Healthy Eating Archives

Evidence-Based Health Benefits of Almonds

imgresAlmonds are an incredibly popular tree nut.

Despite being high in fat, they are highly nutritious and extremely healthy.

Here are 9 evidence-based health benefits of almonds.

Almonds Deliver a Massive Amount of Nutrients

The almond is a very popular tree nut. Almonds are high in healthy monounsaturated fats, fiber, protein and various important nutrients.

Almonds Are Loaded With Antioxidants

Almonds are high in antioxidants that can protect your cells from oxidative damage, a major contributor to ageing and disease.

Almonds Are High in Vitamin E, Which Protects Your Cell Membranes From Damage

Almonds are among the world’s best sources of vitamin E. Getting plenty of vitamin E from foods is linked to numerous health benefits.

Almonds Can Assist With Blood Sugar Control

Almonds are extremely high in magnesium, a mineral that most people don’t get enough of. High magnesium intake may have major benefits for metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.

Continue reading…

th benefits of almonds.

Does Your Diet Affect Your Mood?

apple-15687_640While it may seem harmless enough, what you choose to eat for lunch could impact how you feel all afternoon. We all know about the “hangries” — being so hungry that you become cranky and angry — but once you’re fed, your meal can actually enhance or detract from your mental state.

While exercise is also an important factor, eating a diverse diet of healthy, wholesome foods can have an incredible impact on how you feel each and every day.

Here are 5 ways in which the foods you eat (or don’t eat) rule your moods.  

Black Pepper: More Than a Spice

Black pepper is perhaps the most popular spice in the world, and black, green and white peppercorns all come from the black pepper plant (Piper nigrum), native to Asia. Black pepper is the whole, partially ripened fruit; green is the unripe fruit; and white pepper is derived from the peeled seed. Some reasons to eat black pepper?

  1. It is a proven antibacterial agent.
  2. It contains compounds that help maintain the integrity of DNA, possibly providing some protection against cancer.
  3. It has been known to help calm digestive issues

See more…

Eating too Many Processed Foods?

Snack Box Diet Vegetables

Snack Box Diet Vegetables

Could it be that we really are eating too many processed foods?

I would say yes!

But what is the alternative?

Is getting back to nature one of them?

For a long time the question has been posed that staying along the lines of “Can eating like Neanderthal or an ape improve our health?”

When we see how many diseases there are apparently connected to high cholesterol and blood pressure –  we’re told that the numbers of these diseases are on the increase day by day. It does rather raise the issue about whether or not our current western diet is actually a major factor or cause, of these cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension, stroke and diabetes.

Paying the Price

That of course leads us onto the second question: “Are we paying the price for eating all these processed foods?”

Dietician Lyn Garton was responsible for taking ten volunteers on a journey back to our culinary roots, where she took a leaf out of our ancestors’ cookbooks, just to see what impact a comparatively short few days of eating much healthier food would have on reducing the risk of fatal illnesses, as mentioned above.

At the end of the test, biological markers for cholesterol and hypertension were measured to see how successful this test was. After the twelve day test, the groups total cholesterol fell by over 23%, and there was a marked decrease in the amount of sodium levels. From all of this, we can conclude that simply by introducing changes into our diet, by moving away from processed foods towards more healthily organically based foods, our health can be dramatically improved.

All the volunteers used in this test were chosen because they had above-average levels of cholesterol, according to the doctors, ranging from between 5 and 6.8. Also the test group confessed that they were eating diets which had very few fruits and vegetables, and were probably very high in trans-fats and many of them were confessing a life of fast, processed food.

Now obviously, the dramatic results from this test were slightly skewed because the volunteers were following a diet that had 5kg of fruit and vegetables a day, which with a balanced controlled carbohydrate diet would prove unnecessary, and in fact the pressures of our modern lives would probably make this totally impractical.

The Value of Good Vegetables.

However, what it does show is that if you want to lower your triglycerides levels then cutting down on processed foods and re-introducing vegetables, nuts and certain fruits into your diet would make that possible.

