Posts filed under ‘Your Health’
Sodium: Are you getting too Much?
You’ve been trying to eat less sodium — just a pinch of table salt on your baked potato and a dash to your scrambled eggs.
But a pinch and a dash can quickly add up to unhealthy levels of sodium, especially when many foods already contain more than enough sodium. About 11 percent of the sodium in the average U.S. diet comes from adding salt or other sodium-containing condiments to foods while cooking or eating. But the majority of the sodium — 77 percent — comes from eating prepared or processed foods that contain the mineral. So even though you may limit the amount of salt you add to food, the food itself may already be high in sodium.
Are you getting too much? Here’s where sodium sneaks into your diet and ways you can shake the habit.
Sodium: Essential in small amounts
Your body needs some sodium to function properly. Sodium:
- Helps maintain the right balance of fluids in your body
- Helps transmit nerve impulses
- Influences the contraction and relaxation of muscles
Your kidneys regulate the amount of sodium kept in your body. When sodium levels are low, your kidneys conserve sodium. When levels are high, they excrete the excess amount in urine.
If your kidneys can’t eliminate enough sodium, the sodium starts to accumulate in your blood. Because sodium attracts and holds water, your blood volume increases. Increased blood volume, in turn, makes your heart work harder to move more blood through your blood vessels, increasing pressure in your arteries. Certain diseases such as congestive heart failure, cirrhosis and chronic kidney disease can lead to an inability to regulate sodium.
Some people are more sensitive to the effects of sodium than are others. People who are sodium sensitive retain sodium more easily, leading to excess fluid retention and increased blood pressure. If you’re in that group, extra sodium in your diet increases your chance of developing high blood pressure, a condition that can lead to cardiovascular and kidney diseases.
How much sodium do you need?
Various organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, have published recommendations on daily sodium limits. Most recommend not exceeding the range of 1,500 and 2,400 milligrams (mg) a day for healthy adults. Keep in mind that the lower your sodium, the more beneficial effect on blood pressure.
If you are older than 50, are black or have a health condition such as high blood pressure, chronic kidney disease or diabetes, you may be more sensitive to the blood pressure raising effects of sodium. As a result, aim for a sodium limit at the low end of the range recommended for healthy adults. Talk to your doctor about the sodium limit that’s best for you.
Three main sources of sodium
The average U.S. diet has three main sources of sodium:
- Processed and prepared foods. Most sodium in a person’s diet comes from eating processed and prepared foods, such as canned vegetables, soups, luncheon meats and frozen foods. Food manufacturers use salt or other sodium-containing compounds to preserve food and to improve the taste and texture of food.
- Sodium-containing condiments. One teaspoon (5 milliliters) of table salt has 2,325 mg of sodium, and 1 tablespoon (15 milliliters) of soy sauce has about 900 to 1,000 mg of sodium. Adding these or other sodium-laden condiments to your meals — either while cooking or at the table — raises the sodium count of food.
- Natural sources of sodium. Sodium naturally occurs in some foods, such as meat, poultry, dairy products and vegetables. For example, 1 cup (237 milliliters) of low-fat milk has about 107 mg of sodium.
Be a savvy shopper: Find the sodium
Taste alone may not tell you which foods are high in sodium. For example, you may not think a bagel tastes salty, but a 4-inch (10-centimeter) oat-bran bagel has 451 mg of sodium.
So how do you identify foods high in sodium? The best way to determine sodium content is to read food labels. The Nutrition Facts label tells you how much sodium is in each serving. It also lists whether salt or sodium-containing compounds are ingredients. Examples of these compounds include:
- Monosodium glutamate (MSG)
- Baking soda
- Baking powder
- Disodium phosphate
- Sodium alginate
- Sodium nitrate or nitrite
How to cut sodium
You may or may not be particularly sensitive to the effects of sodium. And because there’s no way to know who might develop high blood pressure as a result of a high-sodium diet, choose and prepare foods with less sodium.
You can cut sodium several ways:
- Eat more fresh foods and fewer processed foods. Most fresh fruits and vegetables are naturally low in sodium. Also, fresh meat is lower in sodium than luncheon meat, bacon, hot dogs, sausage and ham are. Buy fresh and frozen poultry or meat that hasn’t been injected with a sodium-containing solution. Look on the label or ask your butcher.
- Opt for low-sodium products. If you do buy processed foods, select those that have reduced sodium.
- Remove salt from recipes whenever possible. You can leave out the salt in many recipes, including casseroles, stews and other main dishes. Baked goods are an exception. Leaving out the salt could affect the quality as well as the taste of the food.
- Limit your use of sodium-laden condiments. Salad dressings, sauces, dips, ketchup, mustard and relish all contain sodium.
- Use herbs, spices and other flavorings to enhance foods. Learn how to use fresh or dried herbs, spices, zest from citrus fruit, and fruit juices to jazz up your meals.
- Use salt substitutes wisely. Some salt substitutes or light salts contain a mixture of table salt (sodium chloride) and other compounds. To achieve that familiar salty taste, you may use too much of the substitute and actually not use less sodium. In addition, many salt substitutes contain potassium chloride. Though dietary potassium can lessen some of the harm of excess sodium, too much supplemental potassium can be harmful if you have kidney problems or if you’re taking medications for congestive heart failure or high blood pressure that cause potassium retention.
Your taste for salt is acquired, so it’s reversible. To unlearn this salty savoring, decrease your use of salt gradually and your taste buds will adjust. Most people find that after a few weeks of cutting salt, they no longer miss it. Start by using no more than 1/4 teaspoon (1 milliliter) of added salt daily, and then gradually reduce to no salt add-ons. As you use less salt, your preference for it lessens, allowing you to enjoy the taste of food itself.
Source Mayoclinic.com
With AIDS, Time to Get Beyond Blame
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. 
You don’t hear much about AIDS in America anymore. The few new headlines are reserved for dispatches from the developing world, where the dying young still make good old-fashioned heart-wrenching copy.
But AIDS endures right here in the U.S.A.: our outpatient clinics are bursting at the seams, and new cases show up daily. A million domestic stories are languishing untold, but they are not the operatic tragedies we have grown used to.
Instead, as illustrated by last week’s report about a Florida athlete indicted on charges of willfully transmitting H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, these are nuanced and complicated fables, with morals that extend beyond the disease itself.
The athlete, Darren Chiacchia, a bronze-medal Olympic equestrian, was charged a few months ago with what is a first-degree felony in Florida: repeatedly exposing a sexual partner to H.I.V. Mr. Chiacchia first tested positive for the virus in 2008, and his partner reportedly tested negative when their relationship began in early 2009.
The relationship ended in rancor six months later, and the partner filed a complaint with the sheriff, claiming that Mr. Chiacchia never disclosed his infection — that the partner found out only by discovering medical papers confirming it. It is not known whether the partner did in fact contract H.I.V. during that time. Mr. Chiacchia’s trial begins in June.
