It’s a windy cold winter’s day and roast chicken and vegies with gravy is what you’ve been dreaming of all afternoon, ever since your partner called to share what was planned for dinner tonight. The aromas as you walk through the front door are what dreams are made of. As you fall asleep that night, you can still remember that first juicy bite. The last thing you expected was to be taken to hospital at 3am vomiting uncontrollably! You were just another of the 5.4 million cases of food poisoning on average which occur each year in Australia (including 120 deaths). This results in 2.1 million days of lost work each year at an estimated annual cost of $1.25 billion. A large majority of these cases of foodborne illness involve Norovirus,…
Acetaminophen is the key ingredient in many household pain relievers. Used to relieve mild to moderate pain from headaches, muscle aches, menstrual periods, colds and sore throats, toothaches, backaches, and reactions to vaccinations (shots), and to reduce fever. Acetaminophen is in a class of medications called analgesics (pain relievers) and antipyretics (fever reducers). It works by changing the way the body senses pain and by cooling the body.
The American National Institute of Health did a study of hundreds of thousands of Americans and then followed them for years. What they found was that the frequent consumption of sweetened beverages, especially diet drinks, may increase depression risk among older adults. Whether soda, fruit-flavoured drinks, or iced tea, those artificially sweetened drinks appeared to carry higher risk. There was a benefit in coffee drinkers compared to non-drinkers, but if they added sugar, much of the benefits appeared to disappear, and if they added Equal or Sweet-and-Low, the risk appeared to go up.
Transitioning to an organic mattress and organic bedding is a hefty investment, but many health experts including Dr Ellen Vora believe it's worth it. We spend so much of our lives sleeping and its impact on our health and function in life is enormous.
Does using a mobile phone increase the risk of developing brain cancer? As many times as it has been asked, there is seemingly no simple answer to that question, as studies continue to produce conflicting results. But the answer may lie somewhere in the middle between a yes and a no, according to Dariusz Leszczynski, PhD, adjunct professor of biochemistry, University of Helsinki, Finland.
Traditionally, the recommendation has been to limit saturated fatty acid intake in favour of unsaturated fatty acids. Because butter is one of the foods highest in saturated fat, the advice often given by practitioners has been to limit butter consumption.
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.
