Bladder Health—Knowing the Basics

Figure 1.  Dr. Eric Berg's cheat sheet on how to fix frequent urination

Your kidneys are part of your urinary tract – along with your bladder and the tubes that connect these organs (the urethra and ureter). The main purpose of your kidneys is to clean the waste from your blood. The good news is that kidney infections aren’t common. They’re essentially a much more serious urinary tract infection.^[1]

Video 1.  Frequent bladder infections are tied to breast cancer (YouTube link)

Bladder Infection vs Kidney Infection

Bladder infections very rarely progress to kidney infections.

You will be pretty sick if you have a kidney infection, and it’s important that you seek treatment right away.

Symptoms of a bladder infection are:

• Urgency and frequency in using the bathroom
• Burning with urination

while symptoms of a kidney infection are much more severe and include:^[1]

• Fever and flu-like symptoms
• Lower back or side pain
• This can be on the left or right side of your back depending on which kidney is infected. “It may feel like you were hit in the back with a baseball bat,” Dr. Vasavada says.
• Nausea and vomiting
• Urine that is cloudy, has blood in it and is foul smelling
• A general sense of malaise

Video 2.  How to Fix Urination Frequency at Night (Nocturia) for Good (YouTube link)

Overactive Bladder

Overactive bladder, also called OAB, causes a frequent and sudden urge to urinate that may be difficult to control. You may feel like you need to pass urine many times during the day and night, and may also experience unintentional loss of urine (urgency incontinence).^[3]

Medications are available for people with bladder control problems:

You can take a look at medications commonly prescribed to treat urinary incontinence and their possible side effects in [2]. 

Keep in mind that medication combined with behavioral treatment, healthy diets (watch video 1), and stop snacking at night (watch video 2) might be more effective than medication alone.  Also, noted that:^[4]

Drinking mass quantities of any liquid will inevitably send you to the bathroom, but beer, booze and wine amplify the effect. The reason? Alcohol is a diuretic, which – in the simplest of terms – increases the production of urine.

References

1. Urinary Tract Health, From Bladder to Kidney Infections
2. Bladder control: Medications for urinary problems
3. Overactive bladder - Symptoms and causes - Mayo Clinic
4. Is ‘Breaking the Seal’ a Real Thing When Drinking Alcohol?
   

10 Hallmarks of Cancer

Figure 1.  Fighting 10 hallmarks of cancer with diet

10 Hallmarks of Cancer

1. Evading growth suppressors
2. Avoiding immune destruction
3. Enabling replicative immortality
4. Tumor-promoting inflammation
5. Activating invasion & metastasis
6. Inducing angiogenesis
• Suggested reading: Naturally-Occurring Antiangiogenic Substances
7. Genome instability & mutation
8. Resisting cell death
9. Deregulating cellular energetics
10. Sustaining proliferative signaling

Video 1.  Fighting the Ten Hallmarks of Cancer with Food (YouTube link)

References

1. Fighting the Ten Hallmarks of Cancer with Food

How Does Your Skin Age?

Even if you have great genes and look much younger than you are, age-related changes in our facial appearance are unavoidable. Those changes reflect our joys and challenges in life.

Over time, as stem cells decrease, our skin becomes thinner, which decreases its protection.  

How the Face Ages

As we age, number of stem cells are reduced.  Dozens of changes take place as the years add up, some of them obvious and familiar:^[1]

• Foreheads expand as hairlines retreat
• Ears often get a bit longer because the cartilage in them grows
• Tips of noses may droop because connective tissue supporting nasal cartilage weakens.

There are also:

• Skin wrinkles 
• Because two components of our skin — collagen and elastin — degenerate
• By your mid-20s, the collagen in your body starts to diminish, and by the time you reach your 80s, you have around 4 times less collagen
• Those deep ones in the forehead and between the eyebrows are called expression lines (or animation lines)
• They're the result of facial muscles continually tugging on, and eventually creasing, the skin. 
• Other folds may get deeper because of the way fat decreases and moves around. 
• Finer wrinkles are due to sun damage, smoking, and natural degeneration of elements of the skin that keep it thick and supple.
• Itchy skin (or alloknesis)
• Past studies have shown that Merkel cells in the skin are reduced in elderly people and people with dry skin conditions^[2]
• Bruise easily with age^[3]
• As we get older, several factors can contribute to easy bruising, including:
• Aging capillaries
• Thinning skin
• Structural rearrangements 
• When we're young, fat in the face is evenly distributed, with some pockets here and there that plump up the forehead, temples, cheeks, and areas around the eyes and mouth. 
• With age, that fat loses volume, clumps up, and shifts downward, so features that were formerly round may sink, and skin that was smooth and tight gets loose and sags.
• Meanwhile other parts of the face gain fat, particularly the lower half, so we tend to get baggy around the chin and jowly in the neck.

Video 1.  How Does The Skin Age and Why Do We Get Wrinkles (YouTube link)

References

1. Skin Care and Repair
2. Why getting old gives you itchy skin
3. Easy bruising: Common as you age
4. Creepy Skin? A Surprising Cause — and 4 Expert Fixes