Masage Therapy & Simple Nutrition

It’s Science: Get plenty of Veggies every day

It’s hard to argue with the health benefits of a diet rich in vegetables and fruits: lower blood pressure; reduced risk of heart disease, stroke, and probably some cancers; lower risk of eye and digestive problems; and a mellowing effect on blood sugar that can help keep appetite in check.

But most Americans don’t eat enough of them. In fact, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only a third eat fruit at least twice a day, and only about 26% eat vegetables three or more times a day.

“Historically, nutrition campaigns have been social marketing campaigns targeting individuals,” states HSPH’s Lilian Cheung. “This is not enough — we need to create an environment that supports healthy eating.”

Vegetables, Fruits, and Blood Pressure

Vegetables on a fork High blood pressure is a primary risk factor for heart disease and stroke. As such, it’s a condition that is important to control. Diet can be a very effective tool for lowering blood pressure. One of the most convincing associations between diet and blood pressure was found in the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) study.

This trial examined the effect on blood pressure of a diet that was rich in fruits, vegetables, and low-fat dairy products and that restricted the amount of saturated and total fat. The researchers found that people with high blood pressure who followed this diet reduced their systolic blood pressure (the upper number of a blood pressure reading) by about 11 mm Hg and their diastolic blood pressure (the lower number) by almost 6 mm Hg—as much as medications can achieve.

More recently, a randomized trial known as the Optimal Macronutrient Intake Trial for Heart Health (OmniHeart) showed that this fruit and vegetable-rich diet lowered blood pressure even more when some of the carbohydrate was replaced with healthy unsaturated fat or protein.

vegetablesx

5 tips for adding more fruits and veggies into your day

1. Keep fruit out where you can see it. That way you’ll be more likely to eat it. Keep it out on the counter or in the front of the fridge.

2. Get some every meal, every day. Try filling half your plate with vegetables at each meal. Serving up salads, stir fry, or other vegetable-rich fare makes it easier to reach this goal. Bonus points if you can get some fruits and vegetables at snack time, too.

3. Explore the produce aisle and choose something new. Variety is one key to a healthy diet. Get out of a rut and try some new fruits and vegetables.

4. Bag the potatoes. Choose other vegetables that are packed with more nutrients, and more slowly digested carbs such as whole grains.

5. Make it a meal.Try some new healthy recipes where vegetables take center stage.

Couple healthy eating with regularly scheduled massages, and who knows what health may grow!

ANTIBIOTICS and the HUMAN BODY Repeated antibiotics alter beneficial gut germs

ANTIBIOTICS and the HUMAN BODY

Repeated antibiotics alter

beneficial gut germs

LAURAN NEERGAARD

WASHINGTON (AP) – Antibiotics can temporarily upset your stomach, but now it turns out that repeatedly taking them can trigger long-lasting changes in all those good germs that live in your gut, raising questions about lingering ill effects.

Nobody yet knows if that leads to later health problems. But the finding is the latest in a flurry of research raising questions about how the customized bacterial zoo that thrives in our intestines forms – and whether the wrong type or amount plays a role in ailments from obesity to inflammatory bowel disease to asthma.

Don’t be grossed out: This is a story in part about, well, poop. Three healthy adults collected weeks of stool samples so that scientists could count exactly how two separate rounds of a fairly mild antibiotic caused a surprising population shift in their microbial netherworld – as some original families of germs plummeted and other types moved in to fill the gap.

It’s also a story of how we coexist with trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes in the skin, the nose, the digestive tract, what scientists call the human microbiome. Many are beneficial, even indispensable, especially the gut bacteria that play an underappreciated role in overall health.

“Gut communities are fundamentally important in the development of our immune system,” explains Dr. David Relman of Stanford University, who led the antibiotic study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Let’s not take them for granted.”

Next, Relman plans to track whether antibiotics used during the first year or two of life, when youngsters form what will become their unique set of gut bacteria, seem to predispose children later to immune-related diseases.

Antibiotics already should be used cautiously because they can spur infection-causing bacteria to become drug-resistant. The new research raises different questions about effects on beneficial bacteria – and if abnormalities in the microbiome really are linked to health problems, how those changes might begin.

