Could Dark Chocolate and Green Tea be the Perfect Combination for Increased Concentration?

 

A new study has found that combining dark chocolate with green tea could be a better concentration pick-me-up than coffee.

Hershey Company sponsored a scientific study to find out whether their new product idea could become the ultimate concentration booster. A team of researchers at Northern Arizona University conducted the study, which included 122 participants between the age of 18 and 25.

What were the results?

Five different cacao concentrations were used to test the mental response of all participants, with 60% cacao counting as the minimum for the dark chocolate category.

It was found that those who ate chocolate containing at least 60% cacao were more alert and attentive, but also showed an increase in blood pressure. When green tea was added to the same chocolate, their blood pressure decreased!

“It’s remarkable! The potential here is for a heart-healthy chocolate confection that contains a high level of cacao with L-theanine that is good for your heart, blood pressure, and helps you pay attention”, says Larry Stevens, a professor of psychological sciences at North Arizona University who led the study.

The study was published in the Neuro-Regulation journal and claims to be the first to used electroencephalogram (EEG) technology, which measures electrical activity in the brain. By doing so, researchers were able to capture images of brain activity after the stimulants were given to participants, which helped them to prove the direct and positive effect of a green tea and dark chocolate combination.

What’s L-Theanine?

L-theanine is a type of amino acid found almost exclusively in tea and is especially potent in pure green tea.

It is known as a non-sedating relaxant, which helps to calm nerves, clear the mind, and reduce blood pressure naturally. Combined with dark chocolate, L-theanine is highly effective at reducing blood pressure while complementing the concentration and energy boost that the caffeine in both products gives.

Where to get it?

Professor Stevens says that green tea dark chocolate bars are not available on the market yet, but that Hershey’s was so impressed by the studies that they plan to include it in their new product launches.

Recent studies have already proven that including dark chocolate, red wine, and green tea in a healthy diet can boost weight loss, balance blood pressure, and increase energy and concentration, so the new findings come as no surprise.

Any other health benefits?

Dark chocolate is packed with iron, fiber, magnesium, caffeine, protein, antioxidants, and a range of vitamins and minerals, which has been proven to help with weight loss, anxiety, headaches, and preventing multiple diseases.

Green tea is packed with antioxidants, polyphenols, catechins, caffeine, and L-theanine, which helps with boosting mental, physical, and overall wellbeing.

While a variety of chocolate bars and green teas are available on the market, it’s best to stick to chocolate containing 60-100% cacao and pairing it with a cup of organic green tea.

The good thing is, the more intense the cacao concentration is, the less refined sugar you’ll get, which is excellent for promoting better health!

Could Dark Chocolate and Green Tea be the Perfect Combination for Increased Concentration?

For child sports prodigies, extreme practice may not make perfect

Research suggests that kids who specialise in a single sport when they’re young don’t improve their odds of attaining an elite sporting career. Photographs: Alamy

Recently, a preteen tennis player came into Neeru Jayanthi’s clinic for follow-up on an overuse injury to his wrist. Jayanthi, a sports medicine physician at Loyola University Medical Centre in suburban Chicago, learned that the child’s coach had instructed him to take off his splint before a tryout, for fear that it would hinder his performance. “He’s only 11!” Jayanthi says.

The tennis player’s story may be an extreme example, but Jayanthi says it’s emblematic of a growing emphasis on performance and specialisation that has invaded many youth sports. Efforts to corral children into highly focused sports programmes often arise from good intentions, Jayanthi says, yet research suggests that kids who specialise in a single sport when they’re young risk injury and burnout but don’t improve their odds of attaining an elite sports career. In most cases, giving kids more time for unstructured play and a chance to sample a wide array of athletic pursuits provides a better recipe for success, he says.

The push to start children on focused training programmes stems in part from the idea that practice distinguishes elites from the rest, a notion Malcolm Gladwell popularised with his “10,000-hour rule” in his book Outliers. Citing research by Florida State University psychologist K Anders Ericsson showing that a group of elite violinists accumulated an average of 10,000 hours of practice before reaching the top, Gladwell asserts that 10,000 hours is the “magic number for true expertise”.

