Month: September 2009

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News on Health & Science

What Causes Arteries Clog Up

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British scientists have identified an enzyme that plays a crucial role in clogging up of arteries . Here’s what causes arteries to clog up :

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They have discovered that an enzyme called matrix metalloproteinase-8 that raises blood pressure and causes abnormal build-up of cells in the arteries – both of which increase the risk of heart disease….

“Our research tells us that this enzyme plays a crucial role in the build-up of fatty deposits in the arteries which causes heart disease,” said lead researcher Shu Ye, Professor of Molecular Medicine and Genetics at Queen Mary, University of London.

“Many patients with high blood pressure or heart failure are currently treated with ACE inhibitor drugs. However, some patients do not respond sufficiently to ACE inhibitors alone.

“We hope that what we’ve found here could be the basis for new drugs that can enhance the effects of ACE inhibitors, which would reduce deaths from heart disease,” Ye added.

During the study, researchers genetically engineered mice to lack the MMP8 enzyme.

The mice were fed on a Western-style diet high in fat and cholesterol and compared to normal mice fed on the same diet. The mice, which lacked the enzyme, had clearer arteries and lower blood pressure.

The researchers also studied 2,000 patients who were being tested for clogs in arteries leading to their hearts with a test called a coronary angiogram.

They found that around 25 per cent of these patients had a slightly different version of the gene for MMP8 and their arteries were more clogged than other patients.

Source: The Times Of India

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Featured Meditation

Meditate Your Pain Away

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Zen meditation – a centuries-old practice that helps people gain mental, physical and emotional balance – can keep pain at bay

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Universite de Montreal researchers.

According to a Psychosomatic Medicine study, Zen meditators have lower pain sensitivity both in and out of a meditative state compared to non-meditators. Along with Pierre Rainville, a professor and researcher at the Université de Montréal, Joshua A. Grant, a doctoral student in the Department of Physiology co-authored the paper.

The main aim of the study was to examine whether trained meditators perceived pain differently than non-meditators. “While previous studies have shown that teaching chronic pain patients to meditate is beneficial, very few studies have looked at pain processing in healthy, highly trained meditators. This study was a first step in determining how or why meditation might influence pain perception,” says Grant.

To reach the conclusion, the scientists recruited 13 Zen meditators with a minimum of 1,000 hours of practice to undergo a pain test and contrasted their reaction with 13 non-meditators. Subjects included 10 women and 16 men between the ages of 22 to 56.

The administered pain test was simple: A thermal heat source, a computer controlled heating plate, was pressed against the calves of subjects intermittently at varying temperatures. Heat levels began at 43 degrees Celsius and went to a maximum of 53 degrees Celsius depending on each participant’s sensitivity. While quite a few of the meditators tolerated the maximum temperature, all control subjects were well below 53 degrees Celsius.

Grant and Rainville noticed a marked difference in how their two test groups reacted to pain testing – Zen meditators had much lower pain sensitivity (even without meditating) compared to non-meditators. During the meditation-like conditions it appeared meditators further reduced their pain partly through slower breathing: 12 breaths per minute versus an average of 15 breaths for non-meditators.

“Slower breathing certainly coincided with reduced pain and may influence pain by keeping the body in a relaxed state. While previous studies have found that the emotional aspects of pain are influenced by meditation, we found that the sensation itself, as well as the emotional response, is different in meditators,” Grant said.

The ultimate result was that Zen meditators experienced an 18 per cent reduction in pain intensity.

Source:The Times Of India

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Healthy Tips

Coconut Oil Could Ward Off Type 2 Diabetes.

Diet Rich  Coconut Oil Could Stop Type 2 Diabetes.  A diet rich in coconut oil could ward off Type 2 diabetes.

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The oil, used in foods such as margarine, helps prevent insulin resistance.

This is where muscle and fat cells stop reacting to insulin, the hormone that helps to mop up excess sugar in the blood.
Australian scientists used mice to compare the effects of coconut oil-rich foods with a lard-based diet, consumed by many in the developed world.
The results showed coconut-fed mice were much less likely to develop resistance to insulin. Previously, coconut oil has had a mixed reception because it is high in saturated fat, which is linked to high cholesterol.

