Ever flipped your pillow to the cool side? I have.

There's a reason we do it, and that's the reason that cooling pillows work. Not that I knew any of this until last week.

Our body lets us sleep best when the ambient temperature is about 16 to 18 degrees Celsius. A fall in body temperature due to circadian rhythms causes drowsiness and increases our propensity to want to go to sleep in the evening.

If we feel hotter, our sleep is disturbed, and we flip the pillow to seek cooling.

It was only one week ago that I discovered that such a thing as a cooling pillow existed. I was surprised, especially since I was not reading advertising but a research report. I had no inkling that such a thing existed (beyond marketing).

We rarely hear of the need to keep our tendons healthy. But we know that our balance gets worse as we age. The things we need to do to keep our tendons healthy also help us better sense the position and movement of our joints.

As we age, our ability to sense the position and movement of our joints degrades, even in very active older people. This loss is more severe in inactive people and leads to a less stable gait and more falls.

This is why it helps to think of regular daily exercise as a means of living longer better by avoiding falls - and also looking better longer with an upright posture. Your aim is not to build muscles and exhaust yourself; it is to improve your balance. In doing that, you'll need to build more muscle, but that outcome is a side-effect.
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The best program to combat loss of balance is a combination of aerobic, balance and strength exercises. This combination keeps our tendons healthy, as well as our ligaments and muscles.

There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that dietary nitrate may have a protective role in health, in particular vascular health, and in particular by lowering blood pressure. 

Coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke, and heart failure are three of the leading causes of death globally. Cardiovascular Diseases (CVDs) are responsible for a significant (typically about 25%) of premature deaths, and the risk substantially increases with age.

​For such a major public health problem, it is perhaps surprising that by simply improved our diet quality - by eating more vegetables - we can substantially reduce the risk of dying early.

Doing simple stretches may improve blood flow throughout our body by making the arteries more flexible and able to dilate, according to a study in the July 1, 2020, Journal of Physiology.

More than 300 years ago, the great English physician Thomas Sydenham observed, "A man is as old as his arteries."

It's as accurate today as it was then. In fact you might consider that your health is only as good as your arteries since these blood vessels carry vital oxygen-rich blood to all of our body's tissues.

Working out is known to improve the moods of people with depression, although why it works is still somewhat a mystery. 

What is not a mystery is research which reveals that exercise intensity is not associated with the level of mood improvement. For example, in this study, all participants experienced about the same level of reduced depression after hard, moderate and light aerobic exercise.

Building regular exercise into your day will improve your day, and you can start as small as you like. Here's how.