Swimming As A Recreational Activity - 7 Facts About Swimming That You May Not Know

Swimming As A Recreational Activity - 7 Facts About Swimming That You May Not Know Swimming is one of the safest and most effective forms of exercise. It is almost impossible to get injured while swimming and it is also a great workout for your body. Whether you are trying to lose weight or stay in shape, swimming has something to offer just about anyone. Here are 7 facts about recreational swimming that you may or may not know.

*You can swim for exercise no matter what your age. Some people teach their infants and toddlers how to swim so that they will learn to love and respect the water at a very early age. I also know people well into their eighties who swim regularly to stay in shape.

*An estimated 65 thousand people in the United States alone do not know how to swim. Many of them learned as young children but never go to a pool, lake, river, or ocean anymore and have forgotten how to swim over the years. Others were never taught and continue to avoid the activity altogether. It was once thought that knowing how to swim was important for safety reasons, but now it is pretty much left up to the individual.

*Swimming in extremely cold water can be very dangerous. People with heart conditions or other ailments, as well as elderly people, should avoid swimming in water that is too cold. Cold water cools down the human body 25 times faster that cold air does, so swimming in water that is below about 15 degrees Celsius should never be undertaken. This can lead to thermal shock, hypothermia, and eventual death.

*Swimming is also a very safe form of exercise because it is considered to be low impact and easy on the bones and joints. You can do exercises in the water using floats and weights and enjoy a good workout without worrying about serious injury. This is especially true if you have arthritis or other types of physical limitations.

*It really is true that you shouldn't swim for about an hour after eating. This is primarily because your body is digesting your food and you may get a cramp during the time right after you eat. Allow your body to rest after eating and then go into the water.

*Swimming is a good way to lose weight. This form of exercise will stimulate your entire body and could lead to an increase in metabolism over time. If you are trying to lose weight, swim for at least twenty minutes three or four times each week.

*Going swimming is very relaxing and has been compared to yoga and meditation in terms of its soothing effect on the mind and body. So swim often and remember that some of the most intelligent and creative people in the world choose swimming as their form of exercise and relaxation.

Swimming As A Recreational Activity - 7 Facts About Swimming That You May Not Know
By Connie Ragen Green
Source: http://ezinearticles.com

Native Nutrition Photos

If you enjoy taking photos and/or looking at photos, there's a new Flickr photo group devoted to photos related to native nutrition, nourishing traditions, and paleo-diet. It includes photos of healthy traditional food, meals, food preparation and processing methods, cooking tools and techniques, as well as healthy people and animals, gardens, farms, and ways of growing your own food.


The idea behind this photo group is to share healthy ideas in the form of photos, along with helpful comments so that we can all help each other to learn and grow. The photos on this post are linked back to the original photos on Flickr. To see the group photo page click on this link: Native Nutrition. On the group photo page, click on the "More photos ..." link to see all of the group photos. Click on the individual photos to see a larger image, along with information about the photo and any comments.


If you've never heard of Flickr before, it may be the world's largest repository of photos. Typically, about 3,000 to 4,000 photos are uploaded to Flicker *every minute* from all over the world. Today it ranked number 39 among the world's most visited web sites.


If you'd like to join the group, it's easy. You can get a free account at Flickr for up to 200 photos. If you have SBC-Yahoo internet service, you get the "pro" account for free, which includes unlimited uploading of photos and otherwise costs about $25 a year. No April fooling :)


Hope to see you soon - your photos, that is :)

A Real Farm!

I recently went to the Sand Creek Farm and dairy for a tour. About 10 or 15 families came for the tour. It's a beautiful and ideal farm run by Ben and Alysha Godfrey, near Cameron, Texas. The tour was great fun for all. There was a visit to the dairy, a ride on a horse drawn trailer, a visit to the field for a romp in some haystacks and a hands-on demonstration of plowing with horses, a visit to a pasture with pigs, chickens, and cows, and an opportunity to collect eggs from the hen house.

Click here to see a set of photos from the tour.
The photos can be viewed individually, by clicking on the photo miniatures, or as a slideshow, by clicking on the "View as slideshow" link on the upper right side of the page. Click on the "Map" link to see a map showing the location (use the zoom bar on the upper right to zoom out or switch to the satellite view).

Sand Creek Farm is a real farm, where the animals are pastured, well treated, and fed their natural diet. The dairy produces clean fresh real milk, cream, and cheese that are not damaged by pasteurization and homogenization. The crops and feed are organic. No GMO here!

Ben and Alysha were raised in the city and graduated from Texas A&M University with backgrounds in agriculture leadership and scientific nutrition. They are home schooling four beautiful daughters. Ben led the family to a farm in 2003. They more recently moved to a larger farm, where they are working to achieve a sustainable farm based on holistic principles of proper soil and animal health.

