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AS her little girl pointed at her obese tummy and asked if she was pregnant, India Faulkner-Wiley's heart dropped.

The mum-of-two, 38, knew she'd piled on the pounds after developing an unhealthy addiction to takeaways and sweet treats.

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And she'd ballooned to nearly 12 stone and a dress size 16 after becoming a mum to her children Jazmine, 13, and Saffron, five.

But it was at that moment when Jazmine asked if she was having another baby that India knew she desperately needed to make a change and lose weight.

The former teacher, from Morecambe, Lancs, decided to sign up to Slimming World and has since shed an impressive three stone.

She said: Ive dropped four dress sizes and love the fact I can choose fashionable clothes straight off the rails rather than knowing they wont fit me right.

I am so proud of the shape Im in and, as a mum, I feel passionate about being a positive role model.

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India had always struggled with her weight since her teens but never knew how to lose weight.

She said: "The first time I realised my weight was a problem was when I was just 16.

"Id just been given a place at a performing-arts school and I was bigger than most of the other pupils.

"I had to no idea what to do about it, so I failed to lose any weight.

Id get self-conscious about my growing weight

"I went to university from college and became a teacher after I graduated.

"I fell into a routine and would eat snacks every time the kids had break time, then be so tired by the end of the day I would pick up a takeaway or a ready meal on the way home.

"I had regular glasses of wine in the week and rarely thought about fruit and vegetables.

"Every now and then, Id get self-conscious about my growing weight and try a fad diet you name it, I tried it.

"But even if I did shed weight, it wasnt much and it never stayed off."

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India continued to get bigger as she gave birth to her two children and went through a divorce in 2007.

"I got married at 22 and, after crash-dieting for two months, I walked down the aisle as a size 10 weighing 9.5st," India said.

"A year later I fell pregnant and I used pregnancy as an excuse to put my weight firmly to the back of my mind.

"Jazmine was born in September 2006 and I gained 4st, taking me to 13.5st and a size 16."I told myself it was normal as a new mum.

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"A year later, my husband and I divorced. Im definitely an emotional eater and this difficult time saw me reach for junk food.

"Sweets, takeaways and chips were my go-to foods and the weight piled on.

"I eventually moved on with a new relationship in 2010. I felt happy and secure and I fell back in love with food and my unhealthy habits.

Sweets, takeaways and chips were my go-to foods

"When I fell pregnant again, history repeated itself and the weight piled on.

"Saffron was born in May 2014, four weeks early, at home at 2am. It was a stressful time and, again, I forgot about my weight gain."

India ignored her growing waistline until a comment from one of her children gave her an extra incentive to slim down.

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Speaking about her wake-up call, India added: "It was only when, four months after the birth, Jazmine pointed at my tummy and asked if I was going to have another baby I realised I needed to change. Not with a fad diet but for good.

"An old friend had lost 5st in a year with Slimming World. Id seen her transformation photos on Facebook and was amazed.

"I asked her about what she was eating and she said shed never felt hungry the whole time."

India found her local group and brought along her mum Susan, 72, for moral support.

"All the food looked delicious and, in the first week alone, I lost 4.5lb," India said.

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"I loved all the recipes and pre-prepared my lunches so I had healthy food and snacks with me at all times.

"As the weight fell off, my confidence grew and, after two months, I started introducing Body Magic the Slimming World activity programme into my life, too.

"At first, I built more exercise into my normal day.

"I walked instead of driving and used a tracker to count my steps.

Since then, Ive joined a gym and enjoy regular spin classes, too."

India has now lost three stone and dropped four dress-sizes - and loves the fact she can now shop in high-street stores.

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"Even though my relationship didnt work out, being healthy and happy with my weight has helped me remain confident," India said.

"My friends and family have noticed such a massive difference in me and Im so proud of the shape Im in.

"As a mum, I feel passionate about being a positive role model."

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Weight loss: I lost 3st after my daughter pointed at my obese tummy and asked if I was having a baby - The Sun

Drake shocked many followers when he appeared to name his one-year-old son Adonis mom, Sophie Brussaux, a fluke in his new track When To Say When they usually took to Twitter to precise their opinions.

Drake, 33, obtained the eye of many Twitter customers on Mar. 2 when one of many lyrics in his new track When To Say When appeared to shade Sophie Brussaux, 30, the mom of his one-year-old son Adonis. Within the monitor, the rapper addresses his child mama and the way he feels about her. Child mama fluke, however I really like her for who she is the lyric says. Though he didnt name her by title, since he solely has one son, followers realized that he almost definitely meant Sophie and didnt maintain again on expressing their disappointment.

I simply heard that track on the radio the place Drake known as his child mama a fluke hes a really insecure man, one tweet learn. I like drake however calling his child mama a fluke ??? You a hoe drake, one other learn. Drake known as his child mama a fluke, I hope he is aware of that makes him a fluke too. Hes a POS, a 3rd tweet learn.

Not all Twitter customers have been indignant about Drakes lyrics although and a few even defended him. Drake mentioned his Child Mama a fluke & yall mad Lol Im positive he can name her no matter he desires she nonetheless smiling & flossing to the financial institution each month, one carefree tweet learn. Yall nervous about drake calling his child mama fluke however yall be getting known as bitches and smacked round by yall boyfriends each day Face with tears of joyFace with tears of joyFace with tears of pleasure, one other daring tweet learn.

Drakes line about his child mama in his new track comes as considerably of a shock contemplating that though he and Sophie, whos an artist, are not romantically concerned, they get alongside nicely. The doting mom, who primarily lives in France, has been noticed in Drakes hometown of Toronto, Canada greater than as soon as over the previous few months they usually have by no means publicly talked about one another in a adverse gentle earlier than Drakes newest monitor was launched on Feb. 29.

Sophie has but to talk out in regards to the line in Drakes new track, however well be looking out to see if she does. Within the meantime, were hoping these two are on good phrases for the sake of their son!

Read more from the original source:
Insurgent Wilson Reveals Off Her Weight Loss & Slimmer Waist In Tiny Ski Outfit Pics - BingePost

On the morning of March 1, 1954, a hydrogen bomb went off in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. John Clark was only 20 miles away when he issued the order, huddled with his crew inside a windowless concrete blockhouse on Bikini Atoll. But seconds went by, and all was silent. He wondered if the bomb had failed. Eventually, he radioed a Navy ship monitoring the test explosion.

Its a good one, they told him.

Then the blockhouse began to lurch. At least one crew member got seasicklandsick might be the better descriptor. A minute later, when the bomb blast reached them, the walls creaked and water shot out of the bathroom pipes. And then, once more, nothing. Clark waited for another impactperhaps a tidal wavebut after 15 minutes he decided it was safe for the crew to venture outside.

The mushroom cloud towered into the sky. The explosion, dubbed Castle Bravo, was the largest nuclear-weapons test up to that point. It was intended to try out the first hydrogen bomb ready to be dropped from a plane. Many in Washington felt that the future of the free world depended on it, and Clark was the natural pick to oversee such a vital blast. He was the deputy test director for the Atomic Energy Commission, and had already participated in more than 40 test shots. Now he gazed up at the cloud in awe. But then his Geiger counter began to crackle.

It could mean only one thing, Clark later wrote. We were already getting fallout.

That wasnt supposed to happen. The Castle Bravo team had been sure that the radiation from the blast would go up to the stratosphere or get carried away by the winds safely out to sea. In fact, the chain reactions unleashed during the explosion produced a blast almost three times as big as predicted1,000 times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb.

Within seconds, the fireball had lofted 10 million tons of pulverized coral reef, coated in radioactive material. And soon some of that deadly debris began dropping to Earth. If Clark and his crew had lingered outside, they would have died in the fallout.

Clark rushed his team back into the blockhouse, but even within the thick walls, the level of radiation was still climbing. Clark radioed for a rescue but was denied: It would be too dangerous for the helicopter pilots to come to the island. The team hunkered down, wondering if they were being poisoned to death. The generators failed, and the lights winked out.

We were not a happy bunch, Clark recalled.

They spent hours in the hot, radioactive darkness until the Navy dispatched helicopters their way. When the crew members heard the blades, they put on bedsheets to protect themselves from fallout. Throwing open the blockhouse door, they ran to nearby jeeps as though they were in a surreal Halloween parade, and drove half a mile to the landing pad. They clambered into the helicopters, and escaped over the sea.

Read: The people who built the atomic bomb

As Clark and his crew found shelter aboard a Navy ship, the debris from Castle Bravo rained down on the Pacific. Some landed on a Japanese fishing boat 70 miles away. The winds then carried it to three neighboring atolls. Children on the island of Rongelap played in the false snow. Five days later, Rongelap was evacuated, but not before its residents had received a near-lethal dose of radiation. Some people suffered burns, and a number of women later gave birth to severely deformed babies. Decades later, studies would indicate that the residents experienced elevated rates of cancer.

