Most Powerful Painkilling Essential Oil (You’ve probably never heard of it)

Most Powerful Painkilling Essential Oil (You’ve probably never heard of it)

15 Amazing Uses of Himalayan Salt You’ve Never Heard Before

15 Amazing Uses of Himalayan Salt You’ve Never Heard Before

The Important Cumin Recall You May Not Have Heard About

There is a giant, ongoing recall of cumin and products containing the spice due to undeclared peanut proteins.

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If you have friends or family with food allergies (as I do), this may be the most important post you share all week: There is a giant, ongoing recall of cumin and products containing the spice due to undeclared peanut proteins. What’s unusual is this recall has been building since December, with more and more foods (from taco kits and Cajun seasoning mix to beef and chicken) added and major retailers including Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods yanking products off their shelves. Thankfully, no deaths have been reported, which is especially lucky considering that peanuts are one of the foods most likely to trigger a fatal anaphylactic reaction, according to Food Allergy Research and Education (FARE). (The others are tree nuts and crustacean shellfish.) The exact danger posed by a contaminated food “depends on the ingested quantity and the degree of sensitivity,” explains Sami Bahna, MD, a spokesperson for the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. “The reaction can vary from minimal rash to chest wheezing to airway obstruction, or anaphylactic shock. Some patients need to have an epinephrine auto-injector for immediate use.” (My second-grader, Gus, is both peanut- and tree nut-allergic and must have his EpiPen with him at all times.)RELATED: The Weird Reason Some People Are Allergic to Fruits and Veggies To stay safe, first check your kitchen (including the fridge and freezer) and dump not only the recalled foods but any others that clearly contain cumin. Here’s where it gets tricky. You can’t always tell which spices are in that can of soup or frozen chicken patty, because manufacturers aren’t required by law to specify exact spices—they are allowed to group them under “spices.” How can that be? “Competition among food manufacturers requires some secrecy about the ingredients or recipes,” says Dr. Bahna. “It took many years to get legislation to require the food industry to list on labels the 8 major food allergens.”Allergic Living points out that cumin is likely to be in many Tex-Mex and Indian foods, making them suspect. (As those of us whose kids have food allergies know, we’re always in “better safe than sorry” mode.) Also key: Sign up for USDA food allergy alerts so you’ll be first to hear if new products are pulled. The welcome news, according to Dr. Bahna, is that these scares may be a little less scary in the not-too-distant future: “Research studies are going on for desensitization. In a few years, we expect the development of effective, safe protocols for building tolerance—at least against accidental exposure in the highly sensitive.” Here’s hoping.RELATED: 5 Ways to Find Out About Bad Food and Dangerous Products

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The Important Cumin Recall You May Not Have Heard About

I had heard clean eating made you feel better – but for me it went wrong

I got into clean eating with a friend around my AS levels, when I was 16. My friends only followed the diet for about two weeks but when they all stopped I continued. I got addicted to it and I lost loads of weight.

We all started the diet because we were really stressed and tired and had heard eating better made you feel better, but for me it went wrong.

I cut out snacking, I had smaller portions, and everything was a health food. I prepared all my meals myself from scratch.

I cut out dairy and any drinks that weren’t water. I was eating fruit and vegetables and no carbohydrates and no snacking. I was eating no processed food – I would have a handful of dried fruit if I had a snack. An average dinner would be just meat or fish and a small side of vegetables.

I obsessively watched Lean in 15 – a YouTube channel on healthy eating by Joe Wicks. I used to watch a lot of his videos and also followed loads of “transformation” accounts where people ate healthily to lose weight.

At first I did this all to feel better in myself and then it became about losing weight. I liked how it felt and people saying: “Oh you’ve lost weight and you look great.” I used to limit food groups and obsessively weighed my food. I had foods I was afraid to eat and would avoid, such as carbohydrates. This went on for two years, from 16 to 18, and eventually I was diagnosed with anorexia with orthorexic tendencies.