Here is just a small sample:

 

  • Apples
  • Apricots
  • Asparagus
  • Avocado
  • Bananas
  • Blueberries
  • Broccoli
  • Cabbage
  • Carrots
  • Cashews
  • Cauliflower
  • Cherries
  • Courgettes
  • Dates
  • Figs
  • Grapes
  • Hazelnuts
  • Honey
  • Kiwi fruit
  • Mange toutes
  • Mangoes
  • Melons
  • Mushrooms
  • Olives
  • Paw-paws
  • Peaches
  • Peanuts
  • Pears
  • Peas
  • Peppers
  • Plums
  • Radishes
  • Raspberries
  • Satsumas
  • Spring Onions
  • Strawberries
  • Sugar-snap peas
  • Summer Cabbage
  • Tomatoes
  • Walnuts
  • Watercress

To name but a few!

Many of these are allowed on The Snack Box Diet and would add a tasty addition to what you may be eating already.

As we’ve said before, variety is something to aim for in any diet – the more the merrier.

The Metabolism myth

Healthy Photo by artistlike

You eat less than your skinny friend but still put on weight – can that be true?

It is true that our metabolism – the rate at which we process the food we eat – varies from person to person.

What is not clear is why two people can appear to eat virtually the same amount of food, which causes one to be thin and the other to pile on the pounds.

We uncover some home truths…

Many of us have friends who seemingly can eat anything they want and never put on weight. Whereas there are some of us who can just look at a slice of cake and we can feel our waistline getting bigger by the second. Whilst metabolism may have some effect, the answer is not as simple as we may think.

The Test

In this test, two friends – Cindy and Michelle – were the volunteers. They both have very different shaped bodies. Cindy was very slim while Michelle was nearly 15kg over her desired weight.

They both thought that the amount that you ate was really down to your metabolic rate.

Over the course of ten days, both Cindy and Michelle were watched closely and also asked to record how much food they ate in their food diaries.

However, it wasn’t left entirely to chance, or the honesty of the two ladies! At the beginning of the test they were each given half a litre of doubly labelled water. This is water in which both the hydrogen and the oxygen have been partly replaced with an uncommon isotope of these elements, in this case a non-radioactive form of deuterium and oxygen 18.

By doing this, it was possible to see exactly how many calories each of the girls were consuming, as well as the energy they were using just by moving around, by examining a urine sample each day.

It won’t be too much of a surprise that by the end of the week, the urine samples didn’t match the food diaries! The urine samples showed that although they did much the same amount of activity, Cindy actually ate 50% less each day than Michelle did.

Here is a simple but stark fact, and it may fly in the face of a lot of things that you understand, the fact is that the larger you are, the higher amount of energy your body will use, even at rest.

This means that your metabolic rate is higher as well. If you think about it, this is obvious, because even though you are at complete rest, larger people need more energy to pump the blood around the body and keep moving. You could use the analogy of a big car, having a big engine, so it uses more fuel to move itself around. In the same way, a bigger person uses more energy to move themselves around.

So the next time you’re tempted to blame your metabolism for your weight, remember, here’s the simple stark truth.

Some people eat less.

The other thing that should be pointed out is that whilst our two friends thought they both ate about the same, remember, Cindy ate 50% less than Michelle, and no-one was more surprised about that than her!

Now it is possible to make your metabolism work faster. One of the simplest ways of doing that is by exercising to the point where you start to be out of breath.

Once your body gets the message that it needs to ‘up’ the energy level – it will continue to do so even when the exercise has stopped.

That means you’ll be using up more calories even when you’re sleeping.

How Your Body Gets Energy

How Our Bodies Get Energy

How Our Bodies Get Energy

Do you know how your body gets the energy it needs and what it does with it?

Like many people, you will probably have an idea but no real details about how our bodies get and use the food we eat. So here’s a quick resume covering the two most misunderstood hormones our bodies use.

Knowing about these will give you an insight about how our bodies convert what we eat into energy and what happens to the excess ‘energy’ our bodies produce. More importantly, it will show you just how you can gain more control over what your bodies does with what you eat and how by having that knowledge, you can get the most from the Snack Box Diet through evening out your eating habits.

