Healthy leafy greens: More reasons to eat them!

The twenty or so vitamins, nutrients and minerals in spinach and other leafy greens are good enough reasons to make sure we include them in our daily diet.  Yet now, Swedish research points to greens benefiting our blood pressure.  It is believed that the dietary nitrates help our body's cells run more efficiently, bringing about a relaxing of the blood vessels thus lowering blood pressure and improving in circulation.  And, increasing the flow of oxygen and nutrients to working muscles making us stronger!   ... more from the Health article in the Globe and Mail, including cooking guides (and btw: cooking some vegetables will boost their antioxidant content)

Sitting on an exercise ball: Beneficial to your posture and therefore your back?

 Dr. Timothy McCall

“A good yoga teacher would recognize that the balls could be therapeutic for some people, and counterproductive for others. Some people with sway-back, that is an excessive inward lumbar curve, for example, might tend to hyperextend their lower backs even more when sitting on a ball than on a chair.”  

“The reason (that sitting on exercise balls can be beneficial) is that the balls allow your thighs, and specifically the femur bones, to angle down at something like a 110 degree angle from your spine. This angle allows the pelvis to tip slightly forward, which makes it easier to maintain a healthy curve in your lower back (lumbar spine), if your tendency is to round into the typical C-shaped slump.”

Movement is Medicine
by Carol Krucoff and Mitchell Krucoff, M.D., Healing Moves
Recognize that your body needs movement to be healthy. We know that when we're hungry we should eat, and when we're tired we should sleep. But when we get stiff, achy and sluggish, we generally don't recognize these signals as cues that our body craves movement. Instead, we misinterpret them as a need for rest, which makes us stiffer, achier and even more sluggish. In our sedentary society, many adults have smothered their body's natural "move me!" impulses and have forgotten that exercise is essential to health. So instead of always living "in your head," learn to take your awareness of out your mind and into your body, so you can recognize the signals it sends you... more on physical activity
Carol Krucoff is an award-winning journalist and founding editor of the Health Section of The Washington Post. She holds a second-degree black belt in karate, runs, lifts weights and practices yoga.  Mitchell Krucoff, M.D., F.A.C.C., is an associate professor of cardiology at Duke University Medical Center.

Meditation and Change in the Brain
Richard J. Davidson, PhD, Director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, and
other researchers conducted a randomized controlled study to determine the effects of an eight-week training  program in mindfulness meditation on the brain. Brain electrical activity was measured in a group of 25 participants before the eight-week training, at the end of the training, and four months later. A control group of 16 non-meditators was also tested. The study reported significant increases after eight weeks in left-sided frontal activation in the brains of the meditators, as compared with the control group. The left side of the frontal cortex is associated with positive feelings such as joy, happiness, compassion, and lower levels of anxiety. After 16 weeks, the shift in brain activity remained.
There was also a significant reduction in self-reported experience of anxiety among the meditators after the eight week training, and this state of reduced anxiety persisted four months later. There was no change in anxiety level for the control group. These results (increased positive feelings and decreased negative feelings) would likely correlate with less frequent activation of the sympathetic nervous system’s stress response. This study is a good example of how the process of repetition in meditation practice can create meaningful change.
Source: Davidson, R. J., Kabat-Zinn, J., Schumacher, J., Rosenkranz, M., Muller, D., Santorelli, S.F., Urbanowski, F., Harrington, A., Bunus, K., and Sheridan, J.F. (2003). Psychosomatic Medicine, 65, 564-570.

The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working

Tony Schwartz, author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: "Humans aren’t meant to perform like computers, at high speed, continuously, for long periods of time, he says. Yet we routinely try to do so, neglecting our four key needs – our physical needs, met through fitness, nutrition and rest; our emotional need to feel valued; our mental need to control our attention; and our spiritual need to believe that what we do matters."
..."We are physiologically meant to pulse, and we operate best when we move between spending energy and renewing energy. We value spending energy and we are good at it, but we undervalue renewing energy, even though that’s a powerful way to improve performance."
The immense benefits of 'pulsing' can be truly significant in a yoga practice when we pause between effort and rest throughout the practice.

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