Food

Ginger – The Amazing Healing Herb

Ginger is a very good antioxidant and has anti-bacterial, antiseptic, sedative and antipyretic effect. Fresh ginger submerged in warm water, deeply penetrates the tissue, brakes down and melts accumulated mucus, initiate circulation, relieves pain, inflammation and swellings, accelerates detoxification it is very useful in the case of muscle inflammation and chronic back pain.

Ginger – The Amazing Healing Herb

Melts fatty deposits

This healing root speeds up the muscle metabolism, lowers cholesterol, helps in secretion of saliva and ingested food starch, reduces bloating and constipation, all of which contributes to weight loss.
If you want to loose weight fast, add to yo meals fresh or dried ginger or drink tea made from this beneficial root.

Improves mental capacities

Ginger relieves headaches and contribute to a better brain function. If it in any way we use it during the day, we will be fresher and will have more strength and energy, and if in the evening we eat hot vegetable soup with an addition of ginger, we will provide our self a good rest and sleep.

Lowers Stress

Ginger is rich in antioxidant, which helps in harmful chemicals removal, that our body produces when we are under worries, and thus affects the reduction of psychological stress. During this depression treatment it also impairs and the digestion process followed by occurrence of nausea, for which ginger is the ideal cure for these problems too.

Fights against colds and flu

If you regularly use ginger, you can easily prevent and fight the flu or colds, as well as the potential complications from these diseases. Ginger will strengthen our immune system, facilitate breathing and relieve headaches. It encourages sweating, so that`s why it`s excellent for lowering high body temperatures.

Cures Arthritis

Since ginger has anti-inflammatory properties, it is highly effective in the treatment of rheumatoid arthiritis, osteoarthritis and other diseases of the musculoskeletal and connective tissue. Some studies show that in the case of arthritis, ginger is even more effective than other conventional drugs and medications.

Cure for cold hands and feet

Herb ginger is a powerful tool for engaging of the circulatory system.
If you suffer from cold hands and feet you should drink tea from this medicinal herb.

Source: only pure nature

Meet the man who has eaten pizza for every meal for 25 years

When Dan Janssen tells people about his pizza-only diet, he usually gets one of two reactions.

“They either want to kill me, or they think I’m a hero,” he told.  Janssen, 38, claims that he has eaten pizza for nearly every meal over the past 25 years. He said he rarely eats breakfast, subsisting on mainly coffee in the morning, and then downs a whole pizza for lunch and another one for dinner, day after day.

“I think I’m an anomaly,” he said. “I don’t advocate this. I’ve been surprised at how polarizing this is.”

Janssen, the founder of artisanal woodshop Imperium Woodcraft in Ellicott City, Md., was raised on a meat-and-potatoes diet but became a vegetarian for ethical reasons when he was 14 years old. There was just one problem with that.

“I hate vegetables,” he said. “I tried for maybe a couple weeks, and then I realized the thing I really like is pizza, so I’m going to eat that.”

And while many who have heard of his diet are nothing short of jealous, some are worried about his well-being.

“Eating the same food day in and day out can limit a person’s ability to get a vast array of foods and nutrients he or she needs to optimize health and meet daily nutritional needs,” said Elisa Zied, a New York-based dietitian/nutritionist and the author of “Younger Next Week.” “While pizza tastes great and certainly has its virtues, subsisting on it and having little else in the diet is a recipe for an unhealthy, nutritionally-inadequate diet. Also, limiting foods/food groups can set you up for one boring diet.”

Janssen eats plain pizza, but mixes it up with everything from frozen pizza to local pizza places to making his own.

“I love the nuance of pizza, so I try to vary it in different ways,” he said. “Once a week to be healthy, I’ll eat a bowl of Raisin Bran, but other than that it’s just pizza.”

His freezer is crammed with frozen pizzas, and then the other part of the refrigerator includes ingredients from artisanal pizza shops. He went to one pizza place so much that he became friendly with the owners to the point where he started helping them with their marketing.

“I would say all the pizza shops around here know me by name,” Janssen said. “All the Domino’s places know I used to work there in college.”

He also considers his diet to be economical.

