Health Literacy

Archive for November, 2009

It’s harder for your body to utilize excess calories that are consumed at one time, “explains Catherine Christie, Ph.D., R.D. director of nutrition programs at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville and coauthor of Fat Is Not Your Fate (Fareside, 1005). So instead of consuming the bulk of your calories at dinner, which is what many people do, it’s better to allot 500 each breakfast, lunch and dinner and to include two 150-calorie snacks and burn them of through the day.

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Source: admin

To raise health literacy you have to start early. Introduce Home Economics, Basic physiology & biology into the primary school curriculum.

Home economics to feature food. That is food selection, purchase, transport, storage, preparation, cooking methods, presentation and hygiene.

Regrettably, that requires the lead time to train the educators before this can be introduced but in 30 years health literacy will be significantly improved.

Source: yourHealth | What should we do to boost the health literacy of Australians?

What a better opening for our January SharpBrains Summit than to have Marian C. Diamond, one of the pioneers of neuroplasticity research since the 1960s, introduce us to the human brain, its anatomy and function, and implications from neuroplasticity for brain health and performance at any age.

Marian C. Diamond, Ph.D., is Professor of Neuroscience and Anatomy at UC-Berkeley  and one of the world’s foremost researchers on neuroplasticity and enrichment since the 1960s . She is author of more than 100 scientific articles and three books, including Enriching Heredity (Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 1988) and The Magic Trees of the Mind (Plume, 1999). In particular, she is interested in studying the effects of the external environment, aging, and immune responses on the cerebral neocortex.

You can read a number of her public education essays online:

• The Brain . . . Use It or Lose It: a core component of brain exercise is challenge. Passive observation is not enough.
• Why Einstein’s Brain?:  Dr. Diamond describes how she came to be interested in studying the particularities in Einstein’s brain back in the early 1980s.
• Successful Aging of the Healthy Brain: beautiful essay on how to keep our brains and minds active and fit throughout our lifetime.
• Response of the Brain to Enrichment: although the brain possesses a relatively constant structure, the ever-changing cerebral cortex is powerfully shaped by experiences before birth, during youth and, in fact, throughout life.
• The Significance of Enrichment: here, the brain physiological changes are explored in more detail.
• My Search for Love and Wisdom in the Brain: “The frontal lobe is undoubtedly the most important area to culminate the neural processes leading to what we call wisdom and the most refined sense of love.”

To learn more about the agenda of the SharpBrains Summit and the incredible roster of speakers who have agreed to participate in this important event, click on SharpBrains Summit.

Source: Alvaro Fernandez

Cervical spondylosis is a condition that occurs when there is abnormal wear and tear of the bones and the cartilages of the neck.

This is caused by the wearing away and consequent degeneration of the cushions between the neck vertebrae and the joints of the cervical spine.

Abnormal growths, also known as spurs on the surface of the spinal bones are also a characteristic of cervical spondylosis.

What happens is that over time, this wearing away of the bones and cartilages can cause compression upon the nerve roots and the situation is further aggravated, the spinal cord also gets added to the equation and the arms and legs also get affected by the disorder.

By the time women reach the age of 60, most will show some signs of cervical spondylosis since age is the prime causal factor that brings about the sort of wear and tear that sufferers exhibit.

Spine surgery, injury or arthritis also increase the chances of developing this disorder, which usually exhibits symptoms such as

• Neck pain or stiffness. This is the sort of pain that may spread outward to the shoulders and the arms. Many experience a reduced ability to bend the head towards the shoulders or fully rotate the head.
• Numbness or loss of sensation or even change in sensation of the affected area, which is usually the neck , shoulders and arms but may also affect the legs.
• A feeling of weakness in the arms (and sometimes legs) can be observed due to deterioration of certain nerve roots or damage to the spinal cord. When this kind of damage does occur, it causes one’s reflexes to slow down as well.
• Headaches are also a symptom, but unlike usual headaches, those which are symptomatic of the cervical spondylosis are situated at the back of the head.
• Some people may also experience symptoms such as loss of balance and incontinence (this usually occurs only when there is some amount of compression in the spinal cord).

For those women that exhibit any or more of these symptoms, they may require investigation to detect if it is indeed cervical spondylosis that is causing the symptoms.

Exams and tests include a CT scan or an MRI, an X ray of the neck or the entire spine, and EMG (Electromyography is a test that checks the health of the muscles and nerves that control muscles) or an X ray of the neck and spine that is taken after the injection of a dye into the spinal column.

Source: admin2