Healthy Choices The amazing health benefits of turmeric
Stay Healthy
Astrid
Eat a Banana Full Ripe or Yellow?
Eat a Banana Full Ripe or Yellow?
That depends on your taste buds and the health benefits you desire. According to Japanese Scientific Research, full ripe banana with dark patches on yellow skin produces a substance called TNF (Tumor Necrosis Factor) which has the ability to combat abnormal cells. The more darker patches it has the higher will be its immunity enhancement quality; Hence, the riper the banana the better the anti–cancer quality. Yellow skin banana with dark spots on it is 8x more effective in enhancing the property of white blood cells than green skin version.
It is a fact that nutrient content of fruits change slightly as they ripen. As a banana ripens and turns yellow, its levels of antioxidants increases. These antioxidants in ripe bananas protect your body against cancer and heart diseases. But while overripe bananas certainly have nutritional value, they also lose some benefits. In full ripe bananas with dark spots on skin, the starch content changes to simple sugars that are easier to digest but the glycemic index also increases.
Tumor Necrosis Factor(TNF) is a cytokine, substances secreted by certain cells of the immune system that have an effect on other cells. This is indeed helpful in fighting abnormal turmor cells in body. Research done on ripening bananas has proved that the levels of TNF induction increased markedly with dark spots on skin before the entire banana peel turned brown. The research concluded that the activity of banana was comparable to that of Lentinan, a chemical immunostimulant that is intravenously administered as an anti–cancer agent. So, ripe banana can act as an anti–cancer agent by stimulating the production of white blood cells in the human cell line.
Once bananas ripen fully, store them in the refrigerator to minimize further vitamin loss. Fresh bananas with brown patches on the skin are ripe enough to eat immediately. Make sure to avoid over–ripe bananas whose skin has turned brown or split open.
If you want to extend the freshness of a banana, the easiest way if you prefer to keep them at room temperature, is wrap plastic around the top or separate them.
What About The Carbs?
What About Them? You can still eat bananas regardless if you’re diabetic or on a weight loss program. All fruit has some carbohydrate, so you simply need to count them in your diabetes or weight loss meal plan. If you want to include bananas in your meal plan, become familiar with portion sizes and the number of carbohydrates in each.
Bananas vary quite a bit in size, so counting the carbs that they provide can be difficult. Below are some estimates for different sizes.
Extra small banana (6 inches long or less) — 18.5 grams of carbohydrate
Small banana (about 6–6 7/8 inches long) –23 grams of carbohydrate
Medium banana (7–7 7/8 inches long) — 27 grams of carbohydrate
Large banana (8–8 7/8 inches long) — 31 grams of carbohydrate
Extra large banana (9 inches or longer) — 35 grams of carbohydrate
Carbohydrates affect blood sugar and insulin levels. Slow–releasing carbohydrates are low on the glycemic index and can keep your blood sugar levels stable. Foods higher up the glycemic index will release their energy quicker, often causing the blood sugar levels to rise and fall rapidly. Following a low glycemic index diet helps control diabetes, weight gain and also plays a role in cardiovascular disease prevention.
Bananas are low on the glycemic index and release their energy into the bloodstream slowly. According to the GI Database, fully ripe bananas has a glycemic index of 51. This counts as a low glycemic index food, because its GI value is under 55. The maturity of your banana can have an effect on its GI rating. Slightly under–ripe bananas with green sections remaining have been calculated at 42 and over–ripe bananas with brown flecks have a GI of 48. This is not a huge difference, but it is something you might like to be aware of.
The Morning Banana diet was developed by Hitoshi Watanabe, who studied preventive medicine in Tokyo, and his pharmacist wife, Sumiko. The diet has since gained popularity by word of mouth, web sites, TV shows, magazine articles, and a book written by the Watanabes.
The Morning Banana Diet is a super simple plan. For breakfast, you have only bananas and room–temperature water. Then, you can eat whatever you like for lunch, dinner, and snacks, as long as you don’t eat after 8 p.m. The only restrictions: No ice cream, dairy products, alcohol, or dessert after dinner, and the only beverage you may have with meals is room–temperature water. One sweet snack is allowed midafternoon.
