Halloween Home Made Dog Treats
If your doggie is going to be a star in the local pet parade, you might want to coax him along with some Halloween home made dog treats.
I found this easy recipe for peanut butter and pumpkin dog treats at Allrecipes.com.
Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour
2 eggs
1/2 cup canned pumpkin
2 tablespoons peanut butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
Whisk together the flour, eggs, pumpkin, peanut butter, salt and cinnamon in a bowl. Add water as needed to help make the dough workable but the dough should be dry and stiff. Roll the dough into a 1/2 inch thick roll. Cut into 1/2 inch pieces.
Bake in preheated oven until hard, about 40 minutes.
Have fun dressing your pet in a Halloween costume, show him off in a Halloween pet parade and support your local shelters at the same time! Oh, and don’t forget the Halloween home made dog treats!
Chocolate For the Heart After a Heart Attack
This sweet study by researchers in Sweden found evidence that chocolate for the heart after a heart attack increases survival rates. The results are published in the September Journal of Internal Medicine.
1,169 nondiabetic men and women who had been hospitalized for a first heart attack were followed by the researchers. Each participant completed a standard health questionnaire that also included a question about chocolate consumption over the past 12 months.
A health exam was given to the patients three months after their discharge from the hospital and they were then followed for the next eight years.
Researchers found that the more chocolate people consumed, the more likely they were to survive. However, because it was an observational study and not a randomized trial, cause and effect cannot be definitively established.
Compared with people who ate none, those who had chocolate less than once a month had a 27 percent reduction in the risk for cardiac death, those who ate it up to once a week had a 44 percent reduction and those who ate it twice or more a week had a 66 percent reduction in their risk of dying from another heart attack.
Dr. Kenneth J. Mukamad, co author and associate professor of medicine at Harvard said that there was considerable data from other studies suggesting that chocolate lowered blood pressure and that this might be a cause of the lower cardiac mortality found in the study.
Whatever the cause, chocolate for the heart after a heart attack can only be a good thing!
Aggressive Prostate Cancer Treatment May Not Be the Answer
September 17, 2009 by Nancy
Filed under Featured Story
A study announced Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests aggressive prostate cancer treatment may not be the answer in every case of the disease.
Prostate cancer kills 254,000 men every year and is second to lung cancer as the most common cancer in men worldwide.
The research shows the risk of dying from prostate cancer in the 10 years after diagnosis fell by more than 60 percent in patients diagnosed between 1992 and 2002 compared with patients diagnosed in the 1970s and 1980s.
However, doctors only manage 10 percent of cases conservatively by allowing time to watch and wait for treatment until symptoms demand it.
Surgery, radiation and hormone therapy are current treatments and can cause harm, impotence and incontinence in about a third of patients. Considering this, the authors of Tuesday’s study said doctors and patients should reconsider the watch and wait option.
Another recent study, published in August, showed routine screening for prostate cancer led to more than 1 million men in the U.S. being diagnosed with tumors who might otherwise have suffered no ill effects from them.
In Tuesday’s study, Grace Lu-Yao and colleagues at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey studied 14,500 men 65 or older when they were diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer and who were cared for without surgery or radiation for 6 months after diagnosis.
After 10 years, they found 6 percent died from prostate cancer which was far fewer than in results of previous studies dating from 1949 to 1992.
Aggressive prostate cancer treatment may not be the only answer but Lu-Yao said the improvement in diagnosis and survival rates could relate to the introduction in 1986 of PSA blood testing that can pick up the disease 6 to 13 years before it may otherwise be found.
