Health Benefits of Pancakes

The batter used to cook pancakes includes milk, a great source protein and calcium. Eggs can supply additional protein. Pancakes made from whole wheat or buckwheat flourare healthier due to the low GI nature of these ingredients, as well as providing fiber, vitamins, antioxidants and minerals. The additional fiber of whole wheat pancakes and added protein from eggs and milk help keep you feeling fuller longer when compared to white flour pancakes.

Adding flaxseed you can make your pancake even more healthy. Flaxseed adds to the fiber content of the pancake. A typical 6 inch pancake should contain 175 calories.

What about the Extras?

Adding extras such as syrup, butter, whipped cream, sauces, powder sugar and fruit can all add to additional unnecessary calories. Fruit is the healthiest extra from this list. Using whole fruits are better than those covered in a sugary fruit syrup. To further reduce unwanted calories which not try a light syrup instead of the regular syrup. A low sugar or sugar-free jam can also help.

Enjoy

Now you can sit back and enjoy your pancake with zero guilt.

Click here to read more about the ingredients that can help your body’s skin health.

Over a third of 14- and 15-year-old boys in 1987 said they ate sugary cereals on most mornings. This reduced to 16% by 2010. More than 25% of 12- and 13-year-old girls in 2000 said they ate deep fried or roast potatoes on most days. This decreased to 11% by 2010. This suggests that today’s youngsters are eating more vegetables. Almost 50% of 12- and 13-year-old boys said they ate vegetables on most days in 2010, compared with around 33% of the same group in 1999.

“When I go to the supermarket I see a wall of crisps and sweets. So we asked ourselves do we believe these results? And I think we do,” said Dr Regis. “Schools are serving better school dinners and they are also taking more of an interest in the contents of pupils’ lunchboxes. The packed lunch and tuck-shop police have been in action. Tuck shops are no longer the sea of fizzy drinks and crisps they once were.”

However the study also shows some teenagers are missing meals to reduce weight. In 2010 almost a third of Year 10 girls (14- and 15-year-olds) had no breakfast. The day before, 25% of this group also missed lunch.

A general increasing trend in numbers of students skipping lunch has been shown. The study also showed that most of the pupils missing meals were older girls, who were reported to saying they were doing so in an attempt to lose weight. Between 1991 and 2010 the number of girls on a diet went up by 60%.

Dr Regis said: “As a secondary analysis, we also recorded the pupils’ weight and height and we did not find that this number of pupils were overweight. There is some genuine cause for concern here. Do 60% of Year 10 females need to lose weight? Probably not. The good news is that teenagers are eating better. The bad news is that some are skipping meals, which is not healthy. There has been a tendency for the government and schools to promote the healthy eating message loudly, by megaphone. You can’t do the same about skipping meals being a bad idea. A bit of listening to what teenagers are really thinking wouldn’t go amiss.”

Further studies need to be carried out to show the reason why teenagers diet. Some say celebrities are to blame for our perception of what is a normal body image. This may be celebrities on extreme diets, or severely edited photos on billboards and magazine covers. Ironically, eating fewer calories than our body requires, pushes it into “starvation mode”. In this mode the body will try to convert as much food as possible into fat. This is because the body’s natural mechanisms strive for survival, and as it is not receiving enough energy, it will try to save as much as it can for later use. It is far better to calculate your Base Metabolic Rate (BMR), consume at least this amount in a day, and ensure you burn off more through activity. This method, combined with eating meals regularly, means that you will always be in a calorie deficit, and that fresh energy is in constant supply to the body.

For more advice on how you can benefit from a healthier lifestyle, book in to see Principal Osteopath Mr Trishul Vadi, and start using your body the way it was supposed to be.

Related topics:
Body Mass Index (BMI) – ‘misses obesity risks’

It is important to note that the trials are still only at the early stages and carried out in just a handful of patients. Similar techniques with cells extracted from bone marrow (prime source of stem cells), has been shown to have a much longer pedigree.
The report by Cochrane concluded that bone marrow therapy “may lead to a moderate long-term improvement” in heart function which “might be clinically very important”.

Proof is still needed of “any significant effect on mortality” when compared with standard treatment. However, this could be due to the small size and short time of the studies. Lead author Dr Enca Martin-Rendon, from NHS Blood and Transplant at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, said: “This new treatment may lead to moderate improvement in heart function over standard treatments. Stem cell therapy may also reduce the number of patients who later die or suffer from heart failure, but currently there is a lack of statistically significant evidence based on the small number of patients treated so far.”

Prof Anthony Mathur, from Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, is leading the largest ever trial of stem cells in heart attack patients, expected to start this year. Three thousand participants will be injected with stem cells five days after a heart attack. Their response will be then monitored for the next two years.

Prof Peter Weissberg, medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “This review reflects the consensus of opinion about these trials – cell therapy has a modestly beneficial effect. Despite that, no-one knows why, or even if, cell therapies will translate into better survival or sustained improvement in damaged hearts. It’s much too early to judge the likely long-term benefits.”

Related topics:
Cure to broken hearts?

Cryotherapy, the technique of submerging muscles in cold water, reduces swelling, stiffness and soreness resulting from a hard workout on the muscles.
It was first introduced for elite level sports people, however it is rapidly becoming more popular amongst the general public and regular gym goers.

The participants who took part in the research carried out by the Cochrane team were submerged in cold water post-exercise, e.g. running, cycling or weight lifting. Participants in most of the studies stayed in the water (10-15C) for 5 -24 minutes.

The study was lead by Dr Chris Bleakley, of the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, who said: “We found some evidence that immersing yourself in cold water after exercise can reduce muscle soreness, but only compared to resting or doing nothing. It is important to consider that cold water immersion induces a degree of shock on the body. We need to be sure that people aren’t doing anything harmful, especially if they are exposing themselves to very cold water for long periods.”

Leonie Dawson, professional adviser to the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, said: “This isn’t advisable for everyone. If someone had an underlying heart condition then the shock could be damaging. And for anybody with Raynaud’s – a problem of the circulation – it would have a devastating effect on them.”

Generally, applying something cold to the skin to decrease pain and swelling was safe. It makes up part of the PRICE guidelines – Protect, Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation – for managing soft tissue injury. But it is worth remembering that some of those gel ice packs you can get go down to temperatures of minus 20 and if you go to sleep with them on you can get a rather nasty ice burn.

Mr Trishul Vadi, Principal Osteopath at The Osteocare Clinic said: “As a general rule of thumb, ice should be used in the first 24 hours for 5 minutes every 15-30 minutes. Heat can be introduced between the ice after the initial 24 hours period. However, advice must be tailored to each patient to get the best and safest results.”

A heart attack occurs as a result of the organ being deprived of oxygen, e.g. a clot blocking blood to the heart. As the heart mends, the dead muscle tissue is replaced with scar tissue, but because this does not contract like heart muscle the efficiency to pump blood around the body is decreased. The larger the scar tissue the greater the deficiency of the heart. Stem cells, which can transform into any other type of specialised cell, figure prominently plans to “regenerating” the heart to replace the scar tissue with functioning muscle.

The trial consisted of twenty five patients. Scar tissue accounted for an average of 24% of their left ventricle, a major chamber of the heart, before the trial. This figure decreased to 16% after just six months and 12% after a year. Healthy heart muscle appeared to replace the scarring. The study concluded the cells, “have an unprecedented ability to reduce scar and simultaneously stimulate the regrowth of healthy [heart] tissue”.

Researcher Dr Eduardo Marban said: “While the primary goal of our study was to verify safety, we also looked for evidence that the treatment might dissolve scar and regrow lost heart muscle.This has never been accomplished before, despite a decade of cell therapy trials for patients with heart attacks. Now we have done it. The effects are substantial, and surprisingly larger in humans than they were in animal tests.”
However, a significant increase of the heart’s ability to pump was not found. Prof Anthony Mathur said: “The findings would be very interesting, but obviously they need further clarification and evidence.”