“I save a lot on food,” he said. “In today’s foodie culture with all the focus on organic and no preservatives and locally grown, you can go to the grocery store, spend $100 and only get two meals out of it. I can get pizza for a week on that.”

While it may be cheaper, Janssen’s diet often prompts questions about how it affects his health. He says he was diagnosed with diabetes, which runs in his family, before embarking on his pizza-only diet, but has not had any complications. He does not drink or smoke, and exercises regularly by riding his bike long distances.

“I understand that this is a disgusting diet,” he said. “You expect me to be overweight and have no energy, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. Whenever I see a new doctor, I tell him, ‘I have a terrible diet, and I only eat pizza.’ With three different doctors, they have done bloodwork and my cholesterol levels and blood pressure are great, and I am fit and energetic.

“I’m sure when I’m 60 I’ll drop dead of a heart attack, but right now I am fine.”

Janssen says he’s heard varying reactions since his story first appeared on Vice.

“People are really angry about it, which I don’t understand,” he said. “When somebody says, ‘I’ve been a smoker for 20 years,’ most people say, ‘That’s your choice.’ I eat pizza for 20 years, and people want to kill me, or they think I’m a hero.”

While pizza is his first choice, he has subsisted on other foods when necessary. During a two-week trip to Germany, he ate only soft pretzels because German pizza was so bad.

“I’m good at pretending,” he said. “It’s not that I’ll die if I eat something new. I can fake it, like if I go to a wedding or something. My reputation precedes me where I live. I’ll get an invite, and it will say, ‘We’re having a party, but there’s not gonna be any pizza there.’ I’ll eat whatever if it’s a situation like that.”

Janssen, who is engaged, has seen a therapist about his eating habits but says that right now he is perfectly happy with his pizza-centric diet.

“My fiancée is trying to slowly get me to change,” he said. “I do want to change, but this is how I’m living, and I feel great.”

Source: today

The better your mood the healthier you eat!

Previous research has found that emotions affect eating, and that negative moods and positive moods may actually lead to preferences for different kinds of foods. For example, if given the choice between grapes or chocolate candies, someone in a good mood may choose the former while someone in a bad mood may choose the latter. The research reported in this article looks at the “why:” Why, when someone is in a bad mood, will they choose to eat junk food and why, when someone is in a good mood, will they make healthier food choices?

To get at the “why,” we married the theories of affective regulation (how people react to their moods and emotions) and temporal construal (the perspective of time) to explain food choice. Conceptually, when people feel uncomfortable or are in a bad mood, they know something is wrong and focus on what is close in the here and now. We hypothesized and demonstrated that this kind of thinking gets us to focus on the sensory qualities of our foods – not things that are more abstract like how nutritious the food is. Analogously, we hypothesized and demonstrated that when people are in a good mood, things seem okay and they can take a big picture perspective. This kind of thinking allows people to focus on the more abstract aspects of food, including how healthy it is.

We studied these hypotheses in four laboratory experiments. In the first study, we investigated the effect of a positive mood on evaluations of indulgent and health foods by examining 211 individuals from local parent-teacher associations (PTAs). Next we studied whether individuals in a negative mood – who had read a sad story– evaluated indulgent foods more positively and whether those who were in a positive mood indicated a desire to remain healthy into their old age. 315 undergraduate students participated in this study. In the third study, involving 151 undergraduate students, we altered participants’ focus on the present versus the future along with their mood and measured how much healthy and indulgent food they consumed. To get more direct insight into the underlying process, the fourth study, involving 110 university students, focused specifically on the thoughts related to food choice and differentiated concrete taste versus nutrition benefits.

Ultimately, the findings of all the studies combined demonstrated that individuals select healthy or indulgent foods depending on whether they are in a good or a bad mood, respectively. The findings also indicate the integral aspect of the time horizon, showing that individuals in positive moods who make healthier food choices are often thinking more about future health benefits than those in negative moods, who focus more on the immediate taste and sensory experience. Finally we found that individuals in negative moods will still make food choices influenced by temporal construal which suggests that trying to focus on something other than the present can reduce the consumption of indulgent foods.

