How The Nutrients Work When Your Engine Is Running #3

In addition to the blood vessels dilating and bringing blood to the surface to cool the body, your body also begins to sweat. This is the body's most effective way of cooling itself. The sweat evaporates and results in cooling of the body.

There is a downside to this and that is if you sweat a lot, you can become dehydrated for two reasons. First, if you are sweating you are usually doing some activity that is going to require more oxygen, so you may have an increased respiratory rate. Usually, as you begin to breath faster you will open your mouth and breath through both nose and mouth. This will begin to dry the membranes of the air passages and hence begin the dehydration process. Secondly, as you sweat, you are not only losing water through the skin. If you lick your skin after you have been sweating, it will taste salty, because you lose sodium, chloride and potassium through the skin as well with the sweat. These elements stay on the skin while the water evaporates. Beware that you are replacing what you are losting.

How the Nutrients Work When Your Engine is Running #1

Normally the nutrients that I mentioned over the past week circulate in the blood stream and go where they are needed. One of the things that we require to do anything is power or energy. When your muscles start to work, they require energy. Energy can be supplied by glucose which is either stored in your muscles as glycogen or it can be brought to the muscle via the blood.

In order for your body to convert the glucose into energy, the body must also supply oxygen, which comes via the blood stream.

The Art of Breathing Part 4

Some of you may experience breath holding. To determine this, pay attention to the transition between inhalation and exhalation. If you feel a little "catch" between these two, and you find that you have a slight difficulty in initiating the exhalation, you may be breath holding. This tends to happen most often during exercise.

You can reduce the breath holding by consciously relaxing the abdomen at the end of the inhalation. It is particularly important to breathe during exercise since you are increasing the demand for oxygen in the body. Be aware of how you breathe during exercise.

The Art of Breathing Part 2

Yesterday you became aware of what type of breather you are. Now, still lying on your back, put your hands around your lower ribs. Continue to breathe in your normal fashion, focusing on your hands. What you should feel is an effortless expansion of the ribs as you inhale and slow recoil as you exhale.

If you ribs remain motionless, your breathing is too shallow even if you are an abdominal breather. Many times people who are chest breathers will not feel any movement of the lower rib cage when they do this, because they are by nature of the way they breath shallow breathers.

Shallow breaths do no use the full capacity of the lung and decrease the amount of oxygen available to the blood stream and hence the rest of your body.

The Art of Breathing

Most of us just taking breathing for granted. We don't really spend much time thinking about it, we just breath. But there is an art to breathing. Taking a little time each day to think about your breathing will help you in many ways.

First just become aware of what type of breather you are. Lying on your back, put one hand on your chest and one hand on your abdomen. Just think about your hands and become aware of the movement of your hands. If the hand on the chest is moving and the one on the abdomen is not, you are a chest breather. If the hand on the abdomen is moving more than the hand on the chest, you are an abdominal breather.

Why is this important? Chest breather's are less efficient in their breathing. If you are an abdominal breather, you are filling the little air sacs in your lungs down to the bases of the lungs which is more efficient and gives your body more oxygen to work with.

Pulmonary Hypertension

Yesterday I mentioned the disease pulmonary hypertension. Today I want to explain a little about this complex disease. Pulmonary hypertension is basically a high blood pressure in the pulmonary system vasculature. It can be in the arteries, veins or capillary beds or a combination of these. Like the high blood pressure that we are all familiar with, this high blood pressure is in the lungs. This makes it difficult for oxygen to get into the blood stream and CO2 to get out of the blood stream. Hence you may become short of breath because your oxygen saturation levels will drop.

These high pressures in the lungs will put high pressures on the heart and result in a heart that fails. But these pressures don't just affect the heart, they also affect the liver and can result in liver failure as well.

While we do have earlier detection these days and we can closely monitor someone with this disease, the survival rate is not great beyond 3 years from the time of the diagnosis.

So if you end up with this disease as a result of a weight loss drug, is it worth losing a few pounds to the total detriment of your health?

Bounce in Your Life

I've talked about bouncing before, but there is evidence that supports why bouncing is important to the health of your body. Bouncing exercises not only strengthen muscles, but also strengthen organs and all cells in the body.

Bouncing works against gravitational pull and creates a G-force that is 2-3 times that of you standing still. This results in every cell having to lift more weight. If you are using a trampoline (not required, used as a demonstration here), the weight of a 200 pound man doubles when he startes upward in the bounce. At the top of the bounce the weight is 0. But you're doubling the weight in the upward movement. This was demonstrated with astronauts who were going to be going into weightless situations and needed to maintain their muscle mass and strength. The extra weight causes all of the cells to react and work harder. Breathing is critical here because the cells will also have an increased demand for oxygen. Increasing the oxygen through deeper breaths also assists organ to be healthier by providing more oxygen so that they can become more efficient in their function.

Wheat Germ - Benefit or Not

Wheat germ is the kernel of the wheat. There are many nutrients in this kernel, including protein, vitamin E, vitamins B1, B2, B5 (pantothenic acid) and B6, fiber, magnesium, zinc, and thiamine. These are essential nutrients that our body uses, so there are many benefits to wheat germ.

Once thing you should know about wheat germ is that it has a fairly short shelf life once the container is opened. Once opened, wheat germ should be stored in a tight container in the refrigerator where it can keep for up to 9 months. Because of the unsaturated fat content, the whet germ tends to become rancid in a short period of time if no refrigerated.

Wheat germ is a brain food in that it helps the brain become more alert. This in part is due to the increase in oxygenation utilization that wheat germ facilitates. Octacosanol is the part of the wheat germ responsible for improved tissue oxygenation. Another benefit here is an increase energy in the muscles and as a result endurance and overall stamina increases.