1.   In the module section, chapter 10 (12.4), read the article Sitting is the New Smoking.   Write a 6 sentence summary of the article.   What do the letters NEAT stand for?  What effect does

Read the articles  What Minerals Do.   

https://www.healthylivinganswers.com/vitamins/minerals-essential-for-body-and-health.html

Watch the 'How do you know your food has minerals' video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY_3U8Pr2CA

3.   Watch the video  Science of Sleep part I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J1L2kmZQdM

the Science of Sleep part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIGHvFUclM8

12.4 Sitting is the New Smoking

Sitting is the New Smoking

by Shape Up America! (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. · July 1, 2015

Too much sitting is hazardous to your health, even if you exercise. Researchers from the University of Toronto reviewed 47 studies and found that people who sat too much (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. had a higher risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and early death. The health risks were greater in adults who did little or no exercise, but even regular exercise didn’t erase the harm from sitting for up to half the day. The more you sit, the greater the risk of dying prematurely from heart disease (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. And the more difficult it is to manage your weight (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..

Daily physical activity is good for your health, but it’s not just what’s done in the 30 minutes or one hour of exercise that matters, it’s also the movement that’s done throughout the day, like carrying groceries or getting the mail. These everyday activities get you up and moving and can also benefit your weight.

The calorie-burning from everyday activities and movement is called NEAT or Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis.   What counts as NEAT? The activities you do as part of your daily life like walking in your home or workplace, climbing stairs, fidgeting and standing are NEAT. But not intentional exercise like taking a brisk walk or working out in a gym.

In a 2006 study by the Mayo Clinic (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., researchers compared NEAT in inactive people who were at a healthy weight or obese. Those who were obese spent over 2½ more hours of their day sitting than the others who did more standing and moving. The researchers found that people with the most NEAT activity had the lowest amount of body fat, which can lead to better health. Based on this study, moving more as you go about your daily life can also help you manage your weight.

Shape Up America!® encourages plenty of exercise, especially for people who have lost weight and want to keep it off. If you are a healthy weight, sitting less can help prevent weight gain. But NEAT activities such as doing chores at home instead of sitting and watching TV, and getting up to speak to a coworker at the office burn more calories than calling, emailing or texting.

Bottom Line: For good health and weight control, sit less and move more. Some ideas for work and play:

• Get up from your chair for a couple minutes every hour.

• Have a “walk and talk” business meeting.

• Consider a “standing desk” or a “treadmill desk” to sit less at work.

• Stand up and stretch or walk around during TV commercials and while on the phone.

• Move to the music on your smart phone or radio and dance away!

• Wear a pedometer to count the steps you take each day.

http://shapeup.org/sittingneat/

11.3 Study offers clues to emotional eating

Study offers clues to emotional eating

By Anne Harding, Health.com

The study drives home just how difficult it can be to eat healthy and resist so-called emotional eating in a stressful world.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Researchers "fed" the volunteers through an unmarked stomach tube

• The study is among the first to show that the effect of food on mood is biologically based

• Participants were given brief mood surveys after receiving a saline or fat solution

• They found sad music considerably more depressing after the saline solution

(Health.com (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.) -- Anyone who's sought solace in pizza or a pint of ice cream knows that food can be comforting. But experts still don't know exactly why we gravitate toward fatty or sugary foods when we're feeling down, or how those foods affect our emotions.

Taste and the pleasant memories associated with junk foods surely play a role, but that may be only part of the story. According to a small new study, hormones in our stomachs appear to communicate directly with our brains, independent of any feelings we have about a particular food.

Most research on food and emotion has looked at the overall experience of eating -- the tastes, smells, and textures, in addition to nutrients. In this study, however, the researchers took that subjective experience off the table by "feeding" the volunteers through an unmarked stomach tube.

Even in this artificial environment, saturated fat appeared to fend off negative emotions. The study volunteers were more upbeat after listening to sad music and seeing sad faces if their bellies were full of saturated fat versus a simple saline solution, which suggests that emotional eating operates on a biological as well as psychological level, researchers say.

