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Give Students A Second Chance At Life; Help Put MIKEYS In Every Peel School.

Here’s a scary fact: Every year in Ontario, children and teens are among the more than 6,500 people who experience Sudden Cardiac Arrest.

As an investment in Canada’s future, we launched The Mikey Young At Heart Program, hoping to give a second chance at life for many of those children. Not only are these MIKEYs available to students, they are also available to teachers and school staff. Think of the sporting games, community gatherings, election polling and other events that take place at schools. When you consider that schools are the heart of our community, the life-saving potential of this program is even more amazing.

Schools are the heart of our community.

To date, over 200 MIKEYs have been placed in schools including Peel District School Board, Toronto District School Board, Halton District School Board, Halton Catholic District School Board and Limestone District School Board.

But we’re not stopping there! We’ve decided to expand the Mikey Young At Heart Program, making a commitment to place a MIKEY defibrillator in every Peel District School Board school. We’ve already gotten a great head start. Below is the list of Peel schools that have a MIKEY. Don’t see you or your child’s school? You can make it happen! We’re raising $500,000 for the placement of these MIKEYs, and we need your help!

With the generous donations from our supporters, we pledge to put a MIKEY in every Peel school!

Visit our Mikey Network Donation page, and help give students a second chance at life!

 

Peel Schools With MIKEY Units

Gordon Graydon Memorial SS | Applewood Heights SS | Cheyne MS | Judith Nyman SS | Turner Fenton SS North Building | Turner Fenton SS South Building | Lincoln M Alexander SS | Parkholme School | North Park SS | Stephen Lewis SS | TL Kennedy SS | Applewood School | Meadowvale SS | Sandalwood Heights SS | West Credit SS | Central Peel SS | Chinguacousy SS | Clarkson SS | David Suzuki SS | Erindale SS | Fallingbrook MS | Bramalea SS | Mississauga SS | Heart Lake SS | Harold M. Brathwaite SS | Mayfield SS | Allan A. Martin Sr. PS | Fletcher’s Meadow SS | Glenforest SS | Woodlands SS (The) | Rick Hansen SS | Humberview SS | John Fraser SS | Castlebrooke SS | Lorne Park SS | Louise Arbour SS | Brampton Centennial SS | Streetsville SS | Peel Alternative School North | Peel Alternative School South | AEC South | North Field office | Royal Orchard MS | Cawthra SS | Jack Smythe Field Centre | Gordon W Finlayson | Mississauga Field Office | HJA Brown Education Centre | Sir Winston Churchill PS | Hewson PS

How Does Sugar Affect You?

This week’s Fitness Post is brought to you by personal trainer Igor Klibanov from Fitness Solutions Plus.

how does sugar affect youAre you feeling tired, sluggish and slow? Pay attention, because we’re going to talk about how sugar affects you both short-term and long-term.

But first, let’s clarify something. When I say “sugar”, I don’t mean just the plain ol’ sugar you put in your tea. I’m also referring to all products that contain refined sugar: breakfast cereals, donuts, muffins (even the “healthy” muffins at Tim Hortons, Starbucks, Second Cup, etc.), pastries, etc.

Short-Term

It makes you fat. Let’s waste no words here. Specifically, it makes you fat in the belly, love handles and upper back (we measure 12 different spots on our clients, so we know how different nutritional strategies affect fat storage patterns). It decreases your energy. Why? Because when you eat sugar, it’s basically a poison to the body, so the body has to release its resources in order to neutralize those toxins. Those resources are the B vitamins, chromium, magnesium, and calcium. All nutrients needed for energy production.

It decreases your mental sharpness (and if you’re an athlete, throw reaction time into the mix). Sugar negatively affects your memory and mood. It makes you feel good for the first 15-30 minutes, when you’re on your “sugar high”, but after that, you don’t feel so upbeat and peppy.

As one of my clients remarked on facebook “lately, I’ve been having a lot of sugar and junk food, and I felt it slowed me down by a large margin when teaching and training at AIMA (Academy of Integrated Martial Arts). I stopped eating all that and in just a matter of a week I felt back to normal.”

