IMPROVING DIET FOR FERTILITY: COMPLEX CARBOHYDRATES

April 23rd, 2009

Carbohydrates include sugars and starches. They are an important source of energy and are all eventually broken down in your body into the simple sugar, glucose. There are two types of carbohydrate – complex and simple. Complex carbohydrates include grains (such as wheat, rye, oats, rice, barley and maize), beans and pulses (such as lentils, chickpeas and kidney beans), and vegetables. Simple carbohydrates include white and brown sugar, honey, fruit and fruit juice.

To optimize your health, you should eat plenty of unrefined complex carbohydrates. This means choosing brown whole meal bread, brown rice and brown pasta, instead of the refined white versions which have been stripped of essential vitamins, minerals, trace elements and valuable fibre content. (In order to digest these refined foods your body has to use its own vitamins and minerals, thus depleting your stores.)

Simple carbohydrates, in the form of fruit and dried fruit, certainly have a place in a healthy, balanced diet. But it’s important, for your health and fertility, to maintain a steady blood sugar level. For this reason, you should avoid sugar, honey and undiluted fruit juice, which can all produce a sudden rise in blood sugar, followed by a sudden fall.

Soya

Soya is being studied extensively around the world for its effectiveness in lowering cholesterol and preventing cardiovascular disease. It also appears to have an important role to play in balancing male and female sex hormones. Scientists believe that hormonal imbalance and over-exposure to chemicals that have oestrogen-like qualities may be one reason for the rapid increase in breast and prostate cancers over the last couple of decades. Crucially, this hormonal dysfunction and overload are also implicated in the menstrual and reproductive problems that affect fertility.

Soya is classed as a phyto-oestrogen, which means that it contains substances that act like hormones. These phyto-oestrogens fit into oestrogen receptors in the breast and block them, effectively shielding the body from exposure to oestrogen which is believed to be one of the major causes of breast cancer. Studies of Japanese women, who traditionally eat a great deal of soya, suggest that it may protect them from this disease.

Oestrogen is not only implicated in breast cancer but is also believed to play a part in causing other problems like endometriosis, fibroids, and heavy and/or long periods – all of which can affect female fertility.

Some women have problems conceiving because the second half of their menstrual cycle, just after ovulation, is shorter than it should be. This ‘luteal phase defect’, as it is known, means that there is not enough progesterone at the right time to maintain a pregnancy. Scientists have found that if they add soya to a woman’s diet it can lengthen the cycle by 2.5 days.

For all these reasons, it’s well worth adding soya to your diet – perhaps in the form of soya milk and tofu (soya bean curd, often used in Oriental stir-fried dishes). However, you need to ensure that the soya used to manufacture these products is not genetically modified, so buy organic.

So, for optimum health, you should eat plenty of:

• Essential fats (nuts, seeds and oily fish)

• High-fibre foods (fruit, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds)

• Complex carbohydrates (whole grains, beans, pulses and vegetables)

• Non-GM organic soya

*27/73/5*

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ACCIDENTS AT WORK: FALLING DOWN ON THE JOB

April 23rd, 2009

Every day, 17 people go to their death after going to work. Each year, more than 6,000 people are killed on the job-92 percent of whom are men. And you thought your home life was stressful?

As you might expect, those at greatest risk for dying on the job are men who work in the great outdoors, where the whims of Mother Nature often become a factor, says Guy A. Toscano, economist in the Office of Safety, Health, and Working Conditions at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C. Fishermen and loggers have it the worst by far. While the national average for deaths on the job is 5 out of every 100,000 workers, these out-doormen die at rates 20 to 30 times higher- losing more than 100 workers and, in some years, even rates as high as 150, out of every 100,000 on the job. “Truck drivers, farmers, and construction laborers have occupations that have high fatality rates as well as high numbers of job-related fatal injuries as well,” says Toscano.

But as bad as those figures sound, things are actually better than they used to be. Back in 1912, when we knew (and some would say cared) less about job safety, between 18,000 and 21,000 workers a year lost their lives while earning their daily bread. By 1995, with a work force more than triple in size producing 13 times as many goods and services, occupational deaths had decreased by more than two-thirds. “We have become more aware of safety issues in society at large,” explains Michael Buchet, manager of the construction division and the labor division at the National Safety Council in Itasca, Illinois. “In industry, we’ve been encouraging safer workplace practices and are pushing for training, training, and more training.”

That said, after decades of progress, it seems harder to make gains in workplace safety these days, Toscano says. “We’ve clearly hit a plateau in that the number of fatal occupational injuries has held steady at the 6,000 to 6,500 mark for the past five years,” he says. “That doesn’t mean that we can’t make any more progress. But it does mean that safety professionals have to be willing to work harder to recognize risk and promote safety measures.”

*108/36/5*

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