Chocolate-Covered Chocolate-Mint Cookies

When I was a Girl Scout, I sold more cookies than anyone in my troop. I knew that Friday, payday, was the day to sell in my neighborhood. I would make my rounds on Friday nights and nab dads with fresh cash in their pockets. Now I buy the cookies by the case every year and give them out to the gang in the kitchen. I developed my own versions of Girl Scout cookies for the launch party of a book that the Girl Scouts produced about inspiring women; Barbara Lazaroff, co-owner of Spago, was featured in the book. The chocolate-covered chocolate-mint cookies were always my favorite. Freeze them in the summer.

Excerpted from Desserts by the Yard. Copyright © 2007 by Sherry Yard. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.



Ingredients:Makes 72 cookies


1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/4 cups sugar
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
6 ounces (1 1/2 sticks) cold unsalted butter , cut into 1/2-inch pieces
2 large egg yolks
1 1/2 tsp. peppermint oil
1/4 tsp. vanilla extract
1 1/2 pounds bittersweet chocolate
Place the flour, cocoa, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a food processor fitted with the steel blade and pulse a few times to combine the ingredients. Add the butter and pulse to cut the butter into the dry ingredients. Add the egg yolks, peppermint oil, and vanilla and pulse until a dough forms on the blades of the food processor.

Remove the dough from the food processor and shape into a 2-inch-thick log. Wrap in plastic wrap or parchment paper and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, or overnight.

Place racks in the middle and lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 350°F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.

Why Subtle Action Is a Powerful Tool to Change Your Energy

Subtle action is the most powerful tool we have to change our energy. Deepak Chopra explains how we can change the energy in our daily lives by viewing our bodies as a flowing process guided by energy.
Recently I've been discussing how to change your energy. Many problems—physical and mental—seem to come down to a person's beliefs, habits, lifestyle, moods and emotions. We use the words "positive" and "negative" to describe people we know, yet modern medicine hasn't been able to find the source of these factors. There's plenty of data to prove that people who undergo traumatic events, such as being widowed or losing a job without warning, suffer from lowered immune response. There are countless studies linking stress and poor health.

In my book Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul, I suggest that the missing link is energy—a term that appears everywhere in Eastern medicine, from the life energy called Chi in Chinese medicine to Prana in Ayurvedic medicine from India. The important thing, however, is to find out for yourself if you can change your energy. In fact, there are ways that do not depend on esoteric beliefs or aligning yourself with Eastern medicine.

The most powerful tool for changing your energy is subtle action. This is nothing more than having an intention that your body can respond to. When you lift your arm, your body is responding to an intention. We're used to that kind of mind-body link, yet subtle action goes much deeper. Experiments with Tibetan monks who have meditated on the value of compassion have proved that their brains actually change. The area of the prefrontal cortex associated with higher functions, like compassion, light up stronger in these monks than in any other tested subjects.

In daily life, feeling love and sending it to others is a subtle action. Experimenters at Harvard have shown the immediate effect of love on the body. Subjects sat in a room to watch a film of Mother Teresa and her work with abandoned children in Calcutta. The images were deeply moving, and clearly the audience was touched. At the same time, their breathing rates and blood chemistry changed, revealing greater calm and less stress. All these responses are controlled by the brain.

The Ultimate Beauty Morning

Wake up before your alarm clock after seven to eight hours of sleep. You may have to get up a little earlier (or later) than 6 a.m., depending on your particular schedule and lifestyle. Seven or eight hours is the amount of time your body needs to recharge; plus, sleep is the major stimulant for your natural growth hormone, which keeps skin taut and vibrant.

When you wake up, take a few minutes for an inventory of the way your body feels—specifically the minor aches and pains that may subconsciously distract you from the focus of your life. When you wake up, perform a few light stretches. Take just a few minutes to get your blood going, think about your breathing and prepare yourself for your day. While you meditate to the sensations of your body, dream about one big idea you want to pursue today.

Q: Is there a diet I can follow or certain foods I can eat that would help me sleep better?

