14 Warning Signs That You Have Poor Blood Circulation

From the day you were born your body has worked constantly to circulate more than five liters of blood through your body. Your arteries and veins are like highways for blood transportation. This helps your organs function, delivers nutrients and hormones, regulates your PH, and contributes to essentially every bodily process. Like highways, they require maintenance and care to function properly.

What is Low Blood Circulation?

Somebody with poor blood circulation receives insufficient amounts of blood to certain parts of the body. Plaque buildup and other factors slow the blood down and limit the effectiveness of transportation to the legs, arms, heart, and other important areas.

There are several life habits, medical conditions, and behaviors that make an individual susceptible to this issue. Smoking, pregnancy, eating disorders, and weight gain are just a few of many ways someone can become vulnerable to this condition.

Poor circulation affects people of all ages and if left untreated can cause serious damage to your brain, heart, liver, kidney and limbs. It’s most common in elderly people but should be taken seriously at any age.

The Symptoms

Poor blood circulation is a danger because of its silent nature. It can be easy to overlook in its early stage and only found once it has worsened. The following symptoms are common indicators of a weakened circulatory process.

Visible Signs

Leg Ulcers – Ulcers are sore inflamed parts of the skin much like a rash that refuses to go away. Someone with poor circulation might notice them beginning to develop near their feet and on their legs. Look for dry red patches of varied sizes digging into the skin.

Swelling – If poor circulation interferes with the kidneys it can lead to abnormal swelling. If your hands or feet begin to gather fluid from slow blood flow they might appear swollen and puffy. This happens because the circulatory system tries to reduce the load and the result is leaving some fluid that is called edema.

Discolored Skin – Without the right amount of oxygen pumping through your veins you’ll notice a slight discoloration, also known as cyanosis. Your fingers and toes will have a slightly bruised look to them and other areas might look more blue than usual.

Varicose Veins – If the valves working to pump blood are weakened it allows blood and pressure to build up. This causes the veins just below the surface of the skin to twist and swell. You might notice pain after long periods of sitting or random itchiness during the day. These veins most commonly appear near the feet and ankles.

Hair Loss and Weak Nails – One of the clearest signs that your body isn't getting the right amount of nutrients is within your hair and nails. Hair might become dry and start to thin and fall out in certain areas. Your skin may also become much more dry and itchy and nails tend to become much weaker and fall apart easily. Your fingernails can actually tell you a lot about your health.

Physical Signs

Digestive Issues – With less blood pumping through your body all the other processes have to be slowed as well. When digestion is slowed it causes constipation. Bowel movements become much less frequent and more difficult. To ease constipation, you can find more information in my previous article about the 10 best natural remedies for constipation.

Weakened Immune System – Your body’s ability to detect and fight off pathogens and remain healthy will also be affected by a slower blood flow. You may pick up illnesses much easier because of the sluggish antibodies. You also might find that wounds and injuries take much longer to heal. You can find here ways of how to boost your immune system naturally.

Cold Hands and Feet – When your blood is flowing at optimal speed it helps to keep your body temperature at a healthy and comfortable level. If your circulation is poor, the process of regulating temperature is interfered with. This causes chilly feelings, usually in areas with a lot of nerve endings like the hands and feet.

Exhaustion – When blood flow is slowed down, it restricts the amount of fuel delivered to your muscles. With less oxygen and nutrients fueling your muscles you’ll feel tired much quicker as they struggle to keep up with the stagnant flow of blood. This symptom is characterized by a lack of breath, sore muscles, and less endurance during daily activities.

Erectile Dysfunction - Men with poor circulation might experience an insufficient amount of blood flow in the reproductive organs. It becomes increasingly difficult for them to perform sexual tasks and may eventually stop completely.

Angina – This symptom is indicated by a squeezing pain in the chest. There is less blood flowing to the heart, which causes a tight feeling of pressure in the area surrounding it. The heavy feeling will come and go randomly and is a likely sign of poor blood circulation.

Lack of Appetite - Your liver is responsible for sending hunger signals to the brain when it receives an adequate amount of blood flow. You start to experience less food cravings and eat smaller meals during the day. This also leads to weight loss, another common symptom of bad circulation.

Poor Cognitive Function – The brain relies heavily on blood flow to function properly. You might feel less focused and determined throughout the day. Poor circulation may also affect the effectiveness of your short and long term memory. 

Feeling Numb – Almost everybody has experienced the feeling of numbness from keeping your limbs stagnant for too long. With poor circulation you’ll feel this much more frequently and in parts of the body that you don’t normally lose feeling in. The feelings of numbness usually last no longer than a few minutes.

As you can see, poor blood circulation can affect your body quite significantly. And while treating the symptoms can bring a relief, it’s still best to treat the source of the problem and to improve the blood circulation itself. 

http://www.healthyandnaturalworld.com/warning-signs-of-poor-blood-circulation/

Sharpen The Brain For Better Circulation

Moringa leaf powder for...appetite suppression

Feeling constantly hungry can lead to snacking and before you know it, you've put on extra pounds that can be awkward to shift, but by taking Moringa leaf powder, you could suppress your appetite and cut your food intake. The supplement does this by keeping your blood sugar levels constant, which is important as it's the spikes in this that can give you hunger pangs – keeping them steady allows your body to feel full for longer so you don't want to snack so much. Suppressing your appetite isn't the only way that Moringa leaf powder may help you maintain a trim physique – by eating less, your body will break down the fat deposits in it and your metabolism will increase, meaning that your weight shouldn't fluctuate wildly – once you get the fat off, it can stay off. Find out more about how Moringa leaf powder may help your weight control regime and make a purchase by visiting ankhrah.com.
http://www.ankhrah.com/wpsite/health-and-nutrition-videos/

Is Sugar The New Tobacco?

