Everyone enjoys a nice cold slice of watermelon during the summer months of the year for picnics and barbeques but what you may not know is watermelons contain similar ingredients to Viagra. Recently, scientists from the Texas A&M’s Fruit and Vegetable Improvement Center in College Station have found that watermelon can be used as a natural libido. As they continue to study this fruit in particular, it is no longer just “good” for you, there is a long list of different health benefits that can be obtained from watermelon alone; benefits we ignored in the past.

The health benefits are derived from phyto-nutrients, which are bioactive compounds that react accordingly with the human body. Within watermelon you will find lycopene, beta-carotene and citrulline. Each of these phyto-nutrients has their own health benefits but together in watermelon they provide the ability to relax the blood vessels in a similar fashion the popular prescription medication, Viagra can.

When you eat a piece of watermelon the phyto-nutrient citrulline is turned into arginine by the amino acids in your system. Arginine is an amino acid that has been long associated to heart health and a strong immune system. Aside from these health benefits, Arginine also has the ability to boost the nitric acid within your body, which therefore relaxes your blood vessels. Watermelon is a much more natural way to reduce the symptoms of erectile dysfunction. Of course, Viagra may be more targeted to the specific organ than watermelon but the key to this information is watermelon is all-natural. This means no worries of side effects or increased risk of other conditions, which is often associated with prescription drugs.

It is so simple for men who experience erectile dysfunction to simply walk into the drug store and pay for a prescription medication. Viagra is seen all over the media in many different marketing forms and the benefits of watermelon are not widely known. When you have a health problem such as this, it is beneficial for you to take the time and research the natural solutions at your disposal. More times than not you will find there are dozens of natural ways you can cure and even prevent these health problems in the future.

We have spent too many years relying on prescription medications and now we are nervous to try what is 100% natural! Consider testing the abilities of watermelon stated in this study and get rid of your Viagra for good. Although watermelon is 92% water, that other 8% is full of the antioxidants, amino acids and natural nutrients you need to cure your erectile dysfunction, naturally.

	In the medical and health world today we are always so focused on how to eliminate and decrease the levels of bad cholesterol that the good cholesterol levels are often not even acknowledged. A study was recently published in the Journal of the American Heart Association stating that if you are currently middle aged and have low levels of good cholesterol (HDL)
you are actually increasing your risk of memory loss and dementia in your near future. These researchers took 3,673 patients from the Whitehall II study, which was a study that began in 1985 to examine British Civil servants.

Twenty six percent of these patients were women and the researchers found the low levels of HDL to be the indicator of memory loss to occur by age 60 in each of the participants. Memory problems are the key to dementia and when these occur at such an early age, dementia is sure to be around the corner. When the term “low” is used to identify the HDL levels in any given participant this refers to levels lower or equal to 40 mg/dl. The researching team compared blood fat data from several different phases of the Whitehall II study, when the participants all reached their middle age.

After an 8 hour fast, the researcher’s then measured their blood fat and cholesterol levels finding that participants over the age of 55 showed a 27% decrease in memory in association with their low HDL levels in comparison to those with higher levels. As the participants age increases so does their risk of memory loss and therefore, dementia. For participants at age 60 their risk increased to 53%, which is a significant jump for only a 5 year difference. Because middle aged people today are a large part of our population, dementia and memory loss could become somewhat of an epidemic if the proper measures are not taken.

There are many natural and simple ways to increase your HDL or “good” cholesterol levels that include:

- Aerobic exercise on a regular basis (walking, biking, swimming, jogging, etc). 

- Maintaining a healthy weight for your height and heart.

- Eliminating trans fats and artificial sweeteners from your diet.

- Add soluble fiber to your diet through oats and fruits.

- Stop smoking.

- Drinking cranberry juice has been known to increase your HDL levels as well. I’m not referring to commercially manufactured cranberry juice, which is loaded with refined sugars. Look for natural cranberry juice.

As you can see, simply living a healthier lifestyle and choosing healthy foods and snacks throughout the day can help increase your HDL and therefore reduce your risk of memory loss in your elderly years.