Yet Gladwell’s rule contradicts the evidence regarding sports. Studies have found a wide range in the amount of practice that athletes require to reach the top, says David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene, a book that examines sports performance. He points to Swedish athlete Stefan Holm as an example. Holm devoted most of his life to training for the high jump, only to lose the 2007 World Championships to a competitor who had taken up the event 18 months earlier.

Hours spent training are just one aspect of an athlete’s development; motivation and other psychological factors are also important, says Karin Moesch, a sports psychologist at the University of Copenhagen. Kids who have completed many hours of concentrated training by age 12 or 13 may start to lose interest, Moesch says. “They think, ‘I’ve already done enough of that,’ so they stop.” Studies show that as specialisation increases, satisfaction often drops, and that puts kids at risk of burnout, she says.

Injury is another concern. Jayanthi’s research team studied young athletes who had come to a clinic either for sports-related injuries or sports physicals. Among the 124 tennis players in the study, those who were injured spent more than five times as much time playing tennis as they did in unstructured recreation. Uninjured players spent slightly more than twice as much time in organised sports as in free play. In another study, Jayanthi’s group evaluated about 1,200 athletes between the ages of seven and 18, and found that injuries occurred more commonly among those who did specialised training.

“It’s not just the hours spent, it’s what you’re doing during that time,” Jayanthi says, and unstructured play appears less risky than organised practice. “Kids have self-restraint. When they’re playing for fun, they stop when they start to feel a strain, but if they’re at practice they may continue because they don’t want to let the coach down,” Jayanthi says.

Early specialisation cuts short a period when young athletes would otherwise sample a wide variety of sports and robs them of the opportunity to stumble upon their best fit, Epstein says. “Though narrowly focused child prodigies fascinate us and garner media attention, it turns out that later specialisers are more the norm than the exception,” he writes in the paperback edition of his book. Research shows that when children are given an opportunity to engage in many different sports, they’re more likely to find one they like and then stick with it, Moesch says. “They are more intrinsically motivated in sports in general and in their specific sport.”

Early specialisation does not seem to increase an athlete’s chance of turning pro. Moesch and her colleagues compared 148 elite and 95 near-elite Danish athletes from sports such as cycling and track and field and found that the near-elites had amassed more training hours in their favoured sport up to age 15. By age 18, the total hours accumulated by both groups had evened out, suggesting that athletes who start specialising in their late teens can still catch up to their peers who got an earlier start. The study also found that elite athletes in cycling, running and swimming tended to specialise at a later age and to participate in their first national and international competitions at an older age compared with near-elites.

Often, kids who excel at an early age are just early developers, Epstein says. For instance, a Swedish study of youth tennis players found that many who experienced early success reported that they had grown larger and stronger before their peers had. When they reached puberty, their physical advantage diminished, and they lost faith in their abilities. Many quit the sport all together. By contrast, players who reached elite status (competing at top national or international levels) in tennis had taken part in multiple sports when they were young and played tennis in settings that did not emphasise performance.

“We need to change the culture,” Jayanthi says. If we want kids to reach their potential and retain a life-long enjoyment of sports, he says, we need to create an environment that de-emphasises winning and puts a premium on play.

This article appeared in the Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from the Washington Post

For child sports prodigies, extreme practice may not make perfect

How to get the perfect seaside entire body (with science) | Dean Burnett

Now that summertime is upon us here in the northern hemisphere, it’s getting more frequent to see posts, diets, workout regimes and the like that tell you how to achieve the perfect beach body, or some variation thereof. For several people (but notably ladies) there is rising pressure to accomplish a physique variety that is acceptable for displaying on the beach. Why bodily display is regarded crucial is a total other discussion, but a great number of men and women obviously believe that it is.

