How to Naturally Treat Allergies

Over half of the Americans suffer from allergies. This is because in some people, their immune system overreacts to foreign substance such as tree pollen or mold and releases chemicals in the body that cause the unpleasant allergy symptoms.

There are a wide variety of natural supplements that you can take to help ease allergy symptoms.

1. Astragalus – A traditional Chinese remedy for allergies by supporting the immune system.
2. Butterbur – The herb butterbur (Petasites hybridus) shows potential for relieving seasonal allergy symptoms.  In one Swiss study, butterbur was just as effective as an over-the-counter antihistamine for reducing allergy symptoms.
3. Evening Primrose – The evening primrose oil acts as an anti-inflammatory to decrease the reaction and stimulates the white blood cells that regulate the production of histamines and antibodies.
4. Gamma Linolenic Acid (GLA) – GLA has a long history in folk medicine for treating allergies. Studies have found that women and children who are prone to allergies have lower levels of GLA.
5. Green Tea – It delivers EGCG, an antioxidant that blocks production of histamine and immunoglobulin E, both of which trigger allergy symptoms.  
6. Probiotics –Probiotics benefit the immune system and hence reduce allergies.
7. Omega-3s – Studies have shown fish oil can help alleviate hay fever, sinus problems and allergic skin conditions.
8. Quercetin – This flavonoid, found naturally in onions, apples and black tea, has anti-inflammatory properties and has been shown to block histamines or reduce the release of histamine, which decreases symptoms.
9. Skullcap – This herb has been traditionally used in Chinese medicine to treat hayfever. It has antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and antihistaminic properties.
10. Spirulina – This algae can boost the immune system and protect against allergic reactions.
11. Stinging Nettle – The roots and leaves of the stinging nettle plant (Urtica dioica) have been used to treat everything from joint pain to prostate problems. Some people use freeze-dried stinging nettle leaves to treat allergy symptoms.
12. Vitamin C – Found mainly in fruits, its immune-boosting antioxidant lowers histamine levels in the bloodstream, which could prevent the onset of allergies.  2,000 mg of vitamin C can cut histamine levels (which trigger allergy symptoms) by up to 40%, improving breathing and airway.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and count our blessings!

   

Close-grip Pushups

In everyday life, strong triceps at the back of our upper arms help us pull open heavy doors. To develop the muscles, close-grip push-up is one of the most effective exercises. And so if you want to tone and strengthen your triceps, making close-grip push-ups as part of your strength-training routine.

 

Exercise Instructions

1.         Warm up to get your blood flowing and to prepare your body for the work to come. Set up by placing your palms on the floor in a triangle position with your thumbs touching on another. Position your hands directly under your shoulders or slightly narrower. The closer your hands are together the harder the exercise and the greater the emphasis will be on your triceps.

 

2.         Tighten your abdominals to support your back and then extend your legs out behind you and prop up on the balls of your feet. Don't sag your torso to the floor or push your hips up. Contract your glutes and quadriceps to help keep your body straight as a plank.

 

3.         Bend your elbows, keeping them firmly at the sides of your torso, and lower your chest toward the floor. Stop lowering when your chest is about two inches above the floor and your upper arms are nearly parallel to the floor.

 

4.         Extend your elbows and push yourself up to the starting position in about half the time it took you to lower yourself. Make sure to contract your abdomen and gluteals. Immediately go into the next repetition 12 to 15 times.

 

Exercise Tips:

• Inhale as you bend your elbows on the way down, and exhale as you straighten your elbows on the way up.
• Make close-grip push-ups easier by doing them on your knees, against a wall or with your hands on an elevated surface.
• On the other hand, for a greater challenge, perform close-grip push-ups with your feet raised on a bench or on a stability ball.
• Keep your elbows tucked in at your side while you do it.  It is tempting to lock them out, but doing so takes some of the strain off your arms, making the exercise less effective.

The American Council on Exercise ranks this move as the "gold standard" for triceps exercises, reporting the greatest muscle activity among all triceps exercises.

