| From: Julius Wong | 6/24/2024 9:46:27 AM | | | | | | Gardening has great mental and physical health benefits. Here's why you should pull weeds and plant seeds.
There are so many benefits to gardening. Here's what to know. (Getty Creative)
Do you have a green thumb? Even if the answer is no, gardening is one hobby you may want to pick up for the health benefits alone. Studies show that all that time outdoors pulling weeds, planting seeds and tending to your yard can reap big rewards for your overall well-being.
Ready to hit the plant nursery? Read on to see just how gardening improves both mental and physical health — and why you’ll want to also take a stab at growing fruits and vegetables in addition to beautiful blooms.
What research says about gardening- People who spent time in gardens and green spaces had improved mental and physical health, a 2018 analysis from the United Kingdom found. Among other benefits, researchers cited exposure to vitamin D, the social interaction found in community gardens and the physical labor that can lead to better balance, strength and dexterity.
- Research from 2017 found those who gardened had a reduction in depression and anxiety symptoms, as well as increases in quality of life, sense of community, physical activity levels and cognitive function.
- A 2024 umbrella review of previous studies on gardening published in Systematic Reviews concluded that gardening and horticultural therapy improves mental well-being, quality of life and overall health.
- A 2021 study found that gardening therapy had positive effects on people with dementia, improving their engagement, reducing agitation and depression and potentially decreasing medication needs.
- A 2023 study published in The Lancet Planetary Health found that people who participated in a community garden ate more fiber, were more physically active and had lower stress levels than those who did not.
- While a just-published 2024 study involving older cancer survivors did not see a significant improvement in diet, physical activity and physical function after a vegetable gardening intervention, those who took part in the gardening did increase their vegetable and fruit consumption. They also experienced significant improvements in perceived health and physical performance compared with peers who did not garden.
How does gardening benefit your mental health?
Dr. Andrea Papa, a psychiatrist and chief medical officer at Advantage Behavioral Health, tells Yahoo Life that there are several reasons why gardening can support your mental health. When you garden, your focus is on the “process,” and not necessarily on other aspects of your life that may cause you stress, she says. “You are out of your head, you’re not necessarily thinking about what happened at work — you’re at peace with yourself.”
There are also mental health benefits to simply being outside, Papa says. A major one is getting vitamin D from the sun; a deficiency in vitamin D has been associated with impaired mental health.
While gardening is often a solo activity, joining a gardening program, such as pitching in with a community garden, can have a positive impact on your mental well-being. “You’re going to have collaboration, which can help build friendships — and we know friendships are great for our mental health,” Papa says. “As humans, we crave human contact. I would say it’s a good thing to do it with other people. While there are times we may want to be by ourselves … as a whole, I think it’s a good idea to garden with others.”
Dr. Shivani Amin, who specializes in functional medicine, tells Yahoo Life that gardening helps lower our levels of cortisol, a hormone that regulates stress.
How does gardening benefit your physical health?
Gardening can be great for your cardiovascular health, as the act of gardening can get your heart rate up, whether that’s through pulling weeds or digging holes for your new plant friends.
“Cardiovascular health improves with any exercise that repeatedly causes heart rate elevations,” physician Dr. Gerda Maissel, founder of patient advocate service My MD Advisor, tells Yahoo Life. “Improved cardiovascular health reduces the risk of strokes and heart attacks.”
Maissel says that the caloric burn of gardening depends on what you are doing, as vigorous digging is going to burn more calories than, say, trimming flowers. “In general, gardening is considered a low to moderate activity level, which will burn approximately 90 to 160 calories per hour,” Maissel explains.
Sneaking in extra cardio through an activity like gardening may also lead to results like better sleep and weight management, Maissel notes.
Moving in general can be important for our physical health, even if we aren’t spiking our heart rate, says Amin. “Our bodies are not designed to be sitting at our computers for hours on end, so gardening incorporates everyday movements that contribute to improved physical health,” she explains. “At minimum, gardening involves standing up, bending down and walking around, which benefit cardiovascular health, increase flexibility and mobility and strengthen muscles.”
Amin notes that tasks like digging, weeding or carrying heavy loads such as bags of soil, pots or plants can specifically strengthen the back, shoulders, arms and legs.
But it’s not just the actual act of gardening that can improve your physical health. Having a garden can also improve the quality of your diet — if your focus is on growing food, that is.
