Choosing the Healthiest E-Juice: E-Liquid Ingredients Explained

Vaping is about 95 percent healthier than smoking, according to Public Health England, mainly due to the lack of combustion. When you light a cigarette on fire, it produces more than 4,000 chemicals, at least 40 of which are known carcinogens.

Vaping uses heat instead of flame to produce a vapor from your e-juice, automatically making it a safer alternative. The only chemicals you’ll encounter are those used as ingredients, and you can keep those at a minimum.

Standard E-Liquid Ingredients

Most e-liquids contain the chemicals of propylene glycol (PG) and vegetable glycerin (VG), along with optional nicotine and some type of flavoring. PG and VG are both generally recognized as safe for ingestion by the Food and Drug Administration, and both are widely used in a variety of consumer products.

• Propylene glycol is frequently found in asthma inhalers, and it produces a sensation similar to smoking. PG is responsible for producing the throat hit vapors experience, and it’s also useful for carrying the flavor.

• Vegetable glycerin has a range of uses, including keeping baked goods moist. It adds a hint of sweetness to e-liquid while helping to produce large vape clouds.

• Nicotine is optional in most e-liquids, available in a range of levels. E-juice manufacturers may offer levels that start as high as 18 mg and dip all the way down to 0 mg. The healthiest option here would be an e-liquid with no nicotine.  

• Flavoring can be derived from a natural extract or man-made from synthetic ingredients. The best way to avoid unnecessary chemical additives is to opt for flavoring created using natural extracts, such as the tobacco extract used in Black Note e-juice.

Other Possible Ingredients

Manufacturers may use a combination of natural and artificial flavorings in their e-liquids, with many ingredients carrying no known risks. Ingredients you may run across include:

• Acetyl pyrazine: Organic compound for graham cracker-like flavor
• Ethyl maltol: Organic compound for sweet flavor
• Linalool: Component in flower, plant and fruit essential oils for herbal flavor
• Malic acid: Organic compound for fruity and sour flavor
• Tobacco absolute: Tobacco extract for tobacco flavor
• Vanillin: This vanilla bean extract component for vanilla flavor

Ingredients to Avoid

While there are many components used for flavoring in e-liquids that have no known risks, a few of them are better off avoided. These include diacetyl, acetoin and acetyl propionyl.

• Diacetyl is a buttery flavoring that has been associated with lung disease. Alternatives to diacetyl include acetyl propionyl and acetoin. 

• Acetyl propionyl may carry risks similar to diacetyl. 

• Acetoin is not known to be hazardous on its own, but it may contain traces of diacetyl.

For the healthiest vaping experience, it’s essential to know what’s in your e-liquid. While many ingredients may not come with any known risks, make sure you’re aware of those that do. The safest route is always the best route. This particularly holds true if you’re turning to vaping for a healthier alternative to smoking and you want to make vaping as healthy as it can be.

SOURCES:
http://www.quitsmokingsupport.com/whatsinit.htm
https://www.blacknote.com/whats-in-vape-juices-and-is-it-safe/
https://www.blacknote.com/vaping-side-effects/
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/456704/McNeill-Hajek_report_authors_note_on_evidence_for_95_estimate.pdf

This is a guest blog entry.

Sports and Broken Legs: What You Should Know

If you’re a serious basketball fan, you’ve likely seen one of your favorite players get injured in the course of a season and have to miss weeks or even months of games while rehabilitating.

Injuries are common for some sports, especially team sports that require physical body contact with other players. Although the risk might be discouraging for some people, sports and physical activities are good for your physical and mental health. You only need to be aware of sports-related injuries such as fractures and how to manage them, as accidents do happen.

What is a Fracture?

A fracture occurs when a bone in the body cracks or breaks. Fractures are generally classified as compound or simple. In a compound or open fracture, the broken bone punctures through the skin while in a simple or closed fracture, the skin remains intact but there might be an obvious deformity. Signs and symptoms usually include swelling, pain, and limited movement in the injured area.