Source: eureka Alert

Call for Shake-Up in Africa Nutrition Research

Rwanda has achieved remarkable success in reducing child hunger, and nutrition experts believe there may be lessons here for other countries in Africa.

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in a 2013 report on progress in tackling malnutrition, noted that in 2005 more than half of Rwanda’s children under five years of age – about 800,000 – were stunted. “Just five years later, stunting prevalence had decreased from an estimated 52 percent to 44 percent,” the report said.

The Rwandan approach has been to try and find home-grown solutions.

It scaled up community-based nutrition programmes in all 30 of the country’s districts, and has also been setting up an almost universal community-based health insurance scheme. “This was all done with the help of food grown locally, and not packaged interventions provided by donors,” said Fidele Ngabo, director of Maternal Child Health. “There are thousands of local solutions for hunger…

“Each village comes up with community-based approaches to tackle malnutrition and food insecurity that don’t cost money – we are at the centre to provide support and play a monitoring role,” she said.

Examples include the setting up a communal grain reserve to which each household contributes at least 20 percent of their harvest during a good season, with the stored grain being used during the lean season; or the expansion of kitchen gardens with shared information on the vegetables to be grown.

Suggestions and proposed solutions are debated in working groups comprising aid agencies, researchers, academics and government officials.

Source: All Africa

Can Pizza Prevent Norovirus?

You may have heard of binging on pizza as a cause of stomach distress, but how about a a cure?

Researchers found that a chemical in oregano called carvacrol causes norovirus to break down in mice, according to a study published today in the Journal of Applied Microbiology.

“Carvacrol could potentially be used as a food sanitizer and possibly as a surface sanitizer, particularly in conjunction with other antimicrobials,” Dr. Kelly Bright, who led the research at the University of Arizona said in a press release. “We have some work to do to assess its potential but carvacrol has a unique way of attacking the virus, which makes it an interesting prospect.”

Carvacrol, which gives oregano its distinctive flavor, caused the layer of proteins surrounding the vomit-inducing virus to break down. Another antimicrobial would then be able to get into the virus and kill it.

Since carvacrol doesn’t produce any noxious fumes or by-products, it has good potential to be used in sanitizers for schools or hospitals, the researchers noted.

Oregano has developed a reputation as a super-spice. In 2012, researchers from Long Island University discovered that it may also be used to treat prostate cancer. In that study, researchers found that carvacrol could be used to induce “cell suicide.”

“Some researchers have previously shown that eating pizza may cut down cancer risk,” Dr. Supriya Bavadekar, assistant professor of pharmacology at Long Island University said in a press release. “This effect has been mostly attributed to lycopene, a substance found in tomato sauce, but we now feel that even the oregano seasoning may play a role.”

Milk Drinking Still a Mystery

The mutation for milk-drinking evolved independently in different parts of the world over the last 10,000 years as a result of strong natural selection, but why was it so advantageous?

Among the more momentous developments in human evolution was the ability to digest milk beyond early childhood.

Milk: Does It Really Do A Body Good?
Add it to the list of things that are bad for you: milk!
Mutations that enabled lifelong milk drinking appeared independently in several parts of the world over the last 7,500 years, according to growing evidence. And those genes spread rapidly. Today, about a third of adults around the world can drink milk without stomach problems, a trait known as lactase persistence.

But why was milk drinking so advantageous to humankind?

A new study debunks one leading theory: that milk provided a valuable source of vitamin D, which would’ve helped people absorb its calcium.

Newly analyzed human skeletons from an ancient site in Spain show that the milk-drinking gene spread just as rapidly in that sun-drenched climate as it did in other places, suggesting that milk must have been beneficial there for some reason other than its vitamin D content.

“Throughout the years, I have heard so many evolutionary hypotheses about lactase persistence because they are so fun to coin,” said Oddný Sverrisdóttir, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. “For decades now, people have hypothesized that it was because of lack of sunlight in the north of Europe that people would have had to supplement the lack of calcium and vitamin D by drinking milk.”

“Now, looking at this picture from Spain,” she said, “the calcium-assimilation hypothesis either didn’t affect the evolution of lactase persistence at all, or other forces were there as well.”

