Are you looking for ways to promote your health or the health of your family? Operation Live Well, a DoD initiative, provides a wealth of information each month on a targeted topic. September is National Cholesterol Education Month and National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month. High blood cholesterol puts you at risk for heart disease, the number one killer of men and women in the United States. Encouraging family physical fitness can instill a lifetime of healthy habits and decrease risks for problems such as heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. Check back often to see new topics and explore methods to improve and sustain your well-being!

One Shot One Kill: Want to learn how the elite warrior accomplishes optimal performance time after time, under the most challenging conditions? The HPRC now has new program materials for the One Shot One Kill (OSOK) performance enhancement program online for you to use and download—by yourself or with your unit! One Shot One Kill (Integrative Platform version) is a “warrior-centric” performance enhancement program that warriors can set up and manage on their own. OSOK-IP is designed to enhance performance, hardiness, and resilience. By building on the skills that Warfighters already possess, OSOK aims to translate good Warfighter qualities to outstanding ones. OSOK-IP comes in two versions:

OSOK-IP Solo is a step-by-step integrative training plan, with supplemental materials, that enables the individual Warfighter to pursue this method of Total Fitness on his or her own and reach the optimal level of performance in almost all areas of life.

OSOK-IP Train the Trainer enables your unit to train as a group by selecting one member to learn and present OSOK-IP to the rest of the unit. This section of the website has the full curriculum available to download and even customize OSOK-IP content for your own military culture and unit.

We look forward to your feedback, too. Check out OSOK and let us know what you think!

Military Pathways presents an “infographic” (a graphic fact sheet) that highlights basic information on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The sheet includes are statistics on PTSD in both the general population and military to help put this syndrome in perspective, as well as possible causes and outcomes of not getting help for PTSD, and identifies prevention and treatment methods that you can use to help avoid or minimize the occurrence and effects of PTSD.

The Office of Dietary Supplements has released new fact sheets on multivitamin/mineral supplements. The QuickFacts version was designed for consumers; health professionals and those who want to know more can get additional detailed information from the Fact Sheet.

Looking for programs to help manage your weight? The Human Performance Resource Center just posted its new “Fighting Weight Strategies” page, where we have compiled a list of programs and resources, arranged by service, for maintaining overall health and body weight. You can find these helpful resources by going to the Fighting Weight Strategies page of HPRC’s website.

If you are a healthcare provider, you may be interested in two new resources available on our website. One is “Guidelines for Taking a Comprehensive Dietary Supplement History” and the other is “How to Probe for Dietary Supplement Use and Report Adverse Events” [video]. Both of these helpful tools can be found on the website by clicking on the Dietary Supplements tab on the home page, then choosing Dietary Supplement Resources from the left-hand column, and then clicking on the Resources tab on the next window.

You may have heard about the Body Mass Index (BMI), but do you really know what it is? BMI is an indicator of body fat for most adults—a screening tool for possible health problems. BMI is calculated using weight and height, and depending on the number, the result is categorized into underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese. The higher the BMI, the higher the risk of certain diseases such as heart disease, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has an adult BMI calculator, child and teen BMI calculator, and information for interpreting the numbers.

What has the Human Performance Resource Center (HPRC) been doing this past year to make our Warfighters safer? A lot! HPRC has a number of missions, but the most important one—and the one that all of HPRC’s other tasks support—is to provide evidence-based information on Human Performance Optimization (HPO). HPO involves giving our Warfighters the training and information they need to effectively carry out their missions in any environment, with the resilience to avoid injury and illness and the ability to recover quickly if injured or ill. As it turns out, HPO embodies all the domains of Total Force Fitness (TFF)—physical fitness, nutrition, dietary supplements, extreme environments, family/social issues, and psychological fitness—that ADM Mullen is asking the services to embrace.

Some of the accomplishments of HPRC this year are:

1. Responding to questions from the field (mostly from Warfighters and providers) at the average rate of one per day and growing. These questions cover topics such as proper hydration, dietary supplement use, sleep requirements, managing altitude sickness, how to beat heat illness, and fitness fueling. Every question answered has the potential of protecting our Warfighters from inaccurate commercial information and harmful practices and of increasing their resilience.
2. Overseeing a workgroup of subject matter experts (SMEs) who developed a white paper on High-Intensity Training that helps put in perspective the information available on these popular training programs. A scientific paper will be published in the near future.
3. Overseeing the workgroup of SMEs who are developing the concept of Total Force Fitness for ADM Mullen, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff.
4. Developing and expanding a website that is now servicing more than a thousand people a week by supplying needed information on HPO and TFF.
5. Supplying “healthy tips” to entities such as the Uniformed Services publication The Pulse and the Military Times.
6. Partnering with multiple organizations across the services and DoD to help collaborate and coordinate efforts in HPO/TFF.

These examples provide a good snapshot of the activity level at HPRC. The staff and volunteer SMEs are working hard to make our Warfighters safer and more resilient to both physical and mental trauma. Who could ask for a better mission?

Fruits & Veggies — More Matters™ is a health initiative led by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Produce for Better Health Foundation (PBH), to increase daily consumption of fruits and vegetables. Visit the CDC and PBH websites for helpful tips, recipes, and interactive tools to help you increase your intake of fruits and vegetables.