Day 360- Exercising During Pregnancy

Exercise during pregnancy is still such a controversial topic, especially if you never really exercised in the first place, and since there have not been very many studies on the results of exercise on the fetus, women have a right to be skeptical. Mothers worry that their elevated heart rate can be passed on to their fetus, which could result in diminish blood flow and oxygen.

A study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology studied 45 women between 28 and 32 weeks of pregnancy. The women walked or jogged on a treadmill for 30 minutes at a moderate intensity, which was defined by the researchers as 40 - 59% of their maximum heart rate. Of these 45 women, 15 where not use to regular exercise. The remaining 30 women either did around 20 minutes of exercise 3 or more days a week, or 20 minutes of vigorous exercise, such as running, more than 4 days a week. The women that were use to regular exercise were asked to workout for an additional 30 minutes doing high intensity exercise on the treadmill. High intensity exercise was defined as 60-84% of their maximum heart rate.

Researchers would measure the fetus's heart rate and the blood flow to the fetus before and after each exercise session using a Doppler ultrasound. A biophysical profile was conducted as well using an ultrasound to determine that the baby was moving as it should.

The researchers found that the fetal heart rate rose after the medium and high intensity workouts, but that the heart rate, blood flow, and biophysical profile stayed in the normal range. Reassuring mothers that exercise did not harm the fetus.

"The findings are in line with the recommendation of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that healthy pregnant women get at least two and a half hours of medium-intensity aerobic exercise a week even if they did not exercise before becoming pregnant. Exercise improves heart health and may reduce the risk of complications during pregnancy, such as developing high blood pressure and diabetes."

Although the study was small, all babies in the study were born perfectly healthy. If nothing else, this study was a step in the right direction of showing women that exercise is healthy during pregnancy, and that they should be encouraged to workout on a regular basis.

I have also come across a great blog about female fitness and nutrition. Cassandra Forsythe has a PhD in exercise science and a MS in nutrition and metabolism. She has an ongoing blog series called Fit Pregnancy, where she interviews fit mommies on their exercise routines during pregnancy and their babies birth results after pregnancy. It is a fantastic, inspiring blog that encourages women that exercise is healthy for the mom and baby.

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP

Day 359- Seattle Plans for the First Food Forest

A forest close to a big city where you would be free to go and pick fruit, vegetables, and herbs? Where there are no club fees or special initiation procedures?

Sounds like an imaginary place, or at least not a place that you would find in Seattle city limits, right? Seattle will be the first to partake in the innovative concept of a "food forest."

"A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest." -Take Part

By extreme community outreach, Friends of the Food Forest will be able to make this dream soon become a reality. They have been able to reach out to the community, to get people involved in the planning, and make sure that things go as planned.

But what exactly is a food forest?

"A food forest is a gardening technique or land management system that mimics a woodland ecosystem but substitutes in edible trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals. Fruit and nut trees are the upper level, while below are berry shrubs, edible perennials and annuals. Companions or beneficial plants are included to attract insects for natural pest management while some plants are soil amenders providing nitrogen and mulch. Together they create relationships to form a forest ecosystem able to produce high yields of food with less maintenance."- Beacon Food Forest

For anyone interested in learning more or finding out ways that they can be involved in the first Food Forest of it's kind, click here to visit their website.

Pura Vida!
Alica Ryan, NTP

Day 358- Maca Root- Peruvian Viagra?

My morning shake consists of several different ingredients; a rice protein powder from the company I work for which helps to reduce inflammation, supports the liver and gallbladder during detoxification, and provides healthy vitamins and minerals, a scoop of protein powder, a scoop of powdered greens, a piece of fruit (usually a banana or blueberries), kale or swiss chard, maca root powder, ice and water; yum!

The new additions to my shake have been the protein powder and the maca root. Both of these items have been added to help support me during intense workouts. They give my muscles fuel to burn so that I am not burning my muscles instead.

One website claims that by consuming Maca, "you may be able to train harder, recover faster, and even lift heavier weights."

Maca root as I have recently learned is a pretty incredible plant. The maca plant can be found in Peru, and has been nicknamed the “Peruvian ginseng.” Although it is not related to ginseng, the maca root has been noted to increase strength, energy, stamina, libido, and sexual function.

So what is Maca exactly?

