Sunday, December 25, 2016

Fruits and Vegetables - Vitamin C

Fruits Highest in Vitamin C


  • Papaya (one medium) - 224% (Papaya seeds can be dried and used like black pepper; makes great enzyme supplement)
  • Strawberries (one cup) - 113%
  • Pineapple (one cup) - 105%
  • Oranges (one medium) - 93%
  • Kiwi - (1 - 2 in) 85% (Eat the peels!)
  • Cantaloupe (1 cup) - 78%
  • Grapefruit (1/2) - 59%


  • Vegetables highest in vitamin C

  • Bell Peppers (1 cup red or yellow) - 157% (green peppers are unripe peppers)
  • Broccoli (1 cup) - 135%
  • Brussels sprouts (1 cup) - 129%
  • Cauliflower (1 cup) - 73%
  • Kale (1 cup) - 71%
  • Cabbage (1 cup) - 69%
  • Bok Choy (1 cup) - 59%
  • Parsley (1 cup) - 54%
  • Turnip greens (1 cup) - 53%
  • Sweet potato (1 cup) - 52%





  • Vitamin C is needed for the immune system, but that is not its only claim to fame. Vitamin C is needed for many physiological functions. It is an anti-oxidant. It is a co-factor for eight enzymes, thereby aiding in developing and maintaining scar tissue, blood vessels, cartilage, hormonal stability, biosynthesis of neurotransmitters, and transport of fatty acids into mitochondria.

    So how can you mix and match some of the veggies and fruits above to deliver a power dose of vitamin C to your diet? A fruit salad? Yeah, that's an easy way. But let's look at a more creative recipe.


    Beautiful and delicious kale salad

    • 1 bunch of kale
    • 1 tablespoon of olive oil
    • 1 red bell pepper
    • 1 tart apple
    • handful of walnuts
    • handful of raisins
    • 1 lime
    • honey to taste
    Tear the kale into edible pieces, saving the stems for another recipe or thinly slicing them for this salad.

    Sprinkle olive oil over the leaves (use a little more or a little less as needed) and massage the oil into the leaves with both hands until the leaves become soft and pliant.

    Add sliced red pepper, chopped apples, raisins, and walnuts.

    Juice one lime. Add honey to taste and whisk. Pour over salad and mix well.

    Enjoy!

    Thursday, May 26, 2016

    Eating whole fruits linked to lower risk of Type 2 diabetes


    Eating more whole fruits, particularly blueberries, grapes, and apples, was significantly associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a new study led by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers. Greater consumption of fruit juices was associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes. The study is the first to look at the effects of individual fruits on diabetes risk.
    "While fruits are recommended as a measure for diabetes prevention, previous studies have found mixed results for total fruit consumption. Our findings provide novel evidence suggesting that certain fruits may be especially beneficial for lowering diabetes risk," said senior author Qi Sun, assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH and assistant professor at the Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital.
    The study appears online August 29, 2013 in BMJ (British Medical Journal).
    The researchers examined data gathered between 1984 and 2008 from 187,382 participants in three long-running studies (Nurses' Health Study, Nurses' Health Study II, and Health Professionals Follow-up Study). Participants who reported a diagnosis of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or cancer at enrollment were excluded. Results showed that 12,198 participants (6.5%) developed diabetes during the study period.
    The researchers looked at overall fruit consumption, as well as consumption of individual fruits: grapes or raisins; peaches, plums, or apricots; prunes; bananas; cantaloupe; apples or pears; oranges; grapefruit; strawberries; and blueberries. They also looked at consumption of apple, orange, grapefruit, and "other" fruit juices.
    People who ate at least two servings each week of certain whole fruits -- particularly blueberries, grapes, and apples -- reduced their risk for type 2 diabetes by as much as 23% in comparison to those who ate less than one serving per month. Conversely, those who consumed one or more servings of fruit juice each day increased their risk of developing type 2 diabetes by as much as 21%. The researchers found that swapping three servings of juice per week for whole fruits would result in a 7% reduction in diabetes risk.
    The fruits' glycemic index (a measure of how rapidly carbohydrates in a food boost blood sugar) did not prove to be a significant factor in determining a fruit's association with type 2 diabetes risk. However, the high glycemic index of fruit juice -- which passes through the digestive system more rapidly than fiber-rich fruit -- may explain the positive link between juice consumption and increased diabetes risk.
    The researchers theorize that the beneficial effects of certain individual fruits could be the result of a particular component. Previous studies have linked anthocyanins found in berries and grapes to lowered heart attack risk, for example. But more research is necessary to determine which components in the more beneficial fruits influence diabetes risk.
    "Our data further endorse current recommendations on increasing whole fruits, but not fruit juice, as a measure for diabetes prevention," said lead author Isao Muraki, research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH. "And our novel findings may help refine this recommendation to facilitate diabetes prevention."

