60 to 70 million Americans suffer from some sort of digestive health issue. And four out of five women, about 80%, experience occasional irregularity.

The LiveActive Movement was just launched to help guide the millions of Americans who suffer from digestive health issues toward better gut health and overall health and wellness. A new lifestyle–based approach to feeling good inside and out, the LiveActive Movement is designed to help people keep up with their busy lifestyles and achieve digestive wellness by maintaining a healthy balance of good bacteria in the digestive system.

By joining the Movement, Americans can follow a tailored LiveActive Everyday Plan that includes tips on how they can do good things for their gut daily by incorporating regular exercise into their routine, choosing foods that promote gut health and making sure they get enough fluids each day.

Leslie Bonci, Director of Sports Medicine Nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh, nutritionist for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Penguins and Pirates and a registered dietitian, helped develop the LiveActive Everyday Plan and can explain the LiveActive Movement, as well as provide steps for tailored eating and fitness and lifestyle tips for bettering your digestive health and overall well-being. These steps include:

• Keep Things Moving. Maintaining a balanced routine of exercising, stretching and relaxing work with your body to help move things along.
• Incorporate gut-friendly foods — like those rich in probiotics and prebiotics — into your everyday diet. These items are getting easier and easier to find in common grocery stores across the nation — particularly in the dairy aisle. Items like cottage cheese and natural cheese snacks are now being packaged under the LiveActive name — an easy indicator of their digestive health benefits.
• Give yourself a Gut Check. Using online tools, like the ones at LiveActiveFoods.com, assess your current eating, exercise, and relaxation habits. All of these come into play when determining overall digestive health.

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The post Leslie Bonci Offers Advice & Shares New Solutions for Better Digestive Health “Classic Good News” 12/10/07 appeared first on Good News!.

“Does your marketing team talk about impressions, clicks, and likes on Facebook more than cost-per-sale, and return on marketing investment?,” Donohoe asks in his debut book, The CEO’s Digital Marketing Playbook; The Definitive Crash Course and Battle Plan for B2B and High Valve B2C Customer Generation.

“If the answer is yes, you are setting money on fire,” Donohoe quips.

Welcome to the candor of a man who offers the C-suite of America’s high-end brands a focused look at what many companies fail to understand or execute when it comes to digital marketing. He explains, in his new book, how to fix what’s not happening in a company’s marketing and sales funnel, especially for companies that sell B2B or high end B2C.

“Digital advertising is the best, most cost-effective vehicle to win new business in B2B and high-value B2C,” says Donohoe, whose digital advertising agency has been on the Inc. 500 list and won an E&Y Entrepreneur of The Year Award, among others.

He boils down his prescription to four essential things that he calls The Core Four, and eight more areas he labels The Advanced Eight once the fundamentals are in place. He clearly details how a company should spend marketing dollars to drive more customers and revenue – and to do so profitably. His play book is geared towards billion dollar corporations to small businesses, both which frequently don’t execute on the essential, must-have arrows in the quiver of digital marketing.

Donohoe shares his strategies, tips, and insights on:
• The four essential digital marketing campaigns that every company in the world needs to run.
• How to focus all marketing conversations on things that deliver immediate ROI – and why clicks, retweets, and likes are not nearly as important as how much marketers talk about them.
• How to prioritize the major digital channels efficiently – search engines, social networks, display advertising, email campaigns.
• Why there is a 99% chance your company is not deploying the most simple, profitable campaigns and marketing tactics to compete in the 21st century.
• The key questions all CEOs need to be asking their company’s marketing leadership.
• Why and how terms such as PPC, SEO, and SEM are misused, misunderstood, and miscalculated.
• If you care about profitable marketing, you must use Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube and stop talking about any other digital channel.
• What needs to go into today’s ad creative in order to break through the clutter.
• Why tech terms and digital tools confuse most CEOs and CMOs – leading them to underperform and mismanage.
• The trends, challenges, and changes of the digital marketing landscape.
• What needs to be on a must-have, high-level strategy checklist for every company on Earth.

“This book is about creating new, or engaging with current, customers and driving more revenue and profit, and the methods, tech, ad channels, and work that it takes to do those things all day, every day,” says Donohoe. “Sometimes they’re not sexy, but they definitely work.”

