How to build strong bones

1.- Ingest at least one and a half gram of calcium per day.
2.- Avoid diets that contain animal proteins and excessive salt.
3.- Make sure you expose to solar light for at least five minutes a day. This is very important because it helps the organism to produce D vitamin.
4.- Avoid consuming bran because it inhibits calcium absorption.
5.- Consume vegetables such as spinach and beetroot because they impede complete absorption of calcium.
6.- Ingest some supplements, principally of calcium and D vitamin, to get your bones stronger.
7.- Drink abundant liquid.
8.- Sleep well.
9.- Work out regularly, specially lifting weights because they have proved to increment bone mass and strength.
10.- Avoid alcohol and tobacco.
11.- All men with more than 70 years should undergo bone density checkups.

Cure and prevent insomnia (some advices)

By following these simple advices:

  1. Work out regularly but if you exercise by night, suspend it two hours before going to sleep.
  2. Don´t take naps.
  3. Turn off radio and television before sleeping.
  4. Have a light dinner before sleeping, don´t eat products with fat excess during the night, because this substance retards the digestion.
  5. Don´t drink coffee, carbonate drinks (fizzy) or chocolate, because those substances have caffeine, and caffeine provokes insomnia.
  6. Sleep with comfortable clothes (nothing tight).
  7. Lose some weight.

How to prevent visual stress

Working on the computer tires our eyesight, that's why while we are working in front of a computer, it's necessary to relax the eyes once in a while. We may consider some useful guidelines to do this, such as: blink often, and every ten minutes, more or less, focus your eyesight in the furthest object of the room for five to ten seconds.

When you reach half of your working day, we advised you to make a "gently massage". You should do it like this: sitting in a chair, "blindfold" yourself using the palm of your hand, but leave some space between the eyes and the palm, do not put pressure on the eyes. The fingers of one hand have to be placed above the fingers of the other one, over your forehead. Then you close your eyes, breath deeply and imagine that your eyes are the ones that are breathing. The autosuggestion continues imagining a relaxing landscape in which we carry out an activity that make us feel full. This exercise can be done for ten minutes and can be repeated at the end of the working day, next to a circular massage to the eyes.

How to prevent baby-bottle caries

The are a few things you can do to prevent this disease:

  • Make the first visit to the dentist from the ninth month of life onwards, when the baby-bottle caries haven't produced yet.
  • Keep your child in a vertical position while it's being fed, and prevent him/her from sleeping while it's being fed with the bottle. If this happens, it's important to wake him up and clean his/her teeth with a soft lint o give him/her some water to get rid of milk remains.
  • Avoid extending too much time the bottle feeding. Whenever he/she is able to drink from a cup or a glass the bottle has to be eliminated, approximately in between 12 to 15 months of life. If you want to have a gradual change, you may substitute the content for water, the baby will adapt in three weeks.
  • Parents must brush his/her child's teeth as soon as they appear, but without toothpaste because the baby could swallow it. In babies in which we cannot use a toothbrush, his/her teeth may be cleaned with a soft lint.
  • Do not impregnate the bottle or the dummy with substances with high cariogenic potential, such as: sweetened condensed milk, sugar and packed juices. There are studies that show the presence of bacterias (related to caries) that have been passed from mother to son in the first months of life. For this reason it's recommended to eliminate the caries that the mother may have.

Night eating syndrome: waking up in the middle of the night and grabbing a byte from the fridge. People who have this "new disease" suffers from stress and sleeping disorders, waking up between three and four times by night, with an uncontrollable need of eating caused by a drop of melatonin and leptin, two hormones linked to the good sleep and appetite, and an increment of his levels of cortisol, a hormone related to stress.

What's the difference between diet and light?

Light is synonymous of low calories -yogurts and cheeses, for example-; while diet products are those that have suffered a modification in their's composition. They may not have salt or sugar, for example, but the caloric content it's the same. A bread could be diet because it has bran or wholemeal. But it wouldn't be light.