CDC:  Eight Percent of U.S. Diabetic  Have you noticed how everything seems to be “on the rise”?  The cost of food is on the rise, the cost of oil is on the rise, tuition, housing, cost of living…The only thing that seems to be on the decline is the dollar.  This rising trend has gotten a whole lot of media attention, but there’s one other rising trend that hasn’t garnered the same attention as the rising prices in fuel or milk – the number of diabetes diagnoses.

According to a new report released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately eight percent of the United States population has diabetes – that’s about one in 24 people!  In fact, in the last two years, three million people were diagnosed with diabetes.  This surge in diagnoses has doctors urging the government to shine a greater light on diabetes and what can be done to prevent it.

As most of us know, diabetes tends to run in families, which makes its prevention just that much more difficult.  Difficult, yes, but given the fact that the majority of new cases are Type II – the type that’s been linked to obesity, lack of exercise and poor nutrition – lifestyle changes can greatly diminish the likelihood of inheriting diabetes.

Now, these suggestions are nothing you haven’t heard before.  But considering the fact that there’s been a surge in diabetes cases, many of them linked to poor lifestyle habits, perhaps a refresher course is in order.  And perhaps the surge in diabetes cases is the wakeup call necessary to make the changes necessary.

Exercise

You know it’s important to your physical and mental health, but it’s of particular importance to diabetes sufferers.  Diabetics produce either too little or too much insulin in the regulation of blood sugar and must take a number of precautions to maintain those blood sugar levels.  But studies suggest that insulin levels are maintained at a more balanced level when regular exercise is a part of those precautions.  I define regular exercise as moderate activity every day, for at least 30 minutes.

Diet

If you’ve seen the diabetes food pyramid, you know that it doesn’t vary much from the standard food pyramid:  minimizing, if not eliminating, processed foods and saturated fat consumption from your diet, while increasing the number of whole grains, fish and other quality carbohydrates, proteins and fats into your diet.  Nuts are a particularly good choice for diabetes sufferers.  Studies suggest that consuming five or more one ounce servings of nuts a week significantly increases one’s immunity from diabetes compared to those who don’t eat nuts.  Almonds and pistachios, in particular, are among the most nutritious of nuts.

Lose Weight

While eating right and exercising regularly are great lifestyle habits to adopt, weight loss is typically the motivation behind its adoption (i.e.  Most of don’t start eating well because we feel it a moral obligation to live healthfully, in other words).  Whatever the motivation, a healthy weight is a particularly good thing for diabetes sufferers because study after study says that overweight men and women are more likely to develop or be at risk for developing diabetes than those who stay lean.

I don’t put a whole lot of stock in infomercial magnates and what they have to say at 2 in the morning, but the following statement by an infomercial salesman has stayed with me lo these many years:  How you eat today is how you’ll look and feel tomorrow.  If more people live by this rule today, I have no doubt we’ll see far fewer diabetes diagnoses tomorrow.

Study:  Heart Attack Prevalence Highest Among Men Low in Vitamin D   If you’re a regular reader of my column, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve referenced the tragic death of Tim Russert with some consistency lately.  I do this not only because his death shocked me as well as many others around the world who admired his tenacity and fairness as a journalist, but also because it happened to someone who – by all accounts – was making every effort to improve his health through a good diet and regular exercise.  The randomness of it all has

reconfirmed in me the importance of making every effort to increase our own vitality by ensuring we don’t fall victim to similar circumstances, namely, a sudden heart attack.  And according to research recently published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, a sudden heart attack may be in the offing for those with low vitamin D levels.

The study followed the health of approximately 1300 men, all of whom were health professionals, between the ages of 40 and 75.  Some of the men – 454 of them, to be exact – had suffered a non-fatal heart attack or had died in the course of the 10-year study.  The remainder of the men studied had no history of heart problems. 

To determine any tie between vitamin D and heart attacks, the researchers took blood samples from each of the men and tested the vitamin D levels of each.  What they found was that those men who were classified as “deficient” in vitamin D levels – having approximately 15 nanograms per milliliter of blood – were up to two and a half times more likely to suffer from a heart attack than those who were in the normal range – at least 30 nanograms of vitamin D per milliliter of blood.

