The number of bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract greatly outnumber the cells in your body; your gut has 100 trillion microorganisms while you have about 10 trillion cells in your body!

What this means is that the microflora in your gut is a powerful and compelling force in your body, one that may influence far more than how well your food gets digested. This living inner ecosystem is becoming a favorite topic among scientists and nutritionists alike, and you may be wise to listen to what the newest research is revealing.

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A patient says to his doctor, “Doc, when I twist my head hard to the right, I get a sharp pain in the neck.” To which the doctor replies, “Then don’t twist your head hard to the right!”

You’ve likely heard this joke, or a variation, before, but it bears repeating because it is SO true! When you learn to pay attention to your body’s signals, you will find it lets you know when you are making positive or negative choices for your health and well-being.

Ultimately, by listening to your body and leading a healthy lifestyle, you can avoid much of the “sick care” system that will try to solve your solution with medications and surgeries. Often, these sick-care “solutions” will lead to side effects that require even more treatments because they are not addressing the underlying causes of your problems.

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 Summer vacation — a little over two months of free time and fun for your kids — but that doesn’t mean they should lose everything they learned over the school year.

The long, lazy days of summer pose a risk for school-aged children and it’s even been coined as “summer brain drain.” Research has shown that if your child’s brain remains stagnant without challenge over the summer months, they could lose, on average, 2.6 months of grade level equivalency in math skills and nearly a whole reading level.

Other studies have shown that on the average students will score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation compared to the same tests they took at the beginning of the summer.

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Mother’s Day just around the corner, this is a great time to reflect for many on the importance and relationship we have had with our Mothers. Few lifelong relationships can compare to the complex range of emotions shared between mothers and daughters. And whether you’d describe your relationship as “best friends,” “mortal enemies” or somewhere in between, most daughters reach a point in their life when they stop and think, “I sound just like my mother.”

This may be music to your ears or, perhaps, it may make you cringe a little and remember how you swore you would never be that way. Yet, for many women, the imprint of their mother is an important, and inescapable, part of who they are.

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Wounds, whether due to injury or surgery, can exact a great toll on your quality of life if they do not heal quickly and completely. And, whether you realize it or not, there’s a lot more to wound healing than Band-Aids and antibiotic ointment. In fact, to really understand the mechanisms behind how to best heal your wounds, it helps to first know a bit about how the process works at a biological level.

The Three Phases of Wound Healing

Anytime you have an injury to the skin it triggers a complex series of events at the cellular level. This prompts the three stages that will help your wound to heal properly:

Phase 1: Inflammatory

The inflammatory process begins in response to injury, and first involves forming a clot to stop bleeding (hemostasis). Then antibodies and white blood cells get to work fighting off bacteria and collagen formation begins. This phase begins when the wound is created and lasts two to four days.

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Sea vegetables, better known as seaweed, are the leafy greens of the sea. Though not technically a vegetable (they’re actually classified as algae), seaweed is loaded with nutrition and has a unique, slightly salty flavor that’s been a staple in Japanese cuisine for more than 10,000 years!
In ancient China, meanwhile, sea vegetables were a delicacy reserved for honored guests and royalty. In fact, numerous cultures that live near their coasts have been enjoying sea vegetables for quite some time. This includes not only parts of Asia but also Iceland, Norway, New Zealand, coastal South America, Scotland, Ireland, and the Pacific Islands.

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Cancer experts recommend regularly checking your body for lumps or bumps that appear out of the ordinary. Should you discover something that may be, in fact, cancer finding it early will give you the best chance to overcome it.
Here’s a breakdown of what to keep an eye out for.

Breast Lumps

Experts recommend that women do a breast self-exam once a month to check for anything out of the ordinary. Feel for distinct lumps along with areas of “thickness,” skin redness, distension, dimpling or pitting, asymmetry, pain, nipple inversion or unusual nipple discharge.

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It’s fair to say that the average American, at one point and time in their life, has wished that they could change something about themselves. Whether it’s a smaller nose, better logic, or more mathematical skills, many of us wish for better genetic traits because we know that we can’t control our inheritances – or, in simpler terms, we can’t change what our parents gave us.
Or Can We?

For years studies have found evidence proving that our genes can actually change through experiences and lifestyle choices.

Philip Hunter, a science writer specializing in biology, explains this phenomenon, known as epigenetics, in his paper “What Genes Remember”:

“It has long been known that an organism’s fate is not determined by genes alone. This much we can tell by observing identical twins, who over time tend to diverge both physiologically (developing differences in, say, height and posture) and psychologically (exhibiting different personality traits and even, sometimes, sexual orientations). Despite most identical twins having similar diets and lifestyles, subtle cultural and environmental distinctions appear to alter their phenotype—the sum of their nature and nurture.”

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