The shocking power of Castle Bravo spurred the Soviet Union to build up its own nuclear arsenal, spurring the Americans in turn to push the arms race close to global annihilation. But the news reports of sick Japanese fishermen and Pacific islanders inspired a worldwide outcry against bomb tests. Nine years after Clark gave the go-ahead for Castle Bravo, the United States, Soviet Union, and Great Britain signed a treaty to ban aboveground nuclear-weapons testing. As for Clark, he returned to the United States and lived for another five decades, dying in 2002 at age 98.

Among the isotopes created by a thermonuclear blast is a rare, radioactive version of carbon, called carbon 14. Castle Bravo and the hydrogen-bomb tests that followed it created vast amounts of carbon 14, which have endured ever since. A little of this carbon 14 made its way into Clarks body, into his blood, his fat, his gut, and his muscles. Clark carried a signature of the nuclear weapons he tested to his grave.

I can state this with confidence, even though I did not carry out an autopsy on Clark. I know this because the carbon 14 produced by hydrogen bombs spread over the entire world. It worked itself into the atmosphere, the oceans, and practically every living thing. As it spread, it exposed secrets. It can reveal when we were born. It tracks hidden changes to our hearts and brains. It lights up the cryptic channels that join the entire biosphere into a single network of chemical flux. This man-made burst of carbon 14 has been such a revelation that scientists refer to it as the bomb spike. Only now is the bomb spike close to disappearing, but as it vanishes, scientists have found a new use for it: to track global warming, the next self-inflicted threat to our survival.

Sixty-five years after Castle Bravo, I wanted to see its mark. So I drove to Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. I was 7,300 miles from Bikini Atoll, in a cozy patch of New England forest on a cool late-summer day, but Clarks blast felt close to me in both space and time.

I made my way to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where I met Mary Gaylord, a senior research assistant. She led me to the lounge of Maclean Hall. Outside the window, dogwoods bloomed. Next to the Keurig coffee maker was a refrigerator with the sign that read STORE ONLY FOOD IN THIS REFRIGERATOR. We had come to this ordinary spot to take a look at something extraordinary. Next to the refrigerator was a massive section of tree trunk, as wide as a dining-room table, resting on a pallet.

The beech tree from which this slab came from was planted around 1870, by a Boston businessman named Joseph Story Fay near his summer house in Woods Hole. The seedling grew into a towering, beloved fixture in the village. Lovelorn initials scarred its broad base. And then, after nearly 150 years, it started to rot from bark disease and had to come down.

They had to have a ceremony to say goodbye to it. It was a very sad day, Gaylord said. And I saw an opportunity.

Gaylord is an expert at measuring carbon 14. Before the era of nuclear testing, carbon 14 was generated outside of labs only by cosmic rays falling from space. They crashed into nitrogen atoms, and out of the collision popped a carbon 14 atom. Just one in 1 trillion carbon atoms in the atmosphere was a carbon 14 isotope. Fays beech took carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to build wood, and so it had the same one-in-a-trillion proportion.

When Gaylord got word that the tree was coming down in 2015, she asked for a cross-section of the trunk. Once it arrived at the institute, she and two college students carefully counted its rings. Looking at the tree, I could see a line of pinholes extending from the center to the edge of the trunk. Those were the places where Gaylord and her students used razor blades to carve out bits of wood. In each sample, they measured the level of radiocarbon.

In the end, we got what I hoped for, she said. What shed hoped for was a history of our nuclear era.

For most of the trees life, they found, the level had remained steady from one year to the next. But in 1954, John Clark initiated an extraordinary climb. The new supply of radiocarbon atoms in the atmosphere over Bikini Atoll spread around the world. When it reached Woods Hole, Fays beech tree absorbed the bomb radiocarbon in its summer leaves and added it to its new ring of wood.

As nuclear testing accelerated, Fays beech took on more radiocarbon. A graph pinned to the wall above the beech slab charts the changes. In less than a decade, the level of radiocarbon in the trees outermost rings nearly doubled to almost two parts per trillion. But not long after the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, that climb stopped. After a peak in 1964, each new ring of wood in Fays beech carried a little less radiocarbon. The fall was far slower than the climb. The level of radiocarbon in the last ring the beech grew before getting cut down was only 6 percent above the radiocarbon levels before Castle Bravo. Versions of the same sawtoothlike peak Gaylord drew had already been found in other parts of the world, including the rings of trees in New Zealand and the coral reefs of the Galapagos Islands. In October 2019, Gaylord unveiled an exquisitely clear version of the bomb spike in New England.

When scientists first discovered radiocarbon, in 1940, they did not find it in a tree or any other part of nature. They made it. Regular carbon has six protons and six neutrons. At UC Berkeley, Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben blasted carbon with a beam of neutrons and produced a new form, with eight neutrons instead of six. Unlike regular carbon, these new atoms turned out to be a source of radiation. Every second, a small portion of the carbon 14 atoms decayed into nitrogen, giving off radioactive particles. Kamen and Ruben used that rate of decay to estimate carbon 14s half-life at 4,000 years. Later research would sharpen that estimate to 5,700 years.

Soon after Kamen and Rubens discovery, a University of Chicago physicist named Willard Libby determined that radiocarbon existed beyond the walls of Berkeleys labs. Cosmic rays falling from space smashed into nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere every second of every day, transforming those atoms into carbon 14. And because plants and algae drew in carbon dioxide from the air, Libby realized, they should have radiocarbon in their tissue, as should the animals that eat those plants (and the animals that eat those animals, for that matter).

Libby reasoned that as long as an organism is alive and taking in carbon 14, the concentration of the isotope in its tissue should roughly match the concentration in the atmosphere. Once an organism dies, however, its radiocarbon should decay and eventually disappear completely.

To test this idea, Libby set out to measure carbon 14 in living organisms. He had colleagues go to a sewage-treatment plant in Baltimore, where they captured the methane given off by bacteria feeding on the sewage. When the methane samples arrived in Chicago, Libby extracted the carbon and put it in a radioactivity detector.. It crackled as carbon 14 decayed to nitrogen.

Read: Global warming could make carbon dating impossible

To see what happens to carbon 14 in dead tissue, Libby ran another experiment, this one with methane from oil wells. He knew that oil is made up of algae and other organisms that fell to the ocean floor and were buried for millions of years. Just as he had predicted, the methane from ancient oil contained no carbon 14 at all.

Libby then had another insight, one that would win him the Nobel Prize: The decay of carbon 14 in dead tissues acts like an archaeological clock. As the isotope decays inside a piece of wood, a bone, or some other form of organic matter, it can tell scientists how long ago that matter was alive. Radiocarbon dating, which works as far back as about 50,000 years, has revealed to us to when the Neanderthals became extinct, when farmers domesticated wheat, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written. It has become the calendar of humanity.

Word of Libbys breakthrough reached a New Zealand physicist named Athol Rafter. He began using radiocarbon dating on the bones of extinct flightless birds and ash from ancient eruptions. To make the clock more precise, Rafter measured the level of radiocarbon in the atmosphere. Every few weeks he climbed a hill outside the city of Wellington and set down a Pyrex tray filled with lye to trap carbon dioxide.

Rafter expected the level of radiocarbon to fluctuate. But he soon discovered that something else was happening: Month after month, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was getting more radioactive. He dunked barrels into the ocean, and he found that the amount of carbon 14 was rising in seawater as well. He could even measure extra carbon 14 in the young leaves growing on trees in New Zealand.

The Castle Bravo test and the ones that followed had to be the source. They were turning the atmosphere upside down. Instead of cosmic rays falling from space, they were sending neutrons up to the sky, creating a huge new supply of radiocarbon.

In 1957, Rafter published his results in the journal Science. The implications were immediately clearand astonishing: Man-made carbon 14 was spreading across the planet from test sites in the Pacific and the Arctic. It was even passing from the air into the oceans and trees.

Other scientists began looking, and they saw the same pattern. In Texas, the carbon 14 levels in new tree rings were increasing each year. In Holland, the flesh of snails gained more as well. In New York, scientists examined the lungs of a fresh human cadaver, and found that extra carbon 14 lurked in its cells. A living volunteer donated blood and an exhalation of air. Bomb radiocarbon was in those, too.

Bomb radiocarbon did not pose a significant threat to human healthcertainly not compared with other elements released by bombs, such as plutonium and uranium. But its accumulation was deeply unsettling nonetheless. When Linus Pauling accepted the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning against hydrogen bombs, he said that carbon 14 deserves our special concern because it shows the extent to which the earth is being changed by the tests of nuclear weapons.

Photos: When we tested nuclear bombs

The following year, the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty stopped aboveground nuclear explosions, and ended the supply of bomb radiocarbon. All told, those tests produced about 60,000 trillion trillion new atoms of carbon 14. It would take cosmic rays 250 years to make that much. In 1964, Rafter quickly saw the treatys effect: His trays of lye had less carbon 14 than they had the year before.

Only a tiny fraction of the carbon 14 was decaying into nitrogen. For the most part, the atmospheres radiocarbon levels were dropping because the atoms were rushing out of the air. This exodus of radiocarbon gave scientists an unprecedented chance to observe how nature works.