In the past I’ve written about vitamin D being a defensive vitamin by helping the body immunize itself from viruses like the common cold, and by its ability to extend one’s lifespan when taken as a supplement (see “The D-fensive Vitamin:  Study Finds Vitamin D Extends Life”).  This study is just more evidence of vitamin D’s protective properties.

The question is, what is the best way to supplement our lives with this all important fat-soluble vitamin?  It being the summertime, perhaps the easiest way is by spending more time outdoors.  Instead of driving to your local gym in the morning and spending 30 to 60 minutes on the stationary bike, why not take your outdoor bike to the gym?  Not only are you increasing your bottom line by saving money on gas, you’re also increasing your vitamin D levels by exposing yourself to the sun’s rays.

The other way is, of course, what we choose to eat.  Fortunately, vitamin D tends to be found most abundantly in health food choices like salmon, cod, dandelion greens, and oatmeal.

Anyone can find out about their vitamin D level simply by asking their doctor to perform a blood test.  Those particularly at risk for low levels of vitamin D include African Americans, the elderly, and those suffering from various thyroid and/or kidney conditions.

	A study led by Austrian researchers has recently grabbed the attention of the medical world today. The patients within this study were tested for their vitamin D levels and in consequence their health record and futures as well. It was found that the patients who displayed lower levels of vitamin D were 2 times more likely to die of any given health condition, but heart
disease is one of the strongest related to vitamin D deficiency to date.

This study involved 3,258 German men and women who were all around the age 62 with heart disease. Their vitamin D levels were checked through weekly blood tests over a period of 8 years. During the duration of this study, 737 of these men and women died and 463 of them died of heart disease in one form or another. The statistics they kept of their study showed that 307 of the deaths were of people who had extremely low levels of vitamin D and the other 103 had higher levels of vitamin D. The researchers took age, physical activity and health into consideration before determining their conclusions.

The leader of this study has made an official statement that these results do not prove low levels of vitamin D are harmful but the evidence is right in front of us now. In the past, vitamin D was thought of nothing more than to strengthen our bones but today scientists and researchers are beginning to learn there is far more to this vitamin than we realized in the past. Researchers from Harvard have recently published a similar study connecting low vitamin D levels to heart attacks. Two studies proving the same theory is enough to make the FDA and the medical world think twice about vitamin D.

With estimation that 50% of adults in the USA are vitamin D deficient it is time to boost these levels naturally in order to decrease your risk of heart disease. Vitamin D can be obtained through:

-Fish liver oils

-Oatmeal

-Sweet potatoes

-Salmon

-Dandelion greens

-Halibut

-Parsley

This is just a small example of the foods you can include in your diet to boost your vitamin D levels. Remember, Vitamin D is best obtained through natural sunlight. Even though these researchers are not encouraging anyone to boost their levels through supplements and sunlight, these studies cannot and should not be ignored. Obtaining an adequate amount of vitamin D on a daily basis is essential. 

Another Reason to Reduce Caffeine Intake   Diabetes has been in the news a lot lately and even with diabetes, the bad news seems to come in threes.  After the Celtics beat the Los Angeles Lakers in dramatic fashion in game 5 of the NBA Finals, Ray Allen, Boston’s surefire shooting guard, quickly left the Staples Center to attend to the health concerns of

his toddler son, just recently diagnosed with Type I diabetes.  After the untimely death of Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington Bureau Chief and moderator of Meet the Press, it was revealed by doctors after his autopsy that one of his pre-existing conditions was Type II diabetes.  And now, according to researchers from Duke University Medical School, caffeine intake may cause a dramatic increase in blood sugar amongst diabetics.

While I am not an advocate of caffeine intake and believe it to be a highly addictive stimulant that’s overused and abused by far too many, I understand fully that it is used by a majority of Americans.  It therefore saddens me that this news gives diabetics just one more thing to worry about, as if they didn’t have enough to worry about already (i.e. typical concerns include:  what things are OK and not OK to eat or drink, being able to check blood-sugar levels, worrying about having enough insulin, should one need an injection, while travelling or enjoying time away from home, etc.).

