Exercise…you either love it or loathe it. (Or you hate it and do it anyway…)

But despite your feelings on the matter, few—if any—people would dispute the tremendous benefits of regular physical activity. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any real downside to working out. Well, take that back. If there is one drawback that seems to be expressed by busy parents, career people and students alike, it’s this: the inability to find time to fit exercise into the day.

Yes, squeezing an hour—even half an hour—of exercise into an already jam-packed schedule can present quite a challenge. But, according to emerging research, “I don’t have the time”should no longer be an acceptable excuse if you want to be as healthy—and productive—as possible. Why?

Because research shows that regular physical activity enhances the ability to integrate your personal and professional lives. In other words, fitting exercise into your routine can help you achieve significantly better work-life balance.

This idea certainly seems counter intuitive. How can adding yet another item to an already overflowing to-do list actually create better balance?

Lead researcher Dr. Russell Clayton collected data from 476 working adults who answered various survey questions on exercise behavior (such as how often they exercised), as well as how they handled conflicts between work and family obligations.

Dr. Clayton and his team discovered that exercise allows people to physically, mentally and emotionally detach from work and other responsibilities, therefore alleviating stress and helping them feel more confident and empowered.

According to Dr. Clayton, even one exercise session can help you experience a sense of mastery. Meeting exercise goals—like running two miles, for instance—produces a prolonged “can-do” attitude that spans across multiple roles throughout the day, from work and school to parenting and even your marriage.

He calls this “self-efficacy,” the “sense that one is capable of taking things on and getting them done.” He explains that people with high self-efficacy see difficult situations as challenges that can be conquered, rather than problems that can bring them down.

Exercise Doesn’t Have to Be Fancy

Many people think that in order to get a good or worthwhile workout, you need to go to a gym. If you prefer this approach to physical fitness, then by all means continue doing it. But you don’t necessarily need fancy equipment to raise your heart rate and break a sweat. A good fitness routine can be as simple as taking a 30-minute walk or jog in your neighborhood, or putting in a workout DVD and completing it in your living room. Simply doing squats, push-ups, sit-ups or wall sits in your own home counts as a workout too.

Also think about what time of day works best for your schedule. Some people like to wake up before dawn (while the rest of the family sleeps) to exercise. Others like to break up their day with a lunchtime workout session. Still others prefer to unwind in the evening and work out their stress in the gym or weight room. Whatever your inclination, stick to it—and the rewards, as this research shows, will cross over every single part of your life.

• Anaphylaxis is a serious allergic reaction that can be life-threatening.
• Hesteminophobia is the fear of allergies and allergic reactions.
• Eight foods are responsible for 90 percent of all food allergy reactions: wheat, milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, soy, fish and shellfish.
• Cabbage contains 91 percent water.
• Never use pine, spruce or other evergreen wood to cook food over. These trees contain harmful tars and resins that, when burned or smoked, can leech into the food.
• The herb saffron is made from the dried stamens of cultivated crocus flowers.
• Legend has it that tea was discovered in 2737 BC by a Chinese emperor when tea leaves accidentally blew into a pot of boiling water.
• In the 1950s, approximately 80 percent of chickens in the U.S. and Europe were free range. By 1980, it was only one percent. Today, that number has increased to about 13 percent.
• Mouthwash has a higher percentage of alcohol than wine.
• One acre of land can grow ½ ton of wheat or five tons of potatoes.
• The oldest known account of soup consumption dates back to 6,000 BC-and was made from hippopotamus.
• Honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs has been found to be still edible.
• Every Easter, Americans consume $7 billion of candy.
• 57 percent of an egg’s protein is found in the white part.
• The color of the yolk is representative of the hen’s diet. The more vibrant the color, the greater her consumption of yellow and orange plant pigments.
• Eggshells can be crushed and used to control slugs in the garden and improve the health of your rosebushes.
• When it comes to highest quality food protein, eggs are second only to breast milk
• Scrabble word #1-chyme. It is the medical word for the digested food in your stomach.
• Scrabble word #2-glabella. That (ideally) hairless space between your eyebrows.
• Since the brain has no nerves, brain surgery can be performed while the patient is awake. (They are put out for the actual opening of the skull however.)
• We’ve come long way since 1972, when a group of scientists tried (unsuccessfully) to prove you could cure the common cold by freezing the big toe.

