ElectricintheForest

The World Health Organization says that eating processed meat can cause cancer. But that doesn’t mean its as bad a smoking cigarettes.

The World Health Organization has declared that processed meat causes cancer, particularly colon cancer. The organization now places bacon, sausage, and hotdogs in a category of known carcinogens, a list that also includes cigarettes, diesel fumes and asbestos.

That doesn’t mean all the items in this category are equally likely to give you cancer. It just means that there’s sufficient evidence to support that these things can cause cancer, a conclusion that scientific study can only reach after much research.

But the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the organization within the WHO responsible for reviewing cancer research, doesn’t rank the items on this list against one another. In other words, all the items on this list can cause cancer, but do not represent the same level of risk.

But unfortunately, many newspapers-or at least their headline writers-don’t seem to understand this. “Bacon, burgers and sausages DO cause cancer and are as big a threat as cigarettes, says World Health Organisation” declares one headline. “Bacon, Hot Dogs, and Processed Meats Pose as High a Cancer Risk as Cigarettes” claims another. As attention-grabbing as these headlines may be, they are shamefully misleading.

Although the WHO doesn’t rank these known carcinogens, their data does provide some information about relative risk. They estimate that 34,000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are caused by eating a diet that’s high in processed meat. You can compare that number to the 200,000 deaths per year caused by air pollution, 600,000 per year caused by alcohol consumption and 1 million deaths per year caused by cigarettes according to the Global Burden of Disease Project, another WHO research body.

The WHO also placed red meat-beef, lamb and pork-in the next-to-highest cancer risk category. That means red meat is a “probable” carcinogen, but the organization said they still need further data to confirm this and that in limited quantities it may have some nutritional benefits.

Setting the misleading headlines aside, there’s still plenty of reasons to quit eating heavily processed industrial meat. Producing processed and red meat has a much heavier environmental burden than plant-based foods, requiring more water and land, and creating more pollution and greenhouse gases. If more people choose to eat less meat for personal health reasons, there could be a decrease in the amount of resources these meat products gobble up.

And much like smoking cigarettes, increasing your exposure to processed meat increases your risk of cancer, and may also put you at a higher risk for other health problems like heart disease and obesity.

So, even if starting your morning with a sausage breakfast isn’t as likely to kill you as starting your morning with a cigarette, neither is a good choice.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments.

Healthcare practitioners have known for a long time that using relaxation techniques can improve health, but it’s hard to prescribe such treatments without scientific evidence. That’s why researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital decided to run a retrospective analysis, in which they analyzed the records of 4,000 patients between 2006 and 2014 who followed their doctors’ recommendations for relaxation techniques, and compared them to 13,000 other patients who did not use those same techniques.

The results were impressive. The use of “Relaxation Response and Resiliency Training,” as the study calls it, reduced the incidence of healthcare visits by 43 percent. By learning how to use the relaxation techniques, patients were better able to care for themselves and manage symptoms without needing a physician’s intervention.

Stress-related disorders are the third leading cause of healthcare expenditures in the United States, after heart disease and cancer. In 2012, the treatment of stress-related disorders, such as headaches, back pain, insomnia, reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, and chest pain, cost Americans more than $80 billion.

“Over 90 percent of people suffering from stress or stress-related problems seek help through primary care and tend to be frequent healthcare utilizers. These visits can comprise as much as 70 percent of physicians’ caseloads. In addition, more than 80 percent of patients presenting to general practice evidence lack of resiliency and psychological stress.”

Teaching patients how to use relaxation techniques is an excellent way to reduce physicians’ caseloads, lessen the overall burden on the healthcare system, save money, and provide non-interventional solutions to physical problems that are safe and effective.

“Our results indicate that mind body interventions can reduce individual disease burden as well as the utilization of healthcare resources and are well suited to the changing healthcare environment… Mind body interventions are inexpensive relative to the cost of an emergency room visit, a hospitalization, or even other complementary and alternative medicine therapies.”

