Health - Advanced Chiropractic of South Carolina

Apr 22 2019

Leftovers

We have a standing joke in our family that helps us to laugh off what would otherwise be a very dangerous situation.

My mother is a saver. She saves rubber bands, paper, string, paper clips, plastic bags, etc. You get the picture. And any chance she gets, she makes sure to reuse these items in some way.

She is clearly on board the reduce, recycle, reuse bandwagon. And I, for one, am very proud of her.

Until she appeared at my house one day with a big garbage sack filled with styrofoam containers she has been saving from her hamburger and chicken purchases.

“Look what I brought you!” she exclaimed as she separated the styrofoam platters by color, yellow, pink, and blue.

I knew exactly what they were, but I didn’t know she’d been saving them.

“I brought them so that after our big family gathering today, everyone can take home leftovers.”

My face tried to smile, but my stomach lurched and I’m sure I turned a little green. You see, I studied microbiology in college. I know what goes on just beyond our ability to see with the naked eye. And while styrofoam is an excellent primary choice for packaging our raw meat to get it home from the supermarket, it cannot be sterilized.

I repeat, it cannot be sterilized.

That means that those piles of styrofoam containers now gracing my kitchen counter were teeming with invisible but potentially deadly pathogens that my mother wanted to send home with my brothers and sisters, their spouses, and their sweet children.

Just to be sure, I quickly got on my computer and fortunately the University of Illinois had recommended against the re-use of styrofoam meat packaging trays because they are filled with tiny bubbles that harbor those ugly little microbes.

I thanked my mother and put all the trays back in her garbage bag and then sterilized my counter in order to get our big family pot-luck going. I also quietly passed the word from one sibling to the next.

Soon I saw one of my nephews get up and quietly go out the front door. When he returned he had big bags of to-go containers he had just purchased at the store. His timing was perfect. We managed to put all leftovers that my family wanted to take home with them into the new containers that could be washed and sterilized.

After everyone was gone, I explained to my mother the problem with saving meat trays and using them for food storage later. I’m glad I didn’t embarrass her in front of all my siblings because she was very upset at the thought of poisoning her grandchildren. I’m sure she figured my siblings and I had lived this long, she doesn’t have to worry about us.

But please, if you know anyone who tries to be similarly environmentally conscientious pass the word on about styrofoam.

Image: The Weather Up Here: Thanksgiving Leftovers (all neat and tidied up!!!)

Apr 22 2019

Mistakes We Make in Relationships

Where do we get our beliefs about love? Usually we get them from people around us, our parents, grandparents, neighbors, friends. We also derive some of our believes about love and relationships from the books we read and the movies we watch.

Unfortunately, Hollywood and the magazines at the cash register at the grocery stores do not give us good advice about relationships. And when we derive our beliefs about relationships from these sources, when we hit a bit of a bump, we begin to wonder what is wrong with us. Why do other people have seemingly easy relationships while ours is always so rocky? What might be just a small problem could be blown out of proportion and you might end up breaking it off with the person who would have been perfect for you.

What are the most common mistakes we make in relationships?

One is that we feel if we have any doubt whatsoever about our relationship we are with the wrong person. Unless you are a truly gifted seer, you will never know without a doubt, anything. Life is full of uncertainties and having doubt about a decision as major as a relationship is a perfectly natural thing. I have doubts about whether I will like a pair of hiking boots two years down the road. How could I not have doubts about the person I hope to spend the rest of my life with?

You don’t need butterflies in your stomach or have your foot pop on your first kiss to be with the right person. Hollywood has taken these signs of infatuation and turned them into some kind of demonstration of true love. Sorry kids, but the fairy tales ended when you became an adult. There are no princesses and no knights in shining armor. True love can be found among the very real men and women we meet on a daily basis. They are human, filled with the very human qualities of tenderness and fear, anger and deep love. Humans are not created by design. Real love between two people requires that each one be open and honest with one another, and commit to traveling together through life regardless of how hard it may become.

Sorry, but please don’t go looking for some kind of “sign” that this is true love. You have to trust.

