Coming Soon

Yes, I know people like to say things like "coming soon" and they make a big deal about it for months and months (some even do this for a year). Well, I'm just saying "coming soon" meaning January 3, 2011. On that Monday, we'll have a new format with new ideas and a real plan to help in your healthy quest. We'll be following one gal's quest for better (or existing) physical conditioning and another gal's quest for better eating. To keep this short, we have plans. And, if you would like to contribute, feel free. We would love to have you post healthy questions and/or comments. The more the merrier....maybe?

Public Health Needs Your Help

In the U.S., at least, one of the biggest enemies to public health is fear of the unknown or fear of what is perceived as the truth. The American Council on Science and Health states that the indiscriminant misconceptions publicized as a pandemic does a great disservice to the real role of public health officials who are charged with keeping the public safe. Therefore, U.S. officials need to be vigilant about the message they send to the masses. If the public perceived a pandemic, massive hysteria may arise and little positive or accurate information can be disseminated.

A case in point concerns the AIDS/HIV virus. This was once a disease thought to be spread by holding hands or coughing on someone. People were frightened to be around those with AIDS for fear of contracting the disease. Even some children with AIDS were banned from attending school because they may be contagious. All of this was based on fear and ignorance. Fortunately, with time, education and a mass communication campaign to publicize facts about transmission, many people began to understand how this disease was spread and worked to prevent an outbreak. Of course this all took a great deal of financial resources.

However, throwing money at a problem isn’t always the best solution. The oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is one example where money alone will not solve the problem. Billions of dollars have been spent in the past 40 days to resolve the gushing oil, yet as of this writing, nothing of substance has been accomplished. Oil is still rapidly spewing from the earth. This is and will be a public health hazard for years to come.

Globally, the main concerns of public health officials are pandemics, endemics, poverty, and politics. Political abuse, or garnering as much power as possible, is one sure way to collapse well-established public health infrastructure. For example, the once agrarian towns in South Africa became corrupted, militaristic, and led by an oligarchic government. This made it impossible for roads to be built, basic telephone services to be employed, and electricity used for basic human needs. Shipping routes were unavailable for all but the wealthy and the impoverished areas could not afford medicines, good quality food, hospitals to be built, or trained personnel to keep people alive.

Around the world, infectious microbes were cause for a myriad of diseases especially among the poor neighborhoods. The people in these neighborhoods hadn’t the money to spend for proper diets. Therefore, their immune systems were compromised, their living conditions made it possible for the citizens to develop dysentery, and they were exposed to other various bacteria in contaminated waste and poor water supply. Poverty and disease are not mutually exclusive; when a country suffers financially, people’s health is compromised. One person gets the disease and instead of ridding that disease from one person, it spreads throughout the community. Then, the community hasn’t the financial or other resources to combat the situation and it turns into a pandemic. If this becomes a way of life, then this becomes an endemic.

In order for public health officials to thwart calamities and keep its citizens safe, a central government must be (relatively) free from corruption and put its people’s safety and lives ahead of individual power.

Get real for better health: Say no to faux

'Tis the season for dieting.

It seems everyone is on some sort of a diet – eat grapefruits until you drop diet, the cookie diet, the stress diet, and my favorite, the Hershey Kisses diet.

Instead of introducing you to another fun-filled fascinating fantasy, let’s get real. How about something different this time and something that will work more than a week or a month?

Mark and Phyllis Franklin of Edmond learned about The Full Plate Diet while de-stressing at Lifestyle Center of America, where you are encouraged to eat real food you can buy at real grocery stores. Lifestyle Center of America is a place you can go to relax, learn about healthy living and to recharge your batteries.

It’s a 1,700 wooded-acre campus located in the beautiful Arbuckle Mountains near Sulphur, Okla. The grounds are some of the most spectacular scenery around with wild boar, deer and other animals scurrying about. Just deeply breathing in the fresh air could cut your stress level in half.

The nutritional advice bestowed to the Franklins at this center came from The Full Plate Diet, written by Stuart A. Seale, M.D., Theresa Sherard, M.D. and Diane Fleming, Ph.D., LDN. The book really should be called “Eating Real Food 101,” because the book encourages you to consume food Mother Nature created and not created by a manufacturing plant.

As my friend Rachel told me, if it comes from a plant, eat it. If it is made in a plant, don’t. Not preferred, are foods filled with unpronounceable ingredients such as: calcium disodium EDTA, phosphoric acid, acesulfame K, or pyridoxine HCL (I don’t know what this stuff is, either).

Instead, the full plate diet encourages you to power up your plate by adding food to your plate rather than take it away. The whole key to this is increasing the amount of fiber you eat from 10 grams (what the average American consumes) to 40 grams a day.

“It’s very doable,” Phyllis Franklin said. She loves this new way of eating and has even lost weight although she did not enter Lifestyle Center of America with the expectation she was going to change her behavior much.

“They teach you how to make better choices,” she said about the staff. “It’s incorporating more fiber into your diet.”

