Chew on this: Gum may be good for body, mind

Chew on this: Gum may be good for body, mind

Finally! Chewing gum does help curb Your appetite!

(CNN) -- If you're looking to curb your appetite and improve your memory, you're probably exercising, eating healthier foods and trying to get some sleep.
In one study, students who chewed gum had better final grades compared with the non-chompers.

In one study, students who chewed gum had better final grades compared with the non-chompers.

Those things are all good, but maybe you should try chomping on a stick of sugar-free gum.

At least that's what research funded by the Wrigley Science Institute and being presented at the Experimental Biology 2009 meeting this week may have you think. The data are part of a growing body of research that is giving Americans more reasons to pop some gum in their mouths and chew away.

One line of research suggests that gum should no longer be treated as contraband in schools. This newest study indicates that chewing gum can lead to better academic performance.

Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine took 108 eighth-grade math students from a Houston, Texas, charter school and divided them into two groups, following them for 14 weeks. One group chewed gum while doing homework and during test-taking situations. The other group did not chew gum at all.

The results were surprising. The gum-chewing students had a 3 percent increase in their standardized math test scores compared with those who did not chew gum. Also, the students who chewed gum had better final grades compared with the non-chompers.
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"Chewing gum is an easy tool students can use for a potential academic edge," says Craig Johnston, Ph.D., the lead researcher and an instructor in nutrition at the Department of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine.

He also reports that teachers anecdotally found that students who chewed gum required fewer breaks, paid better attention and stayed quiet longer than those who did not.

Another study adds to a growing body of evidence centering on chewing gum satiety and cravings. Investigators at Louisiana State University took 115 people who regularly chewed gum and fed them lunch. They measured their cravings before and after lunch. They found that those subjects, who chewed gum three times hourly after lunch, ate fewer high-calorie snacks. The chewers also reported decreased feelings of hunger and cravings for sweet foods.

"We decreased overall snack intake by 40 to 60 calories. Having something in the mouth likely calms the appetite," explains Paula Geiselman, Ph.D, lead researcher and physiological psychologist.

So, is chewing gum the next in fad diet trends? Nutritionists and doctors are prescribing a healthy dose of caution.

"The only reason to do these studies is to sell more gum," warns Marion Nestle, Ph.D., a nutritionist at New York University and author of "What to Eat."

But Nestle does admit that it may have some minor benefit, "Gum has no calories. If it helps people eat less, it could be useful."

As for boosting academic performance, Nestle is familiar with results showing that feeding breakfast to hungry kids results in better schoolwork, but she's quick to burst the bubble on the LSU study.

Nestle remains cautious about the funds being pumped into research by the gum industry. "Sponsored studies almost invariably produce results favorable to the economic interests of the sponsor. [They] are always designed in ways that fail to control for alternative explanations for the results."

Aside from the industry-funded findings, there is solid evidence that gum chewing brings big benefits in dental health and acid reflux disease.

The American Dental Association says on its Web site that "chewing sugarless gum for 20 minutes following meals can help prevent tooth decay" and recommends looking for gum with its ADA-approved seal. The saliva produced in the mouth by the physical act of chewing can wash away acids and bacteria, thereby protecting teeth.

Besides beating tooth decay, independent research finds that gum can aid in reducing the symptoms of acid reflux disease. The saliva flow can lead to an antacid effect in the stomach.

There is also early evidence that gum chewing increases blood flow to the brain and the head by up to 25 percent, but no one can explain what impact that blood flow may have on cognition.

As for dieting, one study from the Mayo Clinic finds that the body burns 11 calories an hour through working the jaw. "Overall gum chewing is more beneficial than it is harmful," says Dr. Michael Benninger, chairman of the Head and Neck Institute at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

"This isn't like smoking. The downsides are minimal," Benninger adds. "There are people who probably shouldn't chew gum such as people with Temporomandibular Joint and Muscle Disorders, or TMJ, people with chronic tension headaches or if you grind your teeth at night."

As manufacturers come up with new flavors, packages and brands, gum's popularity continues to grow. Sales topped $1.2 billion last year alone, and sales of sugar-free gum increased by more than 11 percent in 2008, according to marketing research provider Information Resources Inc. It's definitely big business for what may be the world's oldest confection.

Ancient cultures around the world found their own forms of gum. The Greeks called it mastiche. Mayans chewed on the sap of the sapodilla tree and called it chicle. Native Americans introduced the sap of the spruce tree to early European settlers in New England.

