(HealthDay News) — The holidays are typically full of tempting meals and desserts. The downside is the resulting weight gain. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sugests how to keep holiday weight gain at bay: Stay active. Walk often and park far from store entrances. Take a few extra laps around the mall, or start your work day by taking the stairs. Eat healthier foods. You can indulge now and then, but eat small portions and balance fattier, sugary fare with healthier options. Don’t arrive at a party hungry, which may lead to overeating. Plan activities that don’t focus on food.
A little about: Weekly Gravy
All Sauce from Weekly Gravy:
Increase the Calories You Burn When Walking
Walking is not only a great first exercise, it can also be a forever exercise. Here are some ideas to show you how to take it to the next level. Making walking more of a challenge enables you to burn more calories and raise your working heart rate. You can do this by working out on a treadmill with an incline setting and wearing a weighted vest. You can start with either one to scale up or combine both ideas for a greater challenge. According to the American Council on Exercise, wearing a weighted vest is a great option if you’re relatively new to exercise because it won’t feel as difficult as ramping up your speed, for instance. If you choose a vest that weighs about 15 percent of your bodyweight, you can burn 12 percent more calories when walking at 2.5 miles per hour — an easy pace. You can achieve a slightly higher calorie burn by wearing a vest that’s just 10 percent of your bodyweight if you walk on a treadmill at that speed and at an incline with a 5 or 10 percent grade. To ease into the combined approach, walk for 5 minutes at a flat or 0 grade, then 5 minutes at 5 percent grade, followed by 5 minutes at 10 percent grade. Finish up by going back to… read on >
Some Foods Can Be Cholesterol Fighters
Watching your cholesterol has gotten easier. Nutrition experts now agree that foods high in cholesterol, like shrimp, don’t have the impact on blood cholesterol that was once thought. So depending on your current cholesterol count, you may not have to curtail your intake of many formerly forbidden foods. Even better news — some foods can bring down your cholesterol level. Since that’s only one of their benefits, consider adding them all to your overall diet. Walnuts have healthy unsaturated fats that help lower low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol — that’s the unhealthy type. Almonds, hazelnuts and pistachios are good choices, too. The magic in beans and oats is soluble fiber, which helps flush cholesterol out of your system before it can do harm. Enjoy hot or cold oat cereals and experiment with beans in place of meat at lunch and dinner. Avocados are rich in mono-unsaturated fatty acids and can also help lower LDL. Use slices instead of mayo on sandwiches and dip raw veggies rather than chips into fresh guacamole. Many plant foods naturally contain sterols and stanols, substances that fight off cholesterol, and some foods are now fortified with them. Eating 2 to 3 grams of sterols and stanols a day can lower LDL by 10 to 15 percent, and lower heart disease risk by 20 percent when you also follow a heart-healthy diet,… read on >
Could You Be Short on Vitamin D?
You’d think vitamin deficiencies would be rare in the United States, but many people are running low on vitamin D, and it’s a serious health threat. Being short on vitamin D not only affects bone density, it’s also been linked to conditions such as heart disease, mental decline, some types of cancer, autoimmune diseases, infectious diseases and type 2 diabetes. The problem is twofold: Not knowing how much vitamin D you really need, and how to get it. While 600 to 800 International Units (IUs) is the recommended daily amount, it can take more than that to bring you up to a healthy level and maintain it once you have a deficit. The body can make vitamin D through sun exposure, but there are many variables, from time of day and the season to your location and your skin color. People with pale skin make vitamin D more quickly than those with darker skin. While there is concern about skin cancer risk, under the right conditions, exposing arms and legs (and your torso when possible) for only a few minutes two to three times a week allows the skin to produce enough vitamin D. Very few foods naturally contain D. Many others are fortified with it, but it’s usually only 100 IUs per serving, making it unlikely that you’ll get even the daily minimum just… read on >
Health Tip: Manage Diabetes During the Holidays
(HealthDay News) — The holiday season can be difficult to navigate if you have diabetes. But with proper planning you can stay healthy, the American Diabetes Association says. The ADA offers this advice: Focus on timing. If your meal will be later than usual, eat a snack before to keep your blood sugar where it needs to be. Stay active during the holiday season, to compensate for overeating. Eat healthier versions of holiday foods. Keep portion sizes small. Eat lots of vegetables.