    Source:
    Harvard School of Public Health

    Monday, May 23, 2016

    Higher potato consumption associated with increased risk of high blood pressure

    Higher intakes of boiled, baked, or mashed potatoes, and French fries is associated with an increased risk of developing high blood pressure (hypertension) in adult women and men.



    The US-based researchers suggest that replacing one serving a day of boiled, baked, or mashed potatoes with one serving of a non-starchy vegetable is associated with a lower risk of developing hypertension.
    But a linked editorial argues that studying overall dietary patterns and risk of disease is more useful than a focus on individual foods or nutrients.
    Potatoes are one of the world's most commonly consumed foods -- and have recently been included as vegetables in US government healthy meals programs, due to their high potassium content. But the association of potato intake with hypertension has not been studied.
    So researchers based at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School set out to determine whether higher long term intake of baked, boiled, or mashed potatoes, French fries, and potato chips (crisps) was associated with incident hypertension.
    They followed over 187,000 men and women from three large US studies for more than 20 years. Dietary intake, including frequency of potato consumption, was assessed using a questionnaire. Hypertension was reported by participants based on diagnosis by a health professional.
    After taking account of several other risk factors for hypertension, the researchers found that four or more servings a week of baked, boiled, or mashed potatoes was associated with an increased risk of hypertension compared with less than one serving a month in women, but not in men.
    Higher consumption of French fries was also associated with an increased risk of hypertension in both women and men. However, consumption of potato chips (crisps) was associated with no increased risk.
    After further analyses, the researchers suggest that replacing one serving a day of boiled, baked, or mashed potatoes with one serving of a non-starchy vegetable is associated with a decreased risk of hypertension.
    The authors point out that potatoes have a high glycaemic index compared with other vegetables, so can trigger a sharp rise in blood sugar levels, and this could be one explanation for the findings.
    They also acknowledge some study limitations and say that, as with any observational study, no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect.
    Nevertheless, they say their findings "have potentially important public health ramifications, as they do not support a potential benefit from the inclusion of potatoes as vegetables in government food programs but instead support a harmful effect that is consistent with adverse effects of high carbohydrate intakes seen in controlled feeding studies."
    In a linked editorial, researchers at the University of New South Wales argue that, although diet has an important part to play in prevention and early management of hypertension, dietary behaviour and patterns of consumption are complex and difficult to measure.
    "We will continue to rely on prospective cohort studies, but those that examine associations between various dietary patterns and risk of disease provide more useful insights for both policy makers and practitioners than does a focus on individual foods or nutrients," they conclude.


    Wednesday, June 17, 2015



    If you are looking for an easy trick to improve your life and overall health, than look no further. Drinking lemon water first thing in the morning is a pretty simple routine to get into and will have tremendous effects on your overall health.

    Since I started this simple and surprisingly healthy habit a few years ago, I definitely noticed the difference. Not only does the refreshing taste wake me up in the morning, it helps to kick start digestion and finalizes my body’s natural detoxification processes… And lemons are packed with vitamin C, B, calcium, iron, magnesium, potassium, enzymes, antioxidants, and fibers.

