Key points from today’s guests:

Morning Rounds – Summary of Current News

Dr. Julie Quick, comprehensive ophthalmologist, The University of Kansas Health System

• With the upcoming solar eclipse, you’ll need to take precautions to protect your eyesight.
• When you're buying eclipse glasses, you want to make sure that they are ISO-certified and compliant. It should actually look like it's completely black when you're looking through them.
• You can get them from most major retailers and at our clinic -- we're actually selling eclipse glasses for $5 to benefit the KU Eye Lions Vision Clinics which provides free vision services for those in financial hardship and without insurance.
• You never want to directly look at the sun without protection, but you can indirectly look at the sun during the eclipse.
• So to do that, you would make what's called a pinhole projector. Make a hole in cardstock or cardboard. You can put it up to the eclipse and let the sunlight shine down on concrete or a white piece of paper to see the eclipse shape.
• Looking directly at the sun can cause solar retinopathy, which is what happens when the bright sun rays hit the back of your eye the retina and it can damage the fovea. People can have blurry vision or color distortions. Sometimes people recover and sometimes people don't, so it’s not worth the risks.

Focus Topic

Sara Arnold, sports performance dietician and certified personal trainer, The University of Kansas Health System

• The metabolic test includes laying down and putting on an astronaut looking hood over your head with a large area of plastic wrap to measure your resting metabolic rates.
• What we're looking at is the rate at which you consume oxygen because that directly translates essentially into how many calories that you burn in a day, solely at rest.
• When we think of the metabolic rate or metabolism, it is like a supply and demand.
• About 90 percent of people underestimate their required daily calorie intake.
• We can see upwards of a 400-calorie difference at rest between athletes and more sedentary people.
• Building a meal plan is a balance of all of the things, but we focus on making sure that the athlete is fueling their bodies so that they have adequate energy availability.
• We do see a lot of iron deficiency. It's estimated that around 15 percent of female athletes do experience iron deficiency at some point. Also, female athletes under consume carbohydrates by about 45 to 95 percent.

Dr. Lisa Vopat, sports medicine specialist; director, Female Athlete Program, The University of Kansas Health System

• An energy deficit is essentially when you're not taking in enough fuel to account for all the activities that you're doing throughout the day. And if so, your body over time will actually compensate.
• So if you hit a certain threshold where you're not getting in enough fuel to meet your body's baseline physiologic needs -- pump your heart and have your lungs breathe -- then the body is going to adapt, it's going to realize it's in starvation mode, and it's going to slow down every physiologic process in the body.
• You need to fuel your body. So many females “under fuel.” I see it all the time and it can be both intentional and unintentional where they just don't really understand what their body needs.
• A starved brain knows when it's starved and there's really good studies out there that show that if you're under fueling your body, you're going to have a higher risk of depression, anxiety, and your mood is going to be severely affected. And then when you refuel, and you feed your brain, all those symptoms can improve as well.
• We have to go back to the basics and remember that you are what you eat. If you want to gain muscle, you have to make sure you have adequate levels of protein.
• If you want to feel good with exercise, you have to give your body the fuel source -- the glucose and the carbohydrates -- to feel good with that exercise.
• Women and girls need to not be afraid to lift heavy -- pushing themselves to whatever feels hard to them. That's the way that our muscles adapt. And that's how we gain muscle and we gained strength.

Ali Thompson, physical therapist, The University of Kansas Health System

• Women will tend to have wider pelvic angles and increased ligament laxity which predisposes us to more injuries at the knees and the ankles.
• One way that we can counteract this is by strengthening the outer hip muscles, called our gluteus medius and minimus.
• These are our pelvic stabilizers, so they're preventing excessive rotation at the knee and the ankle and can help reduce a lot of injury risk if we can get stable from here working down the chain.
• All you really need to strengthen these muscles is just a simple resistance band that you can get at most retail stores.

Wednesday, April 3 at 8 a.m. is the next Open Mics with Dr. Stites. How can hot tubs help your brain health? We’ll show you the science of an Alzheimer’s research study that sounds too good to be true.

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