Showing posts with label diet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diet. Show all posts

Monday, October 31, 2011

Getting The Most Nutritional Value From Fruits And Vegetables

You’re eating lots of fruits and vegetables every day, but are you sure you’re getting the most nutritional value from them, and what can you do to improve how many nutrients you are getting. To understand we need to take a deeper look at the trip that fruits and vegetables make to get to your table.

Many different factors can affect the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables before they reach your table. The two most important are time and traveling conditions. The shorter the time frame that the fruit is packed until it reaches your table the better. If you are lucky enough to have a home garden try to pick your vegetables early in the morning for peak flavor and nutritional value. The next best choice is to use a local market stand. Generally the foods they are selling were picked within a few hours of being set out for sale. If there are no local markets in your area like most people you’ll be forced to shop at a supermarket.

Before any produce reaches your local supermarket it must first be picked, and packaged. If the food is coming to you from the same state or neighboring state chances are it was picked within 48 hours of reaching the stores shelves. If you’re produce is making it way from California to New York chances are it was picked 7 to 10 days ago. Why do you need to be concerned about when something was harvested? When any produce is picked off of the vine it is at its nutritional peak value. It starts to lose that value as time passes, the more time that passes, and the more value it loses.

The second biggest contributor is handling. If care is taken no to bruise or damage the exterior skin produce will last longer. Additionally storing a produce at the proper temperature will also help slow down the loss of nutrients. Here’s where it gets a little tricky, some fruits like temperatures as high as 60 degrees, and other prefer temperatures in the mid 30’s. So the longer your food is in transit, and the more care that it shown to handling it properly the more packed with nutrients it is likely to be when it hits the shelves of your local supermarket.

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Saturday, October 8, 2011

High Mercury Content in Fish

We all know that adding fish to our diets can help increase our body's ability to repair itself, as well as its ability to burn body fat and keep our energy up, but it’s important to choose fish that’s also going to improve your health as opposed to silently poisoning you…

Being exposed to too much mercury can cause memory loss, tremors, neurological difficulties, advanced aging, decreased immune functions, and death.

But how is all this mercury getting into our body?

Well here’s the top 4 places that contribute to the levels of mercury in our body (not in any specific order):

Vaccines (past and present)
Dental fillings
The environment
And Fish

We’re going to focus on fish right now because that’s the prime source of mercury in our diets. When coal is burned, inorganic mercury is released into the air and eventually ends up in our lakes, rivers and oceans. There, bacteria mixes with it and transforms it into methylmercury which is easily absorbed by fish (especially large or fatty fish), and is also easily absorbed by us when we eat those fish.

The good new is that our most recent studies indicate that the human body naturally rids itself of mercury over time – assuming we stop ingesting it long enough for our body to do what it was made to do, and to help the process here’s a list of fish that naturally have a low, medium and high level of mercury:

High mercury: Mercury levels differ from one species of fish to the next. This is due to factors such as type of fish, size, location, habitat, diet and age. Fish that are predatory (eat other fish) are large and at the top of the food chain, and so tend to contain more mercury. Fish that contain higher levels of mercury include:

Shark
Ray
Swordfish
Barramundi
Gemfish
Orange roughy
Ling
Canned or fresh tuna
Mackerel
Grouper
Tilefish
Chilean sea bass

Moderate mercury: Alaskan halibut, black cod, blue (Gulf Coast) crab, dungeness crab, Eastern oysters, mahimahi, blue mussels, pollack.
Low mercury: Anchovies, Arctic char, crawfish, Pacific flounder, herring, king crab, sanddabs, scallops, Pacific sole; tilapia, wild Alaska and Pacific salmon; farmed catfish, clams, striped bass, and sturgeon.

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Sunday, August 7, 2011

Learn What Foods Will Infuse Your Body With Energy

Do you want to know how to feel good? Do you want to be vibrant for a long time? Take care of your body and it will take care of you.

Digestion takes probably more energy than anything else. The average meal takes 3 hours and 30 minutes to digest if combined properly. Incorrectly combined food can sometimes take up to 14 hours to digest. This is a very powerful way to conserve energy.

Take note: Recall the last time you had a huge meal…a huge meal when you felt so full you could hardly move. That doesn’t make you feel like going out and running a marathon, does it? How often do you feel like going out and running a marathon after eating a huge steak?

How would you like to learn something interesting? Starches and proteins require different mediums to digest in the stomach. One requires acid in the stomach to digest and the other alkaline. Now anyone with even a basic knowledge of chemistry knows that acids and alkalines cancel each other out.

If you want to have more energy you need to learn to properly combine your foods.

