The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Saunas may give your heart a healthy boost Posted: 28 Nov 2011 01:37 AM PST  New research finds that regular sauna treatments can increase heart health in patients with chronic heart conditions. ― AFP pic This week British science magazine New Scientist reported on the research, which found that people with chronic heart failure who took fives saunas a week for three weeks enjoyed improved heart function and a boost in their exercise endurance. In the study, researcher Takashi Ohori and colleagues at the University of Toyama in Japan asked 41 volunteers with heart failure to take a 15-minute sauna fives time a week. After the sauna treatment, participants were asked to wrap themselves in a blanket for 30 minutes to keep their body temperatures about 1°C higher than normal. "Sauna treatment increased the heart's ability to pump blood, and boosted the distance participants could walk in 6 minutes from 337-379m," wrote New Scientist. The researchers also found improved function in the membrane lining the inside of the heart, which plays a role in controlling the diameter of blood vessels. The findings were published in The American Journal of Cardiology. Thanks to the increase in body temperature, separate research has found that a sauna treatment can trigger neurons in your body to release serotonin, resulting in a feel-good sensation. ― AFP-Relaxnews Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Mediterranean-ish diet tied to better heart health Posted: 27 Nov 2011 07:56 PM PST NEW YORK, Nov 28 — Once again, eating a diet based on fish, legumes, vegetables and moderate amounts of alcohol is linked to lower chances of dying from a heart attack, stroke or other vascular "events", according to a study of New York City residents.  Mediterranean-ish diet rich in fibre and omega-three fatty acids could influence heart health, study shows. — Reuters pic "While it's not the Mediterranean diet, it is comparing a healthier diet to a less healthy diet, and there was some improvement," said Teresa Fung, a professor at Simmons College in Boston who was not involved in the study. For nine years, Dr Clinton Wright at the University of Miami and his colleagues followed more than 2,500 residents of northern Manhattan, a neighbourhood with about 63 per cent Hispanic residents, 20 per cent African Americans and 15 per cent whites. Information about the health benefits of a so-called Mediterranean diet in the black and Hispanic populations in the US is lacking, Wright's group notes in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Because both groups are burdened by high rates of heart disease, the team set out to study how much of a difference diet might make. A little more than half of the study participants were Hispanic, while the other half was split roughly between non-Hispanic blacks and whites. All were over 40 years old when the study began. At the outset, researchers asked participants about their health history, and ranked their eating habits along a nine-point scale: the higher the number, the closer the person's diet was to the Mediterranean ideal; with lots of fish, vegetables, legumes, whole grains and vegetable oils and very little meat or animal fats. The group then tracked how many people later suffered a stroke, heart attack or death related to a vascular problem such as pulmonary embolism and aneurysm. More than 300 people in the study died from a vascular issue. Each point higher that a person scored on the nine-point Mediterranean diet scale reduced the risk of vascular death by 9 per cent. The study did not find that the diet had any effect on the risk of having a stroke, however. Among the 171 people who suffered a stroke, those at the high end of the diet scale were just as likely to have had one as those at the low end of the scale. The researchers did detect slight protection from heart attack among those whose diets ranked in the top four on the Mediterranean scale, but the finding could have been due to chance. The results back up previous research that also reported benefits to heart health from eating a Mediterranean diet. The study does not prove that diet is responsible for the benefits the researchers saw. But the Mediterranean diet is rich in elements such as fibre and omega-three fatty acids, which could influence heart health, Wright said. The evidence was not conclusive, he said, but overall, the Mediterranean diet appeared to be good for people's heart health. "There's very little evidence to suggest that it's harmful compared to some other diets that we consider harmful, such as diets rich in red meat," Wright said. "So it seems like there isn't much harm in it and there's increasing evidence that it's beneficial." — Reuters Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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