Why Veggie and Steak Bowls Should Find Their Way Into Your Diet

As you enter the retirement years, a main goal held by many people is achieving a healthy lifestyle. Everyone loves those sweet and savory treats at times, but healthy food tends to make you feel better. Pinpointing healthy foods can be difficult at times, however. Mature adults will often turn to veggie and steak bowls as a way to stay healthy. Learn why these meals should find their way into your diet today.

Cutting Out the Carbohydrates

There are essentially no carbohydrates in a veggie and steak bowl. Rice, potatoes and other starchy foods are carbohydrates. Your body uses these nutrients to burn as fuel. However, you want the body to burn the fat already stored in the tissues. By reducing the carbs in your body, the muscles and other tissues burn your fat reserves instead. You'll lose weight while supporting your body with a strong balance of energy versus food.

Filling up on Fiber

Vegetables are naturally full of fiber. When you fill your bowl with veggies instead of carbohydrates, your digestive system benefits with the fiber necessary to clear out your intestines. You'll notice better digestion with solid regularity. As you age, your digestive system will often have problems with regularity. Vegetables are a better source of fiber compared to supplements. If you must decide between the two choices, natural foods will always win by comparison.

Benefiting From Protein Fullness

Your steak is a healthy choice regardless of the cut of meat. The body gains protein when you eat steak. Protein is a critical substance that supports the muscles, which translates into a strong skeletal system. Because protein takes time for the body to digest, you'll have a full sensation in your stomach for a lot longer than other foods. As a result, hunger won't overwhelm you until the protein finally moves through the system.

Diversifying Your Meals

No one can eat just one type of meal and be satisfied each day. Diversify your veggie and steak bowls during each meal. Pick different veggies to complement a particular meat, such as pork or beef. Saute or cook the veggies in various oils so that there's a complex, taste sensation with each meal. By diversifying the food, you won't be bored or tempted by other foods. You might even choose chicken as your steak meat to further diversify the ingredients.

Eating Out or In

It's possible to have a veggie and steak bowl whether you're eating out or staying in. Look for healthy eateries with these bowls as the stars of the show. Ask for the rice or carbohydrate to be removed from the bowl so that you can eat it as you desire. You have more control over the ingredients with a home-cooked meal, but it's nice to have a change as you celebrate a meal with friends.

Don't forget to fill your other meals with healthy foods too. Look for whole grains, such as quinoa, to cover your carbohydrate needs for the day. By selecting healthy foods in moderation, you'll feel and look younger than ever. Veggie and steak bowls are simply one part of a larger diet that can help you reach your 70s, 80s and beyond.

Why Happiness is So Important to Health

At this point, multiple researchers have uncovered quite a bit of evidence that negative emotions can damage your health. This damage can take a number of forms. In particular, experiencing stress during your earliest years can permanently change how your body responds to stimuli. When neglected or abused as children, people often develop "hair trigger" responses that exacerbate the stresses of ordinary life. These effects can manifest as unhealthy spikes in heart rate and blood pressure. Over the years, prolonged stress or fear can speed up the natural processes that lead to disease. 

So we can clearly see that negative emotions are clearly bad for your health. However, happiness is more than simply a lack of negative emotions. Researchers are still working to understand how active positivity could benefit your health. These processes appear fairly subtle and studying them is difficult. For one thing, it is simply easier to see the physical effects of negative emotions at work. Anxiety and anger cause immediate effects in your body, from raised cortisol levels to increased heart rate. On the other hand, it isn't so easy to clinically differentiate between a person with a neutral mood and a person who is genuinely happy. Researchers have worked around this problem by conducting long-term studies which monitor subjects' self-reported moods and health outcomes. 

Laura Kubzansky is one of recognized leaders in this field of study. In a 20-year study that ended in 2007, Kubzansky found positive health results for adults with enthusiasm, hope and personal engagement with life. Subjects who reported more of these positive qualities were significantly less prone to coronary heart disease. This particular study only looked at the health outcomes of people between the age of 25 and 74. However, it is safe to assume that maintaining these healthy attitudes can prove physically beneficial for people of all ages. 

Having a positive attitude can indirectly improve your life by helping you build and maintain a network of family and friends. Older adults and senior citizens with stronger social networks are prone to live longer lives. Thus we see that besides subjectively improving your life quality, maintaining a happy state may actually lengthen your life. While longevity is largely influenced by heredity, clinging to positive attitudes can certainly make a difference. 

Although researchers have certainly made some headway in exploring this issue, they will need to do a lot more work before the connections between positive emotions and health are fully clear. The research in this area remains controversial and fraught in some respects. During a time when the birthrate is low and our population is rapidly aging, society has a vested interest in improving the health of older adults. To further this goal, responsible stakeholders should work together to fully explore the positive effects health effects of positive thinking.

