7 Tips for Healthy Lifestyle

If you think you are leading a healthy lifestyle, then better think again! When it comes to living a healthy lifestyle, you might think that you are maintaining “good health” with physical activities and eating habits. But ask yourself genuinely: Are these enough to be considered “healthy”?

Did you know?

According to the Archives of Internal Medicine, only 3% of American adults meet the criteria for a healthy lifestyle.

Are you one of that 3%?

Also, 97% of Americans fail to have an ideal “healthy lifestyle” that can protect them from heart diseases.

Many people get confused between health and nutrition, and many qualified experts hold opposing opinions, making it difficult to comprehend what you should do to optimize your health. But despite all disagreements, many healthy lifestyle tips are well supported by researchers.

This article will give you an overview of improving and augmenting actions in life to have a healthy lifestyle. We have included 7 tips for a healthy lifestyle that are the essential components and must be a part of our daily routine. In addition to the tips, the article also covers avoiding actions that cause unhealthy living. But let’s first understand what healthy living is!

What is Healthy Living?

The majority of people think that “healthy living” means the balanced and well-functioning physical and mental health processes in a person. In many instances, physical and mental health are interlinked, and when one gets affected, it directly affects the other.

So, the following tips include suggestions for living a healthy life both emotionally and mentally.

Tips for Living a Healthy Lifestyle

Eat a Balanced Diet – The Best Medicine

Eating healthy doesn’t involve extreme diets! The secret of a balanced diet involves foods with low fats and sugar and high in minerals, vitamins and other nutrients.

According to the research of Dietary Guidelines for Americans, your optimal energy needs a balanced diet that should be high in fruits, vegetables, low-dairy fat, lean protein and whole grain.

Eat Varieties of Meals

Eat various food such as green vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, legumes and whole grains. Make a habit of eating at least 400 grams of seasonal fruits and vegetables every day. If you are not a veggie person, add fatty fish to your diet, as it helps prevent inflammatory diseases such as heart diseases.

Reduce Salt Intake

Don’t consume salt more than 1 gram (or 1 teaspoon). While cooking food, limit the number of high sodium condiments such as adding less salt soya sauce and also avoiding salty snacks. If you suffer from high blood pressure, then cut back on salt, and a high amount of sodium increases the risk of high blood pressure.

Limit Sugar Consumption

Take sugar about 50 grams or 12 teaspoons a day. Avoid eating snacks, sweetened drinks, and candies to achieve the target. Limiting your sugar intake reduces the risk of likely diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, stroke and some cancers.

Avoid Unhealthy Fats

Fats should make up 30% of your total energy intake. Avoid eating saturated fats that include butter, cheese, red meat, Trans fat and ready-to-eat items. Instead, add saturated fats to your diet, including fish, olive oil, avocados, nuts, and seeds.

Exercise Regularly – The Glow of Healthy Lifestyle

Do you end up feeling lethargic after returning from work or halfway through the day? Do you often get winded by simple household chores such as cleaning or grocery shopping?

Make exercise your daily habit as it strengthens your muscles and relieves stress and tension. It also boosts endurance that helps you work more efficiently during other physical activities. Do exercise while respecting the body’s limits.

In addition to your physical and mental health, exercise also improves your sleep quality by three scientifically proven activities: aerobic exercise, yoga, and strength training. This way, you can improve your healthy lifestyle and happiness in life.

According to Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 150 minutes of weekly movement adds energy to you and does not subtract from it.

Sleep Well – The Best Meditation

Your sleep and immune system have a strong link to each other. Don’t break that connection!

Get at least 7 to 9 hours of sleep daily. Getting more sleep is a sign of a healthy person that many people need to improve.

Getting enough sleep heals your body and is vital for your physical and mental health. But what prevents you from sleeping well? Think about what stops you from achieving this habit!

Maybe you are addicted to using your phone or spending your whole night scrolling different social media apps. Remember, sleep deprivation can perpetuate severe health issues, and it also negatively affects your mood, determination, motivation and energy levels.

