Watching his old movie “The Juror.”

It’s incredible how fat he has gotten. I mean, he has to be at least 50+ pounds from where he used to be.

I hope he doesn’t blame his genes!

And, in no time, he could get that body back. All it would take is a plan……..

Jim

While most fertility treatments are done on women, 40% of the need for them stems from the men.

Eating a diet high in antioxidants (that’s fruits, veggies and whole grains, to begin with) may prevent free radicals from harming a man’s swimmers.

So, if you are trying to get pregnant, approach it from ALL angles as both of you should be eating a clean diet to up your odds.

Jim

Whole grains may help keep blood pressure in check

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Eating lots of whole grains could ward off high blood pressure, according to a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

In the study, men with the highest whole-grain consumption were 19 percent less likely to develop high blood pressure than men who ate the least amount of whole grains.

While refining grains removes their outer coating, whole grains retain their bran and germ, so they are richer in many nutrients, Dr. Alan J. Flint of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and his colleagues note in their report.

The most recent US guidelines recommend that people get at least 3 ounces, or 85 grams, of whole grains daily, and that they consume at least half of their grains as whole grains.

There’s evidence, the investigators note, that women who eat more whole grains are less likely to develop high blood pressure, also called hypertension, but there is less information on how whole grains might affect men’s heart health.

To investigate, Flint and his team looked at data from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, which has followed 51,529 men since 1986, when the study participants were 40 to 75 years old. They looked at a subset of 31,684 men free of hypertension, cancer, stroke or heart disease at the study’s outset. During 18 years of follow-up, 9,227 of them developed hypertension.

The men in the top fifth of whole grain consumption, who averaged about 52 grams daily, were 19 percent less likely than the men in the bottom fifth, who ate an average of about 3 grams of whole grains daily, to develop hypertension during follow-up.

When the researchers looked at separate components of whole grains, only bran showed an independent relationship with hypertension risk, with men who consumed the most at 15 percent lower risk of hypertension than men who ate the least. However, the researchers note, the amount of bran in the men’s diet was relatively small compared to their total intake of whole grain and cereal fiber.

The relationship between whole grain intake and hypertension risk remained even after accounting for men’s fruit and vegetable intake, use of vitamins, amount of physical activity, and whether or not they were screened for high cholesterol.

This suggests that the association was independent of these markers of a healthy lifestyle behavior pattern. It’s possible, the researchers say, that the men who ate more whole grains gained less weight over time.

The current findings, Flint and colleagues conclude, “have implications for future dietary guidelines and for the prevention of hypertension.”

SOURCE: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, September 2009.

I know I have talked about this before, but it becoming more and more of an issue and read this excerpt from an article in the LA Times:

Soram Khalsa is on a mission to get Americans to up their levels of Vitamin D. Why? To protect them against a myriad of illnesses, including cancers, heart disease and diabetes. He even had a patient from his who’s-who-studded medical practice in Beverly Hills hand deliver a copy of his book, The Vitamin D Revolution, to Michelle Obama. “In the front, I wrote, ‘Vitamin D can help the country’s health-care crisis. Please contact me if you are interested’ and included my phone number. I haven’t heard from her yet, but…”

Known simply as “Dr. Soram,” this staff member at Cedars-Sinai for the past 30 years has been molding alternative therapies with mainstream Western medicine—long before it was fashionable. The son of a “nice Jewish family” in Cincinnati, Ohio, who always wanted to be a doctor, Soram suffered chronic fatigue syndrome when he was a medical student in the early ’70s. When traditional medicine failed to find the source of his ailment, he started to look for ways to get well.

“I took vitamins, became a vegetarian, and then I went to a yoga class—and I felt different,” says Soram, whose search for more yoga took him to California, and eventually led him to convert to Sikhism.

What Soram deals with so effectively is the “walking wounded,” who fall between disease and optimal health. “What they forgot to teach us in med school is about the gray zone in the middle…people who aren’t sick but don’t feel good in so many ways—with fatigue, headaches, digestive problems that are unattended. Organs are not yet sick, diseased or damaged but are weakened, run down, stressed or toxic,” says Soram. “In this gray zone, we are always making progress. I don’t ever get tired of looking for what’s working and what’s helping people.” —Samantha Dunn