Why Are Lots of Babies Born around 8:00AM

The general view of childbirth is that it is pretty random and inconvenient, with babies arriving in the middle of other important events or in the middle of the night. Babies seem to come on their own time schedule and expectant parents often have to accommodate that, no matter how inconvenient it may be. But this general view is somewhat out of step with actual modern birthing practices.

Historically, this view was much more accurate than it is today. When childbirth was a more natural process simply because doctors did not know how to intercede, it did tend to be more out of the hands of the parents. However, these days there are three general birthing methods: natural, induced labor and C-section. The rise of scheduled C-sections accounts for a large part of the high number of morning births. 

Although babies tend to generally be born more during the day by all methods, C-sections are often scheduled ahead of time. Thus, they are heavily influenced by factors like hospital staffing. This contributes to the fact that when you break births down by the minute around the clock, you see 3.5 times as many births at 8 a.m. than at 3:09 a.m. These are the two extremes of most popular and least popular minute of the day for being born.

Currently, only half of U.S. births are "natural." This is defined as a vaginal delivery that has not been induced. Another 18 percent of births involve induced labor and the final 32 percent are C-section births. Both induced labor and C-sections are much more likely to happen during the day, with the largest spike occurring in the morning.

In fact, C-sections account for a large proportion of the births between 8 and 9 a.m. That one hour span sees 3.7 times as many C-sections as average. Total births are only up by 1.9 times the average delivery rate per hour and induced births are actually slightly less common at during that time.

Some of the factors influencing these statistics include older mothers having more children and women generally working more. Women with jobs, and especially women with serious careers, are more likely to schedule a delivery than full time homemakers. Many of them feel they simply cannot afford to have their lives so completely disrupted by waiting for the baby to show up on its own schedule.

Older women also may schedule a delivery due to complications that come from being pregnant while older or due to having had intervention from a fertility specialist. If more than one embryo was implanted and more than one took, the resulting twins or triplets are likely to come early and need more help.

So, there is nothing nefarious about the increase in C-sections. It generally grows naturally out of a changing world and changing lifestyles. In some ways, it is an indicator of the more empowered lives of the average American woman compared to how our mothers and grandmothers lived. It wasn't all that many decades ago that some women could not get a job without the permission of her husband. 

Due in large part to changing lifestyles, birthing practices have changed substantially. Scheduled C-sections are more common, and this fact largely accounts for the spike in births that occur around 8 a.m.

Don’t Make Me Yawn! Why We Can't Help But To Mimic Yawning

It's a fact that humans yawn several times a day, especially in the morning and evening. The science behind yawning isn't a fast-paced industry because most researchers believe that it's a function that has many causes or triggers. Narrowing down the reasons why humans yawn may be difficult, but most people understand that there's some mimicry or contagious factor in play. When you yawn, someone nearby may yawn too. Take a moment to learn about yawning and why it's mimicked among most intelligent organisms.

The Myth of Extra Oxygen

In the past, researchers believed that the yawning process was a mechanism to bring more oxygen into the body. When you saw a person yawn, your body responded at a primitive level to take in more oxygen too. Yawning involves a huge intake of air, but with little exhalation afterward. Although this hypothesis was a strong one, today's researchers understand that the bloodstream doesn't actually reflect an increase in oxygen after a yawn. Basic breathing is all that's necessary. With this fact in mind, researchers looked for other reasons why humans yawn and its contagious nature.

Your Hot Brain

The latest research suggests that yawning is meant to cool your brain. Your mind uses a lot of energy, and that fact makes it run hot. The scalp helps you release heat to the atmosphere through sweating. At times, however, your brain needs another mechanism to cool off. Yawning simply offers another cooling outlet. Mimicking a yawn means that your subconscious mind is keeping up with the surroundings. If another person is yawning, your brain may need cooling off too. 

Cooling Off

The brain cools off with yawns by accessing the incoming air. As you yawn, cool air moves into the nasal passageways where it can move through the sinuses. The bones and tissues cool off to a certain extent, which ultimately affects your brain. 

Environmental Cues and Circadian Rhythms

The body uses circadian rhythms throughout the day to keep up with waking-and-sleeping patterns. As you wake up, the brain starts its hard work for the day. Your brain's temperature rises high enough that a yawn may be necessary to cool it off. Researchers wondered at that point about bedtime yawns. It was presumed that the brain cools off in the evening, but it actually warms up as bedtime approaches. When you mimic yawns brought on by the circadian rhythms, it's a way to keep your body on track with waking and sleeping too.

The Empathetic Mind

A major part of mimicked yawning is your ability to have empathy for others. From a social aspect, you yawn with another person because you can put yourself in their shoes. This human connection means that you can relate to the acquaintance on a primitive level even if you don't know the person.

As you grow into your senior years, you'll have more time to contemplate some of these yawning scenarios. Think about your surroundings when you yawn along with the time of day. When it's possible to yawn around an average of eight times a day, observing your own behavior becomes a lesson in science and empathy.