High fiber foods include fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains. Fiber-filled foods are naturally low in calories and have the added benefit of giving you that full feeling so your body has no idea its consuming fewer calories than normal. Fewer calories ingested than your body burns simply turns into weight loss. One thing about fiber, though, is the quality.

Not all fiber is created equal. Today, fiber is the buzz ingredient for food manufacturers much like “no trans fats” is the buzz term for food marketers.

They know fiber is considered a healthy way to go, so they inject fiber into anything including candy bars, yogurt and Fruit Loops. These foods are not considered good quality fiber foods because the fiber has been engineered into them.

Now, food manufacturers can boast “high fiber” and more people will buy their product. These are the same agencies that will claim “no trans fats” in orange juice when oranges don’t naturally have trans fats.

Instead of simply eating just regular foods from trees and other plants, people are looking for the magic potion. They think exotic foods from the deep forests of the Amazon have the secret healthful enzymes needed for optimal health and low body fat. They want phytochemicals, antioxidants, detoxification, and weekly cleansing regiments.

What’s really missing, Franklin discovered, is that people are not eating enough real fiber. Instead they are gorging themselves with pseudo fiber and other forms of faux foods.

Franklin even surprised herself with the ease of this program and the fact she doesn’t even crave the old zero-gramed fiber foods she once consumed. Instead she enjoys the natural taste of fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes -- and yes, legumes are fill with fiber as well as protein.

If you are looking for more information on how to get more real fiber into your diet (and even some cool recipes and an online fiber calculator), take a look at www.FullPlateDiet.org. This, I assure you, is the “magic” elixir you’ve been craving.

Riding the bus is good for your health

If you are like millions of Americans that have been incessantly searching for the magic, easy weight-loss secret, then read on.

Edmond has had this covert, clandestine solution for a while. And yes, they have even tried to get the message out, but for some reason not everyone got the message about this miraculous tonic. Or perhaps some people are cognizant of this method but don’t realize it works because the cost is free and it has no side effects.

They are used to paying lots of money to lose weight and dealing with a whole range of side effects.

The answer is simply this: Ride Edmond’s Citylink bus every day.

Since December of last year, I’ve been taking the bus to my job downtown Oklahoma City as a health and wellness coach. I walk about three-fourths of a mile to the bus stop every morning and then about one-fourth mile from the bus to my office.

I do this every day, which equates to walking 10 miles a week. Since walking (or running) a mile burns up 100 calories, I expend an extra 1,000 calories a week. It takes about 3,500 calories to burn up one pound of fat; after 52 weeks, I’ve burned up 52,000 calories – or better yet, put it in fat pounds -- more than 12 pounds are burned up!

That’s 12 pounds a year automatically and I don’t have to sweat it out, starve myself, or take pills that make me jittery, nervous, cranky or subject to death.

There’s another health reason for taking the bus. You don’t have to worry about the ever-increasing traffic that inundates every road through Edmond or the drivers who can’t seem to maintain a decent speed, thus sending your blood pressure into the stratosphere.

You can meet wonderfully interesting people on your way to and from work, engage in a bit of relaxing small talk or simply sleep an extra 30 or so minutes while someone else pleasantly whisks you to your destination.

Ahhh, doesn’t that sound much better than rushing around, jamming on the brakes because of a rubber-necker, getting to your parking garage downtown, paying those monthly parking garage fees and then of course walking through the sometimes scary parking garage? Plus, a short, brisk walk can only make you smile. Try walking and frowning; see if you can do it.

The next reason for riding the bus is what most people think of – saving money.

According to the American Public Transportation Association, “the cost of transportation to and from medical treatment is staggering and growing each year. Medicaid and Medicare services pay nearly $3.5 billion a year to provide transportation to non-emergency medical treatment. In 2000, more than 100 million Medicaid trips were funded at an average cost of $16 per trip.

“More than half of Medicare ambulance trips (as many as 90 percent in rural areas) may be for non-emergencies at a cost that can exceed $500 per trip."

In fact, nearly 4 million children in families with incomes less than $50,000 a year miss crucial doctors’ appointments because they can’t find transportation that fits in their budget. Because Citylink is free, those people who need to get to their doctor in Edmond can find the medical help they need.

Taking the bus helps me financially because I don’t have to pay for gasoline, oil, maintenance on my car or even car washes. If you want to figure out specifically how much money you could be saving by taking the Citylink, log on to:

http://www.publictransportation.com/contact/stories/calculator_08.asp

Just input your car's gasoline mileage, price per gallon of gasoline, number of miles in your round trip commute and the cost of your bus ticket. Since Edmond's Citylink costs riders nothing, you save even more.

You can even calculate your carbon dioxide emissions by logging on to:

http://www.publictransportation.com/calculators/carbon_08.asp

Studies have proven that air pollution exacerbates asthma and can cause lots of health problems in the elderly. Also, taking the bus is much safer than driving a car to work. Annually, there are 190,000 fewer deaths, injuries and accidents than trips by an automobile.

Plus, according to the National Safety Council, riding the bus is nearly 170 times safer than traveling by car.