An extensive review of relevant research has demonstrated that the more physically active schoolchildren are, the better they do academically. 
Researchers analyzed 14 studies, ranging in size from as few as 50 participants to as many as 12,000. 

All of the studies involved children between the ages of 6 and 18.
According to the authors:
“Physical activity and sports are generally promoted for their positive effect on children’s physical health; regular participation in physical activity in childhood is associated with a decreased cardiovascular risk in youth and adulthood.
There is also a growing body of literature suggesting that physical activity has beneficial effects on several mental health outcomes, including health-related quality of life and better mood states.
In addition… there is a strong belief that regular participation in physical activity is linked to enhancement of brain function and cognition, thereby positively influencing academic performance.
There are several hypothesized mechanisms for why exercise is beneficial for cognition, including:
(1)  Increased blood and oxygen flow to the brain
(2)  Increased levels of norepinephrine and endorphins resulting in a reduction of stress and an improvement of mood
(3)  Increased growth factors that help to create new nerve cells and support synaptic plasticity
… The increasing pressures to improve academic scores often lead to additional instructional time for subjects such as mathematics and language at the cost of time for being physically active. Given the suggested relationship and the ongoing discussions on the replacement of physical education lessons by academic subjects, we aimed to review the evidence on the longitudinal relationship between these two variables…
To summarize, the literature provides inconclusive evidence on the positive longitudinal relationship between physical activity and academic performance. However, there is a strong general belief that this relationship is present, and research in this area is ongoing.”

Exercise and Academic Performance
Keeping kids active at school is a superb way to increase learning, focus and even test results. As many of you reading this have likely experienced, if your mind is feeling cluttered or you’re having a mid-afternoon slump, a brisk walk or a quick workout can give you a renewed sense of clarity and focus.  This is certainly true for kids too.

Two years ago, ABC News reported on a special program being implemented at Naperville Central High School, where students could take part in a dynamic gym class at the beginning of the day, and had access to exercise bikes and balls throughout the day in their classrooms. The results were astounding. Those who participated nearly doubled their reading scores, and math scores increased 20-fold!

Research has shown that after 30 minutes on the treadmill, students solve problems up to 10 percent more effectively.
Although it’s becoming more widely known that physical activity has a direct result on brain function, many schools in the US are removing rather than improving their phys ed programs… This means it’s up to you to encourage your child to stay active after school and on weekends in order to reap the wonderful brain-boosting benefits that exercise has to offer.
 
Recource Mercola.com

According to the findings from a 2010 study that didn’t get any widespread attention, vitamin D is a highly effective way to avoid influenza.

In fact, children taking low doses of Vitamin D3 were shown to be 42 percent less likely to come down with the flu.

The randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled study included 430 children aged 6-15, who were followed between December 2008 and March 2009.

Half were given 1,200 IU’s of vitamin D3 daily, while the other half received a placebo. Influenza strains were determined through lab testing of nose and throat swabs.

Eighteen of the children taking vitamin D contracted influenza Type A, compared to 31 children in the placebo group.
Type B influenza rates were unaffected by vitamin D use, however, the illness resulting from Type B influenza strains is typically milder than Type A.

Considering the fact that influenza was reduced by 42 percent at a dose of just 1,200 IU’s a day, it’s possible that even better results might be obtained with higher dosages—depending on just how deficient you are to begin with, of course, because it’s not really the dosage that matters; it’s the amount of vitamin D in your blood.

Hope this letter finds you healthy, happy and warm this Holiday season! We would like to take a moment to thank you for your continued support of the Heshmat Pain Management Clinic.  We are so thankful to have such wonderful patients, and we continue to strive to bring you the best of Integrative Medicine and non-invasive pain management.
 
Being that the end of the year is rapidly approaching, if you have any discomfort don’t let your insurance coverage go to waste! Please feel free to call our office to see what coverage you have left that you can use before the end of the year!  Some of you have visits that can be used toward massage, acupuncture, or chiropractic visits.  Just give us a call and we can give you a personalized break down of what you may be able to use to get you pain/stress free for the New Year!
 