And if you're over 60, have dark skin or slather on sunscreen every time you step outside, put yourself in the 85 percent zone. That's bad news for your health. Not just because you need D to build strong bones, but because a steady stream of recent research suggests this familiar nutrient is responsible for more good deeds than a string of superheroes put together—including the biggie that it can even help you live longer. Several studies have found that if people take more vitamin D, they have 25 percent less cancer and heart disease.

If you don't? A just-released study found that people with the lowest levels of vitamin D in their blood are 26 percent more likely to die from any cause (heart disease, cancer, infection, you name it) than folks with respectable amounts.

That's just the beginning. Vitamin D is like the quiet kid in the back of the room who ends up developing the next Google. It's equally underestimated. New benefits of D are being discovered faster than you can say cholecalciferol (that's science-geek speak for the active form of vitamin D, also known as vitamin D3). Here's the latest on how it helps you stay young and healthy.


It cuts your risk of breast and colon cancer.
Many cells love to multiply faster than rabbits in the arugula patch. But out-of-control cell growth can lead to cancer. Enter vitamin D. It keeps a lid on the rate that cells reproduce, and it turns on your DNA spell checker, called the P53 gene. This gene checks your DNA for typos and kills cells—like cancer cells—that have errors. Experts now believe this is why women who live in sunny climates, and thus have plenty of D (your body makes it when sunlight hits your skin), are less likely to develop breast cancer. D has also been linked to lower chances of developing ovarian and lung cancers and better odds of beating colon cancer. Recent research found that colon cancer patients with the highest D levels are the most likely to survive.

It deters diabetes and other serious diseases.
When researchers looked at the link between sun exposure and type 1 diabetes in children, they found fewer cases of diabetes in kids who live closer to the sunny equator (and therefore make more D). And because D improves your ability to produce and use insulin, it may also help protect against type 2 diabetes. The vitamin, which is thought to be an immune system ally, may help prevent autoimmune diseases too, including multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.

It keeps your heart healthy.
Vitamin D helps your ticker by controlling inflammation, moderating blood pressure and keeping your arteries young. That's probably why vitamin D-deficient men are twice as likely to have a heart attack as men with healthy levels—and twice as likely to die from it.

Foods to Help You Sleep Better

Q: Is there a diet I can follow or certain foods I can eat that would help me sleep better?
— Gabriela Vasquez, Bronx, New York

A: You can improve your sleep by eating more plant foods that provide carbohydrates—fruits, vegetables, beans, and whole grains. These tend to produce a slow, steady rise in blood insulin that helps the amino acid tryptophan enter the brain. Tryptophan is used to make serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps induce sleepiness along with improving your mood (and who knows—it just might stimulate good dreams).

This chemistry explains why the time-honored glass of warm milk before bed may actually do the trick: Milk provides a dose of tryptophan while also inducing a release of insulin. By the way, the supposed sedative effect of the Thanksgiving turkey—which, like many kinds of meat, contains tryptophan—is more likely due to the size of the holiday meal. But while a big meal may make you sleepy, digesting it could make for a very restless night.

Certain foods and drinks can disturb your slumber. The stimulant caffeine—in soda, coffee, some teas, and chocolate—will interfere with sleep if you ingest it within four hours of bedtime. An alcoholic drink can make you drowsy, but metabolizing the sugar can disrupt your shut-eye (some people overheat). Sugary treats eaten just before bed can likewise raise your body temperature and leave you restless.

Your diet can also have an indirect effect on your sleep. Being overweight can lead to the heavy snoring and interrupted breathing of sleep apnea, for example. And eating a lot of simple carbohydrates (sweets) and refined starches (white flour, rice), which continually causes your blood sugar to spike and fall, may throw off the hormones that regulate metabolism. This can derail the body's natural rhythms and cause wakefulness at night.

A Global Guide to Medical Tourism

Bargain hunting for a new television or negotiating a better deal on a car is being a smart consumer. But what about shopping around for the best price on a major, life-altering surgery?