Where we get our Energy

Glucose is a simple sugar that provides energy to all of the cells in your body. Your cells then take in glucose from your blood and break it down for energy.

For instance, brain cells and red blood cells rely solely on glucose for fuel. The glucose in your blood comes from the food you eat.

When you eat, food gets metabolised via your intestines and is distributed through the bloodstream to the cells in your body. In all conditions your body tries to keep the supply of glucose constant, maintaining as consistent as possible glucose concentration in the blood. If it did not do this [private_silver](as in diabetes for example) your cells would have too much glucose right after a meal (particularly one that is high in carbohydrates) and starve in between meals and during sleep.

When you have an excess of glucose, your body stores this in your liver and muscles by making glycogen, long chains of glucose. Conversely, when glucose is in short supply, your body mobilizes glucose from stored glycogen and/or stimulates you to eat food.

To maintain this constant blood-glucose level, your body uses two hormones – insulin and glucagon. These are produced in your pancreas and have opposite actions.

The Pancreas

Your pancreas is formed from clusters (Islets) of alpha and beta endocrine cells. The beta cells secret insulin and the alpha cells secret glucagons. Both these secretions are protein hormones made up of amino acids.

What Insulin Does

Insulin is used by almost all of your body’s cells, but it’s most active in the liver, fat and muscle cells. Insulin has the following effect:-

  • Inhibits the liver and kidney cells from making glucose from intermediate compounds of metabolic pathways (gluconeogenesis)
  • Causes the liver and muscle cells to store glucose in glycogen
  • Stimulates fat cells to form fats from fatty acids and glycerol
  • Causes the liver and muscle cells to make proteins from amino acids

Insulin production is the signal for the body to store energy (as fat). It does so by reducing the concentrations of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids in the bloodstream.

What Glucagon Does

Now when you don’t eat or eat food that have a very low glycemic index  (Are low in carbs), your pancreas releases glucagons instead which causes your body to produce glucose… Glucagon acts on the same cells as insulin, but has the opposite effects in that it:

  • Stimulates the liver and muscles to break down stored glycogen (glycogenolysis) and release the glucose
  • Stimulates gluconeogenesis in the liver and kidneys

The action of glucagon is opposite to insulin in that glucagon mobilizes glucose stored inside your body and increases the level of glucose in your blood, thus stopping your blood glucose levels from falling dangerously low.

How Insulin and Glucagons Work as a Tag Team

Under normal circumstances, the levels of insulin and glucagon are effectively counter balanced.

When you eat, your body metabolises the food quite rapidly and registers the presence of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids absorbed from the food. This causes the pancreatic beta cells to release insulin into your blood and inhibit the pancreatic alpha cells from secreting glucagon.

As the levels of insulin in your blood begin to rise they act on the liver, fat and muscle cells in particular causing them to absorb the incoming molecules of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids. The insulin acts to prevent the concentration of glucose, fatty and amino acids from increasing too greatly in the bloodstream.

In this way, your body maintains a steady blood-glucose concentration. This action occurs when you eat a properly balanced diet as opposed to the high carb diet of today. Unfortunately, where the diet is high in carbs (or there is just too much food) it has to go somewhere and inevitably, it is deposited as fat in just where you don’t want it to go.

Between meals, or when you are sleeping, your body senses that it is effectively starving. However your cells still need a supply of glucose to keep going. So while in this condition, the slight drops in blood-sugar level stimulate glucagon secretion from the alpha cells in the pancreas and in turn inhibit the release of insulin.

This causes glucagon levels in the blood to rise and start acting on the liver, muscle and kidney cells to mobilize glucose from glycogen to make glucose that’s then released into your blood. Such action prevents the blood-glucose levels from falling too much.

This change occurs many times throughout the day with the secretion of either insulin or glucagons helping to keep your blood-glucose level relatively constant, typically in the range of 90 mg per 100 ml of blood.

