Thursday, November 26, 2009

OPP – Diabetes Care: How to Choose Your Foods


Diabetes is a disease that can not be cure thoroughly, hence, diabetes care is a lifelong responsibility and all patients must take round-the-clock commitment. Careful diabetes care can reduce the risk of serious or even life-threatening diabetes complications.


Keep a well-controlled diet as one of the ways to care for diabetes. Diabetic Diet for diabetics is simply a balanced healthy diet which is vital for diabetic treatment, however, a lot of people have the misconception that these diet consist only diabetic foods. Thus, Ms.Sunny Yong has kindly delivered a talk entitled “ Diabetes Care: How to choose your foods” on 23rh November 2009 (Monday). A diabetic must understand that making wise food choices will help them feel good everyday and even reduce their blood glucose level to a target range. To control the intake of sugar means to control the intake of carbohydrate foods. The Glycemic Index (GI) is a ranking of foods based on the glucose response by body after a meal, compared with a reference food (normally glucose or white bread). Meaning if we ate a plate of fried rice, it will result in a certain increase in blood glucose. Different foods result in different responses from the body. For instance, if we drank 50 grams of pure glucose diluted in water, we would trigger a much higher GI response than if you consumed 50 grams of fructose (fruit sugar), which is a low GI carbohydrate. They must learn how to select foods, included what type of foods as well as how much to eat.


Next up, Crown manager Mr. Wong Tiam Choy has also gave a motivation talk with a title of “The characteristics of a successful man”. Success is not the destination, but are the steps we take on the path to our destination. In order to succeed, we must successfully navigate the path to our dreams, goals, and objectives. Everyman wants to be successful isn’t it? Becoming a successful man is not an easy task! There are certain qualities that are absolutely necessary if you would like to become successful in any ventures. The successful ones share some common traits, such as persistent, avid goal settler, passionate, work hard, show value, courage and others.


"The person who gets the farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore." –Dale Carnegie

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

How does She Quit?



Surprisingly, when men smoke, people tend to treat that as a normal phenomenon, but when you see a woman or a female smokes in front of you, a bad perception and impression might strike your mind out of a sudden.

What makes women smoke? Many would have guess that they smoke, because, they experienced the same thing men do. Many times, they blamed that on stressful situation at work, problems in marriage and so on.

But according to a new meta-analysis (results of several studies), it suggests that women do not quit smoking because they are afraid of gaining weight. True enough, scientifically, nicotine which presents in the cigarette has the ability to suppress one's appetite and boosts a smoker's metabolism. But the after effect of smoking could be hazardous as it could cause death by shortening your life span greatly.

So, for those female smokers, how should they quite smoking? Is there any other alternatives where it helps female smokers to quite smoking? Gratefully, the mentioned findings suggest that women who quit smoking while receiving treatment for weight control are better ablt to control their weight gain and are more successful at quitting cigarettes.

Based on a recent paper which published in the Journal of Addiction, the study showed that women who addressed both smoking treatment as well as weight control treatment were 29 percent more likely to quit smoking in short term (about three months) and 23 percent in the long term (about six to fourteen months), compare to those who only conduct smoking treatment.

This latest study would certainly encourage more and more females to quit smoking as it encouraging as far as weight management is concerned.


Alarming Increase



Loyola University has conducted a latest study on diabetic patients recently, and the result of their research suggested that one out of five Type 2 diabetics is morbidly obese. This article focuses only on US diabetics. But although the United States appear to be a well known Western country, while the country we're currently living in, Malaysia, is an Eastern country. Two far continents do not seem to have any intimate connections with each other. If you think that way, you're probably wrong, as diseases are normally circulated from the Western side towards the Eastern side.

In this article too, we will be looking at some statistics about the diabetics in the United States:

Based on Dr. Holly Kramer, a kidney specialist and lead author of the study published online in the Journal of Diabetes and its complications, as well as fellow researchers, between the study periods between the year of 1976-1980 and 2005-2008, there was an alarming 141 percent of increase in the rate of morbid obesity among adults with Type 2 Diabetes.

In regards to that, they also found that the greatest growth in obesity has been among diabetics who are morbidly obese. Approximately two-thirds of adults in the United States with Type 2 Diabetes are obese and about one third of them without diabetes are obese. If we look into BMI, obesity is defined as having a BMI value greater than 30, but based on the findings between 1976-2006, the average BMI of Type 2 Diabetics increased to 34.2.

If such phenomenon does not come to a halt, as a result, more and more diabetics will resides within us. Without hesitating, drink GTF Milk Powder now to boost your defense against the deadly diabetes!

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Thoughtful Words in Marriage



In many Western countries, the divorce rate is especially extremely high if making comparison with the divorce rate in many Asian countries. Many seem to treat this phenomenon as a norm, and nobody really does something which is considered beneficial to it, or in other words, things which could salvage the marriage. Though, many couples or spouse did, but what about the scientist? Do they ever look in depth on this one?

All of us know that fighting or quarrels within a marriage sometimes are inevitable, but of course, we tend to avoid these things from happening as best as we possibly could. But if we are trapped under such circumstance, what should we do? Are we just going to take a deep breath and count silently from 1 to 10 in order to swallow it? Would that be effective? Many individuals do not think so. This method, to many people, seems like one "solution" which does not solve the problem up front, but more like avoids in facing the reality.

During a fight between couples, tension and stressful situations seem to prevail. But today, we are not only talking about one of the latest marriage salvation method, but what we are going to discuss today, could also resulting in bringing health benefits to the couples.

A recent study shows that individuals in a stressful situation (ie: in a troubled relationship), tends to have elevated levels of cytokines (a kind of protein). When this kind of protein is elevated to an abnormally high level, visible problems could be seen by appearing in the forms of illnesses, such as cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, arthritis (all sorts of metabolic syndromes) and even cancers.

Instead of fighting with just by spilling out unthoughful words during quarreling, researchers suggested that by linking cognitive processing, that is, by using thoughful words which involve events of think, because, reason, why, people tend to be making sense of the conflict or at least thinking about it in a deep way.

The results of the researchers suggest that people who used more cognitive words during the fights showed a smaller increase in IL-6 (Interleukin-6) and TNF-alpha, where both are very familiar pro-inflammatory cytokines, especially to GTF distributors.

Jennifer Graham, assistant professor of biobehavioral health, surprisingly speculates that women, who are more adept at communication, tend to use cognitive words more often than men, a gender which is more prone in thinking things in logical ways; and the cognitive words used by women also have bigger impacts on their husbands.