Today scientists are still learning from these man-made atoms. I feel a little bit bad about it, says Kristie Boering, an atmospheric chemist at UC Berkeley who has studied radiocarbon for more than 20 years. Its a huge tragedy, the fact that we set off all these bombs to begin with. And then we get all this interesting scientific information from it for all these decades. Its hard to know exactly how to pitch that when were giving talks. You cant get too excited about the bombs that we set off, right?

Yet the fact remains that for atmospheric scientists like Boering, bomb radiocarbon has lit up the sky like a tracer dye. When nuclear triggermen such as John Clark set off their bombs, most of the resulting carbon 14 shot up into the stratosphere directly above the impact sites. Each spring, parcels of stratospheric air gently fell down into the troposphere below, carrying with them a fresh load of carbon 14. It took a few months for these parcels to settle on weather stations on the ground. Only by following bomb radiocarbon did scientists discover this perpetual avalanche.

Once carbon 14 fell out of the stratosphere, it kept moving. The troposphere is made up of four great rings of circulating air. Inside each ring, warm air rises and flows through the sky away from the equator. Eventually it cools and sinks back to the ground, flowing toward the equator again before rising once more. At first, bomb radiocarbon remained trapped in the Northern Hemisphere rings, above where the tests had taken place. It took many years to leak through their invisible walls and move toward the tropics. After that, the annual monsoons sweeping through southern Asia pushed bomb radiocarbon over the equator and into the Southern Hemisphere.

Eventually, some of the bomb radiocarbon fell all the way to the surface of the planet. Some of it was absorbed by trees and other plants, which then died and delivered some of that radiocarbon to the soil. Other radiocarbon atoms settled into the ocean, to be carried along by its currents.

Carbon 14 is inextricably linked to our understanding of how the water moves, says Steve Beaupre, an oceanographer at Stony Brook University, in New York.

In the 1970s, marine scientists began carrying out the first major chemical surveys of the worlds oceans. They found that bomb radiocarbon had penetrated the top 1,000 meters of the ocean. Deeper than that, it became scarce. This pattern helped oceanographers figure out that the ocean, like the atmosphere above, is made up of layers of water that remain largely separate.

The warm, relatively fresh water on the surface of the ocean glides over the cold, salty depths. These surface currents become saltier as they evaporate, and eventually, at a few crucial spots on the planet, these streams get so dense that they fall to the bottom of the ocean. The bomb radiocarbon from Castle Bravo didnt start plunging down into the depths of the North Atlantic until the 1980s, when John Clark was two decades into retirement. Its still down there, where it will be carried along the seafloor by bottom-hugging ocean currents for hundreds of years before it rises to the light of day.

Some of the bomb radiocarbon that falls into the ocean makes its way into ocean life, too. Some corals grow by adding rings of calcium carbonate, and they have recorded their own version of the bomb spike. Their spike lagged well behind the one that Rafter recorded, thanks to the extra time the radiocarbon took to mix into the ocean. Algae and microbes on the surface of the ocean also take up carbon from the air, and they feed a huge food web in turn. The living things in the upper reaches of the ocean release organic carbon that falls gently to the seafloora jumble of protoplasmic goo, dolphin droppings, starfish eggs, and all manner of detritus that scientists call marine snow. In recent decades, that marine snow has become more radioactive.

In 2009, a team of Chinese researchers sailed across the Pacific and dropped traps 36,000 feet down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. When they hauled the traps up, there were minnow-size, shrimplike creatures inside. These were Hirondellea gigas, a deep-sea invertebrate that forages on the seafloor for bits of organic carbon. The animals were flush with bomb radiocarbona puzzling discovery, because the organic carbon that sits on the floor of the Mariana Trench is thousands of years old. It was as if they had been dining at the surface of the ocean, not at its greatest depths. In a few of the Hirondellea, the researchers found undigested particles of organic carbon. These meals were also high in carbon 14.

Read: A troubling discovery in the deepest ocean trenches

The bomb radiocarbon could not have gotten there by riding the oceans conveyor belt, says Ellen Druffel, a scientist at UC Irvine who collaborated with the Chinese team. The only way you can get bomb carbon by circulation down to the deep Pacific would take 500 years, she says. Instead, Hirondellea must be dining on freshly fallen marine snow.

I must admit, when I saw the data it was really amazing, Dreffel says. These organisms were sifting out the very youngest material from the surface ocean. They were just leaving behind everything else that came down.

More than 60 years have passed since the peak of the bomb spike, and yet bomb radiocarbon is telling us new stories about the world. Thats because experts like Mary Gaylord are getting better at gathering these rare atoms. At Woods Hole, Gaylord works at the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry facility (NOSAMS for short). She prepares samples for analysis in a thicket of pipes, wires, glass tubes, and jars of frothing liquid nitrogen. Our whole life is vacuum lines and vacuum pumps, she told me.

At NOSAMS, Gaylord and her colleagues measure radiocarbon in all manner of things: sea spray, bat guano, typhoon-tossed trees. The day I visited, Gaylord was busy with fish eyes. Black-capped vials sat on a lab bench, each containing a bit of lens from a red snapper.

The wispy, pale tissue had come to NOSAMS from Florida. A biologist named Beverly Barnett had gotten hold of eyes from red snapper caught in the Gulf of Mexico and sliced out their lenses. Barnett then peeled away the layers of the lenses one at a time. When she describes this work, she makes it sound like woodworking or needlepointa hobby anyone would enjoy. Its like peeling off the layers of an onion, she told me. Its really nifty to see.

Eventually, Barnett made her way down to the tiny nub at the center of each lens. These bits of tissue developed when the red snapper were still in their eggs. And Barnett wanted to know exactly how much bomb radiocarbon is in these precious fragments. In a couple of days, Gaylord and her colleagues would be able to tell her.

Gaylord started by putting the lens pieces into an oven that slowly burned them away. The vapors and smoke flowed into a pipe, chased by helium and nitrogen. Gaylord separated the carbon dioxide from the other compounds, and then shunted it into chilled glass tubes. There it formed a frozen fog on the inside walls.

Later, the team at NOSAMS would transform the frozen carbon dioxide into chips of graphite, which they would then load into what looks like an enormous, crooked laser cannon. At one end of the cannon, graphite gets vaporized, and the liberated carbon atoms fly down the barrel. By controlling the magnetic field and other conditions inside the cannon, the researchers cause the carbon 14 atoms to veer away from the carbon 12 atoms and other elements. The carbon 14 atoms fly onward on their own until they strike a sensor.

Ultimately, all of this effort will end up in a number: the number of carbon 14 atoms in the red-snapper lens. For Barnett, every one of those atoms counts. They can tell her the exact age of the red snapper when the fish were caught.

Thats because lenses are peculiar organs. Most of our cells keep making new proteins and destroying old ones. Cells in the lens, however, fill up with light-bending proteins and then die, their proteins locked in place for the rest of our life. The layers of cells at the core of the red-snapper lenses have the same carbon 14 levels that they did when the fish were in their eggs.

Using lenses to estimate the ages of animals is still a new undertaking. But its already delivered some surprises. In 2016, for example, a team of Danish researchers studied the lenses from Greenland sharks ranging in size from two and a half to 16 feet long. The lenses of the sharks up to seven feet long had high levels of radiocarbon in them. That meant the sharks had hatched no earlier than the 1960s. The bigger sharks all had much lower levels of radiocarbon in their lensesmeaning that they had been born before Castle Bravo. By extrapolating out from these results, the researchers estimated that Greenland sharks have a staggeringly long life span, reaching up to 390 years or perhaps even more.

Barnett has been developing an even more precise clock for her red snapper, taking advantage of the fact that the level of bomb radiocarbon peaked in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1970s and has been falling ever since. By measuring the level of bomb radiocarbon in the center of the snapper lenses, she can determine the year when the fish hatched.

Knowing the age of fish with this kind of precision is powerful. Fishery managers can track the ages of the fish that are caught each year, information that they can then use to make sure their stocks dont collapse. Barnett wants to study fish in the Gulf of Mexico to see how they were affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. Their eyes can tell her how old they were when they were hit by that disaster.

When it comes to carbon, we are no different than red snapper or Greenland sharks. We use the carbon in the food we eat to build our body, and the level of bomb radiocarbon inside of us reflects our age. People born in the early 1960s have more radiocarbon in their lenses than people born before that time. People born in the years since then have progressively less.

For forensic scientists who need to determine the age of skeletal remains, lenses arent much help. But teeth are. As children develop teeth, they incorporate carbon into the enamel. If peoples teeth have a very low level of radiocarbon, it means that they were born well before Castle Bravo. People born in the early 1960s have high levels of radiocarbon in their molars, which develop early, and lower levels in their wisdom teeth, which grow years later. By matching each tooth in a jaw to the bomb curve, forensic scientists can estimate the age of a skeleton to within one or two years.

