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Is Emotional Intelligence Key to Improving Health & Wellness?

In today’s fast-paced world, we’ve started to see a major focus on health and wellness in the last few years. That makes sense since many people sit at a desk for eight hours a day—or longer.

Work-life balance is a struggle for many people in our 24/7 work culture and the stress of constantly focusing on our professional lives is leading to burnout, health problems, and other issues.

So what can be done? Some people turn to yoga and meditation, fitting in sessions before they head into the office. Others turn off electronic devices at night or keep to a strict sleep schedule.

In order to make meaningful changes for our health and well-being, we may need to turn to an unexpected facet of our personality: our emotional intelligence.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Introduced as a concept in the 1990s, the idea of emotional intelligence is a counterpoint to the traditional IQ measurement of intelligence. While IQ is based on logic and analytical problem-solving, emotional intelligence or EQ is about one’s ability to self-regulate, empathize, and work with others.

A person’s EQ is extremely important in all areas of their professional and personal lives and has been shown to be more important than IQ in determining workplace success.

How Emotional Intelligence Can Promote Healthy Balance

Emotional intelligence can tell you when you need to step back and take a break, but it can also help you maintain healthy habits like “unplugging” every night and control stress at work. Studies show that high levels of EQ have a relationship to wellness in the nursing work environment, and many people intuitively use these skills to improve their well-being both at work and at home.

In the workplace, wellness initiatives like mindfulness practices, mental health breaks, and encouraging employees to unplug are helping people to live more balanced lives. However, employees need to have the EQ to recognize when they need to make their wellness a priority.

Employers can offer encouragement and resources, but ultimately each person needs to recognize what they need and figure out how best to regulate their mood and emotions.

Continue reading at Thrive Global

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Can the Coffee Diet Really Help With Weight Loss—and Is It Safe?

Now, coffee has become the central component of a weight loss plan some refer to as “the coffee diet.”

What is the coffee diet, exactly?

The plan, based on the 2017 book The Coffee Lover’s Diet by medical doctor Bob Arnot, involves drinking a minimum of three cups of light roast coffee daily, due to its higher polyphenol antioxidant content. (Coffee polyphenols are linked to a reduced risk of a number of diseases, including type 2 diabetes and certain cancers.) In fact, you can have as much coffee as you’d like, either decaf or regular, as long as you hit the three-cup minimum.

Dr. Arnot includes a good deal of research in the book about coffee’s ability to curb appetite, reduce fat absorption, boost metabolism, improve circulation, and burn fat. (Some of the benefits Dr. Arnot promotes are linked to caffeine, while others are true for regular or decaf coffee.) He advises skipping the sugar, cream, and milk, however, especially since the latter reduces polyphenol absorption.

Can the coffee diet promote weight loss?

So is coffee really the solution to shedding pounds and keeping them off? Due to the aforementioned benefits, which are research-backed, it may help. Yet keep in mind a few important points.

First, sipping java throughout the day without regard to the rest of your diet will probably not yield results. Simply displacing healthy meals and snacks with black coffee can become a form of restriction that deprives your body of nutrients, plus zaps your mental and physical energy. In other words, it’s not just the coffee itself but the balance of your overall eating pattern that’s key to weight loss.

Bottom line: Coffee is good for you, especially without the add-ins. But it’s not a magic bullet, and too much can lead to unwanted side effects. If you’re a coffee-lover, enjoy it in a healthy balance. But if you’re trying to lose weight, remain focused on the bigger picture. Eating clean, being active, getting enough sleep, and managing stress are still the pillars of healthy, sustainable weight loss.

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YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon – Although genetically modified food is commonplace in the United States, it is still controversial in places such as the European Union, which possibly has the most stringent regulations on the products in the world.

This debate over GM food is now taking place in Africa, and the Catholic Church is taking part – although Church leaders are disagreeing on which path to take.

In Ghana, the issue is at the forefront, since field trials on its first GM crop – the Bt cowpea, which is resistant to the pod-borer pest – have recently been completed.

“GMOs can help us deal with agricultural challenges, including the problems with food insufficiency,” said Gaston Kofi Hunkpe, a catechist with the Catholic Church who holds a degree in clinical biochemistry.

“So it’s a good thing we should adopt and implement and it will go a long way to help us … Countries using it testify that it is a good technology and so it should go across the whole world,” he said.

However, Samuel Zan Akologo, the head of Caritas Ghana, told Crux he doesn’t see GMOs as offering solutions to Ghana’s and Africa’s food problems, linking the technology to entrenched financial interests of those promoting it.

In 2013, the president of the Ghana Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Joseph Osei-Bonsu, said: “We believe that Ghana can achieve food sufficiency and even produce surplus food for export using the conventional means of farming.”

Akologo told Crux the position of the bishops has not changed.

“The Catholic Bishops’ Conference did not support the attempt by Government of Ghana to introduce GMOs by legislation through Parliament a few years ago. So, Bishop Osei-Bonsu may have spoken generally about the opinion of leaders of other churches. The position of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference has not changed,” he said.

He said the introduction of GM food could deal a fatal blow to the Decade of Family Farming recently launched by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ) to run from 2019 to 2028.

Read the full article at Cruxnow

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