Also, keep in mind that we have gift certificates available for massage at a special rate of $65/hr.  They make the perfect stocking stuffer, or holiday gift!
 
Thank you again for being a part of our clinic family in 2011, and looking forward to a healthy and pain free 2012!
 
The the warmest of Holiday wishes!
The Heshmat Pain Management Clinic Team.

Laptop and desktop computers—what’s the difference? Visit the Palo Alto Medical Foundation website to read an article on laptop ergonomics. http://www.pamf.org/teen/life/ergonomics/

Garlic has a truly astonishing number of health benefits. Green Med Info has assembled studies that list more than 150 beneficial effects that garlic can have on your health.

The studies show that garlic:

• Inhibits cholesterol accumulation
• Reduces risk for heart attack and stroke
• May be effective against drug-resistant bacteria
• Lessens cadmium-induced liver damage
• May have protective effects against cancer

According to one of the studies linked on the site, garlic may also help fight multi-drug resistant tuberculosis:

“Alternate medicine practices with plant extracts including garlic should be considered to decrease the burden of drug resistance and cost in the management of diseases. The use of garlic against MDR-TB [multi-drug resistant tuberculosis] may be of great importance regarding public health.”
 
Garlic: One of Nature’s Most Impressive Foods
Garlic has been treasured for its medicinal properties for centuries. In ancient times, Greek and Roman soldiers ate garlic before going off to war, to enhance their strength and endurance.
It also happens to be one of the most heavily researched plant foods around. At GreenMedInfo you can find 133 studies involving 153 different conditions that garlic may benefit. Among them:

• Atherosclerosis
• High blood pressure
• Cancer
• Gallstones
• Ear infections
• Mercury poisoning
• Diabetes
• Low immune function
• MRSA
• High triglycerides
• Candidiasis
•  Ulcerative colitis
• Wound healing
• Stroke Heart attack
• Bacterial infections

As you can see from the wide range of conditions it impacts, garlic exerts its benefits on multiple levels, offering anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-fungal and antioxidant properties. It’s thought that much of garlic’s therapeutic effect comes from its sulfur-containing compounds, such as allicin, which are also what give it its characteristic smell.

An Infection-Fighting, Heart-Protective, Cancer-Preventive Powerhouse
Researchers have revealed that as allicin digests in your body it produces sulfenic acid, a compound that reacts faster with dangerous free radicals than any other known compound. This is one of the reasons why I named garlic as one of the top seven anti-aging foods you can consume.
Garlic is also a triple threat against infections, offering antibacterial, antiviral and antifungal properties. Not only is it effective at killing antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including MRSA, but it also fights yeast infections, viruses and parasites.
Garlic also helps relax and enlarge the blood vessels in your body, improving blood flow, especially to your heart. This can help prevent conditions like high blood pressure and life-threatening events such as a heart attack or stroke. Garlic also inhibits the formation of plaques in your arteries, and prevents cholesterol from becoming oxidized, a condition that may contribute to heart disease.
This powerhouse food is also known to help increase your protection against at least five forms of cancer: breast, colon, ovarian, prostate and esophageal. In one study, the more often participants ate vegetables from the allium family, particularly garlic and onions, the lower their risk of certain cancers became.  Part of this effect may be due to garlic’s ability to increase tissue activities of phase II detoxification enzymes, which are necessary to help your body excrete chemicals and other toxins.
Interestingly, the allicin in garlic is so powerful it has even been found to help weight loss in rats fed a fructose-rich diet — which is virtually guaranteed to make most people gain weight. Animals being fed only the fructose-rich diet gained weight, but those whose diets were supplemented with allicin did not, and some even lost weight. Of course, this does not mean you can eat all the fructose you want and then eat a couple of cloves of garlic and expect to lose weight … but it does give you an idea of just how far-reaching garlic’s benefits appear to be.