Even after childhood, bomb radiocarbon chronicles the history of our body. When we build new cells, we make DNA strands out of the carbon in our food. Scientists have used bomb radiocarbon in peoples DNA to determine the age of their cells. In our brains, most of the cells form around the time were born. But many cells in our hearts and other organs are much younger.

We also build other molecules throughout our lives, including fat. In a September 2019 study, Kirsty Spalding of the Karolinska Institute, near Stockholm, used bomb radiocarbon to study why people put on weight. Researchers had long known that our level of fat is the result of how much new fat we add to our body relative to how much we burn. But they didnt have direct evidence for exactly how that balance influences our weight over the course of our life.

Spalding and her colleagues found 54 people from whom doctors had taken fat biopsies and asked if they could follow up. The fat samples spanned up to 16 years. By measuring the age of the fat in each sample, the researchers could estimate the rate at which each person added and removed fat over their lives.

The reason we put on weight as we get older, the researchers concluded, is that we get worse at removing fat from our bodies. Before, you could intuitively believe that the rate at which we burn fat decreases as we age, Spalding says, but we showed it for the first time scientifically.

Unexpectedly, though, Spalding discovered that the people who lost weight and kept it off successfully were the ones who burned their fat slowly. I was quite surprised by that data, Spalding said. It adds new and interesting biology to understanding how to help people maintain weight loss.

Children who are just now going through teething pains will have only a little more bomb radiocarbon in their enamel than children born before Castle Bravo did. Over the past six decades, the land and ocean have removed much of what nuclear bombs put into the air. Heather Graven, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, is studying this decline. It helps her predict the future of the planet.

Graven and her colleagues build models of the world to study the climate. As we emit fossil fuels, the extra carbon dioxide traps heat. How much heat were facing in centuries to come depends in part on how much carbon dioxide the oceans and land can remove. Graven can use the rise and fall of bomb radiocarbon as a benchmark to test her models.

In a recent study, she and her colleagues unleashed a virtual burst of nuclear-weapons tests. Then they tracked the fate of her simulated bomb radiocarbon to the present day. Much to Gravens relief, the radiocarbon in the atmosphere quickly rose and then gradually fell. The bomb spike in her virtual world looks much like the one recorded in Joseph Fays beech tree.

Graven can keep running her simulation beyond what Fays beech and other records tell us about the past. According to her model, the level of radiocarbon in the atmosphere should drop in 2020 to the level before Castle Bravo.

Its right around now that were crossing over, Graven told me.

Graven will have to wait for scientists to analyze global measurements of radiocarbon in the air to see whether shes right. Thats important to find out, because Gravens model suggests that the bomb spike is falling faster than the oceans and land alone can account for. When the ocean and land draw down bomb radiocarbon, they also release some of it back into the air. That two-way movement of bomb radiocarbon ought to cause its concentration in the atmosphere to level off a little above the preCastle Bravo mark. Instead, Gravens model suggests, it continues to fall. She suspects that the missing factor is us.

We mine coal, drill for oil and gas, and then burn all that fossil fuel to power our cars, cool our houses, power our factories. In 1954, the year that John Clark set off Castle Bravo, humans emitted 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air. In 2018, humans emitted about 37 billion tons. As Willard Libby first discovered, this fossil fuel has no radiocarbon left. By burning it, we are lowering the level of radiocarbon in the atmosphere, like a bartender watering down the top-shelf liquor.

If we keep burning fossil fuels at our accelerating rate, the planet will veer into climate chaos. And once more, radiocarbon will serve as a witness to our self-destructive actions. Unless we swiftly stop burning fossil fuels, we will push carbon 14 down far below the level it was at before the nuclear bombs began exploding.

To Graven, the coming radiocarbon crash is just as significant as the bomb spike has been. We're transitioning from a bomb signal to a fossil-fuel-dilution signal, she said.

The author Jonathan Weiner once observed that we should think of burning fossil fuels as a disturbance on par with nuclear-weapon detonations. It is a slow-motion explosion manufactured by every last man, woman and child on the planet, he wrote. If we threw up our billions of tons of carbon into the air all at once, it would dwarf Castle Bravo. A pillar of fire would seem to extend higher into the sky and farther into the future than the eye can see, Weiner wrote.

Bomb radiocarbon showed us how nuclear weapons threatened the entire world. Today, everyone on Earth still carries that mark. Now our pulse of carbon 14 is turning into an inverted bomb spike, a new signal of the next great threat to human survival.

Read more:
Nuclear Tests Marked Life on Earth With a Radioactive Spike - The Atlantic

Worried about gaining belly fat? Here are 5 healthy weight loss breakfasts to keep you full until lunch  |  Photo Credit: Getty Images

New Delhi: Skipping breakfast will not only affect your weight loss by setting you up for overeating later in the day,it may also put you on a fast track to several health problems, including heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol, mood swings, etc. A nutritious breakfast will make you feel full for longer while fueling your brain and body, giving your day a jolly good start.

That said, eating the wrong foods at breakfast can be far worse than skipping it. A healthy breakfast should include protein, fibre, whole grains, and good fats to provide you energy, make you feel full until lunch. So fill up your tummy with one of these healthy choices to start your day off right, help you fight belly fat and without the guilt.

Disclaimer: Tips and suggestions mentioned in the article are for general information purpose only and should not be construed as professional medical advice. Always consult your doctor or a dietician before starting any fitness programme or making any changes to your diet.

Continue reading here:
Worried about gaining belly fat? Here are 5 healthy weight loss breakfasts to keep you full until lunch - Times Now

Losing weight is a dream for almost all, few even go the extra yard to achieve this. One of the ways to shed some kilos is a popular weight loss programme General Motors Diet Plan.

The GM Diet Plan was believed to be a successful mantra, and is considered easy to follow; many nutritionists although do not recommend this plan. It results in immediate weight loss. It claims to shed 15-17 lbs in just 7 days! Critics believe that losing weight in such an abrupt manner could be harmful.

It was created in 1985 by General Motors to help its employees fighting obesity. The employees consumed low-calorie food on different days. By the end of the first week, the employees were found to have lost up to 17 lbs (7.7 kgs).

Low in Calories:

The diet plan is a low calorie food. If you consume low calories, your body shifts to a negative energy balance. This makes you lose weight quickly.

Boosts Metabolism:

The foods included in this diet plan are known to boost metabolism and keep your body in the fat-burning mode.

It includes negative energy foods that burn calories during digestion and processing. This helps one lose weight by burning calories even when one eats normally. It sounds good, but dietitians and nutritionists do not believe in the term negative calorie foods.

A Good Detox:

Consuming good and healthy food and staying hydrated helps you to flush out toxins.

Improve Digestion:

The fruits and vegetables in the GM diet contain dietary fibre, which helps improve bowel movement and digestion.

GM Diet plan:

Day 1

Eat as many fruits as you like. Berries, watermelons, and cantaloupes are recommended. Stay away from bananas on Day 1. Drink 8 to 12 glasses of water during the day.

Day 2

Consume only vegetables. Use olive oil for cooking (no deep frying) the vegetables. Drink 8 to 12 glasses of water.

Day 3

Consume fruits and vegetables. Avoid potatoes and bananas. Drink 8 to 12 glasses of water.

Day 4

Consume 8 (small) bananas and 4 glasses of milk (8 fluid ounces). Banana is a super food that helps to replenish our energy levels. Choose skim milk and avoid adding sugar or sweeteners.

You may consume a bowl of clear vegetable soup if it gets too monotonous. Drink 8 to 12 glasses of water.

Day 5

Have brown rice. Consume 6 large tomatoes. Non-vegetarians can consume chicken breast or fish. Vegetarians can consume tofu or cottage cheese. Keep yourself hydrated with water.

Day 6

Consume brown rice. Non-vegetarians can consume chicken breast or fish. Consume raw or sauted vegetables. Avoid potato. Keep yourself hydrated with water and/or strained fruit juices (without sugar or sweeteners).

Day 7

Consume brown rice. Have raw veggies. Have 4 glasses of fruit juices. Drink 8 glasses of water.

PNN

Originally posted here:
Do you want to get slimmer? Have this diet - OrissaPOST

I have been intentionally losing weight for a couple of years. I have now lost about 60 pounds and am at a weight that I havent seen in about 25 years.

I have noticed some interesting things about losing weight.

The first thing that has surprised me is that everyone that notices I have lost weight has said the same thing. Youve lost weight! Are you alright?

Yes, I am very well, thank you. I suppose it is because I am over age 60 that everyone assumes that I may be ill. Who knows, maybe I dont look so good? Anyway, I am doing very well and feel great!

The second thing I have noticed is that people seem surprised when they ask me how I lost weight and I simply say, I have been eating less food.

They are waiting for me to recommend some amazing trendy diet, exotic supplement that melts fat away, or an expensive weight loss plan. Many seem surprised that I dont even go to a gym.

I have studied weight loss for a number of years and at one time we offered a very successful weight loss plan in our office. There are a number of ways to successfully lose weight. To choose a method it is important to first decide on your true goals.

