Monday, April 26, 2010

Healthy Living Trends and Advances: Responding to Today’s Wellness Consumer

by Angelo Bouselli, Senior Communications Director, FasterCures

Among the early panels that kicked off the 2010 Milken Institute Global Conference was one focused, appropriately, on healthy living trends affecting aging baby boomers. Brian Wood, Managing Director at Imperial Capital moderated the discussion, on how clinical information and public education can influence a person’s behavior and their healthy living decisions.

“There is a need in this country to educate people on the food they eat, the diet supplements they take, and the overall need to increase physical activity in their daily life,” said Pierre Fitzgibbon, President and CEO, Atrium Innovations.”

The diet supplement industry is now a $25 billion industry in the U.S. and has seen an eight percent growth in the past year.

“There has been a healthy living shift in the way we look at diet supplements. This shift is being driven by the anti-aging movement, the rising cost of healthcare, and the overall focus on avoiding sickness,” said Guru Ramanathan, Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Vice President, GNC. “But diet supplements need to be coupled with changes in a person’s diet and daily exercise.”

“One of the biggest changes to nutrition in the U.S. happened between 1975 and 1985 with the introduction of high fructose corn syrup to the diets of millions of American’s. Corn syrup is used in many foods to soften texture and enhance flavor and corn syrup is one of the major causes of obesity in this country,” said David Heber.

Clinical research and public education are helping to advance the health living lifestyle movement forward. Product label claims and warnings, good manufacturing practices, and adverse effect reports are working to educate the public in decisions related to personalized nutrition.

According to Heber, “giving information to the public is not going to necessarily drive them to modify their unhealthy behavior, but personalizing the information for public consumption will have a greater effect on behavior changes.” Heber added, “99.9 percent of people are identical in genetic make-up, it’s a balanced nutrition and a healthy natural lifestyle that separate us apart.

There is an emerging trend and demand for healthier and more active lifestyles, including yoga. Trevor Tice, Founder and CEO of CorePower Yoga, a chain of over 30 yoga studios said “there are currently 15.8 million American’s that do yoga annually and spending on yoga fitness has doubled since 2004.”

2 comments:

B. Grow said...

Stress is an unpleasant and intense feeling that the human body feels, that may have adverse effects on health. Stress is an individual reaction and it is the result of interaction between environmental demands on one hand and the resources, capabilities and possibilities of the individual on the other.Modern life brings more stress on everyone's life: stress at work, at home, in interpersonal relations, in society. The external causes of stress refer to pollution, noise pollution, foods containing additives and colors and the internal, psychological causes are: quarrel, divorce, office tasks that cannot be carried out, separation, illness, which cause an imbalance in the human body. And so, stress symptoms appear: increased respiratory rate to tissue oxygenation, increased muscle tone, increased heart rate.

Vorobiev said...

Stress is unavoidable. It's necessary for evolution and strengthening of each species. Without stress, we wouldn't be able to grow.

But, there is positive and negative stress. When there's too much of stress, a person can break down under pressure.

It's important to try and convert this negative stress into something positive through yoga, exercise, art and healthy living in general.