Can Exercise Ease Anxiety?

If you exercise regularly, you know that a good workout can help you feel less stressed and better able to cope with problems. But can exercise help relieve anxiety disorders?

Some research shows that physical activity can modestly decrease anxiety symptoms. Exercise also boosts self-esteem slightly and improves social interaction skills, both of which can help reduce anxiety. Just how exercise helps isn’t known, but researchers believe a combination of factors probably come into play. Exercise increases endorphins, natural chemicals that act like painkillers. And when done with a friend or in a class, it can promote social interaction.

While it’s fair to say that exercise is beneficial for both mind and body, studies reporting that it reduces anxiety should be viewed with caution. For one thing, few of these studies used subjects diagnosed with anxiety disorders. Instead, they relied on participants’ self-reports of anxiety symptoms. It’s unclear whether the reported benefits would hold true for people with anxiety disorders. Furthermore, the studies didn’t differentiate among types of exercise, intensity, or duration, so it’s impossible to recommend a specific regimen. Despite the unknowns, the authors of a recent review article in The Physician and Sportsmedicine recommended that clinicians strongly encourage people with anxiety to exercise regularly in addition to adhering to proven treatment programs.

Besides boosting your mood, regular exercise offers a host of other benefits, such as lowering blood pressure, protecting against heart disease and cancer, and helping prevent diabetes.

-from Everyday Health

Anti-Cancer Cabbage Soup Recipe

By Dr. Ben Kim
If you want to significantly lower your risk of developing cancer, consider eating cabbage at least a few times a week. Cabbage belongs to the Cruciferous family of vegetables - other vegetables that belong in this family include broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collards, Brussels sprouts, Bok Choy, watercress, and arugula.

Phytonutrients found in cabbage and other Cruciferous vegetables stimulate your genes to increase production of enzymes that detoxify your cells, resulting in elimination of free radicals, toxins, and potential carcinogens from your body.

If you do a search through the archives of peer-reviewed and indexed journals at the National Library of Medicine, you'll find numerous studies that indicate that people who eat large amounts of cruciferous vegetables have a lower-than-average risk of developing lung, colon, breast, ovarian, prostate, and bladder cancer.

Perhaps the most powerful, anti-cancer phytonutrient found in cabbage and other cruciferous vegetables is indole-3-carbinole, a compound that stimulates cellular detoxification, including estrogen detoxification. Indole-3-carbinole's ability to prevent estrogen dominance is what makes cruciferous vegetables like cabbage an excellent food choice for cancer prevention, particularly breast cancer prevention.

If you want to enjoy the many health benefits of cabbage but don't know where to start, give the following Cabbage-Miso soup a try. It's super easy to make, and is one of the tastiest soups that we enjoy in our home.

Cabbage Miso Soup Recipe

6-8 servings

Ingredients:

4 cups (around 10 ounces) chopped green cabbage
6 cups water or vegetable broth (vegetable broth adds lots of flavor)
2 celery ribs, diagonally sliced
1 yellow onion, thinly sliced
1 carrot, thinly sliced
8 garlic cloves, 4 finely chopped and 4 sliced
1/3 cup miso (or Korean den jang)
Few drops sesame oil per bowl(optional)

Directions:

1. Bring 6 cups of water or vegetable broth to a boil in a big soup pot. Add cabbage, celery, onion, carrot, and sliced garlic. Cover, reduce to low-medium heat, and cook for about 15 to 20 minutes, or until vegetables are tender.

2. Stir in chopped garlic, then turn off heat. Dissolve miso with some of hot soup liquid in a cup or bowl, then pour it into the pot. For an extra zing of flavor, add a few drops of sesame oil to each bowl just before serving. If you enjoy sweet and sour soups, add fresh lime juice (about 1 lime for the whole pot) right before adding the miso.

Enjoy this nourishing cabbage and miso soup - it goes wonderfully with a bowl of rice and kim chi, a fermented Korean cabbage dish.