You’ve probably heard people say you need to eat more vegetables. I heard that too for a long time. It didn’t motivate me to go out and eat it. It wasn’t until I understood that food is literally the building blocks of all the substances of your body that I understood the importance of it. What you eat literally becomes your brain, your liver, your kidneys, your skin and your eyes. This is powerful. What you put in to yourself becomes part of your body.

If 70-80% of your body is water, what does it make sense to eat? Foods which have a 70-80% water content. Vegetables are the most important food you will feed yourself in your lifetime. Vegetables will cause your energy to increase, your skin to look brighter, your eyes to sparkle, your energy to rise and your libido to increase. Vegetables are high in almost every substance known to be essential to the building of the body and life.

For the next 7 days eat a salad with every meal.

See, would you take a green shiny apple, spray it with fly spray, then eat it? You know how ridiculous that sounds. Would you eat it? Of course not. Yet that’s what’s happening to our food every day. Our fruits and vegetables are now being treated with pesticides and industrial strength sprays that are poisonous to the delicate insides of our body. Some foods are now being treated with radiation. It’s now proven conclusively that radiation contributes to cancer.

If you tried describing sex to an alien, they probably wouldn’t understand it until they experienced it. They wouldn’t understand it until they did it. You won’t understand the power of making at least 50% of your diet vegetables until you take this and do it. Vegetables are around for a reason, and for the same reason there are no hamburger trees!

Organic food contains up to 3 times the amount of nutrients of conventional fruit and vegetables. How would you like to eat spinach and have the nutrients of 3 times the amount? I certainly would. As food grows, it’s draws nutrients from the ground. The better the quality of soil, the more nutrients can be drawn into the food. Research reports many of our foods are missing vitamins, minerals, enzymes etc because of depleted soils. Buy organic food wherever possible.

The brain knows when you are full, because the stomach sends a signal to a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is 12 minutes “behind” the stomach. There is literally a 12 minute delay between being full, and your body knowing you are full. When you stop eating before you are full, you give your body a chance to recover energy.

Sugar is widely considered to be one of the most dangerous substances for the body. Avoid it at all costs. There are a few other ingredients to keep away from if you are serious about your health and energy. Salt dehydrates the body. It’s not widely known that black pepper is 17 more times irritating to the liver than alcohol.

That brings us to the next point, caffeine. I understand people love their coffee. I was once a coffee drinker, before I became interested in health. Caffeine gives us energy because it opens up the capillaries in the brain. The same effect can be had by deep breathing. The challenge comes when the effect of caffeine wears off. The capillaries in the brain restrict causing us to feel lethargic. Caffeine works because the body has to “speed up” to cope with the dose of poison it’s been given.

Unfortunately, while alcohol has perceived benefits, it is pure fermentation and decay, rotting sugar. It is absolutely toxic. There are other things you also need to be aware of. White rice is treated with bleach. It starts out brown and is bleached to become white. What about white flour? It’s also bleached. What about sugar or pasta? They too have been bleached to give a false sense of purity. Would you go to your laundry cupboard and drink bleach? That’s preposterous, yet most of us eat food treated with bleach. Bleach has the effect of ripping the stomach lining - an effect that is similar to the drug ecstasy. A report out of Germany states “they’re putting fine pieces of cracked glass now in ecstasy, those pieces have the effect of putting finite tears in the stomach lining enabling the substance to enter the bloodstream more quickly”.

Do you like food? Amazingly, most people I interview say “Yes”. What’s the purpose of eating food? While it tastes good and feels good, physiologically eating is the building blocks of the body. Skin, eyes, internal organs, joints, white and red blood cells, they are all built out of the food and liquid that goes into our body. So logically, what’s one of the most powerful ways to change the appearance your eyes, skin and strength of the organs?

Change the building blocks that you choose to take in. Literally improve the food you eat. There’s an old saying that goes “There was no hamburger in the garden of Eden”. Religion aside, when your body starts getting the food it wants and needs, it will start to desire healthy foods. Try it; you’ll literally make new food choices.

Due to the common diet, most people’s bodies are full of bacteria; these bacteria are what are responsible for cravings for terrible food. It’s not the built in mechanism of the body to crave these substances, it’s the bacteria! No one smokes a cigarette for the first time and says “Oh boy, this tastes great!” Over time, the body learns to adapt to the poisons put in.

As you give your body more and more wholesome food and treat yourself with respect, you will naturally crave better and better food. There are plenty of delicious recipes around, recipes that will leave you with energy for hours rather than tired and bloated. It’s just that very few people know about them.

