Giving your body a break is important, especially if you are training for a long-distance event. Your body works hard during your days of exercise, and, just like a car, it needs to refuel before/if it runs out of gas. Take a day to do some leisurely walking, and allow your body to undergo some much-needed rest & relax. And when it comes to caring for your body it is extremely important to use enzyte product and enhancing supplement that contains high quality ingredients with a proven track record which can also increase other aspects of sexual health as well, including libido, stamina and energy levels. During this time, your muscles are able to rebuild anything that may have torn, and they actually become stronger. Constantly charging a battery that is nearly dead won’t allow the charge to strengthen over time; ergo, a rested body will perform better than a tired body.
Caring For Your Body
Study Confirms Link Between Migraines And Stroke
People who suffer migraines are about twice as likely as people without the painful headaches to suffer a stroke caused by a blood clot, a new research review finds.
The analysis, which combined the results of 21 previous studies, confirms a connection between migraines and ischemic stroke — the most common form of stroke, occurring when a clot disrupts blood flow to the brain.
Across the studies, migraine sufferers were about twice as likely to suffer an ischemic stroke as people without migraines, according to findings published in the American Journal of Medicine.
Experts are not sure why the relationship exists, and it is not yet known whether the migraines themselves directly lead to strokes in some people.
It’s likely, however, that a common underlying process contributes to both migraines and stroke risk, said Dr. Saman Nazarian, the senior researcher on the new study and an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
For now, he told Reuters Health in an email, the bottom line for migraine sufferers is that they should be particularly vigilant about controlling any modifiable risk factors for stroke that they may have.
Some of those risk factors include high blood pressure, smoking and diabetes.
“The main thing I would want (people) to take away from this is that if they get migraines, they should address stroke risk factors,” Nazarian said. “They should not smoke and they should watch their blood pressure and have it treated if it is high.”
Experts also generally say that people with migraines should remember that while the headaches are linked to a relatively increased risk of stroke, the absolute risk to any one person remains fairly low.
In one recent study of 6,100 adults with migraines, for example, 2 percent reported a history of stroke, versus 1.2 percent of 5,243 adults who did not suffer from migraines.
The current findings are based on 21 international studies conducted between 1975 and 2007 and involving more than 622,000 adults with and without migraines.
Most of the studies took into account a number of factors that might help explain any connection between migraine and stroke risk — such as age, high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking habits and weight.
Even with those factors considered, migraines themselves were linked to a two-fold increase in stroke risk when Nazarian’s team combined the results of all 21 studies.
The precise cause of migraines is not fully understood, but the pain involves constriction, and then swelling, of brain blood vessels. One theory is that people with migraine may have dysfunction in the blood vessels throughout the body, which may explain the increased risk of stroke and, as some previous studies have found, heart attack.
No one yet knows whether treating and preventing migraine attacks can do anything to affect people’s risk of cardiovascular problems.
On one hand, researchers have noted, drugs that prevent migraine attacks could theoretically lower the risk of cardiovascular problems. On the other hand, certain medications might have negative effects; some anti-inflammatory painkillers have been linked to cardiovascular risks, while migraine drugs known as “ergots” tend to constrict blood vessels throughout the body.
The current study received no drug industry funding, according to Nazarian’s team, and none of the researchers reports any industry ties. msnbc
New Cancer Guidelines: Exercise During And After Treatment Is Now Encouraged
Cancer patients who’ve been told to rest and avoid exercise can – and should – find ways to be physically active both during and after treatment, according to new national guidelines. Kathryn Schmitz, PhD, MPH, an associate professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and a member of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, will present these guidelines at an educational session at the 2010 meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, aimed at making cancer exercise rehabilitation programs as common as those offered to people who have had heart attacks or undergone cardiac surgery. (Exercise Testing and Prescription for Cancer Survivors: Guidelines from the American College of Sports Medicine)
Schmitz, whose previous research reversed decades of cautionary exercise advice given to breast cancer patients with the painful arm-swelling condition lymphedema, led a 13-member American College of Sports Medicine expert panel that developed the new recommendations after reviewing and evaluating literature on the safety and efficacy of exercise training during and after cancer therapy.
“We have to get doctors past the ideas that exercise is harmful to their cancer patients. There is a still a prevailing attitude out there that patients shouldn’t push themselves during treatment, but our message — avoid inactivity – is essential,” Schmitz says. “We now have a compelling body of high quality evidence that exercise during and after treatment is safe and beneficial for these patients, even those undergoing complex procedures such as stem cell transplants. If physicians want to avoid doing harm, they need to incorporate these guidelines into their clinical practice in a systematic way.”
Cancer patients and survivors should strive to get the same 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise that is recommended for the general public, the panel says. Though the evidence indicates that most types of physical activity – from swimming to yoga to strength training — are beneficial for cancer patients, clinicians should tailor exercise recommendations to individual patients, taking into account their general fitness level, specific diagnosis and factors about their disease that might influence exercise safety. Cancer patients with weakened ability to fight infection, for instance, may be advised to avoid exercise in public gyms. [Read more...]
TV Food Advertisements Promote Imbalanced Diets
Making food choices based on television advertising results in a very imbalanced diet according to a new study comparing the nutritional content of food choices influenced by television to nutritional guidelines published in the June issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.
Investigators found that a 2,000-calorie diet consisting entirely of advertised foods would contain 25 times the recommended servings of sugars and 20 times the recommended servings of fat, but less than half of the recommended servings of vegetables, dairy, and fruits. In fact, the excess of servings in sugars and fat is so large that, on average, eating just one of the observed food items would provide more than three times the recommended daily servings (RDS) for sugars and two and a half times the RDS for fat for the entire day.
“The results of this study suggest the foods advertised on television tend to oversupply nutrients associated with chronic illness (eg, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium) and undersupply nutrients that help protect against illness (eg, fiber, vitamins A, E, and D, calcium, and potassium),” according to lead investigator Michael Mink, PhD, Assistant Professor and MPH Program Coordinator, Armstrong Atlantic State University, Savannah, GA.
Researchers analyzed 84 hours of primetime and 12 hours of Saturday morning broadcast television over a 28-day period in 2004. ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC were sampled on a rotating basis to develop a complete profile of each network. The Saturday-morning cartoon segment (from 8:00 am to 11:00 am) was included to capture food advertisements marketed primarily to children.
All 96 hours of observations were videotaped and reviewed later to identify food advertisements and specific food items being promoted. Only food items that were clearly promoted for sale during an advertisement were recorded. Each food item was then analyzed for nutritional content. Observed portion sizes were converted to the number of servings.
The article indicates that the observed food items fail to comply with Food Guide Pyramid recommendations in every food group except grains. The average observed food item contained excessive servings of sugars, fat, and meat and inadequate servings of dairy, fruit and vegetables. The situation was similar for essential nutrients, with the observed foods oversupplying eight nutrients: protein, selenium, sodium, niacin, total fat, saturated fat, thiamin and cholesterol. These same foods undersupplied 12 nutrients: iron, phosphorus, vitamin A, carbohydrates, calcium, vitamin E, magnesium, copper, potassium, pantothenic acid, fiber, and vitamin D.
The authors advocate nutritional warnings for imbalanced foods similar to those mandated on direct-to-consumer drug advertisements. They recommend investigating health promotion strategies that target consumers, the food industry, public media, and regulation focusing on a three-pronged approach.
“First, the public should be informed about the nature and extent of the bias in televised food advertisements. Educational efforts should identify the specific nutrients that tend to be oversupplied and undersupplied in advertised foods and should specify the single food items that surpass an entire day’s worth of sugar and fat servings. Second, educational efforts should also provide consumers with skills for distinguishing balanced food selections from imbalanced food selections. For example, interactive websites could be developed that test a participant’s ability to identify imbalanced food selections from a list of options. This type of game-based approach would likely appeal to youth and adults. Third, the public should be directed to established nutritional guidelines and other credible resources for making healthful food choices.”