HEALTH BUZZ

Advantages and Disadvantages of the Paleo Diet

Have you ever searched on the internet for the real best weight reducing diet programs? If so, you may have read about what is perceived as the next best diet in the planet, which is called the Paleo diet. But, what precisely is this Paleo diet and what really makes it better than all the other diets? The Paleo word is the short for Paleolithic, the prehistoric time of humans, that existed millions of years ago. At the time of this Paleolithic times, humans learned how to farm and how to hunt, this means that these people only ate food that were easily obtainable to them in their own close environment.

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Team Meetings

The improvement of quality of care by providers requires teamwork. The American Medical Association has many articles on just this topic. This article focuses on building high performing teams in the healthcare setting. Of course, the ideas are easily applied to any service business.

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You May Start Seeing Cancer Warnings on Coffee, but Please Don't Freak Out

Ah, coffee. For many of us, that morning cup of joe is as essential to survival as oxygen. A full 64 percent of Americans drink at least one cup of coffee per day… and for many people, it's far more than that.

So it's no surprise California residents aren't loving the news that their coffee might start coming with a warning label. A pending lawsuit would force big businesses like Starbucks, 7-Eleven, and BP to put cancer warnings on coffee products. Uhhh, what?

The big question: Is this is legit? Should we all be worried that coffee is giving us cancer? We took a look at the research to find out what's going on here, and the short answer is no.

First things first: Cancer warning labels are pretty common in California. A law called Proposition 65 requires stores to provide a "clear and reasonable warning" to customers if their products contain cancer-causing ingredients. Hence this lawsuit, which argues coffee shops aren't currently following the rules.

And in one sense, the lawsuit is right. A chemical called acrylamide is found in small amounts in starchy foods such as potato chips, bread, french fries, and—you guessed it—coffee. Acrylamide forms when foods are cooked at high temperatures, and since it comes out naturally during the coffee roasting process, it's impossible to avoid completely.

But is acrylamide dangerous? Studies on rodents have linked it to an increased risk for certain cancers in animals, and because of that, the National Toxicology Program labeled it "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen."

However, humans absorb and metabolize acrylamide differently than animals, and since the levels found in humans are much smaller (like, 10,000 times smaller), it's hard to tell how dangerous the chemical actually is. Because of that, the FDA says it's not worth losing sleep over: "Removing any one or two foods from your diet would not have a significant effect on overall exposure to acrylamide."

What does this mean for us? Right now, not much. There's just not enough evidence that the tiny amount of acrylamide found in coffee is a cancer risk. It's great this law wants to educate people, but it shouldn't cause a panic (or a coffee boycott). Take this as a chance to be better informed but don't worry too much about whether that latte is posing a threat to your health.

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The Increasing Rate of Suicides

Statistics have shown that there is an increase in the rate of suicides and attempted suicides all over the world. Though the rate seem to indicate that young girls have been noticed to have much to experience in this department-some say the rate has jumped from 11% to 13% from 1999 to 2015-the young men also have a high rate of success in committing suicide. This has been attributed to the fact that boys use more violent means to achieve their aim.

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Can You Become Addicted to Chocolate? Science Explains

Do you have a chocolate bar in your fridge at all times for those "emergency situations" when you desperately need something sweet or you'll die? You rip open the package and promise yourself you're only going to have one little square... oh wait, just one more... nope, there goes the whole damn bar. Is it an addiction? Or is it just really, really good? Let's talk.

Chocolate has played both the superhero and the supervillain in national health and wellness conversations recently. One day, word on the dessert aisle was that cocoa could benefit heart health, and the next, we were told that chocolate is—no joke—akin to heroin. What gives?

The research can get confusing, but one thing is for sure: We (the general population) love chocolate—and sometimes, we love it in absurdly large quantities. It's not just since Hershey's started its factory either. Apparently, our obsession dates back to ancient times, when cacao beans were offered up in Mayan dowries (nice to see that our wooing techniques haven’t changed all that much) and even exchanged as currency in some early American civilizations (now that would be the dream).

Today, it's become the most commonly craved food for teens in the U.S., and even us adults gobble up about nine and a half pounds per year. Not surprising when you think about how much we self-prescribe chocolate to treat general sadness; give it to others to show affection; and keep emergency stashes on-hand for late nights, breakups, or particularly bad bouts of PMS.

So, yes, we’re well aware that we’ve got a chocolate infatuation. The larger question is—why? And, for some of us, can it spiral out of control?

Are You Addicted to Chocolate?