“We should start paying attention to this,” says Dr. Martin Blaser, a microbiome specialist at New York University Langone Medical Center, who wasn’t involved with Relman’s work but also is planning to study the issue in children. “The main point is that antibiotic use is not free in a biological sense.”

Everyone is born with an essentially sterile digestive tract, but within days the gut is overrun with bacteria from mom and dad, the environment, first foods. Ultimately, a healthy person’s intestinal tract teems with hundreds of species of microbes, the body’s biggest concentration, with many involved in such things as digestion and immune reaction.

In the not-so-healthy, scientists have discovered that overweight people harbor different types and amounts of gut bacteria than lean people, and that losing weight can change that bacterial makeup. They’ve also found links to other digestive diseases, precancerous colon polyps – and even are pursuing a theory that early use of antibiotics disrupts the developing microbiome in ways that spur autoimmune disorders like asthma or allergies.

Antibiotics aren’t choosey and can kill off good germs as well as bad ones. But Relman and fellow research scientist Les Dethlesfsen wondered how hardy gut bacteria are, how well they bounce back. So they recruited healthy volunteers who hadn’t used antibiotics in at least the past year to take two five-day courses of the antibiotic Cipro, six months apart.

The volunteers reported no diarrhea or upset stomach, yet their fecal samples showed a lot going on beneath the surface. Bacterial diversity plummeted as a third to half of the volunteers’ original germ species were nearly wiped out, although some other species moved in. Yet about a week after stopping the drug, two of the three volunteers had their bacterial levels largely return to normal. The third still had altered gut bacteria six months later.

The surprise: Another die-off and shift happened with the second round of Cipro, but this time no one’s gut bacteria had returned to the pre-antibiotic state by the time the study ended two months later.

“History matters,” concludes Relman, who next is testing what jobs the most affected bacteria performed – such as helping to maintain intestinal barriers against infection – and whether the new bugs fully replaced them. “We may have to be more careful” about repetitive damage.

Of course, antibiotics aren’t the only means of disrupting our natural flora. Other research recently found that babies born by cesarean harbor quite different first bacteria than babies born vaginally, offering a possible explanation for why C-section babies are at higher risk for some infections. Likewise, the gut bacteria of premature infants contains more hospital-style germs than a full-term baby’s.

The big issue is when such differences will matter, something so far, “we’re not really smart enough to know,” Relman says.

Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.

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Poetry in Massage School

Litany

Billy Collins

You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine. You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker, and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard, the plums on the counter, or the house of cards. And you are certainly not the pine-scented air. There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge, maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head, but you are not even close to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star, the evening paper blowing down an alley and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees and the blind woman’s tea cup. But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife. You are still the bread and the knife. You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and–somehow–the wine.

The wonder of children! Check this out.

Thank you Mary for always sharing these with me.

ASIS Massage

Promoting Peace, One Body at a Time!

How the Mind Counteracts Offensive Ideas – or maybe just different ideas

How the Mind Counteracts Offensive Ideas

Posted by Joe Rongo on Mon, Mar 21, 2011 @ 01:21 PM

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September 8, 2010:PSY Blog

art and psychology

People react to ideas they find offensive by reasserting familiar structures of meaning.

The human mind is always searching for meaning in the world. It’s one of the reasons we love stories so much: they give meaning to what might otherwise be random events. From stories emerge characters, context, hopes and dreams, morals even.

Using simple structures, stories can communicate complex ideas about the author’s view of the world and how it works, often without the reader’s knowledge.

And when stories embody values in which we don’t believe, we tend to reject them. But, according to a new study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, it goes further than just rejection, psychologically we push back against the challenge, reasserting our own familiar structures of meaning.

In their research Proulx et al. (2010) used two stories that illustrate divergent views of the world to explore how people react to offensive ideas.

What this research underlines is that we push back against threats to our world-views by reasserting structures of meaning with which we are comfortable.

The researchers measured cultural identities, ideas of justice and a generalized yearning for meaning, but they probably would have found the same results in many other areas, such as politics, religion or any other strongly held set of beliefs.

