Happy holidays to everyone! In this newsletter, we have an offer for holiday gift certificates, a profile of our Director of Community Relations, some cheese and fruit pairings for the holidays and report on a couple new studies. We would also like to wish special holiday wishes to our Director of Quality Assurance, Natalie Richardson and her fiancee, who are getting married next month.

Scroll through our newsletter or click on a specific article title below to skip ahead:

Starting Services and Gift Certificates

Employee Profile: Andi Greathouse

Healthy Dinners for after the Holidays

Study: New Hope for Lung Cancer Patients

Study: Chocolate Good for the Heart

Give Yourself or a Loved One a Break for the Holidays
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The holidays are a time to gather family and dear friends together to share in good times, presents and mirth, but it is also a time of stress.  As the holidays approach, dinner preparations, greeting cards and shopping for gifts all compete for time.  In families with a loved one who needs help with housekeeping and personal assistance, this can present a serious time crunch. Even after the holidays many people feel worn out and have trouble helping out their loved ones.  Home Services Unlimited offers gift certificates to help families during the holiday season.  Consider these gift ideas: 

• Everyone likes to get his or her home in order for the holidays, but some people need extra help doing so.  Get a gift certificate for someone close to you who needs personal assistance, housekeeping or companion services and help them start the New Year off right.  
• If you have friends who are caretakers, they have extra time constraints around the holidays.  A gift certificate for respite care for their loved one makes a perfect present for someone who has been working so hard to help out..
• If you are a caretaker, treat yourself to some free time this season, by ordering respite care from Home Services Unlimited.
• Think about getting gift certificates for yourself, your loved ones or a caretaker friend for use throughout the year.  When giving a gift certificate for our services, you can be certain that your present is useful and unique. 

Employee Profile: Andi Greathouse
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Andi Greathouse has been our Director of Community Relations since September of 2005. On her way here, Andi, who was born on on Greek Cyprus, first immigrated to New York and then went to college in Boston. Right after college, she decided to move to Indianpolis. She has worked in administrative roles at a medical recruiting and staffing company and home health care before deciding to come to HSU. As Director of Community Relations, it can sometimes be hard to catch Andi in the office. Much of the time she's out visiting patients or their families, or giving seminars like her most recent one about avoiding the "winter blues." She says that it was HSU's reputation and employee retention that drew her to us. According to Andi, there is no greater satisfaction on the job thatn having a patient call to say, "I love my nurse" or "I love my physical therapist."

Healthier Dinners after the Holidays
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So, you just finished devouring all that turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes and now there's a honey-baked ham in your stomach and pounds of chocolates on the table in front of you and all you can think about is how you're ever going to get back in shape with that New Year's eve dinner coming up. Well, it's time for a new eating strategy for the New Year.

It is difficult to get those holiday pounds off, because we naturally want to eat more and more fattening foods in the winter. It is important though, not just for our weight, but for our health, that we get ourselves into a healthy eating pattern. I am no dietitian, but I would like to share my method of planning dinner in the winter.

I like to eat foods with a high water-content before the heartier ones. It helps to fill me up with high-vitamin and mineral-rich foods before filling myself up with high-calorie and high-fat foods. This means that I start my meal with a salad. One serving is about a cup of leafy vegetables or half of that for hard vegetables. As much as I love them, ranch and buttermilk dressings are out. One tablespoonful of vinaigrette will adequately dress one serving of salad. Generally, three parts highest quality olive oil to one part vinegar is a good balance of acid, but some people prefer more vinegar. The key to this dressing working is that it has to have enough flavor for the salad. You should not use "white vinegar," which is flavorless, industrial acetic acid diluted with water. Also, make sure you add enough spices (a pinch of salt, ground black pepper, onion powder, garlic powder or even cayenne) and also consider herbs and garlic. I like to keep the same bottle and keep refilling it before it is used up. I'll just drop a sprig of rosemary or some dried oregano leaves and a couple cloves of chopped garlic inside. For a creamier consistency and some more flavor, add some dijon mustard. Stay away from croutons, unless they are homemade with herbs instead of oil or fat. Sometimes instead of croutons I just sprinkle a teaspoon of whole bran over the salad. If you add cheese, add light crumbled ones like feta or ricotta instead of strips of fatty cheeses. Instead of bacon bits or other meats, just sprinkle a teaspoon of sunflower seeds on each serving.

I follow this with a bowl of hot soup. This is a great use for holiday leftovers, too. A turkey carcass adds a lot of flavor to a rice soup and a stripped hambone goes wonderfully with split-pea or bean soups. Soup and salad do a great job of helping to fill you up and you may need nothing else but a bit of crusty, baked bread along with it to do the job. Since you can make one or two pots of soup at the beginning of the week for the rest of your dinners, it is also convenient.

For dessert, just try some fresh fruit. Like salad, this is a high-water content and nutrient rich food. Good dessert fruits that are available this time of year include cherries, honeydew, oranges, raspberries and strawberries, but some other fruits can be found of good quality, even though they are out of season right now and dried fruits are always an alternative.

If you still need some heavy food after the soup, salad, bread and fruit, you can consider getting a heartier bread or having a moderate serving of cheese with your fruit dessert. You can even include a few nuts. Have all the fruit you want, but a proper serving of cheese is an 1.5 ounces, which is about the size of a 9-volt battery, so nibble it or spread it thin on whatever bread you had with your soup. You should also be careful not too eat too many nuts, especially pecans (which are fatty), or those that have been salted, sugared or buttered. Below I have included some of my favorite winter fruit and cheese combinations, along with wine suggestions:

• One classic winter pairing is Stilton and Port. They pair particularly well with anti-oxidant-rich blueberries. Remember that a glass of port, which is high-calorie,should be just a bit over half the size of any other glass of wine.
• Slices of Granny Smith apples with a mixture of Gruyere and Jarlsberg and freshly shelled pecans. Serve with an oaky California Chardonnay.
• Jonagold apples with smoked farmhouse cheddar and good cabernet, merlot or Bordeaux
• My very favorite winter wine and cheese pairing for a special occassion is spiced hazelnuts and pecans, Bosc pears, Roqeufort cheese and Sauternes (a white French dessert wine). Roquefort can be replaced by an American-produce blue cheese of the same style. One such cheese is "Point Reyes Blue."

Make your New Year's resolution a commitment to follow this or another strategy for eating healthy next year. Considering the binging that most of us do on the holidays, the perfect New Year's resolution is to start monitoring your eating habits to live a healthier life.

Study: New Hope for Lung Cancer Sufferers

One of the deadliest aspects of lung cancer is that the tumors develop resistance to chemotherapy. Cancer Research UK released a study in which they identified the pathway that on type of lung cancer, known as small cell lung cancer, uses to achieve this resistance. Researchers believe that they have found the proteins that provide this resistance. Non-cancerous cells have less use for thie protein, which provides hope that a treatment could be developed that would not overly weaken the patient, though side effects would be inevitable.

Lung cancer is difficult to detect early. Because of this, surgery is generally not an option and chemotherapy is the single, primary method of treatment. Unfortunately, chemotherapy is not usually able to defeat lung cancer. Those missing the resistance-building proteins do succumb to chemotherapy, only to have those with the protein multiply in their place. If this research led to a way to attack this protein, chemotherapy may be able to become a more effective treatment for the disease.

Study: Obese Women Should Exercise, Not Diet
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A recent study has shown that exercising is healthier for obese women than dieting is. The program also taught women healthy eating habits, such as how to cook and provide social support. Though the women, who were all obese ina clinical sense, did lose a modest amount of weight, they were also all happier with themselves and in much better shape as far as health is concerned. Dr. Erika Borkoles, who conducted the study said that, "People of all sizes and shapes can reduce risk of poor health by adopting a healthier lifestyle." She exhorted physicians to focus on health and not just weight.

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