Being Active is Only Human

...And being inactive is not very human at all. Humans became what they are today because of the ability to run on two legs for a long periods of time thanks to perspiration. There are other species on earth that are much faster or stronger but they can't run long because they overheat. Not people. Till about ten thousand years ago running the distance of a Marathon was an everyday thing. Our species survived as others did not from that period.
What does this tell us? Well unfortunately for you, it says that to keep healthy, you need to keep active. It's not so easy though, is it?
You actually have to plan and take an effort to make it happen. Walking and running daily is feasible even on the road. Yes it only takes willpower. And of course it is the hardest one because we are accountable for only to ourselves. And we don't want to disappoint ourselves, do we? This would be good to start to motivate us. Forget the doctors and the drug companies and take charge!
Become active, eat well and focus on doing your job well and you will live a long life.
Think and be your own boss above all bosses.

Thoughts on Sleep Apnea, Snoring, and Being Obese

Sleep apnea is a hot topic these days as so it should be. Screening it and keeping it under control will be mandatory in the US and soon after that Canada will follow.

Unfortunately or fortunately? the government or the employers cannot tell people straight into their face to live healthy. Why not? Not just because it would be against personal rights but because even doctors or scientists let alone politicians can agree what healthy is. If you are older than 30, you remember the fat free wave, the carb free wave, eat 6 times a day, eat 3 main meals only, eat when you feel hungry etc. So if you believe the latest diet what's right what not, you will probably have to change next year. Naturally professionals do learn from past mistakes and by now they have a much better idea of what is healthy. But by now enough time passed that huge corporations and the profit oriented food industry made us pick up bad habits and get addicted to sweets or greasy or salty food. All in all they already made the nation fat and they are globalizing it. So here we are, heavier employees have less energy, can harm their tendons and ligaments easily, develop premature illnesses that used to start after a ripe age when most of social duties are fulfilled like raising children and have enough years to retire. Having these conditions show up earlier and earlier strains the medical and social system to the point when our children's future standard of living will be jeopardized.

So officials have to go indirectly to get everybody make changes in their lives that ultimately increase the length of their own lives!

Sleep apnea screening is a step to help people live better, work better. Regrettably, people will only make changes when they absolutely forced to. People will always go with the easier, that is yes, lazier choices, requiring less effort. But when we are forced - well we'd better get started!

First, you snore.

first of all snoring will not disturb the snorer, only everybody else. The snorer will have a good night sleep if    

it's just that. However please note that snoring can have way too many reasons. Smoking raises the risk of snoring. 

 Snoring, like all other sounds, is caused by vibrations that cause particles in the air to form sound waves. For example, when we speak, our vocal cords vibrate to form our voice. When our stomach growls (borborygmus), our stomach and intestines vibrate as air and food move through them.
While we are asleep, turbulent airflow can cause the tissues of the nose and throat to vibrate and give rise to snoring. Essentially, snoring is a sound resulting from turbulent airflow that causes tissues to vibrate during breathing. 

When we are asleep, the area at the back of the throat sometimes narrows. The same amount of air passing through this smaller opening can cause the tissues surrounding the opening to vibrate, which in turn can cause the sounds of snoring. Different people who snore have different reasons for the narrowing. The narrowing can be in the nose, mouth, or throat.Who are those most likely to have it?

• Overweight or right at being obese (have BMI of 25 or more)
• Males (What can I say? Most truck drivers are.)
• Smokers (I don't know the statistics but I would guess it's a huge percentage.)
• Have a thick neck (Yes, either fat or muscles)
• Having a receding chin.
• Do you still have your tonsils? They can enlarge and cause the inability to breath.

Your airway may be blocked or narrowed during sleep because your throat muscles tend to relax more than normal. Your brain in REM sleep maybe telling all your muscles to relax and muscles and the soft palate loosens too much.

It's not permanent if it's your allergies or your nose is congested. 

Work on it!

What about sleep apnea?

What is it that you experience if you have it?
You just don't have a restful sleep. It doesn't mean you actually wake up but because you cannot breath in your resting beauty sleep, your brain pulls you out of this deep sleep and puts you into a shallow sleep to make you breath.That will eventually make you tired not just the next day but it will accumulate to a point you will feel sluggish and lousy.