But coconut fat is now known to be made up of so-called ‘medium chain’ fatty acids, regarded as healthier than the long-chain fatty acids found in animal products such as butter or lard.

Source: Mail online:23rd. Sept. 2009

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Featured Healthy Tips

When ‘Baby Fat’ is Good for Health

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Want to shed your baby fat? Wait, don’t do it just yet, for a new study has revealed that such a fat is good – as long as it is calorie-burning -”Brown Fat”.

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Brown fat burns off calories and generates heat in babies and small mammals.

Most of the body fat is white fat, which also provides insulation but stores calories. It becomes “bad” fat when an individual have too much. The “good” fat-brown fat-was considered essentially nonexistent in human adults.

The new study has found that adults have much more of this type of fat than previously believed.

“We now know that it is present and functional in adults,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Aaron Cypess, MMSc, of the Joslin Diabetes Centre in Boston.

“Three ounces of brown fat can burn several hundred calories a day,” he added.

In the new study involving 1,970 study participants, researchers measured the patches of brown adipose tissue-brown fat-in people with the help of high-tech imaging method that combines positron emission tomography and computed tomography, called PET/CT.

By evaluating biopsy tissue of what appeared to be brown fat, the authors confirmed that they were, indeed, looking at stores of brown fat.

The researchers found that brown fat was located in an area extending from the front of the neck to the chest.

Of the subjects who had detectable brown fat, about 6 percent had 3 ounces or more of the fat.

“We believe that this percentage greatly underestimates the number of adults in the population who have a large amount of brown fat,” said Cypess.

They also discovered that brown fat is most abundant in young women and least frequent in older, overweight men. In fact, women were more than twice as likely as men to have substantial amounts of brown fat.

“One theory for this is that women may have less muscle mass overall, so they need more brown fat to generate heat and keep warm,” Cypess said.

Source: The study appears in New England Journal of Medicine.

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Featured

7 Steps to Start Lucid Dreaming

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Studying your dreams can teach you many things about yourself. The state of dreaming can arguably be viewed as the ultimate form of meditation.
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Dreams bring your subconscious mind to the forefront, and can convey information about your health, relationships, and other matters. For example, they may offer symbolic images that tell you about biological processes going on inside your body, and what you need to do to stay healthy.

Lucid Dreaming is consciously being aware within your dream.

When you are dreaming and you become conscious that you are dreaming you can start to control your dreams. It can be an exhilarating experience, and the feeling of euphoria after your first few lucid dreams can last for days.

1. Remember your ordinary dreams.
To start remembering your dreams try this simple technique — each night before drifting off to sleep, repeat the phrase ‘I will remember my dreams as soon as I wake up’. Say this phrase over and over until you fall asleep, after a few days you will start to remember your ordinary dreams.

2. Keep a dream journal
Even writing a few short sentences about your dream is enough. This will get you into the habit of remembering your ordinary dreams and to start looking for dream signs within your dreams.

3. Pick out dream signs
A lot of your ordinary dreams will have objects or people in them that could act as a cue to you waking up in your dreams.

4. Notice your waking world
To be conscious in your dream world means you have to be conscious in your waking world. Being consciously focused means looking around you and saying what you see, feel, hear, smell and touch and voicing it. If you start to consciously focus on the world around you, you will carry this over into the dream world.

5. Ask yourself; ‘Am I dreaming?’
Ask yourself just now ‘Am I dreaming?’. Your obvious answer is to say no, of course you are not dreaming. How do you know? Try and think about why you know you are not dreaming. This again will carry over into your dreaming world and you will start asking the same questions in your dreams.

6. Your first lucid dream
Many people have their first lucid dream simply by reading about it. You might find that you become over-excited and lose the lucid dream. However, your first lucid dream will be remembered for years to come.

7. Staying lucid
By far the best technique is calming yourself down with self talk and dream spinning. If you find that you are losing your lucidity, you can talk to yourself to calm yourself down and just start noticing the things around you in your dream. Dream spinning means when you feel you are losing control of your dream, you mentally spin like a tornado to stay within your dream. This focuses your mind on staying lucid.

Source: Lifehack August 25, 2009

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