As we gear up for another holiday season and setting goals for the New Year, health consciousness will be on the rise. Forty-one million Americans are members of a gym or health club – though how many of them actually go on a daily basis is debatable. This is where apps and devices come in. Mobile fitness apps allow consumers to take personalized health and fitness programs into their own hands – literally. There are about 100,000 health apps available in major app stores (iOS, Google Play, etc.), and the top 10 generate up to 4 million free and 300,000 paid downloads every day. If you are in the health and wellness app market, here are a few of the best to download. Muscle Pain Relief Stretches Stretching is one of the easiest things you can do for your body. It helps increase flexibility, blood flow to your muscles, and extend the range of motion for your joints, decreasing the risk of activity-related injury. Muscle Pain Relief Stretches is one of the most straightforward, clear, and easy-to-follow apps to help you learn basic stretches at home. You can personalize your stretching routine based on goal (such as pain relief or

You’ve likely already heard the news: the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a well-respected agency within the World Health Organization (WHO), announced last month that processed meats, like hot dogs, ham and sausage, cause colon cancer. Before you reach any conclusions based on the initial announcement, I’ll take you through the basics of the report and how it actually affects you. This is not the first time connections have been made between processed meats and cancer. Research has shown for years that certain types of cancer, such as cancers of the colon, prostate, and pancreas, are more common among people who eat an abundance of red and processed meat. What makes this new report different, and so buzzworthy, is how thorough it is. The IARC evaluated more than 800 studies of the association of cancer and eating processed or red meat, as well as cancer incidences within populations of diverse diets over the past 20 years. The report officially classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen – the same category as smoking and alcohol – and red meat as a “probable carcinogen” due to limited evidence, known as Group 2. While this may sound alarming, these groups

Drinking eight glasses of water a day is the key to hydration – or so they say. Of course, water accounts for 60% of our body weight, so it is important that we get enough. One of the longest-running medical myths is that eight glasses of water each day will keep you hydrated and healthy. Recently however, there have been some articles debunking this myth. A 1945 recommendation from the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council appears to be the origin of the “8 glasses a day” theory. The statement reads: “A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 liters (8.5 glasses) daily in most instances…. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.” Water is in nearly all the food we eat. It is in fruits, vegetables, juice, tea and coffee, and even in meat, poultry, fish and eggs.  While too much coffee can dehydrate you, some research shows that when it is consumed in moderation, it provides similar hydration benefits as pure water. If you are consuming food and beverages high in water content, you are most likely consuming the water you need to stay hydrated for the day. However, the calorie-free benefit of drinking water for hydration outweighs the hydration benefits of juice or milk-and-sugar-laden coffee. When researchers study

What exactly is “staying in shape?” Does exercising twice a week with the same intensity as four times a week elicit the same results? A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t keep up with it consistently, you won’t see any physical gains; however, the number of days a week you should exercise depends on the type of results you’re looking for. First, getting some type of physical activity each day will help improve your overall health. Recently, Business Insider interviewed Rutgers University exercise scientist Shawn Arent about exercise frequency and how often we should work out to stay in shape. Getting moving is the first step towards improving on your health, but according to Arent, you won’t see much difference unless you begin exercising “a minimum of three days a week as a structured exercise program.” But there may not be an actual “magic number” for staying in shape. Different fitness programs will require different frequencies depending on your goals. Most experts will say that if you weight train consecutively throughout the week, you’re more at risk to overstress your muscles. Each time you work out, your muscle fibers experience some wear and tear. Your muscles require

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded last week for the discovery of artemisinin, an anti-malaria compound that can be used to treat deadly parasitic pandemics. The prize was divided, one half jointly to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura “for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites,” and the other half to Youyou Tu, “for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against malaria.” The Nobel Committee at Karolina Institute in Stockholm announced the winning drug therapies as having “revolutionized the treatment of some of the most devastating parasitic diseases.” Parasitic diseases such as river blindness and malaria are transmitted by insects such as black flies and mosquitoes, and are a deadly threat to about one-third of the world’s population. Avermectin, the drug developed by Dr. Campbell and Dr. Omura, treats a variety of roundworm infections; artemisinin, developed by Dr. Tu, is a drug that is a part of standard anti-malarial treatments and has reduced mortality rates of the disease. Following the award, there have been questions about whether the Nobel Prize has vindicated the modern science of pharmacology, research devoted to finding medicines in natural products. Both discoveries are derived from