As well as losing weight, orthorexia made me feel exhausted. I couldn’t sleep because I was really hungry the whole time. I had depression and anxiety and I couldn’t focus on anything at all.

My parents noticed that something was wrong. I actually didn’t know what was happening – they took me to the doctor. I went to the Priory for diagnoses and was referred to Camhs (child and adolescent mental health services). I then got sent there on an outpatient basis and got cognitive behavioural therapy. That helped a lot.

Because of my eating disorder I have body dysmorphic disorder and have always feel more overweight than I am. CBT helped me realise that this was not logical. Medication also helped with my depression and gradually everything got better.

I feel more normal about food now. I am a student at Leeds and cook for myself. I eat out with friends. I still suffer guilt when I eat unhealthily but I can cope.

I think health food bloggers have a big influence on young people and they should make it clear that everything should be eaten in moderation. For example, it’s OK to have a biscuit every now and then – it’s not going to kill you. The expression clean eating makes it sound like other foods are dirty; it’s like making an enemy out of everyday food, making it something negative in people’s heads.

Healthy eating is supposed to make you feel better, but not if you develop orthorexia. Although some people need to be careful about what they eat, others can take this lifestyle to the extreme.

I had heard clean eating made you feel better – but for me it went wrong

"Go smoke free. Stay pretty’ – the health campaigns that haven’t heard of feminism

Hear that sound, all you women of a childbearing age? It’s time, running out. Soon your eggs will be past their prime and you will no longer be of any use to society. Even if you’re hot! Just ask the Italian government, which recently launched an advertising campaign urging women to get a move on with their baby-making. One poster showed a woman brandishing an hourglass with the caption: “Beauty has no age. But fertility does.” Feminism: it has come so far.

The ill-conceived ads, launched ahead of Italy’s first national Fertility Day, were not well received and the campaign has been pulled. It’s 2016 and women feel as if they should be treated as more than glorified incubators. Who knew? There were also some suggestions that maybe the government should focus less on reminding women about their ovaries and more on trying to fix issues such as unemployment, paid maternity leave and poor childcare provisions.

Italy’s fertility publicity may not have worked as intended but it has done a good job of advertising the extent to which women’s bodies are still carefully controlled under the guise of public health advice. So, to ensure you are all up to speed with the latest developments on how to safely operate your lady-body, here are a few more examples of campaigns demonstrating an unhealthy interest in women’s health.

Booze and babies

Mixing alcohol with oestrogen, women are frequently told, is a recipe for disaster. Drinking will get us raped and/or give us herpes for starters. And if that’s not enough to get you to put that glass of merlot down, then won’t you think of the unborn children? Earlier this year, America’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention caused widespread ire when it basically said that fertile women shouldn’t be drinking unless they were on birth control. A press release explained: “Alcohol can permanently harm a developing baby before a woman knows she is pregnant. About half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned, and even if planned, most women won’t know they are pregnant for the first month or so, when they might still be drinking. The risk is real. Why take the chance?”

I’ve also heard that walking down the street puts you in danger of getting struck by a car. The risk is real. Of course, I don’t mean to underplay foetal alcohol syndrome, but this advice seems to greatly underplay women’s common sense. What’s more, it’s based on highly dubious evidence. A number of studies have shown that light and occasional drinking poses little risk to pregnant women, or their foetuses. In any case, the most frustrating thing about the constant flow of moralising about women and drink is how one-sided it is. There’s been very little health advice to men, after all, about how that one sip of Stella is going to turn you into a rapist with raging syphilis.

Making breast cancer sexy again

Save Second Base T-shirt. Photograph: Save Second Base

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide, so it makes sense that a large amount of women’s health advice centres on our breasts. What makes less sense, however, is just how fixated on breasts these health campaigns often are. There have been a slew of “provocative” awareness campaigns centred on messages such as “Save Second Base” and “Save the Ta Tas”, for example.

