Dear Doctors: Ive had back pain since my 20s and have gotten to the point where I cant use aspirin or other pain relievers because they tear up my stomach. My sister-in-law wants me to try meditation, which sounds a little nutty. Do you think it can help?

Dear Reader: The power of the mind over the body is a concept that has been explored, questioned, promoted and ridiculed for centuries, if not millennia. However, the latest studies on the subject offer intriguing insights. Researchers are uncovering evidence that techniques such as meditation and mindfulness can be an effective means of dealing with pain. This is good news for the estimated 11 percent of Americans who live with chronic pain.

Several recent studies have focused on meditation and mindfulness techniques to alleviate lower back pain, with some surprising results. Not only did researchers add to the growing body of evidence that mind-based techniques can be effective, but they also discovered that the relief from pain comes via unexpected pathways.

One study involved 342 adults between the ages of 20 and 70 who had lower back pain for three or more months, a length of time for it to be considered chronic. None of the individuals could attribute the onset of their pain to a particular cause, such as injury, overuse or disease.

The participants were divided into three treatment groups one that followed the traditional medical approach of rest, activity modification, heat or ice, and over-the-counter pain relievers. A second group learned a technique called cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, which addresses thought and behavior. The third group was taught something the researchers called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which included several types of meditation as well as gentle yoga practice.

Six months later, 61 percent of each mind-based treatment group reported improved physical function. About 45 percent of them said they had less back pain. That was measurably better than the group assigned to traditional medical practices. In that group, 44 percent reported improved function, and 27 percent said they had less pain.

While the results may not be extraordinary, they are significant. And as acceptance of this novel pain relief pathway grows, the hope is that continued research will lead to greater understanding and to new techniques that are even more effective.

Speaking of understanding, the results of a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience last year also offered a few surprises.

When you hurt yourself stub your toe or scrape your knee your body responds with a flood of natural opioid compounds that make the resulting pain more bearable. But for the participants in this study, researchers blocked that pain relief pathway. Yet patients involved in meditation still reported feeling less pain in response to unpleasant stimuli than those who did not meditate. This led researchers to conclude the pain relief mechanism of meditation occurs independent of the opioid receptors in the brain.

Bottom line: Your sister-in-law has a point regarding meditation. With a bit of research, you can find a class or program in your area. And if you do follow through, please let us know how it goes.

Eve Glazier, M.D., MBA, is an internist and assistant professor of medicine at UCLA Health. Elizabeth Ko, M.D., is an internist and primary care physician at UCLA Health.

Send your questions to askthedoctors@mednet.ucla.edu, or write: Ask the Doctors, c/o Media Relations, UCLA Health, 924 Westwood Blvd., Suite 350, Los Angeles, CA, 90095. Owing to the volume of mail, personal replies cannot be provided.

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Ask the Doctors: Meditation might alleviate back pain for some ... - Indiana Gazette

Meditation, its been said, is self-medication. But are our modern-day forms of accessing this ancient practice for its proven health benefits doing us more harm than good?

As the collective of meditation businesses has grown to a billion-dollar industry, theres been an influx of quick-hit meditation products and services popping up on every device and city corner near you.

There are now hundreds of apps, such as Headspace and buddhify, devoted to guided and customized meditation. There are also pricey drop-in classes available at increasingly omnipresent calming centers from New York to Los Angeles.

Inscape, a 5,000-square-foot studio in New Yorks Chelsea neighborhood, offers sessions like Deep Rest, where you can pay $22 to sleep, profoundly, followed by curated drinks and bites, if youre so inclined. Just-opened The Lotus in Denver has 18 different classes with titles like Dont Worry, Be Happy and Lighten Up.

So should we feel happy that we can stop by a studio for some quick relief after a stressful day at work or bliss out with our favorite meditation app while were waiting for a red-eye?

Are we really tuning into ourselves and getting the benefits of meditation in single doses, or are we just distracting ourselves with another feel-good health one-hitter with limited lasting impacts?

Is dropping in with other like-minded people, no matter how we do it, more powerful in the long run than dropping out on our bedroom zafu?

The answers are nuanced, according to Andra Brill, a Denver-based meditation instructor, retreat leader and founder of Happy Mindful Families. Im all for planting the seed and offering people a taste of what the experience is like, she tells GrindTV.

Shes not too worried about the format, whether its an app, drop-in studio or committed practice through private instruction.