For those who are comfortable with the idea of medical tourism, the savings are enticing. The average cost of heart bypass surgery in the United States, for example, is $70,000. In India, the same surgery costs only $7,000—a whopping 90 percent less. For the 47 million uninsured people in the United States, these prices matter.

Josef Woodman, author of Patients Beyond Borders, has toured more than 140 medical facilities in 22 countries. He estimates that 240,000 Americans traveled for medical procedures in 2009, and the numbers are growing.

While the idea of going under the knife in a foreign country sounds daunting (if not dangerous), the Joint Commission International has given its approval to 240 hospitals around the world. The Joint Commission is the largest and most respected accreditation agency in the United States, Woodman says. To be approved, an international healthcare provider must meet the same rigorous standards as a hospital in the United States.

Hormone mix may cut breast cancer risk

Women in menopause who have symptoms are currently treated with a combination of estrogen plus progestin hormone therapy, however this treatment comes with side effects, including a higher risk of breast cancer caused by the progestin.

Yale researchers sought to determine a better way of administering hormone therapy without the breast cancer risk.

During the study, lead researcher Dr Hugh S. Taylor, professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at Yale, and his colleagues treated breast and endometrial cell lines with either estrogen or estrogen plus one of the SERMs.

They later looked at various markers of cell growth, including proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA), one of the best-characterized markers of cell growth.

The team found that PCNA was increased when they stimulated cells with estrogen and decreased when they added a SERM, indicating that the SERM blocked cell growth.

Taylor said that breast and uterine cells won't be stimulated by the estrogen plus SERM combination, so women in menopause get the benefits of estrogen without the risk of progestin.

Progestin is a double-edged sword, Taylor said. It poses a breast cancer risk, but if you use estrogen alone without progestin, there is a higher risk of uterine cancer. Therefore SERMs appear to be a good substitute for progestin.

"In our study, the right combination of estrogen and various SERMs was able to prevent the proliferation of breast and endometrial cells,” said Taylor.

"These preliminary findings could lead to a better way of administering hormone therapy to women in menopause," he added.

Younger women prone to breast cancer

Amit Bhargav, consultant oncologist at the Max Healthcare hospital in the capital, said that in his career, the age group vulnerable to breast cancer has dropped drastically.

"When I started practicing oncology about 15 years back, women mostly in the age group of 50-55 were most vulnerable to breast cancer. But these days the incidence of the disease has become common amongst women aged between 35-45," Bhargav told IANS .

Saturday was observed as Breast Cancer awareness day and doctors like Bhargav said that they are doing their bit to spread as much awareness on the disease so that early detection was possible and improve chances of recovery.

"Breast cancer is mostly an urban disease. The maximum incidence of the disease is seen in metropolitan cities where life is fast. Most girls work, have late marriages and then have children even later. All these factors work at increasing the chances of breast cancer," Bhargav said.

Harish Chaturvedi, a cancer expert, added: "High pollution level in cities also contribute to higher chances of breast cancer. Smokers and those who consume alcohol are also a high risk group. Junk food is also a threat."

Stress and obesity are other factors that can increase the chances of having breast cancer.

While genetics - if a woman below 45 years of age has breast cancer, her daughter's chances for the same rise - puts women in the high risk group, those who have had an early menarchy or have attained menopause are also a vulnerable group.

According to B.Niranjan Naik of Dharamshila hospital, a cancer speciality hospital, almost 75,000 new cases of breast cancer are detected in India every year.

"20-25 percent of cancer cases in Indian women is that of breast cancer. The main symptoms which one should look out for are a lump in the breast, discharge from the nipples, skin retraction or thickening, ulceration and skin irritation.

"Early detection is the key to avoid breast cancer. Women in the high risk group must go for breast screening tests when they touch 30," Naik said.

Bhargav added: "Although there is no study done, an estimated 50,000-70,000 women die every year due to breast cancer in India".

Try Iyengar yoga to lift your moodTry Iyengar yoga to lift your moodTry Iyengar yoga to lift your mood

Who would have though yoga would help you feel good about yourself? But here is proof: people who did them for 5 weeks reported a lift in their moods and more spring in their steps. Simple yoga-style stretches and poses could do the trick.

