Here are some healthy eating tips that will really help you.
- Eat regularly and naturally. Healthy way of eating is not restricting your diet, instead having a balanced diet.
- Do not skip your meals, particularly your breakfast.
- Eat small portions frequently. Eating six small portions each day is better than three large portions a day.
- Include plenty of fresh vegetables in your diet. If they are not available, chose frozen vegetables that are better than canned ones.
- Chose whole grain products. They contain adequate amounts of fiber. These cereals and grains should be the main energy source.
- Eat slowly and enjoy your meals.
- Don't forget to include at least one variety of fruit to each meal. Fruits should be a main part of a healthy diet.
- Restrict the intake of sugar and sweets. Consumption of large amounts of refined sugar may lead to overweight and obesity.
- Avoid unhealthy fats. Animal fat contain large amounts of saturated fatty acids. They are needed for the body. However, eating too much saturated fat will increase your cholesterol levels.
- Trans fat is the worst fat. They are found in margarine and other shortenings. So try to avoid them.
- Protein is an essential component in our meals. It is mainly found in meat, eggs, fish, and pulses.
- Drink one or two cups of milk everyday. Milk is a good source of calcium and other nutrients.
- One of the important tips about healthy eating that I want to share is regarding salt intake. Too much salt can raise your blood pressure. Therefore, use it sparingly.
- Eat blueberries. They contain antioxidants that protect your body from oxidative damage. Blueberries are good for your skin.
- Eat iron rich foods such as meat, green leafy vegetables, and grains.
- Don't forget to include fish in your diet. They are good source of omega 3 fatty acids.
- Eat oysters once or twice a month. They have lots of zinc. It is good for your skin and hair.
- You need to eat vitamin C rich foods everyday. Most of the fruits contain vitamin C in good amounts. Oranges, lemon and tomatoes are some examples.
- Carrots and pumpkins have beta carotene. Include them in your regular diet.
- Try to avoid fast food. They are not a healthy diet.
- Drink plenty of water.
- Soft drinks are not good for your health.
- Chose healthy snacks such as raisins, cereal bars, and fruits.
- Always read the nutrition label in food packages. Look for calories, salt and fat content.
- Teach your kids about healthy eating habits.
LOS ANGELES | The largest study ever on stroke rehabilitation found that doing physical therapy at home improved walking just as well as a high-tech treadmill program.Patients who started rehabilitation late — six months after their strokes — still improved. It’s long been thought that there was little to gain from rehab after half a year.“We now have evidence, for the first time, that a prolonged course of therapy will have benefits,” said Dr. Jeffrey Saver, director of the stroke center at the University of California at Los Angeles. “For virtually everyone, we should be doing more intensive therapy than we are.”He had no role in the federally funded study, which was led by Duke University researchers and discussed Friday at an American Stroke Association conference in Los Angeles.Each year, nearly 800,000 Americans suffer strokes, and up to two-thirds of survivors have problems walking. Sophisticated machines such as robots and weight-supporting treadmills increasingly are being used, but researchers have only limited data on how well they work compared with more traditional therapy.Such equipment is popular in high-end rehab hospitals such as the one in Houston where Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona is being treated after her gunshot wound to the head.The study included 408 stroke survivors who had trouble walking. On average, they took 1,700 steps a day; normal is 10,000 steps a day. They either traveled to a facility to get high-tech rehab or received physical therapy at home. Some began therapy two months after a stroke; others started six months after the stroke to see whether there was a difference.In high-tech rehab, patients exercised on a treadmill while their weight was supported by an overhead harness. As they gained speed and endurance, they could practice walking on their own.In the home program, a physical therapist helped patients do exercises to walk every day and improve strength and balance.After a year, both groups made similar improvements in how far and how fast they could walk. However, the treadmill exercisers were more likely to feel dizzy or faint during training and had a higher risk of falling.Furthermore, only 3 percent of patients dropped out of the home therapy, compared with 13 percent in high-tech rehab.“There’s a tendency in our country to go to high-tech machines,” but this study shows they’re not always better, said Dr. Walter Koroshetz, deputy director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the study’s main sponsor.The bigger message, said study leader Pamela Duncan of Duke, is that more treatment over a longer period is best. She said many insurance companies allow 20 visits, while this study gave 36.The care that stroke victims usually get now — less-intense therapy for three to six months — “does not get them to the point where they could be,” Dr. Koroshetz said.Doctors are working on a cost comparison but think the home program is much cheaper. High-tech rehab requires expensive equipment and two to three therapists per patient; the home program needs only one.Published at: The Washington Times