What if you don’t miss one another when you part for a few days. Does that mean you really aren’t in love? No, I say that means that you are fulfilled and not a needy person. You will likely reflect that to your partner, and when you reunite your relationship will continue to be genuine, warm, and healthy. When you miss one another to such extremes as shown in movies, you might be dealing with a personality type that will make a mature relationship difficult.

When you wonder about your relationship, evaluate whether you are measuring it against a real and honest example from real life, or are you hoping for that “happily ever after” ending that will never happen?

Two Hearts in the Sand by Gerhard Lipold

Apr 22 2019

Discriminating Doctors – Not a Happy Thought

If you are a woman, overweight, and have to go to the doctor, prepare yourself. There is a very serious problem with our doctors in this country and that is they discriminate against obese women.

They claim that they do not.

But as awareness to this problem rises, more and more women are speaking up about the problem. And the problem is more than just shaming women about the weight they carry, but doctors are misdiagnosing because they tend to focus too much on a woman’s weight than listening to her symptoms.

One woman went to the doctor after twisting her ankle. Her doctor said it was just swollen because she was carrying extra weight. A cursory look at the x-ray confirmed his diagnosis and she went home to ice and elevate her foot. She felt ashamed and humiliated at the experience.

After a week of enduring continuing pain in her foot, she sought a second opinion and another doctor who viewed the original x-ray saw that she had indeed fractured her ankle.

If the first doctor hadn’t determined that her swollen ankle was due to her weight, he probably wouldn’t have missed the fracture in the x-ray. In all ways, we tend to see what we expect to see.

Weight stigma is getting worse in America and health care providers, surprisingly, are the worst critics. Many studies confirm this as an overarching problem among doctors, medical students, nurses, nutritionists, dietitians, and other health care professionals.

If you work in the health care industry, pay attention because you might be unconsciously judging a woman based on her weight and not on her symptomatology. A research study in 2003 surveyed nearly a thousand primary care physicians and more than half of them used derogatory terms for their overweight female patients. They used terms such as “ugly,” “unattractive,” “noncompliant,” weak-willed,” “sloppy,” and “lazy” among other terms.

Further studies have determined that women don’t even have to be obese to suffer from this characterization. Women who are only fifteen pounds over their ideal weight also suffer from that same stigma.

Men, on the other hand, can be up to seventy-five pounds overweight before doctors demonstrate the same type of judgment. That is a significant gender difference.

But the real problem is that women who suffer from the stigma of being overweight when they seek medical attention are often shamed to the point that they don’t return to their doctor for followup. They miss basic health screening exams because they find it far too painful to pay a health care professional to disrespect them by judging them based on how much they weigh.

What doctors seem to miss is that most obese women don’t want to be obese. Yet they are judged as being weak-willed and lazy when the very thin patient sitting next to them doesn’t exercise, doesn’t eat a healthy diet and consumes gallons of sugar-laden drinks.

Most women feel that no matter what they go to the doctor for, they are told that if they lose weight it would improve their symptoms. If practicing medicine were really that simple, why then do health care practitioners spend all those years going to school?

One would think that as educated as they are, physicians and other health care professionals would be able to rise about a social prejudice that is not only unfair, but consigns overweight women to substandard health care.

Doctor and Stethoscope by George Hodan

Apr 22 2019

Foods You Should Freeze for Future Use

Not only is it more economical to run a freezer full of food, it’s also an excellent reason to freeze foods that you find on sale. When I can find things that I love to eat, they’re in season, fresh, and a good price, then I buy a lot more than I can easily eat in a short time frame because I know I can store them in the freezer for future use.

All you need are freezer bags or freezer containers and a way to label the bag or container with the contents and the date they were frozen and a “use by” date.

Please don’t skip this step. I have a couple of times, and once something has been frozen for a little while, you may (will) forget what was in the container, how long it has been there, and how you might want to use it. I once froze two mouthwatering pieces of filet mignon but didn’t label them. I figured that we never have something that wonderful in the freezer. I couldn’t possibly forget.

But I did. And when I did finally thaw them out, they had been pushed to the back of the freezer, unnoticed for over a year. I tried to cook them, but they were horrible. Since that time, I have never forgotten to label my packages going into the freezer.