We could all do yoga in our house for free, but we value what we pay for, says Brill, who finds that many of her clients request paid private instruction even when they know they can do it for nothing. I see it as a continuum. If I try a meditation app and it helps me sleep a little better and yell a little less, thats a positive.

Its also possible that drop-in meditation centers and apps are just a contemporary version of building community.

Theyre all different flavors of the same thing. I see them as entry points, Brill says. For all the ways we self-soothe in modern society excessive work, food, alcohol, TV, exercise to deal with our frantic lives, I see meditation as one of the least destructive ways to do it.

Its better to do 10 minutes of meditation a day than an hour and a half once a week, offers Brill. So perhaps dropping in for breath doesnt really undermine meditation after all.

Maybe one big hit of breath however you get it is more than OK.

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Is one-hit meditation a healthy trend? - GrindTV

So you fell asleep easily enough, but now its 3 a.m. Your mind is spinning, and rest is elusive. Youre reliving every foolish or embarrassing thing you did in the past 24 or 48 or 72 hours, and that is a lot of material to run through. And you simply cant stop.

Except maybe you could, if only you knew how to be mindful.

When youre caught in that loop of rumination, thats very real, and it creates very intense feelings, explains psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, who reported on brain and behavioral sciences for the New York Times. If youre mindful, you realize its just a thought. You dont have to believe your thoughts. You can question them, and that changes them. It takes energy from the brain that creates the heaviness. Looking at it in a different way makes the rumination less intense.

You might think, on hearing such praises of mindfulness a form of meditative practice that it will solve just about every problem in your life. Meditation can halt the late-night rumination cycle, right? So cant it also make you into a better person? Enlarge your brain? Make you taller and thinner and richer?

Well, no, says Goleman, whos also the author of the bestselling book Emotional Intelligence. Some claims of meditations power are overblown. Some studies are less rigorous than they should be. But science has proven that meditation can induce healthy and important physical improvements, such as lowering your blood pressure, decreasing relapses into depression and managing chronic pain.

Daniel Goleman, also the author of the bestselling book Emotional Intelligence, will talk about Altered Traits at Miami Dade College.

Which leaves us with a question: As our interest in meditation grows, how do we know whats too good to be true?

Goleman, who appears at Miami Dade Colleges Wolfson Campus on Sept. 7, has some answers. With Richard J. Davidson, who directs a brain lab and founded the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Goleman has just published Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (Avery, $27). The book separates truth from fiction, debunking studies and highlighting truth about meditations startling effects on the brain.

Altered Traits also chronicles the authors decades-long friendship and lifelong interest in the subject of meditation, which began at a time during which scientific circles had little patience or interest in the subject.

The book is important because it represents the coming together of two very important voices, says Scott Rogers, founder and director of the Mindfulness and Law Program at the University of Miami School of Law. He will be in conversation with Goleman at Miami Dade College.

Rogers, co-founder of UMindfulness, the universitys inter-disciplinary collaboration that marries research to training, notes another benefit: Not only are Goleman and Davidson experts in their fields, theyre also meditation practitioners.

Scott Rogers of the University of Miami, here leading a group meditation at the Lowe Art Museum, will be in conversation with Daniel Goleman at Miami Dade College.

We need responsible, reasoned voices speaking from a variety of perspectives, and here we have the hard science and the journalist, and both are practitioners. We need a book we can look to as a reliable source of information, Rogers says. They both practice and have for a long time. A lot of researchers have been interested in this over the last 10 or 15 years, but they havent historically practiced mindfulness. There are a bunch of people practicing, but theyre not scientists.

Altered Traits examines scientific studies on meditation and the benefits of intensive retreats, learning to view our selves and our brains in a whole new light and the importance of a good teacher (I feel strongly the quality of the teacher is important, Goleman says). The book also challenges notions we (or at least our bosses) hold dear, such as the idea that multitasking is a positive endeavor.

Multitasking is a myth, Goleman says. You cant really do two things at once. What happens is your brain switches rapidly. As it switches, you lose the power of your concentration. You do many things at once, you do them less well.

But there is good news for multitaskers, according to Altered Traits: Cognitive control can be improved. One test of undergrad volunteers tried short sessions of focusing or breath-counting. Just three 10-minute sessions of breath counting was enough to appreciably increase their attention skills on a battery of tests. And the biggest gains were among the heavy multitaskers, who did more poorly on those tests initially, the authors write.