Eating natural food will also return your body to a more wholesome weight. Have you ever had the case of eating a big meal and immediately afterwards having to go and raid the cupboard? Why is that? The brain has a built in survival mechanism that when it senses the body is lacking nutrients, it tells us to get hungry. That is the sense of hunger is the body telling us it needs nutrients. If you suffer from the problem of being frequently hungry, it’s because the hunger mechanism is literally turned on all the time, the body is in a constant state of asking for nutrients. Due to our poor diets and low nutrients in most of our foods now, many people find themselves living in a case of constant hunger.

Ideally, you should invest in a “juicer”. A juicer takes all the nutrients in food and releases it for the body to absorb readily and quickly. A glass of vegetable juice is more filling than an entire pizza because of the concentrated amount of nutrients.

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Saturday, July 23, 2011

Should We Avoid Carbs?

Very complex carbs (dietary fiber) also have a very complicated molecular structure, and also are resistant to most digestive enzymes produced by the human body. As a result, they cannot be broken down into glucose or other nutrients at all. This is why fiber transits the intestinal tract largely undigested. This has a knock-on effect on the speed of digestion of other carbs around them. For example, where certain starches are "protected" by indigestible fibrous wrapping, the enzymes cannot get to grips with the starch as fast as normal. Also, the presence of soluble fiber in the stomach and intestine typically creates a viscous mass of digesting-food in which carbs and enzymes take longer to mix. Result? Carb digestion slows down.

As we have seen, because the human body runs on glucose all carbs are converted into glucose in the digestive tract. The glucose then enters the bloodstream and thus contributes to a rise in "blood-glucose".

Blood Glucose Must be Kept Within Limits

A very high level of glucose in the blood is toxic, while a very low level is detrimental to bodily functions. Therefore the body has a system to regulate the amount of glucose in the bloodstream to ensure that it remains balanced within safe parameters. This glucose balancing system depends upon two mechanisms: hunger and insulin.
Low Blood Glucose Triggers Hunger

If blood-sugar levels drop, the brain causes us to feel hungry. Result? We eat food that is then converted into glucose and our blood glucose levels rise. If we don't eat and blood-glucose levels fall too low, we trigger the condition known as hypoglycemia.

If we eat a diet that contains too many high GI carbs (carbs that are rapidly converted into blood glucose) we force our body to respond by releasing equally large amounts of insulin into our bloodstream to cope with the glucose. Over time this excessively high level of insulin can cause the "insulin-receptors" in our cells to become less sensitive to insulin.

The hunger-or-insulin see-saw mechanism works well, provided that we don't eat too many high glycemic index (GI) carbs that are rapidly converted into glucose. When this happens, when a LARGE amount of glucose enters the bloodstream (called a "sugar spike"), the system responds by releasing a LARGE quantity of insulin. (It thinks we've eaten a huge amount of food.) The amount of insulin is so large that not only does it disperse the food-glucose we have just eaten, it disperses a lot more. Result? Our blood glucose falls too low. So, within a short time (about 2-3 hours) the brain tells us to feel hungry and we recommence eating. This rapid rise and fall in blood glucose, caused by excess production of insulin, is not good for our health or our eating habits.

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Sunday, June 26, 2011

Drink More Water For More Energy


What makes up 70-80% of our planet? Water. What makes up 70-80% of our body? That's right, water.

Water is the single most important nutrient you will give your body apart from oxygen. Water rejuvenates us and carries vital nutrients all round the body where it's needed. Water picks up all the leftovers, wastes and debris that the cells throw off into the lymph system and transport them out of the body via the channels of elimination.

So when you drink more water it has the double combination of feeding your body and clearing you of all the waste products that were built up in your system.

Your brain needs water, and plenty of it. Without water, your brain will operate worn out, tired and sluggish. Water is the ultimate gift to give yourself to think with clarity. In addition, water acts as a kind of healthy lubricant moistening tissues and joints.

When you drink, you want to avoid tap water. Tap water is more like a dazzling mix of chemicals. It contains fluoride, chlorine, and many others. The amount of chemicals in water will fill up books - it's more like a chemical soup. The evidence that fluoride is poisonous is so overwhelming that it's being pushed to be banned in many countries by action groups.

The thirst mechanism when having been turned off for a prolonged period is often mistaken for hunger. As you drink more water your thirst mechanism will return to its natural state. Not only will you begin to feel thirsty when you need water again, but your appetite will decrease.

