Eating the right vitamins and minerals will give you health, wellness, and longevity. So, short of seeing a nutritionist to help you balance your diet perfectly, what else can you do? A lot of people take a multivitamin but the truth is, when your vitamins come from food rather from pills, you’ll get the optimal health benefits. As a positive side effect, following a nutritious diet will also help you manage your waistline by default. How can you balance your diet?
Journal Your Food Intake
Fitday is a great free calorie and nutrition calculation tool for helping people journal their food to see whether they’re getting the right nutrients or not. At the end of each day, there’s a graph that can show you what % of daily recommended intake you’re getting. By assessing the deltas, you can tackle the issue. You can target foods that you might be missing.
After analysing the area that you’re missing, try adding foods rich in that vitamin or mineral to your diet. RealAge has a free tool that lets you click on a vitamin or mineral and see a list of foods rich in that vitamin or mineral: RealAge Vitamins and Minerals Tool. The tool also tells you what that nutrient will do for you and seeing that could help you improve areas of your health that are currently plaguing you.
For example, if you were vitamin K deficient, the tool would suggest some of the following foods: spinach, asparagus, kiwi, blueberries.
If you wanted to increase your zinc intake, it would suggest: turkey, sunflowerseeds, shiitake mushrooms, almonds
And looking at the above suggestions you can see that there are foods in most categories that can literally be eaten by the handful rather than being difficult to incorporate into your diet. So fitting in your daily recommended intake of Vitamin K and Zinc could be as simple as tossing some blueberries and almonds into your morning oatmeal.
The more you know about your health, the happier, healthier, and more youthful you’ll continue to be. Nutrition is the foundation of health and paying attention to what goes into your body can make a big difference.
There are many pain relief acupoints, or meridian points, located on the wrist, palm and fingers of the hand. Stimulating these acupoints is not the only way to diagnose and treat pain, but it is one of the easiest and most accessible. Traditional Chinese acupuncture is performed anywhere on the body while reflexology concentrates on the meridian points found on the soles of the feet. For the home user, the hands are preferred and make identification of key acupoints much simpler.
Acupuncture and acupressure rely on accessing the body’s meridian points. This refers to the flow of energy throughout the body. Each meridian ends at twelve spots; there are three on each hand and three on each foot. The balance of energy, or the yin and yang, is what determines health and wellbeing. An imbalance of energy along any of the meridian paths results in illness or ailments.
Locating Pain Relief Acupoints Read more at: Identifying Hand Acupoints
Tags: acupressure, acupuncture, alternative health, hand acupoints, meridian paths, pain relief
Boost Your Immune System With Acupoint Therapy
Boost Your Immune System With Acupoint Therapy
By N. Strickland
Acupuncture is no longer an alternative medical procedure reserved for patients being treated by practitioners of ancient Chinese techniques. The modern medical world is now embracing the benefits of various types of acupuncture to treat a wide variety of ailments. In fact, it’s effective even for such diverse conditions as yeast infections, cancer, and immune system disorders.
How Does Acupuncture Work?
Many people hear the word acupuncture and immediately visualise someone lying prone on a table with a large number of long needles sticking out of their body. Whilst this may be the traditional form of pinpointing acupressure points, or acupoints, modern medical practitioners also use such methods as heat, pressure, electrical currents, lasers, and micro- or magnetic waves, or a combination of these.
The concept behind this is to stimulate various parts of the body which are connected to the body’s internal organs and systems. It is thought that this stimulation produces an actual physical change in nerve cells and causes them to release hormones, proteins, and chemicals in the brain. In this way, acupoints help control blood pressure and body temperature and boost the immune system while releasing endorphins, the body’s natural painkiller.
Acupuncture is now an approved medical treatment in several countries, including the United States, throughout Europe, and in China and Japan.
About the Immune System
The body’s immune system responds to diseases, bacteria, and viruses. It contains both endorphin and neuropeptide receptors in its lymphoid organs, which produce white blood cells, or lymphocytes. Communication occurs between the central nervous and immune systems via chemical messages which influence the body’s immunity, and the creation of lymphocytes.
It is the job of the immune system to scan every cell in the human body, then classify each as normal or abnormal. Those cells that indicate signs of infection or irregularity are attacked by T-lymphocytes created in the thymus gland. There are other types of cells in the lymphoid organs, all of which have a particular function in identifying, inactivating, destroying, defending, or eliminating abnormalities.
How Acupuncture Benefits the Immune System
Acupuncture is thought to retrain the immune and central nervous systems to more accurately detect dangerous cell growth and boost its ability to seek and destroy abnormal cells such as cancer.
No matter the type of acupuncture used, the body perceives stimulation to acupoints as a threat. The immune system will be called to action to resist and defend against this invasion. Properly instituted, acupuncture can actually channel the body’s natural defenses to concentrate on particular abnormal cells and provide new instruction, or even reactivate the previously ineffectual immune system.
The benefits of acupuncture over modern medical procedures are many and Acupuncture is quickly becoming the favoured alternative to other forms of treatment for a variety of ailments. The amazing and verifiable link between pressure points and the body’s immune system means that acupuncture can perform near miracles, without the side effects of prescription drugs or invasive medical procedures. This ancient form of therapy might well become the latest, greatest “innovation” in the world of health and medicine.
Learn more about hand acupoints and magnetic wave therapy at Aculife-Ireland.com.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=N._Strickland
http://EzineArticles.com/?Boost-Your-Immune-System-With-Acupoint-Therapy&id=3011635
Tags: Acupoint Therapy, acupunture alternatives, boost immunity