Did you know?

Poor sleep increases the risk for many cardiovascular problems such as high blood pressure, heart diseases and stroke.

If you want to have a successful healthy lifestyle and experience an energized day, then the best thing you can do is prioritize your sleep!

Do Not Smoke – It’s A Slow Poison

You might have read the proposed warning written on the cigarette packet such as WARNING “smoking kills”, “tobacco smoke can harm your children”, “Smoking causes lung cancer” and so on. The warning intends to educate consumers about its side effects on health and likely risks such as coronary disease, lung cancer and pulmonary disease.

One of the significant causes of lung cancer globally is smoking. Apart from lung disease, smoking also develops some other organ cancers. While smoking harms your health and the people around you, smoking damages the airways, leading to the cause of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Life is short; quit smoking to make it last!

Think Positive – Key For Improving Mental and Physical Health

Positive thinking contributes to a long and healthy lifestyle!

Feeling depressed and stressed is harmful to our health and hinders optimum health. Unfortunately, these feelings have become a part of our competitive and fast-paced culture. Millions of Americans are affected by anxiety and depression. These conditions are caused and can be worsened by several physiological issues such as poor diet or hormonal balance. They are often influenced by how we see and respond to our environment.

It is crucial to recognize unhealthy thought patterns that indirectly affect the mind to get a healthy lifestyle. Negative self-talk and self-blaming are the way to enter a cycle of thinking that negatively impacts our physical and mental well-being.

If you want to feel best:

Train yourself to create positive thinking, count your blessings and be content.
Learn to face challenges and opportunities, stare dead in the face of your fears.
Practice patience and understanding instead of anger.

Indeed, we become what we think!

Your healthy lifestyle begins with a single thought of positivity!

Surround Yourself with Good People

Maximize the amount of time from your daily routine to spend quality time and enjoy being around people you like and love.

Surrounding yourself with people who radiate positivity, have good vibes, and share similar interests as you have will excite and energize you. On the other hand, people who are not of your type or have negative outlooks often complain about you and make poor choices and decisions in life; they only drain your energy. Therefore, be selective about the company you want to keep!

Surround yourself with a company that empowers you to become the best version of yourself!

Don’t Stress, Be Happy!

If you suffer from stress, tension, and depression, you put your entire health at risk. Why? This is because stress inflicts disorder on your emotional equilibrium, as well as your physical condition. It narrows your capability to think positively, enjoy life and effectively mind function.

The bills will keep increasing, and there are not more than 24 hours, your work pressure will never stop, and your family responsibilities will remain demanding. In the end, you have more control than you might think.

When you try to manage your stress, you are breaking the hold of stress on your life, which allows you to become healthier, happier and more productive. The ultimate goal for reducing stress is to have a balanced life, relationships, and time for work with fun and relaxation. The aim to “don’t stress” always holds you up and ready to overcome the challenges on your way.

Don’t stress about what you can’t control; instead, find ways for a happy and healthy living!

Final Thoughts

Your healthy lifestyle is always similar to others; there is a just difference when and how we adopt it. The most important thing to remember is by little effort, you can make a huge difference in your physical health and emotional well-being.

Take charge of your life, be mindful because small behaviors help you live a healthy lifestyle. Therefore making just a few of the above 7 tips part of your daily life can help you lead a better life.

Remember, some of the above tips might seem challenging to you at first, but their benefits far exceed to sustain them.

Health Lifestyle

5 Ways to Keep Yourself Healthy During the Pandemic

The recent epidemic of an infectious virus has given the greatest health issues humans have ever faced. A tiny germ was killing people like a serial killer. The past two or three years have really been a more arduous period to pass, but thankfully, the world came together to combat the COVID with collective efforts and has succeeded to a greater extent. However, the game is not over yet completely. The virus is still there and still going to live here for how many years; it is difficult to say at this stage. However, it’s now your responsibility to extract yourself from the pandemic and start living a healthy lifestyle.

