High Blood Pressure Diet

When you were diagnosed with high blood pressure, most likely the first suggestion made by your health care provider was to change your diet. High blood pressure can be eased and even cured by changing the foods you eat.

There are some basic rules to curing your high blood pressure using a nutritional approach. Firstly, you should consume unrefined, unprocessed and fresh foods such as fruits and vegetables, onions, garlic, soy, olive oil, nuts, beans, oily fish such as salmon, tuna or sardines.
Reducing sodium intake is an important component of any diet aimed to lower high blood pressure. Research has also shown that a reduction in sodium works even better if potassium intake is also raised. Sodium can be found in very high quantities in processed foods, which is why these types of foods should be avoided as much as possible. Make sure you check food labels to see the amount of salt and avoid those with high salt quantities.

Hydration is also important when it comes to lowering high blood pressure. It helps the entire system work efficiently. Guidelines state that you should be drinking fifty per cent of your body in ounces on a daily basis. So, if you weight 150 pounds, then you should be drinking 75 ounces of water daily.

Herbs and supplements should also be included to help lower your high blood pressure naturally. Herbs such as hawthorn, garlic and yarrow can be included. Supplements should include calcium supplements of at least 800-1500mg and should be taken daily. Vitamin C supplements should also be taken daily.

Yoga breathing will induce relaxation of mind and body

A really positive benefit that you will discover soon after starting your yoga practice, that you will learn properly. Yes, you will start breathing in such a way as to bring an instant calmness and total relaxation into your life. As long as you are receiving good instruction, or following an accurate guide, the better you will get at this which will further enhance the quality of your life. Furthermore, if you find yourself in stressful situations, you will be better able to cope and remain calm thanks to your yoga training.

A really common fear or phobia that people suffer with is having to speak in public to an audience. Many of the public speaking courses include components on relaxation techniques. These are incorporated into the course as they are considered vital techniques to either eliminate or control panic, which is a common reaction when people address strangers in public situations. People who perform yoga breathing exercises on a regular basis are found to be a lot calmer as individuals, they seem better able to control these stressful situations better than those who are untrained in these or any other techniques.

If you remain calm and in control of your breathing, the fear of public speaking will subside and the apparent enormity of the situation will seem to be in perspective, making the situation easier to accept and control. By simply breathing correctly you will notice a feeling of calm that will enable a person to complete a public speaking engagement; or any other stressful situation for that matter.

Yoga has also benefited many professional sports men and women by allowing them to perform at, and sometimes beyond, their best by eliminating the tension and anxiety that they feel pre-event. In all sports events optimum performance demands that the muscles and breathing of competitors remain as relaxed as possible at all times to allow for maximum performances. Yoga is the vehicle to allow you to achieve that optimum yet relaxed state of mind and body. Other yoga stretching techniques train the body to become more flexible, which is an additional benefit to athletes as a supple body will pick up fewer injuries.

Correct Yoga breathing exercises will imbibe a relaxed, focused individual who will remain calm under pressure and un-phased in the face of adversity.

Source:
Michael J McKay

The Immortality Enzyme

A newly discovered gene may help scientist combat cancer and linked to aging.

As the human body ages, it loses bone. Individual cells lose something equally vital. Every time one divides, it sheds tiny snippets of DNA known as telomeres, which serve as protective caps a hundred divisions, a cell’s telomeres become so truncated that its chromosomes- site of the cell’s genes-begin to fray, rather like shoelaces that have lost their plastic tips. Eventually, such age cells die-unless like “immortal” cancer cells, they produce telomeres. Scientists have long dreamed of drugs that would inhibit the immortalizing enzyme because, observes M.I.T. biochemist Robert Weinberg then maybe cancer cells would run out of telomeres and just poop out.

Wishful thinking? Maybe not . In papers published just a week apart in the journals science and cell, two teams of researchers – one led by Nobel-prizewinning biochemist Thomas Cech of the university of Colorado, the other by M.I.T.’s Weinberg have announced a breakthrough that could help bring about such a drug. Both teams have managed to clone a gene that controls the activity of telomerase enzyme in human cells. That could set the stage for development not only of inhibiting drugs but also of substances that switch on the enzyme which might help combat degenerative diseases associated with aging

Such possibilities to be sure are speculative but that didn’t stop Wall Street where the stock of Geron Corp a small biotech company based in Menlo Park California. That helped Chech’s group discover the gene more than double to 16 ¹/₈ a share.

In fact, Geron researchers have been looking for antitelomerase compounds for several years, using indirect-screening methods. Because tumor cells – the main source of the human enzyme – produce it in vanishingly small quantities, the scientists lacked pure telomerase, which could have sped the search for drugs that might be used against it.

With the new gene in hand the researchers should be able to churn out at will the protein for which it provides the genetic blueprint. That protein, they believe, is telomerase’s most important building block. For us, exults Calvin Harley, Geron’s chief scientist, it’s like having access to an organism’s brain.

The new protein, it turns out, bears an intriguing resemblance to an enzyme produced by HIV, the retrovirus that causes AIDS. Indeed, the AIDS dug AZT has already been shown to inhibit telomerase activity. But the viral enzyme and the human enzyme, says Colorado’s Cech, are only 20 % identical, which explains why AZT is not an ideal telomerase inhibitor. What we want, he declares, is a compound that fits telomerase the way a hand fits a glove.

The odds that such a compound will materialize now seem high. But experts caution that it could take years before the first telomerase inhibitors are ready to be tested on humans to determine if they’ll have any serious side effects – or if they’ll actually inhibit tumor growth. Such questions are perhaps one reason Geron’s stock leveled off at week’s end, closing at 12 ¼ share.

By J. Madeleine Nash