Athletes may suffer from fractures as a result of repetitive stress or due to a strong impact from an outside source that exceeds the bone threshold.

Broken Bones in the Lower Body

In the United States, approximately 35 million young people participate in different types of sports. Sports-related fractures are more common in men than women and are usually acquired from football, rugby, and skiing. Reported cases of fractures typically involved the upper limb, including the fingers, the wrist, and the arms. Although fractures in the lower limb are less common, fractures caused by stress are increasing in number and 90% of these are located in the lower extremities.

First Aid

Fractures from competitive sports are not usually life-threatening but these injuries require immediate care. If a healthcare professional is not around during the incident or is still on the way, here are some of the things you can do to help prior to their arrival.

Recognize the symptoms

If a person has a broken bone in his or her body, there can be:

• Pain in the area that intensifies upon movement
• Numbness
• Swelling and bruising
• Obvious deformity
• A bone visibly piercing through the skin
• Bleeding
• Injured extremity is shorter than the other

Stop the bleeding

Use a clean piece of cloth to apply direct pressure to the wound without moving the bone.

Stay still

Let the person stay as still as possible and immobilize the injured area using a splint.

Cold compress

Apply a cold pack to the affected area to help reduce the swelling and relieve pain.

The Road to Recovery

It usually takes 6 to 12 months for the bones to heal significantly. The doctor or surgeon will be the one to determine if the bones are fully recovered and if the patient is allowed to bear weight again in that area. This depends greatly on the location of the fracture, its severity, and the surgical procedure done.

While on the recovery stage, it’s best to wear leg sleeves which can help relieve pain, reduce inflammation, and speed up your recovery time. If you are not sure what leg sleeves to get, you can check out this list.

There are also a few things you can do at home to help you on the road to recovery.

Adjust your home environment to aid your temporary needs.

If you are using crutches, a cane, or a walker, ask your family and friends to help you make your home fall-proof.

• Rearrange the furniture to make navigation within your house easier.
• Remove rugs or fix them to avoid tripping.
• Make sure your house is well-lighted.
• Keep a phone at an arm’s reach so that it’s easy to call for help in case something bad happens.

Do physical and mental exercises

Aside from working on your rehabilitation exercises as often as prescribed by a specialist, you also need to make sure that you are mentally and emotionally healthy, as disabilities often take a toll on the human spirit.

• Have a support team to help you gain a positive outlook.
• Do puzzles, play video games or other board games.
• Communicate with friends and family daily.
• Participate in social events.

Recovering from a fracture takes time and patience. Bone remodeling, the process of bone formation, requires a lot of energy. To help your bones and soft tissues with the healing process, increase your intake of high-calorie foods. Protein is also a key ingredient in repairing injured tissues so incorporate protein-rich foods in your diet as well.

This is a guest blog entry.

10 Clever Ways to Trick Your Child into a Healthy Lifestyle

Everyone tried to escape their veggies when they were younger, but these days, the health hazards your children face are far more critical. From endless fast-food chain restaurants which offer popular toys with their meals, to eyes glued to touch screens which exercise nothing but their thumbs, it’s no wonder that the numbers of overweight children only continues to rise.

Parents have the thankless duty of pulling their kids out of these bad habits before they get older and the side effects become more difficult to reverse. But how do you get them off their devices and onto their feet? How do you get them to eat their greens? Simple: make the process seem like fun with a little bit of sneaky magic trickery! And here are 10 ways to do just that:

1. Make Healthy Food More Exciting
If your child has already sworn off broccoli, it’s not going to be easy to change their mind. But what if bits of the vegetable worked as the hair on top of a friendly face? Get artistic, mix colors to create culinary masterpieces, perhaps organizing fruit/veggies into animal shapes, or cookie cut them into various unrecognizable sizes, served like a tasting board of fun.