In a supplement to the December 2013 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that covered the Fifth International Scientific Symposium on Tea and Human Health, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles report their conclusion of a protective effect for tea drinking against stroke.

“Considerable observational human evidence suggests a preventive association of tea or flavonoid intake on specific subcategories of cardiovascular disease,” the authors write. “When the outcome is restricted to stroke incidence or mortality, the association seems to be the strongest and most consistent.”

Lenore Arab and her colleagues reviewed five meta-analyses of human studies of tea or flavonoid consumption and cardiovascular disease or stroke published between 2001 and 2011. (The disease-preventive properties of tea have been attributed to its flavonoid content.) The meta-analyses included 15 case-control studies, 43 cohort studies, and 1 cross-sectional study involving green and/or black tea intake. A 21% lower risk of both stroke incidence and mortality from stroke was observed among those with high tea intake in comparison with low, and for those with a high intake of flavonoids, the risk was 20% lower. A similar reduction was associated with each three cups of tea consumed. A search for new studies published subsequent to the meta-analyses included in the current research revealed additional studies that supported the protective effect of tea-drinking against stroke.

Protective mechanisms for tea suggested by the authors include a reduction in blood pressure and improved endothelial function.

The results of a meta-analysis described online on November 27, 2013 in the Journal of the American Heart Association reveal a protective effect for having a high vitamin C level or consuming more of the vitamin against the risk of stroke.

Pooled analysis of participants in studies of plasma or serum vitamin C revealed a 38% lower risk of stroke for subjects with high versus low levels.

Researchers selected twelve prospective studies involving vitamin C intake and six that examined serum or plasma vitamin C levels for their analysis. Studies of dietary vitamin C included a total of 217,454 men and women, in whom 3,762 strokes occurred over durations of 6.1 to 30 years. Among the 29,648 participants in the studies involving circulating vitamin C, there were 989 cases of stroke over follow-up periods ranging from 9.5 to 20 years.

They suggest greater vitamin C consumption for populations with low intake or who are at high risk of stroke and suggest that, since established risk factors appear to be responsible for only half of the cases of stroke that occur, vitamin C levels could serve as an additional predictor of risk.

“Vitamin C is a strong antioxidant, and has been shown to reduce the oxidation of low-density lipoproteins, to inhibit the proliferation of smooth muscle, to protect membrane from peroxidation, and ultimately to slow the progression of atherosclerosis,” the authors write. “There is also growing evidence that systemic inflammation is involved in stroke etiology and pathology, and plasma or dietary vitamin C has been suggested to have antiinflammatory properties. Vitamin C intake in plasma has also been demonstrated to be inversely associated with blood pressure.”

When you have that cheeseburger or piece of cake for dinner, you might think about the consequences it can have on your waistline or your cholesterol levels. But what you probably don’t consider is how it is affecting the alkalinity of your body.

Yet, based on current research, whether your body is mostly acidic or mostly alkaline may be one of the most important factors that determines how healthy you are and what diseases you contract.

Dietary Dangers

Without appropriate pH levels in and around living organisms and cells, life on earth wouldn’t be possible. Human life depends upon a tightly controlled pH level in the serum. The pH level necessary for human survival is between 7.35 to 7.45 (slightly alkaline).

However, the net acid load of the human diet has changed a lot from the hunter gatherer civilization to the present day. As agriculture became more widespread over the last several thousand years and industrialization occurred over the last 200 years, potassium has decreased compared to sodium. Chloride also has increased compared to bicarbonate found in the diet. The ratio of potassium to sodium previously was 10 to 1. In the modern diet, it’s now 1 to 3.

The modern diet is deficient in magnesium, potassium and fiber and rich in saturated fat, simple sugars, sodium and chloride. This results in a diet that sends the body into a state of metabolic acidosis.

Most people in the western world have a highly acidic body, the result of eating plenty of animal-based protein, dairy products and grains. Fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, often lacking in the Australian diet, send the body into a more alkaline state. And it’s this alkaline state that can benefit your health.

Counteracting Cancer

Although the intracellular pH of most cancer cells is normal, the extracellular pH of malignant solid tumors is acidic—ranging from 6.5 to 6.9. This is because cancer cells convert glucose into lactic acid. Normal tissues, on the other hand, are significantly more alkaline, 7.2 to 7.5.

Extracellular acidosis is toxic to most normal cells. But cancer cells can adapt and thrive under these harsh conditions.