Which brings up another important question: If the benefits of meditation expand the deeper a persons practice goes, is meditating in short sessions still useful?

Goleman says yes.

Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body. Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson. Avery. 330 pages. $27.

Casual practice helps you in surprising ways, but the deeper you go and the more you practice, the more benefits you get, he says. The research shows that right from the beginning mindfulness practices counter the ill effects of multitasking. Were all doing so many things a day. But the improvement in attention starts at the beginning.

And if you can only spare 10 minutes at a time for meditation, Goleman suggests spreading your practice throughout the day.

Intersperse it through the day. Ten minutes in the morning. Ten at lunch. Ten at night. The effect is prolonged. If you can do 20 minutes, even better. If you can do it for a year, thats good. Five years is even better.

Who: Daniel Goleman

When: 7 p.m. Sept. 7

Where: Chapman Conference Center, Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus, 300 NE Second Ave., Miami

Cost: Free

Info: 305-442-4408; http://booksandbooks.com/

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What are the health benefits of meditation and mindfulness? | Miami ... - Miami Herald

For the data-driven runner: Simple Habit

Not only does this app boasts a massive library of more than 1,000 meditations from 60-plus teachers, it automatically tracks your progress, tallying your mindful minutes each day, week, and month and rewarding you with badges for streaks. You can sort the programs by guide, goal (boost energy, sleep better), or context (morning, walking, commute, or big event). Searching for athlete, I found a centering exercise designed to psychologically prep for a competition. In six minutes, I was guided through a process of quieting negative thoughts and harnessing the power of adrenaline, rather than letting it derail me. Its a track I can definitely see myself cuing it up on race morning this September.

Subscription options include $19.99/2 months, $99/year, or $299 lifetime; iOS, Android

Holding yoga poses for minutes at a time releases tension in the body and the mind.

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Get Your Head in the Game: These 5 Meditation Apps Can Help - Runner's World

Friedrich Nietzsche was born into a devoutly Lutheran family in Rcken, Saxony, on 15 October 1844. His father, a pastor, died when Nietzsche was four, and the young boy grew up in a house of five women: his mother, grandmother, two aunts, and younger sister.

A few years later the family moved to Naumburg, where Nietzsche went to a local school, before being accepted into the prestigious Schulpforta Protestant boarding school, where he received a rich and deep classical education.

Nietzsche was highly gifted, and went on to read theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn. His studies were disrupted by a feud between two of his professors during which he sought refuge in writing music before following one of them to the University of Leipzig.

He broke off his studies for a period in 1867 to commence military service as a cavalryman, but was injured and returned to university,...

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On this day in 1900: Friedrich Nietzsche dies - Telegraph.co.uk

August 25

In distinguishing the world of love vs. one of hate, David Von Drehle cited the difference between two philosophers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche [Averting humanitys deadliest tendency, op-ed, Aug. 16]. Emerson embodied the optimism and general compassion of the American attitude, whereas, in Von Drehles words, the Nazis had their Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche could be critical of Judaism, but he was critical of almost every religion (especially Christianity) and institution. Much of the Nazis alleged affinity for Nietzsche was not from reading his works but through his sister Elisabeth, who met Adolf Hitler and tried to promote her dead brothers writings.

Most important, Friedrich Nietzsche despised anti-Semitism. His sister and her husband hated Jews and shared visions of a pure race. They even developed a colony in Paraguay to realize their dream. (They failed.) Not the philosopher Nietzsche. In one book, Beyond Good and Evil, he proposed that we expel the anti-Semitic squallers out of the country. In a letter to his sister, he wrote, Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again with ire or melancholy.

Nietzsche, regardless of his genius, certainly had his flaws. But anti-Semitism was not one of them.

Alexander E. Hooke, Baltimore

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Nietzsche had his flaws. Anti-Semitism wasn't one of them. - Washington Post

Stanely Mushava Literature TodayFrom Cecil John Rhodes in Cape Town to Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, monuments of historys bad guys are in the path of sledgehammer-wielding activists who see them as rallying points for reactionary sentiment. The call has not sat well with resurgent Nazis and rednecks, but many who fit neither category also oppose Photoshopping history to pacify any afterthought.

