Tips and Linkups
Educate Your Smart Phone
There’s more to life with a smart phone than downloading your favorite tunes and exercising your fingertips. Apps that are designed to promote your overall health and wellness also are available—and plentiful. The following is just a sampling.
iPhone/iFitness by Medical Productions
Health boosters: Includes more than 300 exercises; many are paired with a user-friendly video demo of how they’re best performed. Comes with practical tools to track your workout routines, progress and weight. (Also available for the BlackBerry.)
Find it at: iTunes App Store in the Healthcare & Fitness category / $1.99
Android/Calorie Counter by FatSecret
Health booster: Browse the database to find calorie and nutrition information for foods and restaurants. Also helps you keep track of what you eat.
Find it at: Android Market / Free
BlackBerry/BMI Active by Bones in Motion Inc.
Health boosters: GPS capability helps you log your workouts and measures time, distance, pace and calories burned.
Find it at: BlackBerry App World in the Health & Wellness category / Free
Myth vs. Fact: Stress Causes Gray Hair
Legend has it that stress caused Marie Antoinette’s hair to turn white the night before she took that fateful march to the guillotine in Paris in 1793.
Actually, hair turns gray when stem cells that produce pigment are depleted and stop doing their job. Today’s scientists dispute the notion that stress can turn hair gray overnight, but the jury’s still out about the definitive causes of graying hair. Some scientists say that consistent mental and physical stress — over the course of many years — may cause premature aging of the body, including hair. Others argue that genes determine when an individual goes gray.
A 2009 study of lab mice, published in the science journal Cell, suggests yet another culprit: the cumulative effect of stress at the cellular level. Researchers theorize that the accumulation of DNA damage in cells may be an engine in aging, prompted by “unavoidable” damaging agents such as ultraviolet light, ionizing radiation and chemicals.