There’s no teacher like experience.

Long-Term

It makes you REALLY fat. If you’re a man, not only will sugar grow your belly, love handles and upper back fat, it’ll also grow your chest. And I don’t mean your pecs. I mean your breasts. But hey, on the bright side, I see that Victoria’s Secret is having a sale on C-cup bras.

It causes diabetes. Diabetes is high blood sugar, and leads to a ton of disgusting complications. Like the death of skin cells, poor vision, and problems with your reproductive system (gentlemen: that’s impotence!)

It causes cancer. Do you know how doctors find out if you have cancer or not? They inject radioactive sugar into your bloodstream, and see where it goes. Cancer cells are the biggest consumer of sugar in your body, so that’s the first place sugar goes.

In a regular, healthy bodies, there are cancer cells all the time. But, in the presence of good nutrition, your immune system gets to these cells way before they become a problem, and kills them. However, if you’re feeding the problem, not only are you making the cancer worse, but sugar also inhibits the cells of the immune system. Double whammy.

But…

I know. Here comes the big but (pun most definitely intended). You must be thinking “but I eat donuts/cereal/whole wheat muffins on a regular basis and I’m fine.” I’d have to argue with that. If you’re eating those foods on a regular basis, then you don’t know what it feels like to not eat those foods on a regular basis.

Most people who eliminate those foods for just a week notice a drop of 2-5 pounds. Yes, the first few days they may experience a headache, changes in bowel movements, changes in skin quality, etc., but that’s just a detox reaction. It’s perfectly normal to feel worse before you feel better. Stick it out for an entire week, and your body will thank you. Then, if you want to try bringing it back into your diet after a week, be my guest. Once you bring it back, you’ll likely feel so awful, that you’ll voluntarily want to keep it out.

What Sweetener Should You Use?

This week’s Fitness Post is brought to you by personal trainer Igor Klibanov from Fitness Solutions Plus.

sweetenerWhat do you use as sweetener? Sugar? Honey? Maple syrup? Something else? What type of sweetener should you use in your tea? First, let’s discuss what you shouldn’t use.

Sugar

This is basically the devil. You shouldn’t use it. Ever. Sugar has no nutrients, and in fact, robs your body of nutrients. Whenever you eat it, your body loses B vitamins, vitamin C, chromium, magnesium, zinc and others. Stop it. Or give it to someone you don’t like.

“But I use brown sugar” I can hear you saying. Brown sugar is just coloured white sugar, and marketed as a health food. It isn’t. Give that to someone you don’t like as well.

Splenda, NutraSweet and Sweet N’ Low

These are all artificial sweeteners. They all have 0 calories. They were designed to get around the problem with traditional sugar: it makes you gain fat. Except there’s one problem with artificial sweeteners. They also make you gain weight. Despite being 0 calories, they have a damaging effect on your metabolism that fat is gained anyway.
These were probably invented by terrorists who wanted to poison you. Stop using them.

Agave Nectar/Syrup

Ah, now we’re getting to the natural stuff. Except this is one instance when “natural” doesn’t mean healthy.
The reason it’s often mistaken as a health food is because it’s natural, and is made of nearly 100% fructose (as opposed to a combination of glucose and fructose, which is regular table sugar). I know what you’re thinking: “oh, 100% fructose, that’s great. It comes from fruits, and fruits are healthy.” Except the fructose in fruits also comes in the same package as fibre, enzymes and many other nutrients. Not to mention that the amount of fructose in a fruit is much lower than that in agave nectar.

Agave nectar has only fructose. No fibre, no enzymes, no other nutrients. When researchers want to create diabetes in mice to study the effects of different treatments on diabetes, they feed them pure fructose. Do you think the same effect can be found in humans? You bet.