On the one hand, we learned to stay safe from pandemic-related health issues through self-isolation, social distancing, and sanitization. While on the other hand, it has made us conscious and concerned about our health more than ever. Hopefully, no other wave of pandemics will hit our earth ever again, but if it does, we should all be prepared to fight with it by keeping ourselves healthy during pandemics.

To learn that preparation, we have prepared this article for you with the best ways to keep yourself healthy during the pandemic. Read till the last to ensure you don’t miss any health tips.

5 Ways of Staying Healthy During the Pandemic

Before going further, let us clarify that these healthy lifestyle tips will help you stay healthy during the pandemic and help you keep up healthy even after the pandemic is over.

Stay Calm

Believe it or not, keeping yourself calm will save you from a lot of issues and unnecessary troubles. The most important thing to stay strong during a difficult situation like a pandemic is to stay calm and content. The more you panic, the more you will create problems; for you and others, and this might even result in stress and anxiety. So, extract yourself from the pandemic and start living healthily.

Did you know?

By minimizing chronic stress you can improve your overall health; in addition, it prevents you from other health risks like anxiety, heart diseases, and depression.

In order to keep yourself calm, you are advised to stay connected with nature, get enough sleep and keep your mind fresh. Also, you can try some meditation or exercise.

Eat Adequately

Prevention is better than cure, and eating healthy is the best thing to prevent yourself from any and every kind of disease.

If you are observing a lockdown in the home, don’t think of it as adversity; rather, make this an opportunity to start a healthy lifestyle. Not going outside means you are staying away from junk foods and restaurant meals. This is the perfect time to eat homemade fresh food and stay fit in your home. Try different things that excite you or the things you haven’t had for so long.

Take a Break from the Internet

We know this seems a bit difficult, especially during a time when you are locked in your home, but this is not impossible. Think for a minute, when was the last time you spent a good gossiping time with your family or when you last made decluttered your cupboard?

For a healthy lifestyle, everyone should have a balance between the tech world and the real world. It is understandable that you are lying all day idle in your bed, so you need to binge Netflix or stroll your Instagram, but these should be done timely.

Tanking small but definite breaks from the internet and social media will cause you no bad. Instead, you will realize positivity and harmony in your personality, and you will feel greater good.

Do Some Physical Exercise

Boys or girls who don’t like to be in good shape these days, shift your focus from pandemic worries to your own improvements. Take time for workouts to get into the shape or the shape that you always wanted for yourself. This time, you don’t even have the excuses of office workloads or busy schedules. This is your time, and use it on yourself.

If you haven’t got your fitness equipment, you can try some physical sports that you can play in your backyard.

Keep Yourself Busy

Since this is the first time that most of us are facing a pandemic situation throughout the world, we are all left perplexed with what to do and what not to do. Everyone is feeling so disoriented and bewildered. The best way to take yourself out of this confusing situation is to think of the things you ever wanted to do; it can be as simple as repainting your walls or learning a new skill that you never got to.

Let your creative and passionate self come out and make this problematic time meaningful and memorable.

The idea behind keeping yourself is actually keeping yourself distracted from the news and counts coming from the world. Pretend as if everything is good outside and you are just on a good holiday at your home. Believe us; you will not need any further tips for staying well and healthy.

Mental Health Issues Prevailing Amid the Pandemic

People still believing that the pandemic just caused physical health deterioration are heavily mistaken. Coronavirus was not only about the fever, flu, and cough. It was far beyond that. In a very short period, the virus has caused millions of deaths around the globe. Those who were saved from dying were living every day with anxiety, stress, and depression. Mental and psychological health have equally got affected as the physical one.

The financial crisis at an individual level and the economic catastrophes at the country level both have left people in extreme unsettlement. The concerns of earning enough bread for the self and family have caused severe mental health issues like depression, overthinking, and restlessness.

Final Words

So these were the best five tips that can help you stay good and healthy in these challenging times. We have already come a long way in the battle of the coronavirus, and hopefully, we will soon be out of this pandemic completely.