The study is among the first to show that the effect of food on mood is "really independent of pleasant stimuli," says Giovanni Cizza, M.D., an obesity and neuroendocrinology researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the study. "It is even more rooted in our biology."

The biological mechanism at work is still unclear, but the findings suggest that the stomach may influence the brain by releasing hormones, says Lukas Van Oudenhove, M.D., one of the study authors and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leuven, in Belgium.

The deep-seated connection between our stomachs and our brains helped keep humans alive when food was scarce (as it was during most of human history), but it may have outlived its usefulness and may be contributing to modern health problems such as obesity, Van Oudenhove adds.

"Evolution has made every aspect of feeding as rewarding as possible," he says. "These days it may not be a good thing anymore. When food is available anywhere, then it may be a bad thing, leading to obesity or eating disorders in some people."

The study drives home just how difficult it can be to eat healthy and resist so-called emotional eating in our stressful world, says Susan Albers, Psy.D., a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic and the author of "50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food."

"Given the strong soothing effect of food on a biological level, we have to work even harder to find ways to soothe and comfort ourselves without calories," Albers says. "This is important in the long run for managing your weight, improving your self-esteem, and protecting your overall health."

The study, which appears in the August issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, included 12 healthy, normal-weight volunteers.

Van Oudenhove and his colleagues infused one of two "meals" into the stomachs of the volunteers: a solution of saturated fatty acids, or a saline control solution. (The researchers used a fat-based solution because comfort foods are often fatty, and because they were familiar with the brain's response to the solution from earlier research.)

After the feeding, the researchers induced feelings of sadness in the volunteers by playing sad classical music and showing them images of faces with sad expressions -- techniques that have proven to be downers in previous experiments.

Brief mood surveys administered throughout the experiment revealed that the participants found the sad music considerably more depressing after receiving the saline solution than after the fat solution.

Functional MRI brain scans taken during the experiment echoed these findings: Compared to the saline solution, the fatty solution appeared to dampen activity in parts of the brain that are involved in sadness and that responded to the gloomy music.

The fleeting feelings of sadness experienced by the study volunteers pale in comparison to some of the emotions that people try to address with food in real life, Albers says. "Think about how this compares to some real-world problems people face, like illness, loss of a job, or a divorce," she says. "We are often under a constant state of stress."

Therapy or other treatments that "teach people how to deal with strong emotions would likely...help people improve their eating habits," she says.

In an editorial accompanying the study, Cizza and a colleague at the NIDDK say that the "most important" question raised by the study is whether obese people respond to fatty foods in the same way as the normal-weight volunteers.

For instance, he says, the brains of obese people may resist soothing signals from the gut more strongly than the brains of leaner people.

But there's nothing wrong with occasionally eating unhealthy comfort food, Cizza adds.

"Evolution has provided us with, if you wish, an over-the-counter anti-anxiety or anti-sadness product," he says. "Maybe if you're sad and you feel like that chocolate could help you, go for it. Don't feel too guilty, but try to limit what you eat and maybe later cut down on something else."

Copyright Health Magazine (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. 2011

David Schardt (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. • June 6, 2016

Posted in Salt in Food (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..

The Food and Drug Administration is finally urging food manufacturers to voluntarily limit the sodium they add to food.

The average American adult consumes at least 3,400 mg of sodium, much more than we need or is healthy for us.

“The link between sodium consumption and blood pressure is strong and well documented,” said Susan Mayne, FDA’s Director of  the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, in announcing the move.

High blood pressure increases the risk for heart disease, stroke, and premature death.

“The totality of scientific evidence, as reviewed by many well-respected scientific organizations, continues to support lowering sodium consumption from current levels,” Mayne explained.

Three-quarters of the sodium we consume is added by companies and restaurants to the food we eat.  Very little is added during home cooking or at the table.

The leading source of sodium in our diet?

Breads and rolls!  A slice of bread can have as much as 230 mg of sodium and most of us eat bread, often every day.