Published in the medical journal Diabetes Care, the Duke researchers wrote about their results after observing and testing 10 people with Type II diabetes.  During the first day of the test, these 10 participants were given a caffeine pill,  the caffeine content of the pill equaling what the caffeine content of four cups of coffee (roughly 532 mg, assuming the cup of coffee is 8 oz and the caffeine content is 133 mg per 8 oz cup).  The next day, the participants were given a placebo.  The researchers then tested the blood sugar levels of the participants on both days to see if their blood sugar levels increased or decreased.

While there was no rise in blood sugar levels among the participants when given the placebo, blood sugar levels increased an average of 8 percent when taking the caffeine pill.  The rise was even more pronounced when the pill was taken after meals – a 26 percent rise after eating dinner!

What explains the increase?  At this point, researchers can’t be sure.  They theorize that blood sugar levels may be rising because of caffeine stimulating the body’s adrenaline levels (this is a pretty good theory, seeing as how many bodybuilding supplements contains a stimulant like caffeine for precisely that purpose).  Another potential explanation of the study’s researchers is that the caffeine is interfering with the liver, the organ of the body that helps remove glucose from the blood by turning it into glycogen. 

As with all research, more needs to be done before anything definitive conclusions can be reached. 

In the meantime, while this is certainly bad news for diabetics who have become reliant on caffeine as a pick me up or as a means to treating a pounding headache, it may prove to be good news in the long run.  For one, it may help to explain why one’s blood sugar levels have been rising, which before this study may have been unclear.  And secondly, it may be just the incentive one needs to help kick the caffeine habit – the alternative being diabetic ketoacidosis. 

So, while diabetes continue to be in the news and be among those making news, perhaps its newsworthiness can be used for good in that diabetes sufferers can make an extra effort in reducing caffeine intake.  Granted, to do so is sure to be unpleasant among those who’ve come to rely on caffeine, but the alternative could be far worse.

	Study:  The Happy Outperform the Unhappy in Stroke Recovery    There’s a great radio show I love listening to, and every Friday, he devotes an entire hour to the topic of happiness.  Appropriately, he refers to the second hour of Friday’s broadcast as “The Happiness Hour.”  During the hour, he fields calls and questions from around the country about some topic related to
happiness – whether it is gratitude, serving others or the importance of responsibility – and what things we as people can do to make our lives happier.  After all, as he likes to say, “The happy make life better and the unhappy make life worse.”  In fact, according to a new study, happiness may make life better by speeding the recovery time from serious health issues.

You’ve no doubt heard in your travels that happiness is the best medicine; that happiness tends to beget happiness.  You know, it’s the old “always look at the bright side of your life” tactic.  Just a bunch of corny mumbo jumbo, right?  But it’s the practice of this so-called “mumbo jumbo” that seems to have worked wonders on patients who’ve left the hospital after suffering a stroke.

Writing in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, researchers recount their analysis of over 800 patients age 55 and over who’ve recently suffered from a stroke.  After three months, the researchers had each of the patients take two tests.  One was an emotional test, where respondents answered a series of questions that gauged their level of happiness on a 12-point scale.  The other was a test called a Functional Independence Measurement (FIM), which is a test administered to people who’ve suffered some traumatic health effects, are developmentally challenged or have other disabilities. It basically assesses how capable someone is to function independently, without the assistance of others.

According to the results, the patients’ level of happiness on the 12-point emotional scale was significantly correlated to how the patients’ scored on the FIM; in short, the happier they were, the more capable they were of functioning without someone’s help.  To paraphrase one of the study’s lead researchers, Dr. Glenn V., Ostir of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, stroke victims who are optimistic are rewarded with greater functionality than those who are pessimistic about their recovery. 

But it’s this idea that happiness could improve one’s ability to heal from a health malady like a stroke reconfirms to me what a vast influence our minds and our attitudes have in determining how healthy we will be.     