    According to the Ayurvedic philosophy, choices you make regarding your daily routine either build up resistance to diseases or tear it down.

    So what are you waiting for to jump start your day with this incredible easy morning routine. Its benefits are endless and I listed the 15 most important ones for you in this article.

    1.    Improves Digestion

    Lemon juice has a similar structure to your stomach’s juices and helps to loosen and flush out toxins from the digestive tract. Lemon juice can help ease indigestion, heartburn, and bloating. It also helps to move your bowels in the morning, hydrates your colon, stimulate bile production, and infuses water in your stool.

    2.    Boost Immune System.

    Lemon juice is rich in vitamin C, which helps strengthen the immunes system and fights cold and flu. But not only vitamin C is important for a good working immune system, iron is another important nutrient, and lemons improve the ability to absorb more iron from the food you eat.

    3.    Hydrates Your Body

    It is important to stay hydrated. Especially during the summer months. Plain water is best, but many people find this boring and are not drinking enough of it. That’s where lemon comes into play to make things more interesting. So feel free to not only start your day with lemon water, but drink as many glasses as you wish during the day to stay hydrated.

    4.    Boost Energy

    Lemon water gives you an instant boost of energy and improves your mood right at the start of your day.

    5.    Promote Healthy And Rejuvenated Skin

    Lemons are a rich sources of antioxidants that prevent free radical damage. These free radicals are responsible for pre-mature aging of your skin. Vitamin C helps to maintain your skin’s elasticity to prevent the formation of wrinkles and decrease blemishes.

    6.    Reduce Inflammation

    Lemons have the ability to remove uric acid from your joints. Uric acid built-ups are one of the major causes of inflammation.

    7.    Weight Loss Aid

    Although lemon water on its own is no weight loss miracle, it can definitely help you to achieve faster and long term results. Lemons assist in fighting hunger cravings, boost metabolism, and give you a stuffed feeling, making it less likely to snack in between meals.

    8.    Alkalize Your Body

    Although lemons have a sour taste, they are one of the most alkalizing food sources on Earth. Too much acids can cause inflammation, obesity, and major diseases like cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

    9.    Cleansing Properties

    Lemons help your entire body to flush out more toxins to prevent built-ups and damage to your cells, tissues, and organs. It stimulates your liver to produce more enzymes and work more efficiently. Lemon juice works as a diuretic to keep your urinary tract toxin-free and can also change the pH levels which discourage bacterial growth. This is very helpful for people who often suffer from UTI (urinary tract infection). And like mentioned before, lemons loosen and flush out waste from your digestive tract and cleanse your colon.

    10.Antibacterial and Antiviral Properties

    Lemons have antibacterial and antiviral properties. They help fight the flu, cold, and soothe a sore throat. Although people who drink their daily lemon water every day are less likely to get these in the first place.

    11.Reduce Mucus And Phlegm

    Lemon water helps to reduce mucus and phlegm formation. People who drink cow’s milk are often more sensitive for mucus production. So starting your day with lemon water can definitely help to lessen mucus if you’re not ready to go dairy-free.

    12.Freshen Breath

    Lemons freshen your breath and fight mouth bacteria. Although lemons are great for your overall oral health, avoid drinking or using it undiluted. The citric acid can erode tooth enamel, so don’t brush your teeth with it, but have a glass of lemon water instead.

    13.Boost Brain Power

    The high levels of potassium and magnesium show beneficial effects on our brain and nerve health. Lemon water can give you the boost you need to fight depression and stress. It creates mental clarity and more focus, making it a great drink for students or people with busy and stressful jobs.

    14.Anti-cancer

    Lemon’s antioxidants not only protect your skin from ageing, but also reduce the risk of several types of cancer. They are great in neutralizing acids as well. Cancer loves to grow in an acidic environment. Alkalizing your body may stop cancer cells to grow and may reduce the risk of getting cancer in the first place.

    15.Get Of Caffeine

    Many people are able to get off caffeine by replacing their morning coffee by lukewarm lemon water. It gives a similar energy boost to wake your body and boost energy as one cup of coffee would.



    How To Make Lemon Water

    Making lemon water is super simple. It takes less than 5 minutes of your precious morning time. Just squeeze half a lemon in lukewarm water. If you weigh more than 150 pounds, use a whole lemon.

    Why use lukewarm (or room temperature) instead of cold or hot water to make this healing morning drink? Well, hot or cold water takes more energy to process, so your first glass in the morning should be lukewarm or at room temperature to slowly wake your body and kick start digestion.

    If you love the taste feel free to add more lemon water to your diet during the rest of the day, cold or hot. It adds up to your daily water need, is less boring than plain water, and adds tons of benefits for body and mind.

    Starbucks' new Frappuccinos contain 'as much sugar as a litre of Coke '




    Cinnamon roll, caramel cocoa cluster, red velvet cake crème- and that's just to drink. But as Starbucks unveiled six new Frappuccino flavours to celebrate the chain's 20th anniversary this week, the amount of sugar in each was also revealed - and it's enough to give you a toothache.

    According to MINA, the worst offender amongst the new flavours is the Cinnamon Roll, which Starbucks describes as "sweet and spicy".

    It's made up of cinnamon dolce syrup blended with coffee, white chocolate mocha sauce and vanilla bean, topped with whipped cream and a cinnamon dolce sprinkle - so perhaps it's no surprise that it also contains an enormous 102g of sugar (20 teaspoons), the equivalent of drinking a one-litre bottle of Coca Cola.

    It's also more than double the recommended daily allowance of sugar for adults in the UK.

    Next on the naughty list is the Caramel Cocoa Cluster, with 97.3g (19 teaspoons) of sugar - made up of toffee nut syrup, blended with coffee, topped with a dark caramel sauce, whipped cream and mocha drizzle.

    At three, it's the Red Velvet Cake Crème, with 87g (17 teaspoons) of sugar hiding inside its chocolate chips, mocha sauce, raspberry and vanilla syrup, topped with whipped cream. That's the equivalent of two slices of carrot cake.

    Then it's the Cotton Candy Crème, which has 83g (16 teaspoons) of the sweet stuff. It's neon pink and is made up of vanilla bean crème, blended with raspberry syrup and, if that wasn't enough, is also topped with whipped cream.

    Cupcake Crème is at number five, with 79g of sugar (15 teaspoons), consisting of vanilla bean crème, blended with hazelnut syrup and the obligatory whipped cream.

    Lastly, the Lemon Bar Crème has 71g of sugar (14 teaspoons) making up its lemonade and vanilla flavour, topped with whipped cream and a caramel sugar sprinkle.

    If you're in Britain and you're still craving something sweet after reading that, then you might have to book yourself a plane ticket - the drinks, which are being dubbed by the coffee giant as 'fan flavours', and are reportedly inspired by the 'secret' Starbucks menu, are currently only available in the US.

    A spokeswoman for Starbucks told The Independent: “We offer over 87,000 drinks that can be customised to suit individual choice, including lighter options for all of the Starbucks Frappuccino range, while our new Mango Passion Fruit Yoghurt Frappuccino comes in at under 200 calories in a tall size.”  

    Tuesday, June 9, 2015

    Why drinking coffee first thing in the morning is a bad idea



    Coffee has ingrained itself in the mechanisms of so many people's early morning routines. There is something romantic about brewing a carafe, or holding a freshly bought cup close, first thing. There is also something practical about it: Sipping piping hot caffeine as soon as possible prepares us for the day — or, at the very least, for the coming few hours.

    But drinking coffee shortly after waking up, as it turns out, is actually a bit counterproductive. Not only does it undermine the caffeine's effect, but it tends to lead people to build a tolerance for the drug, thereby diminishing its effect down the road.

    Our bodies produce a hormone called cortisol, which has been branded the "stress hormone," because it tends to appear when we are either stressed or fearful. But that same hormone is also a key component of our natural, day-long hormonal cycle, known as the circadian clock, which helps wake us up in the morning and wind us down at night. The gist is that when our body releases cortisol, we feel more awake.

    There are two basic problems with consuming caffeine when cortisol production is high. First, caffeine tends to interfere with the production of cortisol. The body then produces less of the hormone and relies more on the caffeine.
    Second, drinking coffee while cortisol is high leads us to develop long-term tolerances for caffeine, which is why so many habitual coffee drinkers say it has less of an effect on them. In effect, caffeine replaces the boost we would ordinarily get from cortisol rather than supplementing it.

    Three times throughout the day — in the early morning, around mid-day, and in the evening–cortisol levels rise.

    It's during the troughs above — between roughly 10 a.m. and noon, and 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.—when people should drink coffee if they want to get the most out of their caffeine. Between those hours, the coffee is actually most needed, and, perhaps most importantly, will not interfere with our body's own essential mechanism for keeping us alert.

    Studies have shown that when people talk about developing a "tolerance" for coffee, they are often talking — albeit unknowingly — about the reality that their coffee consumption has fostered a decrease in the amount of cortisol their body produces during the day.

    Google developing calorie counting robots, so that it will know exactly how much people eat



    Google is developing highly-intelligent robots that can analyse the amount of food on a plate and then count the calories that people are consuming.

    The company hopes that the technology will be used by people to keep closer tabs on what they’re eating, if they’re dieting or looking to restrict how much they eat. A number of similar solutions already exist, but require people either to enter the nutritional information manually or to scan in the packaging of their food and guess how much of it they have eaten.

    The system is called Im2Calories, reports Popular Science. It uses machine learning to recognise the individual pieces of food, measures how big they are in relation to the plate, and then converts them into calories.

    The pictures don't need to be specially-taken or high resolution, so the robots could do their analysis using only Instagram pictures.

    Google already has robots that have learnt to recognise certain things in pictures, using them in its newly-released Google Photos app. Competitors including Flickr have launched similar technology, which uses “machine learning” — computers built to think and understand like humans.

    That means that the system can gradually get better, as human feedback tells it what it’s got wrong or right. Machine learning means that the computers’ designers don’t need to spend time telling it how to recognise things, because its users do instead.

    The company says that the system doesn’t initially need to be that accurate. As long as it’s good enough to get people using it, the AI will start learning from the corrections.

    ““If it only works 30 percent of the time, it's enough that people will start using it, we'll collect data, and it'll get better over time,” said Murphy, according to Popular Science.

    But counting calories has repeatedly been found to be the wrong approach to understanding how healthy a diet is, as The Verge points out. Numerous scientists have said that just eating fewer calories and avoiding fatty foods isn’t a good approach.

    “What you eat makes quite a difference,” the lead author of a 2011 study told the New York Times. “Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”

    The Verge also points out that the machine is using food labels, which have often been shown to be inaccurate.

    The company has filed a patent for Im2Calories. Popular Science reports that Murphy and Google wouldn’t say when it would be available.

    But eventually Google hopes to use the same technology for wider functions.

    “If we can do this for food, that's just the killer app,” Murphy told Popular Science. “Suppose we did street scene analysis. We don't want to just say there are cars in this intersection. That's boring. We want to do things like localize cars, count the cars, get attributes of the cars, which way are they facing.

    “Then we can do things like traffic scene analysis, predict where the most likely parking spot is. And since this is all learned from data, the technology is the same, you just change the data.”

    Google’s focus has moved towards data analysis and machine learning in recent years. At the recent Google I/O developer conference, the company focused less on its Android mobile operating system and other headline products, instead largely selling itself as a data analysis company.

    But that has also made some worried, since the end goal of that analysis is selling the data it generates and using it for ads. If Google knew exactly how much and what food its users were eating, for instance, it might be able to serve special ads for local burger joints when its data indicated that you were probably hungry for one.