Different versions of the Morning Banana Diet tout varying explanations of exactly how bananas work to promote weight loss. One theory suggests that certain enzymes in bananas speed up digestion and elimination, causing rapid weight loss in some people.
Misconceptions
Eating bananas is only part of an overall lifestyle change– including a healthy diet, cardiovascular exercise and strength training — that can result in effective weight loss. Eating bananas should not be the sum of your weight–loss plan, but rather one small part of it.
Bananas, along with most fruits have long been a part of healthy diets and weight loss plans. But while they are nutritious, they don’t have any special weight loss properties on their own.
To lose weight, you need to be physically active and control calories. And to stay healthy, you should choose healthy foods.
The truth is, there are no bad fruits, just poor lifestyle choices and often a misunderstanding of how to use fruits to your advantage in any diet. Anytime someone tells you fruit is bad for weight loss, disregard it. There really are no bad fruits, just good or bad diets.
Feeling depressed? You may be low on B vitamins
Eat More Potassium-Rich Vegetables!
Eat More Potassium-Rich Vegetables!
Why? They can help lower your blood pressure. Potassium explains, at least in part, why vegetables help lower blood pressure and the risk of stroke. And most Americans don’t get enough potassium.
Our list of top 5 vegetable sources of potassium includes sweet potatoes, lima beans, spinach, Swiss chard, and Portobello mushrooms.
Experts now recommend 4,700 milligrams a day. That’ll take more than a banana (420 milligrams). In fact, of the five vegetables that have at least 10 percent of a day’s potassium, only two (spinach and Swiss chard) are low in calories.
The other three (lima beans, white potatoes) have roughly 100 calories per serving. And those are small potatoes. Expect about 200 calories in a typical white or sweet potato. (We left white potatoes out of our Top 5 list because Americans already eat too many fries and potato chips.)
Solution: double those servings of broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, zucchini, and other veggies that have 5 percent of a day’s potassium but only around 20 calories. And eat more vegetables (and fruit), period. After all, potassium can counter the blood-pressure-raising sodium that you consume. Doctor’s orders: Eat your portobellos!
Here are other foods to where to get potassium:
Raisins, Apricot, Spinach, Sweet Potato, Dates, Strawberries, Watermelon, Cantaloupe, Prunes, Beets, Greens, Swiss chard, Soy and Soy Food, Beans, Turkey, Salmon, ect...
My conclusion is: (This is why it's monitored on my online nutrition tracker www.astridschiller.net) too little potassium in the diet can disrupt acid/base balance in the body, contribute to bone loss and kidney stones, and increase high blood pressure risk; a deficiency can cause muscle cramps, weakness, confusion, and/or reduced appetite.
If blood levels of potassium drop too quickly, that can cause heart problems and in some cases, be fatal.
I know it's not always easy to obtain the potassium levels on my online nutrition tracker but at least if you know more about it, it could become a goal for you to set up.
The Ugly Truth Behind Cheap Food
The cheap food is the product of the combination of new farming technology, increased usage of fertilizers, and genetically modified crops (GMOs). But is it possible that with such huge food surpluses, we've got too much of a good thing going on here?
When Bad Food is Cheap
Aniruddh Chaturvedi was a student from Mumbai, India who attended Carnegie Mellon. Upon leaving the United States, he shared some of the most surprising things about our country with Business Insider. Among them: "Rich people are thin/ well maintained, poor people are fat. This stems from the fact that cheap food is fatty, rich people don't eat cheap food — they tend to eat either home-cooked food which is expensive or eat at expensive / healthy places."
Though I would argue that home-cooked meals can be very affordable—you just need the time to make them—Chaturvedi points out an important aspect of our agribusiness model: food that is really bad for you is also very cheap. One look at McDonald's dollar menu will tell you that.
This wasn't always the case. But a combination of subsidies to overproduce corn following World War II, and cheap meat being processed in overcrowded farms—and fed some of this very corn—has created the perfect storm for bad health. Right now, processed corn is present in at least one-quarter of all food products in a supermarket .
