Sunday, July 27, 2014

Forest Bathing - Your Health & Nature

Zarr told me that exhorting patients to “get more exercise” was too vague. Last year, he decided to start trying something different. He stopped asking his patients, “Do you move?” and began asking “Where do you move?” He discovered that many spent very little time outdoors, and he began prescribing time outside for conditions as wide-ranging as ADHD, high blood pressure, asthma, obesity, anxiety, diabetes, and depression.

The Japanese Society of Forest Medicine’s Shinrin yoku plan, an effort to promote health through “forest bathing” (short visits to forests), has been fertile ground for scientific inquiry. Yoshifumi Miyazaki of Chiba University found lower cortisol levels in those who took forest walks when compared with those who walked the same distance in a lab. Qing Li and his colleagues from Nippon Medical School found that visits to the forest (compared with urban trips) can have a long-lasting influence on immune system markers, increasing the activity of antiviral cells and intracellular anti-cancer proteins—and these changes remained significant for a full week after the visit.


- More Here

No comments: