Health - This Week's Health Tips: Improve Blood Pressure, Immunity and Skin

Eat Eggs for Breakfast for a Smoother Skin

Maybe you eat eggs for breakfast because of their awesome power to control your appetite. But here's another reason to give eggs a place at the breakfast table: smooth skin.

Be they poached, hard-boiled, or sunny-side up, eggs can help you feel full longer, thanks to ample amounts of protein in the whites and yolk. Eggs are also rich in two key skin-smoothing nutrients, choline and lutein. Choline -- a member of the B vitamin family -- helps make up fatty portions of cell membranes and is essential for healthy skin-cell functioning.

Choline also helps your body maintain proper levels of other B vitamins. And that's super important because your skin needs B vitamins to produce energy and manufacture collagen and elastin, those rubbery proteins that keep skin looking and feeling firm and smooth. Lutein is another great reason to have eggs for breakfast. This carotenoid antioxidant found in eggs helps preserve skin's elasticity and prevent free radical damage to skin cells.

Research suggests that our bodies may absorb lutein better from eggs than from leafy greens or supplements -- possibly because of some other absorption-assistive nutrient in yolks, such as lecithin. And an egg a day, Tannis writes, can boost your lutein levels by 26 percent.

Benefits of Deep Breathing

You could lower your blood pressure significantly in 30 seconds if you just breathe deeply.Calming activities of any kind are important for relaxing blood vessels and the heart and eventually have a calming effect on the sympathetic nervous system.

Increase Immunity!

A new study shows that while too much stress can pull down your immunity, a fit of optimism may actually buoy it up.

In the study, researchers measured students' optimism with short tests. Then, over time, the students were pricked several times in the arm with a harmless virus or yeast -- and their skin reactions (a sign of immune-system strength) were checked. A bigger bump on the skin meant a bigger immune response. Surprisingly, the students whose optimism grew over the study period also saw their immune responses grow stronger with each prick. On the other hand, immunity dropped somewhat in students whose feelings were growing more pessimistic during the study period.