Like obstructive sleep apnea, central sleep apnea is more common in males and people over the age of 65. However, unlike obstructive sleep apnea, central sleep apnea is often associated with serious illness, such as heart disease, stroke, neurological disease, or spinal or brainstem injury.

While a diagnosis of sleep apnea can be scary, it is a treatable condition. In fact, there are many things you can do on your own to help, particularly for mild to moderate sleep apnea. Home remedies and lifestyle modifications can go a long way in reducing sleep apnea symptoms.

Lifestyle changes that can help sleep apnea
Lose weight. Some people find that even moderate to severe sleep apnea can be completely corrected by losing excess weight. For others, even a small amount of weight loss can open up the throat and improve sleep apnea symptoms.
Quit smoking. Smoking is believed to contribute to sleep apnea by increasing inflammation and fluid retention in your throat and upper airway.
Avoid alcohol, sleeping pills, and sedatives, especially before bedtime, because they relax the muscles in the throat and interfere with breathing.
Avoid caffeine and heavy meals within two hours of going to bed.
Maintain regular sleep hours. Sticking to a steady sleep schedule will help you relax and sleep better. Apnea episodes decrease when you get plenty of sleep.

Bedtime tips for preventing sleep apnea

Sleep on your side. Avoid sleeping on your back, as gravity makes it more likely for your tongue and soft tissues to drop and obstruct your airway.
Try the tennis ball trick. In order to keep yourself from rolling onto your back while you sleep, sew a tennis ball into a pocket on the back of your pajama top. Or wedge a pillow stuffed with tennis balls behind your back.
Prop your head up. Elevate the head of your bed by 4 to 6 inches or elevate your body from the waist up by using a foam wedge. You can also use a special cervical pillow.
Open your nasal passages. Try to keep your nasal passages open at night using a nasal dilator, saline spray, breathing strips, or a neti pot.

Throat exercises to reduce sleep apnea

Studies show that throat exercises may reduce the severity of sleep apnea by strengthening the muscles in airway, making them less likely to collapse.
Press tongue flat against the floor of mouth and brush top and sides with toothbrush. Repeat brushing movement 5 times, 3 times a day.
Press length of tongue to roof of mouth and hold for 3 minutes a day.
Place finger into one side of mouth. Hold finger against cheek while pulling cheek muscle in at same time. Repeat 10 times then rest and alternate sides. Repeat sequence 3 times.
Purse lips as if to kiss. Hold lips tightly together and move them up and to the right the up and to the left 10 times. Repeat sequence 3 times.
Place lips on a balloon. Take a deep breath through your nose then blow out through your mouth to inflate balloon as much as possible. Repeat 5 times without removing balloon from mouth.

What would happen to McDonald's...

Can you imagine what would happen to McDonald's or Tim's if everybody learned the truth about the harm and danger these places hold to every one of us. Cheap processed food, cheap spicing up with salt, using corn syrup for sweetness that will eventually destroy our health but gets us addicted enough will provide good profit to those corporations.
Imagine all the people... living active and in health...
Imagine all those countries... spending less on sick care and more on raising everybody's life standard...
Imagine all those children... playing active and getting smarter...
Imagine all the women... without the threat of cancer becoming happy active grandmothers...
Imagine all those men... still going strong in their late years providing the family with wisdom...
Imagine all the drug companies... switching to test and control healthy clean food without pesticides and additives...
WOW, This'll be the day that I die... happy and content.

When you eat too much you gain fat

Isn't that simple? Eat and live in moderation and sensibly and there will be no problems.
Use food for something else than nutrition or keeping your body healthy, trouble is on the way.
So break the fast and have your breakfast, eat some lunch and your supper. You might not need much in between but in case you do, have some fruit or nuts.
So what happens when you have a coffee date? Then you go to the movies and watch the game on TV.  You have a latte and a slice of something, in the movies you have your soft drink and pop corn, during the game you have a slice of pizza and a beer. You deserve it after a hard day. And what you end up with is double the calories that you would have needed otherwise. Using up the calories? Well, unless you do hard physical work  all day, sitting or standing around at work, sitting in the cinema and in front of the TV will not use up much.
I sometimes call North Americans the Dessert Nations. When I was a child, my grandmother used to love making delicious cakes and delights for us. But only on the weekends. During the week lunch and supper consisted of soup and legumes, or some simple main course, for breakfast some hot cocoa with a slice of bread or such.
Overweight children were very rare. Not every class had an overweight child. Size eight was the regular size that is now probably size four in the US today. There had to be a health reason like hormonal imbalance for the kids to be fat.
And now? Clothing sizes had been adjusted so we wouldn't feel so awful all at ones that instead of size 14 it only shows size 10. People are not at all well dressed and they do not know how to match their clothing with their natural colours and personalities. Why? They are more sluggish with less energy and it wouldn't even look good on them anyway. Just check the people on the streets. They are not at all those ones that eastern countries used to envy having a comfortable lifestyle.
So let's change that. NOW.