This year, a character who is neither colonialist nor confederate flared up her own public art brawl, one just as intense. The Fearless Girl, a sculpture of a young girl in the blast radius of the Charging Bull near Wall Street and Broadway, led some to question the adequacy of a child matador with a waving frock, rather than a grown woman, as a symbol of feminist strength.

While the feminists were at it, a grumpy iconoclast weighed in too: Arturo di Monica, the creator of the Charging Bull. According to The Guardian, the sculptor saw the installation of the Fearless Girl in vulnerable proximity to his bull as an overreach.

He felt that his work, originally purposed to represent optimism at a time of market turmoil, had been wrested out of context.

Oddly, metamodernists philosophers of art documenting new attitudes and aesthetics in politics and culture would see optimism and irony pairing just right. The sculpture fits identically into the metamodernist model where informed naivety is the dominant sensibility, where the new default is dizzy oscillation between modernist enthusiasm and postmodernist irony.

This new feeling, first explained by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in their 2010 essay, Notes on Metamodernism, has been proposed as the gravestone for postmodernism. The duo observes that postmodern tendencies of detachment, relativism and irony are being phased out by millennial forms of correspondence that are reviving engagement, affect and storytelling.

Whereas postmodernism largely maintained cynical detachment and pessimistic divestment from grand narratives and global problems, the turbulent 2000s facilitated a new structure of feeling equal to existential threats crawling the world, the civilisational faultlines and the moral failures of capitalism.

Fastening on to the three Greek definitions of meta as with, between, and beyond, Vermeleun and van ee Akker, place metamodernism epistemologically (its handling of knowledge) with modernism and postmodernism, ontologically (its structure of concepts) between modernism and postmodernism, and historically (its period as the dominant cultural sensibility) beyond modernism and postmodernism.

Yet the new romanticism sitting in the trends and tendencies across current affairs and contemporary aesthetics is not a hopelessly innocent one, Rather, one that basks in defiance while being to the limitations. In the essay, Vermeulen and van den Akker detail art works with lofty ideals but missing rungs, so to speak.

The reason these artists havent opted to employ methods and materials better suited to their mission or task is that their intention is not to fulfil it, but to attempt to fulfil it in spite of its unfulfillableness, notes the duo.

The Fearless Girl is not a fearless woman or a fiery matador, as feminists would have her signify, precisely to allow the irony of optimism. There is enthusiasm, but one alert to the misanthropic tilting of the setting, one that both pulls a cold calcus and thaws it with sunny optimism.

Seth Abramson explains the metamodernist concept of informed naivety as a wilful decision to act as though the facts on the ground arent the facts on the ground. Informed naivete helps us come up with shockingly fresh ideas. In such instances its not that one forgets reality, its rather that, informed by reality, one makes a quite conscious decision to temporarily sidestep or even ignore it in service of ones own mental health and/or the greater good.

Spirit is not tamed by structure. That is what the little girl staring courageously at the charging beast possesses and any alteration would be a needless variable. That is what Kendrick Lamar, precariously standing at pole with a bulls eye on his head, is chanting in defiance of the trigger-happy popo.

Smug elders who perceive in younger peers a naivety they were only plagued with before blending into the practical order of the world, who brush off zeal to change the world with knowing superchill: Thats not how the world works, my dear, are now confronted with a complicated breed of successors.

The Notes on Metamodernism duo imagines young artists telling themselves: I know that the art Im creating may seem silly, even stupid, or that it might have been done before, but that doesnt mean this isnt serious.

Postmodernism is associated with the end of history, captured by Francis Fukuyama as the neoliberal ship landing on Ararat with Karl Marx and others in its ideological body bag. Such complacent times gelled well with postmodernist distrust of meta-narratives, the emergence of late capitalism, the fading of historicism and the waning of affect where modernism had gravitated to utopism, to (linear) progress, to grand narratives, to Reason, to functionalism and formal purism . . .

Enter the turbulent millennium, with climate change, the financial crisis, geopolitical fragmentation, political instability, nuclear brinkmanship, populism, xenophobia, the digital revolution as well as its misanthropic nodes of capital, and nothing is quite the same.

New artists respond to the shifts but, emerging out of postmodernist cynicism, they can no longer move with modernist confidence or romantic abandon. Their defiance, desire and deprivation, oscillates like a pendulum between polar extremes, appropriating the insights inheriting contradictions.

Luke Turners Metamodernist Manifesto sets forth the imperative to liberate ourselves from the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child and proposes a pragmatic romanticism unhindered by ideological anchorage.

