Living Healthy: nutrition

Showing posts with label nutrition. Show all posts

Thursday, October 25, 2012

30 Simple Ways to Supercharge Your Diet

It’s not difficult to eat healthier. Just making simple changes to your diet can ramp up the vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients you’re getting. And better nutrition quickly spells better health. To make it easier for you, I’ve compiled 30 simple ways to supercharge your diet. Subscribe to my free e-mag World’s Healthiest News for more great ways to supercharge your diet.

1. Use avocado instead of butter on your sandwiches, buns, or on veggies.

2. Use naturally-sweet stevia instead of sugar. Be wary of powdered stevia that contain other sweeteners though. Stevia tastes sweet but doesn’t contain any form of sugar like glucose, fructose, maltose, etc. so it doesn’t impact blood sugar levels.

3. Drink green tea lemonade (sweetened with stevia, of course) instead of bottled ice tea or soda. Check out my recipe here.

4. Choose brown rice pasta instead of white pasta. Better yet, use kelp noodles if you can find them.

5. The same is true of rice. Choose brown rice instead of white rice.

6. Use stock instead of bouillon to make soup. It’s really easy to do if you add vegetables and water to a slow cooker and allow them to cook for at least 4 to 6 hours to extract the nutrients. Strain the vegetables out and use the liquid as the base for soup. Bouillon is notorious for containing the harmful neurotoxin monosodium glutamate (MSG).

7. Add a can of beans to a pot of homemade soup. It immediately ramps up the protein and fiber and helps you feel full longer so you’re less likely to crave unhealthy snacks.

8. Make your own salad dressings. They take a minute to make and help you obtain important fats. Use the 3:1 ratio: three parts oil (like olive or walnut oil) to one part acid (like lemon or lime juice, or apple cider vinegar). Add herbs and a little unrefined sea salt and maybe a teaspoon of honey (if desired). Shake in a jar or blend with a hand blender.

9. Switch from peanut butter to raw, organic almond butter. Peanuts are vulnerable to molds called aflatoxins which are highly inflammatory. Almonds are less vulnerable.

10. Eat kale chips instead of potato chips. You can purchase them ready-made or you can make your own by tossing kale in a little olive oil and unrefined sea salt, then bake at 275 until light and crispy (usually 15 to 25 minutes).

Keep reading to discover the food to eat instead of ice cream…

1 of 3

Source : care2[dot]com

Friday, October 19, 2012

Feed Your Skin: Leafy Greens

Need a quick tip on choosing the best foods that'll help brighten your complexion? Watch this!

Source : care2[dot]com

Thursday, October 18, 2012

5 Underappreciated Green Vegetables You Should Be Eating

Michelle Obama wants us to make half of our plate fruits or vegetables, it is World Vegetarian Awareness Month, and we all know how over and over vegetables are proven nutrition superheroes. But before the complaints start coming about how our green leafy friends just don’t taste good, try out some lesser known veggies and discover exactly how delicious they can be. If that’s not enough, a new study out this month says that eating green vegetables at least once a week cut participants’ risk of oral cancer by twenty percent. So eat up!

Leeks: In the same family as onions and garlic, leeks, the national vegetable of Wales, are at their peak during fall and winter. They are found primarily in soups, like our Potato Leek Soup, but can also be eaten raw in salads or sautéed. They contain flavonoids, folate, and antioxidant polyphenols, all important for cardiovascular health. Leeks are low in calories, yet one cup provides many vitamins and minerals including half the daily recommended amount of vitamin K and thirty percent of the daily value of vitamin A. Although less researched for health benefits than garlic and onions, leeks are just as beneficial and their milder taste may appeal to those who dislike garlic and onion’s strong flavor. Be sure to wash these well to remove dirt and grit hiding between the leaves.

1 of 5

By Sarah Shultz for DietsInReview.com

Source : care2[dot]com

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Cancer-Proofing Your Body

Lifestyle medicine pioneer Nathan Pritikin was an unlikely candidate to spark a nutrition revolution. He wasn’t a doctor or dietician but an engineer. As featured in my 2-min. NutritionFacts.org video Engineering a Cure, he reversed his own heart disease with a plant-based diet and went on to help millions of others. He even saved the life of my own grandmother, which is what inspired me to go into medicine.

Pritikin’s work has continued though his research foundation. Once Dean Ornish proved that Our Number One Killer Can Be Stopped, the focus shifted from heart disease to cancer. In the video I feature above, I describe an elegant series of experiments in which people were placed on different diets and their blood was then dripped on cancer cells in a petri dish to see which diet was more effective at suppressing cancer growth.

As you can see, even the blood of those on a standard American diet (SAD) fights cancer, but the blood of those on vegan diets fights about 8 times better. The blood circulating within the bodies of vegans appears to have nearly 8 times the stopping power when it comes to cancer cell growth. That was after maintaining a plant-based diet for a year though. Subsequent studies against breast cancer showed the power of eating plants for just two weeks. Watch the video above to see the remarkable results.

This dramatic strengthening of cancer defenses was after 14 days of a plant-based diet and exercise—they were out walking 30 to 60 minutes a day. Although Pritikin started out reversing chronic disease through diet alone, later—to his credit—he added an exercise component as well. That’s great for the patients, but scientifically it makes it hard to tease out which intervention is doing what. Maybe the only reason their blood started becoming so effective at suppressing cancer growth was because of the exercise—maybe the diet component had nothing to do with it. This had to be put to the test.

In my 4-min. video Is It the Diet, the Exercise, or Both? I describe the experiment. Three groups were compared: a plant-based diet and exercise group, an exercise only group, and a control group that did neither. The diet and exercise group had been on a plant-based diet for 14 years along with moderate exercise as simple as walking every day. The second group was exercise and hardcore exercise at that: 14 years of daily, strenuous, hour-long exercise like calisthenics, but they ate the standard American diet. Which group was better at fighting cancer?

The researchers took petri dishes brimming full of human prostate cancer cells and dripped blood from each of the three groups on different dishes to see whose blood kicked more cancer butt. Watch the diet vs. exercise video to see actual photomicrographs of the effects on cancer cells. Basically they found that strenuous exercise worked, but good diet with just moderate exercise worked better.

Even though diet appears more powerful than exercise in terms of rallying one’s cancer defenses it doesn’t mean we can’t do both! In fact eating certain plants can improve athletic performance—check out my video series that starts with Doping With Beet Juice and ends with So Should We Drink Beet Juice Or Not?.

In health,
Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my full 2012 presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.

Image credit: Dr. Raowf Guirguis / National Cancer Institute / Wikimedia Commons

Source : care2[dot]com

Muscle-Building Foods: Quinoa

Need a quick tip on choosing the best foods that'll help you build muscle? Watch this!

Source : care2[dot]com