Hyvin
A Natural Health and Wellness Blog

By now, most of us know the basics of summer sunscreen use. But here are a few reminders of some less well-known facts that your skin will appreciate:

• According to CBC News online, the biggest mistake people make about sunscreen is that they don’t use enough. Apply liberally. The recommended application for adequate protection is 35 to 40ml per person per session (a handful).
• Apply protection to every exposed area. People often forget the parts in their hair, the tops of their jaws and around their bodies’ corners and curves, but these areas are still vulnerable to sun damage.
• In figuring the length of your protection, you CANNOT add SPF numbers just because sunscreen was re-applied. While reapplication is encouraged after swimming or sweating, it does NOT extend time in the sun. So, for longer protection, you MUST use a larger SPF to start with. For example, if you apply SPF 15, then later in the day, apply SPF 30, you are protected ONLY by the length of time provided by the SPF 15.

If you know you should be using sunscreen, but dread dealing with greasy, sticky sunscreen that dries out the skin and seems to “sit” on the skin’s surface, try this great-for-sensitive-skin alternative.

Well, the results are in from the National Institute of Health conference on the the effects of multi-vitamin/mineral (MVM) supplementation on chronic disease prevention.

Perhaps you’ve seen some of the traditional media reports claiming that the NIH is discouraging the use of MVM’s.

Oh, puh-leez. If you read the actual report you can see for yourself that the bottom line is that the panel didn’t feel they could make strong recommendations about using MVM’s for chronic disease prevention because there haven’t been enough studies done to support definitive conclusions.

Well, on the one hand that’s not too surprising. Few supplement companies can or will commit to that kind of clinical research and those that do, don’t have the huge profit margins of the drug companies at their disposal.

On the other hand, it does make me wonder about a double standard. Drugs are approved for sale and can claim to alleviate health problems all the time without multiple studies. It seems to me that much less is required for an official approval of a synthetic drug. Why do you suppose that is?

On May 16, 2006, the Annals of Internal Medicine reported that, based on an analysis of data from the the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) (from 1999 to 2002), 4.1 million Americans have been infected with the hepatitis C virus (HVC), and most of them have chronic infection. That’s a huge number of people.

According to the Reuters Health report of this article:

Chronic hepatitis C is the leading reason for liver transplantation and up to 5 percent of people with chronic disease will die.

We took a look a couple of weeks ago at the amazing role of the liver in the body and its many critical functions. I am so pleased to tell you that there is a relatively new product available that has been clinically proven to significantly reduce HVC levels in patients with high viral titers!

Talk about a timely public health solution!

This is one of those things that makes me slap my forehead and say, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

According to Reuters Health:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Monday that product labels for three popular asthma medications have been updated to state that the drugs could increase the chance of severe asthma attacks that could result in death.

What is wrong with this picture?! How can these drug companies keep a straight face when they say “here, we have a drug to help your asthma, but it may cause severe asthma attacks”… but this is no laughing matter!

If you’d like some natural health and wellness ideas for dealing with asthma, approaches that can only help and do no harm, please contact me.

You’ve probably seen reports that asthma rates in the U.S. are on the rise. Researchers are trying to determine why. I’m heartened to see that diet and, specifically, nutrient intake, are among the factors being considered.

Researchers reported in the May 2006 edition of the journal Thorax that they compared diets of healthy control subjects with those of asthma patients, some experiencing symptoms, and some not having had symptoms for the last year.

What I found most interesting in the Reuters Health account of this research was that compared to asymptomatic asthmatics, “Lower intake of both vitamin C and manganese were tied to an increased risk of symptomatic asthma”. Also, “…symptomatic asthma patients had significantly lower levels of plasma vitamin C than healthy controls.”

Have you ever seen (or experienced!) a bedsore? They look so painful! Reuters Health just reported on some encouraging news from the journal Advances in Skin & Wound Care:

Elderly patients with bedsores healed more quickly when regularly taking a liquid protein supplement.

It doesn’t surprise me at all. Protein comprises much of the elastic fibers in the skin. The trick is to get
a complete protein containing all of the essential amino acids (the building blocks of protein) in the right amounts. Not all proteins are created equal.

According to the National Institute of Health website, the NIH will hold a “State-of-the-Science” conference from May 15-17 to examine the effects of multi-vitamin/mineral (MVM) supplementation on chronic disease prevention.

