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How do you fancy watching your own heart attack? Sounds absolutely terrifying to me, but it certainly made me want to learn more about “the most important 2 minutes of TV you’ll ever see”. The program will air in the UK on ITV1 on Sunday 10th of August at precisely 9.17pm.

The British Heart Foundation

The short program is brought to us by The British Heart Foundation (LINK) who are a UK based charity founded in 1961 by a group of medical professionals who were very concerned about the increase of deaths caused by heart related disease.

They focus their charity efforts in 3 main areas:

•    Investing in research
•    Support and care for patients with heart related diseases
•    Education for the public to help them to help themselves

Technorati Tags: british heart foundation, heart attack, heart attack prevention

I was interested in an article by Victoria Fletcher in the Daily Express on Friday 1st August. She writes about new research at the Centre for Developmental and Biomedical Genetics at Sheffield University in the UK which has discovered that taking garlic every day can be just as effective as drugs for lowering blood pressure.

Blood pressure reduction

In the research at Sheffield University those patients who took a garlic supplement every day for up to five months experienced a significant drop in their blood pressure. In some patients this reduction in blood pressure was the same as that experienced by patients who take drugs such as ACE inhibitors and beta blockers.

Dr Tim Chico, a cardiologist from the research team at Sheffield said: “The reduction in blood pressure is not trivial, it is the same as gained from taking pills.”

Technorati Tags: garlic benefits, high blood pressure, how to reduce high blood pressure

First, what is Diabetes?

Diabetes is a condition in which the amount of glucose (sugar) in the blood is too high because the body cannot process it properly. This process is normally carried out by a vital hormone known as insulin, which is produced naturally in the body by the pancreas and it helps the glucose enter the cells where it is used as a fuel by the body.

Type 1 Diabetes: this usually develops before the age of 40 and is the least common form of the disease. It occurs when the body is unable to produce any insulin.

Type 2 Diabetes: this usually develops after the age of 40, is generally associated with being overweight and accounts for the majority of all people suffering from the disease. The body can make some insulin, but not enough and sometimes the insulin produced just doesn’t work properly.

Technorati Tags: diabetes, diabetes type 2, reduce risk of diabetes, reduce type 2 diabetes, walking benefits

If you jog or exercise outdoors you will enjoy it so much more in the summer. None of that battling against the wind, rain and freezing temperatures (unless you live in the UK - Beeble). But remember to protect yourself properly against the damaging effects of the sun. The sun rays can cause skin cancer and have an ageing effect on the skin.

Skin Cancer

Here in the UK someone dies from skin cancer every four hours according to the British Association of Dermatologists and some newspapers have reported that this type of cancer is rising faster than prostate and breast cancers.

Here are some points to remember before you go training in the sun:

•    Wear a hat, sunglasses and cover up your body as much as possible – loose cool trousers rather than shorts
•    Remember that the sun can cause damage even on cloudy days

According to reports in several newspapers in the UK this weekend, research carried out by the University of Athens suggests there may be a link between inactive desk jobs and prostate cancer. Details of this were published on 4th July 2008 in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention.

The university compared a group of 320 men with prostate cancer with a similar group who did not have the disease. They discovered that those men whose jobs involved sitting for most of their working day were 30 per cent more likely to develop this particular cancer.

Dr Areti Lagiou, who led the research, stated that in 1997 physical activity was not even listed as a possible protective factor against prostate cancer. But he said that during the last decade there has been evidence that it may give protection.

Exercise helps prevent other cancers too…

Technorati Tags: cancer, Exercise, Health, prostate cancer, sedentary lifestyle, wellbeing