The next nine leading sources of sodium:

• Cold cuts and cured meats

• Pizza

• Poultry

• Soups

• Sandwiches

• Cheese

• Pasta dishes (not including mac and cheese)

• Meat dishe

• Snacks

These 10 types of food account for more than 40 percent of the sodium we eat each day!  Once manufacturers add sodium, we can’t really take it out. That’s why it’s critical for the nation’s health that companies cut back on the amounts they put in.

Health (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Jun 17, 2015 07:00 AM ET // by Benjamin Radford  (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Americans often use euphemisms when talking about their extra weight—including “big boned” and “plus sized” — in an effort to avoid the “f-word.” Obese comedian Gabriel Iglesias, for example, has made a career out of tongue-in-cheek weight denial, using the stage name “Fluffy” and naming his popular show “I’m Not Fat, I’m Fluffy.”

Social hypocrisy is always good fodder for comedy, but in the real world fat denial is no laughing matter. Though you might think that being overweight would be painfully obvious to a person looking in the mirror, the surprising fact is that many people don’t recognize how heavy they really are (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. This is a serious medical problem because if people don’t recognize that they’re overweight or obese, they won’t take steps to lose weight and become healthier.

ANALYSIS: Does Childhood Obesity Affect Brain Development? (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Though the common perception is that most people are constantly struggling to lose weight, polls find that about two-thirds of Americans think their weight is “about right,” which is ironically the same percentage of Americans who are overweight or obese. One Gallup study found that people’s ideal weight actually increases along with their actual weight (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., so for example when a person weighed 215 pounds his ideal weight was 200, but a few years later when he weighed 230 pounds his ideal was now 215. The report referred to this paradox as “weight denial”: Most of us know we should lose some weight but at the end of the day we figure we’re fine as we are.

As adults we can make health choices for ourselves but when children are involved it’s a much thornier issue. Parents are responsible for the health of their children and have great influence over their child’s diet and exercise routines. Parents are often blind to weight gain in their children, a factor the “New York Times” noted is contributing to the childhood obesity epidemic (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.: “One reason parents may have difficulty perceiving their child’s weight is because of the ‘new normal’: Throughout the developed world and even in some developing countries, children are generally becoming heavier… And when parents believe their children are active, they are more likely to consider their child’s weight to be normal, studies have shown. But parents often overestimate their children’s physical activity.”

ANALYSIS: Active Video Games Can Battle Childhood Obesity (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Some parents may avoid acknowledging that their child is overweight for fear of triggering an eating disorder. This concern arose in 2011 when a book titled “Maggie Goes On a Diet” was published, about an overweight teen who loses weight to get healthier and play a sport she loves. A social media firestorm erupted (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., with many critics deeming the book dangerous, apparently assuming that that the word “diet” in the title referred to unhealthy calorie restriction. However in the book Maggie loses weight in the way that doctors have recommended for decades: not eating less but instead making healthier food choices and getting more exercise.

A study published earlier this year (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. in the journal “Child Obesity” asked American parents whether they considered their child, ages 2-5 years, to be overweight, underweight, or just about the right weight. The researchers found that across two surveys about 95 percent of parents perceived their overweight child as just about the right weight, and for obese children — whose condition would presumably be even more obvious — “as high as 78.4% of parents perceived their obese child as just about the right weight.”

ANALYSIS: School Gardens Plant Seeds of Healthy Eating (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

And it’s not just parents in denial: A 2010 study (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. published in “Pediatrics” found that nearly 30 percent of overweight adolescents don’t consider themselves overweight. The researchers also addressed the question of whether telling an overweight teenager that he or she is overweight is harmful; “the findings that accurate perceivers [those who correctly identified their weight status] did not have significantly higher levels of unhealthy weight-related behaviors… provide some support that increased recognition may not be harmful.” In other words, parents and doctors shouldn’t avoid encouraging an overweight teenager to lose weight for fear that he or she will end up with an eating disorder.

You can’t address a problem that you don’t recognize that exists, and Americans are not doing themselves — or their health — any favors by pretending that they or their children are thinner than they are.

http://news.discovery.com/human/health/denial-by-parents-kids-contributes-to-childhood-obesity-150616.htm