 

Are you worried about midlife?

Midlife doesn’t have to be a time of crisis. It can be a catalyst for purpose, impact, and growth. It is actually an opportunity to begin the better half of your life.

Bob Buford has written a good book encouraging the reader to approach the second half of life as a quest for significance instead of success.

 

Among the points covered in the book include:

1. A challenge to think about what you believe and to find the one most important thing in your life and build on that.
2. How to continue to learn in the second half of life.
3. Practical ways on how to regain more control over your life.
4. Questions to ask and answer as you "go in to the locker" and prepare for the second half of your life.
5. Find something that fits within the following 2 questions: What have you achieved? What do you care deeply about? 

Bob Buford provides the encouragement and insight to propel your life on a new course away from mere success to true significance—and the best years of your life. The first half of life is busy with "getting and gaining, earning and learning," doing what you can to survive while clawing your way up the ladder of success. The second half of life should be about regaining control and calling your own shots. Do not allow the second half of life to be characterized by boredom and decline.

Buford focuses on this important time of transition—the time when a person moves beyond the first half of the game of life. It is halftime, a time of revitalization and for catching a new vision for living the second half, the half where life can be lived at its most rewarding. Bob Buford believes the second half of your life can be better than the first, much better. But first, you need to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. 

As Buford explains, “My passion is to multiply all that God has given me, and in the process, give it back.” 

Are you ready to move into the second half of your life?

Read and be encouraged to believe that the second half of your life need not be a time of waste or past memories!

Stick-up

Stick-up is a very good variation of the Scapular Retraction exercise and is particularly good for anyone who suffers from a slumped forward posture. Not only does it help mobilise the upper back and shoulders, but also it develops the muscles needed to pull the body back into an upright posture, and it teaches us how it actually feels to be upright. 

Ways to do it:

• Stand with your back against a wall or any flat surface.
• Have your feet a few inches away from the wall.
• Keep your belly tight throughout.
• Have your bum, shoulder blades and back of head touching the wall.
• Keeping these 3 points of contact at all times, put your arms up.
• Squeeze your shoulder blades back together until your elbows touch the wall.
• If you can, try to get your wrists to touch the wall also.
• Keeping these 5 points of contact with the wall at all times, slowly slide your arms up and down to the count of 4 seconds.
• When pulling your arms down, think about squeezing your elbows in tight to your sides.

If this move feels very alien to you, it means your posture is off at the moment.

Some ways to prevent cancer

• Drink hot lemon water can prevent cancer. Do not add sugar. Hot lemon water is more beneficial than cold lemon water. Hot lemon water kills cancer cells and can control cancer tumor growth. The bitterness in hot lemon water is the best substance to kill cancer cells. Cold lemon water only has vitamin C, no cancer prevention. Clinical tests have proven that hot lemon water works. In addition, hot lemon water can prevent blood clots.
• Both yellow and purple sweet potatoes have good cancer prevention properties.
• Taking supper often at late night can increase the chance of stomach cancer. No food 3 hours before bed time.
• Eating pope’s nose (chicken backside) can cause stomach cancer.
• Drinking 10 glasses of water a day can prevent bladder cancer while drinking a glass of plain water every morning before food can prevent gall bladder stones. Drink more water in the day, less at night.

10 Cancer-causing foods

Many common food items have been scientifically shown to increase cancer risk. Here are the 10 of the most unhealthy, cancer-causing foods:

1) Processed meats. Most processed meat products, including lunch meats, bacon, sausage and hot dogs, contain chemical preservatives such as sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate that make them appear fresh and appealing, but that can also cause cancer. Both sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate have been linked to significantly increasing the risk of colon and other forms of cancer, so be sure to choose only uncured meat products made without nitrates, and preferably from grass-fed sources.

2) Microwave popcorn. The U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognizes the perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in microwave popcorn bag linings as “likely” carcinogenic, and several independent studies have linked this chemical to causing tumors. Similarly, the diacetyl chemical used in the popcorn itself is linked to causing both lung damage and cancer.