Even when you’re really on the seashore, there is nonetheless no excuse for not keeping your physique in leading problem. On my last vacation, I witnessed an workout class for girls. It was a yoga class specifically. I bear in mind this vividly because the instructor was the formidable sort who ended the session by screaming “relax from your yoga!” in a terrifying Russian accent, which appeared to misunderstand the entire level of both yoga. And relaxing, as far as I know.

But if men and women are so keen to acquire a “perfect beach body”, then it is important to create what qualities a best beach body would have. There are several items that are pointed out in this kind of contexts, like the bikini bridge or thigh gap or sternum ski-lift or some other guff. But these factors are pure social constructs (especially the last one, which I made up). So what does science say you want to accomplish the ideal seaside body? Nicely, there are many needs.

Measurements

Naturally this will vary from individual to individual, what with people having this kind of a drastic assortment of dimensions, but the best beach physique presented in the standard upright posture starts at the scalp (hair has as well a lot personal variation and has no nervous innervation anyway so is not regarded here) and ends at the soles of the feet. Or, if you are going from the ground up, the other way all around.

The waistline also varies between men and women, but for a excellent beach physique it need to type a total perimeter about the mid-stage of the entire body. Regardless of size, this is essential. But don’t panic, as it must be logically extremely hard for the waistline to not go all the way around the entire body, assuming it is in 1 piece.

Foot dimension is also an important measurement. The excellent beach physique would have feet extended and broad sufficient to permit efficient locomotion on sand. Strolling on sand requires two to 3 times as much energy as strolling on challenging surfaces owing to various physical properties of the substances, so the ideal seaside physique would have feet capable of sustaining this action.

Anatomy

The best seaside entire body demands the full complement of vital organs in purchase to sustain functioning. As nicely as these, the best physique need to have a functioning musculoskeletal program, along with a operating nervous method, to enable autonomous movement, which will assist in receiving to and from the seashore, specifically as beaches can frequently be in remote, tough to accessibility coastal areas. But even if the beach is in an simply accessed location with abundant transport links, you normally even now need to have a functioning musculoskeletal program to use these.

Offered that seaside-primarily based exercise can be physically strenuous (as discussed over) then a functioning digestive program is required to convert foods and drink sources into power. Also, provided that folks generally pay a visit to the seaside in sizzling, sunny problems, it’s essential to be aware of the physical consequences of these, and the ideal beach physique would be ready to cope with the stresses of this kind of an environment.

Seashores are typically by the sea, so it could be argued that the “perfect” seashore entire body would be greater equipped to deal with aquatic conditions. Maybe the ideal seashore entire body would have gills for survival in the water, like Kevin Costner in Waterworld. Even so, people area a excellent deal of value on bodily attractiveness when at the seaside, and somebody who has gills, a entirely unfamiliar bodily attribute for people, would most likely result in upset and be socially rejected by individuals who observe them, like Kevin Costner in Waterworld.

So although it may possibly be advantageous in the bodily sense for a perfect seashore entire body to have aquatic adaptations, the idea of some kind of “marine primate” is clearly ludicrous.

Skincare

Given that circumstances at the seaside typically involve exposure of the skin to direct sunlight, it is additional important to guarantee that your skin is capable of dealing with this. The excellent seashore physique has skin that goes all about and covers each and every last element of it, in buy to keep all the vulnerable and essential bits on the within. Some individuals may possibly have parts of their entire body that aren’t covered by skin, but this is normally a temporary scenario, ending with restore or, if ignored for too extended, death. The skin should also include mechanisms to handle or cope with direct exposure to UV rays.

It is essential to note that even the most ideal seaside physique can require additional help with steering clear of sun harm, by means of factors like sunblock. Nevertheless, no body acknowledged to science has ever derived safety from ridiculous magic water.

The excellent seashore body’s skin should also have ample sweat glands to help regulate temperature, and also have pores little sufficient to make certain that sand grains stay on the outside.