By Elizabeth Svoboda

You already know that eating too much sugar causes your teeth to rot and can lead to diabetes and obesity. But could it also trigger high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease and possibly even cancer? That's the theory of a group of progressive medical researchers who argue that sugar acts as a toxin in the body and is responsible for not only our rising rates of diabetes and obesity but also increasing incidences of heart disease, cancer and other chronic illness. Because sugar is so prevalent in food today -- in obvious items like ice cream, cookies and soda, as well as in "healthy" foods like crackers, energy bars and salad dressings -– experts contend that most people are living in toxic overload.

"Sugar is the biggest public health crisis in the history of the world," says Dr. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, whose 2009 speech "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" has received more than 2.5 million hits on YouTube. In an opinion paper published earlier this year in the journal Nature, Lustig and colleagues provoked debate when they stated that sugar is so harmful, it should be regulated like alcohol and tobacco. "Every substance of abuse -– cocaine, heroin, you name it -– has required personal or social intervention," says Lustig. "For sugar we have nothing, and my prediction is that we will need both."

At first blush, this antisugar advocacy may seem alarmist. But Lustig and his University of California colleagues argue that sugar is harmful in significant amounts –- not necessarily because it's high in calories but rather because it triggers a toxic chain of reactions in the body that produce harmful fats, hormones and other metabolic by-products. Sugar is found in nearly every food except meat, oil and butter. But there's a big difference between the sugar that occurs naturally in raw, unprocessed foods like fruits, vegetables, milk and whole grains and the type added to prepared or processed foods. Added sugars include every sweetener imaginable: white sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, dextrose, honey, agave nectar. It's these added sugars that experts say are the root cause of our sugar problem because high amounts of them are found in almost every food we eat, most of which are also high in calories and devoid of nutrients. "Nature made sugar hard to get," Lustig and his colleagues wrote in Nature. "Man made it easy."

Among all the different types of sugar, fructose may be the most harmful, many experts believe. Fructose is found naturally in small amounts in fruit, but is also combined with glucose (the other basic sugar molecule) to make nearly every type of commercial sweetener, including table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Why is fructose so harmful? "It's unique," says Dr. Miriam Vos, a gastroenterologist at Emory University. "It's primarily metabolized by the liver," so when you eat it, it's processed and then stays in your liver and starts producing harmful blood fats called triglycerides.

Sugars that don't contain fructose, on the other hand, like pure glucose and corn syrup, are processed by the liver and then sent out into the bloodstream, whether you need the fuel or not. Eat enough fructose and build enough triglycerides, and the result can be a fatty liver and insulin resistance -– when the body can't produce enough insulin to break down the sugar you eat.

For years, researchers have known that insulin resistance can lead to weight gain and diabetes. More recently, though, they've also discovered that it can cause heart disease, in part because eating too much sugar suppresses "good" HDL cholesterol. Eating too much sugar of any kind also seems to increase blood pressure, yet the effect is worse when glucose and fructose are consumed together, which is the case with high-fructose corn syrup and white sugar. Some researchers suspect that the effects of sugar on insulin metabolism may even cause cancer or accelerate its growth. "The cancer story is very early," says Lustig. "But we know that sugar drives insulin resistance, and insulin resistance drives cancer." One theory is that the high levels of insulin drive tumor growth, as the hormone already stimulates cancer cells to grow faster in the lab.

Unfortunately, exercise can't entirely save you from the negative effects sugar has on the body. While exercise may improve your cholesterol numbers by a few points, it's usually not enough to bring levels into a healthy range. "If you're a thin, active person, having a diet high in sugar is still harmful," says Vos. If you're an athlete, you may not want to cut out sugar entirely, especially before and during hard workouts. "There's some evidence for the super-athlete that small amounts of fructose are good," says Dr. Richard Johnson, a nephrologist at the University of Colorado, noting that the effect is beneficial only when sugar is consumed in moderate amounts before or after intense activities.

Other experts insist that sugar isn't as much of a threat to anyone -– including those of us who don't exercise intensely –- as Lustig and others have claimed.

Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale Prevention Research Center, says that while too much sugar isn't great for us, Lustig's dismissal of it as "poison" goes too far, pointing out that our bodies manufacture it naturally as an energy source. "The notion that sugar is toxic is silly," says Katz. "You can show dreadful effects of a high dose, but so what?" He's also skeptical of experts who push elimination of sugar to the exclusion of all else. "This is exactly the sort of dietary boondoggle we've been bogged down in for decades. We fell in love with low-fat; we fell in love with low-carb. If we fall in love with low-sugar, we won't improve our overall nutrition. It's a classic missing-the-forest-for-a-single-tree scenario."

Though Katz does agree that most Americans probably eat too much sugar, he doesn't recommend giving up the sweet stuff entirely because that can lead to food bingeing. Instead, he and most nutritionists advise learning to keep your quantities under control. For men, this means limiting yourself to nine teaspoons of added sugar per day and six for women (a can of cola has eight) if you want to meet the American Heart Association's recommendation. To gauge that limit, start scanning the nutrition labels of the packaged products you eat every day for at least one week. Add up your daily intake, keeping in mind that four grams of sugar on a food label is equivalent to one teaspoon of sugar. If you exceed the recommended limit on a regular basis -– and most of us do -– start by substituting lower-sugar options for foods that shouldn't taste sweet, like crackers and salad dressings. Ditch all sugar-sweetened drinks, like soda and even fruit juice, which packs a condensed amount of fructose without the fiber or other healthy nutrients of real fruit. Finally, prioritize eating whole, unpackaged foods, which don't contain added sugars.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/05/sugar-new-tobacco