2. Disguise Healthy Food
If the above fails, why not use camouflage? Bake fruit into a low-calorie cake, or blend veggies into a tasty smoothie “milkshake”. Many parents have sworn by the entertainment value of dipping carrots or peppers into hummus or flavored yogurts, encouraging their kids to experiment and enjoy these foods.

3. Get Them Involved
No matter how old your child is, if they are part of the preparation team, there will be an additional sense of pride towards the final result. Allow them to pick out a few choice ingredients, give them a simple mealtime responsibility, and then enthusiastically educate them about the advantages of each nutritious food group along the way.

4. Select the Right Toys
Promote physical and mental development by researching the healthiest entertainment for kids on the market, such as water paints for creativity, building blocks for cognitive progression, video games which encourage physical activity (like Nickelodeon Fit), or colorful hand exerciser and stretcher products (like therapy putty) for strengthening their growing wrists and fingers. You’ll probably want to get involved with the fun too!

5. Have a Dance
Whenever you find a spare moment in the day, put on your child’s number one song and jump around the living room with them for as long as you can keep up. Dancing is a great way to increase the heartbeat and stretch the body out, not to mention that they will have no idea they are even exercising.

6. Play Outdoor Games with Them
Avoid the word “exercise” and replace it with more thrilling alternatives, such as “tag”, “swimming”, “trampoline jumping”, or “bike riding”. Even taking them to the zoo, the beach, or an amusement park will secretly promote a lot of healthy walking time.

7. Make It Competitive
Nothing will bring out the fire in your children quite like a little bit of a neighborly challenge. Set up a competition around a safe obstacle course or a friendly sporting game, and invite your kids as well as their friends to get involved. If no friends are around, challenge your child yourself, or express doubt that they can beat their previous record time.

8. Reward Them
With any of these suggestions, you are guaranteed success if you offer something concrete for their efforts, which doubles up as a great introduction to the capitalist system anyway. It doesn’t even have to be anything of significant value either, for example: allowing them to stay up 10 minutes past their bedtime, choosing tonight’s dinner, or simply a golden star stuck to their forehead. These prizes should be enough incentive to inspire your children to chase that warm sense of achievement, just like everyone does.

9. Encourage Barefoot Activities
An often overlooked trick is to remove your children’s shoes as often as possible. Considering that their developing feet will be responsible for a lifetime of balance, posture, growth, and functional nerve receptors, it is always recommended to introduce their toes to every different texture available. And, of course, they will adore the free feeling this practice provides.

10. Be a Good Influence
Finally, if you are overweight yourself and plagued by bad habits, it won’t take long until your child mimics these behaviors. Lead by example and use your young ones as motivation, by participating in all of the above suggestions too. And then before you know it, you will have even tricked yourself into a healthier lifestyle.

This is a guest blog post.

Understanding Parkinson’s Tremors

One of the hallmark symptoms of the neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson’s is tremors, affecting about 80% of those with the disease. Understanding the types of tremors and how they are treated, may equip someone with Parkinson’s and their caregivers with tools to better manage the disease and improve day to day life.

What Causes Parkinson’s Tremors?
Different than other conditions like multiple sclerosis where tremors are most prominent with purposeful movement, Parkinson’s tremors often occur when limbs are at rest. Why exactly? The overall nature of Parkinson’s disease is a dysfunction of motor control centers due to damaged and dying nerve cells in the brain.

A decrease in dopamine production, a critical neurotransmitter, disrupts the normal communication processes between cells which help control body movements. When dopamine receptors are not sufficiently stimulated it causes a chain reaction in the brain of irregular neural impulses. As the motor cortex receives more and more irregular input from the thalamus which helps control motor and sensory signals, symptoms including tremors, bradykinesia (slowed movements), contractures, and balance problems.

Tremors specifically are believed to be the result of decreased thalamic output due to overstimulated of the globus pallidus interna (GPi), nuclei in the basal ganglia of the brain which regulate muscle tone. Skeletal muscles are voluntary which means they need specific signals from the brain to move, flex, etc. When those signals go haywire, you get movement dysfunction such as tremors.

