Your Health: Shopping tips for home exercise equipment

Home workout buys

As we enter the season for gift-giving and resolutions, fitness expert Brad Schoenfeld, author of "Women's Home Workout Bible," offers a few shopping tips for home exercise equipment:

• Never buy exercise equipment from an infomercial. These are often impulse buys of poor quality equipment that you'll regret.

• Buy dumbbells before you buy a treadmill. You need some basic equipment for resistance training, but not for cardio. Calisthenics like jumping jacks, skipping in place and squat thrusts provide as good a cardio workout as any machine.

• Comparison shop on the Internet. Don't automatically pay list price at a sporting goods store. Bring in a price from the Web and the store might match it.

Kids health Web site

Parents looking for advice about their children's health have a new trusted source: the American Academy of Pediatrics new Web site.

Healthychildren.org offers up-to-the-minute advice from pediatricians on a variety of subjects:

• Ages & Stages: Health issues and development milestones for infants through adolescents.

• Healthy living: Guidance on fitness, sports, oral health, emotional wellness and nutrition.

• Safety & Prevention: Preparing for health issues that arise at home, and in-depth information on immunizations.

• Health issues: A to Z information on more than 300 health-care topics.

"Ask a Pediatrician" lets users scan for frequently asked questions or pose their own query, and a search function lets parents find a pediatrician in their area.

Sit? Don't stay!

Sitting can kill you, a recent study suggests.

The Pennington Biomedical Research Center tracked 17,000 Canadian adults. After 12 years, about 20 percent of those who said they sat almost all of the time had died, compared with 12 percent who sat about half the time, and just 6 percent of those who sat almost none of the time.

That's true of both smokers and nonsmokers, the skinny and the overweight.

Sitting might affect the balance of insulin and sugar.

So if you sit a lot at home or work, researchers suggest standing up regularly, taking a walk, and doing anything to encourage blood flow.

Faith for health

Local churches are working to help people with mental illness.

The Faith and Mental Illness Network trains clergy and lay people how to respond to people with mental illness and get them the help they need.

To plan a training event for 2010, interested participants will meet from 8:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 14, at the Samaritan Interfaith Counseling Center, 1819 Bay Scott Circle, Naperville.

For further information or suggestions on who to include in the planning effort, call Bob Skrocki at DuPage County Health Department, Mental Health Services at (630) 682-7979, ext. 7986, Mark Pedigo at Samaritan Interfaith Counseling Center at (630) 357-2456, or Sheila Frett/ Pat Doyle at NAMI of DuPage County at (630) 752-0066).