Love your Brain, Love your Body, Love your Life - Stroke Prevention

May is National Stroke Awareness Month.  Many people don’t realize that 80% of all strokes are preventable. What can you do to prevent a stroke?

According to the CDC, Living a Healthy Lifestyle is the best way to prevent strokes.

• Eat a healthy diet. Choose healthful meals and snack options. Be sure to choose plenty of fresh fruits and veggies. Eating foods low in Saturated fat, cholesterol and foods high in fiber helps prevent high cholesterol, limiting sodium in your diet helps prevent high blood pressure.
• Maintain a healthy weight.  If you know your weight and height, you can calculate your BMI at CDC's Assessing Your Weight Web site.
• Be active. It lower’s cholesterol and blood pressure. A minimum of 30 minutes of moderate exercise most days of the week is the Surgeon Generals recommendation.
• Don’t Smoke.
• Limit Alcohol Use. Too much alcohol causes high blood pressure. No more than 2 servings a day.

Love your Brain, Love your Body, Love your Life - Combining Foods for Optimum Nutrition

Making good food choices is the best thing we can do to stay healthy. Hope you find this helpful.

Research has shown that some food combinations are more nutritious when eaten together.  Here are four powerful pairs that are better together: 

Broccoli & Mustard

Raw broccoli is a good source of the powerful cancer-fighting compound sulforaphane. But cooking destroys the enzyme (myrosinase) in broccoli that makes sulforaphane available to your body. The fix? Combine broccoli with mustard (yes, the condiment) or another raw cruciferous veggie, such as wasabi or arugula—the extra dose of myrosinase will help you absorb more sulforaphane.

Coffee & Sugar

If you take your coffee with sugar, good news—it may make you more productive on the job.  When study participants drank the two together, researchers found that areas of the brain associated with attention worked more efficiently than when sipped solo. If you don’t like coffee, try green tea with a drizzle of honey.

Adzuki Beans & Raspberries

Pairing adzuki beans—classically used in Japanese desserts—with raspberries may bump up the duo’s antioxidant power by 45 percent.  That was the biggest boost researchers saw among 55 combinations of different fruits, veggies and legumes. Top a spinach salad with adzukis; for dessert, dig into fresh raspberries.

Tumeric & Fish

Curcumin (a component of turmeric) and DHA (an omega-3 fat in oily fish) protect against certain cancers by keeping cancer cells from multiplying. Combining the two may slow tumor growth and the spread of a type of breast cancer cells more so than when the compounds interact with the cancer cells separately, researchers think DHA helps cells to utilize curcumin. Rub salmon or trout with turmeric or curry (a spice blend containing turmeric).

More to come on food power couples, so check back :o)

Eating Well Magazine May/June Pg. 18 - Combining Foods for Optimum Nutrition

Love your Brain, Love your Body, Love your Life - Boost your Creativity with a Vacation

Is it important to schedule that annual vacation? When money is tight and schedules don’t seem to permit taking that summer trip, how important is it really?

In Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine - How Creativity Works, he discusses in great detail why our brain needs vacation time to stimulate creativity. Chapter 5, entitled “Outsider”, gives several examples of how being an outsider is a state of mind. We need to go outside our normal everyday surroundings, duties, chores and problems; to get away! Travel is one of the best ways to do this, the reason it’s so useful for creativity is a “quirk of cognition in which problems that feel close get contemplated in a more literal manner.” “When we are physically near the source of the problem, our thoughts are automatically constricted, bound by a more limited set of associations.  It only allows us to focus on the facts at hand - it inhibits imagination.”

Detaching from the familiar environment can help get new perspectives on everyday life, when you ask a friend for advice on solving a problem, his or her suggestions are often more creative than what you would have decided yourself - that’s because your friend has psychological distance from the situation at hand. When you’re in the middle of a problem, it’s sometimes hard to untangle yourself from it to think about it clearly.

This is why travel is so helpful: “When you escape from the place you spend most of your time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas previously suppressed. Many people have epiphanies when they travel because they can view their life back home from a more detached, outsider’s view.

Experience of another culture gives the traveler a valuable open-mindedness, making it easier for him or her to realize that a single thing can have multiple meanings. We need to change cultures to feel the disorienting diversity of human traditions. The same details that make foreign travel so confusing - do we tip the waiter? where is this train taking me? - turn out to have lasting impact, making us more creative because we’re less insular.  We’re reminded of all that we don’t know, which is nearly everything. We go home and home is the same but something in our minds has been changed, and that changes everything.

Of course, it’s not enough to simply get on a plane or drive a few hundred miles to the beach: if we want to experience the creative benefits of vacation, then we have to rethink the reason for the vacation. Our mind is most likely to solve our most stubborn problems while getting a sunburn far away from home. So instead of napping on the beach, or reading the latest issue of US Weekly, we should be mulling over those domestic riddles we just can't solve.