What do Parkinson’s Tremors Look like?
While Parkinson’s tremors most often appear first in the hand, leg, or arm (and typically starting on just one side of the body), they may also present in the jaw, face, and feet. A cardinal Parkinson’s tremor is referred to as a “pill rolling tremor” because it looks like someone rolling something small, like a pill, between their thumb and forefinger, almost like a finger twitch.

Tremors in the leg when standing or lying down, as well as tremors in the hand when sitting, standing, or lying down, are often decreased when purposeful movement is taken like adjusting posture, reaching for something, or walking. Tremors may begin as minimal involuntary shaking, quivering or spasming and progress to very visible and disconcerting shaking that affects one or both sides of the body.

A clinical diagnosis from a neurologist will usually help someone with these types of tremors deduce whether Parkinson’s disease could be a factor. Other accompanying symptoms like lack of facial expressions, not blinking, not swinging arms at one’s side when walking, muscle stiffness and rigidity, and slowed movements contribute to a proper diagnosis.

Managing Parkinson’s Tremors
While some medications are used specifically to target tremor-type symptoms with dopamine-replacement therapy, there are also non-medicinal ways to mitigate the effect tremors have on your daily living at home:

• Use a self-stabilizing spoon or other specially designed flatware which employs motion-sensing technology to counteract tremors when eating.
• Keep up with aerobic exercises and low-impact activities which aid muscle flexibility, coordination, and balance (i.e. yoga, swimming, cycling, etc.)
• Occupational and physical therapy can also re-train the body to better manage motor symptoms
• Home health equipment like shower chairs, bed rails, and grab bars can simplify daily tasks and provide support and stability as tremors worsen
• Tremors in the jaw and tongue may subside in part by chewing gum

Combined with slowed movements, muscle rigidity, and postural instability, tremors can increase risk for someone suffering from Parkinson’s to experience a debilitating, even potentially fatal falls. Taking precautions in the home to prevent falls can therefore significantly improve their health outcomes.

Fall prevention starts with clearing away unnecessary clutter from common walkways, as well as removing trip hazards like cords and curled up carpet corners. People with Parkinson’s and their loved ones may also consider installing fall mats by couches and beds where a lot of standing and sitting happens.

This is a guest blog post.

What Is So Important About The Stress Hormone Cortisol?

Cortisol is actually a key hormone in your body and regulates many of the daily processes; these include your immune response and your metabolism.

It is important to be aware that your body is a complex piece of machinery. There are thousands of different chemical processes which are carried out every day, disrupting even one of these can make a difference to your health.

Unfortunately, cortisol can disrupt nearly all of them! There is a good reason for this but, what really makes cortisol so important is modern society!

Stress

In times of stress your body releases the hormone cortisol. It has one predominant purpose, to prepare your body for a fight or to run away.

This is a primitive response but an essential one; in a life threatening situation you need to either run, or fight, potentially to the death.

The release of cortisol prevents many of your normal chemical processes from working. All available energy is redirected to your muscles; ready for action. Your body will also stock up on fat reserves, making you hungry; this is to help you survive if you have to flee.

The problem is that when your normal processes are prevented from working you’ll find there are drops in key chemicals. Men will notice a drop in testosterone. In fact, it is worth having your testosterone levels checked regularly by a reputable firm. A quick search online will reveal a number of hormone test providers, testochecker is one which works hard to get you fast results.

How Modern Life Affects This Process

Releasing cortisol in a life or death situation is essential and the prevention of your normal process is acceptable. However, this is supposed to be a short term thing and your hormone levels will return to normal.

The problem is that your body doesn’t know the difference between an armed robbery which threatens your life and a stressful meeting at the office. Cortisol is released in both situations.

In short, your body is stressed the majority of the time and the result is an inability for your body to perform correctly.

