Stress and Students
The powerful chemicals triggered by stress dampen or suppress the immune system - the network of organs, tissues and white blood cells that defend against disease. Impaired immunity makes the body more susceptible to many diseases including infections (from the common cold to tuberculosis) and disorders of the immune system itself.
Traumatic stress, such as losing a loved one through death or divorce, can impair immunity for as long as a year. Even minor hassles take a toll. Under exam stress, students experience a dip in immune function and a higher rate of infections. Ohio State University researchers found a significant drop in the immune cells that normally ward off infection and cancer in medical students during exam periods. So whether you are a political science major or studying to become a nutritionist, stress can take a toll on your immune system. Certain uplifts including altruism, and humor may buffer the harmful effects of stress. In studies of college students, watching video tapes of comedians bolstered immune function. Altruism may be good for the body as well as the soul. Students who provided services to others or who watched a tape of Mother Teresa caring for the poor showed temporary boost of immunity.
The Digestive System is also affected by stress. D0 you ever get butterflies in your stomach before giving a speech in class or before a big game? The digestive system is, as one psychologist puts it, "an important stop on the tension trail." To avoid problems, pay attention to how you eat. Eating on the run, gulping food, or overeating result in poorly chewed foods, an overworked stomach, and increased abdominal pressure. The combination of poor eating habits and stress add up to real pain in the stomach. Tomorrow we can touch on some ways to manage stress.
Physical Well-Being
While physical well-being is essential to health, the term wellness when used by health professionals, has a much broader meaning. In fact if you are studying how to become an accountant, or a nutritionist, it is important to understand how the two concepts of wellness and health fit together. Think of an automobile and how the transmission works in it. Having a disease or an illness can be compared to putting an automobile in reverse. Absence of disease or relatively good health would put your car in neutral, and positive health changes and steps toward wellness would put your car into drive or forward motion. When your lifestyle is based on health enhancing behaviors, you're in high gear and going at top speed and you've achieved total wellness.
In wellness, health and sickness may show a considerable overlap in the functioning of the mind, body and spirit. In recent decades, scientists have shown a major role in psychological factors enhancing physical well-being and preventing illness. In addition, they can also trigger, worsen, or even prolong physical well-being by preventing illness. Unfortunately psychological symptoms can also trigger, worsen or prolong physical symptoms. The mind clearly can have a profound effect on every aspect of physiological functioning. Individuals who are chronically angry, pessimistic, anxious, worrying, or depressed are proven to be more susceptible to stress and illnesses such as heart disease and cancer. Similarly almost every medical illness affects people psychologically as well as physically. An example of this would be depression. It is commonly shown that individuals who suffer kidney failure or neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease also suffered from depression. Understanding the various dimensions of health can help you appreciate the complex interactions of your body and mind.
Accounting and Financial Management
How does accounting and financial management fit together when running your own business? While studying how to become an accountant it became obvious to me how important accounting and finance is to anyone interested in running their own business. As mentioned, accounting is like history with dollar signs. As with many things in life, we can learn a great deal from history. To the end, financial accounting, often taking the forms of balance sheets and income statements, can help you as a manager of your business, to make ongoing decisions to help your organizations or small businesses maintain both profitability and viability. The financial environment of today's health care industry is very different and always changing. There are a number of unique aspects of health care that require a solid understanding before one can start to completely understand accounting and financial statements that are generated by accountants. Here is a little overview of what might be important to know when juggling the finances of your own business. Financial management is the finances of the organization with the goal of maximize the organization's wealth and the achievement of it other goals. Accounting can be thought of as the provisions of financial information. Financial accounting provisions are retrospective information regarding the financial position of the organization and the results of its operation. Managerial accounting is slightly different and can be considered the provision of prospective financial information for making improved managerial decisions. Financial provision is the analysis concerning the acquisition and disposition of the organization's resources. The goals of financial management are profitability where a trade-off always exists between the maximization of expected profits and the acceptable level of risk. Undertaking greater risk requires greater anticipated returns. Viability is a trade-off that always exists between viability and profitability. Greater liquidity results in more safety but lower profits.
While accounting may seem complicated at first, we will work to clarify this subject in the health care industry for the next couple of months. Stay tuned.
Danger of Coffee
Since I have gotten pregnant, coffee was the hardest thing for me to give up. It was difficult, but I have since replaced it with tea. It helps me to remain strong when I remind myself of the facts surrounding caffeine and coffee.
When caffeine is abused, it is damaging to your metabolism and can give you hormone inbalances. The reason is because caffeine is a stimulant to the central nervous system. This stimulation makes your endocrine system think that you are being threatened in some way. With that third or fourth cup of coffee at your desk each day, you kick your body into fight or flight mode while you're just checking e-mail. Your adrenals begin to pump out epinephrine and norepinephrine. These two stress hormones set into motion a cascade of fat building hormonal actions. Also, your blood vessels constrict, making you feel like your blood sugar is dipping even further. Ever notice how you crave someth
ing sweet somewhere between the first and second cup of coffee? That's your body is reacting to a feeling of blood sugar shortage. The acids in coffee are also harmful to your body.