Cultural lenses for viewing the world as cynical bystanders and innocuous entertainers have become unsustainable. Artists can no longer push aside the responsibility to be morally invested in the problems of the world. When the art of late modernity self-immolated under its apathy and cynicism, capitalism and state power not only floored the poor but also compromised the planets capacity to support life.

Metamodernists know that artists can no longer treat global problems as teapot storms that will boil out on their own yet they also acknowledge the real-time limitations of their project. They are with their postmodernist predecessors, short-circuiting grand narratives but they also see what can be redeemed from them.

Metamodernism has been theorised from varied angles (I commend articles of Seth Abramson, Luke Turner, Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin van den Akker, Hanzi Freinacht and associated acts for a fuller picture) but I am interested in mapping here changes within more African art forms.

For me, the foregrounding of the prophetic text in popular culture once again is a key metamodernist shift and, tied to it, the suspension of the prophetic from the ego and the hyperliterate blending of prophetic references.

If Sheol is connected to YouTube, Friedrich Nietzsche, the spiritual father of postmodernist Antichrists, may be turning in his grave to realise that the only funeral that happened is his own, not Gods, with invocations of the divine once again reigning atop popular culture. Religion is back, not as the opium of the masses but as the language for speaking truth to power.

The prophetic text is washing away hedonistic decay from popular culture and chanting down power factions. Crucially, the prophetic is suspended from the ego and from narrow sectarianism, both to deflate fanaticism and to maintain a buffer between prophecy and power.

A persuasive case would be the vital and experimental Kendrick Lamar. Visuals and lyrics to Alright, the default soundtrack for Black Lives Matter, where defiance rubs against vulnerability, magic against mortality in metamodernist fashion.

The juxtaposition of u and i, the cathartic progression of To Pimp a Butterfly, the double conflict of DAMN. with its late-cut exclamation: It was always me versus the world until I realised its me versus me are essentially metamodernist.

The sonic experiments, the hyperliterate, part confessional, part sympathetic appropriation of prophetic texts from The Bible to Pan-Africanist figureheads, from Hiii Power mantra and gangsta rap to Hebrew Israelite doctrine, blend the canonical text with pop appeal, utopia and paranoia, the misanthropic system and personal warts into a great experiment of modern art.

In the metamodern, the collapse of the intellectual and the pop, as set for by Seth Abrahamson, is a key feature, a feasible cutting away from the post-moderns anti-world monastery. And one needs only to contrast the Lamartian document with the gore-fetishising, ego-driven, smug and resigned motifs of earlier artists to appreciate the extent of the transgression.

Then there are the midlife spiritual crises of dancehall artistes who led the break from spiritually driven and socially engaged reggae, with Lady Saw, Mr Vegas, Sasha, Stitchie, Papa San and others reaching to the Bible for meaning, and younger acts like Chronixx, Bugle and Raging Fyah making Rasta pop again.

While this cultural front may not be readily bundled into the metamodern school, it shows a resurgent motivation to transcend.

There is new hunger, there is a new feeling and as the world increasingly stares into the Apocalypse, prematurely dismissed cultural strands like romanticism, myth, grand narratives, justice, truth, prophecy, reason and faith will still be pushing out of the postmodernist body bag.

But they will not be free from the darkness and conflict of the elapsed era.

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Ain't nobody praying for Nietzsche - The Herald

TUESDAY, Aug. 29, 2017 (HealthDay News) -- If the cold weather makes you shiver, your blood vessels and heart may be quivering, too -- and that may be enough to trigger a heart attack in some people, new research suggests.

The study found that more heart attacks occur when temperatures drop below freezing, suggesting people with plaques in their coronary arteries may not cope well with the body's response to cold.

"There is seasonal variation in the occurrence of heart attack, with incidence declining in summer and peaking in winter," said study first author Moman Mohammad, a doctoral student from Lund University in Sweden.

"It is unclear whether this is due to colder temperatures or behavioral changes," Mohammad said.

The body responds to cold by narrowing superficial blood vessels, reducing heat conduction in the skin and raising blood pressure, the researchers explained. The body also shivers and increases heart rate, which boosts metabolism and raises body temperature, they added.

"In the majority of healthy people these mechanisms are well tolerated," said Mohammad. "But in people with atherosclerotic plaques in their coronary arteries they may trigger a heart attack."

