Below you will find a selection of the most recent entries from bloggers in our Family/Health section. To view the entries from individual bloggers, click on the links below:
- Lee Eldrige
The Athlete Tribe
- Dr. Michelle Wright
Dr Michelle Wright is a British-trained General Practitioner and Director of HealthFirst, providing physical First Aid training and Mental Health First Aid training, as well as Health Education, throughout Switzerland (www.healthfirst.ch). She also has a regular radio show about health on World Radio Switzerland. Believing that prevention is better than cure and that we should be treating the root cause of illness, Dr Michelle is also a Lifestyle Medicine enthusiast. - Birgit Suess is a Swiss-American who grew up between the US and Switzerland and speaks English, German and Swiss-German. Because of a worldwide shortage of Speech Therapists, she uses technology to connect special needs students around the world with English speaking Speech Therapists. With almost 20 years of experience as a Speech Therapist and 10 years experience with Teletherapy, she is a pioneer in the Teletherapy world. Her personal specialty is working on social language with high functioning children on the Autism Spectrum. Her passion is finding new and innovative ways to help children with special needs.
- Dr. Irina Schurov is a Nutritional Neuroscientist with a PhD from Cambridge University (UK) and over 20 years’ experience in science and health-providing services. She created and founded LiveRight, an initiative to help others through nutrition and wellbeing strategies. By building an educational platform around healthy eating habits, by restoring the relationships between people and food, by supporting your individual circumstances and through personalized coaching in nutrition, she wants to help you and your family achieve the optimal balance between help and life.
- Dr. Penny Fraser
Dr Penny is a British-trained Emergency Medicine doctor, who lives in Geneva. She is also the mother of two busy little skiers aged 7 and 8. Along with Dr Michelle Wright and her other colleagues at HealthFirst, she has a passion for delivering health education and First Aid training to the English-speaking community in Switzerland
By Hiba Giacoletto, Healthwise
Have you ever eaten a full meal, but still felt there was something missing? You are physically full but not satisfied and you go on a wild rampage in search of something sweet or salty to give you that hit you didn’t get from your meal.
What if the simple solution were simply to add more umami to your meal?
Umami elevates the taste intensity of a dish. It’s your regular meal, on steroids. And this is very important since taking full pleasure in what you are eating actually increases nutrient absorption in the body while stopping you from overeating or having cravings later on.
By Hiba Giacoletto, Healthwise
This is a tasty and healthy addition to any main dish. Choose root vegetable such as sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnips, black salsify, Jerusalem artichoke, celery root, beets, potatoes etc. Most of these vegetables are currently in season and you can use them without even knowing their names! You can also add squash or pumpkin and roughly chop a few onions to add more taste. Roasting these vegetables is a great way of bringing out their natural sweetness and giving them a more complex flavor that even people who don't normally eat vegetables will like!
By Hiba Giacoletto, Healthwise
With the start of the cold season, are people around you sniffling and coughing? Now is the time to start boosting your immune system so you can keep the dreaded cold and flu virus at bay with delicious, whole foods and common-sense lifestyle shifts!
Here are a few ideas:
Meet the allium family
Vegetables from the allium family - onion, garlic, leeks, shallots, chives, spring onion - are among the best foods to boost your immune system. Garlic in particular, has been shown to fight bacteria, viruses, and fungi. So add these wonderfully pungent vegetables to your soups, stews, sauces and salads!
I wake up each morning to an amazing view of the Jura from my bedroom window then drive to work with the impressive panorama of the Alps before me. Each day they are different – colour, light, haziness, contrast, snow - but what remains the same is their status as a playground for people of all ages and all seasons.
However, as the experienced and hardy would say ‘the mountain is not your friend!’ This might sound rather dramatic but it is true. However knowledgeable you are, weather, accidents, medical conditions, equipment failure can mean that you need to know:
- When to call out a rescue helicopter
- What telephone number to call for help (if you have a signal, a warm phone and enough battery)
- What to say to the operator
- How to prepare for an arriving helicopter
- How to give a distress signal if you have no phone
When to call out a rescue helicopter
If the land emergency services (ambulance, fire service etc) would take too long, the access is too difficult or impossible. This can also apply to the non-mountainous extremes of your canton/area.
By Jennie Delbridge, Peak of Wellbeing
Figuring out which ratios of Protein, Fat and Carbohydrate our body needs, can be quite a challenge. There are no hard and fast rules. It would be great if there were a really simple cookie cutter approach, a quick fix solution, but unfortunately it doesn’t exist.
Our unique nutritional needs are based on many things:
- Gender
- Genes/DNA
- Lifestyle
- Stress Levels
- Level of daily activity
- The weather
- Where we live
- Pregnancy
- Menopause
- Age
- Health levels
