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| HEALTH & FITNESS |
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Looking better
every year, but how? EYESIGHT Ayurveda & you Health Notes
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Looking better
every year, but how?
Natural or "intrinsic" aging: Natural, biological aging is responsible for the inevitable thinning of our skin. The good news is that this biological aging is the least important of the causes of wrinkles on your face. Sun damage: The sun is responsible for at least 90 per cent of the appearance of skin aging. The sun is the most destructive and also the most preventable of the causes of wrinkles. You can prevent these deep, sun-induced wrinkles by applying a high-protection sunscreen and always wearing a hat. Your facial expressions: While the sun is largely responsible for most of your wrinkles, it is your facial expressions that cause all the furrows that become imprinted on your face. Once again, there is hope! Many of these deep creases are indeed avoidable, and all of them are treatable! If you squint when you read or drive, get glasses. If your eyes are sensitive to the sun, wear sunglasses. Gravity’s effect: Although gravity makes life possible (and helps people walk rather than flaat!), we are not often conscious of gravity’s effect on our appearance. And as we age, gravity pulls our skin down! With the natural thinning of our skin with age and loss of underlying fat comes drooping, especially of the eyelids and jowls. Another cause of gravity-induced wrinkles is a major weight loss. If you allow yourself to become overweight or obese, your skin has no choice but to stretch to accommodate. As you (hopefully) lose that extra weight, you may suffer not only from stretch marks, but also from having excess skin! The younger you are, the more resilient is your skin. When a younger person loses weight, the skin reforms to a thinner body; with age, excess skin just droops. The key to retarding this immutable force of gravity on your skin is prevention. Do not let yourself become overweight. Always exercise to protect your muscles and bones. Eat a healthy diet to provide your system with essential supplements. Take good care of your teeth to avoid the need for dentures. You will not only enjoy a longer life in better health, but also a better, more youthful skin with fewer wrinkles. Your sleeping position: The average person sleeps for one-quarter to one-third of his or her life. By the time you reach 60 years old, you will have slept for 15-20 years! What you may not be aware of is that while you have been sleeping, you have spent six-eight hours each day pressing wrinkles into your face! A dermatologist or plastic surgeon can almost always recognise the side on which you tend to sleep because wrinkles are deeper on that side. Thousands of years ago, Chinese women recognised that they could prevent creases appearing on their faces by sleeping on their backs, using concave porcelain pillows. You don’t need to suffer so much to learn not to bury your face in your pillow! You can easily learn to sleep in a different position. If models and actresses can sleep on their backs, face-up to prevent wrinkles, so can you! I have two other pieces of simple advice to help you sleep comfortably without adding wrinkles to your face. Firstly, invest in a silky-smooth, satin pillow case. It’s luxuriously comfortable, and your skin does not "stick" to satin as it might to cotton, especially if you perspire occasionally. Secondly, use a big, soft, non-synthetic pillow that does not apply added pressure to your facial skin if you tend to toss and turn. Smoking: Cigarette smoking actually accentuates facial wrinkles! You can often immediately recognise long-term cigarette smokers by their wrinkles: smokers in their forties often have as many facial wrinkles as non-smokers in their sixties. The writer is Chief Dermatologist, Mohan Dai Oswal Cancer Treatment and Research Foundation, Ludhiana.
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EYESIGHT Mr Mehta had become reclusive and introvert. Of late, he had been avoiding meetings and remained alone in his office. He had developed a twitching around his eyelids and right side of the face which was making him self-conscious. This got aggravated at times causing involuntary closure of the eyelid. Mr Mehta has a condition known as "hemifacial spasm" in which all or some of the muscles on the one side of the face go into involuntary over-action leading to twitching and abnormal movements around the eyelids and cheek. Sometimes patients develop spasms of the muscles around both eyelids, leading to a forceful involuntary closure of the eyelids known as "essential blepharospasm". Apart from the psychological stress caused, this can be functionally disabling too. Can it be cured? Yes, now we have an answer in Botox! These and other such conditions of abnormal twitching of muscles are amenable to treatment by Botox. What is Botox? It is a natural, purified protein that relaxes wrinkle-causing muscles. Botox is a formulation of a drug and is called Botoxinulim A which causes paralysis of the muscle into which it is injected. This relieves the spasm of the muscle and alleviates the symptoms. It’s a simple non-surgical procedure. One-time 10-minute treatment — a few tiny injections — relaxes the muscles and keeps them relaxed for four months. What Botox isn’t? Botox is not magic. It’s a medicine. Botox is highly purified protein that is extracted from bacteria, in a similar way that penicillin comes from a mould. Botox injections are also used in selective cases of squint, eyelid retraction and sometimes in cases with improper eyelid closure, to protect the cornea. These injections have gained popularity for cosmetic purposes and can be used to decrease wrinkles around the eyes (crows feet) and for frown lines on the forehead. What to expect from the treatment? Your doctor will determine exactly where to use Botox to achieve the best results. No anaesthetic is required. Treatment takes around 10 minutes. Discomfort is minimal and brief — most patients describe it an ant-bite sting for a few seconds. Botox lasts up to our months. Depending on the individual you can decide to repeat the procedure as you wish. The results will wear off gradually. To maintain the effect you may require repeat injections two-three times a year. Studies show that with repeat Botox treatment, the effect can last longer. The most common side-effects are temporary and localised to the area of injection. These include soreness or mild bruising. No permanent side-effect of Botox has been reported. Botox is not recommended during pregnancy or breast-feeding or for patients with a neuromuscular disease. Is Botox suitable for you? To find out if Botox will work well for you, please consult an oculoplastic surgeon who is a trained professional and can judge the optimum treatment to relieve you of your discomfort. The writer is Chairman and Medical Director, Centre for Sight, New Delhi. E-mail: msachdev@bol.net.in
