That's Fit

Your TV screen might offer a home-field advantage when it comes to enjoying the big game, but did you know that most kids would rather play sports than watch them on television? That's what 80 percent of children ages 6 to 18 said in a recent survey.

The lesson: Be sure to make outdoor time readily available for young sports fans and/or offer them a chance to join a team or league. Other results from the survey revealed these interesting athletic nuggets:

• Among 6- to 9-year olds, 43 percent said they play their sport "because they love it," versus 32 percent of the 13- to 18-year olds.
• Ten percent of 13- to 18-year-old girls quit playing sports after being told they weren't good enough by a coach.
• Girls attend practice in greater number than boys.
• Nearly 50 percent of the kids said their parents urge them to play a team sport.

You recognize your family traits -- you have your mother's nose and your brother has your father's eyes -- but what about the health problems? Did you inherit any of those? According to the U.S. Surgeon General, your family health history is a powerful screening tool and now there's a new web program to make it easy for anyone to create a sophisticated family-health portrait. Users can keep updated information to share with the family doctor and the information that you provide creates a drawing of your family tree and a chart of your family health history. Both the chart and the drawing can be printed and shared with your family members or your health-care professional. Access it at familyhistory.hhs.gov/

Women are living longer, healthier lives than ever before. That's why it's even more important today to prevent one of the leading causes of death among women: heart disease. In fact, heart disease is the leading cause of death among women over 65.

While most of the risk factors, signs and symptoms are the same in women as they are in men, there are unique aspects to women's heart health that are different, so it's important to get tested. And though many tests measure cardiac health, some are better at detecting disease in women.

According to MORE magazine, these are the tests that you should be asking for and why:

• Stress echocardiogram -- A stress echocardiogram uses ultrasound to show the heart's motion at rest and at peak exercise and is more accurate for women than conventionsl stress testing, which can lead to false positives in women.

Last week, both my children came home from school with a flier asking them to participate in a fundraiser. To help the Ronald McDonald House, they were asked to collect aluminum pull-tab rings found on soda pop cans. However, in our house we don't drink soda (I quit years ago) ... so even though it was a worthwhile cause, I told them that this was one fundraiser we wouldn't be able to participate in.

Yesterday (seven days later) any child who collected any tabs was asked to turn them in. Can I just tell you that just about every child brought in tabs and not just one or two ... they brought in ziplock bags filled to the brim. All I could think about while looking at each child was "Is that how much soda you drank last week?"

Ironically, it seems that to complete this 'do good' task, children felt inclined to drink a lot of soda. Or, who knows, possibly this is how much soda they consume regularly. Either way, someone was consuming it ... I guess even with all the facts, people aren't quite ready to stay away from sugar (or sugar substitutes).

How much do you know about sugar? Take this quiz.

Scientists in Britain think so. According to them, the position in which you hold your body plays a major role in maintaining your blood pressure.

New Scientist magazine reports that the studies suggest that good posture could help keep blood pressure levels normal while bad posture could increase it.

Posture is the position in which a body is held upright against gravity while standing, sitting or lying down. And good posture involves training a body to stand, walk, sit and lie in positions where the least strain is placed on supporting muscles and spine during movement or weight-bearing activities.

Scientists had earlier suspected the link between the muscles in the neck, blood pressure and heart rate. Now, they have found a direct connection between these neck muscles and a part of the brain stem, which plays a crucial role in regulating heart rate and blood pressure. Researchers also claim that their findings could explain why blood pressure and heart rate sometimes change when the neck muscles are injured.

Similarly, it is possible that hours spent hunched over a computer may raise blood pressure.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past couple of decades, I'm sure you're aware that pollution and global warming are ever-increasing problems in our society. And, recently, there has been a major boom in the production and purchase of "organic" products, everything from food, to fabric -- even beauty products are jumping on the bandwagon, but what do these new labels mean?

If you are anything like me, you can easily become confused by all the verbage and symbols that are posted on products. It's almost as if you need a degree in Label Reading to be able to properly determine what you are eating or putting on your face. So, to help you decipher a few of them, here's what I found out about some of the new icons popping up everywhere:

Your medical history, that is. If you (or your spouse) has a strong family history of cardiovascular disease, you (or your spouse), too, could be at risk, and you could be passing that risk on to your kids. Therefore, it's important to make your internist and your pediatrician aware of any incidence of heart disease in primary relatives -- parents, siblings, and grandparents.

Your family doctor probably has taken a detailed medical history, but your child's doctor might not have. So don't hesitate to bring up the subject with your pediatrician at the earliest possible opportunity.

Did you know almost one in every six Americans is afflicted with arthritis?