The acids in one cup of coffee will elevate your cortisol for up to fourteen hours. Now, if you sip caffeinated drinks all day, you switch on your stress reactor again and again. This causes your short term energy to burn out, and forces you to grab another cup. This becomes a cycle of hormone and cortisol release and effectively turns you into a coffee addict. Caffeine can also affect your adrenals.
Caffeine abuse overstimulates and eventually wears down your adrenals; it also inflicts the long-term effects of real stress on your body; Oxygen flow to your brain slows, your immune system is suppressed, the excess cortisol actually increases your appetite and encourages fat to collect onto your mid-line. To make matters worse, when it's time to restore your body with rest, the caffeine you drank during the daytime can prevent you from getting the adequate sleep you need at night - and lack of sleep also creates insulin resistance.
The phosphoric acid in colas and coffee interferes with calcium absorption. In addition to being brutal on your bones, this calcium deficiency, and the caffeine itself, can make the symptoms of PMS much worse, including increased breast tenderness, nervousness, and irritability.
Accounting and Nutrition
Many health care and health related businesses such as being a nutritionist does not have the maximization of profit as a goal, however, they must generate some level of profit in order to achieve other goals. Whether for profit or non-profit, health care organizations need profits to invest in expansion of services, so they may offer their services to a wider range of clients and people. This does not mean that profits are your only goal, they do not even need to be your primary goal. When studying how to become an accountant in the health care industry, I realized that high-quality health care often comes first. However, we must always bear in mind that profits are necessary to be able to achieve the goals related to providing high quality nutritional advice or health related care.
Health care organizations will need profits to pay salaries, replace old equipment and buildings, to pay for supplies, and to invest in new technology which will keep you current in your field. Profits are used to cover the basic costs of running a day to day operation.
As noted, profits are not the sole reason that most health related fields exist. Sometimes profits are just a means to an ends, and not an end in itself. Health care organizations should always make decisions that keep the underlying mission in mind. When hiring an accountant to take care of the financial side of your business, it is important that he or she understand your goals and help you to make the best financial decisions with those in mind.
Mix it Up: Your Work Out
Know your enemy - its name is hemeotosis. This is the term for your body's natural tendency to maintain stability or the status quo. The problem with most people's exercise routines can be summed up in one word: monotony. Apart from being boring, doing the same exercise routine all the time allows your body to become accustomed to it, and after a while, no matter what you're doing, your workouts will stop yielding results. You know how it goes; If you haven't exercised for awhile and all of a sudden one day do 10 push-ups and you'll be sore the next day. But do the same 10 push-ups for 10 days straight, and by the tenth day, you're not sore anymore. That's because your has responded by strengthening the muscles in your chest, shoulders and triceps just enough to accommodate the stress of those push-ups.
To make your body change the way you want it to, you must constantly apply new and challenging stimuli. You must keep your body guessing when you work out to make sure that you don't get into a rut. You must focus on continually challenging yourself. To accomplish this sometimes it is best to employ a personal trainer or coach. They can help you by using unique methods which employ resistance training, strength training, weight training, and cardio. A personal trainer can often help you to overhaul your physique and transform your body and reach your goals. For the next couple of blogs we will talk about fitness routines and what a personal trainer can provide.
The Importance of Vitamin D
Vitamin D is necessary for calcium absorption. Breastfeeding mothers should be sure to get enough vitamin D and calcium to meet their own physical needs and the demand from the baby. If you do not consume enough vitamin D or calcium your body will take the vitamin and mineral from your bone reserves to satisfy your baby’s dietary needs. This will cause you to eventually loose bone density and other related problems. In order to prevent your reserves from being diminished it is important that you consumes foods like milk, butter, eggs and oily fish. Leafy vegetables are also ideal for calcium. While studying how to become a nutritionist, you will learn all about the importance of different vitamins.
Sunlight causes the body to synthesize vitamin D. If you live in an area that is nice and sunny spend some time outdoors. Take a walk or read a book in the fresh air. It is not only good for your body but it can also be emotionally good for you to spend some time outside. If the weather is terrible or you are unable to get enough sunlight each day than you should take a vitamin D supplement. A mother can safely take a 400 IU vitamin D supplement each day. Anything over 2000 IU is not recommended.
Calcium cannot be absorbed without vitamin D. If you eat a lot of whole unprocessed grains you may also have difficulty absorbing calcium. Eating fewer than two to three whole grain servings a day should not interfere with your calcium absorption.