Unfortunately, most people are seduced by the ads that promise to help you shed 30 pounds in your first month. In the back of their mind, what they really want is to be slimmer and stay slimmer. In many cases they want to turn back the clock to an earlier time in their life before they gained excess weight.

But another part of their brain is easily enticed by the slick ads that promise quick results easily. Only in rare cases does quick weight loss equate to lasting weight loss. Usually the weight you lose quickly amounts to stored water that you will quickly regain.

So many people in our culture are overweight or obese that it can almost be universally said that practically everyone would like to lose weight. I was in that category for years, but didnt do much about it. Only when I took a methodical, persistent approach did I accomplish significant weight loss.

I checked my Body Mass Index (BMI) this week. I was pleased to note that while only a couple of years ago I was moving from the overweight into the obese category, now I am solidly in the normal category. That is a good feeling.

There are a couple of things that are important to communicate in this column. The first one is that for most people, notwithstanding specific medical or genetic disorders, it is indeed possible to lose all the weight you need to lose without resorting to gimmicky weight loss schemes. If the methods you have tried in the past have not worked, try a different sensible approach.

Secondly, weight loss that matters is fat loss. Losing a fast 10 pounds of water weight does nothing but dehydrate you and falsely elevate your ego for a few weeks. The weight that matters is excess fat. If you are overweight, you are too fat.

The next thing that is important to talk about is that it is fat you cannot see is affecting your health. You may look in the mirror and see that bulge in the belly, those thighs that bug you or a double chin that you wish would go away, but that is not the fat that matters most to your health.

It is the fat that has accumulated in places like your heart, blood vessels, liver, pancreas and other organs that matters. You cant see that fat, so you dont know about it unless a doctor tells you about it after some testing or imaging.

The good news is that as the visible fat of your body begins to disappear, so does the unseen fat that has invaded your organs. That is a slow process that requires months to years to reverse but it can happen.

Research has proven that it is possible.

In fact, research has proven that it is possible to actually slow or even reverse a number of diseases and health conditions, including Type 2 diabetes, by losing weight. That sentence really should say losing fat because it is the invisible internal fat loss that matters most and that happens only from true slow methodical fat loss.

So many people have just quit even trying to lose weight and resigned to being obese, thinking there is just no way to successfully lose the excess weight. If that is your thought, I urge you to reconsider. It is possible to regain a healthy weight with the right, sensible approach. Your health will benefit, you will feel and look better and you will save a lot of money in future healthcare expenses.

Dr. Mark Kestner is a licensed chiropractic physician in Murfreesboro. His office is at 1435 NW Broad St. Contact him at mkestner@DrKestner.com.

Read more from the original source:
The secret to losing weight is there's no secret - Murfreesboro Post

Hitting the pool is the best bang for your buck

Ive always been a big fan of the water. At six months old, I took the first plunge into the pool and have been in love with swimming ever since. Whether it was participating on the swim team, swimming in the ocean or enjoying a few recreational laps, the activity has always been near and dear to my heart.

Swimming makes me feel a rich mixture of varying emotions. The feeling of cool water rushing on me makes me feel incredibly at peace; the splashing of the water simultaneously induces a jolt of energy rush through me. Through swimming, I find refuge after a long day of work and studying.

I strongly recommend swimming to everyone because of its extraordinary benefits. The activity offers a wide range of advantages that other cardio activities like running and kickboxing can simply not compete with a perfect combination of muscle building and cardio gains, comfort and a low amount of strain.

Swimming truly is the best cardio exercise for building a great figure. The activity burns a significant amount of calories, making it a great fat burner: doing the freestyle or butterfly stroke burns 300 and 450 calories, respectively. Not only does the activity help with weight loss, but it also aids in maintaining and strengthening muscles. It works every single muscle across your body from your arms to your back to your legs, and the fact that water is far more resistant than air allows you to make significant gains quickly. If you want to concentrate on a particular part of the body, there are a variety of easy-to-use equipment to help you in your goal. For instance, for building up the legs and core, you can use a kickboard. If you want to help get ripped chest and arms, you can put a pull buoy between your legs to isolate those muscles. If you are bored with just your body weight, you can try adding some weights to your routine like adding light weights to your ankles to spice it up.

Critics of swimming point out that other cardio exercises are much better at fat loss than swimming. Running, for instance, burns far more calories on average than swimming, cycling or downhill skiing. Although running and some other cardio activities may offer better fat burning results, they neglect the muscle building component that is critical to a balanced workout with both strength and cardiovascular benefits. Long-distance running actually hurts strength gains because it shrinks muscle fibers. Although other versions of running, particularly sprinting, can lead to good muscle gains, they lack the whole body benefits of swimming because they just concentrate on the lower body predominantly.

The other big benefit of swimming is it is a fairly comfortable exercise to do. Because the water temperature is generally kept around 77 to 82 degrees Fahrenheit, your body is working out in perfect temperature that is neither too hot or too cold: you wont be sweating or shivering to death. In the case of other cardio activities, on the other hand, it could get really uncomfortable really quickly. Imagine dancing or riding a bike while being covered in an ocean of sweat. Moreover, exercising too much, especially in high amounts of heat, could lead to heat exhaustion, whose symptoms include nausea and even fainting. Fortunately, swimming prevents heat exhaustion due to the moderate temperature the pool would be in.

The last great benefit of swimming is the low impact on the joints. Because you wouldnt be slamming your body against hard ground while swimming, the stress on bones, ligaments and tendonsare minimal: thats why many doctors recommend the activity for people with injuries and ailments like arthritis and multiple sclerosis.

While exercising, it is important to make sure you follow a regime that strengthens the body in the long-term rather than obtaining short-term gains and long-time complications as in other cardio options. Kickboxing, which involves kicking heavy bags and people as well as jumping motions, is especially hard on the knees. Running does not help either: a whopping 79 percent of runners will develop some sort of injury annually due to the high-impact nature of the sport.

With all the combined benefits of the sport, swimming clearly ranks king of all other cardio activities. Understanding these benefits makes it clear why swimming is the most popular recreational activity among children and adolescents and the fourth most popular recreational activity overall in the United States, besides the fact that it is really enjoyable to do. So, its time for you to grab some swim gear and a towel and hit the nearest pools near you: check out the swim times at Curry Hicks Cage and Boyden Gymnasium here. If you ever need a swim buddy, you can catch me at Curry Hicks on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I have a couple of great partner drills in mind.

Arnav Mehra is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at [emailprotected].

Continued here:
Why swimming is the best cardio exercise - The Massachusetts Daily Collegian

If you're into wellness (and since you're reading this, I'm guessing you are!), you've probably heard the term Ayurveda thrown around. You may have even heard of it used when talking about diets and healthy eating. The Ayurvedic diet has been practiced in India for centuries but its only recently caught on in the U.S. While you might have heard it mentioned here and there, its totally understandable that you might be fuzzy on what, exactly, its all about.

Ayurveda is an ancient Indian medical practice, and it focuses on healing the mind and body in a holistic way. The Ayurvedic diet in particular is all about finding the best approaches to food based on your body type, known as a dosha, explains Jessica Cording, RD, author of The Little Book of Game-Changers: 50 Healthy Habits For Managing Stress & Anxiety.

Each body type has a particular name and, according to the principles of the Ayurvedic diet, following the general rules of your dosha should help make you healthy. Its a holistic approach to the best eating pattern for you, Cording says.

Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, and Julia Roberts have all reportedly followed an Ayurvedic diet at some point. But whats the deal with this diet andmore importantlyis it effective and safe to try? Heres what you need to know.

The Ayurvedic diet leans heavily into the idea that everyone has a dominant dosha, or body type. Once you figure out your dominant dosha, you can adjust your eating plan to meet your health needs, Cording explains. You can determine your dosha by taking a quiz, like this one, and these quizzes are pretty easy to find online or in books about the Ayurvedic diet.

What you eat can help put your dosha into balance; eat the wrong stuff, and youre not living up to your health potential.

Well, the Ayurvedic diet isnt just about eating for your doshathere are some basic principles to keep in mind that apply to everyone.

The diet stresses that there are six tastessweet, sour, salty, pungent, astringent, and bitterand that each one can impact your physiology, or your bodys ability to function properly, Cording says. These are the other principles of the Ayurvedic diet that every dosha should follow:

Ayurveda Cooking for Beginners: An Ayurvedic Cookbook to Balance and Heal

Theres no one manual to the Ayurvedic diet, but there are a few books and people you can look into if youre interested in learning more.

A few books to have on your radar:

The Ayurvedic Institute, which is considered the leading Ayurvedic school in the west, also regularly offers up tips on Instagram. Looking for grammable recipes? Nutritionist Rahi Rajput has got you covered.

The Ayurvedic diet recommends honoring your bodys individual needs, and that can be a good thing. Under the Ayurvedic diet, you shouldnt feel like you have to do the same thing as everyone else. I really appreciate that, Cording notes.