According to Wikipedia, arthritis is a group of conditions where there is damage caused to the joints of the body and arthritis is the leading cause of disability in people over the age of 55. There are many different forms of arthritis, each of which has a different cause. Rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis are autoimmune diseases in which the body is attacking itself. Septic arthritis is caused by joint infection and gouty arthritis is caused by deposition of uric acid crystals in the joint that results in subsequent inflammation.

Because arthritis is a disease of inflammation, the most effective - and logical - treatment is anything that fights inflammation. The problem is that many people (who suffer from arthritis) don't realize how much nutrition can improve the way they feel, but by eating plenty of the right foods you'll automatically reduce the level of inflammation in your body and relieve some of the stiffness.

All too often, you worry about work, your love life, your bills, taxes -- all issues that you know aren't going to go away. So, to turn around those irrational fears, you need to reprogram the way you react to the triggers that bring on your unwanted anxiety.

First: Make a plan. What helps me is to write down how I feel about certain triggers, why I react the way I do, and how I'd like to react instead. By breaking down my fears it helps me discover why they scared me in the first place.

The next step is to reprogram: When you're faced with a fearful situation, you freeze (like I do) because you've programmed yourself to freeze. Instead, concentrate on your breathing and try to visualize a place you associate with calm and serenity -- the beach, the mountains, or your hometown.

Lastly: Practice and improve. Once you recognize the onset of your irrational fears, you'll eventually reprogram yourself to react more pro-actively and that should reduce your stress.

With a whole lot of help from science, humans may some day live for centuries, according to Michael Rose, PhD, author of The Long Tomorrow: How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging.

Currently, the adult body deteriorates rapidly until about age 90, at which point, surprisingly, the decline plateaus. That plateau is what intrigues Rose and his peers. They hope to find a way to hit that plateau at an earlier age, which would allow people to live long enough to know their great-great-grandkids' great-great-grandkids, and then some.

As amazing as that seems, Rose expects that we could, in a few centuries, achieve plateaus that correspond to the mortality levels and health of a present-day 30- to 40-year old. That would mean an average life expectancy of 500 to 800 years.

If you're like most men, you're sucking it up each time you're sick and not going to the doctor, reports the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This feeling of invisibility is what medical experts call the Superman Syndrome, and ironically there's nothing super about it.

It's important for men in their upper teens, 20s, and 30s to be examined regularly, so stop avoiding the doctor. Did you know that testicular cancer is at its highest incidence in these groups? By getting a regular check up, your doctor will not only check for testicular cancer, but he or she will also screen for quiet symptoms of other diseases. They may even be able to help you kick bad habits and give you tips on losing weight.

So the next time you feel like being Superman, try being Clark Kent instead.

A Cornell University study has found that people eat more than twice as much candy when it's in a clear container compared to when it's in opaque containers, and even more when the containers are within reaching distance instead of a few steps away.

With that in mind, I thought this might work for fruits and vegetables. In other words, I thought that what makes the close and open candy dish nutritionally dangerous might just bring the fruit bowl back in vogue.

It stands to reason that you will eat more fruits and vegetables in an open and close container for the same reasons you were eating more candy.

As if fast-food restaurants weren't convenient enough, RoboServer Systems Corp. has unveiled a mechanical self-serve machine called the Line Buster. Similar to an ATM, customers select their order, pay for it, and pick it up at the counter.

Aside from the predictable employment threat, what will these machines do to a nation that's already on the brink of an obesity epidemic? In my opinion, the Line Buster is only going to make the fast-food industry more efficient in getting this crap out to people.

On the bright side, if you're indulging on a cheat day, you are the only one to blame if your order gets messed up.

The next time you sit down to eat a big juicy hamburger, instead of pouring yourself a glass of soda or a milkshake, consider reaching for a glass of apple juice. Certain substances in apple juice help reduce the level of the so-called "bad" (LDL) cholesterol and may protect against heart disease.

Even better, drink cloudy apple juice, often labeled 'natural.' it contains as much as four times the polyphenols as the clear types. These antioxidant chemicals in apple pulp are also believed to reduce your risk of cancer.

Apples have always played a role in a healthy diet. For decades, if not hundreds of years, we've been told to eat an apple a day to maintain our health.

Lucky for us: We now know that the healthy components are not just in apples, but they are in the juice as well (the cloudy juice anyway) ... and that's something we can all drink to.

Sea salt and table salt have the same basic nutritional value and chemical composition. The only difference -- taste and texture -- come from the salt's refining process. Refined salt (table salt) consists of uniform crystals and may contain added iodine and an anti-caking agent, which research suggests is harmless. Sea salt is less refined and composed of larger crystals that contain trace amounts of naturally occurring minerals, giving it a slightly different taste and coarse texture.

Regardless of your preference, odds are you're using too much. Try to limit your intake to 2,300 mg per day.