Protect Yourself and Your Family From Mosquitoes

It's mosquito time again and I’ve printed this information before, but in case you missed it or forgot it, here it is again.

I want to share with you some natural steps you can take to prevent mosquito bites. Yes, you can buy bug spray loaded with poisons, but do you really want that in or on your body when there are much safer options?

One option has recently been approved by the Center for Disease Control. Oil of eucalyptus offers a protection level that is similar to products with low concentrations of DEET. You can find it in Repel's Lemon Eucalyptus.

Two other options were reported in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers found that a soybean based product called Bite Blocker was the most effective and another product called Buzz Away was also effective.

Another natural alternative that I have written about in a previous Teplitz Email Report is a vitamin supplement called Vitamin B1. When you are going to be outside, all you need to do is take 100 mg every six to eight hours and it will protect you from being bitten.

The Army did the original research on vitamin B1 a number of years ago. They sent two groups of soldiers out into the bush for two weeks. One group was given bug goop and the other group took only Vitamin B1. When they came out of the bush, the group using the bug goop was covered with bug bites. The Vitamin B1 group had hardly any bites on them.

A couple of years ago, I went camping with some friends who have hiked the Appalachian Trail. They were willing to experiment and they took the Vitamin B1. Boy, were they surprised when they had no bites at all at the end of the weekend. Another friend was working as a camp counselor in Maine. She wrote me and said the B1 worked great for mosquitoes, and what did I have for gnats?

So you now have more tools to put into your prevention quiver.

Use Meditation To Stop Pain

Meditation can stop pain from happening. Research reported on LiveScience.com reveals how this happens. Meditation changes the way your brain processes pain signals.

They found that it only took four days of practicing a meditation technique called mindfulness meditation to change the pain responses in your brain. Brain activity decreased in areas devoted to monitoring a painful body part and also in areas responsible for relaying sensory information. This reduced the perception of pain by 57%.
 
Since the effect is so fast, if you have to go into the hospital for surgery, you might want to learn how to meditate at least four days ahead and start doing it twice a day. Oh, and you will want to continue meditating during your recovery.

Getting Angry Can Reduce Your Stress

There’s new information about getting angry. It used to be thought that getting angry was unhealthy and would cause stress for women.

A study published in Biological Psychiatry looked at the effect of facial expressions of emotions, such as fear and indignation, on our stress response. They found that displaying anger may cause your brain to release less of the stress hormone cortisol.

The study focused on short-term anger and frustration, such as getting cut off in traffic, not long-term anger. The researchers believe that responding to this kind of anger gives the person a feeling of control over those little things that get to you by counteracting feelings of helplessness and frustration.

So, an occasional #XY!!XZ, might actually be good for women, too.

(Reported Prevention December 2010)