The real reason cortisol is so important is that it prevents your body from working normally.

Dealing With Stress

There are many techniques for dealing with and limiting stress. Of course you can’t simply avoid stress altogether but you can choose moments to completely de-stress.

Yoga, physical exercise and even reading can all help to take your mind away from the stress of modern life. In fact any activity that you enjoy will enable you to put your worries aside and allow you to de-stress.

To ensure that your approach is effective it is advisable to have regular hormone tests. This will help you to detect any issues in your body while making sure that your cortisol levels are right.

Cortisol has an important role to play in your body but it must be in the right context. You need to monitor your hormone levels and periodically reduce your stress to ensure you retain the best possible health.

This is a guest blog entry.

How to Select the Right Medicine Ball

Medicine balls are fantastic workout tools that have proven their value time and time again. In fact, the use of medicine balls in workouts can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece!

Sure, the availability of medicine balls may have been more limited back then, but tracking down the right medicine ball today can also be a difficult task. Finding the best medicine ball can involve a number of factors, depending on a person’s physical size, as well as their fitness aims.

What are the uses of medicine balls?

Medicine balls can be used in a variety of ways, but a couple of areas are most common. Chiefly, medicine balls are used for power, strength, and endurance training exercises. Medicine balls can be used as a standalone fitness tool, or as part of a wider fitness regime, used in tandem to other strength exercises such as pushups to build overall muscle mass.

Beyond gym sessions and regular workouts, medicine balls can also be used for physiotherapy and other forms of rehabilitation. The diversity of all these uses means a medicine ball is a wonderful addition to any home gym, personal training regimen, or even a lounge room or office.  This is especially so as just like a bicycle or skipping rope can be used for a variety of training options, no matter how a medicine ball is used, it is always a fun piece of equipment to have.

How to choose the right medicine ball?

Medicine balls come in a number of shapes and sizes, and each size can provide different benefits. As a rule, a good fit in a medicine ball will be one that (roughly) fits the diameter of the user’s shoulders. For this reason, someone with narrow shoulders will require a different size of medicine ball compared to someone with broad shoulders.

As well as matching the diameter of the user’s shoulder, a medicine ball should also be properly weighted for the exercise it is used for. While plyometrics exercises will generally employ a smaller and lighter medicine ball, strength training and resistance exercises will require a heavier ball.

To some degree medicine balls can be used interchangeably - so two people with roughly the same shoulder width could use the same medicine ball - but it depends on an individual’s build. There are three main types of human body builds - ectomorph (slim shoulders), mesomorph (regular shoulders), and endomorph (wide shoulders).

The type of build an individual has will inform the type of medicine ball they choose, as an ectomorph build should avoid using a medicine ball that would best suit an endomorph’s build.
The same rule applies vice-versa.

What else is important to know about medicine balls?

It is also important to consider whether a medicine ball will be used with other equipment. For anyone that is engaging in plyometrics workouts - AKA pylos or jump training - a medicine ball is selected that can be used in complement to the pylos steps.  A medicine ball that may be perfectly suitable when used as a standalone tool could be too heavy for pylos and endanger a user or be too small and ineffective in use.

Over time it is completely fine for a user to increase the weight of their medicine ball as their strength and fitness increases, but maintaining a cautious approach to the use of medicine balls is essential. Just like any other weighted workout tool, the extra weight can come with extra risks, so careful use is a must.

Final thoughts

The addition of a medicine ball to regular physical exercise can provide a number of great benefits across the board whether it is for strength building, cardio fitness, or more serious physiotherapy and rehabilitation. While the benefits are numerous, there do remain two key factors that are very important when it comes to using a medicine ball.

First, that a medicine ball is selected that suits the physical size, fitness, and overall goals of its user. Secondly, that a medicine ball is introduced into physical exercise gradually. Like any activity, gradual incorporation is ideal to prevent the risk of injuries due to ‘too much too soon’.

This is a guest blog entry.