Being more mindful of how much you eat and how quickly you eat could also help with weight loss. And some research backs this up. A review in the International Journal of Obesity showed that following Ayurvedic principles resulted in clinically significant weight loss compared to a placebo. Additionally, an Ayurvedic and yoga-based lifestyle modification program was shown to be an effective method of weight management, according to a study from the University of New Mexico and the University of Arizona. Still, it's hard to say exactly what aspect of the diet leads to weight loss.

As with any diet, the way you approach it matters. You have to be mindful of going to extremes, Cording says. Meaning: While it might be great for you eat to fresh veggies because youre a Pitta, for example, only having these isnt going to help you meet your nutritional needs.

Portion sizes also matter, Cording says, and eating too much of any foodeven if its good for your doshacan make you gain weight. It's also important to recognize that your dosha is based off a self-assessment or assessment of an Ayurvedic doctornot medical testing. That means the reading might not be accurate, and many people feel they're a combination of multiple doshas.

Cording stresses the importance of paying attention to your body on this diet. If you notice that you dont feel well when you eat a particular way for your dosha, you should honor what feels good for your body and change your eating plan, she says.

Overall, Cording recommends checking out the Ayurvedic dietor some form of itif youre looking for a healthier way to approach eating. It can be a useful tool, she says.

The bottom line: Whether you subscribe to the concept of eating for your dosha or not, being more mindful of what foods you eat and how they impact your body and how you feeland tweaking your diet based on thatis definitely a good thing. If the Ayurvedic diet helps you do that, that's a win.

Link:
What Is The Ayurvedic Diet? Pros, Cons, And How It Works - Women's Health

In the mid-2000s, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris opened a children's medical clinic in the Bayview section of San Francisco, one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. She quickly began to suspect something was making many of her young patients sick.

She noticed the first clues in the unusually large population of kids referred to her clinic for symptoms associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorderan inability to focus, impulsivity, extreme restlessness. Burke Harris was struck not just by the sheer number of ADHD referrals, but also by how many of the patients had additional health problems. One child arrived in her clinic with eczema and asthma and was in the 50th percentile of height for a 4-year-old. He was 7. There were kindergarteners with hair falling out, two children with extremely rare cases of autoimmune hepatitis, middle-school kids stricken with depression and an epidemic number of kids with behavioral problems and asthma.

Burke Harris noticed something else unusual about these children. Whenever she asked their parents or caregivers to tell her about conditions at home, she almost invariably uncovered a major life disruption or trauma. One child had been sexually abused by a tenant, she recalls. Another had witnessed an attempted murder. Many children came from homes struggling with the incarceration or death of a parent, or reported acrimonious divorces. Some caregivers denied there were any problems at all, but had arrived at the appointment high on drugs.

Although none of her mentors at medical school back in the early 2000s had suggested that stress could cause seemingly unrelated physical illnesses, what she was seeing in the clinic was so consistentand would eventually so alarm herit sent her scrambling for answers.

"If I were a doctor, and I was seeing incredibly high rates of autism, I'd be doing research on autism," she says. "Or if I saw incredibly high rates of certain types of cancer, I'd be doing that research. What I was seeing was incredibly, incredibly high rates of kids who were experiencing adversity and then having really significant health outcomes, whether it was difficulty learning, or asthma, or weird autoimmune diseases. I was seeing that the rates were highest in my kids who were experiencing adversity. And that drove me to the latest scientific literature."

What Burke Harris found there would eventually thrust her to the forefront of a growing movement that aims to transform the way the medical profession handles childhood adversity. Childhood stress can be as toxic and detrimental to the development of the brain and body as eating lead paint chips off the wall or drinking it in the waterand should be screened for and dealt with in similar ways, in Burke Harris' view. As California's first Surgeon General, a newly created position, she is focusing on getting lawmakers and the public to act.

Earlier this year, thanks in part to her advocacy, California allocated more than $105 million to promote screening for "Adverse Childhood Experiences" (ACEs)10 family stressors, first identified in the late 1990s, that can elicit a "toxic stress response," a biological cascade driven by the stress hormone cortisol that is linked to a wide range of health problems later in life.

In recent years, epidemiologists, neuroscientists and molecular biologists have produced evidence that early childhood experiences, if sufficiently traumatic, can flip biological switches that can profoundly affect the architecture of the developing brain and long-term physical and emotional health. These "epigenetic" changesmolecular-level processes that turn genes on and offnot only make some people more likely to self-medicate using nicotine, drugs or alcohol and render them more susceptible to suicide and mental illness later in life. They can impair immune system function and predispose us to deadly diseases including heart diseases, cancer, dementia and many others, decades later. Not only does childhood stress harm the children themselves, but the effects may also be passed down to future generations.

A groundswell of support has arisen in the world of public health in favor of treating childhood adversity as a public health crisis that requires interventiona crisis that seems to run in families and repeat itself in trans-generational cycles. At last count, at least 25 states and the District of Columbia had passed statutes or resolutions that refer to Adverse Childhood Experiences. Since 2011, more than 60 state statutes aimed at ACEs or intervening to mitigate their effects have been enacted into law, according ACEs Connection, a website devoted to tracking the phenomenon and providing resources. California's effort is among the most aggressive. The state has set aside $50 million for next year to train doctors to provide screening, and $45 million to begin reimbursing doctors in the state's MediCal program for doing so ($29 for each screening). If it proves effective, other states may soon follow.

"The social determinants of health are to the 21st century, what infectious disease was to the 20th century," says Burke Harris. She rose to national prominence after writing a 2018 book on the subject, embarking on a national book tour and recording a TED Talk that has been viewed more than 6 million times. She was tapped for her new post by Governor Gavin Newsom in January 2019.

The research is so fresh that many clinicians are still debating the best way to tackle the problem, most significantly whether the science is mature and the interventions effective enough to implement universal screening. And the details of California's approach to screening are controversial in the world of public health. (The epidemiologist who developed a key questionnaire being used as a screening tool says it was never intended to be used to evaluate individuals.) But there is broad consensus, at least, about one thing. For all the buzz in public health and policy circles about "ACEs," few people have heard the term before. The first task, many people on the front lines of health education agree, will be to change that so that caregivers themselves can learn about the vicious cycle of childhood adversity, and get the help they need to break it.

The Science of Toxic StressThe research on ACE stems from a seminal 17,000-person epidemiological study published in 1998. The first clue came years earlier, however, with the plight of an obese, 29-year-old woman from San Diego named Patty.

Over the course of a 52-week trial of a weight-loss diet, Patty dropped from 408 lbs. all the way down to 132. Then, over a single three-week period, she abruptly gained 37 pounds of it backa feat that her doctors didn't even know was scientifically possible.

Patty's dramatic weight swings got the attention of Vincent Felitti, the head of the preventative medicine program at the massive managed care consortium Kaiser Permanente, and the man who had designed the obesity study. Felitti had been astounded at the rapid pace with which the study subjects lost weight. "In the early days of the obesity study, I remember thinking 'wow, we've got this problem licked,'" Felitti recalls. "This is going to be a world-famous department!"

Then, for reasons nobody could explain, patients began dropping out of the program in droves. Felitti found it particularly alarming because the ones leaving the fastest seemed to be the ones losing the most weight. When Felitti heard about Patty, he arranged a chat. Patty claimed she was just as mystified by her massive weight gain as he was; she assured him she was still vigilantly sticking to the diet. But then she offered up a suggestive clue: Every night when she went to bed, she told Felitti, the kitchen was clean. Yet when she woke up, there were boxes and cans open and dirty dishes in the sink. Patty lived alone and had a history of sleepwalking. Was it possible, she wondered, that she was "sleep eating?"

When Felitti asked her if anything unusual had happened in her life around the time the dirty pots and pans began to appear, one event came to mind. An older, married man at work had told her she looked great and suggested they have an affair. After further questioning, Felitti learned Patty had first started gaining weight at age 10, around the time her grandfather began sexually molesting her.

Felitti came to believe that for Patty, obesity was an adaptive mechanism: she overate as a defense against predatory men. Felitti began asking other relapsing study participants if they had a history of sexual abuse. He was shocked by their answers. Eventually, more than 50 percent of his 300 patients would admit to such a history.

"Initially I thought, 'Oh, no, I must be doing something wrong. With numbers like this, people would know if this were true. Somebody would have told me in medical school,'" he recalls.

Felitti started bringing patients together in groups to talk about their secrets, their fears and the challenges they facedand their weight loss began to stick. Within a couple years, the program was so successful that Felitti was receiving regular invitations to speak about his program to medical audiences. Whenever he brought up sexual abuse and its apparent link to obesity, however, audience members would "storm explosively" out of the room or stand up to argue with him, he says. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to hear what he had to say.

At least one person was intrigued by his findings. Robert Anda, a researcher at U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), had been studying chronic diseases and the counterintuitive links between depression, hope and heart attacks. He knew firsthand what it was like to deal with colleagues who considered his work flaky. Anda and Felitti got to talking. They realized there was only one way that both of them would be able to overcome the skepticism they were encountering: they needed to do a rigorous study. At Anda's urging, Felitti agreed not just to recruit a larger sample but to expand its scope to examine the link between a wide array of common childhood stressors and health later in life.