Dr. Raj Dasgupta, a physician specializing in internal medicine and a medical reviewer for the National Council on Aging, tells Yahoo Life that those who garden are more likely to grow their own food, which “can lead to healthier eating habits and better nutrition.” It also “gives you access to fresh, organic produce and reduces your intake of pesticides and chemicals, which is great for your overall health.”
Adds Amin: “What’s available to you, you’re more likely to eat.”
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| From: Yorikke | 7/10/2024 1:57:22 AM | | | | | | Iodine A basic soil element that has been generally washed from our diet.
The man to listen to for all you need to know about Iodine (and Salt) is Dr. David Brownstien. There are a dozen or so very good interviews on Youtube with Dr. Brownstein. I particularly like the Videos on the Nutrition with Judy channel.
youtube.com
The supplement to consider is Lugol's Solution. It comes in 2% and 5% solutions. About eight drops of 2% in a glass of water is what is recommended. Iodine is most associated with the Thyroid, but is also present in most other glands in the body.
Watch Brownstein, and you can get your Lugol's on line if you decide to supplement. |
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| From: Yorikke | 7/10/2024 2:07:30 AM | | | | | | Boron: Another essential trace mineral that has been washed out of our diet by modern agriculture and life.
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Boron is an element that increases bone density and has effects on reproductive systems. Its bone strength aspects is very important in this age of very low dosages for the average person. If you have an elderly family member or friend supplementing with Boron might help to delay the inevitable fracture/fall/death that occurs among so many people over sixty. |
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| To: Yorikke who wrote (16549) | 7/12/2024 11:23:03 AM | | From: Pogeu Mahone | | | | Many foods contain iodine, including:
- Seafood: Cod, halibut, pollock, crab, scallops, squid, and tuna
- Seaweed: Kelp, nori, kombu, and wakame
- Eggs: Whole eggs and egg yolks
- Dairy: Milk, cheese, yogurt, and butter
NIH Office of Dietary Supplements
Iodine - Health Professional Fact Sheet
May 1, 2024 — Seaweed (such as kelp, nori, kombu, and wakame) is one of the best food sources...
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| To: Yorikke who wrote (16550) | 7/12/2024 11:24:04 AM | | From: Pogeu Mahone | | | | Scientists Identify a Speech Trait That Foreshadows Cognitive Decline
HEALTH12 July 2024
ByCLAIRE LANCASTER, THE CONVERSATION
 (Smile/Getty Images)
Can you pass me the whatchamacallit? It's right over there next to the thingamajig.
Many of us will experience "lethologica", or difficulty finding words, in everyday life. And it usually becomes more prominent with age.
Frequent difficulty finding the right word can signal changes in the brain consistent with the early ("preclinical") stages of Alzheimer's disease – before more obvious symptoms emerge.
However, a recent study from the University of Toronto suggests that it's the speed of speech, rather than the difficulty in finding words that is a more accurate indicator of brain health in older adults.
The researchers asked 125 healthy adults, aged 18 to 90, to describe a scene in detail. Recordings of these descriptions were subsequently analysed by artificial intelligence (AI) software to extract features such as speed of talking, duration of pauses between words, and the variety of words used.
Participants also completed a standard set of tests that measure concentration, thinking speed, and the ability to plan and carry out tasks. Age-related decline in these "executive" abilities was closely linked to the pace of a person's everyday speech, suggesting a broader decline than just difficulty in finding the right word.
A novel aspect of this study was the use of a "picture-word interference task", a clever task designed to separate the two steps of naming an object: finding the right word and instructing the mouth on how to say it out loud.
During this task, participants were shown pictures of everyday objects (such as a broom) while being played an audio clip of a word that is either related in meaning (such as "mop" – which makes it harder to think of the picture's name) or which sounds similar (such as "groom" – which can make it easier).
Interestingly, the study found that the natural speech speed of older adults was related to their quickness in naming pictures. This highlights that a general slowdown in processing might underlie broader cognitive and linguistic changes with age, rather than a specific challenge in memory retrieval for words.
Alzheimer's explained.How to make the findings more powerfulWhile the findings from this study are interesting, finding words in response to picture-based cues may not reflect the complexity of vocabulary in unconstrained everyday conversation.
Verbal fluency tasks, which require participants to generate as many words as possible from a given category (for example, animals or fruits) or starting with a specific letter within a time limit, may be used with picture-naming to better capture the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon.
The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon refers to the temporary inability to retrieve a word from memory, despite partial recall and the feeling that the word is known.