Positive poses
A type of yoga that focuses on mood-boosting poses seemed to be particularly helpful in raising spirits in a recent study. In fact, people's moods not only generally improved about halfway through 5 weeks of doing Iyengar yoga, but posers also felt a bit better after class, too. Talk about instant gratification. Try doing some of these simple yoga moves at your desk right now.

If yoga doesn't fit into your feel-good plans, try one of these better-mental-place lifestyle changes:

Put on your walking shoes. You could start to feel better after just 30 minutes of walking briskly. Find a walking buddy to walk with and see the bad spell as well as calories melt away!

Think fish, nuts, and flaxseeds . They are great for your skin, stomach and memory.

Indulge in a snooze. Skimping on sleep opens the door to blue moods.

Ten tips to avoid back pain

Marcus, who is the director of muscle pain research at the New York University School of Medicine said on "The Early Show," that people seek medical advice for back pain most than for anything else.

Also, the National Institutes of Health revealed that four out of five Americans would suffer from disabling back pain during their lifetime, reports CBS News.

However, Marcus offered tips to prevent back pain:

1. Your bed does matter- The physician advised tossing and turning at night and getting rid of sagging mattress if you have one.

2. What you do in bed matters- Reading or watching television while lying down is best avoided as when you lift your head to view the screen your muscles may contract causing pain in the neck.

3. Don''t just sit there- Apparently, staying in a particular position for too long stresses the postural muscles in your body. Hence, one should frequently change positions.

4. Cross your legs- The doctor advised alternately crossing a leg if you are sitting for long hours in a particular place, like while in a theatre, as it helps move back and hip muscles.

5. Around the house: Regularly used household items should be preferably kept on easily accessible shelves, as it can help avoid bending and stretching movements.

6. Watch where you put your wallet: Marcus advised men to completely stop sitting with wallet in the back pocket as it can result chronic pain.

7. Just say no- Lifting heavy weights should be avoided. Marcus added: "Ask for help, wait for help, hire help -- or walk away."

8. When you do have to lift a heavy object, bend with your knees and hips -
While lifting heavy objects it should be brought close to the body, such that leg muscles bear maximum pressure.

9. Shoveling snow: A short walk to warm up before beginning to shovel may be a good idea. Also, a smaller blade can help limit each load¸ as snow is pretty heavy.

10. For women only: Women should try to lose weight after pregnancy and strengthen key postural and abdominal muscles, as it is weakened and stretched.

Apart from all the above advice, Marcus also suggested not putting computer keyboards on top of the desk in office to be handy for office employees.

He said: "To avoid neck, shoulder and back muscle strain, your arms should be positioned so that you reach down to use the keyboard, which is the reason keyboard trays can be found under desktops."

Alpha-glucosidase inhibitors

Alpha-glucosidase inhibitors, a type of medication for type 2 diabetes, slow the breakdown of starches in the intestine, blunting the excessive rise in blood glucose that occurs after eating. Taken with the first bite of a meal. Possible side effects: digestive problems, including gas and diarrhea. Medications available: acarbose (Precose) and miglitol (Glyset).

Underestimating Obesity in Children

Overweight moms often don’t notice their children’s chubbiness, and overweight young people are likely to underestimate their own weight, too, according to two studies. In one, mothers of 3- to 6-year-olds were shown nine silhouettes, representing different ages, genders, and body mass indexes. Overweight mothers of overweight children were less likely to pick a body shape that accurately depicted their child. The other study found that 61 percent of overweight boys and 31 percent of overweight girls with an average age of 12 listed their weight as normal or underweight.
Sources: Pediatrics, July 2009; BMC Public Health, June 12, 2009

0Kids, Weight, and Health

Type 2 diabetes doesn’t come out of nowhere. Imagine a cosmic card game where the deck includes diet and weight, genes and geography—even ethnicity. Some people are dealt a bad hand right from the beginning. Latinos, for example, have the highest risk of developing diabetes of any minority group in America: Epidemiologists estimate that half of the Latino children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes at some point in their lives.

