Guava - The Fruit for Good Health

Guavas (Myrtaceae) are round fruits with a thin bumpy outer skin and creamy inner pulp that is packed with seeds.

Health Benefits of Guavas:

• Increased Protection from Bacterial and Viral Infections
• Increased Immune Function
• Reducing Cancer Risk
• Protection Against Heart Disease
• Slowing Aging
• DNA Repair and Protection
• Alleviation of Cardiovascular Disease
• Alleviation of Hypertension (High Blood Pressure)
• Osteoporosis Protection
• Stroke Prevention
• Reduced Risk of Type II Diabetes
• Reduced Frequency of Migraine Headaches
• Alleviation of Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS)
• Antioxidant Protection
• Prevention of Epileptic Seizures
• Prevention of Alopecia (Spot Baldness)

Natural vitmains, minerals, and nutrients found in Guavas: Vitamin A | Vitamin B9 (Folate, Folic Acid) | Vitamin C | Dietary Fiber | Magnesium | Manganese | Potassium | Copper |

Creative Ice Cubes ........

Effects of Global Warming

Signs Are Everywhere

The planet is warming, from North Pole to South Pole, and everywhere in between. Globally, the mercury is already up more than 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius), and even more in sensitive polar regions. And the effects of rising temperatures aren’t waiting for some far-flung future. They’re happening right now. Signs are appearing all over, and some of them are surprising. The heat is not only melting glaciers and sea ice, it’s also shifting precipitation patterns and setting animals on the move.
Some impacts from increasing temperatures are already happening.

• Ice is melting worldwide, especially at the Earth’s poles. This includes mountain glaciers, ice sheets covering West Antarctica and Greenland, and Arctic sea ice.
• Researcher Bill Fraser has tracked the decline of the Adélie penguins on Antarctica, where their numbers have fallen from 32,000 breeding pairs to 11,000 in 30 years.
• Sea level rise became faster over the last century.
• Some butterflies, foxes, and alpine plants have moved farther north or to higher, cooler areas.
• Precipitation (rain and snowfall) has increased across the globe, on average.
• Spruce bark beetles have boomed in Alaska thanks to 20 years of warm summers. The insects have chewed up 4 million acres of spruce trees.

Other effects could happen later this century, if warming continues.

• Sea levels are expected to rise between 7 and 23 inches (18 and 59 centimeters) by the end of the century, and continued melting at the poles could add between 4 and 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters).
• Hurricanes and other storms are likely to become stronger.
• Species that depend on one another may become out of sync. For example, plants could bloom earlier than their pollinating insects become active.
• Floods and droughts will become more common. Rainfall in Ethiopia, where droughts are already common, could decline by 10 percent over the next 50 years.
• Less fresh water will be available. If the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru continues to melt at its current rate, it will be gone by 2100, leaving thousands of people who rely on it for drinking water and electricity without a source of either.
• Some diseases will spread, such as malaria carried by mosquitoes.
• Ecosystems will change—some species will move farther north or become more successful; others won’t be able to move and could become extinct. Wildlife research scientist Martyn Obbard has found that since the mid-1980s, with less ice on which to live and fish for food, polar bears have gotten considerably skinnier.  Polar bear biologist Ian Stirling has found a similar pattern in Hudson Bay.  He fears that if sea ice disappears, the polar bears will as well.



How Safe Are E-Cigarettes?

E-cigarettes may offer a relatively safe way to help smokers quit, but the health effects are still unknown.

• As New York considers becoming the first state to ban electronic cigarettes, debate surrounds the devices and their safety.
• Critics worry that e-cigarettes will attract kids and create a new generation of nicotine addicts.
• The devices, which are tobacco-free, may be a safer alternative to cigarettes, say advocates.