Till then, take good care of yourself and your family and keep praying for those who are hang a tougher time than you.

What is CRISPR Genome Editing?

Editing the Human Genome Through CRISPR

In the world of medical sciences, there is no space for the word “miracle” until something unbelievable, if not impossible, happens beyond the understanding of the human mind; maybe something like creating customizable DNAs to produce a human of your own choice.

To make this miracle a reality, scientists have been working on revolutionary biomedical research called CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). It is indeed one of the few medical breakthroughs in the history of biological innovations.

What is CRISPR Genome Editing?

CRISPR has been widely employed in different fields from medical research, biomedical sciences, and applied biotechnology.

This article is going to provide you with all the necessary information about genome editing and CRISPR. Read till last!

What is Genome Editing?

Genome editing, or gene editing, is a branch of genetic engineering in which the DNA inside the genome of a living thing is cut, altered, or replaced. With this method, we can make changes to the human DNA. In this process, an enzyme is inserted into the DNA at a particular sequence to cut and edit the DNA from that sequence.

Before genome editing, there were different methods through which a host genome could receive genetic material into it. But genome editing is different from those techniques in a way that it can target the insertions at specific locations in the DNA.

The recent advancement of genome editing techniques has enabled scientists to directly target and modify genomic sequences in almost all kinds of cells. Gene editing has made scientists and biologists explicate the contribution of genetics. Also, it supports the making of more accurate cellular and animal models of pathological processes.

What is Genome Editing Used For?

The process of genome editing can be used for multiple purposes, some of which are;

For Research Purposes

Genome editing has proved to be a breakthrough in the area of research in genetics and biomedical engineering. It can be best used to understand the processes of biological changes in the DNA inside a cell. It also helps to understand gene functions and develop ways to treat genetic or acquired diseases.

For Treatment Purposes

Gene editing can also be beneficial in treating diseases like AIDS or Leukemia by modifying human blood cells and reintroducing them in the body. Other genetic diseases like hemophilia or muscular dystrophy or the infections like MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) can also be treated by using the techniques of gene editing.

For Agricultural Purposes

Genome editing is not only limited to humans or animals but can also be employed in plants and crops. The production of several crops can be improvised through gene editing and save crops from droughts and diseases.

Techniques of Genome Editing

The techniques of genome editing were first used in the late 1900. Since then, there has been a revolutionary development in this subject. In 2009, a game-changing technological tool called CRISPR was introduced to make gene-editing easier than ever before.

CRISPR becomes cheaper and faster, and more accurate than other genome editing methods. Many scientists have already stated using CRISPR for editing DNA. Before going into detail about CRISPR, let us see other techniques of genome editing!

Conventional Genome-Editing

Although this technique may not be revolutionary, it helps greatly with genome editing. Conventional Genome-Editing is based on physiological methodologies and involves a double-stranded repair system. Through this technique, homologous related to gene intervention can be recombined. The emergence of advanced technologies has overshadowed the significance of this technique therefore this technique is rarely used in labs anymore.

Chemical Modalities of Genome Editing

In this method, pseudo-complementary peptide nucleic acid (pcPNA) is used, which clears the place within the telomeric region or chromosome. After pcPNA clearing the site, excision is done by a chemical mixture EDTA or the cerium (CE) through splicing. This technique is helpful because you can join a DNA of your own choice within that specified site. This method is very beneficial in high salt concentrations.

Initially, this method was considered the most advantageous technique for genome editing, but with the advancement of genetic engineering, it was realized that this method is more time-consuming. Also, creating site-specific pcPNA was a big problem in carrying out the process.

Homing Endonuclease Systems

The word “homing” in Homing Endonucleases (HEs) interprets the lateral transmission of a DNA sequence in genome editing. HEs are typically naturally-occurring nucleases with a size of about 14bp. They can splice DNA into slightly larger sequences.

Through this method, a site is taken out from a DNA segment through endonucleases, resulting in the creation of two segments of DNA. Now, recombinant adeno-associated viruses (rAAVs) are also introduced, which work as driving agents for taking genetic tools into the human cells.