Most states enacted punitive legislation back in the hysterical old days of AIDS, a period lasting roughly from 1981, when the first reports of the syndrome were published, to 1996, when combination drug “cocktails” proved remarkably effective against H.I.V. Back then, transmitting the disease to an unknowing sexual partner was considered tantamount to murder.
These statutes are still on the books, but the science behind them has changed radically. People do still die of AIDS in the United States — the death rate, after plummeting in the late 1990s, has remained constant at about 16,000 per year. But for a person infected in 2009 to die of AIDS in the future would probably require a substantial amount of bad judgment or bad luck: the medications, if properly prescribed and properly taken, appear almost infallible.
Were it a matter of science alone, all those AIDS statutes could be rescinded tomorrow. But the science was only a small part of the panic that created them. And effective treatment has not altered the rest of that potent emotional brew: the virus still sows terror, uncertainty, shame and endless complications, whether the infection is concealed or revealed.
All of us, no matter how learned, carry an eternally primitive creature in our brains. It is a small homunculus who will always react to illness — any illness — with anger, disbelief and a search for blame. Centuries ago we burned witches and torched infidels for poisoning our wells; diseases were the fault of our enemies (in the 15th century, syphilis was simultaneously the Italian disease in France and the French disease in Italy).
Now we think we know better, but do we really? We blame that coughing woman in the subway for our cold, the giant meat company for our food poisoning, all manner of chemicals and electromagnetic radiation for our cancers, and fast-food outlets for our diabetes and heart disease. We cannot experience illness without casting around for blame.
Yet at the same time we believe deeply in prevention. Surely if we watch our diets and get our mammograms and colonoscopies, wash our hands, take whatever vitamin is foremost in the news and eat our burgers well done, we can avert bad things. Whole generations have now grown up knowing that sensible people “play safe,” with the overriding implication that if you catch a sexually transmitted disease, you have no one to blame but yourself.
And so whose fault is a new H.I.V. infection, really? Is it mine, for giving it to you, or is it yours, for being stupid and cavalier enough to get it?
The court will eventually sort out the Florida case, where despite the particulars the matter is probably less about infection than the old lover’s plaint “I trusted you; you betrayed me.”
But the larger questions endure, and I suspect those obsolete H.I.V. statutes will endure as well. AIDS is only one of hundreds of infections that can move from one person to another. Some travel through the air, like tuberculosis; some move by touch, like staph. The air we breathe and the hands we shake will never be safe, anymore than safe sex is entirely safe, and as long as we are fallible, litigious humans, some of us will head to court and cite hoary public-health law to satisfy that primitive little blame monster in our brains.
As for AIDS, though, the fact is that for most new infections, the language of culpability and blame simply no longer applies. As Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, the MacArthur “genius”-award-winning AIDS expert at Columbia University, wrote with colleagues in The New England Journal of Medicine last month, new H.I.V. infections are now increasingly concentrated in specific pockets in the United States. They move among the poorest of the poor, the disenfranchised and socially marginalized, where substandard education means no escape. In these places the prevalence of disease is so high (Washington, D.C., has rates as high as some African countries) that simply living brings risk of infection.
In other words, if you are a woman in some ZIP codes, falling in love and getting married, with no sexual partner but your husband, puts you at risk for H.I.V. We see these women in our clinics, more and more of them, but you won’t find them in court. Whom would they sue?
Dr. Abigail Zuger, an infectious-disease physician in Manhattan, writes the monthly Books column for the health pages.
Source: The New York Times
A version of this news analysis appeared in print on April 20, 2010, on page D6 of the New York edition
Is Marriage Good for Your Health?
By TARA PARKER-POPE 
In 1858, a British epidemiologist named William Farr set out to study what he called the “conjugal condition” of the people of France. He divided the adult population into three distinct categories: the “married,” consisting of husbands and wives; the “celibate,” defined as the bachelors and spinsters who had never married; and finally the “widowed,” those who had experienced the death of a spouse. Using birth, death and marriage records, Farr analyzed the relative mortality rates of the three groups at various ages. The work, a groundbreaking study that helped establish the field of medical statistics, showed that the unmarried died from disease “in undue proportion” to their married counterparts. And the widowed, Farr found, fared worst of all.
Farr’s was among the first scholarly works to suggest that there is a health advantage to marriage and to identify marital loss as a significant risk factor for poor health. Married people, the data seemed to show, lived longer, healthier lives. “Marriage is a healthy estate,” Farr concluded. “The single individual is more likely to be wrecked on his voyage than the lives joined together in matrimony.”
While Farr’s own study is no longer relevant to the social realities of today’s world — his three categories exclude couples living together, gay couples and the divorced, for instance — his overarching finding about the health benefits of marriage seems to have stood the test of time. Critics, of course, have rightly cautioned about the risk of conflating correlation with causation. (Better health among the married sometimes simply reflects the fact that healthy people are more likely to get married in the first place.) But in the 150 years since Farr’s work, scientists have continued to document the “marriage advantage”: the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people.
Contemporary studies, for instance, have shown that married people are less likely to get pneumonia, have surgery, develop cancer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being married or cohabiting at midlife is associated with a lower risk for dementia. A study of two dozen causes of death in the Netherlands found that in virtually every category, ranging from violent deaths like homicide and car accidents to certain forms of cancer, the unmarried were at far higher risk than the married. For many years, studies like these have influenced both politics and policy, fueling national marriage-promotion efforts, like the Healthy Marriage Initiative of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 2006 to 2010, the program received $150 million annually to spend on projects like “divorce reduction” efforts and often cited the health benefits of marrying and staying married.
But while it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage. Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all. One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single people have poorer health than those who marry, a major study released last year concluded that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced.
All of which suggests that while Farr’s exploration into the conjugal condition pointed us in the right direction, it exaggerated the importance of the institution of marriage and underestimated the quality and character of the marriage itself. The mere fact of being married, it seems, isn’t enough to protect your health. Even the Healthy Marriage Initiative makes the distinction between “healthy” and “unhealthy” relationships when discussing the benefits of marriage. “When we divide good marriages from bad ones,” says the marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, who is also the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, “we learn that it is the relationship, not the institution, that is key.”
Some of today’s most interesting research on the relationship between marriage and health is being led by a pair of researchers at Ohio State University College of Medicine. The duo, Ronald Glaser and Jan Kiecolt-Glaser, are also, fittingly, married to each other.
Glaser and Kiecolt-Glaser’s scholarly collaboration has its roots in a chance encounter during a faculty picnic in October 1978 on the Ohio State campus. Glaser, who is a viral immunologist, spotted an attractive woman standing with members of the psychiatry faculty. Although their eyes met only briefly, he caught a glimpse of her name tag. Intrigued, he tried to track her down, calling the psychiatry department chairman to ask if he knew a petite blonde on staff with a name like “Pam Kiscoli.” The department chairman figured out that Glaser was talking about a new assistant professor named Jan Kiecolt. Glaser and Kiecolt eventually met for lunch at the university’s hospital cafeteria. They married a year later, in January 1980.
The coupling resulted in more than romance. The two scientists were fascinated by each other’s work, which they often discussed over meals or while jogging together. Glaser suggested that they collaborate professionally, but finding common ground was a challenge: he studied virology and immunology; she was a clinical psychologist who focused on assertiveness and other behavior. In the early 1980s, however, Kiecolt-Glaser came across a book on the emerging field of psychoneuroimmunology, which concerns the interplay between behavior, the immune and endocrine systems and the brain and nervous system. The couple were intrigued by a science that lay at the intersection of their disciplines. Today, the two disagree on exactly how their professional collaboration began. “He says I started it,” Kiecolt-Glaser told me. “But I say he started it.”
In their first research collaboration, they sought to measure the effect of psychological stress on the immune system. Although earlier studies had established that trauma and other major stress — like the death of a loved one or prolonged sleep deprivation — weakened the immune system, the Glasers wanted to know if lesser forms of stress, like those associated with the workplace or graduate school, had a similar effect.
The Glasers, who worked at Ohio’s State’s medical school, had ready access to an ample supply of stressed-out students, and so they decided to study the toll exacted by school pressure. They took blood samples from a set of students early in the semester and then did so again in the middle of final exams. The Glasers discovered that the stress of examination time seemed to cause a significant weakening of the students’ immune response: by examination time, the medical students showed a significant drop in so-called natural killer cells, a type of white blood cell that battles viruses and helps prevent cancer.
For their second collaboration, the Glasers turned their attention to domestic strife. They wondered about the role that relationships play in health and about the effects of marital stress, which, like school pressure, can be a source of nontraumatic but chronic strain. In what was to be the first of their many studies on marriage and health, the Glasers recruited 76 women, half of whom were married; the other half were separated or had divorced. The Glasers wanted to identify which married women were in troubled relationships as well as which of the women who were separated or divorced from their husbands were emotionally struggling the most. They did this by using marital-quality scales, types of questionnaires that ask couples to indicate agreement or disagreement with statements like “If I had to do it over again, I would marry the same person” or “We often do things together.” Next, using blood tests, the Glasers measured the women’s immune-system responses, tracking their levels of antibody production and other indicators of immunity strength. The results showed that the women in unhappy relationships and the women who remained emotionally hung up on their ex-husbands had decidedly weaker immune responses than the women who were in happier relationships (or were happily out of them).
Though pleased with this study, the Glasers knew that they had succeeded in taking the measure of marital happiness and health only at a single moment. The couple were also curious to study the effect of marital stress as it unfolded in real time. What happens to the body minute by minute, hour by hour, when couples engage in hostile marital disputes? To find this out, they recruited a study group of 90 seemingly happy newlywed couples. Each couple was hooked up to tubes so that blood samples could be drawn from the pair at regular intervals, and the husband and wife were seated face to face. Obscured by a curtain, the researchers watched the couples on video monitors; nurses took the blood samples. The participants, as they had been prompted to do, discussed their most volatile topics of marital conflict, like housework, sex or interference from a mother-in-law. “You wouldn’t think in a study situation that they would tear into each other,” Glaser, who is now the director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, told me. “But they get into it.” As expected, the couples who exhibited the most negative and hostile behavior during the conflict discussion showed the largest declines in immune-system function during the 24-hour study period.
These data strongly suggested that marital stress could affect the body in striking ways, but the Glaser team had yet to prove that marital conflict had any truly meaningful or lasting effect on health. Kiecolt-Glaser had an idea for another study that would meet this higher standard. She had read about a strange tool used by her dermatology colleagues: a small plastic suction device designed to leave eight tiny blisters on the arm and allow monitoring of the immune-system response at the wound sites. Kiecolt-Glaser’s proposal was to use this blistering device to measure how quickly or slowly physical wounds healed among married couples who had undergone different levels of marital stress.
The experiment had two phases. Each married couple, after their forearms were subjected to the blistering procedure, were asked to talk together for a half-hour: on one occasion they discussed topics chosen to elicit the couples’ supportive behaviors; on another day, after undergoing the blistering procedures again, they discussed topics selected to evoke conflict and tension and tried to resolve them. Before subjecting others to the blistering regimen, each of the Glasers had the device secured to his or her respective forearm to have his or her skin blistered. The sensation is comparable to “someone gently pinching your arm,” Kiecolt-Glaser told me. Nonetheless, the Glasers knew it would be a tough sell to convince others couples to undergo the blistering procedure as well as two weeks of subsequent monitoring of the wounds as they healed. A study grant allowed them to offer $2,000 in total compensation to any couple willing to take part in the experiment. They managed to recruit 42 married couples for the study.
The results were remarkable. After the blistering sessions in which couples argued, their wounds took, on average, a full day longer to heal than after the sessions in which the couples discussed something pleasant. Among couples who exhibited especially high levels of hostility while bickering, the wounds took a full two days longer to heal than those of couples who had showed less animosity while fighting.
Published in 2005 in The Archives of General Psychiatry, the Glasers’ findings help explain epidemiological data showing that couples in troubled marriages appear to be more susceptible to illness than happier couples. The results may also have practical relevance for surgical patients, for instance, waiting for incisions to heal. But most important, the study offered compelling evidence that a hostile fight with your husband or wife isn’t just bad for your relationship. It can have a profound toll on your body.
Kiecolt-Glaser told me that the overall health lesson to take away from the new wave of marriage-and-health literature is that couples should first work to repair a troubled relationship and learn to fight without hostility and derision. But if staying married means living amid constant acrimony, from the point of view of your health, “you’re better off out of it,” she says.
Last year, The Journal of Health and Social Behavior published a study tracking the marital history and health of nearly 9,000 men and women in their 50s and 60s. The study, which grew out of work by researchers at the University of Chicago, found that when the married people became single again — either by divorce or because of the death of a spouse — they suffered a decline in physical health from which they never fully recovered. These men and women had 20 percent more chronic health issues, like heart disease and diabetes, than those who were still married to their first husband or wife by middle age. The divorced and widowed also had aged less gracefully, reporting more problems going up and down stairs or walking longer distances.
Perhaps the most striking finding concerned single people who had never married. For more than 100 years, scientists have speculated that single people, because they generally have fewer resources, lower income and perhaps less logistical and emotional support, have poorer health than the married. But in the Chicago study, people who had divorced or been widowed had worse health problems than men and women who had been single their entire lives. In formerly married individuals, it was as if the marriage advantage had never existed.
