Today a staggering 63.4 percent of Australian adults are overweight or obese -- well over half of our nation's population. That's almost two in three adults. This is a steady increase considering we were at 56.3 percent just 10 years ago. Clearly Australia is getting progressively more overweight.
That is the conclusion of a new study by Israeli researchers published July 4 in Nature Medicine.
During pregnancy, early interventions to improve diet and exercise lowers the risk for gestational diabetes and improve outcomes for women and their babies. But one size does not fit all when it comes to pregnancy weight gain. Physiologic and metabolic factors, societal, ethnic, and cultural differences can all influence weight during pregnancy experts highlight.
Stress has a huge impact on our mental and physical health? It can be a degrading agent in our lives if not dealt with properly. One of the biggest sources of stress is financial stress. How are we going to pay our bills this month? How to pay for tuition? What are we going to eat? How to pay for that unexpected cost that came up yesterday? How could I even contemplate starting the business of my dreams with my current financial situation?
Midlife memory lapses may reflect a shift in the type of information the brain focuses on during memory formation and retrieval, rather than a decline in cognitive function, a new imaging study suggests.
Steve Wanner is a highly respected 37-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, married with four young children. When we met him a year ago, he was working 12- to 14-hour days, felt perpetually exhausted, and found it difficult to fully engage with his family in the evenings, which left him feeling guilty and dissatisfied. He slept poorly, made no time to exercise, and seldom ate healthy meals, instead grabbing a bite to eat on the run or while working at his desk.
Celebrity Nutrition & Fitness Expert JJ Virgin helps clients lose weight fast by breaking free from food intolerance. She shares that, “The key becomes planning intelligently. A little self-control coupled with these seven strategies helps me navigate any social function with grace, dignity, and no lingering morning-after regret.”
One in three Australians suffer from such extreme sleep deprivation that their lives are in constant turmoil, according to The Age.com.au. American sleep researcher William C. Dement declared in his book The Promise of Sleep that we are a “sleep-sick society”. In Australia 70% of all visits to the doctor involve some underlying sleep disorder which cost the country $10 Billion annually.…
According to the NIH, 18 Million US adults meditate which is 8% of the population. The benefits of meditation are overwhelmingly positive and the research to support it continues to grow. Australian companies are not only taking notice but starting to measure the improvements staff experience from regular meditation compared with those that don’t. IBM and NAB are encouraging mindfulness amongst their staff. Change leader Anna Phillips says, “IBM introduced its mindfulness program in leadership training and found management teams became fitter, healthier, less stressed and interacted better with workers.” They then rolled it out further and got the same result.
We all have different sensors that provide information to our brain about our bodies and our environment. The brain uses this information to ensure that we are safe by sending messages to different parts of our body in order to react appropriately. This reaction can be automatic, e.g. to pull your hand away from a hot stove or the reaction can also be planned, e.g. to close the window when you are cold.
“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Wrote Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789. Despite our amazing advancement in medicine since Franklin’s time it is still not well known how and what constitutes "a good death". We naturally tend to focus a lot of our lives on living a good life but give very little, if any, serious consideration or instruction for how we would like to die. At what level of illness and incapacitation do we wish for our carers not to revive us or keep us alive on life support? What dignity consideration would we really want those we love to observe and consider in supervising our care?
You have probably heard a hundred times that it is important to eat together as a family but it is not always as easy as it sounds. You might work late so the kids eat before you’re home...your child may be transitioning from baby food to family foods – or not.. Someone in the family may require different food, for example if they have a food allergy.. or sometimes, it’s simply habits such as TV which destroy the family mealtime. Learning to eat well needs to be just that, learnt! If a child has no model, we can’t really expect them to understand how to eat well. We know that until adolescence, parents or main caregivers have the biggest influence on a childs’ eating behaviour. So if you want your child to eat…
Chinese and Ayurveda medicine have been using ginger for medicinal and healing purposes for centuries. In the west it has been recognized as a good natural food flavoring however somewhat over looked in most households as a good medicinal food to include as a staple ingredient.
Yoga may lessen pain and improve function in patients with chronic, nonspecific low back pain, a new Cochrane review suggests. Low back pain is a common and potentially disabling condition. Researchers calculate that 38.9% -85% of people will suffer lower back pain in their lifetime. Low back pain is associated with loss of work productivity, poor quality of life, and high medical expenses. And it represents a substantial economic burden on society.…
Brisbane Physiotherapist Sean Thomson commonly treats shoulder pain and explains there can be many causes and just as many effective treatments. When nerves are compressed however, the signs and symptoms are unique to a condition referred to as Thoracic Outlet Syndrome (TOS). The thoracic outlet, is the space between the clavicle, first rib and manubrium (upper sternum). This space is dynamic and therefore changes in size with the movement of the shoulder. Thoracic outlet syndrome represents a diverse group of disorders that have one feature in common, the compression of any one or more of the neurovascular structures traversing through the thoracic outlet space (brachial plexus, subclavian vein/artery). There are three types of thoracic outlet syndrome which are caused by three different physiological scenarios each resulting in similar pain and restriction for the patient but…
Social media is really handy to see what our friends are up to with a few swipes on our phones and to capture and share special events in our busy lives. Once in a blue moon you might even watch an inspiring or uplifting video or laugh out loud watching some most unfortunate mishap videos. Sensis data reveals, “More than a third of people now access social media more than five times per day (35%), which is up from 26% just last year. This begs the question, how much is too much?
Albert Einstein as a boy played with simple building blocks which some feel had a considerable effect on the way he thought later in life. He famously said "Imagination is everything”. A lot of educators like renowned child educator, Maria Montessori tend to agree. She shares, “Play is the child’s work.” Children are not just playing when they play, but they are working. Play is an important part of child development, and the types of toys that a child interacts with shapes their understanding of the world around them. Toys are the tools children use to accomplish their work, but it is best for the number of toys that a child has to be limited.
New international research shows that sleep deprivation disrupts and slows normal neural activity in specific regions of the brain. Israeli researchers have discovered it doesn’t just slow down our reactions, it also slows down individual neurons in our brain.
It is well known that exercise has a positive influence on cognitive function during ageing. However, the optimal dose, intensity and duration of exercise for improving cognitive function is not known, nor are the mechanisms by which exercise may prevent or even reverse cognitive decline. Join our study to help identify the ‘sweet spot’ for exercise and memory. How much is enough? How much is too little?