How to Choose a Weight-Loss Program

Some people lose weight on their own, while others like the support of a structured program. If you decide to join a weight-loss program, here are some questions to ask before you join:

• Does the program provide counseling to help you change your eating and activity habits? The program should teach you how to permanently change those eating and lifestyle habits, such as lack of physical activity, that have contributed to weight gain.
• Does the staff include qualified health professional, such as nutritionists, registered dietitians, doctors, nurses, psychologists, and exercise physiologists? Qualified professionals can help you lose weight safely and successfully. You need to be evaluated by a physician if you have any health problems, take or plan to take any medicine, or plan to lose more than 15 to 20 pounds. If your weight-control plan uses a very low-calorie diet (a special liquid formula that replaces all food for 1 to 4 months), you will also need an exam and follow-up visits by a doctor.
• Does the program offer training on how to deal with times when you may feel stressed and slip back into old habits? The program should provide long-term strategies for preventing and coping with possible weight problems in the future. These strategies might include setting up a support system and a regular physical activity routing.

• Do you help decide on food choices and weight-loss goals? In setting weight-loss goals, the program should consider your personal food likes and dislikes, as well as your lifestyle.
  

• Are there fees or costs for additional items, such as dietary supplements? You need to know the total costs of participating in the program.
• How successful is the program? Many programs don’t gather information on how well they work, but it is worthwhile to ask what percentage of people who start this program complete it, what percentage of people experience problems or side effects (and what are they), and what is the average weight loss among those who finish the program.

-from Everyday Health

Are Women More Stressed?

A survey of 30,000 people in 30 countries has found that in similar circumstances, women are more likely than men to say they are under stress. Other studies suggest that women are three times more likely than men to become depressed in response to a stressful event. And women are disproportionately subject to certain kinds of severe stress — especially child sexual abuse, adult sexual assaults, and domestic violence.

Everyday experiences as well as traumatic ones may provoke stress, leading to depression in women. Women, who are often raised to care for others, tend to subordinate their own needs more than men. For example, women who work outside the home also tend to work a "second shift" — taking care of housework, children, and older relatives. Many have too much to do in too little time, with too little control over how it is done. Marriage and children, while a haven for some women, ratchet up the stress level for others. Studies have found that, compared with their single counterparts or married men, married women are less likely to feel satisfied. In an unhappy marriage, the wife is three times more likely to be depressed than the husband. Being a mother of young children increases your risk for depression, too.

Another kind of stress is poverty. Women are on average poorer than men — especially single mothers with young children, who have a particularly high rate of depression.

Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) can involve emotional fluctuations on top of physical symptoms such as bloating and tiredness. Women with PMS may feel sad, anxious, irritable, and angry. They may also suffer from crying spells, mood changes, trouble concentrating, loss of interest in daily activities, and a feeling of being overwhelmed or out of control. Sometimes depression is mistaken for PMS, or vice versa. To help distinguish the two, chart your symptoms through two menstrual cycles to see if they appear only in the week before menstruation and go away a day or two after bleeding begins. If a clear and persistent pattern emerges, it’s likely that changing hormone levels are to blame. If a clear pattern doesn’t emerge, depression may be the culprit.

Premenstrual dysphoric disorder is a severe form of PMS that occurs in 2%–10% of menstruating women. It can cause symptoms similar to a major depressive episode in women who are unusually sensitive to the changing hormone levels of the menstrual cycle. Some of that sensitivity may be due to interactions between female hormones and neurotransmitters that regulate mood and arousal.

Whether PMS, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or depression is at the root of your symptoms, it’s important to talk to your doctor about the fluctuations in your mood and how best to treat them.

Researchers are also investigating whether hormones play a role in depression around the time of menopause. Some women report feeling depressed during perimenopause, a time of transition that occurs in the months or years before menstruation stops. It’s commonly believed that declining levels of estrogen are to blame, although this has not been proved scientifically. When estrogen is given to treat depression, the results have been mixed. For now, estrogen’s role in depression during perimenopause remains controversial.

There is evidence to suggest that genes play a role, too. Researchers have identified certain genetic mutations that are linked to severe depression — some of which are found only in women. In one of these cases, the mutation is in a gene that controls female hormone regulation. These biological differences could account for some of the difference in the rates of depression between men and women.
-from Everyday Health