Using Sweden's heart attack registry, the research team identified more than 280,000 consecutive heart attacks treated at a coronary care unit between January 1998 and December 2013.

The researchers also tracked the weather conditions that occurred during this 16-year period, calculating the average daily minimum temperature for the entire country as well as six health care regions.

Although the study wasn't designed to prove a cause-and-effect relationship, the researchers found a link between more heart attacks and colder temperatures. This was true across all regions studied.

This translated to four additional heart attacks in Sweden each day the average daily temperature was less than 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius) compared to when temperatures were a more balmy 50 degrees F (10 degrees C).

Heart attacks were also linked to higher wind velocities, reduced sunshine duration and more humidity. This was true even after the researchers took other possible factors into account, such as older age, high blood pressure, diabetes, previous heart attacks and medication usage, the study showed.

"Our results consistently showed a higher occurrence of heart attacks in sub-zero [Celsius] temperatures," Mohammad said in a news release from the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).

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"The findings were the same across a large range of patient subgroups, and at national as well as regional levels, suggesting that air temperature is a trigger for heart attack," he said.

Other risk factors for heart attack that are affected by seasons include lung infections and the flu, the researchers pointed out. They added that dietary changes and reduced physical activity during the winter months could also affect rates of heart attack when temperatures are low.

The study was presented Monday at the annual meeting of the ESC, in Barcelona, Spain. Research presented at meetings is typically viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

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As Temperatures Fall, Heart Attacks May Rise - Fremont Tribune

You have probably heard that eating a healthy breakfast is important. After all, breakfast is often said to be the most important meal of the day. Its difficult to prove that any one meal is more important than another, but research does show that eating breakfast can lead to important health benefits.

Breakfast provides energy to start the day. This is especially important if you will be active in the morning, either through an early trip to the gym or if you have a strenuous job, but even people who are less active may find that they feel more alert if they eat breakfast and not just because of coffee.

Eating breakfast can help reduce hunger and overeating later in the morning or at lunch. This is why breakfast is often emphasized in weight loss diets. In fact, 78% of participants in the National Weight Control Registry report that they eat breakfast every day as a way to lose weight and keep it off. These successful losers have lost an average of more than 60 pounds, so their advice is worth paying attention to.

What is a healthy breakfast? Unfortunately, there is no specific answer to that question. Most experts would agree that a good breakfast should include a combination of carbohydrates, protein and fat but be low in added sugar. These broad guidelines suggest that there are many ways to create a healthy breakfast, even if it doesn't include traditional breakfast foods.

A better approach may be to identify foods that would be poor choices for breakfast. Chances are, if your breakfast doesnt include items from this list, you are on the right track. However, if any of the following are true about your breakfast, it could likely use some improvements:

I think everyone would agree that foods that are frosted are better classified as dessert than breakfast. That said, from doughnuts to Pop Tarts to breakfast bars, many unhealthy breakfast foods are covered with a layer of frosting.

Just like frosting, breakfast foods that contain marshmallows are probably better choices for dessert. Marshmallows are found in cereals, granola bars and other packaged foods that are almost always high in added sugars beyond the marshmallows.

A fruit smoothie can be a healthy breakfast, but a fruit smoothie topped with whipped cream is probably closer to a milkshake as far as sugar and calories are concerned. The same goes for coffee drinks. A mocha-caramel-latte with whipped topping may contain coffee, but it also has far more sugar, fat and calories than you might expect.

Research shows that eating chocolate may have health benefits, but the research involves consuming small amounts of dark chocolate, not chocolate donuts or chocolate-flavored cereal. Again save the chocolate for dessert.

More specifically, you got the food while you were in your car, which means it likely came from the drive-through window at a fast food restaurant. Fast food is just as poor of a choice for breakfast as it is for lunch or dinner.

Of course, there are exceptions to these guidelines. There is nothing wrong with treating yourself to a chocolate frosted doughnut once in a while. But if your daily breakfast includes items from this list, you could benefit from a breakfast makeover, and this list should help you avoid many unhealthy choices.

Dr. Brian Parr is an associate professor in the Department of Exercise and Sports Science at USC Aiken where he teaches courses in exercise physiology, nutrition and health behavior. You can learn more about this and other health and fitness topics at http://drparrsays.com or on Twitter @drparrsays.

