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Indigestion And Food Combinations

admin — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:44:22 +0000

There are many causes of indigestion including stress, smoking, alcohol, ulcers, and of course a high fat diet. But what many people do not realize is that most common forms of indigestion in basically healthy people can be prevented by simply eating foods in the correct combinations, or more importantly, avoiding food combinations that are likely to cause indigestion. This article will give you a brief overview of the food combinations that are most likely to give you a pretty bad case of indigestion. Hopefully, after reading this and avoiding these combinations, you’ll find that your bouts of indigestion are few and far between.

The first thing you need to understand is that there are a number of different food groups and each food group uses a different enzyme or group of enzymes to digest that particular group. What happens with people who suffer from chronic indigestion is that they’re usually mixing foods from groups that don’t go together. Why don’t they go together? Because the enzymes required to digest each type of food cancel each other out and ultimately what happens is these foods end up laying in your stomach for long periods of time, thus causing indigestion.

So, what are the food groups and which ones go together and which ones should be avoided during a single meal?

The basic food groups are proteins, which include nuts, seeds, legumes and meats; vegetables, starches, which include potatoes, yams, squash, grains and corn; and fruits, which are further broken into sweet fruits and sour fruits.

Let’s start with fruits because this is the easiest to understand. Fruits should NEVER be eaten with anything. If you’re going to eat fruit, eat it as a snack by itself or way after your meal is over as a dessert. Fruit will ferment with anything that you put with it. Also, do not eat sweet and sour fruits together.

As for the remaining food groups, proteins and vegetables are excellent combinations. A nice salad of greens with some lean turkey or chicken is unlikely to cause indigestion. Do not put tomatoes in your salad. Tomatoes are fruits and will not mix well with everything else.

Vegetables and starches also go very well together. Actually, vegetables are almost the universal safe food as they only things they don’t go well with are fruits.

What trips a lot of people up is eating proteins and starches. We all do it. How many people live on sandwiches for lunch? Even something as simple as turkey on whole wheat is asking for trouble. However, if you restrict your protein and starch combinations to one meal a day, you limit your chances of coming away with an upset stomach.

In addition to avoiding certain food combinations, eating slowly and thoroughly chewing your food will also greatly reduce your chances of coming down with a case of indigestion.

Eleven Heart Healthy Snacks

admin — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 12:55:21 +0000

These snacks get our hearts pumping, literally and figuratively. They’re delicious alternatives to the ho-hum bag of chips or candy bar. Skip the drive-through or the candy aisle and load up on some heart-healthy snacks that will not only maintain your cardiovascular health, but may help you drop a few pounds as well.

1. Vegetables dipped in hummus.

Fresh vegetables are low in calories and have many antioxidants, and many have no fat with plenty of fiber to satiate you. Fiber has also been shown to lower cholesterol. Hummus, made from chick peas, is a great alternative protein without saturated fat.

2. Fruit skewered on a stick with a little dark chocolate for dipping.

Fruit has a variety of antioxidants to fight cancer and heart disease. Dark chocolate has a high concentration of flavinols, a type of antioxidant, to fight heart disease.

3. Half of a cantaloupe filled with fat free cottage cheese, a dash of cinnamon and some berries.

The cantaloupe and berries have antioxidants, and the fat-free cottage cheese fulfills a serving of dairy without the saturated fat.

4. Fat-free yogurt with fruit and a sprinkle of nuts.

Get another serving of dairy without saturated fat as well as antioxidants from fruit and unsaturated fat from the nuts.

5. Smoothies with silken tofu and berries plus a dash of grape juice or pomegranate juice.

Beta-Carotene Boosts Antioxidant Properties

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:50:56 +0000

Pain symptoms that cannot be attributed, or at least not fully attributed, to an organic origin are more frequently and more severely experienced by patients with depression than by those without.