The food police may find this hard to take, but chocolate has gotten a bad rap. People say it causes acne, that you should eat carob instead, that it's junk food. But these accusations are not only undeserved and inaccurate, they falsely incriminate a delicious food that turns out to have profoundly important healing powers.There is in fact a growing body of credible scientific evidence that chocolate contains a host of heart-healthy and mood-enhancing phytochemicals, with benefits to both body and mind.For one, chocolate is a plentiful source of antioxidants. These are substances that reduce the ongoing cellular and arterial damage caused by oxidative reactions.You may have heard of a type of antioxidants called polyphenols. These are protective chemicals found in plant foods such as red wine and green tea. Chocolate, it turns out, is particularly rich in polyphenols. According to researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, the same antioxidant properties found in red wine that protect against heart disease are also found in comparable quantities in chocolate.How does chocolate help to prevent heart disease? The oxidation of LDL cholesterol is considered a major factor in the promotion of coronary disease. When this waxy substance oxidizes, it tends to stick to artery walls, increasing the risk of a heart attack or stroke. But chocolate to the rescue! The polyphenols in chocolate inhibit oxidation of LDL cholesterol.And there's more. One of the causes of atherosclerosis is blood platelets clumping together, a process called aggregation. The polyphenols in chocolate inhibit this clumping, reducing the risks of atherosclerosis.High blood pressure is a well known risk factor for heart disease. It is also one of the most common causes of kidney failure, and a significant contributor to many kinds of dementia and cognitive impairment. Studies have shown that consuming a small bar of dark chocolate daily can reduce blood pressure in people with mild hypertension.Why are people with risk factors for heart disease sometimes told to take a baby aspirin every day? The reason is that aspirin thins the blood and reduces the likelihood of clots forming (clots play a key role in many heart attacks and strokes). Research performed at the department of nutrition at the University of California, Davis, found that chocolate thins the blood and performs the same anti-clotting activity as aspirin. "Our work supports the concept that the chronic consumption of cocoa may be associated with improved cardiovascular health," said UC Davis researcher Carl Keen.How much chocolate would you have to eat to obtain these benefits? Less than you might think. According to a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, adding only half an ounce of dark chocolate to an average American diet is enough to increase total antioxidant capacity 4 percent, and lessen oxidation of LDL cholesterol.Why, then, has chocolate gotten such a bum reputation? It's the ingredients we add to it. Nearly all of the calories in a typical chocolate bar are sugar and fat.As far as fats go, it's the added fats that are the difficulty, not the natural fat (called cocoa butter) found in chocolate. Cocoa butter is high in saturated fat, so many people assume that it's not good for your cardiovascular system. But most of the saturated fat content in cocoa butter is stearic acid, which numerous studies have shown does not raise blood cholesterol levels. In the human body, it acts much like the monounsaturated fat in olive oil.Milk chocolate, on the other hand, contains added butterfat which can raise blood cholesterol levels. And it has less antioxidants and other beneficial phytochemicals than dark chocolate.Does chocolate contribute to acne? Milk chocolate has been shown to do so, but I've never heard of any evidence incriminating dark chocolate.Dark chocolate is also healthier because it has less added sugar. I'm sure you don't need another lecture on the dangers of excess sugar consumption. But if you want to become obese and dramatically raise your odds of developing diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's disease, foods high in sugar (including high fructose corn syrup) are just the ticket.Are chocolate's benefits limited to the health of the body? Hardly. Chocolate has long been renown for its remarkable effects on human mood. We are now beginning to understand why.Chocolate is the richest known source of a little-known substance called theobromine, a close chemical relative of caffeine. Theobromine, like caffeine, and also like the asthma drug theophylline, belong to the chemical group known as xanthine alkaloids. Chocolate products contain small amounts of caffeine, but not nearly enough to explain the attractions, fascinations, addictions, and effects of chocolate. The mood enhancement produced by chocolate may be primarily due to theobromine.Chocolate also contains other substances with mood elevating effects. One is phenethylamine, which triggers the release of pleasurable endorphins and potentates the action of dopamine, a neurochemical associated with sexual arousal and pleasure. Phenethylamine is released in the brain when people become infatuated or fall in love.Another substance found in chocolate is anandamide (from the Sanskrit word "ananda," which means peaceful bliss). A fatty substance that is naturally produced in the brain, anandamide has been isolated from chocolate by pharmacologists at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. It binds to the same receptor sites in the brain as cannabinoids -- the psychoactive constituents in marijuana -- and produces feelings of elation and exhilaration. (If this becomes more widely known, will they make chocolate illegal?)If that weren't enough, chocolate also boosts brain levels of serotonin. Women typically have lower serotonin levels during PMS and menstruation, which may be one reason women typically experience stronger cravings for chocolate at these times in their cycles. People suffering from depression so characteristically have lower serotonin levels that an entire class of anti-depressive medications called serotonin uptake inhibitors (including Prozac, Paxil, and Zooloft) have been developed that raise brain levels of serotonin.Since I am known as an advocate of healthy eating, I'm often asked about my food indulgences. One of my favorite desserts is a piece of dark organic chocolate, along with a glass of a fine red wine.I do have a policy, though, to eat only organic and/or fair trade chocolate. This is because of what I have learned about child slavery in the cocoa trade.May your life be full of healthy pleasures.