Awesome! I look forward to the results of this conference.

The panel experts will likely be looking at studies such as these conducted by my favorite supplement company to prove the efficacy of their MVM:

Effects of Calcium and Micronutrients on Premenopausal and Postmenopausal Bone Loss. J Am Med Assoc 1980;244:1915 (abstract).

Multivitamin-mineral Supplementation: Effects on Blood Chemistries of College-Age Women. Spiller, Pattison, Jensen, Wong, Whittam, Scala. Acta Vitaminol Enzymol 1985;7:217-22.

Calcium Nutrition and Skeletal and Alveolar Bone Health. Albanese, Lorenze, Edelson . Nutr Rep Int 1985;31:741-55.

Homocysteine Lowering in Men and Women with Normal Plasma Homocysteine Levels. Spiller, Bruce, Jensen. J Am Coll Nutr 1998;17:530 (abstract).

Effect of Long-Term Vitamin-Mineral Supplements on Immune Response in Older Healthy Adults. Spiller, Whittam, Bruce, Morse, Chernoff, Jensen. J Am Coll Nutr 1998;17:511 (abstract).

We just learned thatU.S. health ranks behind England in terms of diabetes, heart disease, strokes, lung disease, and cancer.

Now here’s news that the U.S. ranks behind lots of countries for newborn survival rates. Can you believe that?! And why?

According to a Fox News report of this recent ranking, researchers identified lack of national health insurance and short maternity leaves in the U.S. as contributors. Fox also cited a health policy expert who claimed that, while the U.S. excels in high-tech services for complicated cases, Americans lack (by not paying for) basic preventative health care.

Basic preventative health care… hmm… prevention… hmm… not very flashy, is it? Isn’t that what it’s all about for those of us trying to adopt natural health and wellness measures? That is TRUE health care (not the “sickness care” of the medical establishment).

I agree that our traditional medical field provides incredibly valuable services for “high-tech” procedures like complicated surgeries, but I do think we would do well to rely less on the medical establishment for this basic preventative care. This report suggests it’s not there anyway, and we CAN do much more for ourselves, don’t you think?

Have you seen the news reports on recent research concluding that Americans are much sicker than people from England? This is despite the fact that “U.S. health care spending is double what England spends on each of its citizens”, according to the Yahoo News account of the comparison.

Released in the Journal of the American Medical Association, these results appear to be confounding the “experts.” A lot of possible contributing variables have been accounted for (wealth, ethnicity, education, etc.) and the English are still healthier than us, with lower rates of diabetes, heart disease, strokes, lung disease, and cancer!

Now, I’ve always believed that “health care” is a misnomer; it should be called “sickness care.” The medical profession’s role is primarily the treatment of disease, so if we want to know why we, as a nation, are sicker, methinks we better look at what makes us sick, not what we spend when we get sick. And what does make us so much sicker than the English?

Well, I suspect that it not a one-answer question, but I DO believe we should be looking at individuals’ basic health and wellness choices: diets, exercise patterns, use of nutritional supplements, exposure to toxic substances in daily life, and so on. I firmly believe that these things make a huge difference in many cases.

I’m no expert, but I’m not nearly as confounded as they appear to be. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that the U.S. lags behind England (and many other countries) in basic health and wellness practices. We reap what we sow, don’t you think?

Sleep has been in the news more often lately (now, don’t start yawning! ). Two polls showing that youth aren’t getting enough sleep have recently been released.

Here are the results of a KidsHealth® KidsPoll:

• On average, kids were short nearly 90 minutes of sleep each night.
• 70% of kids said they would like to get more sleep than they usually get.
• 39% of kids said they feel very sleepy when it’s time to wake up on schooldays.
• 40% of kids said they’re tired or sleepy at school every day or often.

And CNN just reported on a poll of adolescents conducted by the National Sleep Foundation which found that only 20% of teens get enough sleep!

As I admitted to you before, I was guilty of this same teen behavior, which extended even beyond my teen years. And we know the consequences of a sleep deficit: lack of concentration, poorer learning ability, emotional and physical health impediment, unsafe conditions (as in when driving), moodiness, and don’t forget just feeling crummy!!

On top of that, the CNN report of this study stated that: “[T]he agency [National Institute of Health] said there is growing evidence linking a chronic lack of sleep with an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and infections.”

Okay, okay, can we just go to bed now!