Healthy Living

Wordless Wednesday 7-01-2009

5:30 pm – Flowers opened wide.

7:30 pm – Closed up tight for the night.

June 30th, 2009 Posted By: Will     |     5 Comments     |    

    Categories: Photography
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Vegetables – The Memory Solution

   Several recent studies have shown that people who eat lots of veggies perform much better on memory tests. One study of older adults showed that the higher their vegetable consumption, the slower their rate of cognitive loss. This is not really breaking news, but what these follow-up studies have done is confirm the results of research done previously. The great thing was that less than 3 servings a day was able to slow their cognitive decline by over 40 percent! I wonder if those of us that regularly eat more than 3 servings per day have even better results?

There was one thing that bothered be a bit reading the news of these studies. Several times I saw a statement along the lines of “researchers who looked at fruit consumption found no corresponding benefit”. In other words veggies help, fruit does not. I did not see one person who questioned this statement. Here is the issue I have with that. Some of the items on the list of beneficials were tomatoes, zucchini, squash, and peppers. All of these we call vegetables, but they are really fruit. If there is one thing I think would make this research easier to digest, it would be to have a list of “vegetables” rated from best to least effective in terms of cognitive benefit. I did see one researcher quoted as saying the most benefit came from dark, leafy, greens. That makes sense.

One last thing was looked at in these studies. Researchers found that people who took large amounts of supplements, rather than increasing their vegetable consumption, showed no cognitive benefit. This confirms what other studies have shown. There are many phyto-compounds in vegetables in addition to the vitamins that benefit human health. There is virtually no research that does not show many different kinds of health benefits from eating a plant based diet. The results always show, the more the better. No matter what your current eating habits are, you will benefit from eating more plants.

June 29th, 2009 Posted By: Will     |     4 Comments     |    

    Categories: health
    Trackback: http://willtaft.com/health/vegetables-the-memory-solution/trackback/

Wordless Wednesday 6-24-2009

 Ok, not so wordless this week, but in the past whenever I tried to take a photo of the rain, you could never actually see the rain in the shot. This photo is nothing special, but I did like the lighting, although it was much more dramatic in reality than in the photo. But… you can see how hard it was raining and this is a first for me.

I missed WW last week, but I did post the answer to the photo question from WW on June 10th. Check it out and see if anyone guessed correctly.

And last but not least, please try to put a link to your site in the Mr Linky box below. He has been having trouble getting the widget to work correctly and I would like to test if it has been fixed.

Thanks!

June 23rd, 2009 Posted By: Will     |     15 Comments     |    

    Categories: Photography
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Health Care Reform and Doctors

Finally there is some discussion in the big media about the shortage of Primary Care Physicians and the stalling effort to reform and improve the health care system in the U.S.  Since my oldest daughter has decided to go to medical school, I have been thinking about the choice she will eventually have to make as to what area of medicine to practice in.  She seems to be most interested in a general practice area or pediatrics, both of which have are said to get chosen by declining numbers of new doctors.  The reason is simple.  Doctors now leave medical school with crushing levels of student loan debt.  With the average age of medical school graduates now approaching 30 years old, and then having another 4 to 8 years of residency, starting in practice in your mid-thirties with an average school debt of $130,000, it is easy to see why doctors choose to enter specialty areas where they earn 3, 4, or 5 times the income of primary care doctors.

If the U.S. health care system is to be fixed, increasing the number primary care physicians will be a big part of the fix.  Incentives must be put in place now to let current students see there will be help available if the choose to practice in the most needed areas of medicine.  Because becoming an M.D is such a long and arduous process, and medical students often tend to be focused, goal oriented people, letting them know early in their education that they have viable options to practice primary care is critically important.

One of the recent articles can be read at this link.  Let’s hope that our President and his political cohorts make this a part of  any reform.  Without a solution to this particular health care delivery problem, providing primary care to all people will be impossible.

June 22nd, 2009 Posted By: Will     |     5 Comments     |    

    Categories: health
    Trackback: http://willtaft.com/health/health-care-reform-and-doctors/trackback/

Sunday Search of the Week 6-21-2009

This week’s search is a real puzzle.  I can’t figure out what the searcher was looking for, what the complete search even was, or what post the searcher landed on here.  At first I was thinking hypodermic needles, but then I thought maybe evergreen needles as part of some magic potion.  Maybe one of you can see something in it and offer a guess?

“pure needles as a main ingredient for h”

June 21st, 2009 Posted By: Will     |     One Comment     |    

    Categories: Just For Fun
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The Fastest Bird Alive

   The world’s fastest bird almost disappeared years ago due to DDT and other egg shell weakening pesticides.  Now Florida has become the latest state to announce the official recovery of the Peregrine Falcon.  The successful recovery of birds of prey has been one of the best stories to come out of the effort to control and reduce the use of chemicals in agriculture.  The history of these majestic birds is also a warning that we may not know the end result of out current use of herbicides, pesticides, and genetically modified plants until a critical, unanticipated problem arises.  We almost lost these birds and that would have been a shameful reflection on the chemical age of humans.

On a side note, I will never forget my first close-up observation of a Peregrine Falcon.  I was on the 36th floor of a tall office building in San Francisco, standing at a conference room window watching the weather and some pigeons that were flying off from a window ledge.  As one of the pigeons went by my view, there was a blur and an explosion of feathers as a falcon dropped out of nowhere and claimed its dinner.  It happened so fast, I was unclear for a few seconds what I had observed.  As I watched the falcon carry its prize to the top of a shorter office tower, all I could think was how lucky I had been to have been where I was at just the right second in time.

June 19th, 2009 Posted By: Will     |     One Comment     |    

    Categories: Environment
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