VERY USEFUL INFORMATION!!!
" Health Benefits of Consuming Dates "
1) Dates are free from cholesterol and contain very low fat. Dates are rich in vitamins and minerals.
2) They are rich source of protein, dietary fiber and rich in vitamin B1, B2, B3 and B5 along with vitamin A1 and C.
3)It helps improve the digestive system as it contains soluble and insoluble fibers and different kinds of amino acids.
4) Dates are great energy boosters as they contain natural sugars like glucose, sucrose and fructose. To get more advantage add dates to milk and make it a very nutritious snack.
5)Dates are very low in calories and are extremely suitable for health conscious people.
6) Dates are rich in potassium and reduced in sodium. This helps regulate a healthy nervous system. Researchers have revealed the fact that potassium intake up to a certain extent can reduce risk of stroke.
7) Dates also help in lowering of the LDL cholesterol.
8) Dates have high iron content and are very useful in treating anemia. The patients can eat many dates for better advantages.
9) Dates also have fluorine that slows down the process of tooth decay.
10) It helps people suffering from constipation. Soak dates overnight and take it along with water to have added advantage.
11) Dates help in weight gain and are beneficial for those who suffer from over slimming problem.
12) Dates are excellent for alcoholic intoxication.Cures abdominal cancer.
13) It also helps in improving eye sight and helps in curing night blindness as well.
"The best thing is that it does not have any side effect on the body and is completely natural as well as it works better than medicine."
Skipping breakfast primes the brain to seek out fat
Brain scans show that skipping breakfast makes fatty, high calorie foods appear far more attractive later in the day, according to researchers.
Scans of 21 people showed the brain was more attracted to food if breakfast was missed so people had more food at lunch.
Scientists said it made losing weight challenging as missing meals made calorific food even more appealing.
Nutrition experts say breakfast is known to take the edge off appetite.
However, researchers were curious about what happened inside the brain to alter the food people choose to eat.
ScansTwenty one people, who were all normal weight, were shown pictures of calorie packed foods while they were positioned in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine at Imperial College London.
On one day they were given no breakfast before the scans and on a different day they were fed a large, 730 calorie, breakfast an hour and a half before.
The researchers said skipping breakfast created a "bias" in the brain in favour of high calorie foods.
The results, presented at the Neuroscience 2012 conference, showed the brain changed how it responded to pictures of high calorie foods, but not low calorie foods, when breakfast was skipped.
They showed part of the brain thought to be involved in "food appeal", the orbitofrontal cortex, became more active on an empty stomach.
When the researchers offered the participants lunch at the end of the study, people ate a fifth more calories if breakfast was missed.
Dr Tony Goldstone, from Imperial College London, said: "Through both the participants' MRI results and observations of how much they ate at lunch, we found ample evidence that fasting made people hungrier, and increased the appeal of high calorie foods and the amount people ate.
"One reason it is so difficult to lose weight is because the appeal of high calorie food goes up."
Dr Catherine Hankey, a senior lecturer in nutrition at the University of Glasgow, said research had shown that breakfast "takes the edge off appetite" and that the latest study was an "interesting" insight.
She said breakfast was linked to stable blood sugar levels, which "keeps you on the straight and narrow".
Future studies will investigate how obesity affects the same system in the brain.
Protein
The word protein originates from the idea that proteins are central to life and the first nutrient. Vitamins – vita meaning life and amin meaning protein – got their name from the misconception that amino acids, the building blocks of protein, were the essential components for maintaining life.
Proteins are found in animals and plants, but the mixture of amino acids – the building blocks of the protein found from different sources – varies. As a result, there are 21 common amino acids consisting of 12 nonessential and nine essential amino acids. Essential amino acids are those that cannot be synthesized from other amino acids, but must be consumed in the diet. The usual way that nonessential amino acids are formed is by metabolism of other amino acids. All amino acids have a basic structure of an alpha-amino nitrogen and carboxylic acid.
Maintaining the amounts of protein in muscles and organs is essential to life and is the main objective of the adaptation to starvation. In fact, loss of more than 50 percent of body protein is incompatible with life. The protein is stored in organs and there is no labile compartment.
The Importance of Protein
There is evidence that modestly increasing the proportion of protein in the diet, while controlling total calorie intake, may:
- Improve body composition.
- Facilitate fat loss.
- Improve body weight maintenance after weight loss.
Fat Retention
Mankind is very well adapted to malnutrition and starvation, and this adaptation is reflected both in the way the body stores energy and how it uses these stores of energy when food intake is reduced or eliminated altogether. In the average 70 kg (154 lbs) man:
- The largest store of calories is in the form of fat in adipose tissue with approximately 135,000 calories* stored in 13.5 kg (30 lbs) of adipose tissue.
*A dietary calorie is 1,000 calories or a kcal, but for simplicity will simply be noted as calories. You may also see dietary calories capitalized as “Calories.”
This storage compartment can be greatly expanded with long-term overnutrition in obese individuals.
There are approximately 54,000 calories stored as protein both in muscle and organs, such as the heart and liver. Only half of these calories can be mobilized for energy, since depletion below 50 percent of total protein stores is incompatible with life. In addition to being an energy source, protein plays a functional role in many organs, including the liver, and depletion is associated with impaired immunity to infection. In fact, the most common cause of death in an epidemic of starvation is typically simple bacterial pneumonia. Conservation of protein is an adaptation tightly linked to survival during acute starvation.
Meal Replacement Shakes and Weight Maintenance
Studies show that meal replacement shakes are a viable way to maintain weight, as recognized by the European Food Safety Authority, and that increasing the protein to about 30 percent of resting metabolic rate, as estimated by bioelectrical impedance, leads to greater loss of fat with retention of lean body mass.