Prof Jeremy Pearson, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “It’s the first time these scientists’ potentially exciting work has been carried out in humans, and the results are very encouraging. These cells have been proven to form heart muscle in a petri dish but now they seem to be doing the same thing when injected back into the heart as part of an apparently safe procedure. It’s early days, and this research will certainly need following up, but it could be great news for heart attack patients who face the debilitating symptoms of heart failure.”

The patients were separated into three groups: low calorie intake (600 to 1,526 calories a day), middle (1,526 to 2,142.5) and high (2,142.5 to 6,000) and the incidence of mild cognitive impairment was evaluated. The results (presented at the American Academy of Neurology) showed no change in the low and middle groups, however, the high intake group had over twice the incidence of MCI. Researcher Dr Yonas Geda said: “We observed a dose-response pattern which simply means; the higher the amount of calories consumed each day, the higher the risk of MCI.”

However, the study cannot conclude a high calorie diet causes MCI, as those who are cognitively impaired may consquently eat more food or there could be other factors involved which increases the risk of both. Dr Geda did suggest there was potential for therapy: “Cutting calories and eating foods that make up a healthy diet may be a simpler way to prevent memory loss as we age.”

Dr Marie Janson, from Alzheimer’s Research UK, said the findings were interesting, and fitted in with “the bigger picture of a healthy lifestyle preventing Alzheimer’s in later life”. She said it was “difficult” to work out what a mechanism linking calories and cognitive impairment would be.
But she added: “We know that age is one of the greatest risk factors for dementia, but adopting a healthy lifestyle including a balanced diet and regular exercise, is beneficial in protecting against dementia along with a number of other chronic diseases.”

Calories are a measure of energy, so the number of calories tells you how much energy is in the food. Although most people talk about calories, the actual measure is kilocalories, shortened to kcals
• Men = 2,605 kcal
• Women = 2,079 kcal

Related topics:
Link between maternal diet & diabetes
BMI (Body Mass Index) – ‘misses obesity risk’
Reduce cancer by eating less red meat

In 2011 researchers identified the protein SAMHD1 as being an important part of this resistance. Now scientists figured out how it works.
The SAMHD1 breaks down the building blocks of DNA. So if a cell needs to clone itself it will have a pool of these building blocks – deoxynucleoside triphosphates or dNTPs – which make the new copies of the DNA. However, these are also utilised by viruses. The study, carried out by an international team of researchers, showed that protein SAMHD1 reduced levels of dNTPs less than that required to build viral DNA and prevent infection. When protein SAMHD1 was removed, those cells had higher levels of dNTPs and were infected by HIV. The report said: “By depleting the pool of available dNTPs, SAMHD1 effectively starves the virus of a building block that is central to its replication strategy.”

Professor Baek Kim, one of the researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center, said: “It makes sense that a mechanism like this is active in macrophages. Macrophages literally eat up dangerous organisms, and you don’t want those organisms to have available the cellular machinery needed to replicate and macrophages themselves don’t need it, because they don’t replicate. So macrophages have SAMHD1 to get rid of the raw material those organisms need to copy themselves. It’s a great host defence.”

Dr Jonathan Stoye, virologist at the Medical Research Council National Institute of Medical Research, was part of the team which uncovered the chemical structure of SAMHD1 last year and predicted that it would attack the dNTPs. “We hypothesised that it works in this fashion and the paper tells us we were right. It is depleting cells of these dNTPs, in cells which are not proliferating (dividing).”

However, some cells such as CD4 cells do need to divide to boost numbers as part of the immune defence. CD4 cells are the prime target for HIV infection. “Cells which are proliferating would be in trouble if we took dNTPs away,” Dr Stoye said. He added: “How we can use the anti-retroviral action of this protein is not clear to me.”

Recent times have been hard financially for many of us, and I do my best to provide any help I can. Which is why I have not increased our prices for the last three years. Therefore you can feel safe in the knowledge that you don’t have to suffer with any pain or discomfort unnecessarily, and know that you can count on The Osteocare Clinic to be your helping hand.