However, seeing as the secretion of the pancreas lag behind the blood glucose levels, the action of eating large quantities of high carb food will drastically disturb this. Simply put, when the blood glucose level is overly high more quantities of insulin will be produced than are needed as the glucose will have been dealt with. So more glucose will have been absorbed than was necessary. This will cause a dip in the blood glucose level causing us to feel a lack of energy and trigger a production of glucagon.

Sunday Lunch Syndrome

This is something I call the “after Sunday lunch syndrome” as it is most often seen after a big meal. You will most likely have noticed that 30 – 60 minutes after eating far too much (as in a typical Sunday lunch) and then not moving a great deal either, you tend to feel really sleepy and quite soon many will also start to get the munchies and go looking for that last roast potato or piece of pie. In fact the body is wanting anything that will get the blood sugar up again – and so the cycle continues…

What Can You Do?

Well, the most obvious first step is to cut down on foods with a high level of carbohydrates in them.

The nest thing would be to even out the amount you eat by eating smaller quantities more regularly throughout the day.

Just by taking these two small steps in cahnging what and how you eat will make a masive difference to how your body reacts to what you eat. And that will be shown by improved or more even energy levels and slowing down or even reversing the process of fat gain.  I.E. You will start to lose fat instead of putting it on.[/private_silver]

 

Advantages of Raw Milk

Milk Photo by Kyle MayI’m very fortunate to live iin a community where we can get good quality raw milk – in our local supermarket (SPAR). It comes from a farm a little up the valley and if I have a mind to do so I can even go and watch the cows as they making it for me. (OK not just for me – but you never know…)

But just why should we want to drink raw milk, why is it better then treated milk?

Thomas Cowan MD explains

As I’m sure most of you know by now, there are very few subjects as emotionally charged as the choice of one’s diet. Sexual relations, marriage and finances come to mind as similarly charged subjects and, like diet, we are all sure we know all we need to know about each of these subjects. The subject of milk, as I have discovered during the past four years, when properly viewed will challenge every notion you currently have about what is good food and what isn’t.

The story of milk is complex and goes something like this.

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A Little History…

Back in the pre-processed food era (that is before about 1930 in this country) milk was considered an important food, especially for children. Not only was there an entire segment of our economy built up around milk but, as I remember, each house had its own milk chute for the delivery of fresh milk directly to the house. It was unquestioned that milk was good for us and that a safe, plentiful milk supply was actually vital to our national health and well-being. It was also a time (now I’m referring to the early part of the century) when many of the illnesses which we currently suffer from were rare.

As an example, family doctors would often go their whole careers without ever seeing a patient with significant coronary artery disease, breast or prostate cancer, whereas current doctors can hardly go one month without encountering a patient with such an illness. Furthermore, as scientists such as Weston Price, DDS discovered, there were pockets of extremely healthy, long-lived people scattered about the earth who used dairy products in various forms as the staple of their diets — further evidence that milk and its by-products were amongst the most healthful foods man has ever encountered.

Recent past

If we fast forward to the 1980’s, we now find an entirely different picture. For one thing, there have been numerous books written in the past decade about the dangers of dairy products — the most influential being a book by Frank Oski, MD, the current chairman of paediatrics of Johns Hopkins University and perhaps the most influential paediatricians in this country. It’s called Don’t Drink Your Milk. In it Oski pins just about every health problem in children to the consumption of milk, everything from acute and chronic ear infections, constipation, asthma, eczema, and so on. Secondly, just about all patients I have now in their initial visit proudly announce that they have a good diet and that, specifically, they don’t eat dairy (which they pronounce with such disdain).

One might well ask where the truth in this picture. Perhaps the experiments of Dr. Francis Pottenger in the 1940’s can help to solve this mystery. In these experiments Dr. Pottenger fed one group of cats a diet consisting of raw milk, raw meat and cod liver oil. Other groups were given pasteurized milk, evaporated milk or sweetened condensed milk instead of raw milk. The results were conclusive and astounding. Those that ate raw milk and raw meat did well and lived long, happy, active lives free of any signs of degenerative disease. Those cats on pasteurized milk suffered from acute illnesses (vomiting, diarrhea) and succumbed to every degenerative disease now flourishing in our population, even though they were also getting raw meat and cod liver oil. By the 3rd generation a vast majority of the cats were infertile and exhibited “anti-social” behavior — in short, they were like modern Americans.

