Enhance Your Health
Health Tip of the Week: Health Benefits of Pumpkin
Pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin coffee, pumpkin beer and most importantly, pumpkin pie.
Pumpkins were found in central America over 7,500 years ago. Oddly enough they were not given their named until 1584, by a French explorer who reported finding “Gros melons,” which was translated into English as the word pompions which over time evolved to pumpkins.
One cup of pumpkin contains more than 200 percent of your recommended daily intake of vitamin A, which is beneficial for your vision and more.
Pumpkin is rich in fiber and contains vitamin C, potassium, riboflavin, copper, and manganese, along with vitamin E, B vitamins, folate, iron, and phosphorus.
Pumpkin has many medicinal properties including helping with high blood pressure and high blood sugars. Pumpkin also has antioxidant, anti-carcinogenic, and anti-inflammatory effects. With a wide variety of nutrients ranging from magnesium and manganese to copper, protein, and zinc, pumpkin seeds are also beneficial for your health.
You don’t have to resort to canned pumpkin; it’s easy to make pumpkin puree at home from fresh pie pumpkins. You can also think of pumpkin as a squash (which it is).
Take chunks of carved out pumpkin meat and cut into pieces and slices which can be added to soups, stews or a stir fry. Remember pumpkin by itself does not really have a unique taste or flavor.
The taste of what we commonly think of pumpkin comes from all the spices – cloves, ginger and cinnamon.
Thought for the Week
It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness.
Chiropractic Thought for the Week
Here is a analogy. Think of how the inside of your body works as if your body was a lightbulb. The brighter the light, the healthier you are. Much light equals optimal function, performance and health. Less light equals poor function, distress and ill health. Chiropractic care, specifically the spinal adjustment would be akin to a light switch. The adjustment enhances or improves your nerve flow, increasing your inner light allowing your body to function as nature intended it to.
Pregnancy / Prenatal Chiropractic Care
During pregnancy one of the many hormones released is one called relaxin. Relaxin is named its name because the effect of the hormone is to relax the ligaments on both sides of the pelvis (the sacro-illiac joints from the back and the pubic bones in the front).
The hormone reduces the stability of the joints and changes how the muscles work. This is a good thing for pregnancy as these areas reposition for the baby to have an easy exit. The issue is that during pregnancy, this doesn’t always happen evenly. The imbalance of the ligaments and muscles can create uneven shifts in pelvic alignment which can create instabilities that can cause discomfort and also lead to less space in the uterus for the baby to move.
Chiropractic prenatal care addresses these pregnancy concerns by working on the soft tissue areas of the round ligaments and bringing stability back to the sacro-illiac and pubic bone joints through pelvic and pubic bone adjustments.