The relatively cheap, easy, and most profitable types of things companies should be doing include:
• Advanced tradename search engine advertising on Google and Bing.
• Advanced social media advertising via Facebook/Instagram.
• Using digital advertising to nurture leads and customers can lift ROI by more than 35%.
• Stop treating email as if it can get you new customers.
• The use of landing pages versus your homepage.

“I fear that a huge percentage of a CEO’s or CMO’s marketing mindshare, let alone the stuff that employees in marketing departments really do on a daily basis, are focused on things other than activities directly tied to customer generation, revenue and profit.”

The CEO’s Digital Marketing Playbook highlights what does and does not work well in digital marketing and advertising. It could all change tomorrow, but for CEOs and CMO’s looking to execute smart, cost-effective digital campaigns for today’s marketplace, Donohoe provides us with the tools, insights, and strategies to succeed.

The post CEO’s Digital Marketing Playbook. Tom Donohoe, the CEO and founder of Level.Agency appeared first on Good News!.

Neuroscientists have discovered evidence for the neural basis of a mind-body connection.
They have identified the neural networks that connect the cerebral cortex to the adrenal medulla, which is responsible for the body’s rapid response in stressful situations.
Specifically, the findings shed new light on how stress, depression, and other mental states can alter organ function, and show that there is a real anatomical basis for psychosomatic illness.
The research also provides a concrete neural substrate that may help explain why meditation and certain exercises such as yoga and Pilates can be so helpful in modulating the body’s responses to physical, mental, and emotional stress.
“Our results turned out to be much more complex and interesting than we imagined before we began this study,” says senior author Peter L. Strick, chair of the neurobiology department and scientific director of the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute.
Tracing networks of neurons
In their experiments, the scientists traced the neural circuitry that links areas of the cerebral cortex to the adrenal medulla (the inner part of the adrenal gland, which is located above each kidney).
The sheer number of neural networks they discovered surprised the scientists.
Other investigators had suspected that one or, perhaps, two cortical areas might be responsible for the control of the adrenal medulla. The actual number and location of the cortical areas were uncertain.
In the study, the Strick laboratory used a unique tracing method that involves rabies virus. This approach is capable of revealing long chains of interconnected neurons.
Using this approach, Strick and his colleagues demonstrated that the control of the adrenal medulla originates from multiple cortical areas.
According to the new findings, the biggest influences arise from motor areas of the cerebral cortex and from other cortical areas involved in cognition and affect.
Fight or flight or something else
Why does it matter which cortical areas influence the adrenal medulla? Acute responses to stress include a wide variety of changes such as a pounding heart, sweating, and dilated pupils.
These responses help prepare the body for action and often are characterized as “fight or flight responses.”
Many situations in modern life call for a more thought-out reaction than simple “fight or flight,” and it is clear that we have some cognitive control (or what neuroscientists call “top-down” control) over our responses to stress.
“Because we have a cortex, we have options,” says Strick. “If someone insults you, you don’t have to punch them or flee.
You might have a more nuanced response and ignore the insult or make a witty comeback. These options are part of what the cerebral cortex provides.”
Another surprising result was that motor areas in the cerebral cortex, involved in the planning and performance of movement, provide a substantial input to the adrenal medulla.
One of these areas is a portion of the primary motor cortex that is concerned with the control of axial body movement and posture.
This input to the adrenal medulla may explain why core body exercises are so helpful in modulating responses to stress.
Calming practices such as Pilates, yoga, tai chi, and even dancing in a small space all require proper skeletal alignment, coordination, and flexibility.
Conflict and mess-ups
The study also revealed that the areas of the cortex that are active when we sense conflict, or are aware that we have made an error, are a source of influence over the adrenal medulla.
“This observation,” says Strick, “raises the possibility that activity in these cortical areas when you re-imagine an error, or beat yourself up over a mistake, or think about a traumatic event, results in descending signals that influence the adrenal medulla in just the same way as the actual event.”
These anatomical findings have relevance for therapies that deal with post-traumatic stress.
Additional links with the adrenal medulla were discovered in cortical areas that are active during mindful mediation and areas that show changes in bipolar familial depression.
“One way of summarizing our results is that we may have uncovered the stress and depression connectome,” says Strick.
Overall, these results indicate that circuits exist to link movement, cognition, and affect to the function of the adrenal medulla and the control of stress.
This circuitry may mediate the effects of internal states like chronic stress and depression on organ function and, thus, provide a concrete neural substrate for some psychosomatic illness.
The National Institutes of Health and the Pennsylvania Department of Health supported the work, which appears early online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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