foxridgecountryclub - Healthy Life

Olympic figure skating champion Peggy Fleming has teamed up with a company called Health Saver. Below Peggy Fleming and Health Saver offer some practical tips for getting a grip on stress and for getting back on a healty lifestyle track if you have veered off a little.

Peggy Fleming says, “Plan a ’self make-over’ for better health, improved fitness, less stress and more time for yourself to reach your goal and achieve significant success in 2008. To lose weight, incorporate physical activity into your daily routine and establish a smart diet. A balance between calories consumed and calories burned will leave you looking and feeling your best.”


Get a Grip on Stress

The BBC is reporting that thousands of young women and teenage women with type 1 diabetes are intentionally skipping injections to fuel weight loss.

People with type 1 diabetes need daily injections to help them absorb glucose to use as fuel. Failure to take correct doses can lead to rapid weight loss.

Charity Diabetes UK estimates that up to one-third of young women with the disease miss injections to stay thin.


Doctors warn that the “diabulimia” eating disorder can lead to blindness, heart and kidney disease.

US doctors recently went public on their concerns about the practice.


It is very sad to read about teen girls and young women suffering from type 1 diabetes engaging in the very dangerous behavior of skipping insulin shots simply to lose weight. You can read more about diabulimia here and here. A personal story about diabulimia can be found here.

The BBC reports that a new blood test that measures the amount of a protein called RBP4 in the blood may help determine the amount of fat around a person’s internal organs. The scientists doing the research are hopeful that cutting RBP4 may have health benefits.

The researchers believe that measuring RBP4 would potentially be an effective way to assess body fat, and that treatment to cut levels of the protein might also have health benefits.

In previous work, they showed that cutting RBP4 levels in obese mice helped the animals to make better use of the hormone insulin - and thus reduce their risk of diabetes.


They also showed that measures to improve insulin sensitivity in human subjects resulted in a drop in RPB4 levels.

Researcher Dr Matthias Bluher said: “We believe that in the near future, measurements of RBP4 serum concentrations might serve as a novel biomarker for visceral obesity and increased risk for type 2 diabetes and other adverse outcomes of visceral obesity.


“In addition, pharmacological interventions that reduce RBP4 levels might be a new approach in the treatment of metabolic syndrome and visceral obesity.”

The only known function of RBP4 is to carry vitamin A in the blood.

Measuring visceral fat is important because just because people appear fat on the outside doesn’t mean they have a lot of visceral fat. There are also people known as tofis (thin on the outside, fat on the inside) who appear thin but carry a lot of visceral fat, or fat around their internal organs.

CNN reports that a new study has found that eating fish sharpens the mind and reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and stroke.

For the new study, researchers measured how well 3,718 people did on simple tests, such as recalling details of a story. The participants, all Chicago residents 65 and older, took the tests three times over six years. They also filled out a questionnaire about what they ate that included 139 foods.


“We found that people who ate one fish meal a week had a 10 percent slower annual decline in thinking,” said co-author Martha Clare Morris, an epidemiologist at Rush University Medical Center. “Those who ate two fish meals a week showed a 13 percent slower annual decline.”


Eating fish containing omega-3 fatty acids has been shown to have health benefits — like preventing heart disease — in past studies. The downside is that fish with omega-3s, like tuna and salmon, have also been linked to high levels of mercury.

Consumer Reports (CR) examined nine popular diets in its June issue. CR said they calculated the diets� calorie counts and nutritional composition, checked whether they conformed to U.S. dietary guidelines, and evaluated their effectiveness with a comprehensive review of clinical research. Here are some of CR’s findings:

# Weight Watchers received the highest overall rating. A nutritionally balanced diet, plus weekly meetings and weigh-ins for behavioral support, give this large commercial weight loss program the highest long-term adherence rate of any diet studied. This plan doesn’t exclude any food group and its point system encourages consumption of low-fat, high fiber meals.
# Slim Fast, which received the second highest overall rating, is recommended for people who don’t like to cook�branded bars and drinks replace part of breakfast and lunch�and dieters need to prepare only one full meal a day. People on the Slim Fast plan lost the most weight in six months using products like 180-calorie shakes.