This method has a few shortcomings, due to which can not be relied upon completely. The primary issue with this technique is preparing nucleases and creating vectors to drive them into the cells. Also, rAAV was challenged with off-target effects with less specificity of the site. Another issue was the lower integration of DNA and the risks involved with host genome mutations.

Introduction to CRISPR

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, abbreviated as CRISPR, is a gene-editing technique that disrupts host genes and inserts sequences of DNA of own choice. This method uses the Cas9 protein and RNAs as a guide to carry out the gene-editing process.

The concept of CRISPR is driven by bacteria that use an adaptive immune response with a similar process as CRISPR. Since its anticipation, CRISPR has become the most favorable technique of gene editing in the field of genetic engineering. Compared to other techniques, CRISPR is a cheaper solution and a very fast method to process.

This method can be used to cut and edit a segment of DNA as well as to knock out agene from the body completely. This method helps significantly with the research of functions of genes, DNA modifications, and the subject of genetic engineering.

How it Works

First of all, the process starts with taking RNA, a molecule responsible for giving out the genetic information of DNA. The job of RNA is to spot a place within the nucleus where editing can be done.

Then it guides Cas9 to that spot to cut. Then Cas9 locking onto the double-stranded DNA and unzipping it causes the creation of a break in both strands of the DNA molecule. The cell, sensing an issue, repairs the break. Hence, it becomes possible to fix something inside or add a new gene. The latter is a little more complicated, though. This method also helps disable some genes inside the DNA that cause certain genetic diseases.

Applications of CRISPR

CRISPR-Cas9 can be used in a variety of ways. Some of the best applications of CRISPR are as under.

CRISPR can be applied to produce genetically modified organisms from early embryos by injecting Cas9 into the animals’ blood in the laboratory. This way tissues can be edited or modified, achieving substantial genome editing in tissues subsets.
CRISPR can also be used to modify the genomes of farm animals, crops, plants, laboratory model animals like mice or rats. Through the application of this technique, botanists have developed methods to combat bacterias that are resistant to antibiotics.
CRISPR also enables the development of curing human disease through animal models, and it also helps with the removal of HIV from infected cells of the human body.

Limitations of CRISPR

Although CRISPR is a potent tool, it comes with certain limitations which need to be addressed. The limitations are:

For this technique, CRISPR materials are difficult to deliver to large counts of mature cells, which creates issues in many clinical operations.
It is not completely efficient, so there might be the case where CRISPR material reaches a cell that does not have gene editing ability.
Also, this method is not 100% accurate either, and it can not be fully relied upon for hitting the right target always. Though rare, a small mistake can cause serious consequences, in clinical applications in particular.

Pros and Cons of CRISPR

Pros:

Curing Genetic Diseases

CRISPR can help cure genetic diseases such as diabetes cystic fibrosis. CRISPR could also be used to cure the genes that are infected and that cause genetic diseases.

Drug Research

Genetic scientists believe that CRISPR can hugely help with the processes of drug discovery. But for that purpose, this technique needs to be accurate, affordable, and convenient. CRISPR technology is already being incorporated into drug research and discovery by some of the world’s drug manufacturers.

Inexpensive

Gene-editing through CRISPR is comparatively cheaper than other techniques for the same purpose.

Cos of CRISPR

Inefficient

In the CRISPR process, editing can be affected by multiple factors and can seriously hamper your efforts, getting you insufficient results.

Time-Consuming

Sometimes CRISPR can be very hectic and time-consuming, as optimizing a protocol for CRISPR can be a lengthy and challenging process.

Final Verdict

This was the review of CRISPR, the latest advancement in genome editing technologies in recent years. It has emerged as an innovative gene-editing tool with a focus on animal models and eukaryotic cells. It can help cure several diseases and be a great tool in potential therapies. There are some challenges in implementing this technology, yet it is believed that the day is not far when there will be handmade humans on this earth.

References:

CRISPR DNA DNAediting gene GenomeEditing