So, need to your body have all the qualities listed over, congratulations! You have got the perfect beach physique. Anything at all else is just personal preference. And if you, by means of no fault of your own, really do not have a body that conforms to the above description, then yet again really don’t worry. As you need to have spotted by now, the really idea of a “perfect beach body” is a meaningless one particular.

Dean Burnett will adhere to this up in November with a scientific guide to how to get the ideal winter physique (it’s specifically the exact same as the one described right here, but with a coat on). You can keep away from his less-than-perfect entire body altogether by following him on Twitter, @garwboy

How to get the perfect seaside entire body (with science) | Dean Burnett

Technologies Insights to Aid Hospitals Navigate the "Perfect Storm"

In the rapidly changing healthcare sector, maintaining up with new technologies and innovations has grow to be much less of a wish and far more of a necessity.  To far better comprehend the possible effect of these new alterations, we reached out to executives at many organizations in the healthcare sector.  We asked each of them what guidance they would give to Chief Info Officers (CIOs) of healthcare companies as they navigate a “perfect storm” of technological, regulatory, legislative, and cultural adjustments.

Proactive is the new normal.  Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) proactively display their population, identify problems early, and use people outcomes intelligently to bring sufferers in for preventive treatment.  Going forward, they’ll have a large aggressive advantage above hospitals that just wait for sufferers to come in.  For CIOs, the challenge will be setting up systems that instantly screen sufferers based mostly on the individual info they give, recognize the health issues they are susceptible to, and integrate seamlessly with all aspects of patient care.

Along the very same lines, hospital IT leaders need to encourage and integrate the use of research and patient data in the screening approach.  For illustration, rather than pushing out details on “Five Methods to Avert Sleeplessness,” healthcare providers can get what they know about rest apnea – such as the typical age range, gender, and physique-mass index (BMI) of someone with rest apnea – and send out a 5-question quiz to a pre-targeted population.  This interactive technique could diagnose patients who wouldn’t otherwise know they had a wellness difficulty.  By assisting healthcare organizations better make use of investigation to section the population, CIOs can support these organizations get a far more proactive part in patients’ health.  -Boris Glants, Chief Technological innovation Officer, Tonic Wellness

Intensive Care Unit (Photograph credit score: Calleamanecer by way of Wikipedia)

 

Use technological innovation to fill the gaps.  With latest healthcare reform, between other modifications, the industry is beginning to deploy distinct payment mechanisms for healthcare.  Rather than paying as they go, patients will quickly shell out suppliers for the good quality of the care they get.  This payment model is shifting care to a new model named population well being, which will have a large affect on CIOs and how they seem at the two their position and that of electronic records.

The huge question will be how do we offer equipment and technologies so that irrespective of spot, sufferers get the care they want?  When this reimbursement model comes into play, the major concern for hospital CIOs will be how to help caregivers maintain up with individuals when they aren’t within a health care facility.  CIOs will be tasked with locating methods to employ engineering to communicate with sufferers and fill in the gaps among doctor’s visits.  For example, a physician with a diabetic patient will only be capable to give the highest good quality of care if they can – at any point in time – see his or her most latest insulin intake.  When this is attainable, the next stage will be to track information this kind of as glucose amounts, and flag them if and when abnormalities surface. -Karen Thomas, Senior VP and CIO, Primary Line Health

You’re in healthcare initial, Details Technological innovation 2nd.  The reality is, no matter whether you’re a medical doctor or an intern for a healthcare technologies supplier, you’re in the healthcare industry.  That means you are working toward one end result above all other folks: to preserve individuals wholesome.  For hospital CIOs, this indicates creating strategic selections in regard to which technological innovation providers, platforms, infrastructure, and applications will allow hospitals and other healthcare institutions to offer a consistent level of top quality care.  Especially, CIOs in the healthcare sector should continually decide which elements of technologies are very best managed in-house, and which elements are better managed – for quality support delivery and expense effectiveness – by a third get together.  - Jack Dziak, Executive VP, Managed Companies, SunGard Availability Services

Keep one particular stage ahead.  Just lately, the volume of mobile applications for well being and wellness on the industry has grown dramatically.  There are approximately 50,000 healthcare-relevant mobile applications available on iTunes today.  Mobile applications give hospitals the capability to monitor patients virtually, without getting them come into a facility.  Even so, linked overall health is producing the healthcare sector take a difficult seem at privacy and compliance.  Every application and platform is collecting more and far more information, rising the scope of what information requirements to be protected.  Do we have the greatest infrastructure and appropriate regulations in place to enable this virtualized environment for the healthcare market?