Although the words beta-carotene may sound more like something you would find on a computer instead of in your body, you will want to make sure it is a good portion of your diet. Since beta-carotene is a source of vitamin A, you may think you are eating enough through a healthy intake of meat and eggs, but food sources rich in beta-carotene transform into not one, but two vitamin A molecules in your system essentially doubling their power.

Also called “pro-vitamin A,” by boosting the nutrients from vitamin A by two into your system it stays longer providing maximum health benefits. The other sources of carotenoids—over 100 different sources of antioxidant properties—only provide one molecule of vitamin A, so why settle for one when you can get two?

Because of the incredible antioxidant powers, beta-carotene has proven to effectively protect against multiple types of cancer, especially targeted at lung cancer—the leading cause of cancer deaths throughout the United States. Besides helping to protect from cancer, beta-carotene is especially helpful against vision loss, and past research has shown that this compound also protects from damage caused by free radicals, help for the skin, and a boost of immunity.

Researchers in the 1970s found that beta-carotene can protect the skin from developing an inherited skin disease called erythropoietic protoporphyria, where the sun causes skin to become red and inflamed almost like an allergic reaction. In 1985, a study was done where volunteers taking beta-carotene were found to have more T-helper cells, essential for a healthy immune system. A more recent study among the elderly resulted in a minimum intake of 30mg of beta-carotene per day to increase these cells which are needed to attack unwanted matter within the body.

Beta-carotene is called on to almost single-handedly wipe out free radicals that have already formed in your body. By ridding the body of “singlet oxygen” the species that has the ability to generate free radicals, beta-carotene works overtime to squash the oxygen species before it can turn into skin or lung cancer, but it needs the help of vitamin E. Vitamin E is taken to turn singlet oxygen into its natural state but is destroyed in the process, and also tries to prevent free radicals from ever being formed. Experts recommend that beta-carotene be balanced out with an intake of vitamin E to combat the singlet oxygen together.

As far as a minimum or maximum intake per day for beta-carotene, the government has yet to put a number to it. The good news is that we can eat as much non-toxic beta-carotene food sources we want everyday and not harm your body with the excess amounts. Once converted to vitamin A within the small intestine, any excess will be converted by the liver. If the body cannot use all of the beta-carotene you have consumed, your body doesn’t waste, and knows how to store it properly inside fat tissue or let it circulate through the blood until it is needed. This is why foods like spinach, broccoli, and carrots are on a list of “superfoods” you should be eating.

Here is what else you could be eating to keep the beta-carotene properly stored in your system: Butternut squash, turnip greens, kale, beet greens, red peppers, tomatoes, collard greens, apricots, cantaloupe, peaches, prunes, and the gem of my Thanksgiving table side dishes…the humble and underrated sweet potato.

Another reason to up your dosage of beta-carotene is the possibility that it may protect your cardiovascular health and ward off heart disease, heart attack, or stroke. While hard-pressed to find anything negative about this miracle antioxidant, I did find one possible side effect to eating too many foods high in beta-carotene like sweet potatoes and carrots; you may develop a yellowish tinge to your skin because of the increased levels in your blood, so be sure to watch how much you eat.

Coca-Cola sued over VitaminWater claims

admin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:09:14 +0000

A nutrition advocacy group on Thursday sued the Coca-Cola Co., the biggest beverage maker in the world, over what it calls “deceptive” health claims about VitaminWater.

The Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest accuses Coke of selling what it says is basically sugar water by claiming it has vitamins that boost immunity and reduce the risk of disease.

The group said the health benefit claims that Coca-Cola makes about its VitaminWater are “nonsense.” It filed a class action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California.

“Any nonsensical claim you like, you can find in their line of VitaminWater,” said the group’s senior nutritionist, David Schardt. VitaminWater flavors are marketed with words such as defense, rescue, energy and endurance. The drinks’ top three ingredients are water, cane sugar and crystalline fructose, a form of sugar, according to the bottle labels. The 20-ounce bottle has roughly 33 grams of sugar, compared with about 39 grams in a typical 12-ounce soft drink.

Coca-Cola bought Glaceau’s VitaminWater for $4.1 billion in June 2007. It was considered a coup at a time when consumers were buying less and less soda. Consumers worried about their health had been driving down sales for soft drinks and switching to bottled water and other drinks like VitaminWater. The lawsuit says Coca-Cola “profited enormously” from sales driven by consumers’ health concerns.

“It truly shocks the conscience that a company like Coke would try to keep customers by selling them a soft drink and telling them it’s a vitamin,” said Stephen Gardner, director of litigation for the group. The lead plaintiff in the case, San Francisco resident James Koh, said in a statement, “I was attracted by the prospect of getting extra vitamins. But I had no idea that I was actually getting almost a Coke’s worth of sugar and calories. There’s no way I would have spent money on that, had I known.”

“This is a ridiculous and ludicrous lawsuit,” Coca-Cola spokeswoman Diana Garza Ciarlante said. She called the lawsuit a “cheap, opportunistic publicity stunt.”

“Not only that, consumers can readily see the nutrition facts panels on every bottle of GlacDeau VitaminWater, which show what’s in our product and what’s not,” she said.

This is the second lawsuit the Center for Science in the Public Interest has filed against Coca-Cola. In 2007, the nonprofit sued Coke and NestlDe over claims that their artificially sweetened green-tea drink Enviga would help you lose weight. Also, it sued MillerCoors last fall to stop the brewer from selling Sparks, an alcoholic energy drink. Last month the company agreed to remove some stimulants from its formula.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned Coca-Cola Co., the world’s largest soft-drink maker, that its claims that Diet Coke Plus contains vitamins and minerals violate federal regulations.

The agency said the company product is misbranded, because it includes the content claim “plus,” and it urged Coca-Cola to “take prompt action to correct these violations,” according to the FDAs Web site. Coca-Cola disputed the finding, saying the complaint doesn’t involve health or safety issues, according to the news agency.

The FDA letter said it was not appropriate to fortify snack foods such as carbonated beverages. Diet Coke Plus has vitamins and minerals, including 10 percent of the recommended daily value for magnesium and 15 percent for vitamin B-12.

A company spokesman said the label on Diet Coke Plus complies with FDA policies and regulations and that it plans to reply in detail to the complaint in early January, Bloomberg reported.

The FDA has begun cracking down on companies that overstate the benefits of the products. It has endorsed health claims on several foods, but only after government researchers verified that the products help prevent disease.

It is not uncommong for the FDA to send warning letters to companies that don’t follow regulations for manufacturing and marketing. The letters are not legally binding, but the agency can take companies to court if they are ignored.

RATS & JUNK FOOD

admin — Sun, 25 May 2008 13:56:21 +0000

Ever wonder how you’d feel if you completely changed your diet for a week to 10 days? Scientists experimenting with rats did just that. Granted, we still don’t know how the rats feel. But when they were switched from a low-fat diet to a high-fat diet they showed serious reductions in their physical endurance and cognitive ability.

“After just nine days, they were only able to run 50% as far on a treadmill as those that remained on the low-fat diet,” said the lead author of the study, Dr. Andrew Murray, now at the University of Cambridge.

Endurance depends on how much oxygen can be supplied to muscles and how efficiently muscles release energy by burning the fuel supplied by food. Fat as a fuel is less efficient, but studies on how various diets affect physical performance have been mixed, the authors said.

The rats in the study showed a 30% decline in running stamina after only five days. They also began making more mistakes in a maze task. The rats also had significantly bigger hearts after only nine days.

The study “shows that high-fat feeding even over short periods of time can markedly affect gene expression,” Kieran Clarke, chief of the research team at Oxford, said in a news release. “By optimizing diets appropriately we should be able to increase athletes’ endurance and help patients with metabolic abnormalities improve their ability to exercise and do more.”