Simple Roots Wellness offers healthy recipes

By Deborah Neyens, correspondent

January 20, 2015 | 5:00 am

VINTON Alexa Schirm wants to expose the myths around good nutrition.

You dont have to eat crazy health food to be healthy, she said. I want people to understand that eating whole foods is a realistic lifestyle.

Schirms desire to help people sift through the ever-changing and often contradictory information about how much and what they should be eating is the foundation of her business, Simple Roots Wellness.

Schirm, who has a degree in dietetics from Iowa State University and is pursuing a masters degree in health sciences from the University of Alabama, previously owned a fitness studio in Vinton. She sold that business last year so she could focus on providing nutrition consulting services on a full-time basis.

In February 2014, she launched Simple Roots Wellness as a blog and an eight-week, online nutrition course. The blog provides tips and recipes for eating healthier, while the course provides instruction in nutrition basics along with meal plans and other tools to help clients implement healthy changes in their diet.

I showcase nutrition in a different light, Schirm said of her online services. The eight-week course helps people understand the science behind nutrition and gives them a practical application for the information.

Its not about a restrictive diet. Its about understanding the bodys needs so they can choose the right foods.

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A New York Times report, triggered by the leak of new documents, sheds light on how US officials so quickly concluded North Korea was the source of the November hacking attack against Sony Pictures.

President Barack Obama in December blames North Korean for the Sony hack and vows to respond proportionately. Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images

The National Security Agency was tracking North Korea's hackers long before they attacked Sony Pictures, according to report that sheds light on how US officials so quickly concluded North Korea was to blame for the hack.

The NSA used malware to track North Korean hackers as part of a program launched more than four years ago, The New York Times reported on Sunday, citing former US officials, computer experts and a newly released top secret document, (PDF), which was provided to Der Spiegel by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

"Spurred by concerns over North Korea's maturing capabilities," the spy agency penetrated North Korea's networks in 2010 with help from South Korea and other American allies, the Times reported. A classified program evolved into an "ambitious effort" to place malware that could track the internal workers of computers and networks used by the North's hackers -- "a force that South Korea's military recently said numbers roughly 6,000 people," the Times reported.

Evidence gathered by what the Times referred to as the "early warning radar" of software reportedly played a role in President Barack Obama's relatively quick decision to accuse Kim Jong-un's government of ordering the attack on Sony -- a move that raised some eyebrows in the security community.

Brian Hale, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said he could not speak to the Times report as it relates to the Sony hack. But he did confirm that the US intelligence community (USIC) is fully aware of North Korea's many efforts in recent years to "probe and infiltrate US commercial networks and cyber infrastructure.

"The USIC has been tracking North Korean intrusions and phishing attacks on a routine basis. While no two situations are the same, it is our shared goal to prevent bad actors from exploiting, disrupting or damaging US commercial networks and cyber infrastructure, " he said in a statement. "When it becomes clear that cyber criminals have the ability and intent to do damage, we work cooperatively to defend networks."

The cyberattacks against Sony, carried out in November by a group that called itself the Guardians of the Peace, resulted in the leaking of thousands of documents that revealed the inner workings of Sony and its movie deals, including embarrassing email exchanges between executives and personal information of employees and celebrities. Four weeks after the attack, the FBI said it had determined the North Korean government was responsible for the hacks, based on analysis of the software used during the attacks.

Obama signed an executive order early this month to authorize sanctions that allow the US Treasury Department to restrict North Korean officials, entities and supporters from accessing the US financial system. This means Americans are not allowed to do business with them.

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NSA was tracking North Korea back in 2010, docs reveal

Robert Allenby had been in the Amuse Wine Bar inside the Honolulu Design Center with friends last Friday night. Photograph: Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images

A woman has presented a version of events that shed further light on the golfer Robert Allenbys story of being kidnapped and beaten in Hawaii.

The woman reportedly told Nine News that she found the 43-year-old Allenby bloodied and confused and arguing with two men approximately a block away from where he had been last Friday night.

Allenby said he was abducted from the popular Amuse Wine Bar in the tourist hub of Waikiki, beaten by a group of men, thrown in the boot of a car and dumped on a street some 10 kilometres away.

The four-time PGA Tour winner said he became separated from his friend after they paid the bar tab at 10.48pm. He went to the bathroom and next thing you know Im being dumped in a park miles away, Allenby said. I only know this part because a homeless woman found me and told me she saw a few guys pull up and throw me out of the car. That is where I got the scrapes above my eye from the sidewalk.

Allenby claimed that the woman, who has spoken to the Hawaiian police but who has not been named, helped him escape the attentions of other homeless people.