For CIOs, part of adapting to this new normal is locating health-related staff that understands the latest compliance updates and rules, and creating an IT infrastructure that can scale, evolve, and expand with your hospital and the business. CIOs want to be vigilant and proactively investigating in purchase to build an setting that’s responsive to change. -Bert Robles, Senior VP and Corporate CIO, New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation

Be inclusive now to put together for prospective breaches later on.  By leveraging the knowledge of people outside of the IT division now, CIOs can recognize best practices in patient privacy, close prospective gaps in protection across the organization, and be far better prepared need to potential problems close to a information breach arise.  A lot of say it’s only a matter of time ahead of every single entity experiences a breach.  Crucial topics to discuss with leaders in wellness details management (HIM), compliance, and danger contain: patient consent management, accounting of disclosures, protected health details, process and governance redesign, and centralized and de-centralized approaches to Overall health Details Exchanges (HIEs).  - Gavin Krumenacker, VP, HIE Remedies and Enterprise Improvement, MRO Corp

Although every single of these industry leaders undoubtedly has a various point of view on how ideal to integrate new technology into the healthcare ecosystem, they all agree on one central theme: individuals should usually come first.

Robert J. Szczerba is the CEO of X Tech Ventures and writer of the Forbes column “Rocket Science Meets Brain Surgical procedure.”  Comply with him via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Technologies Insights to Aid Hospitals Navigate the "Perfect Storm"

The public sector isn"t perfect but at least it doesn"t fleece us | Will Hutton

Nonetheless friendly individuals doing work a contact centre are, they are caught in a method that puts the buyer final. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Observer

Lloyds Bank casually announced final week that it was setting aside an additional £1.8bn to meet likely claims from clients soon after knowingly promoting them expensive insurance coverage policies they could not need to have nor use. The grand total of provisions it has produced is now nearly £10bn for claims from up to 700,000 individuals – a spectacular indictment of its organization practices.

Yet there is minor public angst. Final December, Lloyds was fined a record £28m by the Monetary Perform Authority for the period among 1 January 2010 and 31 March 2012 – throughout which the government held a 39% stake in the bank – for possessing lax controls and incentivising its personnel to treat its clients as milch cows. Extravagant “champagne” bonuses were presented to employees who could loot their buyers with policies cynically designed to offer nothing of worth, practically nothing less than organised theft. In Ireland at least, the former executives of the bust Anglo Irish bank are on trial. In Britain, the former head of Lloyds retail banking division, Helen Weir, has gone on to turn into finance director of John Lewis, but at least she has stated how sorry she is. That’s all correct then.

Otherwise, Lloyds Bank is hardly consuming humble pie. Although Barclays chief executive, Antony Jenkins, is trying to engineer a substantial alter in his bank’s culture, his counterpart at Lloyds appears to be targeted on 1 target only – making certain sufficient profitability to allow the government to offload far more of its stake and, along the way, to vastly enrich himself. There has been zero pressure from his biggest shareholder – the government – to reproduce Jenkins’s initiative and do a lot more about the mis-selling scandal than to utter bromides about winning back trust. The remedy is for the bank to become 100% owned by the personal sector as quickly as achievable, observed as an unalloyed very good thing.