The true name of the plant is, Lepidium Meyenii, and it produces a radish-like root. Back during the height of the Incan empire, word has it that the Incan warriors would consume maca before fighting in battle, helping to increase their strength and stamina.

The maca plant has seemed to have grown in popularity in the last few years as people have started learning about its sex boosting properties as well. Arizona physician Gary Gordon, M.D., and former president of the American College for Advancement in Medicine, is a maca supporter. "We all hear rumors about various products like maca. But using this Peruvian root myself, I personally experienced a significant improvement in erectile tissue response. I call it nature's answer to Viagra.”

What properties of the Maca plant can be contributed to these special sex-enhancing effects? Well the plant contains proteins, carbohydrates, and various fatty acids, but the unique ingredients lie in two compounds; the macamides and the macaenes. These two compounds are said to be directly responsible for the sex-boosting properties.

According to Discovery Health:

"To test this idea, researchers conducted a series of controlled animal experiments, the results of which were published in the April 2000 issue of the medical journal Urology. Rodents fed MacaPure extract, which contains a concentration of macamides and macaenes, demonstrated greatly increased energy and stamina. The animals also exhibited a striking increase in sexual activity as compared with non-maca-fed animals, or those fed lesser amounts of macamides and macaenes. So how does this translate to humans? Individuals who consume maca also get sexual results. Men and women with low libido feel a boost in sexual desire, and men with erectile problems notice marked improvement in sexual function."

Maca is also an adaptogen, meaning that it provides lots of broad spectrum support without any negative side effects. In studies thus far no toxicity has been shown or any adverse pharmacologic effects. The Peruvians on average take around 3,000 to 5,000 milligrams of maca a day. Feel free to take more or less depending on how you feel.

According to the Maca website here are some additional benefits:

• Increases energy and endurance
• Increases stamina
• Improves sexual function in men and women
  
• Enhances fertility in people and animals
  
• Reduces hormonal dysfunction during menopause & andropause
  
• Can regulate hormonal imbalances
  
• Has a beneficial action on the circulatory system; Speeds wound healing and reduces anemia
  
• Enhances memory, learning, and mental ability
  
• Has a beneficial action on the circulatory system; gives skin a more youthful appearance
  
• Good for healthy teeth and bones
• Supports the adrenal glands
• Acts as a fungistatic and bacteriostatic
• Acts as an anticarcinogen and antioxidant
• Is an alternative to anabolic steroids, helps to build muscle
• Is non addictive

The brand that I have been using is called Maca Magic, but there are several out there that you can find at your health food stores. For more information check out these helpful websites:

• Discovery Health
• Maca Root
• Wikipedia

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP

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Day 357- Amylopectin- The Super Starch

We already know that for most of us gluten is not a good thing, but did you know that besides the gluten aspect of wheat it also contains what some call a “Super-Carbohydrate,” or “Super-Starch?” Wheat is made up of chains of glucose (sugar), which are called polymers. These polymers are made mainly of chains of branching glucose units called amylopectin, and a smaller amount of linear chains called amylose. Both amylopectin and amylose can be digested by the salivary and stomach enzyme, amylase, but amylopectin is more readily digested and broken down into glucose during this process than in amylose. Amylose can make it’s way to the colon undigested much more often, thus having less effect on the body’s blood sugar levels. Since amylopectin is broken down easily into glucose it raises the blood sugar in the body.

We also know that a lot has changed to the structure of grains over the last few years. Bread products have become more “fluffy.” Even bread labeled, “Whole Wheat,” is soft and gets stuck to the top of your mouth. So what has changed?

“We eat dwarf wheat, the product of genetic manipulation and hybridization that created short, stubby, hardy, high-yielding wheat plants with much higher amounts of starch and gluten and many more chromosomes coding for all sorts of new odd proteins. The man who engineered this modern wheat won the Nobel Prize -- it promised to feed millions of starving around the world. Well, it has, and it has made them fat and sick.” –Mark Hyman, MD

I came across a website created by Dr. Davis on the difference between the different forms of Amylopectin. Although I searched for more information and research on the different forms, I was unable to find a lot of information. To me what Dr. Davis is describing makes sense, but I guess my disclaimer is to take this information that I am presenting with a grain of salt.