Sounds like it’s time to dust off the old yoga mat or sign up for that class you’ve been meaning to take at the meditation center! You might as well start now, rather than waiting till your personal health reaches a crisis point.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments.

“We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity.” – Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.

When people turn to healthy eating, they generally do it with one goal in mind: to become healthier and skinnier. My goal was to improve my health. I wanted to eliminate my gut problems, my skin problems, minimize the rate at which I got colds and flu, and feel amazing from the inside out. I was so excited by all the health benefits whole foods could empower me with that I began my quest of healing through food.

Of course it wasn’t so easy at first. I made a lot of mistakes. When I learned that I should quit refined sugar, I switched it for brown sugar. When I learned I shouldn’t eat added sugar at all, I bought juices sweetened with Splenda. When I learned packaged juices and artificial sweeteners are even worse for you, I threw out an entire package of the aforementioned juices. It was a rocky start, but I wasn’t giving up.

I began questioning everything I decided to buy and eat and I encouraged my family to do the same. My family wasn’t as amazed by these newly found benefits as I was. At first, I would get on my dad’s nerves when I suggested him to stop buying 2-litre sodas or when I explained that Welch’s grape juice contained high fructose corn syrup.

Switching to a wholesome diet and ditching unhealthy foods got me what I initially wanted: I stopped having gut problems, my skin clarified, and my colds and flu diminished at a dramatic rate. I was healthier, but I noticed that improving my diet not only benefited my body, it created a profound change in my mindset. I became more self-loving, happier, more mindful, and more grateful.

If you’re going through a healthy eating journey, or if you’re just thinking about taking a small step towards eating better, these are 10 ways eating well can transform your mindset in a positive way, beyond the physical benefits:

1. You welcome mindfulness into your life

Healthy eating by default turns your attention towards what you consume. It makes you contemplate what you buy, what you cook, and what you bite. You’re no longer mindlessly taking sugary cereal out of a box and calling it breakfast. You become aware that every meal is an opportunity to nurture yourself with healing, delicious, and nutritious food.

This is the main shift I noticed in myself. Every food decision became deliberate and I began to purposely nourish my body with the best possible choices. Becoming aware of what you eat connects you with the moment and snaps you out of autopilot.

2. You become the boss

Once you start making better choices, you shed old patterns and behaviors. You break the status quo. Change makes you question and reject the usual order of things. This good rebellion manifests when instead of grabbing dinner at Taco Bell’s drive-through you decide to use the vegetables sitting in your fridge to make a salad, or simply go out to a non-fast food restaurant.

Every decision you make different empowers you and breaks you free from the norm.

3. You seek improvement

Once you break the status quo, you become aware of the possibilities and often seek to upgrade bit by bit. The spark of change can grow to become a fire. Maybe you switched your fries with a side of salad one day, then you decided to order a healthier meal altogether, and weeks later you decided to cook a homemade dinner for your loved ones.

Seeking an alternative to sugar made me wonder what else I was eating that had a healthier counterpart, which lead me to switch to grass-fed butter, nut milk and whole-wheat bread.

4. You share and connect more

When you experience the benefits of eating well, you want to share it with your loved ones. You want to inspire positive change around you. This doesn’t mean you start nagging or become a health nut, it simply means you share what you know and offer your friends and family a way to eat in a more nourishing way.

Offering a healthy snack at work, inviting friends over for a homemade dinner, talking to your kids about the benefits of sipping that green smoothie, and trying to get your husband or wife on board with a cleaner diet are all ways to share positive information.

Once you start sharing, you also find like-minded people who enjoy a similar lifestyle. This gives you a stronger sense of belonging.

5. You boost your self-love

Once you are motivated to make better eating choices, you accept you’re worthy of better care. Eating habits are profoundly linked to self-esteem and your sense of self-worth. That’s why people with eating disorders also suffer from emotional problems.

