Quick Hit: Disinfect Your Kitchen Sponge!

With the Canada Day/Independence Day Long Weekend upon us, cook-outs and hot weather are the order of the day. We want to enjoy the fresh food of summer, but just a quick reminder to keep things clean!



I don't think we need reminders to keep prep surfaces separate and clean when preparing raw meat, but I did want to put out a quick heads up about keeping the kitchen sponge clean as well!

Sponges are the ideal medium for bacteria, as they provide a moist environment for them to grow. Many pathogenic bugs like E. coli, Norovirus, and Salmonella have been found in significant numbers, and can be transferred to plates, utensils, and counter top surfaces.

A nice study done in the journal Food Control, compared several methods of disinfecting kitchen sponges.
These included soaking in a bleach solution, soaking in lemon juice, microwaving the sponge, or running the sponge through the dishwasher.

Only the microwave and the dishwasher significantly lowered bacterial counts in the sponge.

WHAT TO DO?

The simplest and most effective method is to put your damp ( a dry one might burn!) sponge into the microwave oven, and blast it on high for one minute. Another way to go is to pitch it in your dishwasher and run it through the full wash and dry cycle.

Have a great long weekend!!

Quick Hit: Weight Training

I'll admit that I was a relatively late comer to the merits of weight training.
Growing up, the sports I played, like hockey and soccer, were more endurance and skill dependent, so coaches never really focused on weight training. On the field, or at the arena, practise time was devoted to either running drills, or sprinting/skating until you felt like puking. The mentality was that the more "fit" your cardiovascular system was, the better you would be able to play in the last minutes of a game. If you happened to get stronger doing it, so be it.



In University, I used to shake my head at the guys in the gym doing weights. I figured these were the fellows who didn't have enough skills to play a sport, and needed some other way to show their manhood. There were rarely any women there, and the weight machines (what ever happened to Nautilus?) were kept in horrible condition. I was focused more on long distance running, swimming, cycling at this point, and couldn't waste time adding weights.


Today, I have come full circle, and recommend weight training as part of any physical fitness regime.

Benefits

The benefits are clear at this stage, and  I've listed only a few below

• Fall Prevention in the Elderly (NEJM, Sept 1994)
• Improvement in Bone Density British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2000
• Improvement in Metabolic Rate (ie weight loss)
• Improvement in Strength
• Improvement in Arthritis Pain, Blood Pressure, Diabetes Control

What Should I Do?

If you aren't already, adding weight training to your workout is worth doing. Consulting with a trainer is worthwhile, and they should clearly explain what technique to follow. They should also be able to explain the specific muscles that an exercise will target, and how the exercise achieves this. If they can't, find someone who can.

Muscles are, for the most part, fairly straight forward. When they contract, they move a joint, flexing or extending it. The more you use it, the stronger, and more toned it gets.

General Technique

• Breathe! When lifting/pushing/pulling the weight, remind yourself to exhale. People often hold their breath when they strain, and this is not a good thing for your body for a number of reasons.
• Aim to do 8-10 repetitions for a given exercise. Find a reasonable amount of weight that will allow you to get 8-10 reps before you are too fatigued to push more. Trying to impress people with a huge load will only get them laughing at you behind your back.
• Good Form. Maybe the most important. Understand the purpose of the exercise you are attempting. Know how the muscle you are focusing on moves, and try to use only that muscle to achieve the movement. Keep your core (trunk) as still as possible, and go through as full a range of motion as you can comfortably do. NEVER cheat through the exercise, just to get it done. If you can't isolate the movement, lighten the weight and try again.

Hopefully, this is useful. We'll keep expanding training, and advancing if the interest is there.

Let me know if you have any specific training questions.

I love the feedback!

QUICK HIT: Dirty Reusable Grocery Bag Causes Soccer Team to Get Sick

How often do you clean your reusable grocery bags? Never? Once a month? Once a year?
Maybe you should do it more often.
In a nice piece of detective work, the Journal of Infectious Disease found that a girls' soccer team was made ill when one member of the team transmitted the Norwalk Virus by contaminating food being kept in a reusable grocery bag (in the bathroom). I'll spare you the gory details, but you can hit the link above if you want to see.

Essentially, though, the index case was vomiting and having diarrhea in the bathroom where the eventual culprit snacks were being kept in a reusable cloth grocery bag (? Food being kept in the bathroom?).  Consumption of snacks (including pre-packaged cookies, chips and grapes) from the bag, was strongly linked to getting ill with the same strain of Norwalk as the initial case.

NORWALK VIRUS is often referred to as "cruise-ship diarrhea", as there have been several outbreaks on cruise ships recently. It is hightly infectious, and once aerosolized (in this case, through throwing up) is very readily spread through touching contaminated surfaces. The more confined the space, the more easily spread.
Symptoms onset rapidly with vomiting and diarrhea lasting 24-48 hours.


TAKE-AWAY MESSAGES

• When travelling as a team, family, or other group, if one person is suspected of having Norwalk, best to isolate them. 
• Be diligent about keeping counter-tops, etc extra clean. 
• Keep your hands clean!
• WASH YOUR RE-USABLE Grocery Bags.
• It seems redundant to say, but Keep Your Food OUT OF THE BATHROOM!!

Let me know what you think of this!