The Healthiest Way to Eat Garlic
In many cases, eating whole foods is a far better approach to taking a supplement, and in the case of garlic this is especially true. Typically, garlic must be crushed or chopped in order to stimulate the process that converts alliin into the beneficial allicin. Once the garlic is cut, the active compound loses potency rapidly and will all but disappear within about an hour of chopping.
So the best way to eat garlic is to take a whole, fresh clove, chop it, smash it or press it, wait a few minutes for the reaction to occur, and then eat it. If you use jarred, powdered, or dried garlic, you will not get all the benefits that fresh garlic has to offer.

There’s an overwhelming amount of evidence confirming that physical exercise is a key player in disease reduction, optimal mental, emotional and physical health, and longevity. After reviewing 40 papers published between 2006 and 2010, researchers found that exercise reduces the risk of about two dozen health conditions, ranging from cancer and heart disease to type 2 diabetes, stroke, dementia and depression. Exercise also slows down the rate of aging itself, providing perhaps the closest example of a real life fountain of youth as we will ever find.
Ideally, you will have made exercise a regular part of your life long before you reach your “golden” years … but if you haven’t, there’s no better time to start than the present.  Research has shown that regular exercise, even initiated late in life, offers profound health benefits. For instance:

• Even a small amount of exercise may protect the elderly from long-term memory loss and even help reverse some of the effects of aging.
• Women between the ages of 75 and 85, all of whom had reduced bone mass or full-blown osteoporosis, were able to lower their fall risk with strength training and agility activities.
• Moderate exercise among those aged 55-75 may cut the risk of developing metabolic syndrome, which increases heart disease and diabetes risk.
• Among those who started exercising at age 50 and continued for 10 years, the rate of premature death declined dramatically, similar to giving up smoking and mirroring the level as seen among people who had been working out their entire lives.
• Exercise significantly improved muscle endurance and physical capacity among heart failure patients with an average age of 76.

Further, the older you get, the faster your muscles atrophy if you’re not regularly engaging in appropriate exercise, so the key to avoiding sarcopenia (age-related muscle loss) is to challenge your muscles with appropriately intense exercise. Age-related muscle loss affects about 10 percent of those over 60, with higher rates as age advances, but you can prevent this from occurring if you exercise.

For the Elderly Exercise Can, Quite Literally, Save Your Life
Exercise is a key to remaining steady on your feet as you get older, which is of incredible importance because not only are falls responsible for most fractures and traumatic brain injuries among the elderly, but those who fall can also develop an intense fear of falling again, which leads them to limit their activities and in turn increases their risk of falling even more.
So while it may seem like exercises to improve balance and strength are optional as you get older, they should really be viewed as a necessity — like eating and sleeping — as they can quite literally save your life. As you get older your muscle and bone mass decrease and the senses that guide your balance — vision, touch, proprioception — may all start to deteriorate, and this can make you unsteady on your feet.

By taking the time to do balance, strength and other exercises on a regular basis you can keep your sense of balance strong, and even restore what’s already been lost.

In a study published last year, eight weeks of balance training reduced slips and improved the likelihood of recovery from slips among the elderly. Separate research, which noted that “altered balance is the greatest collaborator towards falls in the elderly,” found balance training is effective in improving functional and static balance, mobility and falling frequency in elderly women with osteoporosis.

The ability to balance on one leg is also an important predictor of injury-causing falls, so if you know that you’d be shaky if you tried to stand on one foot, you’re at an increased risk of being hurt in a fall and should start appropriate exercises immediately.

Source mercola.com

A recent meta-analysis sought to evaluate the association between chocolate consumption and the risk of developing cardiometabolic disorders. “Cardiometabolic disorders” is a term that represents a cluster of interrelated risk factors that promote the development of coronary heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

These risk factors include:

• Hypertension
• Elevated fasting glucose
• High cholesterol levels
• Abdominal obesity
• Elevated triglycerides

In the featured analysis, researchers pooled the results of seven studies that collectively included more than 114,000 participants. Five of the seven studies reported a beneficial association between chocolate consumption and reduced risk of developing cardiometabolic disorders.