This blend – feckless owners, in this situation HM Treasury, which cares nothing at all about the bank’s ethics but only about its share price, alongside managers who appear to see their clients as objects to be fleeced – is deadly. But the media are hardly abuzz with sustained complaint and protest. Rather, they have aided construct the doctrine that something carried out in the private sector is typically fabulous, and that £10bn scandals such as Lloyds, while deplorable, are the exception. Meanwhile, anything at all completed in the public sector is by definition abominable, wasteful and ripe for privatisation or contracting out. The sooner Lloyds is in the personal sector away from the “dead” hand of state ownership the greater. But the state has not been a dead hand: it has been preoccupied with its very own monetary interests, like every other personal proprietor.

Lloyds is not alone: the other banks have earmarked another £10bn for mis-selling equivalent items. Their investment bank arms are engulfed with expenses of colluding to rig interest rates and foreign exchange markets on a global scale, along with far more record-breaking fines. Meanwhile, the typical customer’s knowledge remains dismal. Staff in disempowered branches and industrialised phone centres do their greatest to be pleasant, but function inside of processes in which a great client expertise is plainly a low priority. Making an attempt to workout my appropriate to flex a credit facility lately was a descent into a privatised Orwellian madness, whilst any person who has had to seem right after an elderly relative’s monetary affairs enters a bureaucratic, time-consuming labyrinth.

This is not a culture confined to banking. Bombardier recently walked away from a £350m contract to supply signalling for London Underground: it had underestimated the technical complexity and would not commit the resource to meet its side of the bargain. But last week it picked up the £1bn contract to construct 65 trains for Crossrail, with its disgraceful behaviour more than the signalling contract forgotten, threatening to shut its Derby plant if it did not get the organization.

Then there are Serco and G4S, with their litany of failures as holders of government contracts. The root of their issues is, whatever their original virtues, both have built a culture in which exploiting, rather than serving, the consumer comes initial – whether or not it truly is Serco charging the state for electronically tagging prisoners who did not exist or G4S woefully underproviding safety guards for the Olympics. The very same dynamic – transient, greedy owners and spend methods that above-reward quick-phrase economic good results and cutting corners – creates the very same result.

Now large elements of the probation service are to be run in the same way by the exact same kind of company, with the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, absurdly promising much more ” reform” and “efficiency”. He is outdone by his colleague Dan Poulter at well being, promoting off 80% of Plasma Assets Uk, the NHS company that secures blood plasma for British sufferers, to Bain Capital, the personal equity organization developed by presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Bain’s sole curiosity is fiscal, constrained only by its worry of a reputational catastrophe if sufferers start off dying as it cuts expenses and more than-rewards managers who consider to fleece the NHS, as they automatically will. Who could consign the provision of blood plasma to such custodians? Only a fool, knave or Tory politician.

The NHS will take a daily pummelling, but enter its portals and a really various culture guidelines. Despite all the efforts of successive New Labour and Conservative ministers intent on reproducing the private sector “disciplines” that so animate Lloyds, Bombardier, Serco, G4S et al, it still manages to combine humanity and efficiency. Its techniques are not extravagant, but there is a sense, as I recently discovered with a near household member in a long spell in hospital, that the patient remains at the centre of everyone’s preoccupations.

The public sector is imperfect: it is run and operated by fallible human beings. There are magnificent failings, ranging from the BBC’s wasted £100m on its digital media initiative to the unfolding IT catastrophe above universal credit. But what it does not deserve is universal castigation because a priori it should be useless. It is accountable. It does not loot its customers. It is fairly effective. It is humane.

Nor does the personal sector warrant this kind of fawning praise or the self-pity of many of its leaders who declare that profit is even now a dirty word. It can do magic – the smartphone, anti-cancer medication, numerous apps, robots – but it cuts corners too. The headlines, as I create, are of a foods scandal in which a third of sampled foodstuffs are wrongly labelled. Regulation, derided as a burden on enterprise, is, rather, what society deploys to hold company truthful, whether it emanates from London or Brussels. It is time for a reset and a rebalance. Finish the jihad towards all factors public and invite enterprise genuinely to earn its earnings.

The public sector isn"t perfect but at least it doesn"t fleece us | Will Hutton