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Sunday, 29 June 2008

Building Six Pack Abs

Contrary to the common misbelief that endless dedicated abs exercises will get you the great abs you want, the truth is that getting six-pack abs has almost nothing to do with ab training. The fact is it has everything to do with reducing body fat.
And that can be achieved in just three steps:
- Full body exercise
- Proper diet
- Consistency
Proper Exercises for Getting Six Pack Abs
A common mistake many men and women do is throwing themselves into ab exercises and countless repetitions of crunches and sit-ups. They wrongly assume that dedicating their workouts to their abdominal muscles will burn the fat in that area and make their six pack abs show.
However it takes more than crunches and sit-ups to get well defined six pack abs. Spot reducing is impossible and the only way to lose your belly fat is to reduce your overall body fat. Therefore, though it may sound illogical at first, the truth is that in order to get rid of the fat that is covering your abdominal muscles you need to reduce the time you spend on ab exercises and increase the time you spend on full body training.
Full body multi-joint exercises burn much more fat than ab exercises. And that is exactly what you need to get your body fat low enough for your six pack abs to show.
Proper Nutrition for Effective Belly Fat Loss
There is much truth in the expression that "the six pack abs is built in the kitchen, not in the gym". Many people are still under the delusion that if they workout hard they can eat whatever they want. This is totally wrong and can only fail you in achieving flat abs.
The truth is that you cannot get six pack abs without proper nutrition. You need to learn how to eat right and get all the macro-nutrients, vitamins, antioxidants, and minerals that your body needs in order to keep your metabolic rate right and burn fat effectively instead of storing it.
Here are some hints to start with: Eat enough quality protein. Proteins require more energy to be digested and serve as the main building block for your muscles. Choose higher fiber carbohydrates; they are good for your diet since high fiber foods will make you feel full and eat less. Eating healthy fats is essential for the process of fat burning. Choose fats from natural sources, such as fish fats, avocados, seeds, nuts, etc. Drink a lot of water. Water is needed for all the processes in your body and is really essential for the fat burning process.
Also you can use Ab Lounge Ultra to speed up the process.

Consistency Is the Key to Success
Nobody says it is going to be easy to get ripped six pack abs. What you need to remember is that it takes time, efforts and dedication but it will be all worth the trouble once you achieve your goal. Just be consistent with your chosen program, exercise regularly, eat right and your body will inevitably respond with losing fat and strengthening muscles -- this is how you will get your great six pack abs.

Tuesday, 10 June 2008

Measuring Antimicrobial Activity

The antimicrobial activity of plant-derived compounds against many different microorganisms, tested individually and in vitro, is well documented in the literature. However, the results reported in different studies are difficult to compare directly. Indeed, contradictory data have been reported by different authors for the same antimicrobial compound (Mann and Markham, 1998; Manou et al., 1998; Skandamis, 2001; Skandamis et al., 2001b). Also, it is not always apparent whether the methods cited measure bacteriostatic or bactericidal activities, or a combination of both. Antimicrobial assays described in the literature include measurement of:
• the radius or diameter of the zone of inhibition of bacterial growth around paper discs impregnated with (or wells containing) an antimicrobial compound on agar media;

• the inhibition of bacterial growth on an agar medium with the antimicrobial compound diffused in the agar;

• the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of the antimicrobial compound in liquid media;

• the changes in optical density or impedance in a liquid growth medium containing the
antimicrobial compound.

Three main factors may influence the outcome of the above methods when used with essential oils of plants: (i) the composition of the sample tested (type of plant, geographical location and time of the year), (ii) the microorganism (strain, conditions of growth, inoculum size, etc.), and (iii) the method used for growing and enumerating the surviving bacteria.

Many studies have been based on subjective assessment of growth inhibition, as in the disc diffusion method, or on rapid techniques such as optical density (turbidimetry) without accounting for the limitations inherent in such methods. In the disc method, the inhibition area depends on the ability of the essential oil to diffuse uniformly through the agar as well as on the released oil vapours. Other factors that may influence results involve the presence of multiple active components. These active compounds at low concentrations may interact antagonistically, additively or synergistically with each other. Some of the differences in the antimicrobial activity of oils observed in complex foods compared with their activity when used alone in laboratory media could be due to the partitioning of active components between lipid and aqueous phases in foods (Stechini et al., 1993, 1998). Turbidimetry is a rapid, non-destructive and inexpensive method that is easily automated but has low sensitivity. Turbidimetry detects only the upper part of growth curves, and requires calibration in order to correlate the results with viable counts obtained on agar media (Koch, 1981; Bloomfield, 1991; Cuppers and Smelt, 1993; McClure et al., 1993; Dalgaard and Koutsoumanis, 2001; Skandamis et al., 2001b). The changes in absorbance are only evident when population levels reach 106 –107 CFU/ml, and are influenced by the size of the bacterial cells at different growth stages. The physiological state of the cells (injured or healthy), the state of oxidation of the essential oil as well as inadequate dissolution of the compound tested may also affect absorbance measurements in growth media.

Unlike the plate counting technique, impedance-based methods can be used to monitor microbial metabolism in real time mode. The impedimetric method is recognized as an alternative rapid method not only for screening the biocide activity of novel antimicrobial agents but also for estimation of growth kinetics in mathematical modelling (Ayres et al.,1993, 1998; Tranter et al., 1993; Tassou et al., 1995, 1997; Johansen et al., 1995; Tassou and Nychas, 1995a,b,c; Koutsoumanis et al., 1997, 1998; MacRae et al., 1997; Lachowicz et al., 1998). The technique depends on using a medium that offers a sharp detectable impedimetric change as the bacterial population grows and converts the low conductivity nutrients into highly charged products. As with turbidometry, calibration of impedimetric data with plate counts is necessary (Dumont and Slabyj, 1993; Koutsoumanis et al., 1998).

Although time-consuming and laborious, the traditional microbiological method of determining viable numbers by plate counting remains the gold standard in antimicrobial studies. The latter method has a major advantage of requiring little capital investment; however, it is material-intensive, requires a long elapse time and may have poor reproducibility. MICs are measured by serial dilution of the tested agents in broth media followed by growth determination by either absorbance reading or plate-counting (Carson et al., 1995). The MIC technique has been miniaturized and automated using the bioscreen microbiological growth analyser (Lambert and Pearson, 2000) to allow a high throughput of compounds and microorganisms (Lambert et al., 2001). The advantage of this method is the simultaneous examination of multiple concentrations of one or more preservatives and subsequent determination of MIC based on mathematical processing.