Electronic cigarettes are handheld nicotine-delivery devices that, despite a devoted following, are currently swirling in controversy.
New York is pushing to become the first state to ban the devices, which so far remain unregulated and mostly unstudied. With cutesy colors, fruity flavors, clever designs and other options, e-cigarettes may hold too much appeal for young people, critics warn, offering an easy gateway to nicotine addiction.
But those criticisms clash with equally strong arguments for the value of e-cigarettes. The devices, which are tobacco-free, may be a safer alternative to cigarettes, say advocates, who point to testimonials from thousands of smokers who say they have used e-cigarettes to help them quit.
As the U.S. Food and Drug Administration struggles to gain regulatory control, and as safety studies remain works in progress, the debate continues.
"There really are a lot of unknowns with respect to health," said Prue Talbot, a toxicologist at the University California, Riverside. "I don't know of any studies in the literature which are peer-reviewed. Almost all of the studies have been paid for by the e-cigarette companies.
"E-cigarettes are often sold as safe, which is probably not true," Talbot added. "They may not be as dangerous as real cigarettes, but on the other hand, they could be. We just don't know."
Electronic cigarettes typically use a rechargeable battery-operated heating element to vaporize the nicotine in a replaceable cartridge. Nicotine is usually dissolved in propylene glycol, a clear and colorless liquid that is commonly found in inhalers, cough medicines and other products.
Some e-cigarettes are made to look like real cigarettes, cigars or pipes. Others look like pens or USB memory devices. There is no tobacco involved, and no smoke either. Instead, users do what's called "vaping." As they inhale, they take in nicotine-filled vapor.
By isolating nicotine, e-cigarettes should carry far fewer chemical risks than regular cigarettes, said Michael Siegel, a tobacco researcher at Boston University. Tobacco contains about 5,000 known chemicals, he said, with as many as 100,000 more that haven't yet been identified. E-cigarettes eliminate many of those ingredients.
Siegel and a colleague reviewed 16 studies that analyzed the contents of electronic cigarettes. In a paper just published in the Journal of Public Health Policy, they reported that levels of certain harmful chemicals were on par with levels found in nicotine patches and hundreds of times lower than what's found in cigarettes.
The researchers also found evidence that vaping reduces cravings among smokers, not just for nicotine but also for the need to hold something in their hands and put something in their mouths -- making the devices more appealing to them than patches or gum.
As a cigarette-quitting strategy, Siegel compared e-cigarettes to heroin needle exchange programs. It's not that the devices are good for anyone, he said. They are just better than what they're meant to replace.
"The relevant question is not, 'Are these things safe?'" he said. "But are these things much safer than real cigarettes, and do they help people quit smoking? The answer to both of those questions we know is yes."
"What New York is doing is equivalent to outlawing lifeboats on a sinking ship because they haven't been FDA approved," he added. "It's a really crazy approach to public health."
For other experts, the list of unknowns is still too large for them to consider e-cigarettes worth recommending. Some users, Talbot said, have reported problems with their lungs and throats that have forced them to stop using the devices.
And even though industry-funded studies have deemed the devices to be safe, an FDA report found levels of carcinogens and toxic contaminants that they determined to be were worthy of concern. Without regulation, Talobt added, cartridges may contain undisclosed chemicals that could end up being more toxic than tobacco smoke.
Quality control is also lacking. In a recent study, Talbot evaluated six brands of e-cigarettes acquired over the Internet. None of the devices were labeled clearly with nicotine levels, expiration dates or other information, she reported in December in the journal Tobacco Control.
Most cartridges leaked onto her hands, the study found, and all were defective in some way. Talbot also found unsubstantiated health claims on many of the company websites and print materials. One says they put vitamins in their e-cigarettes.
Other experts worry about the appeal of e-cigarettes to children. The devices are easy to buy online or in mall kiosks. They come in flavors ranging from chocolate to bubble gum. You can buy them in pink, gold or blue.
"Once a youth has decided to try an e-cigarette, there is nothing that protects him from getting addicted to nicotine by puffing this product," wrote Jonathan Winickoff, a pediatrician at the MassGeneral Hospital for Children, in a letter to the FDA. "Nicotine itself is not safe for children. Nicotine addiction is one of the hardest addictions to break."
New York's move is a reaction to what can't yet happen on the national level. According to a series of recent court decisions, e-cigarettes cannot qualify as drug delivery products, said Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the FDA. As a result, the agency cannot ban them or require more arduous testing.
But even though they are now considered tobacco products, they are not mentioned in the Tobacco Control Act, either. For now, then, they remain unapproved and unregulated.
And anyone is free to buy them.

