Category: health

“You eat and drink 5 grams of plastic per week” (The equivalent of one credit card) – An article about: – #ourplanet #Plastic #Health #environment #WWF

Bjørn Heidenstrøm

The article is from and about:

WWF – one of the world’s largest and most experienced independent conservation organizations, with over 5 million supporters and a global network active in more than 100 countries.

DALBERG ADVISORS Dalberg Advisors is a strategy consulting firm that works to build a more inclusive and sustainable world where all people, everywhere, can reach their fullest potential. We partner with and serve communities, governments, and companies providing an innovative mix of services – advisory, investment, research, analytics, and design – to create impact at scale.

Illustration: WWF

This article is about:

A new study by the University of Newcastle, Australia, takes a closer look at the data gap on what plastic pollution means for human nutrition. The study estimates the average amount of plastic ingested by humans by analyzing and synthesizing the existing but limited literature on the topic. The results confirm concerns over the large quantity of plastic we ingest every day.

I got it from Liv-Marit Hansen at www.oslofjorden.org and you can read it here:

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The Only Strength Exercises You’ll Ever Need | HuffPost Life

Bjørn Heidenstrøm

Source: The Only Strength Exercises You’ll Ever Need | HuffPost Life

Co-written by Andrew Heffernan, co-author of The Exercise Cure (Rodale, 2013)

Big box gyms pride themselves on having lots of equipment — specifically, vaguely medieval-looking contraptions you strap yourself into and lift stacks of weighted bricks by pushing, pulling, squeezing, extending or flexing various parts of yourself against a platform or a lever arm.

For a newcomer to the gym, though, all that machinery can be awfully confusing. Do I get on the machine where I sit and push the pads outwards with my knees — or the one where I push them inward? Or both? And then what do I do? A person could waste a lot of time wondering such things.

The machine/free weight debate is something I’ll take up in another blog post — though I will say here that the people who modeled for all the classical statues many consider the standard for physical beauty never met a Butt-Blaster. Here instead I want to boil down strength training into five simple types of exercise you should be doing in the gym.

Here they are: plank, pull, squat, push, lunge. Do those five moves and you can go home knowing you’ve worked your entire body effectively — no innie-outie machine required.

Taking those things in the order you should do them in the gym:

• A plank is a ramrod straight top-of-a-pushup position, usually done on your elbows and held for time. Think you’re straight enough? Get in front of a mirror and you’ll see your hips are too high. Now squeeze your belly and hold it. 30 seconds too easy? Try it with one leg lifted. Still easy? Lift the opposite arm as well. If that’s easy, it may not be too late for the 2016 Olympic trials. I’ll be rooting for you.

• A pull is a move where you take hold of something and pull it towards your chest or abdomen: a row. A pulldown. A pull-up or chin-up. Often neglected, these moves — especially row variations — are a major key to improving posture and keeping your shoulders healthy. Do them.

• A squat is a squat is a squat. Gym class-style, bodyweight only, is fine, just make sure you drop down to a point where the tops of your thighs are parallel with the floor. Do it holding two dumbbells. Do it with a jump at the top. Then with a barbell on your shoulders, in front or behind your head. Good form is imperative. Get some coaching on this one from that bored-looking trainer wandering the floor. Seriously, that guy needs something to do.

• A push is anything where you… wait for it… push something away from you. (I hope you’re taking notes.) Two dumbbells overhead. One barbell while lying on your back — aka the ever-ego-boosting bench press. Yourself, off the floor, with your body straight (as in a pushup!). If you’re really diesel, try the handstand pushup.

• A lunge is a lot like a squat, only your feet are in a staggered position, one in front of the other. Do them walking, or with your feet planted, or holding light dumbbells, or your grandchild on your shoulders. Don’t let you front knee buckle inward. Keep your form tight, like a Renaissance courtier bowing to royalty.

Those five moves will do it for you. Pretty soon you’ll be able to stroll confidently past all those machines at the gym knowing that all of them are just variations on those five simple moves you’ve now mastered. See something that isn’t? You probably don’t need it. Good luck!