It’s true that fructose doesn’t raise blood sugar as quickly as glucose. But it still causes diabetes nonetheless.
Pure fructose can also cause liver damage. Why? Because glucose is used by just about every cell of the body, so it has somewhere to go. Fructose is only processed by the liver and a few other organs. So there is a greater load on those organs. Stay away from this “health food in disguise.”

Maple Syrup and Honey

Maple syrup and honey are mildly better than agave nectar. At least they have a better nutrient profile (just remember: “better” doesn’t mean “good.” In this case, it just means “less bad”). They have a couple of redeeming values. For one thing, maple syrup it has pretty decent levels of calcium, potassium and zinc. And it’s a powerhouse when it comes to manganese. But that’s pretty much where it ends. The nutritional profile of honey isn’t quite as good as maple syrup’s, but isn’t quite as bad as agave.

Whereas agave nectar doesn’t raise blood sugar very quickly (but remember all the other downsides), maple syrup and honey may as well be an injection of sugar straight into your veins.

Honey, however does have some other redeeming properties. For one thing, if you have a sore throat, it’s very soothing. And if you scraped your skin, honey will seriously speed up its healing when you rub it on your skin (but not eat it). I actually use honey on my calluses when they get torn off as a result of powerlifting.

Stevia

Now we come to the darling of nutritionists and of the natural health world. Stevia is a natural sweetener, and indeed has some beneficial effects. Although I think that the wild enthusiasm about stevia is still very premature.
There is research showing that stevia consumption (in moderate amounts) helps decrease blood pressure and blood sugar. It also has some anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties.

There is also research showing that overconsumption of stevia can be harmful to fertility in both men and women.
Unfortunately most of the research on stevia is done in rats, and very little research on humans. Since this is a fairly new food (to North America), there are still a lot of unanswered questions about it.
As it stands right now, anyways, stevia seems to be the safest of all sweeteners.

No Sweeteners

I’d be a little remiss if I didn’t mention this option. This is by far, head and shoulders superior to every other option out there.

Why?

  • It’s safe. The safest of them all.
  • It does not deplete any nutrients
  • It has many health benefits. Like not being fat, diabetic, unhealthy and unhappy.

Canada’s 911 Ride Foundation Generously Donates to The Mikey Network

Every year, the Canada’s 911 Ride Foundation holds the Canada’s 911 Ride event, a two-day charity motorcycle ride. 2014 was the 9th year for this amazing fundraising event, which took place Saturday August 23rd and Sunday August 24th.

The ride takes the motorcylists through multiple cities and towns in Southern Ontario, where they can see on-lookers watching and waving in awe as a continuous line of motorcycles spanning as long as 4 km ride past with a police escort.

golden helmets

Members of the OPP Golden Helmets Motorcycle Precision Team also put on a show, giving us an exhibition of their superb riding skills. Each 30-minute performance sees the riders take their machines through a series of complex patterns to demonstrate the maneuverability of the motorcycles and the riders’ skills.

This year, the 9th annual Canada’s 911 Ride Foundation donated $15,000 to The Mikey Network!

canada 911 foundation

Dan Lawrence and Jim Adamson, Directors of Canada’s 911 Ride Foundation presented a cheque of $15,000 to Morty Henkle, Executive Director of The Mikey Network. The ceremony took place at Nottawasaga Inn on August 23rd with 200 people in attendance. This brings their total donations to almost $200,000!

We want to thank the Canada’s 911 Ride Foundation for choosing The Mikey Network as their charity of choice, and for all their generous donations over the years. Because of your support, The Beat Goes On.

To learn more about Canada’s 911 ride, visit www.canadas911ride.com.

City News Toronto Covers the 2014 Canada’s 911 Ride

The Annual Canada’s 911 Ride was this past weekend and it was amazing as always! Here’s a CityNews Toronto story that talks all about it. The ride raises money for first responders, their families and children, who have been victims of violent crimes, as well as MIKEYs (defibrillators). Look for more from this amazing event here in the next few days.

(Unfortunately the CityNews website uses flash for the video so if you are reading this on a mobile device, you’ll need to watch it on their site here.)