These tasks are considered a better test of everyday conversations than the picture-word interference task because they involve the active retrieval and production of words from one's vocabulary, similar to the processes involved in natural speech.
While verbal fluency performance does not significantly decline with normal ageing (as shown in a 2022 study), poor performance on these tasks can indicate neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.
The tests are useful because they account for the typical changes in word retrieval ability as people get older, allowing doctors to identify impairments beyond what is expected from normal ageing and potentially detect neurodegenerative conditions.
The verbal fluency test engages various brain regions involved in language, memory, and executive functioning, and hence can offer insights into which regions of the brain are affected by cognitive decline.
The authors of the University of Toronto study could have investigated participants' subjective experiences of word-finding difficulties alongside objective measures like speech pauses. This would provide a more comprehensive understanding of the cognitive processes involved.
Personal reports of the "feeling" of struggling to retrieve words could offer valuable insights complementing the behavioural data, potentially leading to more powerful tools for quantifying and detecting early cognitive decline.
Opening doorsNevertheless, this study has opened exciting doors for future research, showing that it's not just what we say but how fast we say it that can reveal cognitive changes.
By harnessing natural language processing technologies (a type of AI), which use computational techniques to analyse and understand human language data, this work advances previous studies that noticed subtle changes in the spoken and written language of public figures like Ronald Reagan and Iris Murdoch in the years before their dementia diagnoses.
While those opportunistic reports were based on looking back after a dementia diagnosis, this study provides a more systematic, data-driven and forward-looking approach.
Using rapid advancements in natural language processing will allow for automatic, detection of language changes, such as slowed speech rate.
This study underscores the potential of speech rate changes as a significant yet subtle marker of cognitive health that could aid in identifying people at risk before more severe symptoms become apparent.
Claire Lancaster, Lecturer, Dementia, University of Sussex and Alice Stanton, PhD Candidate, Dementia, University of Sussex
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
An earlier version of this article was published in March 2024. |
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| To: Yorikke who wrote (16550) | 7/12/2024 11:28:22 AM | | From: Pogeu Mahone | | | | Boron is a trace mineral that's naturally found in many plant foods. Some of the best sources of boron include:
- Fruits and fruit juices: Raisins, peaches, prunes, grape juice, apples, and apple juice
- Legumes: Peanuts, beans, and peanut butter
- Vegetables: Avocados, potatoes, leafy green vegetables like kale and spinach
- Other foods: Coffee, milk, cider, wine, and beer
NIH Office of Dietary Supplements
Boron - Consumer - NIH Office of Dietary Supplements
Jan 15, 2021 — What foods provide boron? * Fruits and fruit juices, such as raisins, peaches...
Verywell Health
Highest Boron Foods: Best Options for Healthy Bones - Verywell Health
Sep 5, 2023 — And olive oil (in moderation) can be a fine addition to a healthy diet. Peanut ...
Healthline
Brains, Bones, and Boron
Ohio State Health & Discovery
The benefits of boron, and why you shouldn't look for it in borax
Jul 19, 2023 — Prunes. Raisins and grape juice. Avocado. Peaches. Peanuts and peanut butter.
The average person's diet typically contains 1.5 to 3 milligrams (mg) of boron per day. For example, a 100 g serving of dried prunes can meet the daily requirement. However, while coffee isn't particularly high in boron, it can add up for people who drink multiple cups a day.
Boron is considered safe for most people, but large amounts can be harmful. People with kidney problems should avoid boron supplements because the kidneys have to work hard to flush out boron.
Some claim that boron can help with bone health, inflammation, osteoarthritis, reproduction, development, brain function, metabolism, immunity, and retention of vitamin D and estrogen. However, there are limited studies to support these claims.
Generative AI is experimental. |
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| To: Yorikke who wrote (16549) | 7/12/2024 11:58:53 AM | | From: mel221 | | | | I started taking synthroid back in 2013. I never felt different whether I was taking it or not, but the blood tests were always better when I was taking it.
A few year later, I started feeling general fatigue. Just really rundown. I did some research and found some good info on t-nation.
The material suggested that the thyroid would fill with bromine instead of iodine because iodine in our diet is low. The recommendation was to take a large dose of iodine for 60 days. Something like 30 mg daily until you have taken at least 1.5G. I did this with a selenium supplement (something like 200 units).
For maintenance, I take the same thyroid supplement, but only three days a week. The rundown feeling went away, but the rundown feeling returns when I stop taking it.
I take a thyroid supplement called tri-iodine, which has three kinds of iodine. |
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