College Students Unable To Graduate Because They Are Over Weight

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• Wellness

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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• Wellness

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

Sunday Inspiration

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• Inspire

Happy Sunday Everyone. Once again it is Lily of Light’s morning inspiration. This is a sweet video with wonderful music and gentle pictures. It will surely open your heart!

Inspiration from TFFDavid on Vimeo.

Helping PTSD Patients Thru Meditation

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• Meditation

While PTSD is now being fully recognized as a mental health condition, helping professionals are still struggling to find viable and evidence-based treatments for PTSD (Foa, Keane, & Friedman, 2000). Conventional treatment efforts involve mostly cognitive-behavioral therapy, which has received the greatest research attention and support for its efficacy (Please refer to Foa & Meadows, 1997, and Rothbaum, Meadows, Resick, & Foy, 2000 for detailed reviews). Findings, however, revealed that PTSD subjects with prolonged histories of interpersonal abuse responded adversely to prolonged exposure and cognitive restructuring treatment.

Dr. Mo Yee Lee in partnership with Dr. Amy Zaharlick (Anthropology) and Dr. Deborah Akers (Miami University) has been investigating the effectiveness of a six-week meditation curriculum on mental health outcomes among female trauma survivors who also have substance use problems.  Dr. Lee’s research team works in collaboration with Amethyst Inc., a local organization that serves to break the cycle of addiction, poverty, and violence for women and their children.  The team’s work explores the utility, cultural adaptability and appropriateness of using meditation, a primarily Eastern-based practice, as an intervention with clinical populations in the U.S. A preliminary study examined two specific questions: (1) Is a 6-week meditation curriculum effective in reducing PTSD symptoms and improving functioning of female trauma survivors who have histories of prolonged interpersonal abuse? (2) How did participants understand and perceive their meditation experience and its potential benefits? Continue Reading

Can Anything Help With Sleep

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• Wellness

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