Keeping the Women we Love Healthy

We've all heard that exercise, managing stress and healthy eating are the cornerstone of a healthy life.  You can find tons of advice on how to make lifestyle changes that benefit your health -- anywhere from the how to have the right amount of sleep to the effects food has in specific parts of your body; after all, a healthy life IS a happy life! But what is the research behind all these suggestions?  How does it improve your health?  What are those 'simple' lifestyle changes we can implement NOW to be healthier? The Howell Foundation will be hosting Dr. Sears on May 20th.  She will present the latest information about how eating patterns and sedentary behavior are associated with the risk for chronic diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. She will share insights from her latest women’s health-focused research and newly-funded projects in these areas.  Come learn about how you can make changes TODAY that may hel...

Pictured above (from left to right): past Board members Dr. Beatrice Rose, Gladys Kohn, Cher Connor and Jean McGrath; along with Kathleen Franklin and Carole Banka, Howell Foundation Vice Chair and Chair respectively.   The Howell Foundation Legacy Council held its inaugural meeting this month to discuss the ways in which it will work towards recording the history of the Doris A. Howell Foundation.  This group of exceptional community leaders is interested in inspiring, motivating and guiding the current Board on its mission to ‘Keep the Women we Love Healthy’. "We want to be deserving of your donations, and the history behind the Doris A. Howell Foundation plays a significant role when discussing the quality of the programs presented to the community," mentions Carolyn Northrup, Communications Chair.  The Howell Foundation celebrated its 20th anniversary last year --20 years of empowering women to become health advocates for their own health and those of their f...

The Doris Howell Foundation held its first Luncheon Series with the lecture “ Understanding the genome 10,000 experiments at a time: applying genomic approaches to understand autoimmune disease in women" with Sonia Sharma, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Division of Cell Biology, La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology and Director of the Institute’s RNAi Facility. Although the title sounds intimidating,  the fact is autoimmune diseases affect women to a much greater extent than men (See Table). Currently in the US 12 million women and 4 million men are struggling with autoimmune disease; not to mention that research on autoimmune diseases in women has been scattered and unfocused, partly because of the fact that symptoms are often confused with other conditions. For reasons that are yet not fully understood, autoimmune diseases affect more women than men. Dr. Sharma pointed out that women have higher immune reactivity and higher numbers of certain immune cell popula...