The so called FOOD PYRAMID

UH! After a Scandinavian 1972 model the US developed their own food pyramid model that showed the food choices and proportions we should eat. They have been trying to improve it since 1992. A newer variation is the Healthy Plate.
I have some problems with this.
Who could eat consciously and in scientific proportions of essentials molecules and by counting building blocks?
Nobody. It's like when we are told don't think about something. In that moment you have already thought about it and it's too late. We get hungry, and before we know it we eat. Sometimes if we listen to our body we eat what it needs such as the first fresh strawberries that still has the flavour of the sun, the seasonal water melon, the fresh peas or the small new potatoes that is so good with parsley. Our body lets us know that it is getting low on some nutrition so please, fill up. Hopefully you listen and respond well.
We are all different. In North America we came from many different countries and culture, only a few years or decades, maybe a hundred years tie us together with our neighbour. We are all people of the same species so why would it matter?
It does matter. Our own survival depends on the survival mechanisms our own ancestors developed, where they had been, how they survived. They passed it on through their genes to many generations and finally to us.
This is what we need to know and listen to. A few hundred years back it was no problem at all in close knit communities. But now?
I can't even advise you to go to your mother because in North America mothers have been part of the convenient, processed food generations. But try to find out where your grandparents and their parents came from and how they lived.
Did they live in Asia and ate fish rice and vegetables but no dairy or beef?
Did they come from Middle Europe and had a lot of pork and potatoes, some basic vegetables, seasonal fruit, apple and nuts all year around?
How did they prepared their meals? Try that!
All millions of species on Earth have survived for hundreds of millions of years by passing on the knowledge, the habits to the new generations. They didn't have to know why they just ate the right stuff and survived.
So if dairy doesn't agree with you maybe you shouldn't have it. If pork is too heavy for you maybe you should eat something else. No fancy meals, or exotic plants that promise magic power because it is the best for the people that has had it for hundreds of years.
As my father used to say, eat modestly and sensibly and it will be fine.

The Fat You Eat is not the Fat You Carry

We can't - and believe me, you don't even want to eliminate fat from your diet. It is very important to become and stay healthy. 

Vitamins A D E and K are fat soluble which means they can only be digested when fat is present. (So when you take multivitamins or vitamin pills of this sort, you need to take them with food that contains some fat.)

For healthy skin and hair as well as maintaining regular body temperature and healthy cell functions we need fat.

But what kind of fat? Meat with white chunks or spots full of fat or lard, butter, heavy cream, so you get it for sure? Or the fully man-made margarine that used to be a butter substitute during the war when food was scarce? Definitely not!

Humans up till about ten thousand years ago needed fat to survive the ice age of the time when they had to walk and run a marathon-a-day to find and kill their prey. That prey was wild, lean with strong muscles itself.

Do you run many miles a day to find and kill your prey and try to share it and save it for later? Do you eat strong wild game? Oh, no? The animals you eat only live for some months or maybe a year, stay idle and artificially blown up to maximize its size so it would provide the most profit in the shortest period of time. 

Not very appetizing. 

So the fat we need is plant based  in small amounts.

Nuts, beans and legumes, good oils like olive oil, avocado gives you what you need. 

Remember, fat calories are more than twice as much as carbohydrate's or protein's. 9 calories per gram, so you need only a small amount to satisfy your daily needs.

THE FAT YOU CARRY

Remember, our body builds makes its own building blocks. Your fat that you gain under your skin or around your organs can originate from proteins, sugary food as well as grains or carbohydrates. The body is a great factory that can create its own building blocks from almost any combinations. It transforms fat you eat or even protein you don't need to simple sugar for energy and then when you are covered as far as energy goes, it will store the excess in fat cells that will be released in need for energy so it will become sugar again at that time. 