As you know, the things I traditionally promote in this space every week are devoted to all things natural. But I’m going to break with tradition for a moment and advise that you not dabble in something that seems to come naturally: unhappiness.  Happiness takes work, but choosing to act happy – even when you don’t necessarily feel like it – begets happiness.  And as these researchers’ study demonstrated, happiness just may be the antidote to the downtrodden and their overall recovery after suffering something as serious as a stroke.

	Study Suggests Peers Often Determine Success or Failure   So I was watching one of those reality TV shows the other day and I happened to notice something that I thought was on the decrease:  people smoking cigarettes.  The participants in this reality series were all sitting around, talking about the latest task they had to perform and the importance of doing well.  Anyway,
what really had me taken aback was that every one of them had a cigarette either in their mouth or resting between their index and middle fingers.  Though I’m not sure this group of four were bosom friends, the research indicates that if just one of them started working on quitting, the more likely it is that the others would.

At this point, every one in the world knows the dangers of cigarette smoking and the damage it does to the lungs and heart.  Why anyone would start smoking is beyond me.  My hope is that each and every one of the approximately 50 million smokers in the United States are at least trying to quit.  But if they’re constantly among friends or family members who have no desire to quit, the likelihood of their quitting is unlikely.

Published in the May 2008 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the University of California-San Diego investigated whether or not there was any solid evidence supporting the notion that smokers were affected by peer pressure, that if their friends worked on quitting, perhaps they would as well.

To determine whether social pressures had an effect on smokers required quite a bit of research and background information – especially because over 12,000 people took part in their study.  For example, the 12,000 participants had to list the names of friends and family members with whom they associated, how close they were to those friends and family members and whether or not they smoked.  The researchers then had to keep track of these participants and their peers in order to determine whether or not they kept smoking over the 30-year time frame investigated (the participants were also part of a separate study that looked into whether weight gain was “contagious” among friends).

What they found was that the closer one person was to another, the more likely it was that they tended to have the same habits.  For example, according to their results, if one spouse quit smoking, there was a 67 percent chance the other spouse would kick the habit as well.  And if a friend of one of the spouses quit smoking, there was a 35 percent chance the other would quit.  A smaller percentage, sure, but 35 percent is still significant.  In fact, even friends of friends had an effect on smoking cessation.  For instance, if one of the spouse’s friends had a friend who stopped smoking, and that knowledge became known to the spouse, there was a 29 percent chance of the spouse quitting!

Now, the researchers grant that the reliability of their findings is somewhat lacking as it can’t be stated for certain that spouses or friends directly influenced someone quitting or not quitting smoking.  The only way to determine that for certain is asking them directly.  But even asking someone directly is not exactly a reliable determinant because of the Hawthorne effect; where someone tells you what you want to hear and not necessarily what is true (if you were or are a Political Science major, you know what I’m talking about).

Despite its shortcomings, the correlation is convincing enough, from my perspective, that who you interact with socially has an enormous impact on your health – for good or ill.

Study:  Luteolin in Celery, Peppers, Reduces Brain Inflammation   There are a few staples found in just about every refrigerator.  Milk is one of them.  Eggs are another.  A half-full bottle of ketchup is probably a third.

For the health-conscious consumer, though, celery is as much of a pillar as milk is.  Why?  Well, other than the fact that celery stays relatively fresh for a while and is a great snack – plain or with a dollop of peanut butter – celery actually contains negative calories!  That’s right – the energy the body expends to digest a stalk of celery is more than the celery stick itself!

Now, a diet of eating nothing but celery is not only impractical and unwise, but it probably wouldn’t amount to a whole heck of a lot of weight loss – so celery’s negative calorie content is not the reason why it ought to inhabit our refrigerators.  Perhaps the most practical reason why was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

According to the study, the chemical compounds found in celery (and green peppers) can help reduce brain inflammation.  This kind of finding may have profound implications in the advancement of treatments that can help avert neurological diseases and auto-immune system disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis, respectively.

Brain inflammation by itself is not a bad thing.  In fact, brain inflammation plays a key role in the body’s immune system function when we get sick.  But when inflammation gets “out of whack,” if you will, that’s when brain inflammation is a bad thing.