According to what I learned on Dr. Davis’s website the starch that we now find in wheat is called amylopectin A. Amylopectin has various structures, which alter the amount of amylopectin that can be broken down by amylase, remember the more amylopectin that can be broken down affects the amount of glucose that the body will have to deal with. Amylopectin A, what is found in wheat, is the most digestible form of Amylopectin. Other forms such as Amylopectin C and B are less digestible. Amylopectin C is the lease digestible and is found in legumes. This is why many people experience gas or bloating after consumption of beans. The undigested amylopectin is able to make it’s way down to the colon, where bacteria loves to feast on the undigested starches generating lots of lovely gas. Amylopectin B is more digestible than the C form but less so than the A form, and is found in founds such as bananas and potatoes.

So the short, but not so sweet version of all this information is pretty much that wheat is making us fat. Regardless if it is white bread or whole wheat bread they are both raising out blood sugar. Two slices of whole wheat bread now raise your blood sugar more than two tablespoons of table sugar. Beware of labels advertising whole wheat or whole grain, many of those products are already loaded with sugar and they are trying to use those claims to mask that fact. Blood Sugar dysregulation is a huge issue that can lead to obesity, inflammation, diabetes, fatty liver, or other not so favorable things.

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP

Day 356- Chicken and Wild Rice Soup

Ingredients:

• 1 package of uncooked wild rice
• 1 carton of organic chicken stock
• 4 cups water
• 3 chicken breasts, cut into small pieces
• 2 cups carrots, chopped
• 1 bundle of celery, chopped
• 1 cup mushrooms, chopped
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 tablespoon oregano
• 1 tablespoon basil
• Sea salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Place chicken in a pan and cook slightly, no longer than 5 minutes
2. Place all ingredients in crock pot and cook on low for about 5-6 hours

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP

Day 355- Workout of the Week

• Bear crawls, 2 minutes
• Side Lunges, 25 each leg
• High jumps, keep hand straight out in front and touch your knees to your hand, 15x
• Lateral arm raises with dumbbells, 20x
• Rows with dumbbells, 20x
• Side plank hold, 1 minute each side
• V-up crunches, 20x

Repeat each exercise 3 time though

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP

Day 354- Homemade School Lunches Get Searched

Here is a pretty disturbing article that I read on Natural News. Imagine spending the time to put together a healthy lunch for your children that they will eat, just to have your children told at school that what their parents packed for them was not "healthy" enough. Not only does that take authority away from the parents, it also gives them incorrect information. If their homemade lunch is not good enough for them, and they are taught that school lunches are a healthier option, then they are going to begin to associate processed foods as healthy meals. It seems to me that it is somewhat of a slap in the face for all those that have been fighting to change lunches in schools.

Here is the article from Natural News:

U.S. schoolchildren now subjected to sack lunch searches by government agents who enforce nutritional insanity

"A local elementary school in North Carolina is searching the homemade lunches of school children with the goal of forcing children to ditch their nutritious, home-made meals and learn to consume pasteurized, homogenized USDA-approved cow's milk and chemically-laced processed meats that promote cancer.

This is what happened, as reported in the Carolina Journal yesterday:

"A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious."

The paper goes on to report:

"The girl's turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day."

Hold on a sec there, partner. There are AGENTS inspecting lunch boxes of schoolchildren?

You thought the TSA was bad? Get ready for school lunch pat-downs!

That's the first highly disturbing part of this entire story. See, the corrupt state is trying to take over everything, including the American family. Telling little Johnny that his mom packed an "inferior" lunch is one way of teaching children that they should worship the state instead of their parents. It's entirely consistent with the actions of pathetic child health sellouts such as California Governor Jerry Brown who recently signed a law giving 12-year-old children the right to "consent" to being injected with Gardasil vaccines as long as they don't tell their parents.

Parents are useless. The state is God.Write that down, boys and girls, as you'll be tested on it later. And please don't tell all the TSA perverts that new jobs are opening up involving searching the sacks of elementary school children, or they'll quit the TSA in droves and line up to be part of anything that might involve touching little children.

In North Carolina, the homemade school lunches that don't meet USDA guidelines are then "enhanced" with what the state calls the "missing items" (the processed meat laced with chemicals, or the dead, pasteurized milk, produced with Bovine Growth Hormones). Parents are then billed (fined) for the additional cost of these "missing" items.

In other words, the state is forcing parents to buy cancer-causing processed foods and feed them to their children!