3) Soda pop. Loaded with sugar, food chemicals, and colorings, soda pop acidifies the body and literally feeds cancer cells. Common soda pop chemicals like caramel color and its derivative 4-methylimidazole (4-MI) have also specifically been linked to causing cancer.

4) ‘Diet’ foods, beverages. Research studies found that aspartame, one of the most common artificial sweeteners, causes a range of illnesses including birth defects and cancer. Sucralose (Splenda), saccharin and various other artificial sweeteners have also been linked to causing cancer.

5) Refined ‘white’ flours. A study published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Mile Markers, and Prevention found that regular consumption of refined carbohydrates was linked to a 220 percent increase in breast cancer among women. High-glycemic foods in general have also been shown to rapidly raise blood sugar levels in the body, which directly feeds cancer cell growth and spread.

6) Refined sugars. Fructose-rich sweeteners like high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) tend to rapidly spike insulin levels and feed the growth of cancer cells. Since cookies, cakes, pies, sodas, juices, sauces, cereals and many other processed food items are loaded with HFCS and other refined sugars, this helps explain why cancer rates are on the rise these days.

7) Apples, grapes, and other ‘dirty’ fruits. It looks a bit surprising. Many think that they are healthy. But unless these fruits are organic or verified to be pesticide-free, they could be a major cancer risk. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) found that up to 98 percent of all conventional produce, and particularly the type found on its “dirty” fruits list, is contaminated with cancer-causing pesticides.

8) Farmed salmon. Farmed salmon is another high-risk cancer food, according to Dr. David Carpenter, Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University of Albany. It not only lacks vitamin D, but it is often contaminated with carcinogenic chemicals, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), flame retardants, pesticides and antibiotics.

9) Hydrogenated oils. Hydrogenated oils alter the structure and flexibility of cell membranes throughout the body, which can lead to a host of debilitating diseases such as cancer.

10) Genetically-modified organisms (GMOs). Both GMOs and the chemicals used to grow them have been shown to cause rapid tumor growth.

Why do We Suffer from Cancer?

Cancer rates are skyrocketing. Currently, more than one-third of us will develop cancer in our lifetime while one-fourth will die from the disease. There are many reasons for this. However, some cancers are due to avoidable exposures to industrial carcinogens in the food we eat and the cosmetics and household products we use.

However, current product labeling provides no warning for cancer and other chronic health risks. Food is labeled for cholesterol, but not for carcinogens. Cosmetics are labeled for major ingredients, but not for those that form carcinogens or contain carcinogenic contaminants. Except for pesticides, household products contain no information on their ingredients.

In the case of food we eat, for example, Beef Frankfurters contain Unlabeled Toxic Ingredients such as
BENZENE HEXACHLORIDE, Carcinogenic.
DACTHAL, Carcinogenic (can be contaminated with dioxin); irritant; strong sensitizer.
DIELDRIN, Carcinogenic; xenoestrogen.
DDT, Carcinogenic; xenoestrogen.
HEPTACHLOR, Carcinogenic; neurotoxic; reproductive toxin; xenoestrogen.
HEXACHLOROBENZENE, Carcinogenic; neurotoxic; teratogenic.
LINDANE, Carcinogenic; neurotoxic; damage to blood forming cells.
HORMONES: Carcinogenic and feminizing.
ANTIBIOTICS: Some are carcinogenic, causing allergies and drug resistance.
Labeled Ingredient
NITRITE, Interacts with meat amines to form carcinogenic nitrosamines which are a major risk factor for childhood cancers.

Whole Milk contains Unlabeled Toxic Ingredients:
DDT, Carcinogenic; xenoestrogen.
DIELDRIN, Carcinogenic; xenoestrogen.
HEPTACHLOR, Carcinogenic; neurotoxic; reproductive toxin; xenoestrogen.
HEXACHLOROBENZENE, Carcinogenic; neurotoxic; reproductive toxin.
ANTIBIOTICS: Some are carcinogenic, cause allergies and drug resistance.
RECOMBINANT BOVINE GROWTH HORMONE and IGF-1: Also, risk factor for breast, colon and prostate cancers.

