Brain exercises?

Neuro-plasticity - recent buzzword. It fundamentally means keeping your brain as young as possible. Since most of us make our livings using our brains instead of brawn, this is really pertinent to us. Plus everyone had had an older relative that starts to "lose it" - nobody wants that to happen to them I recently read a good article in San Francisco Magazine about this:

http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/brains-steel

Wikipedia defines brain plasticity as: "Brain plasticity as the ability for the organism to adapt to the changes in its environment in a positive and adaptive way because it’s not just enough to change"

This is a really cool concept - basically that your brain is able to rewire itself. In the early studies, the rewired nerves on animals and the animals easily adapted. In the article itself, there are number of different things they list 5 key factors to maintaining a healthy brain w/ plasticity.
(These are in the print article, but I can't find them online)

1. Exercise: it seems to stimulate the creation of new neurons
   
2. Eat Well: Time to start buying organic if you haven't already. Omega-3 fatty acids help too.
   
3. Challenge yourself and make it fun: Acquire new mental & physical skills. Switch the games you play - IE if you're a crossword junky, try sudoku
   
4. Relax: Stress is a culprit. Too much stress hormone impairs memory
   
5. Take off your shoes - believe it or not there is research that says walking in bare feet over uneven surfaces helps your brain.

What are the things that you do to keep your brain "in shape?" I do little exercises like this and take fish oil w/ some regularity.

Organic

We've gone largely organic in our household, it adds a lot of cost to the monthly food budget, but at the same time, you can just tell that a lot of the food is better. Better taste, looks better, etc. Plus you know it doesn't have nearly as many chemicals and other junk on it. The funny thing is, I'm more committed to organic stuff for my kids and I am for myself. I am still an occasional consumer of Hostess ho-ho's.

The article in NYT about organic stuff really caught my eye.

What are some things that you are doing to make your life less chemical/preservative-y?

Unintentionally funny - Duck takes out power to 2,000 households.

OK, some of the comments in here are quite funny. One ernest commentator kicks it off w/ a fear of "is the duck ok?"

Yes, quite crispy and good ma'am - nothing just good about it.

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=11462

Plastics

There have been a number of studies released recently that show that a lot of additives placed in plastics can be quite harmful to people. Ptalates etc get easily converted to estrogen. I for one don't want to start crying when I watch Chick Flicks. :-) So I'm not interested in that. Plus you start to thing about them putting that in plastic that you give your kids and you start to get nervous. Hence, we've gone on a no-plastic binge in our house, firstly buying stuff to put the kids lunches in that was non plastic. The stuff we got was a bit pricey, but quite good:
http://www.lifewithoutplastic.com/

then we ditched out tupperware containers and hit crate & barrel, who seem to have quite a wide array of glass food storage containers. Also ditched all the kids plastic cups - focusing on either glass or stainless steel these days. Big change. Hard to remember at times, but we're working on it.

Long Hiatus

Hokay, that was almost a year of ignoring my blog. Well I'm back.

I wanted to talk about the preponderance of chemicals in all the junk we eat, use, store stuff in etc. When I was younger, I used to wonder how children got cancer, but no more - the amount of chemicals that we as parents have been exposed to in our lives that potentially gets transferred to kids is substantial. Then all the things they are exposed to are likely an order of magnitude higher than what we ourselves were exposed to. I'm going to spend some time and talk about things we've done as a family to try to lower the bar for how many chemicals we are exposed to.