Recent Posts by Alan Carpenter

Can Gardening Boost Your Health?

How about stress release, physical activity, social connections, and produce? Particularly during COVID Gardens and gardening promote health and well-being. A new scoping review of 77 studies showed that gardening promotes mental health, physical health. Specific positive outcomes include reduced stress and depression, and improved self-esteem; reduced isolation and increased social networks; increased physical activity…
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Manage High Blood Pressure With Healthy Lifestyle Choices

Avoid hypertension Reduce your risk of premature death High blood pressure (hypertension) predicts increased risk of cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death globally and in Western countries. Italian medical researchers recently published a brief review of evidence linking lifestyle choices to hypertension. The authors found clear evidence that minimal to modest alcohol intake, not…
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Where’s The Fat?

Location, location, and location How much is less important than where it’s located With fat, location matters. Visceral fat occurs within the abdominal cavity. Subcutaneous fat occurs just beneath the skin. Researchers used data from 3,001 participants in the Framingham Heart Study Offspring and Third-Generation cohorts to determine links between these two types of fat…
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How Many Steps Per Day?

Is 10,000 the magic number? Maybe not magic, but 10,000 daily steps can improve your health Accelerometers are small, simple, inexpensive devices that capture data to calculate the number of daily steps. While accelerometers are relatively new in America, they’ve been used in Japan since the 1960s. Japanese widely embrace a goal of 10,000 steps…
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