something you want to do, getting the right tests done can help catch problems early and can lead to a longer and healthier life.
Colonoscopies are never high on anyone’s to do list, but they should be. A colonoscopy is the test often used to search for colon cancer in both men and women.
It also allows for a doctor to see any subtle bleeding that may be occurring without your knowledge. For males, a colonoscopy can also alert your doctor if you have prostate cancer.
As you get older, it’s important that you don’t slack on breast exams. Starting at the age of forty, women should have regular mammograms done once a year, although some doctors advise it less frequently now.
The risk of breast cancer increases with age, so skipping out on breast exams and mammograms can cause a serious health risk. If you have a family history of breast cancer, your doctor may suggest an exam twice a year instead of just once.
As you age, your bones can weaken and begin to lose density. This is why it’s important you take a bone density test as you grow older. These tests are usually recommended for men and women who are over sixty, but if you’re at a higher risk, it may be needed before that age.
One of the high risk factors is osteoporosis, a condition where bones become brittle. When you have osteoporosis, you’re more likely to fracture or break bones, making a bone density test even more important. With this condition, a fall when you’re older can be more serious.
For women, a pap smear may be just as important as a breast exam or mammogram. Women in their fifties and sixties are just as susceptible to cervical cancer as young women are.
Pap smears are recommended for women every two years regardless of whether or not you’re sexually active. These screenings aren’t just for cancer – they can also help your doctor check for irregular bleeding or other problems.
One of the most important tests, a cholesterol screening, should not be omitted from a physical checkup. Men are more prone to high cholesterol, but studies show that women over the age of fifty tend to develop high cholesterol over the years. High cholesterol is one of the leading causes of heart attacks and strokes. As you grow older, make sure your cholesterol levels are checked periodically.
How Saunas Help Your Body Detox
How Saunas Help Your Body Detox
Although most people really don’t like it, sweating is actually good for your body. But thanks to the ultra convenient lifestyles of today, sweating isn’t something that a lot of people do.
We go from air conditioned homes to air conditioned vehicles to air conditioned offices and shopping places. But this lack of sweating can cause your body to keep toxins trapped inside.
Toxins enter the body one of two ways – either through the mouth or through the skin. When you sweat, your body gets out the toxins and can prevent a build up. Sweating opens up your pores to get out the toxins.
Not only do you feel better and look better, but your skin will also look younger and healthier. While normal sweating can help, it can’t really do the level of detox like a sauna can.
That’s because using a sauna causes you to sweat a lot more than you normally would. If you could check what your sweat contains, you’d see that it was made up of toxins – including airborne ones like pesticides that are sprayed in homes and on plants.
In a sauna, your body also works to release toxins that have been stored in the tissues. It basically forces them loose and then eliminates them. Studies have shown that saunas are effective in detoxification based on the amount of sweat your body will produce in the higher temperature.
Your body will get rid of toxins like uric acid, which is a waste product. And it’s a toxin. If uric acid builds up in the body, it can lead to things like kidney problems. Not only can saunas help your body detoxify from uric acid, but also from toxins from metals, chemicals, household cleaners, and from the medication that you take or put on your skin.
When you use a sauna, your heart rate goes higher – and this is a good thing. That faster heart rate is what will give you a better blood flow. The increase in blood flow will then turn around and help you get the toxins out of your body faster.
Not only that, but there’s a correlation between the temperature of the sauna and the benefit it gives your immune system. When you get a fever, it raises your body temperature to kill off whatever is making you sick.
In a sauna, the increased temperature helps your body fight things that can make you sick. It used to be that if you wanted the detoxification benefit from using a sauna, you had to leave your house to go to one.
But today, you can buy a sauna that you can use right in the comfort of your own home – and they’re affordable. You can find both steam and dry heat saunas for home use.
Top 5 Diets for People with High Blood Pressure
Top 5 Diets for People with High Blood Pressure
Eating healthy can be a good way to bring down high blood pressure numbers. There are many eating plans that you can follow, but some of them are targeted toward people who have high blood pressure.
While others aren’t targeted toward people with high blood pressure, these diets are structured in a way that makes them better at lowering blood pressure levels. One of these diets is the DASH diet, which stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension.
This diet works by factoring in the gender and age of the person following the diet. It also targets what a dieter should eat by how much exercise they do or don’t do.
