Exercise Reduces Colon Cancer Risk

The British Journal of Cancer published a study finding that, "Exercise, including manual labor, cuts colon cancer (the most common kind of bowel cancer) by a quarter."(1)

Another study by the Division of Population Science at the Fox Chase Cancer Center found that, "People who get lots of exercise have a 30 percent to 40 percent lower risk of developing colon cancer" and that "A sedentary lifestyle accounts for as many as 14 percent of all colon cancer cases in the United States." (2)

They stressed in their findings that of 1,932 adults who answered questions about colon cancer risk, 85% did not list physical activity as a method of reducing their risk of colon cancer, and that "not all doctors are informing patients of this simple preventive approach."

According to Dr. Edward Giovannucci, professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, "Sedentary people can greatly benefit from starting a modest exercise program, such as gardening or walking two to three hours a week. Sedentary people should first set such moderate, achievable goals. More benefits could accrue from higher levels and more intense exercise, such as jogging, running or tennis. To some extent, more may be better, but it is important to note that a little is much better than nothing."



Key Encouraging Points:

1. Exercise has definite, positive effect to reduce colon cancer risk
2. Exercise reduces risk, even if you have a family history, or risk factors for the disease.
3. Colon cancer is considered a largely preventable disease.

Related Fitness Fixer on Cancer:

• Exercise and Cancer
• Healthy Mother's Day
  
• Sunlight Needed for Physical and Mental Health
• Fast Fitness - Sprouts Inside and Out
• Junk Food Through Your Skin?
• World Vegan Day is November 1
• World Vegetarian Day

Related Fitness Fixer on Getting Started With Fun Exercise:

• Secret To Get Better and Fitter
• What is "Fitness as a Lifestyle?"
• Getting Stronger Without a Gym
• If you can't walk or run without pain, fix causes so you can enjoy running and walking again - Spotting Back Pain During Running and Walking - What Do Abs Have To Do With It?

Random, Unrelated Fitness Fixer:

• Fast Fitness - Strengthen Character

Labels: cancer, digestion, practice of medicine

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Prescription Acid-Reducing Drugs Produce Heartburn and Dependency

In a study of acid-suppression drugs, healthy adults with no previous symptoms developed

"heartburn, acid regurgitation and dyspepsia" after a course of the drugs. Forty percent of 120 volunteers taking anti-heartburn drugs called proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) had a rebound increase in gastric acid secretion, resulting in acid levels above their starting levels.


Gastroenterology is the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute. A comment appearing in the Journal stated there is, "Evidence that proton-pump inhibitor therapy induces the symptoms it is used to treat." Gastroenterology. 2009 Jul;137(1):80-7, 87. McColl KE, Gillen D.

PPI drugs for gastrointestinal symptoms are highly prescribed. Study authors stated, "This might lead to PPI dependency and thus have important implications."

In the previous Thank You to Grand Rounds, I noted that several prescriptions drugs are known to cause increased symptoms, rebound, even the original problem - Thank You Grand Rounds 5.50, Medicine & Technology.

It is becoming known that PPI drugs do not prevent the source of the problem, so may not be needed in the first place. It does not seem necessary to start a course of drugs that perpetuates your symptoms, even causes the problem itself. The Fitness Fixer article Stomach Acid Drugs Increase Osteoporosis and Hip Fractures explains more.


Related Fitness Fixer:

• Stomach Acid Drugs Increase Osteoporosis and Hip Fractures
• Exercise is More Important Than Calcium Supplements for Bones
• Common, Missed Cause of MusculoSkeletal Pain - Your Drugs
• FDA Orders Suicide Risk Warning for Common Back Pain and Migraine Drugs, and Others
• Forensic Anthropology and Bone Density

Unrelated Random Fitness Fixer:

• Married 63 Years With Good Balance

Labels: digestion, drugs, fix pain, injury, practice of medicine

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Common, Missed Cause of MusculoSkeletal Pain - Your Drugs

Three years ago, I started a series of Fitness Fixer posts about the extensive phenomenon of muscle, joint, and body pain occurring from common prescription drugs. The editors at that time asked me to defer writing about it. I have been watching the medical reports grow, substantiating the numbers and secondary problems of chronic pain from common medicines. This is a short summary, with more coming this summer.