As fellow Fool Alex Planes wrote last year, though the cost of feeding America's youth has declined by 19% since 1960, the cost to keep them healthy has risen by almost 150%!
Of all the stats, two simple pictures tell the story the best.
Obesity in America, 1990
Source: CDC
In 1990, it was difficult to find a state with a population of obese residents making up over 14% of the citizenry. But just 20 years later, there wasn't a single state in the union with obesity rates that low!
Obesity in America, 2010
Source: CDC
Monospeciation and Mutations
The overabundance of corn alone isn't to blame for Americans' poor health. But because all of that land in middle America is being used for corn or soybeans only, there isn't enough left over to produce non-processed fruits and vegetables—what Americans need more of.
Farmers can't shoulder all of the blame; they are incentivized by subsidies to produce corn. And though local farmers' markets are growing , unless there are enough hungry people nearby, most produce doesn't have anywhere near the shelf life of corn.
And the increasing monospeciation of the American farmland -- which is dominated by corn and soy, and helps keep food cheap -- presents some unique and scary possibilities when it comes to food security.
Monsanto was the first company to have a GMO seed on the market for U.S. public consumption, but DuPont and Dow Chemical quickly followed in Monsanto's footsteps. Together, these three companies control enormous market share for corn seeds and processing.
In Monsanto's case, the idea is that by buying GMO corn seeds that are resistant to the company's Round-Up herbicide, farmers can plant corn, then use the herbicide, knowing that once-harmful weeds will be killed.
In theory, that sounds great. In practice, nature has always favored adaptations, and weeds are no different. In 2010, Popsci noted that genetic mutations had led to superweeds that were Round-Up resistant. Because Round-Up Ready GMO crops accounted for 90% of soybeans and 70% of corn and cotton in the United States, these superweeds posed a significant threat to our supply of soy, corn and cotton.
Obviously, three years later, we're still here; no doomsday scenario played out. But we're clearly following the same tortuous pathway: inviting superweeds (or pests) to develop while simultaneously planting more crops that we can't defend when they hit. It's a recipe for disaster.
Booming population
In his 1992 best-seller Ishmael, author Daniel Quinn controversially argued that increased food production isn't a necessity of increased population -- but that the other way around.
Globally, Quinn argued, we humans will always grow our population to meet that of the food supply. We are, after all, simply made up of food in the first place. The more food we cheaply produce, the more our (global) population will grow—even if that food is grown in America and shipped off to other continents.
A hypothetical case from nature provides an easy-to-grasp example. Let's say wolves eat rabbits. As the number of rabbits grows, so will the wolf population. That is, until the wolves eat too many of the rabbits, then the wolf population will slowly dwindle. At some point, it will dwindle enough so that the rabbit population spikes again—and the cycle starts all over. Both populations are kept in check.
In essence, as our resources dwindle, we become less likely to reproduce.
While some may scoff at the idea, the Great Recession provided vivid proof of Quinn's assertion. As Pew Research demonstrated , our birth rate closely mimics our per capita income, and following the Great Recession, the birth rate in America took a precipitous fall.
Source: Pew Research Center
I'll show my cards and tell you that, in reality, I think there's a whole lot of damage done when food becomes as cheap as it is in America. Not only is our particular system of agribusiness producing unhealthy food, but it's also damaging the environment and a key factor in unsustainable global population growth.
In the end, I'm not saying that we should artificially make food costs higher, or that a growing population is an inherently bad thing. Instead, I would argue that food as cheap as it is now is a historical anomaly, and that for better or worse, there are consequences for deviating so far from our evolutionary norm. Eventually (over hundreds of years) I wouldn't at all be surprised to see us revert back a more-normal mean.
The Only Thing More Important Than Food
If investing in natural resources like food is important to you, then you owe it to yourself to discover the most precious resource in the history of the world. It's not gold. Or even oil. But it's more valuable than both of them. Combined. And here's the crazy part: one emerging company already has the market cornered... and stands to make in-the-know investors boatloads of cash. We reveal all in our special 100% FREE report The 21st Century's Most Precious Natural Resource. Just click here for instant access!
The article The Ugly Truth Behind Cheap Food originally appeared on Fool.com.