The homeless woman got me away from the others and then a retired military guy walking past came to my aid, he said.

He got me into a taxi and paid for me to get to my hotel and I called police from there. I have his details and will be getting back in touch with him for sure.

The woman alleged Allenby requested that she use his credit card to withdraw $500 to pay his attackers so he could get his wallet back, according to Nine News. She said that the two men became aggressive and that was when the passing former military officer intervened and helped Allenby into a taxi back to his hotel.

It has also emerged that the Honolulu police department has CCTV footage of a suspect using Allenbys credit card to buy two bottles of alcohol in Waikiki on Saturday.

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A new study led by the University of Colorado is providing insights into the ways people experience pain, and manage it, through separate pathways in the brain.

The study, published this month in PLOS Biology, shows that when people use their thoughts to dull or enhance the experience of pain, the physical pain signal in the brain conveyed by nerves in the area of a wound, for example, and encoded in multiple regions in the cerebrum does not actually change.

Rather, the act of using thoughts to modulate pain, a technique termed "cognitive self-regulation," commonly used to manage chronic pain, works by way of a separate neural pathway.

The study is credited with showing that the processing of pain in our brains goes beyond the mere physical pain signal and underscores a better understanding among neuroscientists that there is not a single pain system in the brain.

"We found that there are two different pathways in our brains that contribute to the pain experience," Choong-Wan Woo, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in CU's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, stated in a news release.

"One way to say it is maybe it's not as important what the sensation is or the immediate pain response is, but it's important how you think about it," Tor Wager, a co-author on the study and associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at CU, said in an interview.

The first pathway mediates the effects of turning up the intensity of painful stimulation and includes regions of the brain such as the anterior cingulate cortex. The second pathway, discovered in the new study, mediates the effects of cognitive regulation and involves boosting activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens regions of the brain linked to emotion and motivation, but not typically responsive to physical pain.

This latter pathway may hold some of the keys to understanding the "emotional" aspects of pain, which can contribute substantially to long-term pain and disability.

"This pathway is really interesting in terms of what pain is and what it means," Wager said. "It doesn't change in activity if you turn up the heat and deliver pain. Its changes are more complex.

"It's really capturing the significance that you assign to pain, and to other emotional events. It turns out to be important not only for pain, but how you value things in life, how much you want or don't want, and when you generate emotional responses. It's also very important to depression, PTSD, and it's important across a range of emotion-related disorders."

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ROLAND John Speir doesnt miss the days when after he rolled out of bed, his back immediately would ache, his ankles would throb and his knees would feel as if they were burning.

In 2013, Speir weighed 398 pounds. He admits that at that time, he had succumbed to a lifestyle seemingly overrun by fast food and soft drinks. Time for exercise, he said, just wasnt in the cards, until a routine visit to his physician served as an unintended wake-up call.

I got on the scales at the doctors office and saw the number 398 pounds; it scared me, said the 43-year-old Speir, a 1989 Sallisaw High School graduate who now works as the Roland Junior High School principal. It then hit me. I knew that I had to do something about it.

Speir immediately thought of his wife, Misty, and their two daughters, Britton, 14, and Emily, 9.

The thought of leaving them hanging really scared me, Speir said. I didnt want to do that. I want to see my girls graduate from high school and college. I knew I wanted to spend time with my family.

Speir was referred by his doctor to the Cherokee Nations Healthy Eating for Life Program (HELP), which is offered through W.W. Hastings Hospital in Tahlequah, Okla. The program has a team of nurses, a surgeon, psychologist and counselor certified in the medical study of obesity, who provide patients with nutrition education, weight loss support groups and, if appropriate and desired by the patient, the option of bariatric surgery.

I actually went on to lose 100 pounds at first, just from the HELP program, before any surgery; that was from August 2013 to June 2014, Speir said. I cut out soft drinks and fast food and started eating chicken and turkey-based meats, and I would go to the gym to exercise. I go four or five times a week to the gym, doing cardio walking and running and then things like free weights.

The HELP program has participants attend monthly meetings and keep daily food journals. Both tools help keep HELP participants on track, Speir said.

The changes in eating and exercise habits were an adjustment at first, yes, but I was OK, he said. A month after I quit drinking soda drinks, I dropped 25 pounds, and my doctor later cleared me to have the laparoscopic vertical sleeve gastrectomy surgery.

Its not as intense as bypass surgery, and its where they take a percentage of your stomach off and reform what is left into a smaller, sleeve-like structure, Speir added. Now surgery isnt for everyone, but it was something that worked for me.

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