Choosing healthy eating is a way of taking care of yourself, of acknowledging your body is sacred and valuable, and of accepting you deserve to feel your best from the inside out. Healthy eating sparked the wish to seek out other ways to nourish myself, like exercising more and taking time to unwind my mind and body through meditation and yoga.

6. You increase your confidence

Healthy eating can boost your confidence and happiness when you set health or weight goals. You feel accomplished because you didn’t cave to that soda, because you nailed a new healthy recipe, or because you could enjoy a delicious breakfast instead of being hungry all morning. In the long term, eating healthier will lead you to your ideal weight, which can improve your self-esteem as well.

I felt amazing a couple of days ago when I decided to cook quinoa hummus cakes for the first time instead of accepting a chicken hamburger.

7. You become more grateful

When you become aware of all of the nourishing foods you have access to, feeling grateful for it comes naturally. When I realized the many options I had to eat better and improve my health, I felt immensely thankful for the opportunity to do so. People living on food stamps and earning a minimum wage don’t often have a choice. Countries with food shortages, droughts, and wars are focused on their basic survival and healthy eating is a luxury.

Healthy eating is a privilege, and I see it as so, so I’m grateful. If you have access to abundant produce and healthy products, realize you have an invaluable source of nourishment and share it if you can.

8. You become an active learner

Just because you decide to eat better doesn’t mean you automatically know how to do it. When you turn to healthy eating, your mind opens to a new field of knowledge. How do you know which ingredients to avoid? Why does this food make you feel bad? Which vegetables are more nutritious? What is gluten exactly? Is sugar that bad? What are superfoods?

Once you start caring, you seek the answers to these questions and more. You research. You ask. You feed your mind new, useful, actionable information, and enjoy the learning process.

9. You spark your creativity

Even if the microwave is the only kitchen appliance you’ve ever used in your life, healthy eating will push you to cook and create. You have to ditch that noodle cup, and take spices, legumes, vegetables, and lean meats and create nutritious meals out of that. When you start browsing easy and healthy recipes that don’t take hours to make (these are of course my favorites), you find smoothies, salads, wraps and a tons of plant-based dishes that are delicious and surprisingly easy.

Taking this first step will make you more inventive in the kitchen and you’ll find yourself thinking about food combinations that will make you excited about preparing lunch. Like Julia Child said, “You learn to cook so that you don’t have to be a slave to recipes. You get what’s in season and you know what to do with it.”

10. Your satisfaction increases

Because choosing to eat better to achieve weight or health goals is a challenging, difficult, and positive transformation, it will make you feel accomplished, satisfied, and proud of your hard work.

Seeing yourself go through the whole process, from the moment you take the first step towards a healthier lifestyle, right until you learn how to make better decisions, lose weight, learn cooking, cure your ailments or feel fantastic, will make you feel like a better version of yourself, and you’d be right. Is there a more rewarding feeling than knowing you accomplished a goal after a lot of willpower and hard work?

My journey so far in healthy eating has showed me the deep connection there is between mind and body. The way you nourish your body reflects in your mind, and anything you create in your mind will manifest in your body.

If you’re thinking about taking a step towards healthy living, or if you’re already in the process, know that it will profoundly affect your mood, self-esteem, motivation, and mentality. And it’s worth it.

How have your eating habits changed your mindset?

Please let me know in the comments below.

We’ve probably all heard someone exclaim, “Ah, my endorphins are kicking in!” at the end of a good run. Endorphins are famous for supposedly producing “runner’s high,” that fleeting sense of calm and euphoria that engulfs many of us after a satisfying workout.

But in fact, endorphins may be unfairly hogging the credit for making workouts enjoyable, according to an enlightening new experiment with animals. The findings suggest that endorphins have little to do with runner’s high. Instead, that euphoric feeling may be the product of a completely different but oddly familiar substance – the body’s own endocannabinoids, the chemicals that, like the cannabinoids in marijuana, lighten mood.

