Staying Healthy : News, products and health information for you and your loved ones.

I read an interesting article about acupuncture and how it has been shown in studies to help with headaches. The study in question was done at Tech Univ in Munich, Germany at the Institute of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology and used 270 patients who suffered from tension headaches.

Tension headaches affect more than 30 percent of the population, so many headache sufferers are willing to give acupuncture a try. The study featured a group that received traditional acupuncture, a group that received “minimal” acupuncture (often referred to as “superficial needling” in which the needles are inserted at points that don’t necessarily correspond to traditional acupuncture methods) and a control group which had none.

Because both traditional acupuncture and the “superficial needling” type of acupuncture often show similar results, as in this study, many experts are reluctant to recommend acupuncture as a means of treatment. However, many agree that there is something to it, whether placebo effect or not, because the study groups that do have some sort of acupuncture always seem to do better than the control.

Source: Healthday / Forbes

I had previously heard that dark chocolate could actually be beneficial to your health, but I never really paid attention to it. After all, it sounds too good to be true and never mind the negative effects it might have with your dental bill and waistline!

But I saw an article yesterday that explained a little bit more about why dark chocolate might be good for you. A study done by the AHA (American Heart Association) reinforced research that has shown that the “flavonoids” that occur in chocolate might aid blood vessel transport. They found that it seemed to lower blood pressure for people with hypertension. Interestingly, the study was done with dark chocolate which had a lot of flavonoids versus white chocolate which had none.

Another benefit seemed to be that dark chocolate seemed to reduce LDL cholesterol and impove body usage of insulin.

Well, they definitely don’t recommend going hog wild on dark chocolate bars as of yet, but still it’s a promising (and quite delicious) study…

Source: CNN/Reuters

An interesting news blurb on how one of the compounds that occur in tumeric, which is a main ingredients in curries, has been shown in laboratory tests to actually interfere with skin cancer (melanoma) cells. The studies were done at the University of Texas’s Department of Experimental Therapeutics M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The compound in the tumeric is Curcumin and was found to suppress certain proteins that tumor cells rely on to keep themselves going.

Source: CNN/Reuters