"What got me so mad," said the girl's mother, as reported in Carolina Journal.com, "...is, number one, don't tell my kid I'm not packing her lunch box properly. I pack her lunchbox according to what she eats. It always consists of a fruit. It never consists of a vegetable. She eats vegetables at home because I have to watch her because she doesn't really care for vegetables."

But the other truly disturbing part about all this is that the "official" USDA-approved nutritional requirements for children are nothing more than a total sellout to the corrupt dairy industry! Here, drink pasteurized, homogenized, hormone-produced milk which will probably make the girls hit puberty at age 9 while causing the little boys to grow armpit hair before they're old enough to tie their own shoelaces.

Ditch your healthy food and eat this homogenized crap!

So the girl brought to school a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, some potato chips and some apple juice. Admittedly, it's not the lunch of champions or anything, but guess what the school forced her to eat instead? Chicken nuggets.

Yeah, those are the deep-fried "parts is parts" chicken-like objects made from mechanically-separated chicken (yuck). They probably contain MSG or some other taste-enhancing chemical, too, and they're no doubt fried in genetically-modified soy oil or corn oil. That must be very conducive to a learning environment, huh?

And this elementary school's current home page features a giant photo of children holding up signs that read, "HELP FIGHT HEART DISEASE." Seriously? Do they honestly think feeding chicken nuggets to preschoolers is an intelligent way to fight heart disease? (Dear God, what has public education come to in America?)

Since when was the state any kind of authority on nutrition anyway?

All this takes a lot of gall for a government that routinely formulates the most nutritionally-depleted school lunch programs and prison food imaginable. If the government was in charge of our nutrition, we'd all be eating genetically modified poison laced with pharmaceuticals and birth control. It's almost like Bill Gates' heavenly recipe for "feeding the world," huh?

Eat this and die. That's what the government's pushing these days. After all, the sooner you all die, the more money the government will save on social security, Medicare and other entitlements it can't afford to pay for much longer. I bet that's one social science lesson these kids aren't taught in school.You're more valuable to the state dead than alive.

The government likes to act like it's all "official" or something, and that it's somehow looking out for the welfare of these children. It was the Division of Child Development and Early Educationat the Department of Health and Human Services which enforced these loony requirements. According to all those "officials" (i.e. government nutritional morons who eat junk food all day while sitting at their desks and injecting themselves with insulin all day), a "healthy" meal for a child should consist of:

• One serving of meat, such as sausages laced with cancer-causing sodium nitrite, which is linked to a 300% increase in brain tumors in children and a 67% increase in pancreatic cancer

• One serving of pasteurized, homogenized, heart-disease inducing cow's milk which also causes allergies, autoimmune disorders and digestive problems.

• One serving of grain, which could be met by serving some nutritionally-depleted white bread.

• Two servings of fruit or vegetables, including those gross canned peaches floating in corn syrup.

Yep! That's the USDA's pathetic definition of nutrition, folks. A bunch of disease-inducing processed dead food that's sanctioned by the very same state that wants a dead population. So it all makes sense, you see.

God forbid the mom that packs a lunch for her child that looks something like this:

• A fresh sprout salad (state officials have never seen living sprouts and would probably condemn them as being too "alive" to be safely consumed. Irradiate it!).

• A fresh avocado sprinkled with paprika and nutritional yeast (huh? Is that a fruit? A vegetable? What does it count for? This would confuse school officials for weeks who would have to convene a committee to study the issue...)

• An egg sandwich made from free-range chicken eggs, served up on gluten-free whole grain English muffins (what? No meat! You are murdering your child, you careless parents! Call Child Protective Services!)

• A bottle of fresh juice made that morning from oranges, carrots, lemons and a hint of ginger. (LIVING food? That's the food of terrorists! Nothing alive is allowed in the schools! Forbidden!)

You see, school officials wouldn't recognize a nutritious lunch of it slapped them across the face. There's nothing quite like being cold-cocked with an egg-and-tomato sprout sandwich.

Instead, these pathetic state "health department" enforcers apparently ended their own nutritional education with health class in high school, which gives you evenlesseducation than the innate knowledge of a typical mule, because at least the mule knows to eat the living grass and flowers growing right out of the soil. Yep, I said it: These state officials knowless than an ass about nutrition."

To read more of this story on Natural News, click here.

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP