Monday, September 26, 2011

Cold Sore Scab

Anyone can get cold sore scab, but women and people in their teens and 20s tend to get them more often. It may run into families but luckily, it’s not contagious. When avoiding certain foods to reduce the risk of contracting cold sore scab.

Cold sore scab is skin eruptions occurring about the perimeter of the mouth, lips, and nose or on the mucous membranes within the mouth. Sometimes tingling and numbness may precede or follow these eruptions. The condition affects people of any age.

Cause
This lesion is produced by the herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1). It is estimated that 9 of 10 persons have been exposed to HSV-1. This virus may lie dormant within the body for extended periods, reactivating during periods of lowered resistance or emotional and physical stress. Cold sore scab may erupt following a rise in body temperature, such as may occur during a common cold or even preceding menstruation. In some instances, however, they may occur before the onset of illness or for no apparent reason at all.

Symptoms
The characteristic lesions are small, pale vesicles appearing individually or in clusters, especially on the lips or about the mouth. The lesions may also be seen elsewhere. The affected area may burn and sting. The lesions may eventually break, forming ulcers or crusts. The crust then falls off and the redness goes away. The whole process takes about 10 to 14 days.

Diagnostic
The diagnosis is made on the basis of the individual’s characteristic lesions. The virus may need to be isolated by histologic examination of the scrapings.

Treatment
Treatment is strictly symptomatic. The drug valacyclovir will shorten the outbreak and lessen recurrence. The lesions should be kept as dry and clean as possible and protected from trauma. Topical analgesics or ointments containing docosanol or benzalkonium chloride may be applied to relieve burning and itching and increase healing. Antibiotic ointments may be recommended to prevent secondary infection of open lesions.

Prognosis
Cold sore scab usually resolves within 1 to 3 weeks. The HSV-1 resumes dormancy, however, and may reappear given favorable conditions. Sometimes another infection or exposure to wind or sun can reactivate the virus

Prevention
There is no specific prevention other than avoiding intimate contact with persons with visible cold sores.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Fat Soluble Vitamins

A vitamin is either fat soluble or water soluble, depending on how it is absorbed and handled in your body. Fat soluble vitamins need dietary fat to be properly absorbed, whereas water soluble vitamins are absorbed with water. Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat soluble; the B vitamins and vitamin C are water soluble.

The fat soluble vitamins are absorbed at the beginning of your small intestine. They are packaged with fatty acids and bile in micelles, small transport carriers that shuttle them close to the intestinal wall. Once there, the fat soluble vitamins travel through the cells in the intestinal wall and are packaged with fat and other lipids in chylomicrons. The vitamins then travel through your lymph system before they enter your bloodstream.

Fat soluble vitamins are stored in your body and used as needed when your dietary intake falls short. Your liver is the main storage depot for vitamin A and to a lesser extent vitamins K and E, whereas vitamin D is mainly stored in your fat and muscle tissues. Because they are stored in the body, large quantities of some of the fat soluble vitamins, particularly A and D, can build up to the point of toxicity, causing harmful symptoms and conditions.

Vitamin A
Major functions: Vision, cell differentiation, reproduction, bone health, immune function.
Food Sources: Beef liver, fortified dairy products.
Toxicity symptoms: Compromised bone health, birth defects during pregnancy.
Deficiency Symptoms: Night blindness, xerophthalmia, stunting of bones.

Vitamin D
Major functions: Calcium balance, bone health, cell differentiation, immune system.
Food Sources: Fatty fish (salmon, tuna, sardines), fortified foods (dairy products, orange juice, cereals).
Toxicity symptoms: Hypercalcemia.
Deficiency Symptoms: Rickets and osteomalacia.

Vitamin E
Major functions: Antioxidant, health of cell membranes, heart health.
Food Sources: Vegetable and seed oils, nuts, seeds, fortified cereals, green leafy vegetables.
Toxicity symptoms: Interference with blood clotting and increased risk of hemorrhage.
Deficiency Symptoms: Nerve problems, muscle weakness, and uncontrolled movement of body parts.

Vitamin K
Major functions: Blood clotting, bone health.
Food Sources: Green leafy vegetables, soybeans, canola and soybean oils, beef liver.
Toxicity symptoms: None known.
Deficiency Symptoms: Excessive bleeding

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Benefits of healthy eating

Healthy eating is the way we eat the right combination of foods, our diet provides all of the nutrients and other substances we need to stay healthy. If we choose a poor combination of foods, we may be missing out on some nutrients and consuming others in excess.

There are actually more than 40 nutrients that are essential to our life. We need to consume these essential nutrients in our diets because our bodies either cannot produce them in large enough amounts for optimal health. Different foods contain different nutrients in varying amounts and combinations.