Sverrisdóttir has long been interested in how and why Europe’s early farmers began drinking milk, so she was excited when she got her hands on well-preserved samples of skeletal remains from eight people who lived in northeastern Spain about 5,000 years ago. That was well after the milk-drinking mutation had appeared in northern Europe, and she was eager to find out if those ancient Spaniards were drinking milk, too. So the first thing she did was test their DNA for lactase persistence.

“I thought at least one would have the mutation,” since so many of today’s Spanish adults can drink milk without health consequences, Sverrisdóttir said. “None did.”

To figure out whether the recent and rapid spread of lactase persistence in Spain was a fluke or if natural selection was at play, Sverrisdóttir and colleagues compared the mitochondrial DNA of modern Spaniards with the ancient samples. Mitochondrial DNA changes very slowly, making it ideal for tracing family trees over time.

And, the researchers report today in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, analyses showed that the ancient cave dwellers were indeed ancestors of people who live and frequently drink milk in Spain today.

Source; discovery news

Your 4- step guide to Detoxification

Sleep — Probably the most important step in getting the clean–up campaign right. One thing which works like a dream is ‘restful sleep’. During sleep, our body works at detoxifying our system and sweeps it clean of all the damage done during the day. Most importantly, it works at restoring our hormonal balance and spikes up the immune system to cope with the next day’s work. Good sleep is linked to good appetite control which means it ensures that you don’t binge the next day and works backwards at reducing our guilt associated with binge eating.

Food — Eating every two hours is not half as difficult as it seems and works wonderfully at reducing our chances of overeating. Having fruits, nuts or wholesome homemade breakfast within 15 minutes of rising helps nourish the system and a well–nourished system is less likely to drown itself in tea,coffee or ‘social drinking’. It is also more likely to feel hungry often in the day.

Staying in touch with your body’s hunger signals and feeding it according to its needs is the crucial aspect of preventing the unhealthy ‘fasting and feasting’ eating pattern, now well established as the classic pattern of creeping obesity (10 kilos in five years syndrome).

Exercise — We owe our body some movement. It’s not designed for a sedentary lifestyle. Be it a Marc or a cycle, both ought to be used at their optimum working levels. Exercise improves blood and nutrient flow to the cells and removes (and recycles) toxins.

It’s an effective way of nourishing and cleaning our system. Hence, people who workout regularly have a clearer stomach, ruling out the panic mode which often compels people to opt for enemas. We must be able to naturally and efficiently let go off the waste products.

A forced expulsion via pills/ powders/ steam/ sauna may not only make us run to the loo multiple times a day but also wash off the important Vitamin B and intestinal flora and fauna. Lost flora and fauna leads to more toxicity because of impaired digestion – the exact opposite of what you expected.

A regular workout stimulates what is called the ‘larger than life kidney’ or the ‘third kidney’ of the body – the skin. The process of sweating as a result of exercise is the best detox for your body.

State of Mind -– An obsession with weight or trying to squeeze into a particular size of clothes speaks volumes of the mind’s imbalance. When the attitude is that of mindless compliance to a fitness or fashion trend, the damage is done even before you subject yourself to a fad diet.
Detoxification begins when the mind accepts the body exactly the way it is and nourishes it out of a sense of responsibility and joy instead of depriving it out a sense of shame and punishment.

Source: Daily Inspirations for Healthy Living

Thinking too much about food could make us eat more

A new analysis of 50 studies has found that thinking before eating may actually undermine people’s dieting goals.

Jessie De Witt Huberts of Utrecht University says that we are expert rationalizers when it comes to finding a reason to eat more. He said that people seem to

be very creative in coming up with such reasons, asserting that they can justify having the cake on account that it has been a hard day, or that they will exercise tomorrow, that it is a special occasion, or that it is impolite to refuse.

Huberts said that this is when justification processes become a slippery slope – as the reasons are often applied ad hoc, they no longer form strict rules that regulate when you stick to your diet and when you can cut yourself some slack.

A growing body of research has found that such justification can even come from performing well on a task or from doing good for others. In several studies, people who received positive feedback on a task were more likely to choose an unhealthy versus a healthy option.

Source: Hindustan Times