And if breast cancer campaigns aren’t drowning in tired innuendo about, giggle, boobs, giggle, then they tend not to think further than pink. Indeed, Breast Cancer Action has even coined the term “pinkwashing”. It defines a pinkwasher as “a company or organisation that claims to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink ribbon product, but at the same time produces, manufactures and/or sells products that are linked to the disease”.

Superficial smoking campaigns

‘Go smoke free. Stay pretty’ … a Queensland government anti-smoking campaign. Photograph: http://ifyousmoke.initiatives.qld.gov.au/

Women only care about their looks, right? You would certainly think so judging by some of the anti-smoking campaigns. An Australian campaign called Your Future’s Not Pretty, for example, explains to young female smokers that if they don’t put down the cigarettes they might as well kiss their futures (based on men finding them attractive, obviously) goodbye: “Go smoke free. Stay pretty.” Women are invited to “upload a pic to the Future You Smoking Booth and see how old and horrible you could look if you keep smoking. It’s a shocking transformation.” Being old and female – don’t let it happen to you!

The dangers of beer goggles

A Tennessee anti-drink and drive campaign. Photograph: John Partipilo/AP

Even public health campaigns aimed at men seem fixated on passing judgment on a woman’s appearance. Last year The Highway Safety Office of Tennessee had to apologise over a campaign that warned men about the dangers of drinking and driving through irreverent messages on beer coasters. For example: “Buy a drink for a marginally good-looking girl, only to find out she’s chatty, clingy and your boss’s daughter.” Imagine, guys, after drunkenly crashing your car you could wake up to find yourself with horrible injuries and the terrible realisation that you’d made out with an ugly girl!

The campaign you haven’t seen yet

More egregious than any of these campaigns are the ones that don’t exist yet. While a large amount of energy is expended on moralising about women’s bodies, there is still a shocking lack of research around many women’s health issues. For instance, nobody knows exactly how harmful tampons might be because there has been very little research done. Ridiculous as it may seem, this would appear to come down to simple squeamishness and embarrassment – society has made menstruation so taboo that science doesn’t want to go near it. (The research that has been done has largely been funded by tampon companies, who – one imagines – aren’t entirely unbiased.)

What’s more, much medical research still focuses on men and neglects to properly control for female-specific differences. I know, it’s depressing, right? Still, I’m going to have to advise you not to take solace in a glass of wine, particularly if you’re not on birth control. It’s for your own good.

"Go smoke free. Stay pretty’ – the health campaigns that haven’t heard of feminism

Doctor"s Diary: Heard the good information?

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The trend of prescribing blood-thinning medicines such as warfarin as a preventive measure against strokes in those with heart rhythm atrial fibrillation, markedly increases the risk of bleeding below the skull, known as a subdural haematoma. Neurosurgeons now see as numerous as 10 circumstances per week that could require a main operation to evacuate the clot of blood pressing on the brain.

The diagnosis, readily confirmed by a CT scan, is relatively easy in those with neurological signs and symptoms following a history of trauma or a fall. But the bleeding may possibly also happen spontaneously and, as Dr Elizabeth Teale of the Leeds Institute of Overall health Sciences observes, “the clinical functions can effortlessly be misinterpreted”.

It might, for example, result in behavioural or character modifications that can mimic a psychiatric illness or dementia. The hazards of a delay in diagnosis are clear adequate, and it is now suggested that people taking warfarin (or other blood-thinning medication, such as clopidogrel) should have a prompt CT scan each time they have even a minor head injury, or build novel mental or neurological symptoms.

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The conundrum of last week’s “excruciating pains” has elicited several related accounts. “Mine also come up in either ear or lower jaw, then progress across my neck and shoulders,” writes a reader. “It is a quite unpleasant knowledge.”

The intensity of the discomfort and reasonably brief duration – lasting from 15 minutes to an hour – is also a feature of the syndrome of “cluster headaches”, prompting the suggestion that they might reply to the anti-migraine drug Sumatriptan.

