College Students Unable To Graduate Because They Are Over Weight

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Most college students expect to receive their diplomas on the basis of grades, but at a Pennsylvania school, physical fitness matters too.

Students at Lincoln University with a body mass index of 30 or above, reflective of obesity, must take a fitness course that meets three hours per week. Those who are assigned to the class but do not complete it cannot graduate.

Now that the first class to have this requirement imposed is nearing graduation day — students who entered in the fall of 2006 — the school faces criticism from both students and outsiders about the fitness class policy.

Lawson, who told CNN she had been putting off getting her BMI tested until this year, recently found out she would have to take the class. At first angry, Lawson said she is now more “confused” about the requirement.

But James DeBoy, chairman of the school’s Department of Health and Physical Education, says the requirement is just like courses to help students’ communications or math proficiency. The faculty also has a priority to be honest with students, he said. Continue Reading

Interesting Health Facts

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You learn something new everyday. Here are a few of those things that you may not have realized about health.

1. Getting in your fruits and veggies can help the body produce its own form of Aspirin. After a study done by the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, participants who ate fruit and vegetables containing benzoic acid, could produce their own salicyclic acid. This is the main ingredient in aspirin that makes aspirin an anti-inflammatory pain reliever.

2. Watching yourself in a mirror while running on a treadmill, will make your workout go faster.

3. Honey can soothe a hangover.

4. Garlic can help cure athlete’s foot.

5. Baking soda helps whiten teeth.

6. Your kitchen sink is dirtier than your bathroom sink. There are approximately 500,000 bacteria lurking around your drain alone. Over 50 million bacteria in a single colony can live on one sponge.

7. Using a diary for weight-loss purposes can double a person’s weight loss efforts.

8. Sexologists can determine a woman’s orgasm history, solely by the way she walks.

9. Oatmeal, citrus fruits, and honey can improve your sex drive, and boost fertility. Oats produce a chemical that sends testosterone into the blood stream, which then increases orgasm and sex drive as a result. Vitamin C in citrus fruits ups a males’ sperm count, and Vitamin B found in honey helps the body produce estrogen which is key for arousal and blood flow.

10. Walking either in water, against the wind, or wearing a backpack burns approximately 50 more calories an hour.

11. Regular exercise can lower a women’s cancer risk, but only if she is getting an efficient amount of sleep.

12. Rinsing your nose with salt water can help fight allergies. Dr. Melissa Pynnonen from the Michigan sinus center says that nasal irrigation is an inexpensive way to find relief from allergies, stuffy nose, and nasal congestion.

13. After a study done at Cornell University, researchers found that people who enter their homes through an entry way that is close to the kitchen tend to eat 15% more than those who enter farther away from the kitchen.

14. Smokers are four times more likely to experience feelings of restlessness after a night’s sleep than non-smokers.

15. It is impossible to get a tan from your computer screen. The Computer Tan Website was created to raise awareness against skin cancer.

Source: Fitness.com

Can Anything Help With Sleep

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Drink some warm milk before bedtime

Decades ago, scientists looked into this folk remedy and posited that tryptophan, an amino acid in milk (and turkey), might be responsible for its supposed sleep-inducing effects. Earlier research had shown that when tryptophan is released into the brain, it produces serotonin—a serenity-boosting neurotransmitter. But when milk (and other tryptophan-rich foods) were tested, they failed to affect sleep patterns. “Tryptophan-containing foods don’t produce the hypnotic effects pure tryptophan does, because other amino acids in those foods compete to get into the brain,” explains Art Spielman, M.D., an insomnia expert and professor of psychology at the City University of New York. Warm milk at bedtime may be comforting, but it won’t boost sleep-promoting serotonin.

Have a bedtime snack.

A light bedtime snack can stave off hunger, a known sleep robber. But eating high-glycemic-index (GI) carbohydrates—hours earlier at dinner—might also help. (High-GI foods cause a greater rise in blood sugar and insulin than do lower-GI foods.) A recent paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that when healthy sleepers ate carbohydrate-rich suppers of veggies and tomato sauce over rice, they fell asleep significantly faster at bedtime if the meal included high-GI jasmine rice rather than lower-GI long-grain rice. While the authors aren’t sure how it happened, they speculated that the greater amounts of insulin triggered by the high-GI meals increased the ratio of tryptophan relative to other amino acids in the blood, allowing proportionately more to get into the brain. Continue Reading

Personality Helps Determine Our Stress

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Our ability to withstand stress-related, inflammatory diseases may be associated, not just with our race and sex, but with our personality as well, according to a study published in the July issue of the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity. Especially in aging women, low levels of the personality trait extraversion may signal that blood levels of a key inflammatory molecule have crossed over a threshold linked to a doubling of risk of death within five years.

An emerging area of medical science examines the mind-body connection, and how personality and stress contribute to disease in the aging body. Long-term exposure to hormones released by the brains of people under stress, for instance, takes a toll on organs. Like any injury, this brings a reaction from the body’s immune system, including the release of immune chemicals that trigger inflammation in an attempt to begin the healing process. The same process goes too far as part of diseases from rheumatoid arthritis to Alzheimer’s disease to atherosclerosis, where inflammation contributes to clogged arteries, heart attacks and strokes. Continue Reading

Budwig Cottage Cheese And Flaxseed Recipe

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The Flaxseed (Linseed) oil diet was originally proposed by Dr. Johanna Budwig, a German biochemist and expert on fats and oils, in 1951.  Dr. Budwig holds a Ph.D. in Natural Science, has undergone medical training, and was schooled in pharmaceutical science, physics, botany and biology. She is best known for her extensive research on the properties and benefits of flaxseed oil combined with sulphurated proteins in the diet, and over the years has published a number of books on the subject, including “Cancer–A Fat Problem,” “The Death of the Tumor,” and “True Health Against Arteriosclerosis, Heart Infarction & Cancer.”

Dr. Budwig found that the blood of seriously ill cancer patients was deficient in certain important essential ingredients which included substances called phosphatides and lipoproteins, while the blood of a healthy person always contains sufficient quantities of these essential ingredients.

She found that when these natural ingredients where replaced over approximately a three month period, tumors gradually receded, weakness and anemia disappeared and life energy was restored. Symptoms of cancer, liver dysfunction and diabetes were alleviated.

Source: Cancer Cure Foundation

I have heard for many years about the Budwig diet, and happen to come across an article recently that was talking about it. I know it has been studied and reviewed for over 40 years with success. I have no personal experience with the diet its self, but I thought it would be interesting to post a video explaining how to make the flaxseed and cottage cheese recipe that Budwig is famous for. Feel free to leave comments if you have further to add about the diet.