Imagine - How Creativity Works & The Benefits of Vacation, The Atlantic by Jonah Lehrer

Why Your Brain Needs Vacations By Elizabeth Landau, CNN May 24, 2011 

Love your Brain, Love your Body, Love your Life- Turn on Your Good Genes For a Happier Healthier You

It seems that a new Swedish study has shown that exercise does way more than toning and burning calories. It found that exercise uses muscles that activate genes that promote fat-burning, prevent disease and disability; along with boosting energy and brain power. And, the benefits kick in with-in minutes of your first steps, so you win every time you move, whether it’s a lunch time stroll or an all-day bike ride.  This doesn’t mean you are changing your genetic code, it means that you are turning on inactive genes; you have the power to turn on the good guys and tone down the not-so-helpful types, some of the gene-flipping benefits are:

Mega-protection against cancer - it revs up more than 100 genes that fight against cancer.

More fat-burning brown fat - exercise activates a newly discovered enzyme, irisin, that turns bumpy, bulgy white fat into easier to use brown fat.

A younger heart - turns on the genes that help heart-muscle cells divide, this helps your heart work better.

Leaner, cleaner liver - sticking to a regular exercise routine turns off genes that encourage extra fat to move into your liver, and turns on genes that produce proteins that tells the fat to move on out. A leaner liver protects against diabetes and heart disease.

Exercise is not your only tool for do-it-yourself genetic engineering. A diet devoid of the five food felons; saturated fat, trans fat, added sugar, syrup and any grain that is not 100% whole along with managing stress, keeps disease fighting and energy giving genes turned on too.  All together you can turn on over 500 healthy genes.  With your body working more efficiently your brain is healthier as well, it’s just a win win.

Remember these daily tips:

Aim for 30 minutes of exercise

Get your dose of fruits, veggies, 100% whole grains, lean protein, nuts and Omega-3 fatty acids.

Include a stress reliever such as yoga, simple stretching, walking or laughing with your kids, whatever works for you.

Oregonian 4/17/12 Dr’s Oz and Roizen

It's Report Card Time

It’s the end of the quarter for most schools in our area, parent teacher conferences are scheduled and report cards are ready.  If you find things aren’t going as well as you would like or even discouraging, there are a few things you can do to help your child succeed.

1. Get your child an Agenda Book to keep track of daily assignments and homework. Check off the assignment when it’s completed and turned in. You, as a parent need to check it daily.
2. Get to know and understand your child’s teacher and their teaching style and expectations. 
3. Understand your child’s dominant learning style; is it kinesthetic, auditory or visual. If the teacher isn’t meeting your child’s learning style you can help at home. With the agenda book filled out properly you can adapt the lesson to your child’s learning style.
4. If your child continues to struggle, then maybe there are underlying issues that need to be addressed. Synergy Training Center has a thorough Cognitive Assessment that can diagnose issues such as ADD, ADHD, Auditory & Eidetic Dyslexia or lack of bi-lateral brain integration.  We also offer a non-medication solution to these issues that is a permanent fix.

If you have questions regarding your child, please call and schedule a free, no obligation appointment to discuss your options. We are here to help.

Does Selenium in Seafood and Fish Protect Against Mercury Toxicity?

By Brierley Wright, M.S., R.D., "Ask Brierley," March/April 2012 EATINGWELL MAGAZINE

Since fish is one of the best "brain" foods, we wanted to share some new information we found in this article from EatingWell Magazine.

A common concern when choosing seafood is mercury. And for good reason: mercury binds up selenium, an essential mineral that's vital to the developing brain and nervous system.

But here's the good news: eating ocean fish that contain more selenium than mercury protects against mercury toxicity.

Ocean fish (e.g., halibut, salmon) and shellfish (e.g., lobster, crab) are chock-full of the mineral: 17 of the top 25 selenium food sources are seafood (it's also in red meat, eggs and chicken).

The fact that most ocean fish are so high in selenium explains why more and more research suggests the benefits of eating seafood outweigh any risks mercury exposure could pose.

Bottom Line: Kids, women who are or could become pregnant and nursing women should follow the EPA's advice to avoid shark, swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish (they contain mercury levels that can be higher than or equal to selenium). But it appears to be unnecessary to limit albacore tuna to 6 ounces a week, says Nicholas Ralston, Ph.D., health effects research program leader at the University of North Dakota. "Like most varieties of ocean fish, tuna contain mercury, but provide far more selenium."

Final's Week Tips

It’s finals week for many high school and college students. Synergy Training Center would like to offer a few tips for having a successful week.