When there’s a challenge to our established world-view, whether from the absurd, the unexpected, the unpalatable, the confusing or the unknown, we experience a psychological force pushing back, trying to re-assert the things we feel are safe, comfortable and familiar.

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HAPPY SPRING!

Myoskeletal Alignment & Massage Therapy

Posted by Joe Rongo on Thu, Mar 17, 2011 @ 05:51 AM

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Myoskeletal Alignment Techniques ®

Erik Dalton’s muscle energy and myofascial techniques offer the pain management, sports therapist and structural integrator credentials that set them apart. The approach taken is of ‘joint mobilization through soft tissue manipulation’.

Well-documented theories explain how joints become fixated from myofascial stressors; yet relatively unknown in the massage therapy community is how joint dysfunction creates protective muscle spasm and dysfunctional strain patterns, such as forward head postures, slumped shoulders and scoliosis. This reflexogenic relationship between muscles and joints is the foundation of the Myoskeletal Alignment Technique and is considered not only uniquely different from traditional thinking, but possibly an important next step in addressing abnormal strain patterns caused by muscle/joint imbalances.

Techniques used line up the iliosacral/sacroiliac relationship and ‘digging out’ of deep fourth layer fibrotic tissue along the spine to restore proper function of specific spinal segments. This work is very specific and involves movement on the part of the client, the result is a restoration of balance of the human body with gravity. Head, neck, shoulder, arm, hand, thoracic, lumbar, pelvis, scoliotic patterns and leg dysfunction are commonly relieved using these techniques.

For more on this work, visit Geoffrey Bishop’s website:

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For more on Dalton’s Certification, and the Freedom from Pain Institution’s courses, click here:

Sedona Sweet Lodge Deaths… Responsibility of Client & Therapist in Therapy!

James Ray Trial: State’s witness was in close contact with one victim

James Ray’s trial will resume on Tuesday with another Dream Team volunteer, Jennifer Haley, on the witness stand. Haley’s testimony began Thursday but was interrupted because of a scheduling conflict. Jack Kurtz, AP pool photo

By Mark Duncan
Enterprise Reporter

CAMP VERDE – In keeping with the seminar theme of “everybody needs to have their own experience,” Laura Tucker’s account of her time in James Arthur Ray’s October 2009 sweat lodge was far different from that of the prosecution’s first witness, Melissa Phillips.

To stay on this topic, visit local Northern Arizona news papers at:

http://www.verdenews.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1190&ArticleID=40736

This is interesting to me as I view the relationship of self responsibility. The power and boundaries we as massage therapists need to manage.

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or join in on the conversations on face book at:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/ASIS-Massage-Education-Arizona-School-of-Integrative-Studies/155566347812200

Active Isolated Stretching and Massage Therapy

Posted by Joe Rongo on Mon, Mar 14, 2011 @ 07:41 AM

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Active Isolated Stretching (AIS) is one of the methods of stretching most used by today’s athletes, massage therapists, personal/athletic trainers, and professionals. Active Isolated Stretching allows the body to repair itself and also to prepare for daily activity.

The Active Isolated Stretching technique involves the method of holding each stretch for only two seconds. This method of stretching is also known to work with the body’s natural physiological makeup to improve circulation and increase the elasticity of muscle joints and fascia. There are several ways of learning about Active Isolated Stretching (AIS).

The creator of Active Isolated Stretching is Aaron L. Mattes. Aaron Mattes has developed this method of proper athletic stretching over the past 35 years, working with thousands of patients, doctors, and health professionals. Aaron Mattes has been improving people’s lives, their health, and their ability to become more flexible.

Forms of Active Isolated Stretching is taught at ASIS Massage within our Injury Rehab portion of the program.

For a schedule of times and dates of upcoming massage therapy programs, click here:

For a list of NCBTMB approved workshops, click here:

To order a copy of Aaron mattes book, click here:

The Mattes Method contains over 700 color photos. A stretching book teaching the proper mechanics of stretching. Specific isolated methods of stretching muscles and facia.Section on how to perform on your own. Large section on how to assist specifically.