Bear in mind that not all chocolate is created equal. I’ll review that in more detail below. As a general rule, any time “chocolate” is evaluated for its health benefits, we’re dealing with dark unprocessed chocolate and/or raw cacao—not your average processed milk chocolate candy bar. That said, the featured analysis found that the highest levels of chocolate consumption were associated with:
37 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease, and
29 percent reduction in stroke

The authors concluded that:
“Based on observational evidence, levels of chocolate consumption seem to be associated with a substantial reduction in the risk of cardiometabolic disorders.”

Source Mercola.com

For years now, you’ve heard that the way to better health is to turn off the Boob Tube and get your body moving. But new evidence shows that cutting back on TV time does more than just help you slip in a little exercise. The fact is it can also add years to your life.

As reported in The Daily Mail, Time Healthland and MSNBC, a new study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine shows that every hour of TV watched by people age 25 or over equates to a 22-minute reduction in life expectancy.

The findings suggest that too much TV is as detrimental to longevity as smoking and lack of exercise.

 Time Healthland repo

What is “pre-diabetes?”

Pre-diabetes (also known as “impaired fasting glucose” or “impaired glucose tolerance”) is a condition in which your blood sugar(“glucose”) level is higher than normal, but not high enough to be classified as (type 2) diabetes. However, if you have pre-diabetes, you are at increased risk of developing diabetes. Without intervention, 25% with pre-diabetes will develop type 2 diabetes in as little as 3-5 years. But, progression from pre-diabetes to type 2 diabetes is not unavoidable. With healthy lifestyle changes, you may be able to bring your blood sugar level back to the range of normal.

What level qualifies as “pre-diabetes?”

A normal fasting blood glucose level (after 12 hours of fasting) should fall in the range of 65-100. Levels above 125 are considered diagnostic of type 2 diabetes. Thus fasting levels between 100 and 125 are considered to
reflect “pre-diabetes.”

Why is it important to prevent diabetes, type 2?

Diabetes is associated with many long-term complications, including heart disease and stroke, kidney disease, nerve damage, blindness, cataracts, glaucoma, serious infections requiring amputation, increased
risk of bacterial and fungal infections, osteoporosis, and increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

These conditions may develop gradually but are often associated with significant disability and possibly death. It is possible that even having “pre-diabetes” may put you at increased risk for some of these problems.

Are there any signs or symptoms associated with pre-diabetes?

Usually, there are no symptoms associated with pre-diabetes. However, it is important to watch for signs of
type 2 diabetes, which may include:

• Increased thirst
• Frequent urination
• Extreme hunger
• Unexplained weight loss
• Fatigue
• Blurred vision
• Slow-healing sores or frequent infections

Are there treatments for pre-diabetes?

Generally, the condition of pre-diabetes does not require medications. However, if your condition progresses to type 2 diabetes or if you have other more serious risk factors for cardiovascular disease, it may be necessary for you to undergo treatment to prevent the more serious complications associated with diabetes.

Is there anything I can do to manage my pre-diabetes and to prevent the onset of type 2 diabetes?

In general, maintaining a healthy lifestyle can be helpful in preventing the progression of your pre-diabetes, even if diabetes already affects members of your family. Some general principles to employ include:

• Choose a variety of healthy foods and a vegetarian-based diet. Choose fresh fruits and vegetables, legumes, and whole grains (all are high in fiber, which helps to slow the release of glucose into
  your blood stream). Limit sugars, sweets, and the “white” breads, rice, noodles/pasta.

Sue Kim, M.D., M.S.
Heshmat Pain Management Clinic

Choose “100% whole” wheat or grain and “low-carb” varieties. It may be helpful to include foods with a low glycemic index (GI)/glycemic load (GL).