Does marrying again benefit those who divorce, in terms of health? In the Chicago study, remarriage helped only a little. It seemed to heal emotional wounds: the remarried had about the same risk for depression as the continuously married. But a second marriage didn’t seem to be enough to repair the physical damage associated with marital loss. Compared with the continuously married, people in second marriages still had 12 percent more chronic health problems and 19 percent more mobility problems. “I don’t think anyone would encourage people to stay in a marriage that is really making them miserable,” says Linda J. Waite, a University of Chicago sociologist and an author of the study. “But try harder to make it better.” Even if marital problems seem small, Waite says, the data suggest it’s wise to intervene early and try to resolve them. “If you learn to how to manage disagreement early,” she says, “then you can avoid the decline in marital happiness that follows from the drip, drip of negative interactions.”
Other researchers have also studied how the “drip, drip” of negativity can erode not only a marriage itself but also a couple’s physical health. A number of epidemiological studies suggest that unhappily married couples are at higher risk for heart attacks and cardiovascular disease than happily married couples. In 2000, The Journal of the American Medical Association published a three-year Swedish study of 300 women who had been hospitalized with severe chest pains or a heart attack; the study found that those who reported the highest levels of marital stress were nearly three times as likely to suffer another heart attack or require a bypass or other procedure. It is notable that these increased risks weren’t associated with other forms of stress. For instance, women who were stressed-out at work weren’t at any higher risk for a second episode of heart problems than women who were happy in their jobs.
Of course, all couples — happy or unhappy — are bound to experience some form of marital conflict. Surely this does not mean everyone is doomed to ill health; some conflicts are better than others. The University of Utah psychology professor Timothy W. Smith has addressed this question, studying how what he calls the “emotional tone” of conflict affects heart risk. In one study, he recruited 150 couples, most of whom were in their 60s and married for an average of 36 years. All were in general good health with no signs of heart disease. Smith collected video recordings of the couples discussing stressful topics like money management or housework. The arguments were then “coded” to indicate the number of warm, hostile and controlling statements and words that were used in the course of the dispute. In addition, the couples were put in heart-scanning machines to measure coronary calcium levels, which are a useful indicator of heart-disease risk. Smith then compared each person’s conflict style with their coronary calcium score.
Smith’s results suggest that there are important differences between men and women when it comes to health and the style of conflict that can jeopardize it. The women in his study who were at highest risk for signs of heart disease were those whose marital battles lacked any signs of warmth, not even a stray term of endearment during a hostile discussion (“Honey, you’re driving me crazy!”) or a minor pat on the back or squeeze of the hand, all of which can signal affection in the midst of anger. “Most of the literature assumes that it’s how bad the arguments get that drives the effect, but it’s actually the lack of affection that does it,” Smith told me. “It wasn’t how much nasty talk there was. It was the lack of warmth that predicted risk.”
For men, on the other hand, hostile and negative marital battles seemed to have no effect on heart risk. Men were at risk for a higher coronary calcium score, however, when their marital spats turned into battles for control. It didn’t matter whether it was the husband or wife who was trying to gain control of the matter; it was merely any appearance of controlling language that put men on the path of heart disease.
In both cases, the emotional tone of a marital fight turned out to be just as predictive of poor heart health as whether the individual smoked or had high cholesterol. It is worth noting that the couples in Smith’s study were all relatively happy. These were husbands and wives who loved each other. Yet many of them had developed styles of conflict that took a physical toll on each other. The solution, Smith noted, isn’t to stop fighting. It’s to fight more thoughtfully. “Difficulties in marriage seem to be nearly universal,” he said. “Just try not to let fights be any nastier than they need to be.”
Researchers have also started to examine the salutary health effects of social relationships, including those of a good marriage. In one recent study, James A. Coan, an assistant professor of psychology and a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, recruited 16 women who scored relatively high on a questionnaire assessing marital happiness. He placed each woman in three different situations while monitoring her brain with an f.M.R.I. machine, which offers a way to observe the brain’s response to almost any kind of emotional stimulation. In one situation, to simulate stress, he subjected the woman to a mild electric shock. In a second, the shock was administered, but the woman held the hand of a stranger; in a third, the hand of her husband.
Both instances of hand-holding reduced the neural activity in areas of the woman’s brain associated with stress. But when the woman was holding her husband’s hand, the effect was even greater, and it was particularly pronounced in women who had the highest marital-happiness scores. Holding a husband’s hand during the electric shock resulted in a calming of the brain regions associated with pain similar to the effect brought about by use of a pain-relieving drug.
Coan says the study simulates how a supportive marriage and partnership gives the brain the opportunity to outsource some of its most difficult neural work. “When someone holds your hand in a study or just shows that they are there for you by giving you a back rub, when you’re in their presence, that becomes a cue that you don’t have to regulate your negative emotion,” he told me. “The other person is essentially regulating your negative emotion but without your prefrontal cortex. It’s much less wear and tear on us if we have someone there to help regulate us.”
With so much evidence establishing a link between marital stress and health, a new generation of research is set to explore the ways in which couples can mitigate the damaging effects of relationship stress. The Glasers are now conducting studies testing whether regular supplements of fish oil, rich in omega-3 fatty acids, can mitigate some of the physical symptoms of stress on the immune system.
The couple are also embarking on a new study looking at the interplay between nutrition and marital stress. Earlier research at Ohio State showed that when study subjects were given intravenous fat injections during times of stress, it took longer for triglycerides, fats that are associated with heart disease, to leave the bloodstream. But Kiecolt-Glaser is more interested in the real-world equivalent of the study: What happens to the body’s ability to cope with fats when couples fight at dinnertime? To find out, she’s planning to feed married couples two types of meals — one relatively healthful meal and one high-fat meal equivalent to fast food. During the meal the couples will be asked to discuss topics of high stress, and a blood analysis will offer a glimpse of the effect that mealtime conflict has on the body’s ability to metabolize fats. “It’s an ideal way,” Kiecolt-Glaser says, “to look at what happens to couples in the real world, where so many family conflicts happen over a meal.”
For the Glasers, their nearly 30 years of professional collaboration have not only given them new insights into the role of stress and health but have also helped them in their own marriage. Like every married couple, they have their disagreements, Glaser told me. But years of watching married couples interact and measuring the subsequent physical toll that conflict takes on their bodies has taught the Glasers the importance of taking time off together and making sure their disagreements don’t degenerate into personal attacks. “Don’t fight dirty,” he advised. “You never go far enough down the road where you hurt each other. We know enough to avoid those kinds of arguments.”
Kiecolt-Glaser added that the couple’s research shows that some level of relationship stress is inevitable in even the happiest marriages. The important thing, she said, is to use those moments of stress as an opportunity to repair the relationship rather than to damage it. “It can be so uncomfortable, even in the best marriages, to have an ongoing disagreement,” she said. “It’s the pit-in-your-stomach kind of thing. But when your marital relationship is the key relationship in your life, a disagreement is really a signal to try to fix something.”
