Its 105-page report found vitamin D use had skyrocketed, especially among women who also were more likely to use calcium and probiotics, and that omega-3 fish oil supplements were exerting a “growing dominance”, used by 75.7 percent of respondents as opposed to 74 percent in 2009.
Unlike many of the other 31 supplement types that featured in the survey, fish oil consumption was ubiquitous among all age groups and both genders.
ConsumerLab.com found 56.2 percent of people surveyed were vitamin D supplement users, compared to 47.9 percent in the 2009 survey and 36.9 percent in 2008 – a 52 percent hike.
“In contrast to fish oil, vitamin D use increased with age and by gender – 61 percent of women used vitamin D compared to 51 percent of men,” ConsumerLab.com president, Tod Cooperman told NutraIngredients-USA.com
Multivitamin consumption rates dropped slightly to 70.1 percent from 72 percent in 2009 among those polled – taken from ConsumerLab’s e-newsletter subscription list.
Botanicals took a hit in 2010 with only 37.6 pecent or respondents reporting using them compared with 44 percent in 2009. Glucosamine/chondroitin fell from 38.5 percent to 35.3 percent.
Online outlets were the most popular with 46.5 percent of people using them, compared to 44.1 percent in 2009 and 39.9 percent in 2008. Vitamin stores, mass merchants and direct distributors registered a small drop in patronage.
Other findings included:
Calcium passed CoQ10 to become the fourth most popular supplement with use rising from 51.2 percent in 2009 to 55.3 percent last year. CoQ10 dropped from 55.3 percent to 51.2 percent over the same period.
]]>"I still get the same butterflies in my stomach, when I'm lacing up my skates, as I did when I was a kid," says Christian Dwyer. "I love the excitement of playing a fast-paced competitive game."
Mr. Dwyer, general manager and senior vice president of MapQuest in Denver, has been playing ice hockey since he was 5 years old. Now 44, he has played consistently in recreational leagues since his 20s, sometimes in three to four games a week. More than an outlet for his competitive energy, hockey is the cornerstone of Mr. Dwyer's fitness. "When time allows, I like hockey to be my primary form of exercise," he says.
When Mr. Dwyer first moved to Denver in 1993, he made friends by showing up at the ice rink for drop-in games. Mr. Dwyer, who stands 1.7 meters and weighs about 80 kilograms, plays right wing, an offensive position. He estimates he's been playing with the same group of guys since 1993. "We're all from places like Boston or Minnesota," says the native of Syracuse, N.Y., "places where hockey was a part of growing up."
Over the years, Mr. Dwyer has sustained his share of injuries while on the ice, including a shattered front tooth, a broken nose, a spider fracture across his ankle and a scar across his eyebrow from a stick hitting just above his right eye.
Last year Mr. Dwyer's hockey workouts were limited, partly because he had his hands full with big changes at MapQuest, including launching a new website and logo. "I probably worked out less last year than I had in previous years because of my demanding work schedule," he says, "but it made exercise and diet become a more conscious effort."
Mr. Dwyer believes the best way to condition for ice hockey is to actually be out on the ice. "Hockey is all about maintaining your skills by actually playing the game," he says. "To me, it's the most fun form of exercise I can think of."
When he isn't on the ice, Mr. Dwyer maintains his fitness level with a mix of running, weights and his other passion—cycling. "My nickname growing up was 'Billy Goat' because I liked to climb." He says he enjoys the work of climbing to the top of a hill on a bike even more than the downhill. "It's that feeling of achievement you get from a workout that makes me push harder," he says. "It's pretty addictive."
Mr. Dwyer plays hockey two nights a week. He plays a drop-in game every Sunday night at 7 p.m., which he says is fairly selective. "You need to be a decent skater to come. If you get out onto the ice and you're not that good, you get ruled out and are asked not to come back," he says.
He is also on a men's recreational league that plays organized games Wednesday nights. Seasons run from October through April and then May through September. Both drop-in and league games are 90 minutes with three periods and about a two-minute break per period. "They don't clean the ice like in professional hockey so the breaks are shorter," Mr. Dwyer says.
All of the ice time means that Mr. Dwyer needs to keep his cardiovascular fitness up. He lives in a neighborhood set at a 1,890-meter altitude where "there's not an ounce of flat land." Running at that altitude with hills takes some serious conditioning, he says. "When I go to New York City for business I feel like I can run forever." Mr. Dwyer tries to get in two 6.5-kilometer runs a week outdoors.
While hockey is his first love, cycling is a close second, Mr. Dwyer says. "Biking for me is very meditative. I can get lost in my thoughts. It's good therapy." He used to ride between 200 to 320 kilometers a week. "Now that I have kids it's a little more challenging," he says. But he still tries to ride 40 to 80 kilometers, or about two to four hours, on the weekends.
Mr. Dwyer spins on a stationary bike in his home for 45 minutes, twice a week, often reading while he works out. He has a Nautilus weight machine and does a 30-minute strength circuit twice a week. His routine usually includes presses, pull downs, curls and various abdominal exercises. "I try to maintain a strong core because I know it will protect my lower back," he says.
Mr. Dwyer grazes throughout the day. He eats oatmeal or Greek yogurt for breakfast topped with flax seed, berries and honey. At around 10 a.m., he will eat an energy bar or a piece of fruit, like an apple or banana.
