Curb The Carb and Sugar Cravings With A Sleep Diet

Add Some Quality Sleep To Improve Your Diet

Not sleeping well can lead to a number of problems and unfortunately, many adults often get less sleep than they need—lesser than the generally recommended eight hours of sleep a night.

Recent study conducted by the King’s College London suggests that increased sleep can be a clear-cut technique to help pare sugar consumption resulting to improved health.

Sugar, as we all know, plays a key role in the development of many of the dreadful diseases we fear most, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s to name a few. As the amount of sleep is reduced, our blood sugar increases. With ample sleep, people can wake up tired and reach to the constant surge of sugar and simple carbs which puts a significant burden on the pancreas.  This leads to a condition called prediabetes which affects at least one-third of the American population these days.

Researchers further looked at the effect of increasing sleep hours on nutrient absorption. They found that extending sleep patterns resulted in a 10-gram reduction in reported intake of free sugars compared to baseline levels. The researchers also noticed trends for reduced intake of total carbohydrates reported by the sleep extension group.

Participants of the sleep extension group underwent sleep management personified to their lifestyle. These are abstention from coffee before bedtime, setting up a relaxing routine, not going to bed too full or hungry and a recommended bed time.

So if you want to stay healthy, begin tracking your sleep now!

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Have You Given Much Thought About Your Urine?

What’s The Normal Color of Urine?

A lot of foods can change the color of your urine. Eating a whole bunch of beets can make your urine red, while eating asparagus can make it green. The color of the urine is not the barometer for health, unless you want to make sure that you are hydrated and see that it is relatively clear. If your urine is a darker shade, like dark yellow or even amber, this means you are not getting enough fluids. Urine ought to be closer to clear than it is to dark yellow.

How Often Should You Urinate?

There is no normal amount per se. Healthy people with healthy kidneys produce 2 liters of urine a day (about 68 ounces) since normal bladder capacity is between 300 to 400 cubic centimeters (that means going about five times per day).  What may be normal for one person may not be for another so there is no need to compare. If you feel like you are going more than normal, discuss this with your doctor. It could signal something more serious like diabetes.

*See How You Can Reverse Diabetes With Nutrition

What’s The Proper Way To Urinate?

Men can either pee standing up or sitting down. But men who have to sit down to pee should see a doctor. Sitting down to urinate to push it out is called “credeing”. This means that you basically have to use your abdominal muscles to pee which is a sign of a problem. However it is a good idea for men of a certain age to sit down even if they are just urinating. Older guys are more likely to get up at night to void, and risk of falling increases with aging.

Is ‘Breaking The Seal” Myth True?

You’re out to drinks with friends when you feel the sudden urge to urinate. It is commonly known as “breaking the seal”— the idea that your initial jaunt to the restroom will trigger a barrage of trips thereafter. When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. There is also no truth about healing a jellyfish sting by urinating on it.

What If There Is Blood On Your Urine?

While beets may make your pee look red, urinating blood is a different story. Blood in your urine isn’t something to be ignored. It may mean something as serious as bladder or prostate cancer, but also as benign as having exercised or developed a bladder urinary tract infection. See your doctor.

Does It Hurt When You Urinate?

Painful urination could be signs of a bladder or urinary tract infection, a sexually transmitted disease or stricture (abnormal narrowing) of your urethra. You should see a doctor. This is more common in women than in men.

Is it Bad To Hold Your Pee In?

Holding your pee in during that long bus ride home from work isn’t inherently an issue. But making it a chronic habit may not be the best idea, as that’s training your bladder to hold more and more urine beyond the 300 to 400 cc limit.

What Does It Mean When You Urinate Too Much?

This can be a sign of a larger health issue. People with diabetes often will present with urinating too much. This includes both the more rare diabetes insipidus (a salt and water metabolism disorder that makes you thirsty and indeed, pee heavily) and mellitus (what is generally referred to as diabetes, when your blood has too much sugar). Peeing too much could also be a sign of overactive bladder, a chronic condition although for some folks it may manifest as the sudden urge to urinate.

*See Meal Planning For People With Diabetes

Can You Drink Your Urine?

Urine is sterile but that doesn’t mean you should drink it. The trend of “urotherapy” in which you drink urine or put it on yourself in hopes of achieving clearer skin and an energy boost isn’t generally advisable unless you are fighting to survive.

Do You Feel Like You Want To Pee But Nothing Comes Out?

This happens to a lot of people and very common both in men and women. Usually it is your bladder kind of being overactive or overly sensitive. It could however be a sign of something more serious depending on factors like the age, medical history or tagalong symptoms.

Originally Published at US News – Health 

 

 

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We Get Tired. But When Could Fatigue Mean A Medical Problem?

When people are asked about how they’re doing, “tired” is often part of the response. A 2015 YouGov.com poll found 38 percent of Americans were often under fatigue and poorly rested at least four days of the week. Research from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from a few years earlier found that 15 percent of women and 10 percent of men said they were “very tired or exhausted” most days or every day of the week.

“It’s very, very common,” says Susan Hingle, chair of the board of regents for the American College of Physicians and an internist at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

If you’re tired all the time, should you worry? It can be hard not to, since a Google search will show you that fatigue can be a symptom of a host of diseases, including serious ones.

Before you go there, consider the most obvious problem, especially if you’re young and otherwise healthy: Maybe you’re not sleeping enough. The CDC reported last year that one-third of Americans aren’t getting seven or more hours of sleep per day. Some studies put that percentage even higher. If you are a woman with children, each kid increases the odds of insufficient sleep by 50 percent, according to a study presented at the recent meeting of the American Academy of Neurology. The study did not find the same result for men with kids.

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It doesn’t mean you should blow off your tiredness, but it does mean it might be helped by what sleep experts call “sleep hygiene.” That means working backward from the time you need to wake up and setting a bedtime so you get sufficient sleep, then sticking to it. Limit daytime napping if you don’t fall asleep until late at night. Cut out the caffeine and alcohol close to bedtime. Exercise regularly. And keep screens — televisions, smartphones and tablets — out of the bedroom if possible, and stop using them an hour or two before bedtime. The light they emit and the stimulation they provide may contribute to sleep problems.

If it doesn’t seem to just be a matter of getting an hour or so more of sleep, talk to your doctor. There is a wide range of medical conditions associated with feeling tired all the time, some more serious than others.

“We try to get [people] to define what they mean by ‘tired,’ ” says Hingle. For example, are you sleepy during the day? Or has your ability to get around and exercise without becoming exhausted or out of breath changed? John Meigs Jr., a family physician in Centreville, Ala., and president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, says he has a patient who reported a decline in his stamina for turkey hunting from last season to this one. “He couldn’t walk,” he says. “That’s a pretty big change in a year.” That kind of exhaustion is a common sign of heart disease, he says, so it’s important to get it checked out.

Other potentially serious ailments include sleep apnea, which can cause people to feel tired all the time even if they’re getting the recommended number of sleep hours per day, says Hingle. In addition to not feeling rested despite sufficient sleep, symptoms include snoring or gasping for air at night. Sleep apnea can increase the risk of heart disease and needs to be taken seriously, so bring it up with your doctor. According to the American College of Physicians, treatments for sleep apnea can include weight loss, if appropriate, or a CPAP device.

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One condition many people have heard of is chronic fatigue syndrome, which is a serious disease that leads to more than everyday tiredness. According to the latest definition, it includes profound fatigue that lasts for at least six months, cognitive impairment and total exhaustion after even minor exertion. Those symptoms require medical attention. The Institute of Medicine estimates between 836,000 and 2.5 million Americans suffer from the disease.

Some people may be tired because they’re anemic from losing blood, says Hingle. That might happen in women who have heavy menstrual periods, which can occur around menopause. A physician may advise you to take iron supplements, but you should be checked out to rule out any other causes of anemia. Colon cancer can also produce blood loss in the stool that leads to anemia, so for some people the resulting tiredness can be an early indication that they need to be tested for the disease.

There is no medical evidence supporting a diagnosis of “adrenal fatigue,” a term that has been used to describe a group of symptoms including tiredness, according to the Endocrine Society.

Type 2 diabetes can also produce fatigue, though it would be unusual for that to be the only symptom, says Hingle. (You’d very likely also be peeing a lot and thirsty all the time.) Same with hypothyroidism; it may make you tired, but you’d also probably notice changes in your skin and hair, as well as constipation, she says. Fatigue is also linked to depression and anxiety, so if you’re experiencing signs of those, or have noticed your sleepiness comes on the heels of stressful life events, talk to a physician, says Meigs.

Now You Can Stop The Stress That’s Making You Fat!

The MELT Diet is specifically designed to break down the stress hormones causing weight gain which makes it impossible for your body to lose weight naturally.

***Copyright 2017 NPR
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New Discovery Revealed An Unknown Appetite Suppression

There has been plenty of recent research focusing on how your gut bacteria can send messages to your brain controlling appetite and feelings of satiation, but a recent discovery by researchers from the Columbia University Medical Centre has revealed a previously unknown appetite-regulating mechanism that is secreted by bone cells.

The CUMC team has been researching the function of bones for many years and back in 2007 made a major discovery. They revealed that our skeletons function as an endocrine organ with bone cells releasing hormones that are known to be crucial in regulating energy metabolism.

The team’s initial studies discovered that bone cells release a hormone called osteocalcin, which controls the regulation of blood sugar. After disabling a certain gene in the bone-forming cells (osteoblasts) of mice, it was noted that the animal’s appetite significantly dropped.

“Since osteocalcin does not regulate appetite, we knew that a second bone hormone had to be involved in this process,” explains associate professor Stavroula Kousteni, who led the study.

This mysterious second hormone was recently revealed as being lipocalin 2, a protein known to contribute to obesity and previously linked to activating neurons in the brain related to appetite suppression. Until now it was thought that lipocalin 2 was mainly secreted by fat cells (adipocytes) but the CUMC research found levels of the hormone to be ten times higher in osteoblasts than previously found in adipocytes.

Read the full article 

 

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Gluten-Free Diets: Where Do We Stand?

Over the past few decades, millions of people around the world have distanced themselves from gluten, eliminating gluten sources from their diets, even if their doctors haven’t recommended that they do so.

Gluten-free diets has a long history of treating people with celiac disease, a digestive disorder in which your body is abnormally sensitive to gluten, a protein component of wheat, rye, barley and crossbreeds of those grains.

Now, going gluten-free has become something of a nationwide obsession in the United States and is increasing in popularity more globally.

“It is now the most popular diet in Hollywood,” said Dr. Alessio Fasano, director of the Center for Celiac Research and Treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital, who has led world-renowned research on gluten.

Nonetheless, “this is a medical intervention,” he said. “For those who just brush it off that this is a fad and a fashion lifestyle, be considerate of the people that survive on this diet. For people with celiac disease, the gluten-free diet is like insulin for diabetics.”

There is little research to support the idea that a gluten-free diet can help improve health problems aside from celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, according to the US National Library of Medicine.

So how did gluten-free eating shift from a rare treatment approach to a trendy way of living? Here’s a look at the rise and fall of gluten and how the gluten-free diet has shaped public health over the years.

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