Tara Parker-Pope is the Well columnist for The New York Times and the author of “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage,” to be published next month.
Step By Step, Ethiopia Pushes Back Unsafe Abortion
By Susheela Singh and Tamara Fetters
This article is based on a report jointly authored by Ipas and the Guttmacher Institute.
If you live in Addis Ababa or in another Ethiopian city and seek a safe abortion, you’re likely to find it. But if you’re like the majority of Ethiopian women and live in a rural area, safe abortion services are hard to find. Four years after the abortion law was liberalized and the health system set to work to implement the new guidelines, only a quarter of all abortions in the country are induced in safe and legal settings.
This week, Ipas and the Guttmacher Institute, in collaboration with Ethiopian Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Ethiopian Public Health Association and Ethiopia’s Federal Ministry of Health, released the results of the first-ever nationwide assessment of abortion in Ethiopia — showing that while the country has made significant inroads in making safe abortion services available, increased access to high-quality contraception and safe abortion services is needed, as well as treatment of complications of unsafe abortion.
The demand for abortion in this poor and predominantly rural country is rooted in low contraceptive use and high levels of unintended pregnancy. Indeed, only 14 percent of Ethiopian women of reproductive age use contraception and more than 40 percent of pregnancies are unintended. It is no wonder then that hundreds of thousands of women seek abortions every year, often with tragic consequences. It is with this in mind that the government moved to make legal safe abortion more accessible. But training providers and educating communities in such a large country takes time.
As in many countries (including the United States), the majority of women who seek abortions are mothers. But when safe abortion services are limited or nonexistent, women will turn to unsafe procedures to end an unwanted pregnancy. Any complications that may arise will affect not only these women but their children as well. Their families pay a tremendous price—one that could be prevented through expansion of comprehensive reproductive health care, including high quality contraceptive services and safe abortion care, throughout the country.
Our study found that in 2008, more than 50,000 women were treated for complications from unsafe abortion procedures. Forty percent of these women showed signs of infection or invasive injuries when they arrived at health facilities for treatment. Many other women never reach a facility because they live too far from services, because fear and stigma prevent them from seeking help or because they die before reaching the facility.
And sadly, many women just don’t know they can seek safe abortion under the new law. While the Ethiopian Ministry of Health and organizations like Ipas are working with women’s groups around the country to educate communities, it takes time to reach women in such a vast rural country. Similarly, health-care facilities outside of urban areas are less likely to be equipped to offer services.
Though it is clear more work must be done to expand services, major findings from this national study do point to positive trends. Substantial progress has been made in providing legal, safe abortion services in the short time since legal reform. Forty-three percent of all health facilities provided safe abortion services in 2008, with higher proportions in public hospitals and private or nongovernmental facilities than public health clinics, accounting for just over a quarter of the roughly 383,000 abortions in Ethiopia in 2008. The remaining procedures were unsafe—that is, performed outside of authorized facilities by untrained or unskilled providers in an unhygienic environment.
The reformed law and new guidelines have certainly resulted in more doctors and midwives being trained to provide abortion care, which has facilitated expansion of safe abortion services throughout the country. To build on this progress, the Ethiopian government must increase the availability of abortion and postabortion care in government hospitals and health centers. Providers and women alike must be educated about the new law. The introduction of medication abortion could also greatly expand access, particularly in rural areas, because it requires less health system resources and provider training. Finally, expansion of contraceptive services is crucial if unintended pregnancy and abortion-related mortality and morbidity are to be reduced. When used effectively, modern contraception can prevent nearly all unintended pregnancies. But for it to work, women must have access to quality services and to methods that suit their lives and they must be able to consistently get these methods.
How Do I Start Barefoot Running?
This guide will help you transition to barefoot running. This plan is universal; it is designed to be used by either novice runners or runners with years of experience. If you are a novice runner, simply begin the program as written. If you are currently training, you may continue your current mileage. Simply add the workouts in this program to your current running schedule. The idea is to replace some of your “shod’ mileage with the barefoot mileage. Some people have done this by simply adding the barefoot mileage at the beginning or end of their already-scheduled runs. I would recommend doing this at the beginning of a run so you will not be as fatigued. Once you reach Stage 5, you may decide to continue replacing barefoot mileage with your shod mileage until your running is completely barefoot, or you may decide to continue both shod and barefoot running. Both options should help reduce injuries.
Form
Form may vary greatly. There is no one “right” method. However, there are some general guidelines that seem to be fairly universal among barefoot runners. The most important is the way the foot impacts the ground. When wearing modern running shoes, most runners use a heel strike. The heel of their foot is the first thing that strikes the ground, and they continue to roll their feet forward and inward. With barefoot running, the ideal is to use a midfoot strike by softly landing on the outside half of the foot and rolling inward. The rest of your foot will then gently touch the ground (see video). This foot-ground contact should occur directly under your body, not in front as many heel strikers are prone to doing. After your foot touches the ground, you will lift it straight up primarily using your quads. It is analogous to riding a bike with your feet clipped to the pedal and using your leg muscles to pull up on the pedal. Sometimes it is beneficial to imagine lifting your knees or hamstrings instead of your feet. If done properly, there should be no pushing off, thus no friction. This relaxed, loose lifting motion tends to force the development of the other elements of good form.
Some other points- your knees should be slightly bent throughout your stride. You should have a very slight forward lean that originates from the ankles. Do not lean forward at the waist. Your posture should be upright without a forward hunch. You do not want to lean forward from the waist. Your head should be up with your eyes focused on the running surface in front of you. Your entire body should be very relaxed. The following is an excellent description of proper posture from PeaceKaren, a contributor to the Runner’s World Barefoot Forum:
“What works for me is to not think about leaning at all. I either think about pushing myself forward from the hips using my gluteus muscles (like my hips are in a race with my feet and I want my hips to win) or imagine being pulled forward from the hips. I sometimes visualize a cord running parallel to the ground, attached at the center of my hips (just below the belly button) and at the other end connected to a winch on a tree or telephone pole or some object directly in front of me. Then I imagine that winch winding in the cord pulling me forward from that center hip position. This automatically pulls my hips under me, improving my posture and causing the lean to happen naturally.”
The cadence (how many times your foot touches the ground) should be around 180-200 per minute. To achieve this, shorter strides are required. The strides will typically be shorter than the strides of a shod runner as you are not extending your stride ahead of your body. Some people have found an MP3 player with a metronome track to be especially helpful in learning good cadence.
