Striving4Zen

By now, most people know they should be eating more vegetables. But are there ways to get more from the vegetables you already eat?

When it comes to vegetables, it’s not only how much we eat, but how we prepare them, that influences the amount of phytochemicals, vitamins and other nutrients that enter our body.

The benefits are significant. People who consume lots of vegetables have lower rates of heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, eye problems and even cancer. But how should they be served?

Surprisingly, raw and plain vegetables are not always best. In The British Journal of Nutrition next month, researchers will report a study involving 198 Germans who strictly adhered to a raw food diet, meaning that 95% of their total food intake came from raw food. They had normal levels of vitamin A and relatively high levels of beta carotene.

But they fell short when it came to lycopene, a carotenoid found in tomatoes and other red-pigmented vegetables that is one of the most potent antioxidants.

“There is a misperception that raw foods are always going to be better,” says Steven K. Clinton, a nutrition researcher and professor of internal medicine at Ohio State University. “For fruits and vegetables, a lot of times a little bit of cooking and a little bit of processing actually can be helpful.”

The amount and type of nutrients that eventually end up in the vegetables are affected by a number of factors before they reach the plate, including where and how they were grown, processed and stored before being bought. Then, it’s up to you. No single cooking or preparation method is best. Water-soluble nutrients like vitamins C and B and nutrients called polyphenolics are often lost in processing.

Studies show that after six months, frozen cherries have lost as much as 50% of anthocyanins, the healthful compounds found in the pigment of red and blue fruits and vegetables. Fresh spinach loses 64% of its vitamin C after cooking. Canned peas and carrots lose 85 - 95% of their vitamin C, according to the University of California, Davis.

Fat-soluble compounds like vitamins A, D, E and K and the antioxidant compounds called carotenoids are less likely to leach out in water. Cooking also breaks down the thick cell walls of plants, releasing the contents for the body to use. That is why processed tomato products have higher lycopene content than fresh tomatoes.

In January, a report in The Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry concluded that over all, boiling was better for carrots, zucchini and broccoli than steaming, frying or serving them raw. Frying was by far the worst.

Still, there were tradeoffs. Boiling carrots significantly increased measurable carotenoid levels, but resulted in the complete loss of polyphenols compared with raw carrots.

That report did not look at the effects of microwaving, but a March 2007 study in The Journal of Food Science looked at the effects of boiling, steaming, microwaving and pressure cooking on the nutrients in broccoli. Steaming and boiling caused a 22 - 34% loss of vitamin C. Microwaved and pressure-cooked vegetables retained 90% of their vitamin C.

What accompanies the vegetables can also be important. Studies at Ohio State measured blood levels of subjects who ate servings of salsa and salads. When the salsa or salad was served with fat-rich avocados or full-fat salad dressing, the diners absorbed as much as 4 times more lycopene, 7 times more lutein and 18 times the beta carotene than those who had their vegetables plain or with low-fat dressing.

Because nutrient content and taste can vary so widely depending on the cooking method and how a vegetable is prepared, the main lesson is to eat a variety of vegetables prepared in a variety of ways.

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Labels: healthy cooking, healthy diet, NY Times, vegetables, Vitamins

Long part of traditional Chinese medicine, “auricular therapy,” as it is called, entails stimulating key points of the outer ear (corresponding to body parts and functions) with seeds or needles as in traditional acupuncture. The practice is now increasingly being used nationwide to treat an array of ailments.

Ear seeds have long been used stateside for addiction treatment. But today, with the growing demand for alternative therapies, there has been an increase in the practice of using ear seeds (or their metallurgic equivalents, acubeads and ear magnets) for health issues from anxiety to pain to insomnia.

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Labels: alternative treatments, auricular therapy, ear seeds, living holistically, NY Times, Traditional Chinese Medicine

Their results are surprising, even to many of the researchers themselves. The investigators find that while you will slow down as you age, you may be able to stave off more of the deterioration than you thought. Researchers also report that people can start later in life — one man took up running at 62 and ran his first marathon, a year later, in 3 hours 25 minutes.

It’s a testament to how adaptable the human body is, researchers said, that people can start serious training at an older age and become highly competitive. It also is testament to their findings that some physiological factors needed for a good performance are not much affected by age.

Researchers say that you should be able to maintain your muscles as you age, including the muscle enzymes needed for good athletic performance, and you should be able to maintain your ability to exercise for long periods near your so-called lactic threshold, meaning you are near maximum effort.

But you have to know how to train, doing the right sort of exercise, and you must keep it up.
“Train hard and train often,” said Hirofumi Tanaka, a 41-year-old soccer player and exercise physiologist at the University of Texas.

Dr. Tanaka said he means doing things like regular interval training, repeatedly going all out, easing up, then going all out again. These workouts train your body to increase its oxygen consumption by allowing you to maintain an intense effort.

“One of the major determinants of endurance performance is oxygen consumption,” Dr. Tanaka said. “You have to make training as intense as you can.”

Full article....

Labels: aging, anti-aging, exercise, NY Times

“Skinny Bitch,” a diet book that is political, profane, passionately pro-animal rights — and hard-core vegan to boot — was published in 2005 and sold more than 850,000 copies. With its drawing of a svelte “Sex and the City” type on the cover, “Skinny Bitch” looked like a beach read, but it read like boot camp.
The authors, Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman, dressed readers down for following low-fat and low-carb diets, drinking diet soda, entrusting their health to the Food and Drug Administration, and most of all for ignoring the miserable realities of the American meat and dairy industries.
Despite its seemingly indigestible qualities, “Skinny Bitch” became one of the hottest-selling vegan books ever published.
Now, the book’s peculiar combination of girl power, tough love and gross-out tales from the slaughterhouse has been translated to the kitchen. The authors’ new cookbook, “Skinny Bitch in the Kitch,” was published in December and reached No. 6 on the New York Times best-seller list in the paperback advice category last week.
“Skinny Bitch in the Kitch” helpfully condenses the entire content of the first book down to three pages (meat is murder; carbohydrates do not make you fat; always read the ingredients and don’t eat anything you can’t pronounce).
The first book barely mentioned cooking, suggesting an eating style based on fruit, snacks and frozen food from the health-food store. It was a vegan version of the fast-food diet the authors say they used to follow equally zealously.
The cookbook makes little use of traditional Asian meat substitutes (there is one recipe each for seitan and tempeh) but there is a lot of frozen Italian “sausage” and vegan creamer sprinkled around. Recipes without those foods were tastier, such as spaghetti squash with spicy braised greens, raisins and nuts, a huge hit at my table because of its subtle infusion of chipotle chilies.
The authors go beyond veganism at many points, rejecting olive oil for cooking in favor of coconut oil (they believe heating olive oil makes it dangerous to health) and disallowing non-whole-grain foods like semolina pasta and white rice.
“You know how you feel when a tall, thin, pretty woman walks by and something inside you wants to say, ‘That skinny bitch!’?” said Ms. Barnouin, who happens to be tall, thin and pretty. “The book takes that envy and anger and gives you a new place to put it.”
Those places include the F.D.A., the U.S.D.A., white flour and sugar, low-fat dairy products (there is no such thing, the authors assert), aspartame, and several other villains, including lazy readers who might be inclined to whine about eating fruit and herbal tea for breakfast every day for the rest of their lives.
“We really want everyone to stop doing all this stupid math,” Ms. Freedman said. “Just stuff yourself with things that are good for you, and you will be fine.”
They also express solidarity with readers who might suffer from cravings for what they call vice items.
“I still have a weakness for anything with high fructose corn syrup,” Ms. Barnouin said. “There are these vegan riblets in barbecue sauce that I literally could eat three times a day.”
Laboring heroically to make a vegan diet seem like the simplest thing in the world, Ms. Freedman said: “We are normal girls. We like reality TV and purses, all the fun stuff. But we just happen to know that most of what normal girls put in their bodies on a daily basis is barely even food.”

NY Times

Labels: healthy diet, healthy living, Holistic Health, living holistically, NY Times, Skinny Bitch

During the 12 months through Sept. 9, Americans spent $150 million on the top three mass-market natural personal care brands, including Burt’s Bees, Jason Natural Cosmetics and Tom’s of Maine, an increase of $51 million over the year before, according to Information Resources Inc., a market research firm. Meanwhile, sales of organic personal care items reached $350 million last year, an increase of $68 million over 2005, according to manufacturers’ data compiled by the Organic Trade Association, an industry group.
“We’re seeing an increased consciousness that what you put on your body is as important as what goes in your body,” said Jeremiah McElwee, the senior coordinator in charge of personal care at Whole Foods, which is the company’s fastest-growing department. “The biggest impetus for buying natural or organic body care is the perceived health benefit.”
It would seem logical to assume that common ingestible ingredients like olives or soy would naturally be healthier for the skin and body than hard-to-pronounce, multisyllabic industrial cosmetic ingredients like the preservative methylchloroisothiazolinone. But representatives for the government and the beauty industry, as well as some environmental activists, acknowledge that there is no published scientific proof to support the notion that plant-based cosmetics are safer, healthier or more effective for people.

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Labels: NY Times, organic, organic make-up, personal care