For lunch, he'll have a turkey sandwich or a chopped salad with bagel chips. At 3 p.m., he has a snack of nuts or another energy bar. Mr. Dwyer says regular snacking on healthy foods helps keep him away from the office vending machine. Mr. Dwyer often eats dinner at the office or out at restaurants for work functions during the week. "I order fish at restaurants almost religiously," he says. "Even when I go to a steakhouse, I order grilled tuna with just lemon and salt." At home, he tries to grill three times a week, making chicken or fish. He snacks on celery with peanut butter or hummus. When out with his hockey buddies after a game, Mr. Dwyer skips the beer. "They heckle the hell out of me," he says. "I tell friends who don't work out not to drink because every glass of beer is like eating a sandwich."
Mr. Dwyer is a bit of a gear obsessive, "I easily have $1,200 worth of hockey equipment alone," he admits. He estimates that his padding (knee, shin and elbow pads; gloves; pants and helmet) cost about $400. His lightweight, carbon-fiber stick cost about $150 and he goes through one stick a year. He recently purchased a pair of Graf 735 skates for $435. Mr. Dwyer spends $500 a season for his recreational hockey league and pays $10 per drop-in game.
Mr. Dwyer also has invested in gear for cycling: his Trek Madone carbon-fiber road bike cost about $3,000, his Specialized mountain bike about $1,600, and his cycling shoes about $150. Mr. Dwyer runs in Asics sneakers and spends about $110 a pair every eight months.
"As I've gotten older, I've realized that sleep is pretty important. I try to get six hours, at least, a night," he says. "When I don't, I'm junk on workouts. I'm not sharp in mind, attitude or spirit."
If Mr. Dwyer only has 30 minutes to work out, he does a five-kilometer run. If he has less time than that, he will lift weights in his home gym or do push-ups and sit ups.
Mr. Dwyer listens to music while he's running, but never when he's cycling, "because I like the wind in my ears when I'm biking," he says. He has an eclectic mix ranging from classic rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd to heavy metal like Metallica and hip hop like Eminem.
]]>Yoga may be becoming more of a mainstream approach to Americans' health woes.
People have been practicing yoga for millennia to improve their strength, serenity and wellness, but its roots in ancient Indian philosophy have kept the exercise discipline firmly within the realm of alternative medicine.
However, a growing body of scientific evidence is building the case that the spiritual balance created by yoga provides proven health benefits.
Research has found that yoga can help people who are dealing with health problems as wide-ranging as back pain, chronic headaches, sleeplessness, obesity, neck aches, upset stomach, anxiety, depression and high blood pressure, said Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate neuroscientist in the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
The health benefits mainly stem from yoga's focus on the connection between mind and body, Khalsa said.
"The best evidence really shows that yoga is good at reducing stress and helping people cope with the stress they have," he said. "It improves management of stress both psychologically and physiologically."
According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, proper yoga practice combines:
All of those elements must be in place for people to get the best results for their health and well-being, said Karen Sherman, an affiliate associate professor of epidemiology with the Center for Health Studies in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington.
Indeed, the elements are interlaced, she said. For example, the physical postures can help people become stronger and more flexible, but a yoga practice focusing solely on postures misses out on the original intent.
"Postures were intended to make the body strong enough to be able to sit for hours in meditation, to support the spiritual aspirations," Sherman said.
Yoga can help people deal with body aches and pains, she said, by making them stronger, showing them how to move in a less-painful way and improving their ability to cope with pain and relax.
The relaxation, meditation and breathing of yoga has been shown to improve a person's sense of well-being and can be a good treatment for anxiety and depression, Khalsa said.
Yoga may also help bolster the immune system by lowering stress. "When you reduce stress, you make the body healthier," he said. "When the body is healthy, it is able to use its own defenses better."
Khalsa's research has shown that yoga can be very helpful to people undergoing cancer treatment.
"They are under stress because it is a life-threatening disease and because everything related to cancer is stressful," he said. But relieving that stress through yoga can improve someone's quality of life and help the person deal with the rigors of chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
Yoga's focus on awareness of the body also has been shown to help people battle obesity. Researchers at the Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center found that people who practice yoga are better able to manage their body weight and have a lower average body mass index than people who don't practice yoga.
But yoga has not been proven a cure-all. Khalsa said that some health claims made about yoga have not yet been borne out by medical research, particularly claims that yoga can help improve the function of specific organs, such as the pancreas or liver.
"That may be true. We don't know," he said. "That's going to take some research."
People interested in improving their health through yoga need to find an experienced teacher who combines the three main elements of yoga, Sherman and Khalsa said.
"Everyone should get an instructor who is experienced and has the traditional yogic principles," Sherman said. "You should be learning how to tune into your body. Yoga is about moving with awareness. That's a skill many of us have to develop."
Many different styles of yoga exist. Those suitable for beginners include kundalini, viniyoga and Iyengar, Sherman and Khalsa said.
Be wary of teachers who focus on postures without also emphasizing breathing and meditation, particularly if they press students to take on extreme postures, they said. Yoga can cause injury if people push themselves too hard, and such contortions have little to do with the mind-body link that students of yoga are trying to attain. For this reason, the experts say, people might do better to start their yoga practice at a traditional yoga studio rather than taking yoga through a gym or health club.
"If practicing extreme postures and being able to bend yourself into a pretzel were the signs of a good yogi, then the people at Barnum & Bailey Circus would be the best yogis in the world," Khalsa said.
More information
The U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has more on yoga.
SOURCES: Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, Ph.D., assistant professor, medicine, Harvard Medical School, and associate neuroscientist, Division of Sleep Medicine, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston; Karen Sherman, Ph.D., M.P.H., affiliate associate professor, epidemiology, Center for Health Studies, School of Public Health, University of Washington, Seattle