It’s a mystery researchers are eager to figure out. Diabetes is extremely common among Latinos, and becoming more so all the time. In 2000, nearly three-quarters of Latino children between the ages of 12 and 19 were overweight or obese, more than double the number in the white population. “It’s sociocultural, possibly genetic, definitely physiological and metabolic,” says Michael Goran, PhD, a researcher at the University of Southern California’s Department of Preventive Medicine in Los Angeles. “It varies tremendously between ethnic groups. Different ethnic groups are more insulin resistant than whites,” even controlling for the differences in average weight between different groups.

Yet relatively little is known about why members of America’s largest and fastest-growing minority group are so much more likely to be overweight and to develop diabetes than the rest of the population. For almost a decade, the ADA has supported Goran’s research into the question by funding postdoctoral researchers who work with him on the problem of pediatric obesity. (For Goran, the focus on ethnicity is no accident: USC is located in east Los Angeles, which is 98 percent Latino.) Goran wanted to know if childhood obesity automatically led to pre-diabetes, a condition a step below full-blown type 2 diabetes that involves resistance to insulin and blood glucose levels somewhat higher than normal. A third factor doctors look at is the body’s beta cells, which are responsible for producing insulin. In people with pre-diabetes, the beta cells struggle to secrete enough insulin to compensate for the body’s growing resistance. Over time, all these factors can play a big role in the development of type 2 diabetes.

To look at the connections between childhood obesity and pre-diabetes, Goran has spent the past decade examining the way risk factors play out as Latino children grow up. In 2000, Goran recruited more than 200 kids between the ages of 8 and 13 from clinics near USC. Children selected for the study had to be Latino, overweight, and have a family history of type 2 diabetes. Every year, Goran’s lab brought the kids in for a complete checkup, including a metabolic assessment that measured things like insulin sensitivity and glucose levels—both key indicators of pre-diabetes.

The kids in his study were selected because their weight was extreme, especially when measured against their peers. “Body weight in children is a moving target,” Goran says. “In childhood we can’t use a fixed body mass index, so we use a percentile.” Most of the children were in the heaviest 3 percent for their age, topping 140 pounds at 10 years old, for example.

Children's Self-Image Can Affect Their Ability to Lose Weight000

When Jacksonville, Fla., psychologist Amanda Lochrie, PhD, decided to study children at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, she was immediately intrigued by the question of perception. To develop a program to help kids lose weight and be healthier, she first had to know how obese children felt about themselves.

What she found was surprising. Talking with nearly 150 children and their parents, the Nemours Children's Clinic researcher discovered that kids and parents both underestimated how serious the children's weight problems were. That reflected a larger trend: As waistlines in America grow, perception of what's normal also expands. "These are significantly overweight kids," Lochrie says. But "they often don't perceive themselves as overweight, and their parents don’t either."


The perception gap first showed up in the study's recruiting process. Lochrie was looking for high-risk cases, not kids who needed to lose a few pounds. To make sure she got enough volunteers, she decided to include children in the top 15 percent of their age group in terms of body mass index, or BMI, a way of evaluating the body's weight relative to its height. But when she signed up the participants, it turned out that almost all of the kids referred by schools and family doctors were at the extreme end of the spectrum: The BMIs of most of the study participants were in the 97th percentile. In other words, it took a lot before children's weight made the alarm bells start to ring in school health centers and doctor's offices.

The skewed perception reached all the way into Lochrie's lab. The seasoned nurse

Move over Rolaids and Tylenol. Step aside Tums and Seldane. If you spell relief D-R-U-G-S, you might want to consider the effects of doing so.

Mouthwash is a neat little invention. It’s an easy way to feel like your mouth is totally clean and fresh smelling in a matter of seconds…and you can achieve all of this without a toothbrush on hand. It’s no wonder that mouthwash is so popular. My only question is this: Why should we grow so acquainted with pouring chemicals into our mouths, supporting the production and manufacturing of products that cause pollution, and spending money we don’t have to spend? There are natural ways to make mouthwash from items you very well may have around the house. Here are a couple recipes. Enjoy!