Turn Down the Heat, Lose Weight?

A small adjustment to your thermostat may do more than just save the planet; it could also help trim your waistline.

THE GIST

• Turning down the thermostat or increasing exposure to cold temperatures could help weight loss.
• Cooler external temperatures force our bodies to expend more energy to maintain body temperatures.
• Even though this effect hasn't yet been proven, it's a strategy with no downside that benefits the environment.

If saving energy isn't enough to convince you to turn down the heat a notch, perhaps this will: Colder temperatures may help you lose weight.
In an article published in Obesity Reviews, Fiona Johnson of University College London and colleagues gather evidence in support of the notion that upwardly creeping indoor temperatures and reduced cold exposure may be a contributor to rising obesity.
Although no studies yet address the question directly, several threads of evidence "seem to suggest that increases in indoor temperatures could be having a significant effect on body weight," Johnson said.

This, combined with adults and children spending less time outdoors in cold temperatures commuting or playing, means people are probably not exposed to as much cold as they used to be, the researchers note.

This reduction could affect how many calories we burn in two ways.
First, it means we use less energy just maintaining our body temperature.
"As the temperature goes down below 27 degrees Celsius (80.6 Fahrenheit), energy expenditure increases," Johnson told Discovery News. "That's simply the expenditure of the body staying warm."
The second effect is that without cold exposure, our inner furnace seems to reduce its ability to stoke our internal fires.
This furnace comes in the form of our stores of brown fat, a type of fat distinct from white fat, which is just stockpiled calories. Brown fat burns energy to create heat, and studies have shown that obese people have less brown fat than thin people, Johnson said.
Babies are born with a lot of brown fat, and those amounts decrease over time. "For a long time it was thought that adults didn't have enough to create a significant effect," she said. Now researchers have found otherwise.
Brown fat becomes activated in response to mild cold and begins to create heat, burning calories. But, "it's use it or lose it," Johnson said. Reduced exposure to cold reduces stores and decreases their effectiveness at burning energy.
Johnson notes that gains from turning down the heat would be tempered by people's natural responses to feeling chilly: seeking more clothes and more food. But evidence suggests layering up and eating more don't completely negate the extra energy expenditures from cold exposure, she said.
All of this points to a connection between shrinking cold exposure and expanding waistlines. However, Johnson notes that direct evidence still is lacking, as is information on how cold one would have to be or for how long to have what effects.

Posted earlier on Discovery News

Brief Written Exercise Eases Test Anxiety

Researchers say they've developed a way to help people with extreme test-taking anxiety to relax before their exams.  The technique involves having test-takers write down their fears, and that simple exercise is credited with a dramatic improvement in test scores. 

Many people are nervous before they take a test.  But some people are so consumed by anxiety that they actually sabotage themselves, performing poorly on the exam even when they know the material they are being tested on.

Sian Beilock is a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago in Illinois who has studied why students become so nervous that they are unable to perform in a test-taking situation.

Beilock and colleague Gerardo Ramirez developed an exercise in which students identified as high anxiety test-takers spend ten minutes, just before an exam, writing down all of their fears and concerns.

The researchers tested the intervention first in a group of college students and then in younger students.  They found that students who spent a few minutes describing their fears in writing seemed able to put those anxieties behind them before beginning their exam.

"What we think happens is when students put it down on paper, they think about the worst that could happen and they reappraise the situation,” Beilock explains. “They might realize it's not as bad as they might think it was before and, in essence, it prevents these thoughts from popping up -- from ruminating -- when they're actually taking a test."

In a series of laboratory experiments, a group of 20 anxious college students was given a short math test and told to do their best.  Afterwards, the students were either asked to sit quietly before taking the test again or to write about their thoughts and fears regarding the upcoming retest.

Researchers created a stressful testing environment, telling the students they would receive money if they did well on the second test.  The researchers also told the students their performance on the retest would affect the grade of other students.

Beilock says the group of students who sat quietly before retaking the second math test scored worse, their accuracy dropping by 12 percent on the second test. 

