by Joanna Yap, reporters@theborneopost.com. Posted on October 13, 2013, Sunday

GROWING UP as a young boy in Kerala, India, Jacob Sebastian can barely recall a time when he was not sickly.

I was born into a family of very healthy people but I was an exception I was sick from birth. My family wondered why. This was during the time when there was no antibiotics, and very little knowledge of things such as cholesterol and blood pressure, he shared with thesundaypost.

It was only years later that Jacob discovered the reason behind his poor health was due to a birth defect. Three of the vertebrae on his left side were fused, causing his left lung to be underdeveloped and not fully functional.

As a teenager, his ill health worsened until it reached the point he almost dying in the hospital.

At that time, his elder sister who was studying medicine in another part of India, took it upon herself to nurse him back to health so that he could continue with his studies in college.

One day, she took Jacob to see her senior colleague, a well-known doctor. Little did Jacob know the doctors advice would have such a profound effect on his life.

He examined me and said to my sister: Your brother will be all right. But he must do two things respect the cold and do breathing exercise. His lung needs breathing. Take him to a yoga teacher, said Jacob who can still remember the doctors words as clearly as when the latter first spoke them more than 65 years ago.

Soon after that fateful meeting, Jacobs sister took him to see a yoga teacher for the first time. The teacher taught the then 19 years old Jacob a series of breathing exercises.

Partners For Life

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Yoga pioneer still going strong

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 11 (UPI) -- Indian-born yoga instructor, coffee-shop owner and actor Kumar Pallana has died at the age of 94, his son Dipak announced on Facebook.

"Dear Papa, you will be missed," Dipak Pallana wrote Thursday.

Trained as a gymnast, Kumar Pallana worked as a juggler and a singer before being cast as an actor -- frequently as Native Americans -- in several Western films, UsMagazine.com noted.

"I came to the United States in 1946. Back then, Indians couldn't even get one foot in the door at the studios," he told the Dallas Morning News in 2004. "There just weren't that many roles for Indians. Oh sure, I got work -- but I played a different sort of Indian."

After he retired from acting, he opened a Dallas yoga studio and coffee shop called the Cosmic Cup where he met writer-actor Owen Wilson and writer-director Wes Anderson who were writing their film "Bottle Rocket" in the mid-1990s, UsMagazine.com said.

Pallana played a supporting role in their film as well as Anderson's other efforts "Rushmore," "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Darjeeling Limited."

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Kumar Pallana, actor and yoga instructor, dead at 94

By Amy Norton HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Oct. 10 (HealthDay News) -- Practicing yoga may not ease menopausal hot flashes, but it might help women sleep a bit easier, a new clinical trial suggests.

Right now, hormone therapy is the most effective treatment for the hot flashes and night sweats many women develop as they go through menopause. But hormones have been linked to risks like blood clots and heart attack, so many women want alternatives.

Some small studies have suggested that yoga can reduce the frequency and severity of hot flashes -- possibly by calming nervous system activity. But that was not the case in this latest trial, which randomly assigned 249 women to either take gentle yoga classes for 12 weeks, or stick with their usual activities.

By the study's end, women in the yoga group were having fewer hot flashes each day -- but so were those in the comparison group.

On the other hand, the yoga practitioners did seem to be sleeping better.

"For the time being, there seems to be little sound evidence that yoga is helpful for hot flashes," said lead researcher Katherine Newton, of the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle.

"However, we did find yoga to be modestly helpful for insomnia," Newton added. That's important, she noted, because sleep problems are one of the most common reasons that women seek some kind of treatment as they go through menopause.

"If insomnia is bothering a woman," Newton said, "this style of gentle yoga, practiced regularly, may be of benefit."

The study was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and recently published online in the journal Menopause.

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Yoga Fails to Cool Hot Flashes, But May Aid Sleep