Nose Holds Clues to Baby’s First Cold
When a baby starts sniffling and sneezing, the type of bacteria in their nose may predict how long the cold will last, a new study finds. Babies with a wide variety of bacteria in the nose recover faster from their first cold than those with less variety, the researchers said. “It’s well known that different types of bacteria live in our gut. The respiratory tract is also home to a wide variety of bacteria,” said study author Roland Neumann, of University Children’s Hospital of Basel, Switzerland. “We are beginning to understand that the types and numbers of these bacteria, what we refer to as the microbiota, can influence our respiratory health,” he added. For the study, the researchers took nose swabs from 183 babies as soon as they developed symptoms of their first cold, and again three weeks later. On average, the babies’ cold symptoms lasted about two weeks. Babies whose symptoms lasted three weeks or longer had less variety of bacteria in their noses. Also, their nose bacteria was more likely to be dominated by the Moraxellaceae or Streptococcaceae families. Some of those bacteria are known to be linked with respiratory disease. The study was published Dec. 2 in the journal ERJ Open Research. The findings could help improve understanding of the role respiratory tract bacteria plays in infections and long-term conditions such as… read on >
For College Students, ‘Hookup Sex’ More Intimate Than Thought
Intimacy plays a larger role in casual sex among college students than previously thought, a new U.S. study reports. Researchers analyzed the results of an online survey that asked several hundred students at a university in the Northeast about their romantic relationships and casual sex. As expected, affectionate and intimate activities — such as cuddling, spending the night, eye gazing and foreplay — were more common in relationship sex than in casual sex, but the rate of these acts in casual sex was much higher than anticipated. While women were more likely to engage in intimate acts, there were no gender differences in terms of eye gazing and foreplay. “We have a stereotype that casual sex [hookups] are just about meaningless sex, but this research shows this is not necessarily true,” said study author Ann Merriwether, a developmental psychologist and lecturer at Binghamton University in New York. The study “shows intimacy is important and desired by many people, especially those who prefer hookups to more traditional relationships,” she added in a university news release. A survey question that asked students if they prefer casual sex or sex in a long-term relationship led to a surprising finding. “Young adults who indicated they prefer casual sexual encounters over relationship sex were more likely to want affection and intimacy from them. This suggests they seek to meet their… read on >
How Puzzles, Games Might Help Your Aging Brain
Those Sunday crossword puzzles may not prevent the aging brain from slowing down — but they might protect it in a different way, a new study suggests. Researchers looked at the “use it or lose it” theory on brain health. The concept holds that mentally engaging activities — from reading to crosswords to board games — may help the brain resist dementia later in life. In this study, older adults who said they enjoyed those pastimes were no less likely to show signs of mental decline over time, versus other older folks. But they did, on average, score higher on standard tests of mental sharpness. That means that while they did decline over time, they did so from a higher “starting point,” the researchers explained. “The results indicate that a lifetime of engagement lifts you to a high point from which you decline, and that can be considered as passive cognitive reserve,” said lead researcher Roger Staff, of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. “Starting from a high point,” he said, “will mean that the threshold at which you are considered impaired will be farther into the future.” “Cognitive reserve” can be seen as the brain’s ability to find alternative ways to get things done. In theory, a person with greater cognitive reserve may be able to withstand pathological changes in the brain for a… read on >
Impact of Racism Could Slow Recovery After Heart Attack
Discrimination doesn’t just cause emotional pain in the moment, it may affect a victim’s physical recovery from a heart attack, new research suggests. In studying more than 2,600 heart attack survivors between the ages of 18 and 55, researchers found that those reporting more perceived discrimination were more likely to have poorer outcomes. A year after their heart attacks, they had more physical limitations and chest pain, lower quality of life and impaired mental health. Perceived discrimination — being treated unfairly because of personal characteristics such as race, gender or sexual orientation — was already associated with risk factors for having a heart attack. Discrimination is a chronic stressor, said study author Andrew Arakaki, a doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Conn. “It’s linked to a heightened reactive stress response as well as chronic systemic inflammation,” Arakaki said. “There’s quite a bit of literature out there about the impact of chronic inflammation on cardiovascular disease, and so that may be part of the underlying mechanism, but I think that what makes discrimination stand out from some other chronic psychosocial stressors is that it’s also really closely linked to structural barriers to health.” That includes things like economic status, access to health insurance and neighborhood investment. It may be that disadvantaged people have trouble accessing essential post-care visits. While the… read on > read on >
Pregnancy Often More Stressful for Women With Autism
Women who have autism are more vulnerable during pregnancy to depression and anxiety, according to a new British study. That makes it imperative that effective mental health screening and support is available to help this group, said lead researcher Sarah Hampton, from the University of Cambridge. “The results also suggest that autistic people may benefit from accommodations to prenatal health care. These may include adjustments to the sensory environment of health care settings, as well as adjustments to how information is communicated during prenatal appointments,” co-author Rosie Holt said in a university news release. She is a research associate at the Cambridge-based Autism Research Center. For their study, researchers surveyed more than 900 women about their pregnancy experience. Anyone who was pregnant at the time or had previously given birth was eligible to take part in the online survey. In all, 417 respondents had autism and 524 did not. Women with autism were about three times more likely to report having had prenatal depression. About 24% of those with autism experienced depression, compared to 9% of others. Nearly half — 48% — of those with autism experienced anxiety, while only 14% of respondents without autism did. “We are grateful to members of the autistic community for providing feedback when we designed this research,” said study co-author Carrie Allison, deputy director of the Autism Research Center.… read on > read on >