If you’re faced with the challenge of serving a high fiber breakfast as your family is racing out the door in the morning, here are a few suggestions to help you get the job done.

Oatmeal – A one-half cup serving of plain rolled oats is packed with 6 grams of fiber and is a perfect way to get the day started off right. Add in a high fiber fruit like strawberries, raspberries or blueberries and you’ll easily have a delicious breakfast with more than 10 total grams of fiber.

Yogurt and Berries – This delicious combination of tastes can also pack a fiber punch. One cup of strawberries or blueberries each has more than 4 grams of fiber. Or you can choose to add a cup of raspberries with 8 grams of fiber. Regardless of your choice, yogurt and berries is a fast way to satisfy a sweet tooth and get your fiber at the same time.

Apple, Peanut Butter and Whole Grain Toast – With two grams of fiber in each slice, whole grain bread makes a perfect piece of toast. Spread on 1 Tbsp. of peanut butter on your bread and layer with apple slices. With 5 grams of fiber in the apple, this breakfast provides more than 6 grams of fiber.

Some additional high fiber fruits to add to your daily meal plan are grapefruit and pears. Prunes, which provide a laxative action, are not a high fiber food.

With all of the breakfast meal suggestions listed above, keep in mind that you must use fruit in its natural form with the skin (that’s where a lot of the fiber is!). Frozen fruit is fine, as long as it is not in a sugary sauce.

While many careers aren’t as profitable or rewarding as they used to be, some are actually predicted to get better over the coming years. Those two are nurse practitioner and dental assistant.

Let’s begin with dental assisting. One of the reasons why dental assisting is growing so rapidly is because it’s a long lasting and rewarding career. Also, the education requirements aren’t very steep.

Most people that decide to become dental assistants usually attend some type of online dental assistant school. But, in some U.S. states, you can become a dental assistant with nothing more than a high school diploma!

Another reason why this career is expected to last a long time is because as long as there are dentists there will be dental assistants. After all dentists need someone to clean their tools, help prepare patients and work the front desk.

Those that are prepared for a lot of education should definitely keep an eye on the nurse practitioner career. Nurse practitioners are some of the highest paid nurses in the world. And while nurse practitioners definitely have a long and rewarding career, the nurse practitioner education requirements are quite steep compared to other careers.

How steep you ask? Think doctorate degree. As you can imagine it isn’t a career for people that aren’t committed. But, for people that are, it’s definitely a good choice. It’s been shown that some nurse practitioners make upwards of $115,000 per year! But, believe it or not, that isn’t the most interesting thing we found out.

Unlike any other nurses, nurse practitioners have the ability to work without the supervision of an MD. The interesting thing about that is that a nurse practitioner can serve as a person’s primary healthcare provider. And that leads to the most interesting point of all, private practices. Yep, that’s right. Nurse practitioners have the ability to open their very own practice if they desire.

Laser eye surgery is the most common elective surgery currently being performed with over one million people worldwide undergoing the procedure each year. Laser eye surgery has actually been around a lot longer than most people realize with the first procedure actually being carried out over 25 years ago. Refractive surgery, which relates to any surgery which corrects people’s vision has actually been carried out for over 30 years but this was not performed using a laser.

As you would expect, the techniques involved with the surgery have been improved and refined over the years and the technology behind laser eye surgery is unrecognizable from what it was when the procedure was first carried out. The main advancements have come with the laser themselves which are now extremely accurate and reliable, meaning the results of the surgery are very consistent.

The surgeons themselves have also significantly improved and laser eye surgeons are now regulated, which was not the case when the procedure first started being performed. Laser eye surgery is now considered to be an extremely safe procedure with a very low risk of complications.

Although there is variation between surgeons, a respectable complication rate is generally accepted to be around 0.1% of all procedures carried out. This means that only 1 in 1000 laser eye surgery procedures result in any sort of complication. You may be reading this thinking that 1 in 1000 procedures is actually too big a risk to take, but it is important to realize that the vast majority of the complication that do occur can be easily rectified by your surgeon, meaning you end up with perfect vision anyway.

When you are considering the risks of laser eye surgery it is probably better to think of them in terms of the likelihood of there being a complication which the surgeon is unable to rectify to a satisfactory conclusion. Again there will be variation between different surgeons but this figure averages out at about 1 in 25,000 procedures. If you are unlucky enough to fall into this category then there is a chance that your vision may actually be worse than it was before surgery.

A commonly asked question about laser eye surgery is what are the chances of going blind following the procedure? The easiest way to answer this is to say that to date no one has ever gone blind as a result of the surgery and most surgeons estimate the risk of blindness to be about 1 in 5 million procedures; which is about the same chance of dying in a plane crash!

Most of the complications of laser eye surgery are relatively minor and include things such as dry eyes and night vision problems. Complications such as these are becoming far less common as the laser technology continues to improve. What’s more, such complications generally improve to the point of resolution over the first 6 months following surgery as the eyes heal.

In summary, while there are risks involved with the procedure, laser eye surgery is generally considered to be extremely safe. The biggest disappointment following laser eye surgery is generally experienced when people’s expectations are too high and it is important that such expectations are managed by the surgeon. It is also important that your surgeon explains exactly what you can expect following surgery as it is when people experience things that they were not expecting that they are likely to be disappointed.

A good example of this is that people who are having laser eye surgery to correct their near sightedness may find that their reading vision is actually worse following the surgery than it was before. Such people’s distance vision will be massively improved which is the reason they had the surgery in the first place, but if it was not explained that their reading vision could be worse following the procedure, then they may perceive the surgery as a failure. If this was fully explained to your prior to surgery then you are unlikely to be disappointed. The single most important factor in having a successful surgery is in choosing a surgeon who you feel comfortable with and one that has the necessary experience to deal with any complications should they arise.

This post was written by Tim Harwood, A laser trained Optometrist from the UK. In addition to his clinical practice ,Tim also provides information for his own website TreatmentSaver – Laser eye surgery which covers all aspects of laser eye surgery including both the cost and risks of the procedure.