Using criteria to match the caloric intake with the user, the DASH diet will propose a specific eating plan. This eating plan contains nutritious and healthy meals chosen from the food pyramid.
The diet is easy to follow because it does a lot of the prep work for you. It plans out the first few days for you to get you started and it includes helpful recipes and teaches users how many servings of each type of food he or she should eat.
The TLC diet stands for Therapeutic Lifestyle Change. This is a diet that focuses on changing what you currently eat to make healthier meals. It concentrates on limiting the kinds of fats that can contribute to heart disease.
Success with this diet is found by eating according to your gender and current weight. It guides users toward healthier food choices by limiting processed foods. It’s a good diet because it lowers your cholesterol, which is often raised in people with high blood pressure. Plus, it helps you lose weight – which also works to lower your blood pressure if you’re overweight.
Another healthy diet for people with high blood pressure that helps lower the levels is the Mediterranean Diet. On this eating plan, you’ll eat plenty of fruits, vegetables and grains.
You can eat fish and poultry, but will have to cut back on the amount of red meat that you eat. This diet is healthy for people with high blood pressure because it replaces the use of salt with spices and flavorful herbs.
Weight Watchers is a diet that focuses on the overall body. It emphasizes keeping your weight at a healthy level. Losing extra weight can often bring the numbers of your blood pressure readings under control.
Healthy eating by consuming fruits, vegetables, grains, plenty of fiber rich foods and lean meats is how the Weight Watchers diet helps. It offers low sodium meal planning and teaches the importance of exercise and cutting out bad habits that are linked to high blood pressure.
Finally, following a vegetarian diet can lower your blood pressure. Eating a plant based diet can lower cholesterol levels as well. Since there’s very little saturated fat in a vegetarian diet, it’s also good for your heart health.
The focus of this diet is on healthy eating with plenty of high fiber. If you don’t think that you can give up meat, you can choose the flexitarian way and choose a vegetarian eating lifestyle with occasional servings of meat.
What Causes High Blood Pressure?
What Causes High Blood Pressure?
Anyone can develop high blood pressure – even someone in his or her early twenties isn’t immune to this condition. That’s because high blood pressure can be caused by a number of different things.
Some things are within a person’s control and some aren’t when it comes to having high blood pressure. Genetics is one of the reasons high blood pressure can develop – and the one thing you can’t do anything about.
The genes that were passed down to you will determine what health issues you’ll have to deal with. Your family history is what will decide if you’ll have high blood pressure or not.
If your parents had it, then you’ll more than likely have it as well. Some diseases that can run in families can contribute to causing high blood pressure and these are said to be secondary hypertension.
That means that you have high blood pressure as a direct result of some other health problem. For example, someone who has kidney disease can, in turn, have high blood pressure as a result of that kidney disease.
Other diseases can also cause high blood pressure. If you have adrenal problems, that can cause elevated readings and so can thyroid diseases. Sometimes, a cyst that grows on a gland like the adrenals or the thyroid can lead to high blood pressure.
Removing the growth will sometimes stabilize the blood pressure within normal range, but not always. Many causes of high blood pressure are related to how a person lives his or her life.
People who are overweight, even if they’re not technically obese, can have blood pressure levels that are in the hypertension range. People who develop high blood pressure as a result of being overweight often find that their levels return to the normal range if they lose the weight.
This is because the heart no longer has to work as hard to pump the blood. Sometimes people who are not overweight will be diagnosed with high blood pressure because of their lifestyle choices.
Eating a poor diet that’s high in saturated fat and sodium is linked to high blood pressure. Drinking too much and smoking are both habits that have also been linked to causing high blood pressure.
Having too much stress in your life can give you high blood pressure. This is because when you’re under stress, your body feels the onslaught of a constant state of “fight or flight” hormone that your adrenals produce.
This will constrict the blood vessels. Chronic stress can cause your adrenals to consistently release the hormones that keep your blood pressure raised. Your age can also play a role in what your blood pressure readings are.
As you get older, your blood vessels undergo changes. Your body has baroreceptors that can tell what the blood pressure is. When it’s not normal, these baroreceptors send messages that help to regulate the pressure. As you get older, these baroreceptors aren’t as quick to pick up the changes in pressure.
Here’s a great video that explains it all