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HEALTH & FITNESS: Tips to choosing healthy breakfast - Aiken Standard

When asked his secret to being productive, billionaire Richard Branson's short reply to journalists was "working out". For every hour he spends working out, he gains four hours in productivity.

It's one of the quotes that Sydney-based go-to trainer for corporate executives, Greg Stark uses in his book, Sweat Equity, to highlight the mind-body connection. Healthy body, healthy mind.

Corporate health is his niche. And Stark says it's not all about achieving a six pack of abs, although that can be a welcome by-product of a new exercise regime.

It's more about helping busy executives make time for fitness.

And, as Branson is on the record as saying, many people fail in business because they feel the only way to succeed is to sacrifice all other areas of life. He said: "It's difficult to keep running at 100mph when you're on zero."

Stark, a personal trainer for 12 years, tells how his time spent looking after elite athletes such as South Sydney Rabbitohs league players translates to looking after everyday athletes.

"I could see the same principles we were applying to the elite sports world would benefit people at the top of the corporate world."

Stark says often the hardest challenge is finding the time to allocate to health and fitness.

"That is the same for a lot of people whether you're a high-level executive or a stay-at-home mum.

"The other part we find, particularly with executives, is it is not about us trying to push them harder, but trying to slow them down. To regenerate and recover, just like you do with an athlete."

He says staying healthy is also about how people perceive stress.

"People think stress is evil: that it is making us sick physically and mentally. But stress is what makes us improve, it builds resistance, it makes our fitness better, it makes our hearts stronger.

"The key is understanding that stress can help us, but we need opportunities to switch off as well.

"And that is where a lot of people struggle. The on switch is always on. We often spend the last five minutes of our sessions doing a form of breathing that is similar to meditation, to hit the reset button. So, your mind and body perform better."

His book is broken up into four sections: mindset, movement, nutrition and recovery.

"The first part of the book is about keeping perspective on where all those things in your life sit. You have to be aware of your priorities.

"I think people have to be a little bit more selfish in some ways, and look after themselves first.

My perspective on health and fitness is that, to be the best for everyone else around me, whether it is the people I am working for, or my clients or my family, I need to be in the best condition myself. I don't want to be a drain upon them, so I need to be keeping myself fit and healthy."

Unfortunately, it often takes a health issue or relationship breakdown for people to realise they need to look after their health.

"A lot of people have the mentality that they will deal with getting fit and healthy when they get enough money or enough time. But unfortunately, those points never occur. A relationship breakdown or a health decline makes them assess priorities.

"The wonderful thing about the industry I work in, is I have seen so many people rebuild themselves."

Greg Stark.

So how much time does it take to change?

Stark says a common mistake is that people go overboard.

"They will go from not training at all to training seven days a week or doing a crazy diet. People will do it for a short period of time and then it all becomes too hard.

"We say come and see us once a week for a personal training session. That will help them start to make the changes around their health."

He works with his clients to establish three keys to drive their success.

*Purpose: Get in tune with why their health is important

*Progress: Establish their current state of wellness and where they want to get to.

*Perception: Address challenges or limiting beliefs that might inhibit their ability to achieve greater health.

"People will find going for one long walk once a week or changing one thing in their diet can have a dramatic effect on all areas of their of health," he says.

And research is showing that health and fitness not only have physical benefits but improve how we perform in our working days.

Companies looking for ways to engage their employees can allow them to exercise in company time. "By valuing your employees' health, there is no greater gift than that."

Stark says another misconception is that if people exercise, they can sit at their desks for eight hours straight.

"Sitting is now the new smoking.

"Research shows that all the benefits you can get from your exercise is negated by that time spent sitting."

However, the opposite of sitting isn't standing, it is moving.

He suggests strategies to help get moving in the workplace.

"Every time you take a phone call, stand up and walk around the room.

"Drink plenty of water so that you have to get up and go to the bathroom on a regular basis.

"Just having a quick stretch for two minutes every hour helps to keep the body performing."

Walking meetings are another option.

"I do it with my team when I have a one-on-one catch-up, rather than having a sit-down meeting. They are often the best meetings we have because of that body/brain connection. The body is moving, the brain is thriving."

Stark is based in Australia but he says his book addresses universal problems.

These are universal principles and there will be one thing that you can incorporate into your lifestyle."

Sweat Equity, Simon & Schuster, RRP $35

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Put fitness into your schedule - New Zealand Herald