But students who wrote about their fears immediately before the re-test showed an average five percent improvement in accuracy on the second math test.

Researchers next took their writing intervention to younger students in a biology class, who were instructed before final exams to either write about their feelings on the test or to think about some other topic.

Researchers found that students who hadn't written about their fears had higher test anxiety and a worse final exam score.

Highly-anxious students who took the intervention received an average grade of B+, compared with the highly anxious students who didn't write; they received an average grade of B-.

"What we showed is that for students who are highly test-anxious, who'd done our writing intervention, all of a sudden there was no relationship between test anxiety and performance,” Beilock said. “Those students most prone to worry were performing just as well as their classmates who don't normally get nervous in these testing situations."

Beilock says that even if a professor doesn't allow students to write about their worst fears immediately before an exam or presentation, students can try it themselves at home or in the library and still improve their performance.

An article on writing to relieve test-taking anxiety is published in the journal Science. VOANEWS

Wonderful Baby Rooms...Creative Design

Study Finds Stroke Spikes Among HIV-Positive People

New medicines may be to blame, researchers say.

A new study of stroke in the United States has found that the rate of brain-damaging blood clots has increased dramatically among people infected with HIV. The increase in strokes coincides with the use of newer, more effective AIDS medicines.

Bruce Ovbiagele of the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues analyzed a database of medical records for the decade starting in 1997.

During that period, hospitalizations for stroke in the U.S. declined by seven percent. "But when you look in the HIV population," Ovbiagele said, "they actually increased almost about 60 percent across the decade. So stroke rates were going up among HIV-infected individuals while they were going down in the general population."

The scientist says the data used in this study is not sufficient to explain definitively why strokes increased in people with HIV. But he believes it's not a coincidence that the surge in strokes came just as HIV patients began using more powerful drugs known as highly active antiretroviral therapies, or HAART medications.
"Now we know that HAART medications have metabolic complication, which include abnormal changes in cholesterol, unfavorable changes in cholesterol. We know that they can also cause increased deposition of fat within the body. And both these things are risk factors for stroke."

Ovbiagele says his study suggests that HIV-positive individuals and their doctors have to be vigilant and proactive to reduce the risk of stroke.

"Screening for high blood pressure should be regular and frequent and treated promptly," he said in a telephone interview. "Screening for high cholesterol should be regular, frequent, and treated promptly. So these are the kinds of things that clinicians and patients should be vigilant about looking for to try and avert a stroke from occurring."

This data was limited to U.S. patients, so he says it's not possible to say if the same pattern of strokes among people with HIV is present in other countries.

Wonderful Creative Soaps

The Unknown Facts

1. Chewing on gum while cutting onions can help a person from stop producing tears. Try it next time you chop onions. 

 2. Until babies are six months old, they can breathe and swallow at the same time. Indeed convenient!

3. Offered a new pen to write with, 97% of all people will write their own name.

4. Male mosquitoes are vegetarians. Only females bite.

5. The average person's field of vision encompasses a 200-degree wide angle.

 8. Babies' eyes do not produce tears until the baby is approximately six to eight weeks old.

 9. It snowed in the Sahara Desert in February of 1979.

 10. Plants watered with warm water grow larger and more quickly than plants watered with .

  11. Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.

 12. Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave.
 
 13. Those stars and colours you see when you rub your eyes are called phosphenes.

 14. Our eyes  (Pupils)  are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

 15. Everyone's tongue print is different, like fingerprints.

 16. Contrary to popular belief, a swallowed doesn't stay in the gut. It will pass through the system and be excreted.

 17. At 40 Centigrade a person loses about 14.4 calories per hour by breathing.

 18. There is a hotel in Sweden built entirely out of ice; it is rebuilt every year.

 19. Cats, camels and giraffes are the only animals in the world that walk right foot, right foot, left foot, left foot, rather than right foot, left foot . 

 20. Onions help reduce cholesterol if eaten after a fatty meal.

 21. The sound you hear when you crack your knuckles is actually the sound of bursting

nitrogen gas bubbles chewing gum cold water.