With the national obesity rate rising above 35 percent, scientists have been digging deeper into the ways in which food affects the brain—and, in turn, how the brain can dictate our intake of food. Symptoms of food addiction can look a lot like drug addiction: going to great lengths to acquire the goods (midnight chocolate run, anyone?), continuing to eat despite negative consequences, and trying and failing to quit on several occasions.

But the similarities don’t stop there—both addictive drugs and particularly tasty foods have been found to cause a release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure, in a region of the brain that’s been dubbed the “reward circuit."

After a while, the reward circuit starts reacting to just thinking about these pleasurable things. Once you start associating these feel-good things with good feels, your brain begins to demand them. In one study, a group of women exhibited this response while looking at a picture of a chocolate milkshake.

Also seen in drug addicts, this anticipatory dopamine rush is thought to play a role in driving addictive behavior. What happens once a craving is satisfied? The women who were given the chocolate milkshake after looking at its picture showed a decrease in activity in the part of the brain associated with control and willpower. This is probably why we can swear off chocolate for life, only to find ourselves devouring a brownie one hour later. (Not that we would know.)

Although you can begin to develop these kinds of relationships with lots of different foods (and all sorts of feel-good human experiences), chocolate seems to have some qualities that scientists and chocoholics alike have pinpointed to be particularly seductive.

This could just be that the chocolate we eat is typically loaded with sugar and fat, but according to one recent study, it may have to do with its interaction with a particular molecule called enkephalin that exists in our brain, looks a lot like endorphins, and may be causing our addiction.

In this case, researchers gave rats a few M&Ms to munch on (don’t try this at home!) and, lo and behold, enkephalin levels in the brain started to rise (yes, they are rats, not humans, but it's still interesting). To see the effects of the mystery molecule, scientists injected the rats with more enkephalin, and they started binging like there was no tomorrow, indicating that this substance that’s naturally in chocolate is also associated with compulsive eating. In other words, if you give a mouse a (chocolate) cookie, you better have more on hand.

Chocolate Vs. Drugs

But while there are a lot of similarities between drug use and chocolate consumption, there are also some key differences. For one thing, there isn’t a whole lot of evidence to show that we can develop chocolate dependence in the same way that we can develop drug dependence. And even though some of us think it's a medical issue, menstrual chocolate cravings and “chocoholism” are pretty predominantly American phenomena. While other countries produce and consume more chocolate than the U.S., very few others feel as simultaneously passionate and defenseless about it as we do.

Although eating chocolate nonstop might not be quite the same thing as having a drug addiction, it’s still important to examine the factors—physiological, cultural, and environmental—that might increase our consumption to the point of abuse. Chocolate is often depicted as a go-to indulgence as well as something we’re supposed to feel guilty about, and the image of the helpless chocoholic surfaces again and again, often in good fun, in advertising and across the media. So maybe the feeling that we’re going cuckoo for cocoa comes, at least partly, from outside of our bodies too.

Seeking (and Getting) the Reward

We’re reward-seeking creatures by nature—we had to be at one point to survive long enough to throw down in the gene pool. Sugary, high-fat foods like chocolate are natural rewards, so our brain responds to them by saying, “get more of that—if you can!” But now, we can. Pretty much all the time. Especially in a society where we can find chocolate of all shapes and sizes everywhere, even delivered ASAP to our doorsteps.

And with research suggesting that constant exposure to stress can hike up your intake of highly caloric and fatty foods, it’s safe to say we’re living in an environment where all signs point to chocolate. After we get that dopamine rush, we feel we’ve done a bad, bad thing. Yet somehow, we do it again.

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that chocolate alone isn’t the enemy. It’s got some addictive properties for sure, but so do exercise and sex. (And we’re definitely not going to tell you to cut those out of your life!) As frustratingly inconclusive as this sounds, there are a lot of elements at play here—but having an awareness that there are a lot of things pushing us to eat (and overeat) the sweet treat might at least help us develop a healthier relationship with it.

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Are Essential Oils BS?

Among the crunchy set, essential oils have a reputation as catch-all solutions to major health problems. Have a fever? Rub peppermint oil on your feet. Suffering from shoddy memory? Put some rosemary oil in a diffuser. It doesn’t help that woo-woo bloggers are running around the internet touting the glory of essential oils in the same breath as some pretty paranoid fantasies ("This is what Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know!!!111").

So what are essential oils?

Essential oils are also known as volatile oils because they evaporate quickly after coming in contact with oxygen. An essential oil is, simply put, the "essence" of a plant, obtained by water or steam distillation, or by cold pressing (for citrus peel oils). Through this process, the oils inside a plant can be extracted into a highly concentrated form.

"When you smell an essential oil," says Tony Ferrari, Ph.D. in chemistry, "its constituents bind to receptor sites in the nose, which read the aroma molecules and send signals through the olfactory nerve to the limbic system and amygdala in the brain. There are more than 5,000 chemical compounds that make up commonly used oils, each of which binds in a different way to different receptors, so their effects can vary widely."

How do essential oils work?

"Essential oils include biological compounds like growth factors, hormones, and neurotransmitters that are concentrated from the plant," says Nada Milo, M.D. "Because different essential oils come from different plants, these components (and their resulting effectiveness) tend to change from plant to plant."

Essential oils can have complex biochemical interactions in the human body, she says—and different essential oils can create different reactions in our enzymes and hormones. One of the active ingredients in tea tree oil, for example, is Terpinen-4-ol, which was shown in studies to kill ectoparasites found on human skin and kill infectious amoebas that cause eye infections.

One unpleasant—but totally effective—parallel you’d find in nature is poison ivy: We react to poison ivy with those awful, itchy-as-all-get-out red bumps because we’re exposed to an active compound in the plant that interacts with our skin. Elizabeth Trattner, M.D., explains that essential oils work differently—but they’re even stronger. "Essential oils can be up to 100 times more potent than the plant itself," she says. "So their effects are visible with just a few drops."

Basically, the active ingredients inside an essential oil can trigger "switches" inside our body. "Here’s another example," Milo says. "An EO like lavender can stimulate olfactory nerves in the brain and cause downstream effects that slow down the central nervous system and induce a sense of calm."

So not all essential oils are going to work as advertised. They’re derived from a variety of plants, all of which have different effects on the body (and some of which aren’t that effective). On top of that, you have to consider the method of application—are you rubbing it onto your skin, ingesting it in a capsule, or simply sniffing it?

Be careful—some methods of applying essential oils are safer than others.

"Untrained lay people, especially in the multilevel marketing (MLM) business, will say anything to make a sale," Trattner explains. Some folks, especially MLM bloggers—and even some big companies—suggest methods for essential oil use, without informing people of the dangers of using essential oils incorrectly. They’ll say that you can use them anytime, anywhere. In demonstrations, they might dab some on their wrist or talk about how oils can be used in capsules.

This is something to be wary of, says David Lortscher, M.D. "People have to be careful about how they use these products. Essential oils have the potential to sensitize and irritate skin. There have been rare reports of serious toxicities, including seizures, adverse effects in pregnancy, and lung or liver toxicity."

For example, linalool, the main component of lavender essential oil, has been shown in studies to cause skin cell death and increase the risks of contact dermatitis. "In general, though," he continues, "these EOs are pretty safe. When irritation does happen, it’s usually mild and limited to the skin."

To minimize the risks of topical essential oil application, it’s best to dilute essential oils with a carrier oil, or a neutral oil that can contain the essential oil. "Most allergic reactions are caused by the application of pure oils, or high-concentration products," Lortscher says. "But if you tolerate them or dilute them, they can help with dry, flaky skin, provide some antioxidant benefits, and also help relax your body."

Many essential oils companies sell their EOs undiluted, so you’ll have to dilute them yourself (NAHA provides some guidelines on safe dilution). Adults should dilute an essential oil anywhere from 2.5 to 10 percent; for a 10 percent dilution, for example, you'd use 60 drops of essential oil per ounce of carrier. Some of the most common carrier oils are jojoba, coconut, and sesame oil.

What about the claims that essential oils are perfectly safe to ingest? That’s not necessarily true. Essential oils are broken down in the liver into phytochemicals, and if they accumulate, they can become toxic to the body. While a study of one is hardly convincing evidence, a woman who ingested peppermint oil was brought to the hospital in a comatose state.

So how can essential oils be used safely—and which EOs have actual health benefits?

Essential oils have been used in aromatherapy for hundreds of years. Our sense of smell (controlled by the olfactory nerve) is very powerful and exerts influence over our thoughts, emotions, moods, memories, and behaviors.

"Essential oils can reduce inflammation or stimulate the immune system or calm down the autonomic nervous system," Ferrari says.

If you're feeling confused, stick with the basics. "Lavender oil is a great EO for beginners. You can inhale it before sleeping, pour a few drops into a diffuser, or rub it onto your pressure points (neck, wrists, and other places where your pulse is most prominent). Plenty of studies have been done on lavender oil to demonstrate its efficacy," Trattner says.

One such study demonstrated that inhaling lavender oil increased the power of alpha and theta brain activities, resulting in significant decreases in blood pressure, heart rate, and skin temperature. Granted, this was from a sample size of 20, so—take the results with a grain of salt.

But another, slightly larger study supported these results and showed that the same method of application (inhalation) before bed significantly decreased anxiety levels and greatly improved sleep quality in patients. Inhaling lavender oil for 30 minutes a day during your period can also reduce the severity of menstrual cramps.

If you’d like to use essential oils for digestive problems, you can ask your doctor about rosemary capsules, which have been demonstrated in studies to inhibit E. coli overgrowth and effectively treat ulcers. The ingredients at work inside rosemary oil are caffeic acid, and its derivative, rosmarinic acid, which have antioxidant effects.

Bergamot, another essential oil with "multitasking" capabilities, is often used as part of a treatment for depression because of its ability to reduce stress responses. When inserted into oil diffusers, it helped create a positive mood in patients. Besides its uplifting effect on mood, it can also be used as an antibacterial and antifungal agent against E. coli, Listeria monocytogenes, Staphylococcus aureus, and Bacillus cereus.

Does quality matter?

You’ll often see companies advertising their "therapeutic grade," "aromatherapy grade," or "medicinal grade" oils. Unfortunately for them, no such thing exists. "There is no formally approved grading standard used consistently throughout the essential oil industry," Lortscher says. Simply put, anyone who says that they have therapeutic grade or "certified" essential oils is lying. "That seal is nothing more than a commercial trademark. It isn’t backed by any scientific body."

So how can we tell whether our essential oils are pure or not? Is the market even regulated?

"The only rules in place in the EO market are those set by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), which states that essential oils must be natural and pure," Lortscher says. "A pure essential oil is very volatile, so it should not leave any residue on a white blotting paper. It also shouldn’t smell rancid or like alcohol."

"Don’t be cheap about essential oils," he says. "Cheap essential oils are almost guaranteed to have synthetic oils or mineral oils mixed inside. Another thing to look out for is the country of origin—oils sourced from plants native or indigenous to their regions are far more trustworthy.

What about synthetic oils?

"Synthetic essential oils may seem like a bargain," says Rupinder Mangat, CEO of Mevei. "It can be difficult to tell the difference between a synthetic oil or a real one. But be careful—chemically reconstructed oils seldom include all the trace chemicals that are found in the real plant. Price can be an indication that an oil is synthetically reproduced or extended."

How can you ensure that your essential oils are pure?

Lortscher says that the purity of different EO’s can vary widely, based on the degree of concentration and where they’re sourced from. "On top of that, the quality of your oils can be affected by adulteration (the purposeful addition of foreign substances), unintentional contamination, inadequate production, or improper storage conditions," he says. "If you keep an essential oil exposed to bright sunlight or oxygen, the composition of the oil can change. It’s best to store them in a cool, dark place."

To make sure that your essential oils are pure, you can ask the company if they do mass spectrometry testing. These tests check to see how pure an essential oil is and can be used to see if the oil has been altered or added to.

The final verdict?

When used in aromatherapy or if diluted for topical use, essential oils can be safe—and helpful. While no essential oil is going to cure asthma or banish migraines, they can help with a variety of health issues.

"Essential oils like lavender and rose can be excellent adjunctive therapy to many health issues like inflammation, pain, and high stress or anxiety levels," Trattner says. "And they can be used as the first line of defense to prevent conditions from developing or worsening. Do I recommend them to my patients? All the time—and I’ve been practicing for over two decades. But they aren’t one-size-fits-all, and they aren’t magic potions, either. If there’s too much pain or you’re facing a severe disease, then it’s time to take something stronger or talk to your doctor to create a cohesive plan of action."

Basically, use essential oils with caution and do your research on the specific oils you plan on using. If you have any questions or doubts, make sure to ask your doctor. Used correctly, essential oils can greatly enhance your life—just don’t expect major miracles out of them.

Theodora Sarah Abigail is a beating heart in a warm body. She works as a writer and poet in the wild, mechanical city of Jakarta, Indonesia. You can join her as she stumbles through life by following her on her blog and on Instagram.

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Is Legal Marijuana Bigger Than The Internet of Things?

Estimates place the number of some time marijuana users in the neighborhood of 50 million people. As many as 7.6 million indulge on a daily basis. Out of the 83.3 million milllennials, fully 68%of them want cannabis to be legal and available. Once legalization takes hold everywhere, dozens of already established firms - in the tobacco industry... in agriculture and irrigation... in pharmacueticals - are going to want to jump in without hesitation. And if you want more proof that marijuana is going mainstream, consider this...

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