What’s ‘in’ Milk

Since the 40’s the “qualities” of milk have been extensively studied to try to find an explanation for these dramatic changes. Studies have shown that before heating, milk is a living food rich in colloidal minerals and enzymes necessary for the absorption and utilization of the sugars, fats and minerals in the milk. For example, milk has an enzyme called phosphatase that allows the body to absorb the calcium from the milk. Lactase is an enzyme that allows for the digestion of lactose.

Butterfat has a cortisone-like factor which is heat sensitive (destroyed by heat) that prevents stiffness in the joints. Raw milk contains beneficial bacteria as well as lactic acids that allow these beneficial bacteria to implant in the intestines. All of these qualities are destroyed during pasteurization. Once heated, milk becomes rotten, with precipitated minerals that can’t be absorbed (hence osteoporosis), with sugars that can’t be digested (hence allergies), and with fats that are toxic.

Raw milk has been used as a therapy in folk medicine — and even in the Mayo Clinic — for centuries. It has been used in the pre-insulin days to treat diabetes (I’ve tried it — it works), as well as eczema, intestinal worms, allergies, and arthritis, all for reasons which can be understood when we realize just what is in milk — such as the cortisone-like factor for allergies and eczema.

How to Ruin Milk

Another way we ruin milk is by feeding cows high protein feed made from soybeans and other inappropriate foodstuffs. Rarely is anyone truly allergic to grass-fed cow’s milk.

Fresh raw milk, from cows eating well-manured green grass is a living unprocessed whole food. Compare this to the supposedly “healthy” soy milk which has been washed in acids and alkalis, ultrapasteurized, then allowed to sit in a box for many months.

The Pottenger cat studies provide a simple but profound lesson for all Americans: Processed, dead foods don’t support life or a happy well-functioning society. We must return to eating pure, wholesome, unprocessed foods, including whole raw milk from pasture fed cows.

In my practice I ALWAYS start there — I encourage, insist, even beg people to eat real foods— no matter what the problem. Often with just this intervention the results are gratifying. SO, find a cow, find a farmer, make sure the cow (or goat, llama, or whatever) is healthy and start your return to good health!

Author: Thomas S Cowan MD

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Cashews Are A Natural Anti-Depressant

 

Cashew Photo by hthorg

2 handfuls of cashews is the therapeutic equivalent of a prescription dose of Prozac. Inside you, the essential amino acid L-tryptophan is broken down into anxiety-reducing, snooze-inducing niacin. Even more important, tryptophan is also made into serotonin, one of your body’s most important neurotransmitters. Serotonin gives a feeling of well-being and mellowness, or as the Australians would say, “no worries.” This is such a profound effect that Prozac, Paxil and similar antidepressants usually either mimic serotonin or artificially keep the body’s own serotonin levels high. You can do the same thing with your food. And no one can tell us that beans, peas, cheese, nuts and wheat germ are toxic if you eat a lot of them!

Plenty of carbohydrates (starches) in your meals help tryptophan get to where it does the most good: in your brain. In order to cross the blood-brain barrier to get in, carbos are required. So cheese and crackers provides a better effect than the cheese standing alone. An egg or two on toast is better than just the egg. Beans, peas, and nuts already contain carbohydrate, so you are all set there.

Consider that five servings of beans, a few portions of peanut butter, or just one big handful of cashews provides one to two thousand milligrams of tryptophan, which will work as well as prescription antidepressants… but don’t tell the drug companies. Some skeptics think that the pharmaceutical people already know. Here are two quotes in evidence:

“Pay careful attention to what is happening with dietary supplements in the legislative arena… If these efforts are successful, there could be created a class of products to compete with approved drugs. The establishment of a separate regulatory category for supplements could undercut exclusivity rights enjoyed by the holders of approved drug applications.” (Source: FDA Deputy Commissioner for Policy David Adams, at the Drug Information Association Annual Meeting, July 12, 1993).