Remember to:

1. Get plenty of sleep, try to get 8 hours. Cortisol levels go up when you are stressed, sleep helps alleviate some of that stress, which will give you better cognitive performance and recall the next day during your test.
2. Eat wisely during the entire week. Plenty of brain food; whole grains, fish, nuts, seeds, fresh fruit and veggies. Minimize your intake of processed & fast foods, sugar and pop.  Healthy, light snacks between meals can help keep blood sugar stable for a long day of testing.
3. Hydrate - 1/2 your body weight in ounces is a minimum requirement for keeping your body and brain well hydrated.
4. Don’t stop your exercise routine during finals week. Exercise, throughout heavy study periods, can increase blood supply, oxygen and neural connections, it also reduces stress.  Even a 15 minute study break and some kind of exercise, can rejuvenate the brain.
5. As much as possible, keep a regular routine of meal times, exercise, waking up and bed times.

Get your mind right - like an athlete prepares for competition your brain needs to be put right. Go into finals week as if it is your March Madness, it’s the most important competition at the moment. Focus on each class as a different game. Think only of that one test, keep your head in the game. Then, when you have finished, move on to the next “game”; don’t dwell on what you couldn’t or didn’t know on the last one, it’s over and done. Keep your thoughts on the moment at hand for each test.

Love your Brain, Love your Body, Love your Life Benefits of Stress Management and Dementia / Alzheimer’s Prevention

As we discussed in December, stress takes a toll on our body and our brain.  Stress raises your cortisol and adrenalin levels, which in excess, damage the cells in the memory center of your brain, block neurotransmitter function and cause injury to brain cells; stress is also linked to high blood pressure, high cholesterol & heart disease. High Cortisol levels impact the ability to learn and retain new information (short-term memory loss). As stress and cortisol levels increase, so does your chance of developing memory loss.

What’s worse, as we age or develop an illness, you naturally have decreased ability to handle stress and lower your blood cortisol levels; damaging the brain cells, a situation that affects all areas of your memory and overall brain health.

Controlling your daily stress is a vital part of an Alzheimer’s prevention strategy. Studies show there is a high correlation between having high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and/or high cortisol and the onset of Alzheimer’s. Stress has been shown to be a key factor in all these conditions.

Managing stress requires regular effort. Applying the stress management tips we shared last month go along way in keeping our brain and body in good health:

• Laughter
• Targeted nutrition
• Quality sleep
• Good hydration
• Regular exercise

You may also include these proven techniques to get your stress levels in check:

• Breathe! Stress alters your breathing rate and impacts oxygen levels in the brain. Quiet your stress response with deep, abdominal breathing. Restorative breathing is powerful, simple and free!
• Schedule daily relaxation activities.  Make relaxation a priority, whether it’s a walk in the park, playtime with your dog, yoga, or a soothing bath.
• Nourish inner peace. Most scientists acknowledge a strong mind-body connection, and various studies associate spirituality with better brain health. Regular mediation, prayer, reflection, and religious practice may immunize against the effects of stress.

Remember, you can manage your stress if you choose to. Love your brain now for a long, happy, healthy future.

Synergy Training Center

Alzheimersprevention.org

Helpguide.org

Love your Brain, Love your Body, Love your Life - Enrich your Life and Arm Yourself with a Weapon to Fight Alzheimer's, Targeted Nutrition

What is Targeted Nutrition? Feel a cold coming on? Eat an orange or other citrus fruit, why? High in vitamin C. Finished a workout? Hydrate and eat a banana to replenish lost fluids and potassium. These are just a couple of examples of “Targeted Nutrition” that help our body function properly or maintain good health. Why would it be any different for our brain? Your brain is only 2% of our body mass, yet it uses 20% of the body’s energy, it needs massive amounts of energy, in comparison with the other organs in our body. It also needs the proper materials (targeted nutrition) to build, heal and grow itself. 

What does our brain need and want?

• Vitamin C & E - Antioxidants are for cell protection from free radicals.
• Vitamin D - for focus and concentration.
• B vitamins -  for memory, nerve, cell and neurotransmitter function.
• Vitamin K - enhances cognitive function.
• Calcium - improves nerve function.
• Magnesium - improves blood flow.
• Zinc - memory and thinking skills.
• Choline - aids in memory and brain development.
• Omega 3 Fatty Acids (ALA, EPA, DHA) - improves communication between the cells; attention management, and mood balancing. Also contain anti-inflammatory substances.
• Glucose - supplies your brain’s energy; your body creates it from the carbohydrates you eat, your brain needs at least 125 to 150g per day to function. Be careful, too much is counter productive.

How can we get all these “brain boosting” nutrients? Let’s look at some super brain foods.