Pain and Injury
One of the dangers of beginning barefoot running is doing too much too soon. Your feet have likely spent most of their active life confined in shoes. Shoes weaken the bones, muscles, ligaments, and tendons of your feet. The skin on the soles of your feet will not be used to the sensory input of the ground. In order to prevent injuries, it is important to begin barefoot running cautiously. Barefoot running feels wonderful! The urge to do too much before your feet are ready is very powerful. As such, it is important to follow a conservative plan even if you feel great in the beginning. Going too fast may result in a myriad of injuries, including tendon and ligament damage, excessive blisters, stress fractures, and other over-use type injuries. If at any time you experience pain, STOP! Add a second day of rest, then try again. Continue until you are pain-free. Do not give in to the temptation to “run through the pain”. The soft-tissue injuries that can occur during the foot-strengthening process can set your progress back by weeks or even months. Give this process time and the rewards will be great!
Barefoot or Minimalist Shoes?
“Should I begin transitioning to barefoot running by wearing a minimalist shoe (Vibram Fivefingers KSOs
The Plan
Stage 1 (2 weeks)
Walk around barefoot as many places as possible. Do not start running yet. This will begin to condition your feet and soles for more active barefoot running. This stage could also include barefoot activities such as hiking.
Stage 2 (2 weeks)
Begin running in place barefoot. The idea is to learn how it feels to lightly touch the ground and pull your feet straight up without pushing off. This will also begin the process of preparing the bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments of your feet to barefoot running.
Stage 3 (4 weeks)
Find hard, smooth surface without debris. Examples include new asphalt, smooth sidewalks, or running tracks. Begin running 3 times per week with at least one rest day after each barefoot run. Limit distance to 1/8 to 1/4 mile depending on running experience. Increase distance by 1/8th mile each day. Pace should be VERY slow, the focus is on finding a form that works well for you. If you experience pain, take an extra day off. If you develop blisters, slow down or reevaluate form.
Stage 4 (4 weeks)
Begin adding different terrain, including softer surfaces and hills. This can include grass, dirt trail, sand, etc. A good strategy is to run a hard surface one day, then a soft surface the next. At this stage, you should be running approximately 1.5 miles barefoot. During this stage, continue adding 1/8th mile per run. Continue going slow, your focus is going to be perfecting your form. Again, if you experience blisters, slow down. If you feel pain, take a day off.
Stage 5 (No specific time frame)
By this point, you should be running about 3 miles per run. You may begin experimenting with slowly increasing your pace, increasing your distance, or adding technical trails or hills to your routine. Only add one element at a time. Do not increase distance by more than 10% per week or speed by more than 15 seconds per mile.
By Jason Robillard
Source: barefootjason.blogspot.com
AIDS: The great medical con, explained
HIV does NOT cause AIDS. HIV does not cause anything. A staggering statement given the hype and acceptance by the scientific establishment and, through them, the public that the HIV virus is the only cause of AIDS. HIV is a weak virus and does not dismantle the immune system. Nor is AIDS passed on sexually.
There are two main types of virus. Using the airplane analogy, you could call one of these virus strains a “pilot” virus. It can change the nature of a cell and steer it into disease. This usually happens very quickly after the virus takes hold. Then there is the “passenger” virus which lives off the cell, goes along for the ride, but never affects the cell to the extent that it causes disease.
HIV is a passenger virus!
So how on earth did it become the big boogy man virus of the world? The person who announced that HIV caused AIDS was an American, Doctor Robert Gallo. He has since been accused of professional misconduct, his test has been exposed as fraudulent, and two of his laboratory executives have been convicted of criminal offenses. Tens of millions of people are tested for HIV antibodies every year and Dr Gallo, who patented his “test”, gets a royalty for every one.
Luc Montagnier, Gallo’s partner in the HIV-causes-AIDS theory, has since admitted in 1989: “HIV is not capable of causing the destruction of the immune system which is seen in people with AIDS”. Nearly 500 scientists across the world agree with him. So does Dr Robert E Wilner, author of the book ‘The Deadly Deception. The Proof That Sex And HIV Absolutely Do Not Cause AIDS’.
Dr Wilner even injected himself with the HIV virus on a television chat show in Spain to support his claims. Other doctors and authors come to the same conclusions, among them Peter Duesberg PhD and John Yiamouyiannis PhD, in their book, ‘AIDS: The Good News Is That HIV Doesn’t Cause It. The Bad News Is “Recreational Drugs” And Medical Treatments Like AZT Do’. That’s a long title, but it sums up the situation. People are dying of AIDS because of the treatments used to “treat” AIDS! It works like this.
Now it is accepted by the establishment and the people that HIV causes AIDS, the system has built this myth into its whole diagnosis and “treatment”. You go to the doctor and you are told your HIV test was positive(positive only for the HIV antibodies, by the way, they don’t actually test for the virus itself). Because of the propaganda, many people already begin to die emotionally and mentally when they are told they are HIV positive. They have been conditioned to believe that death is inevitable.
The fear of death leads them to accept, often demand, the hyped-up “treatments” which are supposed to stop AIDS occurring. (They don’t.) The most famous is AZT, produced by the Wellcome organisation, owned, wait for it, by the Rockefellers, one of the key manipulating families in the New World Order.
AZT was developed as an anti-cancer drug to be used in chemotherapy, but it was found to be too toxic even for that! AZT’s effect in the “treatment” of cancer was to kill cells – simple as that – not just to kill cancer cells , but to kill cells, cancerous and healthy. The question, and this is accepted even by the medical establishment, was: would AZT kill the cancer cells before it had killed so many healthy cells that it killed the body? This is the drug used to “treat” HIV. What is its effect?
It destroys the immune system, so it is CAUSING AIDS. People are dying from the treatment, not the HIV. AIDS is simply the breakdown of the immune system, for which there are endless causes, none of them passed on through sex. That’s another con which has made a fortune for condom manufacturers and created enormous fear around the expression of our sexuality and the release and expansion of our creative force.
Many deaths incorrectly attributed to AIDS
What has happened since the Great AIDS Con is that now anyone who dies from a diminished immune system is said to have died of the all encompassing term, AIDS. It is even built into the diagnosis. If you are HIV positive and you die of tuberculosis, pneumonia, or 25 other unrelated diseases now connected by the con men to “AIDS”, you are diagnosed as dying of AIDS. If you are not HIV positive and you die of one of those diseases you are diagnosed as dying of that disease, not AIDS. This manipulates the figures every day to indicate that only HIV positives die of AIDS.
This is a lie.
Many people who die from AIDS are not HIV positive and the reason that the figures for AIDS deaths have not soared as predicted is that the overwhelming majority of people diagnosed HIV positive have never developed AIDS. Why?
Because HIV has nothing whatsoever to do with AIDS.
Anything that breaks down the immune system causes AIDS and that includes so-called recreational drugs. The vast majority of AIDS deaths in the United States involve homosexuals and this perpetuates the myth that it has something to do with sex. But homosexuals in the US are among the biggest users of drugs which genuine doctors have linked to AIDS. Prostitutes who take drugs often get AIDS, prostitutes who do not take drugs invariably do not get AIDS.