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Ayurveda & you Heart ailment is the leading cause of death in India and abroad, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept it as our fate. With the changing lifestyle and increasing pressures of day-to-day life, heart disease has ceased to be the problem of the elderly people. As more and more young persons are diagnosed as suffering from heart ailments, it is better to start thinking of preventing it at a young age than waiting it to occur through our negligence and carelessness. If we leave aside some of the reasons considered important to the genesis of heart disease like the family history, age and race, diet is certainly the number one factor which needs to be corrected at a young age. A heart-friendly diet means eatables which are low in fat, cholesterol and salt, and high in fibre like whole grain cereals and pulses, vegetables and fruits. Experts believe that making high fat diet a routine is asking for trouble. Good-eating habits need to be adopted early because cardiac arteries start carrying the risk of clogging from the age of 20 to 30 onwards. The rate and ratio of heart problem is tilted unsuitably against men than women. Though we know that regular exercise is good for heart, somehow such initiation is missing in most of the urban population. The aptitude for exercise should be cultivated right at the school or college stage. Regular moderate work-outs are believed to reduce the risk of fatal heart disease by a quarter. Exercise helps to control weight and additionally keeps at bay many other conditions that adversely affect the heart. The general recommendation is to get 30 minutes of moderate physical activity everyday. Hypertension or high blood pressure makes the heart work extra and hardens the artery walls, thus raising the risk of heart problem. Factors like wrong eating habits, inactivity, obesity and unmanageable stress in their own way contribute to hypertension, the disease named as a silent killer. Many times high blood pressure strikes at a young age, so one needs to be careful in preventing or managing it when the time is on one’s side. The writer is a Ludhiana-based senior ayurvedic physician.
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Health Notes LONDON: The 25 biggest food companies in the world are failing to take the global crisis in diet seriously and often change their practices only when faced with adverse publicity that could damage their sales, a new study claims. From Wal-Mart to Aldi and McDonald’s to Coca-Cola, the leaders of the worldwide food industry are accused of a "pathetic" performance on meeting the targets set by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2004 to tackle obesity, heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Of the 25 largest retailers, manufacturers and caterers, just four said they were taking action to reduce the total fat content of their products. Only five said they were cutting sugar and 10 said they were reducing salt. The comprehensive review of the policies and practices of the companies, including four British conglomerates, found that their global reach means they are largely unaccountable for how they address the epidemic of diet-related disease. The study, believed to be the first of its kind, rated the companies on their performance with meeting the WHO’s global strategy on diet, physical activity and health — a policy thrashed out in 2004 under intense lobbying from the food industry to set out basic action to improve diet. According to WHO figures, non-communicable diseases such as cancer, heart disease and obesity currently account for 60 per cent of global deaths. That figure is predicted to rise to 73 per cent by 2020. — The Independent Veggie diet helps lose weight Washington: Now here’s one more reaon to turn to a veggie diet, a new research has found that a vegetarian diet is highly effective for weight loss. Vegetarian populations tend to be slimmer than meat-eaters, and they experience lower rates of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other life-threatening conditions linked to overweight and obesity. The new review, compiling data from 87 previous studies, shows the weight-loss effect does not depend on exercise or calorie- counting, and it occurs at a rate of approximately 1 pound per week. Vegetarian and vegan diets have also been put to the test in clinical studies, as the review notes. The best of these clinical studies isolated the effects of diet by keeping exercise constant. The researchers found that a low-fat vegan diet leads to weight loss of about 1 pound per week, even without additional exercise or limits on portion sizes, calories, or carbohydrates. — ANI Mothers’ high protein diet harmful for babies London: High protein, low carbohydrate diets should be avoided during pregnancy as they can lead to more stressed offspring, research suggests. A UK team followed a group of 86 children born in 1967-68 to mothers who were told to eat a pound of red meat a day to avoid pregnancy complications. The study found the more meat the mother ate, the higher the levels of stress hormone cortisol in the child. The research has been presented at a medical conference in Glasgow. We are very interested in foetal programming which says how we are born as a baby sets us up for future health. — ANI |
Taking care of our
appearance, trying to look as young as we feel, is neither a vanity
nor a luxury; it is essential to our health. We maintain our homes and
our possessions, repairing scratches and dents, and repainting when
necessary. So, shouldn’t there also be a greater interest in
maintaining our health, particularly our outward appearance, and, more
especially, our skin? Here are some major
causes of our facial wrinkles: