Health – Page 52 – Things Are Good

Improve Your Fitness by Being Simple

Unsurprisingly being fit and staying fit is easy for some people and not so easy for others. If you are finding it difficult to maintain a healthy body because you don’t have access to proper equipment there is no reason you can’t work out minimally. Zen Habits has an article on how to have a minimalist workout.

It takes no equipment to get a great workout and get in shape, and with one or two pieces of simple equipment, you can turn that great workout into a fantastic one, you magnificent beast, you.
And with little or no equipment required for a fantastic workout, you can do it at home, or wherever you are. Even if youâ€™re in solitary confinement.
Itâ€™s hard not to find time for this type of workout â€” you can do it while watching TV, for goodness sake!

Not into working out for your fitness? Well there are other things that you can do, in fact 25 things you can do to improve your health.

11. Get friends that live healthy
The ongoing interaction with people who have the health you desire will be a positive influence on you. It is far easier to make the transition to healthy living when you have the social support.

12. Find healthy foods you enjoy
Just because you are eating healthy does not mean you need to suffer eating foods you hate. Look for healthy foods you enjoy and eat them more often. Find recipes online that are both healthy and enjoyable.

13. Take your lunch to work
Not only will brown bagging your lunch save you some money, it will help you avoid eating unhealthy foods for lunch. Take the extra time to make your lunch in the morning or make extra for dinner and eat the leftovers.

Cold Sores No Mores

Luckily I don’t suffer from cold sores, but a lot of people do. Based on some new research a cure for cold sores could be just around the corner. Researchers have found some key information about how cold sores go away and then come back.

By examining the interplay of various molecular substances the virus produces, researchers at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., have found how it hides and then emerges periodically.

One such substance is called latency associated transcript RNA, which the study reveals blocks the formation of proteins that “turn” on the virus and make it replicate. It does this by splitting into strands of microRNAs, which essentially keep the virus in check.

However, in stressful situations, the virus makes more messenger RNA than the microRNAs can handle and eventually viral replication occurs.
…
“In principle, you could activate and then kill all of the virus in a patient,” said Cullen. “This would completely cure a person, and you would never get another cold sore.

Clean Your House, Don’t Hurt the Environment

Synthetic cleaners scare me. A lot. I really don’t like the idea of using bizarre chemicals to ‘clean’ things. In some cases cleaning products use poisons which leaves me wondering how poisons can make a place sanitary.

Clean your house the environmentally friendly way! This video can get you started:

How To Clean Your House The ECO Friendly Way

Fairness is an Emotion

Well this is neat, some researchers are arguing that fairness is a hard-wired emotion.

The belief that things should be divided fairly among members of a group isn’t just a matter of culture or reason — it’s an emotion that’s built into the human brain.

That’s the suggestion of a new study that posed the question: Is it better to give food to some hungry children while others go hungry? Or is it better that every child get a share, albeit a smaller one?

“People prefer equity, when all things are equal, to efficiency,” said study lead researcher Ming Hsu, a fellow at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

And different regions of the brain are involved when making decisions involving fairness or efficiency, he said.

“In terms of the brain, we find areas of the insular cortex are activated when people were choosing the equitable allocation of food,” Hsu said. “Given the involvement of the insular cortex in emotions and fairness judgments, we conclude that emotions are underlying equity judgments.”

Other areas of the brain are activated when people are making judgments about efficiency, he said.

Grow a Heart

A team of international scientists have successfully grown heart tissue from embryonic stem cells. This is great news for people who have had all sorts of heart problems. Except perhaps a broken heart, for them perhaps a hug would work best.