Benefits of healthy eating are the facts that make us to stay healthy with a good range of body weight. The followings are some benefits of healthy eating that we can have from:

• Healthy eating provides the body with sufficient energy and nutrients to promote health, prevent deficiencies, and reduce the incidence of chronic disease. If we have over nutrition in our diet, it will definitely produce an excess of energy or nutrients which are the causes of obesity and the risk increasing of developing diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

• Healthy eating provides the right number of calories to keep our weight in healthy range with the energy we expend to stay alive and active.

• Healthy eating provides the proper balance of carbohydrate, protein, and fat in our diets. The balance of these nutrients is one of the benefits of healthy eating which help to form body structures and to grow our body properly. Remember that it’s difficult to reduce the amount of fat in the diet if we don’t intake more carbohydrates or protein. Likewise, limiting the amount of carbohydrates can lead us to gain amount of fat or protein.

• Healthy eating provides plenty of waters in our body. Water is an essential nutrient that makes up about 60% of our weight. It provides no energy, but it is needed to transport nutrients, oxygen, waste products, and other important substances in the body and is needed for numerous chemical reactions. If body water is low, antidiuretic hormone causes a reduction in urine output and other hormones cause the kidneys to retain sodium.

• Healthy eating provides also sufficient but not excessive amounts of essential vitamins and minerals which help to regulate efficiently the rate of chemical reactions within the body.

Tips for healthy eating:
1. Eat at regular hours.
2. Don't skip any meal.
3. Don't forget to eat breakfast. Always start the day with a well-rounded meal.
4. Take the time to taste and to chew your food well.
5. Vary your menu.
6. Avoid pastries, sweets, crisps, soda drinks - anything that has little or no nutritious value.
7. Beware of salt consumption. It can cause hypertension.
8. Eat a lot of raw vegetables and fresh juice. Choose whole wheat bread.
9. Drink 6 to 8 glasses of water or vegetable juice or sugar-free juice per day.
10. You should also drink milk.
11. Eat good quality food supplements every day.
12. After each meal you should rest. Don't start to work or exercise right after.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

How to grow taller naturally

There are a lot of factors that come into play when you want to grow taller naturally such as Genetics, Nutrition, Human Growth Hormone, Exercises, Growth Plates, Sleep, Deep Breathing, and Massage.

Genetics is the main factor, since we can’t do anything about that. You can’t change or control your growth plates fuse up and close, either. Usually this happens around the age of 24. You can still grow after that, but it is a lot harder. You will gain at most 2 inches of height after your growth plates fuse together.

Actually, you can add up to 2 inches (5 cm) in most cases to your natural height. More dedicated people can even add up to 4 or more inches (10 cm) to their height.

Here are some key points of how to grow taller naturally:

• Having proper nutrition and supplements are important to grow taller naturally. Leaving them out and dismissing them as not as important as the exercises would be a bad move.

• The most important supplement you need is calcium. This is the most important thing you will need for bone growth. You will also need magnesium, chromium, and zinc. These all play major parts in aiding bone growth.

• The best sources for calcium and zinc are milk, yogurt, eggs, and meat. The best source for chromium is meat. For magnesium, it would probably be best to take it in pill form.

• Magnesium actually helps you sleep better which is when you do most of growing. Milk does as well. So consider drinking a glass of milk about 2 hours before bed.

• Try to avoid calcium inhibitors such as soft drinks, cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, refined sugars, and salt. If you want to grow taller naturally then minimize the intake of them.

• You will also need to drink a lot of water to keep your blood thinned out and able to transport all the vitamins and nutrients that your muscles and bones will need to repair and grow bigger and longer.

• Growth hormone helps your skeletal bones and muscles to grow stronger, bigger, and longer. If you don’t have enough growth hormone in your body, it will be hard to grow.

• The Intensities exercises such as jumping, sprinting, etc helps to increase amount of growth hormone released into your blood. This allows your body to grow taller naturally.

• Proper sleep is vital. Remember the first 2 hours of sleep are very important because that is the time when your body produces and releases the most growth hormone. Not getting enough sleep can lower the amount of growth hormone that your body produces.

• Eating big meals with foods that have a high in sugars and carbohydrate will force your body to produce a large amount of insulin to help in digestion. This will effectively block out the flow of growth hormone into your blood stream.

• You will need to avoid eating any food or drinking any soft drinks in the 2 hours before bed. This is critical because you don’t want any insulin surges before and during your sleep.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Best way to gain muscle

Best way to gain muscle is a necessary basic knowledge for beginners who want to get start gaining muscle on the right way without any bad pain, time consuming and side effect to their body.