1. Wholegrain Foods - whole grain bread, oatmeal, brown rice, barley, popcorn etc. Supplies, glucose, vit. B6.
2. Walnuts - omega-3 & 6, vit. E, vit. B6
3. Cashews - magnesium
4. Almonds - riboflavin (B)
5. Pecans & peanuts - choline
6. Blueberries - have compounds that turn on key systems in the brain to enable proteins to help with memory or other cognitive skills. An antioxidant.
7. Strawberries - antioxidant, improves communication among brain cells.
8. Blackberries - antioxidant, particularly anthocyanins, which fights degenerative brain diseases.
9. Sunflower seeds - thiamine (B vitamin), boosts mood and brainpower.
10. Pumpkin seeds - zinc, vit. A & E, omega-3 & 6.
11. Freshly Brewed Tea- enhances memory, focus, fights mental fatigue. Contains polyphenals (antioxidant) which help maintain a steady supply of glucose.
12. Eggs - choline, antioxidants.
13. Avocados - contain mono-unsaturated fats to help maintain healthy blood flow.
14. Tomatoes - lycopene (antioxidant).
15. Broccoli - a super food due to its overall nutrient content; for your brain it’s Vit. K.
16. Red Cabbage - polyphenol (antioxidant).
17. Spinach - slows down the effects of age-related declines in brain function, helps protect from oxidative stress. Improves learning capacity and motor skills.
18. Yogurt and Calcium rich foods - improve nerve function. Yogurt contains an amino acid called tyrosine which is responsible for producing the neurotransmitter dopamine and noradrenalin.
19. Chocolate! - Dark and Milk - antioxidant, enhances mood, focus and concentration. MORE IS NOT BETTER, indulge in moderation :o)
20. Beans - stabilize glucose levels; 1/2 cup every day.
21. Wild Salmon, sardines & herring - rich in Omega-3 fatty acids.

Eat with your brain in mind, it’s the greediest organ in the body, keeping it properly nourished is vital to creative thought, positive mood, memory and overall good health.

Love your Brain, Love your Body, Love your Life Alzheimer’s - Enrich your Life, Enrich your Brain

Neuroscientists are confirming that being proactive in choosing a healthy, enriched, well balanced lifestyle, may be the best way to maintain your overall health and reduce the risk factors for the development or advancement of Alzheimer’s and related dementias. It’s never too early or too late begin.

These five factors are valuable tools that you have control of:
1. Targeted Nutrition
2. Stress Management
3. Structured Aerobic Exercise
4. Cognitive Fitness
5. Social Interactions

During this month, we will discuss each of these items in detail and how it pertains to your brain’s long-lasting health.

Love your Brain, Love your Body, Love your Life

5 Ways to Help Train your Brain

The brain is a very complex organ, however, in some ways it is very simple, and can be compared to your muscles; If you don’t use it, you will loose it! 

There are many levels of training your brain, everything from Synergy’s M5 Performance Training Programs, to simple things you can do in your everyday life. Don’t let modern conveniences do the work for your brain! Remember if you don’t use it, you will lose it! Here are 5 easy ways to help train your brain and keep it sharp without a lot of time or expense.

1. Do your own math! You can check it with a calculator afterwards, but do it yourself. It exercises your brain to keep it sharp.
2. When using spell check on your computer don’t just click on the correct word, go back and type it correctly by hand! It anchors it in the brain and retains it for next time. Clicking on the word the computer gives you, does not.
3. Remember to turn off your own head lights on your car! If you have a car that turns them off automatically after a time, don’t let it. By training yourself to do it after parking and before turning off the engine it trains your brain how to sequence steps and improves short term memory.
4. When shopping, take the time to do good comparison of quantity vs. cost and quality on products! This will exercise several processing programs in the brain, integrating them together and help you make a smarter purchase.
5. Park you own car! If you have a car that parks itself don’t use it unless you have real issues, if you do, you need more serious therapy training than these tips. By parking your own car you train your brain’s eyesight processing and spacial recognition processing, this integrates the two programs together, making you more efficient.

What other things in your life are doing your brain’s job?

Check back for more training tips and also inquire about Synergy’s Brain Training Programs. Remember use it or lose it! Good Luck.

Love your Brain, Love your Body, Love your Life

We hope your first week of the New Year went well and continues to get better each week as the year goes on.

We have two topics for January on our Love your Brain, Love your Body, Love your Life campaign.  The first is brain fitness, yes you heard me, brain fitness. Not psychology, but actually making your brain stronger, so you can think faster, focus better and remember more.  Every year we set goals to get our bodies in shape, Synergy Training Center would like to help you get your brain in shape. Train your brain and your body will follow.

Second topic is Alzheimer’s. January is Alzheimer’s awareness month, we can all agree this is a terrible disease that is growing at an enormous rate affecting nearly every family. According to the Alzheimer's Foundation, an estimated 5.4 million Americans of all ages have Alzheimer’s disease in 2011. We want to do everything we can to either help for a prevention of this disease or help in dealing with the disease.

Check back often as tips and information on these topics will be posted each Monday and Thursday.  The more we know, the more we can do to have a better brain, better body, better life.