We need more farms like this one. Instead, most farms have become factories where profit is maximized at the expense of nutrition and health benefit. Animals are caged, poorly treated, and fed grossly unnatural diets. Plants are genetically modified to withstand pests and herbicides - not to make them healthier to eat. They are sprayed with harmful chemicals that end up in the bodies of animals and humans that consume them.

Food produced using traditional methods is much healthier. It can also be more expensive, but what better investment can you make than your health and the health of your family?

We vote with our dollars. Buy sustainable, traditional, humane, organic foods!

Health Check List

The typical modern diet is missing important foods that kept our ancestors healthy and instead is loaded with highly processed fake foods that are low in nutrients and high in additives that are not good for health. Also, modern lifestyles are often stressful and sedentary. Together, poor diet and lifestyle choices are largely responsible for declining health and quality of life in the modern world.

What can we do to improve our health?

1) Include animal seafoods and/or organ meats and/or dairy
(from Weston A Price study of most healthful native diets)

2) Eliminate refined sugar and minimize sweets
(keep total sugars to less than 5-10% of calories)
and if overweight, minimize starchy foods as well
(keep total carbohydrates to less than 10-20% of calories)

3) Eliminate artificial trans-fats (hydrogenated oils and fats)

4) Restrict polyunsaturated fats to less than 4% of total calories
and minimize omega-6 polyunsaturated fats

5) Get at least 30 minutes of active exercise daily
(appropriate for your level of conditioning)

6) Learn to avoid and properly handle stress
(relaxation, meditation, EFT, diet, exercise)

7) Get plenty of sleep (ideally 7 to 8 hours)

8) Get plenty of sun if possible
(avoid sunscreen but be careful not to get sunburned)

9) Take good quality high vitamin cod liver oil daily
(if you don't get adequate sun, seafood, and liver)

10) Include cultured and fermented foods and beverages
(if tolerated)

11) Avoid exposure to harmful chemicals
(artificial food additives, pesticides, natural food toxins,
unfermented soy, drugs, poisons, health care products)

12) Avoid foods that cause noticeable adverse effects
(identify possible food intolerances)

13) Choose fully pastured or wild animal foods
(from a clean environment and include bone broth)

14) Use coconut oil, tallow, and/or butter for cooking

15) Include a variety of plant foods to taste and tolerance
(prepared to optimize nutrient availability,
preferably high brix organic and locally grown)

16) If dairy is consumed, use raw and cultured dairy

17) If grains and nuts are consumed, soak or sprout them

18) Eat at least half of your food uncooked

19) Minimize or eliminate factory processed/packaged fake foods
(supports 2, 3, 4, 10)

20) When eating out, avoid fried foods, dressings, and sweet foods
(supports 2, 3, 4, 10)

Happiness

I saw some video segments from 60 Minutes on Yahoo News this morning that are very informative about happiness. They are interviews of Tal Ben-Shahar, a Harvard psychology professor and lecturer. The link below will bring up the Yahoo News video player and should play the videos (and a few commercials :) automatically in succession:

Yahoo News Videos
We Can't Have It All
Happiness Defined
Why Americans Are Unhappy
He Practices What He Preaches
Five Easy Steps

According to Tal, in our materialistic society there is a lot of pressure from high expectations. However, wealth does not create happiness. We need to have realistic expectations. We can't have it all but we can have a lot.

He also says it is difficult to define happiness. It is an experience of meaning (importance) and pleasure. Meaning can be achievement, contributing to community, or enjoyment of friendship or a relationship. What is pleasure and meaning will vary over time and by culture and from one person to another. Below are Tal's suggestions for happiness:

* Simplify - more is not always better

* Exercise is important - improves mood

* It's OK to experience painful emotions - give yourself permission to be human

* Appreciate what we have - give thanks and grow and learn both in regard to our relationships and our surroundings

I would add that maintaining good health by eating a good diet is also very important for happiness. It's more difficult to be happy if you're not healthy and many drugs and medications can cause depression. Too much sugar in your diet may also lead to depression, as well as lack of general good nutrition.

Also, below is a YouTube video of a funny interview of Tal Ben-Shahar by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show:



Tal Ben-Shahar has written a book called "Happier", which I have not read but looks interesting and is highly rated on Amazon Books.

I'm happy because I have the day off for President's Day today :)

Health Food

You know the old saying - one person's food is another person's poison - really is true. We are all different, and because of these differences, there is no ideal healthy diet that is optimal for everyone. On the other hand there are definitely some aspects to diet that we all need and some aspects that can be less than optimal for everyone's health.

Many people eat simply to stop the hunger pangs and to enjoy the pleasure of eating, with little thought about what the body needs to stay healthy. Convenience and cost also play a large role in what people eat. In our fast-paced society many people are in a hurry and want their food quick, convenient, and cheap. Hence the rise in popularity of "fast food" including fast food restaurants and fast microwave convenience foods. Most people have a vague notion of what might be healthy, primarily based on the constant barrage of advertising, mainly for fast cheap convenient foods. But much of this advertising is intentionally misleading to sell products. Consequently, many people have become brainwashed into believing that some fast foods are actually "healthy choices". Most of these foods are not so bad that they will quickly make you sick - or they wouldn't sell and would soon drop out of the market. But most of these factory processed-packaged foods are loaded with flavor enhancers and even addicting chemicals to entice and capture customers, often at the expense of their long-term health. They also have lost many of their nutrients during processing and are loaded with chemicals or ingredients that make them less expensive - but are not good for optimal health.

