acai berry (pronounced ah-sigh-ee) has been a real sensation this year with many new products on the market promising everything from weight loss, antivirus properties and even help for people with Leukemia. Earlier this year Oprah put the acai berry on the top of a list of superfoods and you know how things go when Oprah talks about them, the little Acai berry has not been safe since. To me the real story of the Acai Berry is that it is a fruit berry that has strong antioxidant abilities but lets see what we can find out about Acai Berry and your health.

What is the Acai Berry

The acai Berry fruit, a small, round, black-purple fruit is about 1 inch in diameter, kind of like a grape and grows on a very tall tree. Two crops of fruit are pare grown per year. The Acai berry fruit has a single large seed that takes up a lot of the berry. The skin of a ripe berry is a deep purple color, or green, depending on the kind of acai that it is.

The berries are harvested as food in the Amazon region of Brazil, acai palm (the tree it grows on) is incredibly important as it makes up a lot of the diet for the people in the area and is the biggest cash crop for it’s area of Brazil. Read the rest of this entry »

Looking to make a change and lose some weight? I have reviewed the top diet on the internet and you can go and read over 200 comments people have made about why this diet has worked well for them, as well as some of the problems.

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eDiets has an article telling us what fit people do. It is right on the mark

1. Sleep well and wake up naturally. Many fit people arise without an alarm clock feeling energized, rested and hungry. They have set fitness goals and a plan to achieve them. People who are fit fall asleep easier, have more quality sleep and require less sleep than someone who is unfit. Lack of sleep is strongly associated with obesity. Sleeping helps the body repair, rebuild and recover.

2. Get prepared. Fit people pack their gym bags the night before, have clothes laid out for exercise, toiletries packed for a shower, clothes for work and an appointment in their planner for physical activity. They regard their workout appointments as highly as any other business or social commitment. Read the rest of this entry »

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What is Glivec? It seems that w3e always hear cancer storeis and that there are not very many good news stories, not that I usually see anyway. Leukemia is a type of blood cancer that is often fatal and I had not ever heard of any drug therapies that were remarkable until I saw a news result today out of England that said that many people taking the drug Glivec are having amazing results. Here is some info on this Drug from Medical News Today.

Most patients who develop chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) can now expect to live more than 20 years from diagnosis if they are treated with the tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) Glivec (imatinib) according to haematologists involved in the IRIS (International Randomized Interferon versus STI571) study. Before availability of current treatments, median survival from diagnosis was 3.5 years.

Around 95 per cent of patients diagnosed with CML have the Philadelphia chromosome positive (Ph+) form that responds well to Glivec, said Professor John Goldman, professor of haematology at Imperial College, London. The chromosome is the result of translocation between the long arms of chromosomes 9 and 22. Part of the breakpoint cluster region (Bcr) gene from chromosome 22 fuses with part of the abelson leukaemia virus (Abl) gene on chromosome 9 producing the abnormal tyrosine kinase protein Bcr-Abl. It is this protein that causes the proliferation of white blood cells resulting in CML.

Four-year data from IRIS were presented at this year’s American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting. More than 90 per cent of patients with Ph+ CML in the chronic phase, randomised initially to Glivec 400mg daily in the year 2000, were still alive and free of progression to advanced disease at 54 months, Professor Goldman said.

The study confirmed that patients who achieved a major molecular response within one year, ie, a more than 1000-fold reduction in residual leukaemia, fared best. Patients achieving a three-log reduction in Bcr-Abl transcript levels within oneyear were all free of progression to advanced disease at year four.
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