Here are a few things you can freeze that you might have otherwise overlooked:

1. Fresh Corn on the Cob. No need to even husk the stuff, just break off most of the stalk end, place in airtight freezer bags and prepare for some delicious corn mid-winter when your palate will really appreciate it. When it comes to room temperature, cut about an inch off the stalk end, then pull the top of the husk off and all the corn silk should come off at the same time. Fresh from the farm corn lasts nearly a year in the freezer.

2. Avocados. You read that right. Yes, you can freeze avocados. But, they will be in better shape for something like guacamole than cubes for a fresh salad. Freezing avocados does change the texture just a little bit, but as guacamole, it is fabulous. Prepare avocados as if making guacamole by pitting and peeling. I like processing a whole bunch up in the food processor with some fresh lemon juice. Then package them in the smallest freezer bags you can find so that you don’t thaw more than you can use at one meal. Fill the bags, be sure to squeeze all the air out, then freeze flat. After they are frozen, they will stack nicely in a bin that you can label if you don’t want to label all the individual bags. You can store these for up to six months this way.

3. Hummus. While hummus is really easy to make, it is even easier to make a big batch all at once and then freeze what you don’t eat. This way you only have to prepare hummus a couple of times a year, package it in freezer bags. Again, use small bags. I like to have hummus ready to throw in a lunch bag, so I try to do single servings for the freezer. Drizzle just a little bit of olive oil before removing all the air from the bag, press flat as you did with the avocados and once frozen store in a bin or box that is labeled.

4. Buttermilk. I can’t count how many times I’ve gotten a quart of buttermilk to make pancakes or biscuits and then put it at the back of my refrigerator only to discover it a couple months later turning into a science experiment. Once I learned to freeze my leftover buttermilk, I have never wasted a drop. Once frozen, buttermilk doesn’t taste quite the same if you want to drink it, but for cooking and baking, it is perfect. It lasts about 3 months in your refrigerator freezer, and about six months in a deep freeze.

5. Flour and nuts. Unless you go through things like flour and nuts very quickly, it is always best to store any extra in the freezer. Nuts tend to turn rancid when it is warm and flour can become rancid or develop meal worms. They will last indefinitely in the freezer.

Fresh Corn Detail by Petr Kratochvil

Apr 22 2019

Snack Smart

Is there really such a thing as smart snacking? Yes indeed! We have to get over our hangups about food and the word “snack” because it has gotten some very negative connotations. It almost seems to imply that if you snack, you are overweight because you can’t keep yourself from eating.
For some people, that could be true, but generally snacking can be a very healthy way to approach your relationship with food. As long as you understand how to “snack smart” you’ll find it to be helpful with your efforts at weight loss.
Snack when you are truly hungry. Not because your diet plan says you should snack. Every person is different, so to think that a single published diet plan will work well for everyone in your office, you’re mistaken. Certain meals digest more quickly than others and if you are genuinely hungry and your next meal is some time in the future, having a snack is not only smart, but everyone around you will be grateful. When our blood sugar drops, we often become agitated, irritable, and downright grumpy. But remember that a snack is exactly that, it shouldn’t replace a meal, so keep your snack small.
Avoid mindless snacking. Some people think that grazing is just snacking all day. Not so. Snacking is eating a small serving of something in between your regular meals. Grazing takes all the food you would normally eat in your three regular meals a day and eat just that throughout the day. Grazing is a different approach to eating. However, neither method is ideal because our bodies are designed to basically fast between meals.
Mindless snacking includes eating when you are emotionally charged. You’re bored, you open the refrigerator. You’re mad, you tear into a bag of chips. You’re upset, the ice cream in the freezer is sure to make you feel better. These emotional responses to food have absolutely nothing to do with feeding our bodies the nutrition they need and everything to do with responding emotionally by turning to food.
Before you ever put a snack into your mouth, take a mind/body scan and ask yourself why you’re eating that snack. A mindful approach to snacks can help you to see that perhaps a quick walk around the building might be a better way to blow off steam than eating a bag of high-fat, high-sodium, high-carb chips. Start to notice what triggers your need to snack and eat the snack only if you are truly hungry. If the issue is something other than hunger, take a moment to figure that out.
By noticing true hunger, having healthy snacks available, and being mindful about your eating habits, you, too can snack smart.

Popcorn Snack Food Sweet Crunchy by Summer Woods

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