The tumor cells use this acidic environment to their advantage since the acid pH stimulates tumor cell invasion and the spread of cancer (known as metastasis).

It’s thought that acid from the tumor diffuses into adjacent normal tissues where it changes the structure of the tissue in a way that permits local invasion of the cancer cells. This was backed up by a study where regions of the highest tumor invasion correspond to areas of lowest pH (acidic) and tumor invasion didn’t occur in regions with normal or near-normal extracellular pH.

The lower the pH in tumors—as measured by their lactate levels—the better the prognosis. The more acidic the tumor, the worse the outcome.

When tumors are more acidic, they can invade and spread throughout the body easier. Angiogenesis—the process by which tumors spawn new blood vessels to ease the cancer’s spread—also increases in an acidic environment, as does the tumor’s ability to be resistant to cancer drugs.

When scientists pretreated tumor cells with acid before injecting them into animals, metastases occurred at a higher rate than in animals injected with tumor cells not pretreated with acid.

At the same time that an acid environment has accelerated the rate of cancer spreading through the body, creating a more alkaline environment has inhibited the spread of cancer. In mice with experimental breast cancer that were given sodium bicarbonate orally, the growth rate of the primary tumors wasn’t affected, but the pH of tumors increased and the formation of spontaneous metastases decreased.

Make No Bones About It

Researchers have linked eating a Western-type diet to osteoporosis. On the opposite end of the spectrum, administering an alkali-type diet to human subjects results in improved bone health.

Researchers have estimated that the quantity of calcium lost in the urine after eating a modern diet over time could be as high as almost 480 grams over 20 years—or almost half the skeletal mass of calcium.

Researchers also demonstrated that neutralization of acid production in postmenopausal women resulted in calcium and phosphate retention, reduced markers of bone resorption (the process by which bone cells known as osteoclasts break down bone) and an increase in a marker of bone formation called osteocalcin.

Building Muscle

As you age, your muscle mass declines. This puts you at risk of falls and fractures. Research is starting to uncover that sending your body into an alkaline state may reduce this decline in muscle mass. One three-year study found that an alkaline diet rich in potassium, including lots of fruits and vegetables, resulted in preserved muscle mass in older men and women.

There’s more evidence that an acid state is linked to decreasing muscle mass. Conditions such as chronic renal failure that result in chronic metabolic acidosis speed up the breakdown in skeletal muscle.

Acidity, Blood Sugar and Heart Health

Researchers think that abnormalities in intracellular pH regulation may be one of the driving forces behind development of type 2 diabetes and the associated cardiomyopathy and hypertension that diabetes patients often suffer.

Acidity also can affect the way your blood vessels function. In large arteries, intracellular acidosis is associated with widening of the blood vessels, whereas in small arteries, it leads to narrowing of the blood vessels.

Beating Back Pain

One study found that chronic low back pain improved in 76 out of 82 patients after supplementation with alkaline minerals. Mean pain scores dropped significantly by 49 percent (from 41 to 21 points) after four weeks’ supplementation. With supplementation, there was a slight but significant increase in blood pH and intracellular magnesium.

According to the researchers, “The results show that a disturbed acid-base balance may contribute to the symptoms of low back pain. The simple and safe addition of an alkaline multi-mineral preparation was able to reduce the pain symptoms in these patients with chronic low back pain.”

Going Alkaline

The first step in making your body more alkaline is not to eliminate or sharply decrease protein intake. You need protein to prevent osteoporosis and the loss of skeletal muscle mass known as sarcopenia. Eating slightly less protein is okay, but don’t go overboard.

Instead, increase your intake of fruits and vegetables and only indulge in sugar and grains as rare treats. Be certain to have several servings of fruits or vegetables with each meal. Substitute fruits and vegetables for grain-based snacks. Cut back on salt intake, as sodium chloride can trigger metabolic acidosis in a dose-dependent manner. Avoiding alcohol, soft drinks, caffeine and all processed foods is another important step and drink plenty of purified water.

Another option? Supplement with magnesium, which has an alkalinizing effect. Aim for 500 mg per day in divided doses. Taking too much magnesium at once can cause diarrhea.

You can also try supplementing with bicarbonate. Potassium bicarbonate may be a better option than sodium bicarbonate, especially in regards to protecting bone health as noted earlier in the article.

Alkalinity for Optimal Health

More and more research is suggesting that our bodies are healthiest when they’re in an alkaline state. Taking small steps to make your body more alkaline can reap big rewards.