# The Zone is high in protein and includes copious amounts of high-fiber vegetables. Many companies offer home delivery of “Zone favorable meals.” It is recommended for those who want a short-term high protein diet plan.
# Ornish offers ultra low-fat, high-fiber vegetarian meals, which provide fairly large portions for the low calories.
# Atkins Induction and Atkins Ongoing Weight Loss are appropriate for people who want a short-term high protein diet plan. The Atkins diet worked very well in the short term, with results at least as good as our other top-rated diets. But its nutritional deficiencies�too much fat, and too little fiber and too few fruits�depressed its overall Rating and may have a negative effect on some people’s health.


CR said several other popular weight-loss plans — eDiets, Jenny Craig, South Beach, and Volumetrics — are all low enough in calories to produce weight loss. But CR said they could not rate them for this report because these diets lacked data from large, long-term, published clinical trials.

CR said there are four ways to a winning diet:

# Eat high-bulk, low-calorie foods: This is a promising strategy for curbing hunger while keeping calories down. Such foods include fruits, veggies, and other water-filled foods such as soups.
# Control blood sugar: One way is to stay away from starchy, easy-to-digest carbohydrates, such as refined flour, white rice, and potatoes, and avoid added sugar.
# Eat plenty of high-fiber carbs, such as whole grains, fruits and veggies.
# Measure portions and seek encouragement.

After nearly going extinct 150,000 years ago, humankind split into small groups—living in isolation for nearly a hundred thousand years before “reuniting” and migrating out of Africa, a new gene study says. At one point our species may have been down to as few as 2,000 individuals, probably due to climate change—a longstanding theory bolstered by the new findings.

The research fills a gap in our understanding of what was happening in Africa before humans first left the continent.

“The assumption has always been that the original population [in sub-Saharan Africa] was very small but probably a single population,” said Spencer Wells, head of the Genographic Project, which oversaw the study.


“Turns out, that is not the case.”

(The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News and funds the Genographic Project.)

The study appears in the current issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Separate Ways

Around 200,000 years ago, modern humans emerged as a distinct species. All people alive today can trace their ancestry back to these humans, according to previous studies.

By the time the first great migrations out of Africa began, around 60,000 years ago, humanity had split into distinct populations with unique genetic lineages.


So what happened between 200,000 years ago and 60,000 years ago?

To find out, Wells and his colleagues analyzed 624 complete genomes of mitochondrial DNA—which is passed down from mothers—from various indigenous populations across sub-Saharan Africa. A genome is a person’s complete set of DNA (quick overview of human genetics).

DNA tests carried out by a U.S. laboratory prove that remains exhumed last year belong to two children of Tsar Nicholas II, putting to rest questions about what happened to Russia’s last royal family, a regional governor said Wednesday. The bone fragments dug up are those of Crown Prince Alexei and his sister, Maria, whose remains had been missing since the family was murdered in 1918 as Russia descended into civil war, said Eduard Rossel, governor of the Sverdlovsk region

“We have now found the entire family,” he told reporters in Yekaterinburg, the city where the remains were exhumed about 900 miles east of Moscow.

The confirmation could bring the tortured history of the Russian imperial family closer to closure and end royal supporters’ persistent hopes that members of the tsar’s immediate family survived the massacre.

Tsar’s Story

Nicholas II abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia, and he and his family were detained.


The tsar, his wife, Alexandra, and their son and four daughters were fatally shot on July 17, 1918, in a basement room of the merchant’s house where they were being held in Yekaterinburg.

The remains of Nicholas, Alexandra, and three of their daughters were unearthed in 1991 as the Soviet Union was collapsing.

Genetic tests convinced experts of their authenticity and identified one set as those of Anastasia, a daughter some have said survived.

The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Nicholas and his family in 2000, even as it expressed doubts that the remains were indeed those of the tsar’s family.


The remains of Alexei and Maria, however, had never been located, leading to decades of speculation that perhaps one or both had survived.