This became the ground-breaking "ACE Study," a 17,000-person retrospective project aimed at examining the relationship between childhood exposure to emotional, physical and sexual abuse and household dysfunction, and risky behaviors and disease in adulthood. Starting in 1998, and continuing with follow-ups well into the 2000s, Felitti and Anda's team published a series of counterintuitive papers that upended much of what we thought we knew about the mind-body connection.

To gather the data, Felitti persuaded Kaiser Permanente-affiliated doctors to recruit patients in Southern California undergoing routine physical exams. The patients were asked to complete confidential surveys detailing both their current health status and behaviors, and the types of adversity they've endured: physical, emotional and sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, parental incarceration, separation or divorce, family mental illness, the early death of a parent, alcoholism and drug abuse. To analyze the data, the researchers added up the number of ACEs, calculated an "ACE score," then correlated those scores with high-risk behaviors and diseases to see if they could find any patterns.

The first shocker was just how common these ACEs were. More than half of those participating had at least one, a quarter had two or more and roughly 6 percent reported four or more. This was not just a problem of the poor. Childhood emotional adversity cut across all racial, ethnic and economic lines. Even more surprising was the impact of these stressors later in life. When the researchers ran their analysis, they discovered a direct, dose-dependent link between the number of ACEs and behavioral issues like alcoholism, smoking and promiscuitythose who had experienced four or more categories of childhood exposure had a four- to 12-fold increased risk of alcoholism, drug abuse, depression and suicide attempts.

The results went beyond these common trauma-related health risks. The study also linked childhood trauma to a host of seemingly unrelated physical problems, including ischemic heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, skeletal fractures and liver disease.

What made the study so shocking was that the data suggested that even those who didn't drink, use drugs or act out in risky ways still had a far higher rate of developing ischemic heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, skeletal fractures and liver disease. Unexpectedly, the researchers had discovered that childhood adversity seemed to be an independent risk factor for some of the leading causes of death decades later.

"We found a strong graded relationship between the breadth of exposure to abuse or household dysfunction during childhood and multiple risk factors for several of the leading causes of death in adults," the authors wrote.

The study dropped like a bomb in the world of public health. But the scientific work was just beginning. In the years since, scores of researchers have begun to dig into the biological mechanisms in play. And with emerging brain scanning technologies and advances in molecular biology, an explanation for the ACE study has begun to emerge. Some clinicians and scientists have begun to turn these findings into concrete interventions and treatments they hope can be used to reverse or at least attenuate the impact.

Much of the research has focused on how ACEs affect the functioning of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, a biological system that plays a key role in the mind-body connection. The HPA axis controls our reactions to stress and is crucial in regulating an array of important body processes including immune function, energy storage and expenditureeven our experience of emotions and mood. It does so by adjusting the release of key hormones, most notably cortisol, the release of which is increased by stress or low blood sugar levels.

Cortisol has many functions. On a daily basis, it regulates the level of energy we have as the day progresses: we generally experience our highest levels of cortisol, and energy, upon waking up. These levels gradually diminish throughout the day, reaching very low levels just prior to bedtime.

Cortisol also serves a role in the body's energy allocation during times of crisis. When all is calm, the body builds muscle or bone and socks away excess calories for future consumption as fat, performs cellular regeneration and keeps its immune system strong to fight infection. In the case of a child, the body fuels normal mental and physical development.

In an emergency, however, all these processes get put on hold. The HPA axis floods the bloodstream with adrenaline and cortisol, which signals the body to kick into overdrive immediately. Blood sugar levels spike and the heart pumps harder to provide a fast boost in fuel. If an 11-foot-tall grizzly bear is lumbering in your direction and licking his chops, the additional burst of energy helps you run screaming through the woods or wrestle the critter to the ground and plunge a Bowie knife into its heart.

However, when the emergency goes on for a long timeperhaps over an entire childhood of abusethe resulting high levels of cortisol take a big and lasting toll.

Almost as soon as the ACE study was published, dysregulated cortisol levels seemed a likely culprit to explain the study's startling implications. Was it possible that the chronic stressors identified by Felitti and Anda led to elevated cortisol levels in children? And could those elevated levels account for seemingly unrelated diseases and the range of additional problems that researchers were beginning to link to ACEs?

In the decade after the 1998 ACE study, researchers began seeking out children in Romanian orphanages and measuring cortisol levels, in the hopes of verifying this hypothesis. When researchers began to compare their levels to that of children who had not faced adversity, they found substantial differences. But the results were difficult to interpret.

"There was growing evidence that there was an impact, but the studies were contradictory," says Jackie Bruce, a research scientist at the Oregon Social Learning Center, an NIH-funded research center in Eugene that studies child development. "Sometimes people were finding kids with early adversity had low cortisol and sometimes they were finding they had high cortisol."

In 2009, Bruce and her colleagues demonstrated a possible explanation for the discrepancies. Since morning cortisol levels play such an important role in getting well-functioning individuals ready for the day, they sought out a group of 117 maltreated 3- to 6-year-old children transitioning into new foster care placements in the United States. The researchers then trained the children's caregivers to collect saliva samples before breakfast. For comparison, they recruited a control group of 60 low-income children living with their biological parents who had no previous record of abuse or maltreatment.

Children who had experienced more severe emotional, physical and sexual maltreatment did indeed have abnormally high morning cortisol levels. But scientists also found that children who experienced more severe neglect had abnormally low morning cortisol levels. Different types of adversity, in other words, had different impacts on the HPA system. But whether the adversity took the form of an absence of stimulation or the presence of negative, threatening stimulation, the effect was bad for normal development.

"Low cortisol levels, particularly in the morning, had been linked to externalizing disordersthings like delinquency and alcohol usewhereas high cortisol levels have been linked to more anxiety and depression," and post-traumatic stress disorder, Bruce says.

Even so, Bruce and her colleagues noted that within both groups, "some kids are doing really well, some kids are not doing well." This suggested other factors were also involved. And in recent years, much of the research has focused on understanding the complex interaction between external stressors, genetics and interpersonal interventions.

One of the most important findings to emerge recently is that the experience of childhood adversity, by itself, does not appear to be enough to lead to toxic stress. Genetic predispositions play a role. But even among those predisposed, the effects can be blunted by what researchers call emotional "buffering"a response from a loving, supportive caregiver that comforts the child, restores a sense of safety and allows cortisol levels to fall back down to normal. Some research suggests that this buffering works in part because a good hugor even soft reassuring words from a caregivercan cause the body to release the hormone oxytocin, sometimes referred to as the "cuddle" or "love" hormone.

One of the reasons the ACE study was so effective at highlighting the potential long-term health effects that early childhood adversity can have on health, says Burke Harris, was the nature of the stressors measured. The stressors took place within the context of a family situation that often reflected the failure of a caregiver to intervene as a needed protector.

"The items that are on the ACE screening have this amazing combination of being high stress and also simultaneously taking out the buffering protected mechanisms," Burke Harris says. "If you're being regularly abused, often it's partially because your parents are not intervening."

This hypothesis is supported by experiments in rodents. Back in the 1950s, the psychiatrist Seymour Levine demonstrated that baby rats taken away from their mothers for 15 minutes each day grew up to be less nervous and produce less cortisol than their counterparts. The reason, he suggested, was due to affection from their distressed parent in the form of extra licking and grooming. Studies in the 1990s confirmed that the extra affection and comfort offered by the affectionate parents seemed to have flipped biological "epigenetic" switches that caused their offspring to internalize the sense of safety that had been provided and replicate it biochemically as adults.

Scientists have since documented many biochemical mechanisms by which emotional buffering can help inoculate children exposed to adversity to long-term consequences, and how chronic overactivation of the HPA axis can interfere with developmentor, as one widely cited scientific paper put it, can have an impact akin to "changing the course of a rocket at the moment of takeoff." Neglected and abused Romanian orphans were shown to have smaller brains as a population than those placed in loving foster homes, suggesting a lack of stimulation interfered with normal neuronal growth. Adversity and stress without adequate buffering can turn on genes that flood the system with enzymes that prime the body to respond to further stress by making it easier to produce adrenaline and reactivate the fight-or-flight response quickly, which can make it harder for children with toxic stress to control their emotions.