Spearmint

Boil 6 ounces of water and 2 ounces of vodka together. Add in 4 teaspoons of liquid glycerin and 1 teaspoon of aloe vera gel. Remove from heat and let cool. When cooled, add 10-15 drops of Spearmint oil and shake the entire mixture together well.

Health Canada is getting tough with patients who use government-certified medical marijuana, demanding full payment in advance before shipping the wee

Move over Rolaids and Tylenol. Step aside Tums and Seldane. If you spell relief D-R-U-G-S, you might want to consider the effects of doing so.

First there are the obvious side-effects of drugs. The pharmaceuticals that millions of people turn to for relief from pain, inflammation, and other symptoms are not only causing side effects, they are actually damaging the health of many people. Drug side effects are the third leading cause of death. By some estimates six thousand people die every year from “simple” non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). These commonly-used drugs can contribute to congestive heart failure, kidney disease, suicidal depression, cataracts, ulcers, macular degeneration, hearing loss, tinnitus, memory loss, fatigue, liver disease, and many other health concerns.

Prescription and over-the-counter medications can also deplete your body of much-needed vitamins and minerals required for your body’s basic functions. Over-the-counter pain relievers like Aspirin, Advil, Aleve, Tylenol, and the countless others on the market can deplete your body of Vitamin C, folic acid, iron, zinc, and other essential nutrients. These nutrients are needed to keep your immune system strong, heal tissues, maintain cellular integrity, build healthy blood, heal wounds, and nourish skin and hair.

Here are some of the common types of drugs and the nutrients that they often deplete:

Health Canada demands cash on the barrelhead for government grass

Health Canada is getting tough with patients who use government-certified medical marijuana, demanding full payment in advance before shipping the weed.


The move, effective Nov. 30, is designed to halt the rising number of accounts in arrears - and force more patients to pay off old debts that now total more than $1.2 million.


"This change to a purchase-in-advance system will streamline the order and payment process and will prevent further increases to the debt load of the department," says a recent Health Canada letter issued to users.


More than 4,600 people in Canada are licensed to use medical marijuana to treat a wide range of conditions, including chronic pain, that may not be resolved by standard prescription drugs.


Several court rulings forced a reluctant Health Canada to get into the marijuana business in 2003 so that bona fide patients would not have to rely on the black market for supplies.


Most authorized users grow their own pot or have someone else grow it for them, all under licence, but some 800 are currently buying their medical marijuana from Health Canada.


The government sells dried marijuana for $5 a gram - about half the price of street marijuana - or 30 seeds for $20, plus GST and provincial taxes.


The marijuana, which has received poor reviews from many users for being harsh and ineffective, has a THC content of about 12.5 per cent. THC is the main active ingredient of the cannabis plant.


Previously, users could order and pay later. But hundreds of patients - who are often seriously ill, unable to work and on welfare or disability pensions - could not keep up with their Health Canada bills and built up large debts.


Beginning Nov. 30, Health Canada will require a money order, certified cheque, Visa, Amex or MasterCard before medical marijuana is shipped, normally by courier.

Niagara-area woman dies from H1N1, third death in Ont. in just over a week

An Ontario woman from the Niagara Falls area has died after contracting H1N1, following an outbreak in the region, marking the province's third confirmed death from the flu in a little over a week.


Niagara region health spokeswoman Fiona Peacefull says the woman had underlying health conditions, meaning she would have been in one of the high-priority groups to receive the vaccine.


Peacefull says the woman died sometime this week from H1N1 but she could not reveal her age or location due to patient confidentiality.


It is the second death from H1N1 in the Niagara area since the arrival of the flu strain in May. There are currently 119 confirmed cases of H1N1 in the region.


Dr. Robin Williams, medical officer of health in the Niagara region, says she recognizes that H1N1 is in the community, and while generally mild, it can also cause serious illness and deah