The rise in the AIDS figures in the United States corresponds perfectly with the increase in the use of drugs – most of which are made available to people on the streets by elements within the US Government, including Bill Clinton and George Bush. In Africa, the breakdown of the immune system, now known as AIDS, is caused by ill health – lack of good food, clean water and the general effects of poverty. Haemophiliacs do not die from HIV-infected blood, they die, as they did before the AIDS scam, from a quirk in their own immune system. Their immune system locks into foreign proteins in the infused blood and on rare occasions it can become confused during this process and attack itself. Their immune system, in effect, commits suicide. HIV is irrelevant to that.
Yet how many people today who have been diagnosed HIV positive are having their lives blighted by the fear that the symptoms of AIDS will start any moment?
AZT is the killer. There is not a single case of AZT reversing the symptoms of AIDS. How can it? It’s causing them, for goodness sake. The AIDS industry is now worth billions of pounds a year and makes an unimaginable fortune for the drug industry controlled by the Rockefellers and the rest of the Global Elite.
“We can be exposed to HIV many times without being … infected… Our immune system creates [antibodies] within a few weeks, if you have a good immune system.” - Quote from Dr Luc Montagnier, the Nobel prize-winning virologist credited with the co-discovery of HIV, as stated in the documentary film House of Numbers
This article is reprinted courtesy of David Icke from www.DavidIcke.com
Source: www.naturalnews.com
Know the Basics
What is HIV and how can I get it?
HIV – the human immunodeficiency virus – is a virus that kills your body’s “CD4 cells.” CD4 cells (also called T-helper cells) help your body fight off infection and disease. HIV can be passed from person to person if someone with HIV infection has sex with or shares drug injection needles with another person. It also can be passed from a mother to her baby when she is pregnant, when she delivers the baby, or if she breastfeeds her baby.
What is AIDS?
AIDS – the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome – is a disease you get when HIV destroys your body’s immune system. Normally, your immune system helps you fight off illness. When your immune system fails you can become very sick and can die.
What do I need to know about HIV?
The first cases of AIDS were identified in the United States in 1981, but AIDS most likely existed here and in other parts of the world for many years before that time. In 1984 scientists proved that HIV causes AIDS.Anyone can get HIV. The most important thing to know is how you can get the virus.You can get HIV:
- By having unprotected sex- sex without a condom- with someone who has HIV. The virus can be in an infected person’s blood, semen, or vaginal secretions and can enter your body through tiny cuts or sores in your skin, or in the lining of your vagina, penis, rectum, or mouth.
- By sharing a needle and syringe to inject drugs or sharing drug equipment used to prepare drugs for injection with someone who has HIV.
- From a blood transfusion or blood clotting factor that you got before 1985. (But today it is unlikely you could get infected that way because all blood in the United States has been tested for HIV since 1985.)
Babies born to women with HIV also can become infected during pregnancy, birth, or breast-feeding.You cannot get HIV:
- By working with or being around someone who has HIV.
- From sweat, spit, tears, clothes, drinking fountains, phones, toilet seats, or through everyday things like sharing a meal.
- From insect bites or stings.
- From donating blood.
- From a closed-mouth kiss (but there is a very small chance of getting it from open-mouthed or “French” kissing with an infected person because of possible blood contact).
How can I protect myself?
KNOW THE Basics
- Don’t share needles and syringes used to inject drugs, steroids, vitamins, or for tattooing or body piercing. Also, don’t share equipment (“works”) used to prepare drugs to be injected. Many people have been infected with HIV, hepatitis, and other germs this way. Germs from an infected person can stay in a needle and then be injected directly into the next person who uses the needle.
- The surest way to avoid transmission of sexually transmitted diseases is to abstain from sexual intercourse, or to be in a longterm mutually monogamous relationship with a partner who has been tested and you know is uninfected.
- For persons whose sexual behaviors place them at risk for STDs, correct and consistent use of the male latex condom can reduce the risk of STD transmission. However, no protective method is 100 percent effective, and condom use cannot guarantee absolute protection against any STD. The more sex partners you have, the greater your chances are of getting HIV or other diseases passed through sex.
- Condoms used with a lubricant are less likely to break. However, condoms with the spermicide nonoxynol-9 are not recommended for STD/HIV prevention. Condoms must be used correctly and consistently to be effective and protective. Incorrect use can lead to condom slippage or breakage, thus diminishing the protective effect. Inconsistent use, e.g., failure to use condoms with every act of intercourse, can result in STD transmission because transmission can occur with a single act of intercourse.
- Don’t share razors or toothbrushes because of they may have the blood of another person on them.
- If you are pregnant or think you might be soon, talk to a doctor or your local health department about being tested for HIV. If you share HIV, drug treatments are available to help you and they can reduce the chance of passing HIV to your baby.
How do I know if I have HIV or AIDS?
You might have HIV and still feel perfectly healthy. The only way to know for sure if you are infected or not is to be tested. Talk with a knowledgeable health care provider or counselor both before and after you are tested. You can go to your doctor or health department for testing. To find out where to go in your area for HIV counseling and testing, call your local health department or the CDC INFO, at 1-800-CDC-INFO (232-4636).
Your doctor or health care provider can give you a confidential HIV test. The information on your HIV test and test results are confidential, as is your other medical information. This means it can be shared only with people authorized to see your medical records. You can ask your doctor, health care provider, or HIV counselor at the place you are tested to explain who can obtain this information. For example, you may want to ask whether your insurance company could find out your HIV status if you make a claim for health insurance benefits or apply for life insurance or disability insurance.
CDC recommends that everyone know their HIV status. How often you should an HIV test depends on your circumstances. If you have never been tested for HIV, you should be tested. CDC recommends being tested at least once a year if you do things that can transmit HIV infection, such as:
- injecting drugs or steroids with used injection equipment
- having sex for money or drugs
- having sex with an HIV infected person
- having more than one sex partner since your HIV test
- having a sex partner who has had other sex partners since your last HIV test.
If you have been tested for HIV and the result is negative and you never do things that might transmit
In many states, you can be tested anonymously. These tests are usually given at special places known as anonymous testing sites. When you get an anonymous HIV test, the testing site records only a number or code with the test result, not your name. A counselor gives you this number at the time your blood, saliva, or urine is taken for the test, then you return to the testing site (or perhaps call the testing site, for example with home collection kits) and give them your number or code to learn the results of your test.
If you have been tested for HIV and the result is negative and you never do things that might transmit HIV infection, then you and your health care provider can decide whether you need to get tested again.
You are more likely to test positive for (be infected with) HIV if you
- Have ever shared injection drug needles and syringes or “works.”
- Have ever had sex without a condom with someone who had HIV.