Season’s Greetings to you all and best wishes for a happy and healthy 2012…

With the New Year almost upon us, and for some of you those resolutions, it would be a good time to consider getting yourself off to a good start by booking an appointment for a reassessment or to get some of those niggles resolved.

Sooner rather than later!
In the years I have been involved in osteopathic practice it has become all too apparent that many of us have what might be considered at the time as a minor injury and have the expectation that it will clear up soon on its own.

As time passes a natural recovery is not forthcoming. Ultimately, the sufferer seeks help. Make no mistake I can understand the mindset but long standing conditions take longer to resolve, the chance of a 100% recovery is reduced and costs more.

I do recommend that if you are in doubt about any stubborn or new symptoms to either book yourself in to have it checked over or to give me a call to discuss.

2011 has been a busy year for me, however I would not have managed all this without you and your loyal recommendations, please keep them coming I truly appreciate it!

Remember, as a personal thank you from me, you get 50% off your next appointment when you recommend someone new to us.

Holiday opening times
Please be aware The Osteocare Clinic is closed from 25th December 2011 till 2nd January 2012 (inclusive). However if you need to contact me in an emergency during this time, please call 020-8777-4343.

Keep Warm & Stay Safe this Christmas…
Merry Christmas to you and your family!

The researchers observed the athletes a fortnight before their races, immediately after their races and then approximately a week later. The athletes’ hearts had changed shape immediately after the race. Increased levels of a chemical called BNP (B-type natriuretic peptide), produced by the heart during excessive stretching. Majority of the athletes’ hearts had returned to their normal pre-race condition after a week. However, there were signs of scarring of the heart tissue and right ventricular function remained impaired compared with the pre-race readings in the five athletes who had been training for longer than the rest of the group.

Nevertheless, according to the report in the European Heart Journal, these results does not necessarily mean endurance exercises are a bad thing.
The researchers said that a balanced training and recovery schedule should result in better heart muscle function.

This was also supported by Professor Sanjay Sharma, the medical director of the London Marathon. “My personal feeling is that extreme endurance exercise probably does cause damage to the heart in some athletes. I don’t believe that the human body is designed to exercise for as long as 11 hours a day, so damage to the heart is not implausible.” But he said it was too early to say that taking part in endurance sports causes long-term damage.

Doireann Maddock of the British Heart Foundation said, “It is important to remember that the health benefits of physical activity are well established. The highly trained athletes involved in this study were competing in long distance events and trained for more than 10 hours a week. Further long-term research will be necessary in order to determine if extreme endurance exercise can cause damage to the right ventricle of the heart in some athletes. Any endurance athletes who are concerned should discuss the matter with their GP.”

However, not much was known about how normal ageing discs became degenerative.ageing discs into degenerative discs. Scientists from Barcelona’s Institute for Bioengineering studied the nutritional and mechanical effects of stress on the lumbar spine (lower back) discs. By using the models, they were able to observe what happened when they changed disc height, cell density and made degenerative changes to the disc. It is impossible to carry out this quality of research in a living person.

The results of the study show loads on the disc influenced the solute concentration – the amount of glucose and lactate present in the disc. The cells need glucose but do not want too much lactate, an acid which hinders the nutrition process and can kick-start the degenerative process.

Dr Jerome Noailly, study author and expert in the biomechanics and mechanobiology group at the Institute, said the study showed that nutrients could be the key factor. “If we know that lack of nutrition is involved in accelerating the degenerative process and the properties of a degenerative disc hinder nutrition, then this will increase cell death and the disc tissue will start to degenerate more and more. “In order to bring back the function of the degenerated disc, we must address the nutrition problem. This means restoring the water content of the disc and the volume of the disc. A degenerated disc is like a collapsed sponge which needs to be restored to its normal size.” The research team says the findings could open up new areas of research in the field of disc regenerative medicine.

Dr Brian Hammond, chair of the charity BackCare, said: “We are what we eat and the spine is no exception. A balanced diet, adequate fluid intake and regular exercise are essential for a healthy back and neck. There is little doubt that poor diet, being immobile for long periods and bad habits like smoking contribute to spinal degeneration and the high incidence of back and neck pain in the UK.”