Toxic stress can also have powerful influences on the developing immune system. Too much cortisol suppresses immunity and increases the chance of infection, while too little cortisol can cause an inflammatory immune response to persist long after it is needed. That can act directly on the brain to produce "sickness behavior," characterized by a lack of appetite, fatigue, social withdrawal, depressed mood, irritability and poor cognitive functioning, according to a 2013 review paper aimed at bringing pediatricians up to speed on the emerging science. As adults, children maltreated during childhood are more likely to have elevated inflammatory markers and a greater inflammatory response to stress, the researchers reported. Chronic elevations in cortisol have also been linked to hypertension, insulin resistance, obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

In recent years, Fellitti and Anda's original 1998 paper has been cited more than 10,000 times in further studies. And as awareness in the public health community has risen, so too has the amount of data available to work with, and the vast body of research documenting the far-reaching consequences of ACEs. Last fall, the CDC analyzed data from 25 states collected between 2015 and 2017, and more than 144,000 adults (a sample 8.5 times larger than the original 1998 study). The authors noted that ACEs are associated with at least five of the top 10 leading causes of death; that preventing ACEs could potentially reduce chronic diseases, risky health behaviors and socioeconomic challenges later in life and have a positive impact on education and employment levels. Reducing ACEs could prevent 21 million cases of depression; 1.9 million cases of heart disease; and 2.5 million cases of obesity, the authors said.

Hundreds of new studies are published every year. In just the last month, studies have come out analyzing the "mediating role of ACEs in attempted suicides among adolescents in military families," the impact of ACEs on aging and on "deviant and altruistic behavior during emerging adulthood."

How to Save the KidsWhile these findings help explain the link to chronic diseases, Harris Burke and other public health officials believe they also provide the basis for some of the most promising interventions in the clinic today. Not surprisingly given her background, Burke Harris looks to pediatric caregivers and other doctors to lead the effort to detect and treat patients suffering from toxic stress. To help them do it, late last year, California released a clinical "algorithm": basically a chart spelling out how doctors should proceed once they compiled a patient's ACE score.

Patients are found to be high-risk for negative health outcomes if the doctor, using a questionnaire, can identify four or more of the adverse childhood experiences or some combination of psychological, social or physical conditions found in studies to be associated with toxic stress. For children, that's obesity, failure-to-thrive syndrome and asthma, but also other indicators such as drug or alcohol use prior to the age of 14, high-school absenteeism and other social problems. For adults, the list includes suicide attempts, memory impairment, hepatitis, cancer and other conditions found to be higher in populations with high ACE scores.

Doctors are encouraged to educate all patients about ACEs and toxic stress regardless of their ACE scores. For patients found to be at intermediate or high risk, additional steps are recommended. The first step in the case of children is to make sure parents or caregivers understand the links ACEs can have to adverse health outcomes. That way, they can be on the lookout for new conditions and take action to prevent them.

Key to this educational process is making sure caregivers understand the protective role buffering can play in countering the corrosive effects of stress. Buffering includes nurturing caregiving, but it can include simple steps like focusing on maintaining proper sleep, exercise and nutrition. Mindfulness training, mental health services and an emphasis on developing healthy relationships are other interventions that Burke Harris says can help combat the stress response.

The specifics will vary on a case-by-case basis, and will rely on the judgment and creativity of the doctor to help adult caregivers design a plan to protect the childand to help both those caregivers and high-risk adults receive social support services and interventions when necessary. In the months ahead, the protocols and interventions will be further refined and expanded. "Most of our interventions are essentially reducing stress hormones, and ultimately changing our environment," says Burke Harris. "But some of the things that I think are really exciting are on the horizon."

In recent years researchers have begun to explore whether the "love drug," oxytocina hormone released when a parent hugs a child might form the basis for potent pharmaceutical interventions. For now, however, "we're on the scientific frontier," she says.

The relatively young state of the science and the fuzziness and subjective nature of the tools California plans to use to evaluate the threat have alarmed some public-health experts. They worry that the state is moving too fast, before more is known about the science of toxic stress. Robert Anda, for one, is uncomfortable with the use of screening tools that rely on an ACE score. He worries it might be misused in the doctor's office because it doesn't measure caregiver buffering or genetic predispositions that might prove protective. The questionnaire he and Felitti developed for the original study was always meant to be a blunt instrumentsuited for a survey of a huge population of patients. The problem with applying it to individual patients, he says, is that it doesn't take into account the severity of the stressor. Who's to say, for instance, that someone with an ACE score of one who was beaten by a caregiver every day of their life is less prone to disease than someone with an ACE score of four who experienced these stressors only intermittently? On a population level, surveying thousands, the outliers would cancel each other out. But on the individual level they could be misleading.

It's a concern echoed by others. "I think the concept behind ACE screening, if it's about sensitizing all of us to the importance of looking for that part of the population that's experiencing adversity, I'd say that's good," says Jack Shonkoff, a professor of child health and development who directs the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. "But if it's used as an individual diagnostic test or indicator child by child, I would say that's potentially dangerous in terms of inappropriate labeling or inappropriate alarm. We need to make sure that people don't misuse this information so that parents don't feel like they've just been given some kind of deterministic diagnosis. Because it's not that. It's also dangerous to totally give a clean bill of health for a kid who may be showing symptoms of stress."

Burke Harris notes that she has been using ACE scores as part of her clinical care for more than a decade. When used correctly, it is only one part of a larger screening process. And she points out that despite the early phase of the field, the stakes are too high to wait any longer. "This is extremely urgent," she says. "It's a public health crisis. We have enough research now to act. And once we have enough research to act, not acting becomes an unconscionable path."

In the years ahead, more precise methods of detection will likely be available. Harvard's Shonkoff recently completed a large, nationwide feasibility study aimed at developing and rolling out a saliva test which could be used to screen for biomarkers that indicate a toxic stress response in both children and adults. The test, developed as part of a six-year, $13 million grant, measures the level of inflammatory cytokines present in the spit sample. Shonkoff and his colleagues are in the process of taking the next step, which involves gathering enough data to develop benchmarks that indicate normal and abnormal levels for stress markers by age, sex, race and ethnicity.

Even the cautious agree a little education will go a long way. "The most important fundamental prevention idea is that people who are caring for children, who are parenting children, need to understand that childhood adversities are likely leading to issues in their own lives," Shonkoff says. "And if they don't find a way to do things differently with support, they will be embedding that same biology back in their children."

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Yes, Stress Really Is Making You Sick - Newsweek

You have probably heard that drinking at least one cup of tea a day is good for you. You may also have heard that tea is filled with antioxidants, making it ideal for fighting off colds or viruses. A hot cup of tea is a great way to start your morning if you're not a coffee drinker, and if nothing else, it keeps you warm in cold weather.

There's more to drinking tea than you think. What many people don't know is that tea has many other health benefits too.

A brief tea history

Tea originally began as a tradition and ritual in China. It was used more for medicinal purposes and less for enjoyment. As the tradition of drinking tea spread from China to Japan and then to the rest of Europe, it quickly became a popular beverage consumed by millions around the world. People not only enjoy tea for its delightful taste but its health and therapeutic benefits.

Different types of tea

Caffeinated teas derive from the Camellia Sinensis plant. Black tea, green tea, white tea, and oolong tea are the most popular caffeinated brews consumed by Americans. The taste varies based on how the plant is processed. Caffeine levels depend on how long you steep your tea.

Herbal teas, on the other hand, are made from roots, leaves, flowers, and components of different plants. Some popular herbal teas are chamomile and peppermint.

Here are more awesome nutritious benefits that come with drinking tea.

1. Rich in antioxidants

Do you ever wonder why your mother suggests drinking tea when you have a cold? This is because tea, specifically black and green tea, is known for packing a powerful punch of antioxidants. These drinks contain polyphenols that help remove free radicals and decrease cell damage. The warm tea is also very soothing for a sore throat.

2. It's good for your teeth

Has your dentist told you to cut back on soda and juice due to the high amounts of sugar? Do you feel like water is your only option when it comes to beverages? Green tea, specifically, contains an antioxidant called polyphenol, which can protect against oral diseases, such as gingivitis, and periodontal disease.

3. Tea may improve your gut health

Your gut is more important than you think. Your gut contains trillions of bacteria, according to Healthline. The bacteria in your gut help reduce the risk of different health conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, and cancer. However, some of those bacteria are not good for you. Studies show that the polyphenols found in black tea may help promote the growth of good bacteria, increasing the overall health of your gut.

4. Tea is anti-inflammatory

Inflammation is the body's response to injury and infection, according to Live Science. Chronic inflammation has linked to heart disease or stroke. Once again, the polyphenols in tea can help fight inflammation. Studies show that the epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) in green tea has anti-inflammatory effects.

5. It may help with weight loss

More than half of Americans begin their new year with a goal of weight management. Some studies suggest that the caffeine and catechins of caffeinated teas, such as black tea and green tea, may help people lose a pound or two.

6. It increases focus

Everyone has those days where they have a hard time staying focused. Regularly consuming black and green tea can prevent cognitive decline by boosting memory and increasing attention span.

According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, both caffeinated and herbal tea may also provide small amounts of potassium, phosphorous, magnesium, sodium, copper, and zinc.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition. If you have any concerns, please speak with your doctor.

Sinclair Broadcast Group is committed to the health and well-being of our viewers, which is why we initiated Sinclair Cares. Every month we'll bring you information about the "Cause of the Month," including topical information, education, awareness, and prevention. March is National Nutrition Month.

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6 powerful benefits of tea - KUTV 2News