- Have ever had a sexually transmitted disease, like chlamydia or gonorrhea.
- Received a blood transfusion or a blood clotting factor between 1978 and 1985.
- Have ever had sex with someone who has done any of those things
What can I do if the test shows I have HIV?
Although HIV is a very serious infection, many people with HIV and AIDS are living longer, healthier lives today, thanks to new and effective treatments. It is very important to make sure you have a doctor who knows how to treat HIV. If you don’t know which doctor to use, talk with a health care professional or trained HIV counselor. If you are pregnant or are planning to become pregnant, this is especially important.There also are other things you can do for yourself to stay healthy. Here are a few
- Follow your doctor’s instructions. Keep your appointments. Your doctor may prescribe medicine for you. Take the medicine just the way he or she tells you to because taking only some of your medicine gives your HIV infection more chance to grow.
- Get immunizations (shots) to prevent infections such as pneumonia and flu. Your doctor will tell you when to get these shots.
- If you smoke or if you use drugs not prescribed by your doctor, quit.
- Eat healthy foods. This will help keep you strong, keep your energy and weight up, and help your body protect itself.
- Exercise regularly to stay strong and fit.
- Get enough sleep and rest.
How can I find out more about HIV and AIDS?
You can call CDC-INFO at 1-800-CDC-INFO (232-4636); TTY access 1-888-232-6348. CDC-INFO is staffed with people trained to answer your questions about HIV and AIDS in a prompt and confidential manner in English or Spanish, 24 hours per day. Staff at CDC-INFO can offer you a wide variety of written materials and put you in touch with organizations in your area that deal with HIV and AIDS.On the Internet, you can get information on HIV and AIDS from www.AIDS.gov or www.cdc.gov/hiv.
Finding the best medical insurance plan
By Brian Stevens and Stacey Schifferdecke
Finding the best medical insurance plan is important for several reasons:
* You want to be able to get yourself and your family members medical care whenever you need it. People without health insurance are less likely to get preventive care and to let medical problems go until they become serious.
* You want to be protected from financial disaster if you or someone in your family has a major accident or develops a serious illness. Over 25% of bankruptcy filings are directly related to medical bills.
But what’s the best type of insurance for you? That depends on your needs, age, health status, and more.
Choosing an Insurance Plan
Multiple types of insurance plans are available for you to choose from:
* Traditional indemnity plans that let you choose your doctor and pay for most of your bills once you satisfy the deductible
* Managed care plans such as PPO and HMOS, where you exchange some freedom in selecting your health care providers for lower monthly premiums
* Short-term insurance plans if you just need coverage for a few months
* High-deductible plans, often combined with a Medical Savings account, that cover all your medical bills once you reach the deductible
* Major medical plans that just cover accidents and illnesses
So how do you choose? Look at your lifestyle and see what type of insurance you need.
If you’re young and in good health, you may only need a major medical policy. If you’re looking for a job that offers health insurance as a benefit, then you might need a short-term policy.
Have children to think about? A comprehensive policy, such as an indemnity plan, or a PPO or HMO might offer the best coverage.
Where to Get the Best Rate
Whatever type of policy is best for you, be sure to go to an insurance comparison website and do some comparison shopping before you buy anything. This will help ensure that you’re getting the best price for your insurance.
| Visit http://www.LowerRateQuotes.com/health-insurance.html or click on the following link to get medical insurance plan quotes from top-rated companies and see how much you can save. You can get more tips and advice in their Articles section, and get answers to your questions from an insurance expert by using their online chat service.The authors, Brian Stevens and Stacey Schifferdecker, have spent 30 years in the insurance and finance industries, and have written numerous articles on medical insurance plans. |
One second at a Time
By Dr. Shaun Stuto
How often do we hear “take it slow,” “take it easy,” “one step at a time,” “one day at a time” “don’t be so hard on yourself” etc… Do we follow the advice? Probably not as often as we should.
Each second of the day we are faced with small and seemingly insignificant decisions; constant tests of do or don’t, right or wrong. Some of these tests might be so minor we don’t even think about them. Perhaps its a q-tip on the floor or a pillow out-of-place on the bed. Do we take the literal one second to pick up the q-tip or adjust the pillow? Or do we leave the “mess on the floor” so to speak, and allow it to accumulate.
Think of how many areas of our life that these one second challenges are adding up! You probably have piles of “stuff” all around you and fail to even notice it. A great philosophy I recently adopted is “if I think it, I must do it.” If I think about taking the trash out, it probably needs to be done. So I do it NOW! By creating this discipline in my life, more gets done and with minimal effort.
Take action and responsibility in your own life. “If I think it I must do it.” By focusing, literally, on one second at a time we get to accumulate many successes throughout our day. Success builds confidence and results. Confidence and results turn into momentum. instead of looking at how far you still have to go in your transformation process, celebrate the small victories that you choose to experience all day.
Success with our transformations is only one decision away, one meal away, one workout away, one journal entry away, or one phone call away to a loved one. It isn’t 12 weeks away or 18 weeks away. It starts now!
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Dr. Shaun Stuto |
What is important in Life?
By David Shape 
When we are healthy, we seldom think about what it feels like to be sick. But when we are really and truly sick, all we can think about is being healthy again.
No matter how much wealth we manage to accumulate in this world, it is virtually useless without good health. This is tied closely to the knowledge of our own mortality. Deep down, we all know that we only have a handful of decades on Earth and then it’s over.
In light of that, what becomes important then? That is indeed an interesting question. What is important cannot be money, because we can’t take it with us when we die. What is important can’t be our possessions because, once again, they are not going with us. Having money and possessions is very temporary. Those things cease to matter to us when we die.
Some turn to their relationships when they realize this. They feel that family and friends must be the most important thing then. Yet, we will lose contact with family and friends when we pass away too.
Some people die and then come back. They call this the near-death experience. Many of those people talk about what they saw in the state of death. They also talk about how they feel which is almost universally wonderful. There are a few that report going to a very bad place, but the majority feel good. They are free from the pain and suffering of their mortal bodies.
In the near-death experience, many talk about the life review process, where they see their entire lives displayed before them. The good things they do and the bad are right there. In addition they see how their actions and words affected others too. Apparently it can be quite painful to recognize how much we hurt others and caused others pain.
They also get to see the good things they did. I remember one woman who went through the life review process said that the most significant act in her entire life occurred when she was a little girl. She said that the most important action out of her entire life was holding a little flower in her hand and giving it unconditional love. That was it, out of her entire life that was deemed the most significant thing she ever did.
In light of that, we can conclude that what is important is not who we were but how well we treated others in this life. Therefore, when we contemplate our lives and set our goals, maybe it would be a good idea if we thought about others first.
Life is not temporary, but life on Earth is temporary. How are we going to face all those people who are watching what we do, when it is all over? Hopefully, we will have done things that we can be joyous about.
