The New Way To Protect Our Foods – Cinnamon

The New Way To Protect Our Foods – Cinnamon

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Yep…you read it right – cinnamon.

Cinnamon is being acknowledged as a way to protect our foods from molds and fungus. It turns out that cinnamon kills microbes. As an example of the impact of cinnamon, researchers took bread that was already tainted with mold and covered it with wax paper made with 6% cinnamon oil. The cinnamon wax paper inhibited mold growth by 96% and prolonged freshness by up to 10 days.

A separate study reported in the International Journal of Food Microbiology found that adding a few drops of cinnamon essential oil to carrot broth inhibited the growth of bacteria for 60 days. The results were so powerful that the researchers called cinnamon a viable “alternative to traditional food preservatives.”

Maybe it’s time to eliminate some of the chemicals that are going into our foods, and to preserve them with cinnamon. So…anyone want a hot chocolate with cinnamon or apple cider with cinnamon?

(Reported in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, August 13, 2008)

The Way You Talk To Seniors Can Affect Their Health

The Way You Talk To Seniors Can Affect Their Health

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Did you know that the way health care professionals talk to older people that can actually affect their health? Some examples are:

· When the doctor talks to adult children about their elderly parent, who is right there, instead of talking directly to the person;

· The clerk who assumes that an older person needs to be addressed slowly or in a loud voice; or

· An older person is addressed by the health care worker using the familiar term “dear”, rather than the person’s name.

As reported in The Virginian Pilot, these innocent insults can have health consequences. A long-term study of 660 people over age 50 in a small Ohio town was published in 2002 by Rebecca Levy, a Professor at Yale University. Levy found that those who had positive perceptions of aging lived an average of 7.5 years longer.

Other studies found that older people exposed to negative portrayals of aging performed worse on memory tests, walked slower and had higher levels of stress. One study, to be published in December, used video tapes of older people with mild to moderate dementia and their care givers. It was observed that when the nurses used phrases like “good girl” or “How are we feeling?” patients were more aggressive and less cooperative or receptive to care.

The health care workers in those videos thought the statements that they were making conveyed that they cared. Instead the patient was interpreting the message as saying that the older person was incompetent.

So…when you are with an older person, talk to them and treat them as an adult.

Making Sure You Have Enough Vitamin D In Your System

Making Sure You Have Enough Vitamin D In Your System

LiveJournal Tags: Dr. Jerry Teplitz,vitamin deficiency,disease prevention,vitamin d3,vitamin levels,hydroxyvitamin d,diasorin,quest tests

As I’ve reported before, Vitamin D is becoming more and more important in disease prevention and healing. We are also discovering that many of us are deficient in Vitamin D.

Even though your own body can create it by being out in the sun without sunscreen, most of us spend very little time in the sun. This means we need to consider taking supplemental Vitamin D3 (D3 absorbs the best).

So how do you determine what level of Vitamin D you have in your body? You can get a baseline measurement by having a blood test, but you need to make sure your doctor is requesting the right one.

The best blood test is called 25(OH)D which translates to 25-hydroxyvitamin D. For optimum health your results should be higher than the normal range. Normal is 20-56 mg/ml, while optimal is 45-50 mg/ml. Also, make sure your level is never below 32 mg/ml.

Finally, ask what analysis system the lab is using. One testing method called the Quest system gives false results that appear to be 25-40% higher than the better test, the DiaSorin assay, which is available at LabCorp. In addition, the LabCorp test costs less than half of the Quest test.

So…get your Vitamin D level measured make sure it’s the right test and it’s being done via the right method.