Neck pain can be, well, a pain in the neck. For those who have a desk job, the likelihood of experiencing neck pain is much greater: sitting requires the heavy use of the muscles between your shoulder blades and surrounding your neck. Sitting at the top of your body, your neck’s health is dependent on the curvature of the spine and the position of the head. If the head and spine are not in proper alignment – for instance, while slouching – the neck is more susceptible to injury or painful conditions. Slouching is when the head to slants forward in front of the shoulders. The weight of this forward pull puts unwanted stress on the vertebrae of the lower neck and overworking shoulder muscles, causing counterbalance and pain. If you work in an office and sit at a desk all day, reducing neck soreness means paying attention to your body mechanics. Neck and back soreness are some of the most common workplace injuries, especially when you’re slouching in an office chair for a prolonged amount of time. Recent research shows that sitting can be harmful to your health beyond just simple muscle aches. The studies recommend following a 20-8-2

Degenerative disc disease is one of the most common causes of lower back and neck pain. The major cause of this degeneration is loss of blood supply and nutrition as the spine ages. This process can begin as early as 20 to 30 years old in some people. Symptoms can range from mild lower back stiffness or spasm, all the way up to severe and debilitating back pain that limits bending, sitting or moving.     The spinal disc is a gel-filled structure that acts as a “shock absorber” between the spinal vertebra. The healthy disc are made up of predominantly water, along with other proteins and collagen. As disc degeneration occurs, the discs begin to lose water content, or “dry out,” losing shock absorption function. In the young spine, the discs rely on transport from micro vessels in the adjacent bone to receive nutrients, expel waste products, and prevent degeneration. A compromise in this process as we age can be a significant contributor to degenerative discs and low back pain.  Recently, a prize-winning study recently published in SpineJournal examined how dynamic, loading-induced convective transport enhances intervertebral nutrition, ultimately slowing down or reversing the degenerative disc process. This study found that mechanical loading-induced convection may offer therapeutic benefits for degenerated discs by increasing the uptake of nutrients

Epidural steroid injections can be very effective for acutely reducing nerve pain; however, new research finds these injections may be unsustainable for long term recovery. The goal of epidural steroid injections is to relieve lower back pain, but also to be used in conjunction with a comprehensive rehabilitation program. The injection can provide sufficient pain relief to allow a patient to make progress with any rehabilitative stretching or exercising. However, the review suggests that perhaps short term pain relief from a steroid injection is not enough to decrease long-term surgery risk. Should a patient experience effective results from epidural steroid injections, they may return to receive up to three injections within a year. The research team reviewed 8 trials of spinal stenosis, 30 studies of radiculopathy, and 63 published reports about the use of epidural steroid injections for lower back pain. The most common conclusion was that steroid injections provide an immediate improvement in pain, patient function, and short term surgery risk; however, these improvements were small and had “no effect” on long-term surgery risk. Among the patients in the trials that involved spinal stenosis, the results showed no clear difference between a placebo and epidural injection. Researchers suggest that

When we’re young, we believe we can live forever. As we age, we understand that certain choices impact our health. In certain corners of the globe, known as “blue zones,” people tend to practice healthier choices, leading to longer and happier lives. A recent CNN article highlighted the way of life of octogenarians in the blue zone of Ikaria, an island off the coast of Greece where citizens live up to eight years longer than Americans on average and experience less disease. While none of these methods are guaranteed to produce a longer life, these life changes that follow their examples may help you to live happily and healthfully. Lower stress levels High stress levels are known to lead to an increased risk of disease. A study published in summer 2015 by the University of California in San Francisco found that women who experience chronic stress have lower levels of klotho, a protein that regulates aging and enhances cognition. The women in the study with clinically significant depressive symptoms had even lower levels of klotho in their blood versus those women who were stressed but didn’t experience as much depression. Warding off these high stress levels is important for increasing

Recent investigative research has shown that what doctors previously believed about how broken bones heal could be wrong: fibrin, a protein that was thought to play a major role in fracture healing, is actually not required in the process. Rather, the breakdown of this very protein is what’s necessary for proper repair. A research team at Vanderbilt University Medical Center recently investigated how fractures heal and the implications for how to promote fracture repair. What they found was that while many of the current protocols are based on using fibrin to promote healing, bone biology does not require fibrin to heal a fracture. During blood clotting, fibrin forms a mesh-like net of fibers that holds platelets in place to form the clot. When bones break, blood vessels break as well, and the fibrin proteins form these clots to stop the bleeding. What the researchers found is that while fibrin is essential for limiting hemorrhage, its removal – known as fibrinolysis – will actually help healing more so that blood vessels can grow and reconnect, instead of being trapped. Previously, scientists had assumed that fibrin helps the bone healing process by providing a clotting scaffold to support new bone formation. However,