Exercise for building muscle or losing weight - Squats

If you are serious about getting in shape and/or losing weight, one of the best exercises is squats.

Squats work practically every single muscle in your body.  And so more calories will be burned during and after exercise. A particular good one is Y-Squat.

The ways to do it are:

• Hold your hands over your head in a “Y” formation at all times.

• Keep your upper back and shoulders tensed throughout the exercise.

• Stand with your feet just greater than shoulder-width apart.

• Start the movement at the hip joint. Push your hips backward and “sit back into a chair”. Make your hips go back as far as possible.

• Squat as deep as possible, but keep your low back tensed in a neutral position.

• Don’t let your lower back become rounded.

• Push with your glutes, hamstrings, and quadriceps to return to the start position.

Regular squatting improved knee stability, strengthened connective tissue, and made connective tissue tighter and stronger than those who don’t squat. More recently, physiologists at the Mayo Clinic have found that squats actually place less stress on your knees than leg extensions.

In summary, the benefits of Squats include:

1.     Maintain Mobility and Flexibility. Squats build muscles and promote muscle growth across the rest of your body. Nearly 90% of athletic injuries involve the weaker stabilizer muscles, ligaments, and connective tissue and so squats can reduce the risk of injury. And researchers at Ball State University say that leg strength is critical for maintaining mobility as we age.

2.     Increase Functional Strength and Improve Balance. Squats force your body’s nerve networks to work your muscles more efficiently. Also, as we age, nerve endings and connective tissue degenerate naturally. Squats have been proven to improve the communication between your brain and your body’s major muscle groups, and improve muscle memory. This carries into your later years and goes a long way in preventing falls and broken hips.

3.   Increase Sprint Times. The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research published a study in 2002 stating that squatting allowed participants to increase their sprint times by a significant degree.

4.  Sports and Performance. Not only will it make you jump higher and sprint faster, it will make you stronger and more explosive no matter what your particular sport is

5.    Entire Body Workout. No other exercise that works more muscles than Squats.

6.    Increase Upper Body Strength. Growth Hormones and Testosterone are vital for muscle growth and squats stimulate your body to produce these more than any other exercise. Due to the large amounts of growth hormone and testosterone released by squatting, your upper body will grow larger and stronger than it would had you not regularly implemented squats into your workouts.

7.    Tone and Tighten Your Butt and Give You Great Abs.    

Psoralea Corylifolia - Valuable for men

Psoralea Corylifolia is valued in Chinese herbal medicine as a tonic remedy and is used to improve general vitality. It is also of value in the treatment of skin disorders, including vitiligo. However, some caution should be employed when applying the herb externally.

 

This one-seeded fruit is highly regarded as an aphrodisiac and tonic to the genital organs. The seed is anthelmintic, antibacterial, aphrodisiac, astringent, cardiac, cytotoxic, deobstruent, diaphoretic, diuretic, stimulant, stomachic and tonic. It is used in the treatment of febrile diseases, premature ejaculation, impotence, lower back pains, frequent urination, incontinence, bed wetting etc.

 

The seed and fruit contain psoralen. The root is used for treating dental caries. The plant yields a useful medicinal oleoresin, it treats kidney disorders, impotence, lumbago. It is also used externally to treat various skin ailments including leprosy, leucoderma and hair loss. The antibacterial action of the fruit inhibits the growth of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is the third most popular spice, only behind pepper and mustard. It is an aromatic spice made from the peeled, dried, and rolled bark of a Southeast Asian tree.  China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam together produce about 98% of the world’s cinnamon.