New research published online today in the journalScience found that newborn mice can regenerate working heart tissue.So what's the big whoop? Scientists already knew that certain amphibians and fish could regenerate cardiac tissue.Well that, it turns out, is what inspired researchers at the Southwestern Medical Center in Texas to consider the possibility that mammalian hearts could also regenerate. Given the similarities in the hearts of adult zebrafish -- which can regrow tissue -- and immature mammals, researchers wondered if they couldn't "conserve," as they put it, the same mechanisms of regeneration in mice.The results? Within 21 days of scientists surgically removing a portion of the left ventricular apex from newborn mice, the tissue had completely regenerated. The problem, though, is that researchers found mice lost the capacity to regenerate cardiac tissue by the time they were seven days old.The potential implications, the scientists report, is this: "For a brief period after birth, the mammalian heart appears to have the capacity to regenerate." Which means, according to The Guardian, potentially very good things for heart attack sufferers."Now that we know that the mammalian heart indeed possesses the potential to regenerate, at least early in life," Eric Olson, one of the study's authors told The Guardian, "we can begin to search for drugs or genes or other things that might reawaken this potential in the adult heart of mice and eventually of humans."Shared from: The Huffington Post
By Jenifer Goodwin
Friendly discussions with other people can help you solve common life challenges, but conversations that are competitive in tone aren’t helpful, finds a new study.“This study shows that simply talking to other people, the way you do when you’re making friends, can provide mental benefits,” lead author Oscar Ybarra, a psychologist and researcher at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, said in a university news release.In this study of 192 undergraduates, the researchers examined the effect that brief episodes of social contact had on a type of cognition called executive function, which includes working memory, self-monitoring, and the ability to suppress external and internal distractions. These mental processes are essential in dealing with day-to-day problems.Engaging in a short, 10-minute conversation in which they got to know another person helped boost the participants’ performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. But when the conversations had a competitive tone, the participants showed no improvement on the cognitive tasks.The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.“We believe that performance boosts come about because some social interactions induce people to try to read others’ minds and take their perspectives on things,” Ybarra said. “And we also find that when we structure even competitive interactions to have an element of taking the other person’s perspective, or trying to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, there is a boost in executive functioning as a result.”The findings suggest that having a friendly talk with a colleague before a big test or presentation may prove beneficial, according to the researchers.More informationThe U.S. National Center for Learning Disabilities has more aboutexecutive function.– Robert PreidtSOURCE: University of Michigan, news release, Oct. 28, 2010Last Updated: Nov. 04, 2010Copyright © 2010 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Eating a diet rich in fiber—especially the kind of fiber found in whole grains—reduces the risk of dying at an early age from a range of causes, a new government study suggests.Fiber’s beneficial effects on heart health have been known for decades, so it wasn’t surprising that eating a lot of fiber was associated with a lower risk of death due to heart attackand heart disease. But fiber intake also appears to lower the risk of dying from respiratory diseases (such as pneumonia and chronic bronchitis) and infectious diseases, the study found.“The benefits of fiber are broader than what had been anticipated or previously studied,” says Frank Hu, MD, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, who co-authored an editorial accompanying the study. Both were published today on the website of the Archives of Internal Medicine.The source of the fiber appears to be critical. Consuming fiber from whole grains was most strongly linked to a lower risk of dying during the study, while fiber from vegetables and beans appeared to have a minimal impact on death risk. The fiber in fruit seemed to offer no protection at all.The study, which was funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), also found a link between fiber consumption and a reduced risk of death from cancer, but only in men.“We only see significant effects from whole grains,” says the lead author of the study, Yikyung Park, a researcher in the NCI’s nutritional epidemiology branch. “But we don’t know how this fiber works to improve health.”This unexpected finding suggests that the antioxidants and other nutrients in whole grains—not just the fiber—may be partly responsible for promoting health and long life.“Is the fiber in whole grains truly different? Or are you getting the benefits from [the other nutrients]?” says David Frid, MD, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic who was not involved in the study. “We don’t know.”Park and her colleagues analyzed data on more than half a million AARP members between the ages of 50 and 71 who answered survey questions about their eating habits as part of a nine-year study on diet and health.The participants who reported eating the most fiber—about 30 grams a day for men, and 25 grams a day for women—were 22% less likely to die from any cause during the study than those who consumed the least (about 13 grams and 11 grams for men and women, respectively).Published at: health.com