The reason many people gain muscle as they age, especially beginning in their 30s, is because they have less muscle than they had in their late teens and early twenties. As we age, our bodies naturally lose muscle, especially as we are less active in our lives. This muscle tissue loss results in a decreasing metabolic rate. And then, if you continue to eat like you did when you were younger. Then, you’ll slowly gain muscle, pound by pound, month by month, year by year, until one day you look in the mirror and wonder, “What happened?” The key to eliminating accumulated body fat is regaining your youthful metabolism by regaining your muscle.

The following is basic information of the best way to gain muscle that you need to know before gaining muscle:

To gain muscle, you need to consume more calories than you expend. Whether the surplus of calories is used to build muscle or fat depends largely on whether or not you place a demand for added strength on your body. How do you create such a demand? By consistently engaging in short intense bouts of resistance training that consists of mainly compound movements like any type of Push Up, Pull Up or Squat.

Keep a close eye on your body composition. If you notice yourself packing on more fat than you feel comfortable with, back off the calories a bit. On the other hand, if you’re not seeing any changes, bump up your calorie intake.

Keep in mind that if you’re trying to build serious muscle mass, it’s inevitable you’ll pack on a little fat at the same time. Don’t worry about it too much. Focus on eating enough and gaining strength. Then, after you’ve got your muscles, shift your focus to loosing body fat to show them off.

Key points of best way to gain muscle:
- Consume 500 - 1000 more calories than you expend daily.
- Maintain a well balanced diet. 1.5 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight with an even split of carbs and mostly unsaturated fats for the remaining calories.
- Eat frequent meals, 5 - 6 per day, every 2.5 - 3.5 hours, with plenty of whole pieces of fruit, raw or steamed vegetables, nuts, seeds, meats, fish, and diary.
- Consistently strength train.

Whether you want to lose fat, gain muscle, or do both, strength training should be the core of your conditioning with starting it right on best way to gain muscle.

Why am I not losing weight?

You are not losing weight is caused by many reasons whether you’ve tried wrong kind of exercises and diets, and even some people get disappointed and give up eventually when they are not losing weight with trying a lot of their efforts.

Here is might be helpful information why some people are not losing weight as they would like to be.

It is a myth that doing prolonged steady state training usually maintaining a target heart rate for 30 to 60 minutes like aerobics or cardio is the best way to burn calories and achieve cardiovascular health. Ever plod along on a treadmill that tells you the number of calories burned? You might go 45 minutes before you hit 300 calories. Well, guess what? That’s 300 total calories burned in that time, and not 300 calories above what your baseline metabolism would have burned anyway, even while at rest. That’s the reason the exercise machine asks your weight: To calculate your baseline metabolic rate. The average male burns 105 calories at rest in 45 minutes. Those 195 extra calories that the exercise actually
Burned only 195 calories more than if you had been taking a nap can be undone by half a plain bagel in half a minute. And aerobic exercise typically spurns your appetite enough to more than offset those few actual calories burned.

More bad news for aerobic activity: Whether it’s running, cycling, or a step class, the main reason it gets easier the more you do it, is not because of improved cardiovascular conditioning, but because of improved economy of motion. For the most part, it doesn’t get easier because of muscular endurance, but because your body is becoming more efficient at that particular movement. You require less strength and oxygen than you did before because your body’s nervous system is adapting. Wasted movements are eliminated, necessary movements are refined, and muscles that don’t need to be tensed are relaxed and eventually atrophied. This is why marathon runners will huff and puff if they cycle for the first time in years.

Aerobic training actually causes muscle wasting because the body is programmed to adapt to whatever demands we place on it. Long low-intensity aerobic training only requires the smallest and weakest, “slow-twitch” muscle fibers to fire off again and again. The other, stronger and larger, “fast-twitch” muscle fibers are not necessary for the task and become a burden to carry and supply with oxygen. The body has no demand for extra muscle beyond what is needed to perform a relatively easy movement over and over. So your body adapts by actually burning muscle.

Muscle is the most metabolically expensive tissue we have: It takes between 50 and 100 calories a day just to keep one pound of muscle alive, for both men and women, even if you are completely inactive. An extra five pounds of muscle can burn up to 15,000 calories in a month that’s the equivalent of two pounds of fat. Muscle is the single greatest tool for losing weight. Increased muscle mass let’s you are losing weight with less attention paid to calorie counting and food selection otherwise you are not losing weight effectively.

But with consistent aerobic exercise, over time, you’re far more likely to burn five pounds of muscle. That means your body will burn at least 250 less calories a day. And as your body becomes more efficient at running, those 195 calories you burn on the treadmill will decrease to about 125. So let’s do the math: You burn 125 calories above your resting metabolic rate each day you do aerobic exercise. Then add the minimum 250 calories you do not burn due to muscle loss caused by this exercise. After all you’re huffing and puffing, you are now 125 calories in the wrong direction and that’s definitely causing you not losing weight efficiently.