Bone loss naturally occurs during lactation even when you consume enough dietary calcium. Fortunately, as soon as menstruation returns remineralization will take place and your bones will be denser if you were consuming adequate amounts of calcium. Women who breastfeed for several month and who have several children are at a lower risk for developing osteoporosis.
What is Gastritis?
Gastritis is the inflammation of the lining of the stomach. It is often signaled by indigestion that can occur with or without bleeding in the digestive tract. Sudden stress, injury, or illness can cause the development of acute gastritis. If you are a nutritionist or studying how to become a nutritionist, this condition can often be alleviated by changing what a client eats.
Certain medications such as aspirin, gastrointestinal disorders, alcoholism, or viral infections can cause chronic inflammation. Most cases of gastroenteritis are caused by the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, which is most often associated with peptic ulcers. This bacterium is able to survive in the acidic human stomach, where many other types of bacteria would normally be destroyed.
Gastritis occurs more often with age. This may be due to the fact that the digestive system becomes weaker with age. The amount of hydrochloric acid that is produced by the body decreases with age and therefore causes the stomach to be less effective at destroying pathogens. People with gastritis often complain of indigestion, nausea, heartburn, and belching. Some people may have no symptoms. This can be very dangerous if the gastritis is caused by the erosion of the stomach lining, which results in bleeding. Aspirin and other medications usually cause stomach bleeding.
People with gastritis should avoid eating certain types of foods. Spicy foods or foods that are highly acidic can irritate the stomach lining and cause discomfort. Fatty foods, tomato-based products, chocolate, caffeinated drinks, decaffeinated teas and coffee, peppermint and alcohol should be restricted or avoided completely. These types of food can relax the valve between the stomach and the esophagus allowing the acidic contents of the stomach to back up into the esophagus. Acid in the esophagus can cause irritation and discomfort known as heartburn.
Gallstones
Anyone who has ever had gallstones will tell you that they are extremely painful and even debilitating. Although gallstones can develop in both sexes, they are most common in over-weight middle aged women. Gallstones also seem to run in families. The cause of women being more susceptible to gallstones may be due to the female hormones progesterone and estrogen, which may play a role in the formation of gallstones.
Most gallstones are formed from hardened cholesterol and others are made of bilirubin and calcium. This is because bile fluid contains high levels of cholesterol and bilirubin. These often precipitate into crystals and form stones that can cause pain in the upper-right abdomen when the gallbladder contracts and releases bile following a meal. Sometimes stones can obstruct the flow of bile out of the gallbladder causing the skin and the whites of the eyes to become jaundiced. If the stones are not removed they can eventually lodge in the bile duct and cause the liver or pancreas to become inflamed.
Most doctors remove the gallbladder if a patient has severe or frequent attacks. This procedure is called a cholecystectomy and can be performed by conventional surgery or by laparoscopy. Laparoscopic surgeries usually have a faster recovery time because tiny incisions are made compared to a conventionally large incision.
People with gallstones should avoid eating foods that cause pain or discomfort. Usually high fat foods cause discomfort. Generally a diet of fruits, vegetables, moderate portions of protein and small amounts of fats are recommended.
The Importance of Dietary Fiber
Dietary fiber is an important part of a healthy diet. Also called roughage, all of the dietary fiber that we consume comes from the indigestible parts of plants. Unfortunately, a typical Western diet consists of very little dietary fiber. Research has found that fiber consumption can help to prevent disease and maintain good health. Low fiber diets have been associated with widespread diseases and illnesses like coronary artery disease, diabetes, and diseases of the large intestine. A Nutritionist recommends a daily consumption of between 20g and 35g of fiber from high fiber foods.
Fruits and vegetables are excellent sources of dietary fiber. Dried beans, peas and legumes as well as cereals, grains, nuts and seeds are also good sources. Whole grain wheat products are more beneficial than refined wheat. Whole grain wheat maintains its outer layer of grain which contains the most fiber.
There are two categories of fiber- soluble and insoluble fiber. Soluble fiber can dissolve in water and becomes sticky in water. Pectin is a soluble fiber that can be found in fruits, nuts, legumes, and some vegetables. It can also be found in seaweeds, algae, and seeds. Insoluble fiber does not dissolve like soluble fiber and will pass through the digestive tract largely unchanged. Insoluble fiber comes from cellulose, hemicellulose and lignins. Bran, whole grains, and vegetables contain cellulose. Hemicellulose can also be found in fruits, nuts, whole grains, and vegetables. Lignin is a woody substance that can be found in bran, nuts, whole grains and fruit skins.
Fiber helps the body to expel waste more effectively. When fiber is consumed it is able to absorb large amounts of liquid like a sponge. This quality of fiber when consumed helps stools to be softer and bulkier and able to pass through the intestines faster and with less difficulty. Constipation increases for people who eat less than the recommended daily servings of fiber. People who do not eat enough fiber have an increased risk for developing bowel disorders such as diverticulosis and hemorrhoids.