Major side effects of body and muscle pain from common prescription drugs are not rare as once thought. Misdiagnosis of this pain is common. Unnecessary treatments, surgeries, and more drugs are often given. Exercises and stretches do not stop body pain from drugs:

• Statin drugs for cholesterol are a frequent cause of muscle and joint pain, and sometimes, numbness or tingling in the fingers or toes
• Common prescription drugs for anxiety and depression. Even though this class of medicines may be prescribed for nerve pain, they can cause nerve and muscle pain as side effects
• Ritalin (methylphenidate hydrochloride) and related drugs
  
• Some prescription allergy medicines such as Allegra (Fexofenadine)
• Prescription acid prevention medicines called PPIs - proton pump inhibitors (Nexium, Prilosec, Prevacid, Zoton, Inhibitol, and others). PPIs have also been shown to greatly increase risk of hip fracture
• Erectile enhancing drugs
• The calcium channel-blocker drug verapamil
• The antibiotics erythromycin and clarithromycin
• Some HIV medications
• Prescription medicine for constipation like Zelnorm (Tegaserod), irritable bowel, and others digestive complaints.
• Migraine and headache prescriptions
• Medicines for fibromyalgia
• Even many medicines for pain, sadly have pain both as direct side effects and rebound pain, increasing drug dependence and pain cycles
• There are several more prescription drugs that cause more problems than they relieve. List your additions in the comments below.
  

Often the need for the original medicine can be stopped with simple healthy changes. Motivated people can address and change the original problem, making their life better and more active than before instead of paying for more medicines and the problems that come with them.

Two of my books teach how to fix pain and mention specific drugs and what to look for:

• Fix Your Own Pain Without Drugs or Surgery. Each chapter on each kind of pain gives a list of drugs that are known to cause pain.
• Health & Fitness THIRD ed - How to Be Healthy Happy and Fit For The Rest of Your Life. Several chapters include drug information pertinent to the condition covered, plus several chapters on general health, offering many ways to avoid needing the original medications.
• Click the link www.DrBookspan.com/books.

Related Fitness Fixer:

• Stomach Acid Drugs Increase Osteoporosis and Hip Fractures
• FDA Orders Suicide Risk Warning for Common Back Pain and Migraine Drugs, and Others
• Human Growth Hormone
• Doctor Fakes Benefits in 21 Pain Pill Studies

Labels: arthritis, blood pressure, digestion, dizziness, drugs, fibromyalgia, fix pain, headache/migraine, practice of medicine

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Fast Fitness - Open Your Eyes and World View

Here is Fast Friday Fitness - learn a long-known, little talked-about world crisis encompassing health, politics, economics, pollution, and human rights. See the movie Flow to quickly learn several global practices that improve your health to know:

1. Water is the third largest global corporate-profit industry after electricity and oil, leaving surprising pollution, disease, graft, and social destabilization in its wake. Corporations seize local waters for resale, leaving the world's poorest without access to unpolluted water to drink and bathe, and frequently without any water at all. Over 1 billion people do not have safe drinking water, resulting in millions of sicknesses and deaths per year, including several millions of children and infants. Even Westerners are affected. Possibly 116,000 human-made chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and hormones are already identified in public water supply, consumed in the West through drinking and through the skin in washing. Known health effects range from stomach illnesses frequently mistaken for "flu," food-poisoning, or bowel problems, and breathing difficulties.
   


2. Be aware that you can turn on a tap and get water. An average American uses 150 gallons of water per day. Billions in developing countries walk miles and still cannot get more than five gallons. Staggering numbers of people around the world have total income averaging $2 (two American dollars) a day, and are being charged to travel distances and lift and carry water that was once available to them without charge.


3. When you buy expensive bottled water know that it is frequently ordinary tap water resold in deception, various pretentious "fitness waters" are not as healthful as eating ordinary fruit, and the bottling results in avoidable large scale pollution.

Posts of these issues and more things to do:

• Green Water
• Non-Plastic Non-Aluminum Sports and Fitness Food Carriers
• Junk Food Through Your Skin?
• Fitness Water
• Make Healthier Cleaners
• Meet the cook in our school in Asia- one of the many earning only a few dollars a day - Muay Thai in Her 90's

Labels: breathing, colds/flu/infectious, digestion, education, fast fitness, green fitness, injury, mind, movie/media fitness, nutrition

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Junk Food Through Your Skin?

We live part of each year in Asia. For a few months, I was posting articles for you from various villages. The town shower of one is pictured at right - not the hut, the outdoor green post with hose. Imagine what the Internet café was like.

On the flights over, our only bag was lost. US transportation security required us to check our sole knapsack, since it had a small gift for friends containing liquid. It never reappeared. We don't need "things" and it was just as easy to make our own soap, comb, and toothbrushes as carry them.

In Western stores, I am astonished by the number of "personal care items." Not just shelves full, but aisles. Each promising better hair, skin, nails, and other parts, but with ingredients that are not healthy for your body, produced in ways that pollute the world, and packaged in plastics that are unhealthy to produce, pollute when discarded, and which apparently leak chemicals into the product that can be absorbed through your skin - see Green Water. A study commissioned by the Organic Consumers Association found that even shampoos, body washes, and lotions labeled "natural" and "organic" can contain unhealthful, even carcinogenic compounds.