Endorphins first became a household word in the 1980s, when researchers found that blood levels increased after prolonged exercise. This finding made sense. Exercise can cause discomfort or pain, and endorphins are the body’s self-produced opiates, with pain-relieving properties much like morphine.

From that discovery, it was a short step to believing that endorphins must also produce the pleasurable mental sensations that many people feel after exercise.

But there is a substantial problem with that idea, and it involves the substantial-ness of endorphins. They are large molecules, too big to pass through the blood-brain barrier. They might staunch pain in the muscles, but they wouldn’t have effects directly inside the brain, where any high would originate.

So for the past decade or so, scientists have been looking for other substances that might be involved in making exercisers feel high, which led them, perhaps unsurprisingly, to endocannabinoids.

Endocannabinoids are, essentially, internally produced marijuana, or cannabis. Cannabis contains cannabinoid molecules, which are small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier and attach there to receptors, producing a floaty, hey-dude high.

In recent years, scientists have found that exercise raises the levels of endocannabinoids in the bloodstreams of people and animals, making these molecules good candidates to underlie the runner’s high.

But few studies have directly compared the effects of endorphins and endocannabinoids to determine which really makes exercise mildly intoxicating.

So for the new study, which was published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers with the Central Institute of Mental Health at the University of Heidelberg medical school in Mannheim, Germany, rounded up healthy lab mice, tested their anxiety levels by putting them in cages with pockets of darkness and light (anxious animals stick to the shadows), and then gave them running wheels.

Mice generally like running, engaging in the activity even when they are not being pursued. That suggests, researchers believe, that they gain some kind of mental satisfaction or reward from it, experiencing the mouse version of a runner’s high.

That possibility was borne out in an early portion of the new experiment, when the scientists noted elevated levels of both endorphins and endocannabinoids in the animals’ bloodstreams after running. The scientists also found that the animals were more tranquil after running, spending longer periods of time in lighted areas within their cages – something that anxious, twitchy animals won’t do – and that they were more pain tolerant when exposed to slight physical discomfort.

In general, these post-running mice were more chill than before.

But when the researchers used drugs to block the workings of some of the animals’ endocannabinoid system, so that receptors in the animals’ brains couldn’t take up the molecules, their post-run cool disappeared. The animals proved to be as anxious then after running as they had been before and very sensitive to pain.

Without a working endocannabinoid system, they developed no runner’s high.

However, when the researchers similarly blocked the animals’ response to endorphins, while leaving their endocannabinoid system unchanged, the mice enjoyed all of the soothing effects of running. They were calmer in their cages afterward and seemed to experience less sensitivity to pain.

Even without the ability to respond to endorphins, in other words, they experienced the rodent version of a runner’s high, strongly suggesting that endorphins do not contribute to the high, but endocannabinoids do.

The practical implications of these results are somewhat limited, of course, because they involve mice, not people, and tell us only what goes into creating a runner’s high and not how to ensure that we will feel that same post-run serenity.

One possible if slightly disheartening lesson of the study could be, in fact, that we may need to cover considerable mileage in order to experience a runner’s high; the mice in the study, small as they are, averaged more than three miles every day on their wheels.

More broadly encouraging, though, the results should remind us that, like mice, we were built through evolution to be in motion. Our ancestors ran to avoid danger and hunt food. For them, “reduced sensations of pain and less anxiety through long-distance running would have been a benefit,” says Johannes Fuss, now a professor at the University of Hamburg, who led the new study.

To survive as a species, we seem to have needed to run, and nature obligingly found ways to make this strenuous movement pleasurable by providing us with a runner’s high.

So the subtle upshot of the new study may be that we should run. And if we don’t feel a high, perhaps try running more, until eventually a gentle euphoria may settle in and we can turn to our running companion and say, “Ah, my endocannabinoids are kicking in at last!”

Related:

For more fitness, food and wellness news, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or sign up for our newsletter.