Your Health:

Yoga Helps Menopause Transition

Researchers at the Swami Vivekananda Samsthana in Bangalore, India, found regular yoga sessions reduced hot flashes and night sweats in menopausal women. The study involved 120 women between the ages of 40 and 55 performing yoga routines five days a week for eight weeks.  The women also listened to lectures on the benefits of yoga.  The control group, which did only some stretching and strengthening exercises and received standard information lectures on menopause, reported a slight reduction in menopausal symptoms and some increased mental acuity.  The yoga group also showed great increases in their concentration and mental alertness. (Body + Soul:November-December 2008)

Acupuncture for Hot Flashes

Acupuncture has proven itself to be the equal of prescription drug venlafaxine when it comes to controlling hot flashes in breast cancer patients.  A test conducted at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, studied 47 patients over three months to compare the efficacy of acupuncture against the drug, an antidepressant that is marked under the name Effexor.  Half the patients were given regular acupuncture sessions during the 12 week study, while the control group only received the drug.  Both groups reported the same decrease in hot flashes, but the drug group experienced some adverse side effects.  The acupuncture-only group meanwhile reported enhanced sex drive and longer-lasting relief from their symptoms.  (Body + Soul:November-December 2008)

Use Your Hands

We're a nation of depressives.  According to Randolph-Macon College behavioral neuroscientist Kelly Lambert, author of Lifting Depression (2008), we're ten times more likely than our grandparents to suffer from the blues.  The clinical blues, that is – not the my-girlfriend-dumped-me sort. 

Why?  We've abandoned physical interactions with our environment.  “A lot of our mental illnesses are about the perception that we have no control,” says Lambert.  She proposes that, thanks to our affinity for computers and drive-throughs, we don’t engage the brain’s “effort-driven rewards circuit” enough.  Our ancestors made plans – “build shelter; plant potato; kill elk” – and executed them with well-evolved hands.  It’s called controlling your environment.  When we do this, our brains reward us with dopamine. 

But these days we've stopped using our hands for much beyond pushing buttons.  So curing your mood may mean putting down your BlackBerry  and pulling on some work gloves.  A few suggestions: Grow a tomato plant.  Be your own bike mechanic.  Catch a fish.  Clean it and eat it.  Learn guitar.  Call next in pickup basketball.  Just don’t lose – if you don’t execute your plan correctly, well, you don’t get the dopamine. 

-->Outside Magazine, January 2009

Rumination
You are what you think, not what you eat-- and to a large extent what you think about what you eat is far more important.  What you think about your body, health, and illness will determine how your food is used, and how your chemistry handles fats, for instance, or carbohydrates.  The best diet in the world, by anyone's standards, will not keep you healthy if you have a belief in illness.

-- The Nature of Personal Reality, Jane Roberts, Prentice-Hall 1974