Vital Wellness

Allergies are versatile. They can show up just about anywhere in your body and create an incredible variety of symptoms. They can

Allergic Reaction

affect your nose, eyes, throat, lungs, stomach, skin, and nervous system. They can make you itch, wheeze, and sneeze, make your nose run and your eyes weep, give you a headache or a bellyache, and even bring on fatigue and depression.

Allergy symptoms occur when your body’s immune system overreacts to substances in your environment. Most people can live with a little cat dan­der, dust, or pollen, for example. But people with allergies have immune systems that can react to just about anything that comes along. Read the rest of this entry »

Histamine is usually stored in granules inside mast cells. When a mast cell is exposed to a substance that triggers an allergic reaction,

Nose Runs

however, the cell releases its histamine into surrounding tissues.

Histamine plays an important role in certain types of allergic reactions. It causes small blood vessels to widen and become more permeable to fluid, allowing fluid to pass from the bloodstream into sur­rounding tissues, causing nasal congestion, runny eyes and nose, and some­times hives. Read the rest of this entry »

Alcohol Abuse In Pregnacy

Although alcohol devastates the body both directly as a toxin and indirectly through nutrient loss, scientists suspect that it may also affect the body’s natural antioxidant defenses. Antioxidants are substances that protect your body’s healthy molecules against damage by unstable molecules called free radicals. Heavy alcohol use not only increases the production of free radicals, but it also depletes stores of antioxidants, like vitamins C and E. That means that while those nasty rogue molecules are increasing exponentially, the natural warriors needed to fight them off are decreasing rapidly. This imbal­ance is called “oxidative stress.” Read the rest of this entry »

You probably know someone with a drinking problem. In fact, maybe that person is you.

Alcoholic Problem

Problems with alcohol are fairly common in the United States. Two- thirds of all Americans drink and sixty percent are light to moderate drinkers, but up to 10 percent drink excessively.

The lights to moderate drinkers are probably in pretty good health, because is safe and may be beneficial, since it lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease. But excessive alcohol consumption is another story. Excessive drinking on a daily basis—more than three drinks for a woman and more than six for a man—increases your risk of cancer and can damage the liver, pancreas, heart, and brain, and also increases the risk of breast cancer in women, says doctor. It can cause vitamin deficiencies resulting in anemia, memory loss, osteoporosis, and night blindness. Although rare in this country, when scurvy due to vitamin C deficiency and pellagra due to niacin deficiency do occur, it’s usually in alcoholics. Read the rest of this entry »

Because alcohol can derail the transportation system that escorts minerals such as zinc and magnesium out of the liver and into your bloodstream, researchers agree that anyone with a drinking problem also runs the risk of zinc and magnesium deficiencies.

Both zinc and magnesium are excreted in relatively large amounts when people are drinking excessively. They can be replaced by eating a well-balanced diet, he adds. Shellfish, pot roast, and eggs are all good sources of zinc, while nuts, whole grains, vegetables, and tofu are pretty decent sources of magnesium.

If you have heart or kidney problems, it’s important that you talk to your doctor before taking magnesium supplements. Read the rest of this entry »