3 Simple Upgrades to Your Family’s Health and Wellbeing

There are a lot of often overlooked aspects of health flying under the radar. Maybe you’ve thought about them, but not as much as diet and exercise. A good diet and regular exercise can go a long way to aiding some of these problems, but some of them require a little more forethought and regular upkeep.

Read on to find out what you should be adding to everyday life to keep up the health and well-being of your family.

Insurance

Life insurance (with or without a medical exam) is an aspect of well-being that you should think about when you start a family. After paying in throughout your life, your beneficiaries will receive a lump sum, or a series of regular payments when you die to spend however they wish. It is unique in that your insurer doesn’t determine how the money you are paying is spent. How much is available to them comes down to how much coverage you buy and how long you have been paying. Find out more about choosing whole life insurance with no medical exam.

Funeral costs, college tuition, mortgage payments, etc. can all be covered by the money left to them.  Unlike other insurance policies like auto or home insurance, your beneficiaries are simply given a cash deposit to keep them looked after when you are gone.

Protecting your family should always be your first priority. But try as you might, you can’t avoid anything happening to your family. Every experience is going to come with its risks, even something as simple as riding a bike. But you can at least ease the aftermath with a decent insurance policy.

Although the British NHS allows for free health care, the waiting lists and quality of care can often lead patients to seek out alternative forms of healthcare. If your loved one is in a dire predicament, private healthcare can get them the care they need when the NHS is swamped. Private healthcare has a reputation for offering less waiting time and a better environment for care, but it will cost. Private health insurance can cover the costs of private healthcare from diagnosis to treatment.

You can choose between a comprehensive cover or a treatment and care policy. Private diagnosis, treatment and aftercare are all covered by comprehensive cover and your price is determined by factors such as age, lifestyle choices and medical history. It, unfortunately, doesn’t cover chronic conditions, pre-existing conditions, allergies or food intolerances, or natural ageing.

But if your little one has broken a leg, for example, that is a one-off excursion that would be better covered by treatment and care health insurance. It has all the same policies of determining price based on various factors, covers the cost of private treatment with a diagnosis supplied by the NHS, but is suited to one-off problems rather than a lifetime commitment.

Water

Water is an extremely vital aspect of everyday health that is often dismissed when we’re looking to simply quench our thirst with coffee and sodas. It is recommended by doctors that we drink as much as two litres a day, and for good reason. Water is a great contributor to almost every aspect of bodily function. From the brain to the heart, to the gut and the muscles, water is helping out. It helps you remove waste, protects your spinal cord, keeps your cardiovascular system healthy and aids in digestion and brain function.

Dehydration can show itself in many forms. If your lips are chapped in the height of summer, your skin feels dry, or your pee is dark. These are small things that won’t affect your health, but they can lead to bigger problems.

Just in everyday life, dehydration can cause bad breath, which is a sign of too many bacteria in your mouth. You aren’t making enough saliva to wash away all the bad bacteria that can lead to tooth decay and gum disease. You could also experience headaches or dizziness if you are dehydrated. Dizziness can be prompted by too little water lowering your blood pressure, causing an impact on your circulation, and causing blood to not reach your brain as much as it should. A dehydration headache can also occur if you’re not taking in enough water. If you have low blood pressure, a rapid or irregular heartbeat, a dry mouth, or a lack of sweating or muscle cramps, you might need to reach for a bottle of water.

Muscle cramps can also be a symptom of dehydration. It’s a given that you should drink water while you are working out, but it’s rarely done enough. For example, you should also encourage your kids to drink more water while they’re playing. They’re exercising more than any of us and will need to replenish their water supply.

A lack of water will also slow your metabolism, affect your mood, and put you at a higher risk of a stroke, so keep a water bottle nearby. If you are finding it challenging to get enough water into your kids follow our tips for encouraging your child to drink more water.

Teeth

Despite your children’s insistence that they don’t like the dentist, you should enforce respect for oral hygiene. Your mouth is an important part of your body. It does some of the basic functions of living including communication and eating. One small impediment to the health of your mouth can have vital effects for the rest of your body and your daily life.

Looking after your mouth will allow you to avoid oral diseases like cavities, gum disease and oral cancer. But these things can have effects on other aspects of your wellbeing, including your mental health.

For example, a missing tooth or crooked teeth can cause you to slur your speech, enough missing teeth will cause you to need to eat soup forever, and your social life will surely suffer if your breath is bad. If your teeth are damaged, decayed or missing, it can have an effect on your self-image. If these problems are bad enough, they can cause you to withdraw from other people and activities because your smile isn’t as perfect as you would want it.

But it’s not just your teeth at stake when you aren’t looking after your mouth. Your oral health will affect the rest of the body. The mouth is the body’s only input socket for a power supply, but that comes with a lot of bacteria that can cause ongoing problems. Your oral health can contribute to general health conditions like endocarditis, cardiovascular disease, pregnancy complications and pneumonia.

Endocarditis is usually caused by germs from another part of your body, like your mouth, spread through your bloodstream. This is also the case for pneumonia, except the bacteria is being sent to your lungs. The link to cardiovascular disease is still being studied but there is research to suggest that there is a link between heart disease, clogged arteries and stroke and the inflammation and infections caused by bacteria in the mouth.

As for pregnancy concerns, periodontitis, a gum infection, has been linked to premature birth and low birth weight. It isn’t yet clear why this is the case, but lifestyle and dietary factors have been ruled out to come down to an independent link between gum disease and obstetric complications.

Keeping up a routine of brushing, flossing, rinsing with mouthwash and regular visits to the dentist is your best defence against all of these possible problems. Push your kids to keep up with their oral hygiene routine, as the key to most dentistry issues is prevention.