We not just need to eat though, we want to eat often and at every occasion to eat when we socialize, entertain, go anywhere. There is no way we would ever go without food for days. The longest fast is during the night when we sleep so we usually don't eat so when we wake up we break the fast very fast not to go hungry.

So we pile up fat everywhere our body can store it. Bulge here and there, oops, we begin to have a hard time to bend, we might walk funny because our thigh are so close they are rubbing each other, we grow breast like bulges on our backs and it is only the outside. Meantime our organs are getting imprisoned by fat all around them. So they fight and finally they get exhausted and fail. So you go to see a doctor where you want to be repaired when your cure is in your hands and mouth. So is your toxins and poison. 

So you decide. Fat or lean, healthy or sick, energetic or sluggish. I guess that is democracy too when you have all these choices.  

Protein Sources (formerly only known for meat)

 Every cell of our body needs protein for staying healthy. Although most people only associate proteins with muscle and body building and as such it is considered almighty good. BUT STOP!
Each and every cell of our body contains some protein and the number is in the trillions. The protein structure is distinctive to every species. It works many ways. Our body itself creates its main elements called amino acids while we digest our food. Our digestive system takes all that we eat apart and rearrange it to our body's needs. So even if we eat some animal proteins that we need exactly the same way, in our system all that protein is taken, dissembled and reassembled into amino acid sequences we need just at that moment. So don't think that you eat animal meat you get more proteins you need than if you ate plant based protein. Your wonderful body-factory assembly line will do its work anyway. Remember, you will never know what each of your cells need at the moment but your body will!
How much you need minimum? You need not count anything if you eat your nuts, beans and legumes. But there is such a thing as TOO MUCH PROTEIN.
This might become simply fat, so instead of muscle building you just get overweight.
Our excretory system will try to get rid of excess protein so you pee it out. But it can get worse. It can add to building blood clots that will lead to heart and cardiovascular problems.
When you eat a plant based diet your body can metabolize most of the food so you need not worry about your cells or muscles. When you want to get stronger just exercise more and eat you nuts beans and legumes. They are delicious!
Meat? Well, your ancestors had no other way of surviving droughts, ice ages, only if they followed the herds and ate them. There were times when there was simply not enough plants available to survive. Eating whatever we could wherever we could meant life or death at the time. Just like pigs, you might say? Yes. But our original diet did not include meat and our system still did not fully accommodate this alternative. it was good enough until we found better.
And now we have. We don't need to starve in this part of the world so we can clean ourselves and rid our body of cancer causing toxic food.
So, poultry, beef and pork: we will let you become chickens to live over 15 years, turkeys of the wild, cows that will only need to feed their own calves and not mature people, and pigs that resemble our biological system the most so it looked like we committed cannibalism!
REMEMBER TO EAT EVERYTHING IN THEIR NATURAL RAW FORM? CAN YOU DO THAT WITH MEAT? (Oh, you say you like tartar beefsteak? Yukky! )

Those Fruits and Vegetables: YOU NEED CARBS

Our base food has always been and always will be those greens and beautiful coloured wonders of the plant family. Easy to digest, full of vital vitamins and nutrition, less calories that make us fat, clean our body and keep it in top shape. There has been no harmful effects shown from plants. So we can enjoy them without feeling guilty.
One rule of thumb though: use them as fresh and unrefined and unprocessed as possible! It is a good rule to follow for everything.
Eat them as salads, smoothies, peel them, slice them, bite them.
Don't forget the spices that you can use fresh or dried.
Onions, garlic are the base of cooking but healthy in raw form as well.
Nuts should be essential part of our daily meals or snacks. Raw!
Beans and legumes fresh or dried to cook or juiced. Think about soy!
Different cereals and starches belong to the pants family too. Eat them as close to raw as possible which means no refined flour! You can use your own mill to make your own flour for your own bread. You just need to buy some equipment and finally you will know exactly what you are eating!
Believe nobody that says you will be undernourished if you eat plant based food!
Most of the people in North America are way undernourished although they are mostly overweight or simply obese. The umpteen times more calories still do not provide the minimum amount of vitamins, minerals and -surprise! - good fat or useful proteins either. They just stain and clog their systems and make them expire way too soon.
To get good service and life time warranty for your system you have to switch your service provider to the plant family. They will look after you and provide maintenance that will not need extra expensive fixing and mending!
And it was a free advertisement that will only benefit all of us at the expense of nobody. Win-win and enjoy!