The impact celery’s chemical compounds have on excessive brain inflammation is what researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign looked into.  These compounds, called luteolin – yes, they too are flavonoids – are found in various spices and vegetables like cabbage, brussel sprouts, spinach and thyme.

To study luteolin’s impact, researchers performed two experiments.  In the first experiment, they took microglia cells from rats and exposed them to harmful bacteria cells; microglia cells release the molecules in the brain that trigger brain inflammation when under stress.  They then exposed these cells to the luteolin compounds.  When they were exposed to the luteolin compounds, the excessive inflammation observed was reduced.

The second experiment involved injections and spiking.  First, researchers spiked rats’ drinking water with luteolin and had them drink this water for a three-week period.  Near to the conclusion of the study, they injected the rats with a bacterium that causes inflammation in the brain.  Amazingly, four hours after injecting the rats with the bacterium, inflammation had reduced in the brain, particularly in the hippocampus, a region of the brain that’s primarily affected by Alzheimer’s.  The researchers attribute this reduction to the luteolin-spiked water.

More research needs to be done, but this kind of finding is a truly exciting one for all of us with loved ones that are, or have been, afflicted with this terrible disease.  Scientists believe approximately four and a half to five million Americans currently have Alzheimer’s, with no signs of dire diagnoses slowing down.  Thanks to these and other natural health findings, though, Alzheimer’s disease could become a thing of the past.  And it may all start with a stalk of celery.

Big Breakfast, Best Bet for Battling Bulge   The formula makes sense.  If you want to lose weight, you have to do two things: eat less, exercise more.  It sounds simple, but putting the formula into action is anything but.

That said, what if I told you that eating less may not be the key to losing weight after all?  What if I told you that the truly best way to lose weight is to eat more – particularly if you’re a woman.  Don’t believe me?   

Dr. Daniela Jakubowicz and her fellow researchers will be attending The Endocrine Society’s 90th annual meeting this week in San Francisco.  While there, they’ll tell their colleagues and fellow researchers that after studying 94 obese and inactive women over the course of eight months, the women who adhered to a strict diet regained an average of 18 pounds after initially losing weight, while those who ate carb-rich, high calorie breakfasts not only lost weight initially, but continued to lose weight at the eight-month mark:  an average of 16.5 pounds more, in fact!

What explains this?  It’s all about the time in which these women ate their foods and how they spaced their calorie intake over the course of the day.

It all goes back to that maxim you learned way back in grade school:  breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Not only is it the most important meal of the day, but it also ought to be your biggest meal of the day, in terms of caloric intake.

There’s no doubt that consuming a diet low in carbohydrates leads to a drop in body weight – as the low-carb diet craze that swept the country a few years ago indicated.  But as Jakubowicz and her colleagues from the Hospital de Clinicas in Caracas, Venezuela found, women who consumed low carbohydrates craved carbohydrates over time and wound up eating more carbohydrates than they had initially.  No wonder the low-carb diet craze fizzled.

“A very low carbohydrate diet exacerbates the craving for carbohydrates and slows metabolism,” Jakubowicz said.  “After a short period of weight loss, there is a quick return to obesity.”

The researchers found that the group of women who followed a low-carb diet during breakfast lost an average of 28 pounds; the big breakfast group of women lost an average of 23 pounds.  On the surface, this looks like the low-carb diet is the way to go.  After all, five extra pounds of weight loss is nothing to sneeze at.  But in the battle of the bulge, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.  And similar to a marathon, success is highly contingent on the fuel you put in your body before competing.  A pre-race meal that’s low in carbohydrates won’t get you to mile 13.  But a high carbohydrate diet will help carry you through the 26.2 mile marker.

The same standard applies with your day:  the more fuel you provide your body in the morning, the fewer cravings you’ll have throughout the day, leading to a more successful maintenance of weight loss.

Now, does this study mean you can satisfy your ravenous appetite on sugary, high processed foods?  Certainly not.  They’re not very satiating as it is, never mind their lack of nutrients.  Fill yourself up on quality, high-fiber carbohydrates that satisfy:  fresh fruits, veggies, whole wheat breads, and whole grain cereals.