Most important, it is full of nutrients—calcium, iron, potassium, zinc, vitamins A, B1, B2, B3 and C as well as others. Consuming cinnamon is beneficial because it can:

- Relieve diarrhea and nausea

- Counteract congestion

- Aid circulation

- Warm the body

- Fight fungal infection

- Lower blood sugar

- Fight bad breath

- Effective for menstrual pain and infertility

- Reduce pain linked to arthritis

- Useful for weight loss, yeast infection and uterine hemorrhaging

 

However, for women, it should not be used in large amounts during pregnancy.

Do you feel sleepy in the afternoon after meals?

Around 3-4 pm each day in the office, do you find yourself having difficulty in keeping yourself awake? You feel sleepy and just could not continue with your work. Why we experience this way is because excessive energy is needed to digest the food we ate for lunch.

Different foods are digested differently. Starchy foods require alkaline digestive medium and proteins foods like meat require an acidic medium for digestion. But when we mix both together, for example, we eat meat and potatoes together, or fish with rice, milk with cereal, the medium neutralizes with each other. Our digestion is impaired or completely arrested. This is very destructive to our body as more energy is required to digest the same amount of food.

During 3-4 pm, as our organs have already worked hard for half a day, but we still need extra energy to digest our lunch, our body would feel tired and naturally needs to take a rest from it.

In order not to let the foods rob us of excessive energy, we need to eat the right food combination and not mixing the wrong foods together, for example, not eat starchy foods and meat in the same meal. In this way, we shall feel much more healthy than ever before.

Chocolate improves memory in elderly

Chocolate contains cacao , which is packed with healthy chemicals like flavonoids and theobromine. Previous studies found that cocoa (which is cacao in its roasted, ground form) flavanols help improve blood circulation and prevent heart disease. Now, it was also found to have a positive effect on the memory of elderly.

In a small study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, 37 respondents with ages from 50 to 69 were divided into two groups. One group was asked to drink a mixture high in cocoa flavanols for three months while the other group drank a low-flavanol mixture for the same period. 

After three months, those who drank high-flavanol mixture performed better on a memory test than respondents who drank a low one. On average, the high-flavanol drinkers performed about 25 percent better than the low-flavanol group.

Besides improvements on the memory test — a pattern recognition test involving the kind of skill used in remembering where you parked the car or recalling the face of someone you just met — researchers found increased function in an area of hippocampus of the brain called the dentate gyrus, which has been related to age-related memory change.

However, there was no increased activity in another hippocampal region, the entorhinal cortex, which is impaired early in Alzheimer’s disease. This reinforces the idea that age-related memory decline is different and suggests that flavanols might not help Alzheimer’s, even though they might delay normal memory loss.

In addition, “you would have to eat a large amount of chocolate,” along with its fat and calories, said Hagen Schroeter, director of fundamental health and nutrition research for Mars Inc.

Mindfulness (2)

Although it is associated with meditation, the Buddha taught his followers to practice mindfulness all the time. Mindfulness can help us perceive the illusory nature of things and break the bonds of self-clinging, help us overcome grief and sorrow as well as end pain and anxiety.

Mindfulness in the Buddhist sense goes beyond just paying attention to things. It is a pure awareness free of judgments and concepts and self-reference. Genuine mindfulness takes discipline and the Buddha advised working with four foundations to train oneself to be mindful.

The four foundations are frames of reference, usually taken up one at a time. In this way, a student begins with a simple mindfulness of breath and progresses to mindfulness of everything. These four foundations are often taught in the context of meditation.

Mindfulness of Body

The first foundation is mindfulness of body. This is an awareness of the body as body - something experienced as breath and flesh and bone. It is not "my" body. It is not a form you are inhabiting. There is just body.

 

Traditionally, the "introduction to mindfulness" exercise is a focus on just breath. This is experiencing breath and being breath. It is not thinking about the breath or coming up with ideas about breath.

 

As the ability to maintain awareness gets stronger, the practitioner becomes aware of the whole body. In some schools of Buddhism, this exercise might include an awareness of aging and mortality.

 

Body awareness is taken into movement. In this way we train ourselves to be mindful when we aren't meditating, too. 