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Ultimately, further to the relevance of totally emptying the bladder as a preventive measure towards recurrent cystitis, a reader commends the simple if neglected treatment of potassium citrate (pot cit). Her 1st five years of married life was blighted by significant pain on intercourse brought on by repeated bouts of cystitis – until an elderly relative advised the treatment method. “Pot cit possibly saved my marriage,” she writes.

Electronic mail medical queries confidentially to Dr James LeFanu at drjames@telegraph.co.united kingdom. Solutions will be published each and every Friday, at telegraph.co.united kingdom/overall health

Doctor"s Diary: Heard the good information?

How I heard for the very first time and grew to become an net sensation

‘It’s odd to consider so many folks have witnessed one particular of the most substantial moments of my life.’ Link to video: Deaf forty-yr-outdated girl hears sound for 1st time

Last week I hit the headlines when a video of me hearing for the first time soon after having cochlear implants fitted went viral. If you have no hearing it is tough to picture what it will be like to hear for the very first time, and I was completely overwhelmed by the encounter.

I was born profoundly deaf, despite the fact that this wasn’t instantly obvious to doctors, and it was not till I was two years old that I was formally diagnosed. My earliest memory is that of my teary mum watching me leave in a taxi each morning on my way to school sporting my phonic ear box connected to my chest. Fortunately, hearing aids have enhanced in excess of the many years, and in most situations it is no longer right away clear that a man or woman is deaf, or in my case now, deafblind.

As a younger grownup I delivered deaf-awareness coaching and actively became concerned in shifting attitudes and bettering solutions for folks with disabilities. I was a really assured youthful lady, and currently being deaf was just element of who I was. But this all changed. A single day, driving home from work, I realised that I could no longer see what was coming in my wing mirrors. I gave up driving there and then and went to the physicians for exams. It was confirmed that I had Usher syndrome. I was 29 years outdated.

Usher syndrome is a genetic issue that has an effect on both hearing and sight. The sight loss is caused by a problem known as retinitis pigmentosa, which leads to a progressive reduction in vision. There are three sorts of Usher – I, II and III. The age of onset, the extent and progression varies with each particular person and type. There is no remedy, but measures can be taken to manage the emotional and day-to-day impact. Research presently underway implies therapies in the potential may possibly slow down the charge at which a person loses their sight.

Being diagnosed with Usher syndrome drastically changed my lifestyle. I did not know exactly where to start, and found it tough to contemplate that I was no longer just deaf and had to start off living existence as somebody who was deafblind. I felt that I had lost my identity, but began to realise in excess of time I was in reality just the same.

The future petrified me – I knew my sight would not come back but get worse – but stage by step I had to put together. I received instruction in how to use a cane and was offered a manual puppy to support me adopting a positive outlook genuinely aided. As we are all acquiring older, daily life throws factors at us and we have to deal with emotions and problems the ideal we can, and I discover it tends to make you a stronger individual.

Prior to you have cochlear implant surgical treatment, there are no ensures it will work, so in some ways I wasn’t expecting a lot. Hearing sounds such as birds singing and water running for the very first time is past words. Sharing this second with the globe has also been wonderful and has been a brilliant opportunity to raise awareness of Usher syndrome and of deafblindness. A single of my pals phoned in to Lauren Laverne’s radio display on 6 Music, and together they developed a playlist of songs for me to listen to, which she played on air. The response has been outstanding, with tons of strangers sending me songs to include to the playlist via the hashtag #songforjo. I’m going to listen to them all.

My day task is doing work for the deafblind charity Sense as an Usher peer mentor, supporting other individuals with the same condition. I am glad that the video of me has helped raise awareness of Usher and deafblindness. It truly is strange to feel that so many men and women have witnessed what was possibly one of the most substantial moments of my lifestyle, but I’m glad I chose to share it and I hope my story inspires other people.

How I heard for the very first time and grew to become an net sensation