Interestingly, tree sap is long gone from the current treat. Today's gum consists of synthetic ingredients and is made sweet. It can be made sugar-free by adding sorbitol, a substance that can have laxative effects at high doses.
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As for the notion that gum can stay in your stomach for years if swallowed, experts said that's a myth. Gum is passed through the body and not digested.

While the Wrigley Science Institute declines to say just how much money it's spending on research, it's open about its objective. "We're providing more reasons why consumers should chew," said Gil Leveille, Ph.D., executive director of the Wrigley Science Institute.

But medical experts agree that gum chewing may be a tool, as people struggle to chip away at the obesity problem.

According to the American Dietetic Association, "If you chew two sticks of gum at 20 calories instead of eating one to two chocolate chip cookies at 140 calories, you can save 120 calories."

References: Mayo Clinic, and Cnn.com News

Forwarded By, Natalie Pyles

P.S. Call for your FREE Wellness Coaching Consultation in person or by phone today 480-212-1947 or visit www.myfitnesselements.com and I'll send you my FREE Amazing Bubble gum Weight loss Report just Ask Now!

New Autism Horse Therapy Story

'Horse Boy,' family find respite from autism in Mongolia


(CNN) -- When 3-year-old Rowan Isaacson darted away from his father and dived into a herd of grazing horses, it easily could have been the end of the small autistic boy. He was babbling under the hooves of a boss mare.
Rupert Isaacson says he noticed immediate improvement in his son's language skills when he started riding.

Rupert Isaacson says he noticed immediate improvement in his son's language skills when he started riding.
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"I thought he was going to get trampled," recalled Rupert Isaacson, Rowan's father.

But the horse, Betsy, dipped her head and chewed with her mouth in submission. Isaacson, who had trained horses for a living, had never seen it happen so spontaneously. Rowan had seemingly made a connection.

The Austin, Texas, family had been struggling with Rowan.

His wild tantrums were nearly driving Isaacson and his wife, Kristin Neff, to divorce. All the while, little Rowan was becoming unreachable.

"He would just stare off into space," Isaacson said. "I was worried it was going to get progressively worse and that eventually, he might float away from us entirely. Luckily, right about that time is when he met Betsy."

Isaacson began riding Betsy, a neighbor's horse, with Rowan. He says he noticed immediate improvement in his son's language skills. Video Watch Rowan and Betsy »

"He would start to answer. He would start to talk. We would do song games up there on the saddle. I would take books up there in the saddle," Isaacson said.

Autism specialists say that horse riding can be effective in gaining access to autistic children.

Experts make a distinction between the kind of recreational therapeutic riding Isaacson was using with Rowan and hippotherapy, which is a medical treatment that uses horses and is supervised by a licensed speech-language pathologist.

"People perceive it's the interaction with the horse that's making the change. However, the movement of the horse is extremely powerful, and it's that movement that's having neurological impact on the autistic child," said Ruth Dismuke-Blakely, a speech-language pathologist and hippotherapy clinical specialist in Edgewood, New Mexico.
'House Call'
Watch more on Rowan's amazing journey this weekend on "House Call."
7:30 a.m. ET Saturday and Sunday
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According to preliminary analysis of an ongoing study by Dismuke-Blakely, hippotherapy has been shown to increase verbal communication skills in some autistic children in as little as 18 to 25 minutes of riding once a week for eight weeks.

"We see their arousal and affect change. They become more responsive to cues. If they are at a point where they are using verbal cues, you get more words," Dismuke-Blakely said. "It's almost like it opens them up. It gives us access."

She cautions that a horse's movements can be powerful. For some autistic children, riding too long can overstimulate their nervous system, leading to more erratic behavior.

On Betsy, Rowan was at ease. After about three weeks, Isaacson says, Rowan's improved behavior was translating into the home and outside world as well.

But not consistently.

In late 2004, Isaacson, a human rights activist, brought a delegation of African bushmen from Botswana to the United Nations. Among the men were traditional healers, who offered to work with Rowan.

Isaacson says he was skeptical, but he had experience with the bushmen and allowed the healers to lay their hands on his son.

"I was kind of flabbergasted at Rowan's response. For about four days while they were with him, he started to lose some of his symptoms. He started to point, which was a milestone he hadn't achieved," Isaacson said.

When the tribal healers left, Rowan regressed.

Isaacson says he couldn't help but wonder what would happen if he were to give Rowan a longer exposure to the two things that he seemed to have responded well to: horses and shamans.

"I know it sounds completely crazy," he said. "I just had a gut feeling."

Isaacson took his wife and son to Mongolia.
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"It's the oldest horse culture on the planet. Everyone still gets around on a horse there -- so a nomadic culture. The word 'shaman' comes from there," Isaacson said, explaining his decision. "I just thought, 'Well, what if we went there and rode across the steppe and visited traditional healers? You know, what might happen for Rowan? Might there be some positive outcomes?' "

Trekking across the Mongolian prairie on horseback, Isaacson says, Rowan's behavior was changed dramatically.

"Rowan was not cured of autism out there," Isaacson stressed. "The word 'cure' is not in my vocabulary for this. Rowan came back without three key dysfunctions that he had. He went out to Mongolia incontinent and still suffering from these neurological firestorms -- so tantruming all the time and cut off from his peers, unable to make friends -- and he came back with those three dysfunctions having gone."

Isaacson credits Rowan's improvement to horses and time in nature -- and to shamanic healing, which he says he simply can't explain rationally.

Isaacson has written a book, "The Horse Boy," about Rowan's autism.

Rowan, now 7, rides Betsy by himself. His parents never abandoned more orthodox treatments for his autism, and Rowan's applied behavioral analysis therapist has him studying math and English at the third-grade level -- a full year ahead of some of his peers.

"He's just becoming a very functional autistic person," Isaacson said.
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* MayoClinic.com: Autism

As far as the Isaacson family's journey took them, it is the same hard slog facing millions of families gripped by autism.

"A lot of the parents go to the ends of the Earth in their own living rooms every day," Isaacson said. "I mean, we had more stressful car rides to the grocery store than any of the stresses and challenges of the trip to Mongolia."
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You don't have to get on a horse -- or plane to Siberia -- for relief. For autism families, Isaacson encourages parents to simply follow their instincts and listen to what their child shows them.

"In our case, it was horses in Mongolia and these shamans," Isaacson said. "It could just as easily have been bicycles and, you know, steam trains. And if it had been, we'd have done a steam train journey. We'd have done whatever Rowan seemed to be showing us he wanted to do, because that was where he was intrinsically motivated."

P.S. Call Natalie Pyles for your FREE Fitness Evaluation, Wellness Coaching assessment, and Nutritional Consulting session valued at over $ 275.00 of value and expertise. Take advantage of all the information packed in this FREE offer and session and pick up 10 top Recipes for Autism 480-212-1947 or visit www.myfitnesselements.com or fax 623-399-4199

"Can Exercise and proper Eating help you Manage stress Twice as Fast"

I recently read a study performed that regular Healthful Exercise and Eating does help with managing stress
- they suggest it has something to do with those brain chemicals called endorphins

16 Habits of Effective Life Stress Managers

Alter one or more of the causes if possible
Find reasons to be thankful
Celebrate life everyday
Talk to someone about your worries
Seek support from your friends and or family
Do something you have been procrastinating about
Get organized and clean up clutter
Take a time management course
Be more flexible and go with the flow
Come up with ways to say no to excessive demands on your time
Make room in your life for more fun activities
Listen to music that makes you feel good at home or during the commute to and from work
Take a relaxing hot bath
Turn off your phone

These are great life management solutions and tools. Health and Fitness Experts, including personal trainers and dietitians, are well trained to provide advice and solutions to client's issues. Sadly enough, for many people even though they know what they should do, they don't do it. Instead of craeting that lack mindset let's get you into an intentional readiness mindset. Have a happy and healthy day!

Sincerely Yours In Health and Fitness,

By,Natalie pyles

Author, NASN Speaker, NASN CPT,NASN Licensed Sports Nutritionist,ACSM Licensed
Wellness Coach


Call Me For Your FREE Consultation Today! 1-800-681-9894 or 480-212-1947 or e-mail fitnesselementsassociates@yahoo.com

Are you happy?

'The Art of Applying Happiness'


Beware Happiness is contagious in social networks


(CNN) -- If you're feeling great today, you may end up inadvertently spreading the joy to someone you don't even know.
This network from 2000, colored for average mood, shows yellow as happy, blue as sad, and green as in-between.

This network from 2000, colored for average mood, shows yellow as happy, blue as sad, and green as in-between.