This brings us to the next big thing you need to understand about water. If I asked you the difference between inorganic and organic minerals, chances are you couldn't tell me, right? Well let’s briefly explain the difference. It's a simple difference. Organic minerals come from plants; inorganic minerals come from rocks and volcanic sources. Organic minerals can be broken down by the body. Inorganic minerals are not used by the body and are stored until suitable water can come and carry them out. Organic minerals can be broken down by the body, while inorganic cannot. One is derived from natural plant life; one is derived from rocks,filings and small pieces of grit. Which one makes more sense to use?

It’s better to get your plant minerals through the food you eat rather than the inorganic form in water. Bottled water is often taken, tested and found to have bacteria and very often isn't rated much better than tap water.

Do you know the best water to use? The best water to use is the same water you use in your iron. The purest water in the world is distilled water. It's as pure as rainwater should be if our atmosphere wasn’t polluted.

If you haven't yet heard that 70% of the world's population is dehydrated - you will soon, as the UN push to get proper water supply to people in the third world.

The second best method of filtering is a type of filtering called "reverse osmosis". Unfortunately the standard bench top filter isn’t enough.

Most of the nasty contaminants in our water simply don't have a taste. Some people feel it's a case of out of sight out of mind. This may work for things people think, yet when it comes to your body, the life of your children, the health of those you care about and the line between getting cancer and surviving it's far short of acceptable.

The opportunity for energy, for vitality, for a quality of life is only known to a select few who choose to raise their standards and take action to apply what they know. New discoveries are being made all the time as new research comes out of the United States, out of Germany, and out of Australia and other countries. How does this apply to me you may ask? Well, these contaminants can kill you. Is this a reason to get upset? No, it’s simply an action signal to act smarter.

The best bit is when you’re drinking absolutely pure distilled water it is so much easier to drink. It's so easy to refreshingly flood your body with purity that will flush out chemicals, clear out the lymph system and contribute to expelling excess weight in the body. Distilled water is so easy to drink and be absorbed by your body without having to flush out the other nasties first that many people report who were struggling to drink half a litre of water a day, are now drinking 4 litres a day and up, with ease! If you can’t get distilled water, reverse osmosis filtered or table water is the next best option.

Many people in third world countries don't have access to a clean water supply. We in developed countries have currently almost unlimited access to clean water. My suggestion to you is to use it!



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Sunday, May 22, 2011

Dining Out Guide for the Health Conscious Eater


Here's food for thought! Did you know the average restaurant meal has over 1,000 calories? That's enough to blow any healthy eating plan. Fortunately, by following a few simple guidelines, you can dine out without having to sacrifice good taste and nutrition.

1. Avoid ordering an appetizer. It's a little known fact that some appetizers have more calories and fat than the main course. Plus, many appetizers are fried and served with heavy sauces which will add to your intake of saturated fat as well as trans fats and calories. It's not a healthy way to start your meal.

2. Say "yes" to salad. Salad is a healthy eater's best friend. Not only will it fill you up so you'll consume fewer calories overall, but it will also give you a hefty dose of antioxidants which are heart healthy. Be sure to ask your waitress to hold the croutons and cheese which will further reduce your caloric load. Also, choose your dressing wisely. Avoid cream based dressings and go for the vinegar based ones. You also have the option of using vinegar and olive oil which is heart healthy.

3. Make the right entree selection. Go for broiled and grilled rather than fried. Not only will you save calories and fat grams, you'll also avoid trans fats which are so prevalent in fried foods. Instead, consider asking for a doubles order of vegetables with your entree. Very few Americans are getting the 7-9 servings of fruits and vegetables recommended for optimal health. Plus, by avoiding the starch, you'll be reducing your caloric and carbohydrate load. Also, stick to tomato based sauces rather than cream based and you'll enjoy a considerable calorie savings. Lastly, ask for the sauce to be served in a separate dish on the side so you can control the amount you eat.

4. Think about what you're drinking with your meal. By not ordering an alcoholic beverage, you've saved yourself a considerable number of calories. Try sipping iced tea sweetened with a noncaloric sweetener, a diet soft drink, or water with lemon. You'll be glad you did when you consider the calorie savings.

5. Indulge your sweet tooth wisely. Many of the chain restaurants now offer a low fat or low carbohydrate dessert selection such as a low carb cheesecake. These are wise choices for the health conscious eater and still allow you to end the meal on a sweet note. If a healthy dessert option isn't available, try a cup of coffee with skim milk to help satiate your desire for something sweet.

6. Learn to control your portions. Many restaurants are serving larger quantities of food than in the past. If this is the case, put aside a portion of your entree at the beginning of the meal to take home with you. If you remove it from your plate before you start eating, you'll be less tempted to overindulge.

By following these steps, you can make your dining experiences not only healthy, but enjoyable. Your heart will thank you!



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