 

Further, the practitioner compares his own body with a corpse which he imagines he sees thrown onto a charnel ground; all that is left is a collection of bones scattered here and there; in one place a hand bone, in another a shin bone, a thigh bone, a pelvis, a spinal column, a skull, and he observes, “This body of mine is of the same nature. It will end up in the same way. There is no way it can avoid that state”.

 

Mindfulness of Feelings

The second foundation is mindfulness of feelings, both bodily sensations and emotions. In meditation, one learns to just observe emotions and sensations come and go, without judgments and without identifying with them. In other words, it is not "my" feelings, and feelings do not define who you are. There are just feelings.

 

Sometimes this can be uncomfortable. What can come up might surprise us. We humans have capacity to ignore our own anxieties and angers and even pain, sometimes. But ignoring sensations we do not like is unhealthy. As we learn to observe and fully acknowledge our feelings, we also see how feelings dissipate.

 

“There is feeling here,”we acknowledge until understanding and full awareness come about. We remain established in the observation, free, not caught up in any worldly consideration. That is how to practice observation of the feelings in the feelings.

 

Mindfulness of Mind

The third foundation is mindfulness of mind or consciousness. The "mind" in this foundation is called citta. This is a different mind from the one that thinks thoughts or makes judgments. Citta is more like consciousness or awareness.

 

Citta is sometimes translated as "heart-mind," because it has an emotive quality. It is a consciousness or awareness that is not made up of ideas.

 

Another way of thinking of this foundation is "mindfulness of mental states." Like sensations or emotions, our states of mind come and go. Sometimes we are sleepy; sometimes we are restless. We learn to observe our mental states dispassionately, without judgment or opinion. As they come and go, we clearly understand how insubstantial they are.

 

We observe the mind from both the inside and the outside, remain established in the observation of the process of coming-to-be in the mind or the process of dissolution in the mind or both in the process of coming-to-be and the process of dissolution, free, not caught up in any worldly consideration. We are mindful of the fact, ‘There is mind here,’ until understanding and full awareness come about.

 

Mindfulness of Dharma

The fourth foundation is mindfulness of dharma. Here we open ourselves to the whole world, or at least the world that we experience.

 

This foundations is sometimes called "mindfulness of mental objects" because all of the myriad things around us exist for us as mental objects. They are what they are because that is how we recognize them.

 

In this foundation, we practice awareness of the inter-existence of all things. We are aware that they are temporary, without self-essence, and conditioned by everything else.

 

“There is an object of mind here,”until understanding and full awareness come about. We remain established in the observation, free, not caught up in any worldly consideration. That is how to practice observation of the objects of mind in the objects of mind with regards to the six sense organs, six sense objects, seven factors of awakening, etc.

Recipe for healthy chocolate

Ingredients

• Extra dark chocolate bar (3-4 oz bar with 70-85% cocoa content -- this minimizes the sugar content)
• 4 or 5 tbsp of organic nut butter (almond butter, cashew butter or peanut butter, omitted if prefer plain chocolate)
• 2/3 to 3/4 cup of organic coconut milk (source of healthy saturated fats)
• 2 tbsp rice bran (healthy fiber source)
• 2 tbsp oat bran (healthy fiber including soluble fiber)
• 1/2 cup raw pecans, almonds or walnuts (healthy fats, antioxidants together with other vitamins/minerals)
• 1/2 cup dried cranberries or raisins (optional)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• A little stevia to lightly sweeten (stevia is a natural non-caloric sweetener as opposed to harmful artificial sweeteners)

Preparation:

• Start with the coconut milk, nut butter and chocolate bar in a medium saucepan and put it on the lowest heat possible.
• Continuously stir as the chocolate, coconut milk and nut butter melt together. Once these melt, add in all of the other ingredients and stir together very well.
• Once everything is mixed well together, spread the mixture onto some waxed paper laid out in a baking dish and throw it in the fridge to solidify.

Although it is healthy, you still have to keep your serving portions small because this is a calorie-dense snack.