So what are the additives that are likely to be harmful to everyone's long-term health? They include flavor enhancers like monosodium glutamate (MSG) and addicting refined sugar, cheap oils full of rancid polyunsaturated omega-6 fats and/or trans-fats, food colorings, processing additives and conditioners that make foods cheaper to mass-produce, and preservatives to extend shelf-life. These are the ingredients that make fake convenience foods cheap and make them look and taste more like real food so they sell, but at the expense of our long-term health. So, the moral to this story is simple: it's time to get back to eating real food.

What nutrients do we need from our food? We all know about vitamins and minerals. So, why not just take a multi-vitamin and mineral supplement and be done with it? One good reason is that most multi-vitamin and mineral supplements are made from refined chemicals that often may not be properly absorbed or utilized to fill our nutrient needs. Our bodies have evolved to absorb and utilize complex matrices of nutrients from foods, not refined or artificial nutrient analogues from pills. It is also likely that science has not yet discovered all of the healthful nutrients in foods nor all of the synergistic effects of natural nutrients working together. So, what is packaged for convenience in a pill is not likely to fully meet our nutritional needs.

A better approach is to look at diets of healthy people around the world to look for foods that favor health. We can also look for dietary factors that are detrimental to health. The classical work of Weston Price is a good start. He searched around the world to find people eating their native diets and compared their health to that of their contemporaries who had switched to canned and processed commercial foods loaded with refined flour and sugar that were becoming popular in the early 1900's. He consistently found that the people who continued to eat their native diets were healthier than those who switched to more modern commercial diets. He found that the healthiest groups included animal seafoods, and/or organ meats, and/or dairy in their diet. He also found that these people ate a wide variety of plant foods and prepared them in ways that optimized their health benefit. These are the foods that should be the foundation of a healthy modern diet. The challenge today is to find these foods uncontaminated by modern pollution.

Ideal Foods

Buy local foods to help preserve our environment and keep it clean. Buy organic foods to help keep our environment and foods free of pesticides. Buy wild animal foods from clean environments or foods from pastured animals that are humanely raised without antibiotics or hormones and fed natural organic diets. Avoid large fish, which accumulate methyl-mercury from the food chain, and minimize or eliminate factory-farmed animal foods. Include fatty fish and shellfish or organ meats or dairy depending on which of these foods are most appealing and well tolerated. Avoid all processed dairy and choose raw, cultured, and fermented dairy if tolerated. Make bone broth to use in soups, stews, and gravies. Choose a variety of organic vegetables and fruits to suit your taste and appetite. Include some lacto-fermented vegetables if they are tolerated. Grow your own foods if possible. Include whole-grain foods and small amounts of nuts if they are appealing. Soak or sprout grains, nuts, and seeds for optimal nutrient availability. If you are overweight, avoid starchy/sugary vegetables, grains, and fruits.

Use your senses to judge the quality of real foods. If a food is not appealing, don't eat it. Also notice how you feel after eating foods and avoid those foods that do not leave you feeling well. But don't trust your senses to judge the quality of deceptive fake foods - avoid them as much as possible.

To make sure that you are getting a balanced diet, you can use online nutrition calculators or if you have Excel you can try my Dietary Nutrition Calculator to estimate your dietary nutrient intake. These estimates are crude at best, because of the sometimes large variability of some nutrients in foods and because of the variability in how well these nutrients are absorbed and utilized from one individual to another. But at least you can get a rough idea if your diet is providing adequate nutrients for good long-term health.

Taking the time and effort to find and prepare good quality food is a worthy investment for health. What better investment can you make?

Exercise and dementia

Exercise and dementia
Older adult who regularly walk fro exercise may help lower their risk of vascular dementia, the second most common form of this disorder after Alzheimer’s disease.

In group of 749 adults who were 65 years of age or older, Italian researchers found that those who regularly walked or got other forms of moderate exercise were less likely to develop vascular dementia over the next four years.

Compared with their sedentary counterparts, active adults had about one quarter the risk of developing vascular dementia. Vascular dementia is caused by an impaired blood flow to the brain.

Blockages that narrow the blood vessels supplying the brain or complete blockages that cause a stroke, may also lead to vascular dementia.

People with conditions that damage blood vessels throughout the body – such as high blood pressure or diabetes – are also at increased risk. The new findings built on evidence that lifestyles habits are important in dementia risk.

A number of studies have suggested that the same habit s that are good for the heart such as a healthy diet and regular exercise – may benefit the ageing brain as well.
Exercise and dementia