I feel high maintenance just carrying a toothbrush. Then we arrived without even that. What freedom.

We made simple hand sanitizer from coarse salt, rubbed between the palms.


For body, face, and hair, we picked aloe leaves, squeezed out the gel inside, and rubbed directly on - see Fast Fitness - Aloe Inside and Out. It dries non-sticky, and makes your hair shiny, clean, and healthy. We used the rest of the gel in food and drink for healthy digestion.

Bamboo is easily made into cooking pots (photo above left). We also visit our favorite bean sprout PadThai restaurant - an outdoor wok on wheels run by a friend. Paul is always popular when we travel (photo at right). The others are not sitting; Paul is really that tall, and has to duck those umbrellas, doorways, and ceilings.

Baking soda and salt makes clean toothpaste. Even without them, a short branch called a neem stick with one end mashed until fibrous, makes a soft, effective bristled toothbrush. Neem extract is said to be a good antiseptic, and effective against various health ills and germs.

After a long day at work and after hard training, instead of hand lotion, you can rub sesame or other light healthy cooking oil onto your hands and feet. You can scent it with mint leaves, citrus peels, spices, and flowers. More ideas in Healthy Mother's Day.

I don't use sunblock, even in the tropics. I do use something to stop some of the unwanted effects of too much sun, but I do not want to block the Vitamin D and other helpful effects of sunlight. Vitamin D deficiency can lead to osteoporosis (thin, brittle bones) and osteomalacia (rubbery, demineralized bones). Vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased risk of a few types of cancer, including lung cancer. Studies find that people with low blood levels of vitamin D were more likely to have high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, cystic ovary, and type 2 diabetes. Another study found that a number of patients with aches and weakness were vitamin D deficient and concluded, "A lot of 'fibromyalgia' may be D deficiency."

Instead of blocking or deflecting UV rays using chemical sunblocks that may contain chemicals that I am not sure are healthy, I mix my own, that I hope stops the oxidizing effects and makes my own body better able to stop skin cancer mechanisms. I mash together fresh coconut pulp, green tea, vegetable sprouts, mashed turmeric root, and aloe gel. Here is how to get a simple fresh aloe - Fast Fitness - Aloe Inside and Out.

A study by Johns Hopkins researchers, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (October 30, 2007, vol. 104, no. 44, 17500-17505) found that rubbing an extract made from broccoli sprouts on your skin may help prevent skin cancer from high levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Broccoli, and the sprouts in particular, contain a chemical called sulphoraphane, which is found to activate cancer-fighting enzymes in your own cells throughout your body, not only skin cells.

Instead of chemical anti-mosquito products, we try various things. Marigold flowers rubbed on the skin seem to work for us. I don't seem to be "sweet," and mosquitoes often ignore me while going after Paul. We have heard various theories from locals. One is that he eats sweet rice while I eat more garlic. Various grasses rubbed on the skin also work well for us.

There are vines growing in Thailand with beautiful purple flowers. When you rub them on wet hair, it leaves your hair soft and shiny and sweet smelling, but the bugs do not like it. There are other vines that, when mashed with water made effective gentle soap and mosquito control combined.

In Asia, martial arts training is often more rigorous and disciplined than is common in the states. After hard evenings of training, I would sit by a candle made from oil and tightly wrapped bamboo leaves, and rub salt and oil into my, and Paul's, tired feet. Bliss.

• You can exercise for your health. Why undo that by eating junk food - Is Your Health Food Unhealthful
• or by adding junk food to your brain through thinking unhealthful thoughts - Healthier Heart
• or with junk food directly through your skin.

The biggest worry for Paul is just ducking the doorways.

Labels: cancer, diabetes, digestion, drugs, fibromyalgia, fix pain, green fitness, nutrition, osteoporosis, sunlight

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Fast Fitness - Aloe Inside and Out

Here is Friday Fast Fitness - aloe vera fresher and cheaper, and probably more effective than bottled, to help cell repair.






Add a chunk when making fitness water and sports shakes, and rub the inside of the peel on your face and hands, or apply to cuts and small wounds. Dries without stickiness.


Aloe is promoted as aiding cell growth and repair, as an anti-inflammatory, and helps move slow digestion on through. Promotes fitness inside and out.

Labels: digestion, fast fitness, fix pain, green fitness, injury, nutrition

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Healthy Mother's Day

Neolithic groups (stone age) worshiped the mother. Ancient Germans worshipped the virgin Hertha holding her child. Scandinavians worshipped virgin Disa holding her child. In ancient Egypt it was Isis with infant Osiris. In India, Devaki had Krishna (also by virgin birth). In Asia, Cybele and Deoius. Chinese holy mother Shing Moo held her child in arms. Christian missionaries to Tibet, China, and Japan found that holy mothers depicted with splendid light around their head and holding a divine child had been worshiped long before they got there.

