The Healthiest Natural Ingredient

What’s the most natural ingredient to a healthy lifestyle? It may not, in fact, be an ingredient at all. When embarking on the quest to live a healthy lifestyle, it’s important sometimes to take a step back and think about the why. The goal of natural health is to improve your overall quality of life, for however long that may be. While healthy eating habits, supplements and a healthy lifestyle are significant factors in this, the healthiest thing you can probably do for yourself is laugh, and frequently.

This isn’t just "feel-good" advice either. Several studies show that you may reap health benefits not only by chuckling, but also by worrying less and enjoying life more.

To help prove the point, one of these studies, from the School of Medicine at the University of Baltimore, found that laughing literally opens the blood vessels. The researchers reached this conclusion after showing 30 healthy study participants excerpts from two films -- one a gory drama, and the other, a comedy.

The subjects first watched the harrowing Saving Private Ryan, a World War II film with Tom Hanks that opens with a half-hour slaughter scene in Normandy. On another day, they watched There's Something About Mary, a Farrelly Brothers comedy starring Ben Stiller, in which he gets an extremely sensitive part of his anatomy caught in his zipper during a hot first date with Cameron Diaz.

Meanwhile, the researchers hooked the subjects up and took 300 separate measurements of the diameter of the blood vessels in their arms. (Yes, people really do these kinds of studies.)

Sure enough, the depressing movie led to a condition called "vasoconstriction," in which the lining of the blood vessels -- the endothelium -- narrowed. But when the subjects watched the happy movie, their blood vessels relaxed, allowing for healthy blood flow to the heart.

The surprise factor here isn't that the blood vessels relaxed, but that they relaxed to such a significant degree in the laughing state. All the viewers except one showed a 30 to 50 percent expansion in blood vessel diameter when watching the comedy compared to when they watched the drama.

According to Dr. Miller, "The magnitude of change we saw in the endothelium after laughing was consistent and similar to the benefit we might see with aerobic exercise or statin use."

It's an interesting comparison, given that, unless you have a preexisting heart disease, statins are a largely useless and often-dangerous class of drugs prescribed to regulate cholesterol. His comments can be interpreted to reinforce the message that there's at least one reason to forego Lipitor and spend the money on a subscription to Mad magazine instead.

If you have a hard time getting yourself to laugh every day, consider joining one of the more than 6000 laughter clubs scattered throughout 60 nations worldwide -- and enjoy a bit of organic, pure cacao enroute to the meeting. It's certainly a healthier and happier prescription than taking medication to lift your mood or heal your heart condition.

Reference
www.jonbarron.org