New research shows that in a social network, happiness spreads among people up to three degrees removed from one another. That means when you feel happy, a friend of a friend of a friend has a slightly higher likelihood of feeling happy too.

The lesson is that taking control of your own happiness can positively affect others, says James Fowler, co-author of the study and professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego.

"We get this chain reaction in happiness that I think increases the stakes in terms of us trying to shape our own moods to make sure we have a positive impact on people we know and love," he said. Video Watch more on how happiness spreads »

Sadness also spreads in a network, but not as quickly, the researchers found. Each happy friend increases your own chance of being happy by 9 percent, whereas each unhappy friend decreases it by 7 percent. This reflects the total effect of all social contacts.

When framing the question differently, the study found that you are 15 percent more likely to be happy if a direct connection is happy, 10 percent if the friend of a friend is happy, and 6 percent if it's a friend of a friend of a friend.

The study, published in the British Medical Journal, used data from the Framingham Heart Study to recreate a network of 4,739. Fowler and co-author Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School charted friends, spouses and siblings in the network, and used their self-reported happiness ratings from 1983 to 2003.
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Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of "Stumbling on Happiness," called the study "a stunning paper by two of the most respected scientists in the field" in a statement he e-mailed to CNN.

"We've known for some time that social relationships are the best predictor of human happiness, and this paper shows that the effect is much more powerful than anyone realized," Gilbert said. "It is sometimes said that you can't be happier than your least happy child. It is truly amazing to discover that when you replace the word 'child' with 'best friend's neighbor's uncle,' the sentence is still true."

If you are the hub of a large network of people -- that is, if you have a lot of connected friends or a wide social circle -- you are more likely to become happy, the study found.

But the reverse is not true.

"You might only have one friend or two friends or something like that, and if you become happy, you're not going to try to get more friends. You're probably going to stick with what worked in the first place," Fowler said.

The researchers are also looking at the phenomenon on Facebook, which has more than 120 million active users. This study, which has not yet been published, looked at who smiles in their profile pictures who doesn't, and whether their connections also smile or not, Fowler said.

"We find smiling profiles cluster in much the same way as happiness is clustering in the Framingham Heart Study," he said.
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* MayoClinic.com: Health Library

It's not just happiness that spreads in a social network. Fowler and Christakis have also looked at trends in cigarette smoking and obesity using the parts of the heart study network.

They found that when someone quits, a friend's likelihood of quitting smoking was 36 percent. Moreover, clusters of people who may not know one another gave up smoking around the same time, the authors showed in a New England Journal of Medicine article in May.

Social ties also affect obesity. A person's likelihood of becoming obese increased by 57 percent if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given time period, Fowler and Christakis showed in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2007.
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And, like happiness, both smoking behavior and obesity seem to spread within three degrees of separation in a social network, Fowler said. Beyond three, things get fuzzier.

"Eventually you get out far enough in the social network that you're competing with all these other cascades of happiness and unhappiness that are sort of duking it out," he said. "Happiness on average wins, but once you get far enough away from someone in a social network, it's not possible to detect their effect anymore."

Forwarded By, Natalie Pyles

Fitness & Nutritional Expert, Author, Speaker

Call Me For Your FREE Consultation Today! 1-800-681-9894 or 480-212-1947 or fax 623-399-4199 or e-mail fitnesselementsassociates@yahoo.com

'How Harp Music is Soothing Hospital Patients'

Mind-Body-Spirit News:

A harp musician provides live bedside music to soothe patients and support a healing atmosphere at Loyola University Hospital in Maywood, Illinois. The practice of musicians providing therapeutic music in hospitals, hospices and other clinical settings is gaining broader acceptance. In fact, it is becoming so prevalent that musicians can now earn certification as practitioners of music for healing.

The harpist, Linda Fisher, is a medical doctor and an assistant professor in internal medicine/pediatrics at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. She took up playing the harp 12 years ago to ease the stress of patient care. “I thought [playing to patients] was something I could do because I’m used to working with patients and I thought this would be another aspect of healing. It’s like Loyola’s motto, ‘We also treat the human spirit.’ This program does make a difference. Putting people in a better spirit or better state of mind is an important part of healing.”

References: Shirley Archer, JD MA

Forwarded By, Natalie Pyles

Fitness & Nutritional Expert, Author, Speaker

Call Me For Your FREE Consultation Today! 1-800-681-9894 or 480-212-1947 e-mail fitnesselementsassociates@yahoo.com