In Rome, the goddess was Demeter, meaning Earth Mother, wearing wreathes of braided corn in her hair. In ancient Greece, Demeter was called Ceres, the great mother with baby at breast. From her name "Ceres," we get the word "cereal" (grains), "which made man different from wild animals."

In the spring in ancient Greece, celebrations were held in honor of Rhea, the Mother of the Gods. Christian Europe celebrated the spring festival of "Mother Church" who (they believed) would protect them from harm. During the 1600's, England celebrated "Mothering Sunday" on the 4th Sunday of Lent, honoring the mothers of England. All cultures worshiped the divine, the Mother, who gives life and food, compassion and love.

So. How to celebrate this Sunday on Mother's Day? I'm in favor of some goddess worship, probably involving some rocks and food and chocolates and compassion and love. Not so original, but time tested and universal:

• Visit Mom (or a Mom) and give her a massage (if she wants one). Neck, hands, feet, back. Good for circulation for giver and receiver. Touch can be healthy. Ask her stories.
• Teach her a Nice Neck Stretch
• Make her (and you) something healthy to eat. For light teas, try cinnamon, cloves, grated orange peel, or ginger in hot water.
• For a cold treat without unhealthy junk food, mash a frozen banana with crushed raw walnuts or flax seeds. Use a food grinder or get free exercise by mashing them yourself in a bowl. It will taste like creamy ice cream. Flax seeds and walnuts have been found to be effective to help bone health as vegetarian sources of omega-3 (n-3) fatty acids. Raw walnuts (as part of a general low fat and cholesterol diet) have also been found to have a beneficial effect to decrease cardiovascular disease risk, among other benefits. This treat has fiber and is non dairy, both associated with lower breast cancer risk.
• Goddess worship often is helped with chocolate. The primary chemical in chocolate is theobromine. "Theo-" means God and "broma" comes from a word meaning food. The theobromine in chocolate was named for "food of the gods." Theobromine is an antioxidant, weak diuretic, stimulant, and mood booster, opens breathing airways, and relieves coughing. Dark chocolate has more theobromine than lighter chocolate, with flavonoids and phenolics, plant substances that are good for the heart. People who get a kind of vascular headache called migraine do better not to eat chocolate. For others, get plain cocoa, unsweetened, not junked up with sugar. Add the unsweetened cocoa to the frozen mashed banana and walnuts for a healthy sweet wonderful treat that tastes better than you would expect. For exotic flavor and more health benefit, add fresh grated ginger root.
• Sit outside in the air and sun to have your tea and frozen banana. Warnings on the dangers of overtanning are important for preventing skin cancer for people who work outdoors, who over-tan for cosmetic purposes, and a few other populations. Another group to consider is those spending too little time outdoors. Sunlight exposure and the Vitamin D it makes your skin produce, is increasingly documented as crucial to bone density, healthy immune function, positive mood, sound sleep at night, relief of symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, MS, Parkinsons, polycystic ovary, diabetes, and other health issues. A nice massage and tea and chocolate outside in the sunlight could be made into a wonderful Mother's Day. Nice excuse to buy a hat.
• Make Mom (or a Mom) some homemade healthy skin lotion. Commercial products have preservatives, dyes, and chemicals. Try combinations of grape seed oil, tea tree oil (very small amount), vitamins C and E, ginger, honey, tea, fresh aloe, and fragrances from oils, fruit, flowers like lavender, or leaves like mint. (Don't wear citrus oils like lime out in the sun.)
• Help out at a woman and child shelter. Or help at a men's shelter to help the guys get back on their feet to help their own families.
• Celebrate Mother Earth - go out and pick up litter. It's good exercise. Bend right.
• Make a trip to look around a home improvement center to see about some do it yourself solar projects, even if only to replace a few lights.
• Go do gardening for your mother, or your mother Earth. Lift and bend right, reach right, carry in healthy ways.
  
• Do some cooking, shopping, vacuuming, and cleaning for Mom (or a Mom). Water their plants. It's good exercise for you and a nice thing for them.
• Be good to each other - all the children of Earth.
• Follow the advice of the unknown who said, "The most important gift a father can give his children is to love their mother."
• If that doesn't work, take the advice on the side of aspirin bottles: "Take two aspirin, and keep away from children."

Labels: arthritis, circulation, diabetes, digestion, fibromyalgia, fix pain, green fitness, holiday, massage, nutrition, osteoporosis, Parkinson, spirit, stretch, sunlight, upper back

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