Here are 15 other Amazing Health Benefits Of Cashew Nuts – http://www.healthdigezt.com/cashews-are-a-natural-anti-depressant/

Snack Box Diet Food Preperation

Snack Box Diet Food Preperation

This is one problem you won’t have with the snack box diet as when you think about it, you are preparing all your meals for the day at the same time. And even if your still having to prepare meals for the rest of the family, it won’t really take up any more time.

The real keys here are planning and using your time wisely.

Planning is virtually self-explanatory.

With most diets you would be encouraged to sit down at the beginning of the week and sensibly plan what it is you’re going to eat throughout the week or even the month. With the snack box diet this is done for you.

Not only that but the shopping list has also been taken care of as well.

So there is a huge time gain over other diet systems.

Wise Use of Time

This again is fairly self-explanatory.

If you’ve got to be in the kitchen preparing food, you may as well be doing the preparation – not just for the meal that you’re going to eat immediately, but also for the meal that you might be eating later on or even the next day.

While you’re waiting for one pot to come to the boil or something to finish cooking under the grill or in the oven, you can make preparations for what it is you’re going to need for a later meal.

Then all you need to do is store it safely in the cooler ready to be used as and when it’s needed.

Even simple things like doing a few days salad preparation in one hit, and then storing it in a plastic bag in the cooler, can gain you so much time it would seem a shame not to take those opportunities.

So there you have a few seeds for thought, it’s really up to you to take them and nurture them, and build on them, using probably the most valuable tool any cook can have.

That tool? … Plain common sense.

What do I do?

For instance, the other weekend, we had a stir-fry Chinese meal, and when I was preparing the vegetables for that I didn’t just prepare the vegetables that I needed for the immediate meal, I literally doubled the quantity and put the excess into the fridge ready for another meal.

Let’s face it, it’s not the actual work of chopping and peeling and things like that that take the most time – it’s the getting things out and prepared and the clearing away afterwards that takes the most time. So just by doing two lots of vegetables at one time, you gain 15-20 minutes preparation and clearing up time in one fell swoop!

Other things, for example, if you’re cooking a chicken – cook a slightly bigger chicken so that you’ve got extra meat left over that you can then use in another meal, such as a chicken salad. It’s all of these little things that build up in order for you to gain time.

Can Eating More Dairy Help you Lose Fat?

Cheese, Cream, more cheese, in fact everything and anything dairy can be found on the Snack Box Diet plates.

Eating high calcium, higher fat dairy foods, may not be the heart attack weighting to happen foods many people think they are. In fact they can be one of those foods that actually helps you to lose fat, and for good reason too.

Danish Study on Eating More Calcium

Now, a recent study conducted in Denmark has observed that the more calcium you eat in your diet the less body fat you will have, and therefore the less you will weigh. This points to the fact that not only is dairy a high-energy food, it could be that dairy itself can help you absorb less fat.

Professor Arne Astrup, Head of Human Nutrition at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen, Denmark, undertook a study to prove this fact.

In the study, a group of volunteers spent one week eating a diet that was high in calcium, typically more than 2000milligrams of calcium a day; and week 2 was on a low calcium diet, where they were eating around about 500milligrams of calcium a day.

These diets were designed so that they had the identical amount of calories and crucially, they also had the same fat content each week.

The known science led the researchers to expect that the higher calcium diet would indeed cause the body to absorb less fat than on the lower calcium diet.

Better than Expected

However, the results that actually came out were even better than expected, in fact on the higher calcium diet tests on the subjects excretions showed that they passed through twice as much fat as they did on the lower calcium diet.

Putting that another way, on the higher calcium diet they absorbed only half the amount of fat than they did on the lower calcium diet.

What this means for snack box dieters is that when you eat dairy products, not all of their calories count.

But of course, that still doesn’t give you an excuse to binge out on cheese!

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