Interesting stuff and “Alcohol Optimization” from ww.elitehrv.com/blog  ( if you like #health #training ) 

Bjørn Heidenstrøm

Cycling on Sjusjøen – a place where I have a lot of #training & #health and a dash of #alcohol 

Got some interesting stuff from www.elitehrv.com/blog:

The stuff:

Hi Bjørn,
Last week we discussed the alarming weight gain that can occur in just 6 weeks around the end of the year holiday season.
Luckily, we also know a few simple actions that can greatly reduce the damage – like quick digestive “resets”, small sleep tweaks, supplements, and targeted sun exposure.
Heart rate variability (HRV) can help us get even better results with less overall effort, by helping reveal which of the discussed “hidden holiday stresses” are impacting us the most and whether our tweaks are working or not.
Here we will dig a little deeper into a few powerful ways to use HRV around the holidays to minimize damage and make next year that much easier:
Sleep Optimization
You don’t have to get a perfect night’s sleep every night. But if your sleep is disrupted from travel or festivities, it will most likely show up in your HRV scores.
A yellow or red morning HRV indicator after disrupted sleep can help warn you that food cravings and energy levels may temporarily be worse than normal. The good news is that you have a perfectly objective excuse to take a nap or go to bed earlier!
You can also test out different strategies for mitigating the damage of poor sleep:
A refreshing walk outside, a few minutes of downtime in a quiet room, and some clean eating can all help you bounce back more quickly from disrupted sleep during the holiday season.
Alcohol and high quality melatonin can both help you fall asleep, but beware! Alcohol often disrupts sleep quality, which is just as important, if not more important, than the number of hours you sleep. And no sleep aid is 1:1 a replacement for natural, high quality sleep.
A more sustainable strategy to fall asleep faster that also boosts sleep quality is to get some daytime exercise and avoid bright lights and stimulation 1-2 hours before bed. Your body and HRV will thank you afterwards.
Alcohol Optimization 
Whether or not alcohol is truly “healthy” or not matters little around holiday festivities. What is clear is that most people have a tipping point where alcohol goes from having a small effect on health to an extremely large effect on health (at least acutely).
Morning HRV readings can drop for several days after a night of drinking!
Using HRV and isolating a few other variables, you may be able to find out if there is a large difference between 3 and 4 alcoholic drinks in a night for you, or whether cocktails or beer or wine have a bigger impact to your health.
The point of this experiment is not to kill the fun. The point is to find out how much you can enjoy yourself without trashing your sleep, cravings, HRV, and energy levels for the following 3 days.
The type of drinks and the tipping point for quantity seems to be different for different people, so a little pre-holiday experimentation may be in order (for the sake of science, of course!).
Interestingly, our elite athletes and sports teams also find that alcohol has a MAJOR impact on competition performance and HRV and find this experimentation to be helpful if their hard-charging athletes won’t completely abstain.
What about the food?
When talking weight gain, we also need to talk about food. The end of the year is often full of treats, sweets, and festivities.
For starters, just like alcohol, certain foods and food timings are going to disrupt your sleep. Eating processed foods, sugary foods, and eating late can all impact sleep quality, which often shows up immediately in next-day HRV scores.
We also tend to eat a lot more carbohydrates around the holidays and exercise a lot less. Carbohydrates are like rocket fuel to the body and are best used to fuel physical exercise.
Excess carbohydrates combined with little or no exercise is a recipe for fat storage and maybe even insulin resistance – a self perpetuating loop.
What to do?
On days in which your HRV is abnormally low or high (yellow or red, for example), your cravings for carbohydrates and rich foods will likely increase. So when HRV is off, try to:
  • Stay hydrated. Drink extra water (not sugary drinks). Even better if the water has some minerals and electrolytes in it.
  • Up the nutrients. If possible, eat more nutrient dense vegetables as soon as you can. Some supplementation may also help. Adequate protein and high quality fat can also help reduce hunger and cravings.
  • Eat anti-inflammatory foods. Antioxidants and clean foods can immediately help lower inflammation in the body and reduce digestive stress – promoting faster recovery and better energy.
  • Do light exercise. It’s a worthy goal to move your body every single day. Especially on days when HRV is off, some light exercise or movement can help clear your mind, clear waste from the body, reduce cravings, boost energy, and increase sleep quality.
Hopefully you are now armed with a few more tools in your toolkit going into this holiday season