“Often when we feel depleted, we reach for a cup of coffee,” says Dr. Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, “but research suggests a better way to get energized is to connect with nature.”

He is the lead author of a series of studies that the Journal of Environmental Psychology just published in this June 2010 issue. I asked him to send me a PDF of the full-text of his research report, “Vitalizing effects of being outdoors and in nature,” and he did. You can find the abstract online.

Instead of coffee, I restore my energy by going out for a hike. In fact, one of the most popular parts of my website is my blog of photo essays, “Fitness and Photography for Fun.”

Certainly, physical activity makes us feel better. Staying fit is indeed one of the four legs that those of us with diabetes have to keep our blood glucose levels down in the normal range (the other three legs are diet, reducing stress and inflammation, and usually taking oral medication or insulin).

Over the years I have written many articles extolling the benefits of exercise. Some of those articles say how much better I feel after going out for a hike.

Nature This Morning

That’s all true. But these new studies for the first time have teased out the effects of being out in nature alone from the feel-good effects that we get from physical activity and from the socializing that we often get at the same time.

Dr. Ryan and his co-authors were able to separate out the effects of nature alone. To do so they conducted five separate experiments with 537 of the usual suspects — college students.

What they found was so clear, Dr. Ryan says, that “being outside in nature for just 20 minutes in a day was enough to significantly boost vitality levels.” The Journal of Environmental Psychology article defines vitality as having physical and mental energy giving us a sense of enthusiasm, aliveness, and energy.

When we have a greater sense of vitality we not only have more energy to do the things that we want to do but were are also more resilient to physical illnesses. “One of the pathways to health may be to spend more time in natural settings,” he says.

I’m not knocking physical activity. Most of us who have diabetes need to get up and out a lot more. If you aren’t getting out yet, this beautiful late spring weather is a great time to start. I’m saying that getting our physical activity outdoors in nature gives us two for the price of one.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

Whether people with diabetes need bigger brains that other people is something that science hasn’t studied yet. But some scientists who have studied our early ancestors have just discovered that we got our big brains originally from a diet that came in large part from fish and other aquatic animals.

Until now, most of the scientists who study our early ancestors assumed that they lived on the plains of East Africa. This “savannah theory” seemed to point at a diet of roots, seeds and nuts, some green plants and the occasional small game — the hunter-gatherer hypothesis. This is pretty far from the oceans where fish live.

But fish also live in lakes and streams. And now we know that some of our earliest ancestors about 1.95 million years ago lived around such a wet environment. Archeologists working in northern Kenya found that our ancestors ate a lot of fish, turtles, and crocodiles. By analyzing the bones of the animals and the stone tools that our ancestors made the scientists showed that in fact we descend from a long line of fish-eaters.

Yesterday This Fisherman Caught a Smallmouth Bass — Our Ancestors Caught Prehistoric Bass

The connection between fish and brains is omega-3 oils, which make up about 60 percent of the fatty acids in our brains. And about 2 million years ago our ancestors first developed the big brains that humans have.

We didn’t get their big brains from plants, because our bodies are inefficient in converting plant-based omega-3 into the long-chain omega-3 that our brains need. Only fish, shellfish, algae, and those animals that feed largely on aquatic sources have a lot of omega-3 that our brains can use.

Our mothers told us that fish was brain food. And now we know that they were right in this as in so many other things.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

All of us feel sorry for ourselves once in a while. That goes double for those of us who have diabetes.

We do have a serious disease that can be awfully hard on us. The complications of this disease are almost too much to even think about.

But we aren’t alone. If you are as inquisitive as I am, you talk to lots of people who have diabetes. And you will find some who have even worse conditions, believe it or not.

For example, last summer I hiked 132 miles in two weeks on a Sierra Club outing. Four other people made the same High Sierra trek with me, and I assumed that none of them had any physical limitations. Was I ever surprised to learn that every one of them had serious physical conditions — some worse and much more painful than my diabetes!

And this isn’t the half of it. I seriously encourage everyone to watch a bit of Nick Vujicic’s story. Nick is an Australian of Serbian descent.

“He was bitter until age 12, when his mother showed him a newspaper article about a man dealing with a severe disability,” according to an article about him. “It would change his outlook on life. Suddenly, he wasn’t the world’s only struggling person.”

I won’t say any more. Just watch a YouTube clip about him at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc4HGQHgeFE

Life wasn’t fair to Nick, but he is far from bitter about it, which would be about the only thing that could be worse. Life is Beautiful.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

Does it make you angry by my asking if you are a noncompliant diabetic? I didn’t mean to do that by asking you that in the title of this essay. I just wanted to grab your attention.

Getting angry is as unproductive as called us noncompliant or a diabetic. In fact, a new study in Hormones and Behavior shows that when we get angry, our heart rate and arterial tension increase along with other psychobiological changes. So please relax and read on.

No doctor ever dared call me noncompliant, but plenty have labeled me a diabetic. Those terms don’t make me angry — any more. But I don’t like them at all and am doing my best to stomp them out.

As a writer, words are important to me. As a positive person I try my best to avoid these “negative cues.”

This morning a friend mentioned another negative cue that health professionals sometimes use to describe the way we lead our lives. I hadn’t thought of this before, and that conversation is what prompted this essay.

“How are you managing your diabetes?” is the common clinical phrase that they throw at us. While to speak of managing doesn’t appear negative on its face, it really is. It focuses on our burden.

Likewise, I talk all the time about controlling diabetes. I’m now going to try to stop doing that.

The positive way to ask the question is whether we are living our lives boldly and fully. That’s a lot more than a dry, narrow emphasis on management or control.

Six years ago I first wrote about these and other “incorrect diabetes terms” at www.mendosa.com/incorrect_terms.htm in an article with that title. I wrote there that many people who have diabetes actively resist being labeled as a diabetic, as if we were an illness. A correspondent writes, “What I give as an example to doctors and other technical people is: If a person has hemorrhoids, does that make that person one?”

If you have diabetes but aren’t a diabetic or a hemorrhoid, I think that you might enjoy exploring my earlier article about the other words and phrases that our language would be better off without.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.