What kinds of Fatty food does your body require for proper nurishment
March 4, 2007
Fats or fatty acids are essential to keep the body’s weight proportionate by boosting up metabolism. They help to regulate blood pressure, to maintain the stickiness of the platelets, to metabolise cholesterol, to regulate kidney and lung function, to reduce inflammation and improve the immune system.
For an average college student and most adults, the daily requirement of fat is around 50-60 grams.
What kind of Fatty food sources can you indulge in?
Butter: Butter contains antioxidants and cancer preventing trace minerals and Vitamins A and D
Cheese: It is an excellent source of protein, calcium, magnesium and is good for health on judicious consumption
What kind of Fatty food sources you need to avoid…
Margarines: Margarines contain harmful indigestible hydrogenated acids. Use butter instead.
A great butter mix can be made with 450g of butter added to a cup of cold-pressed virgin olive oil. Mash together, preserve in a container and store in a refrigerator. This can be used as a soft, natural nutritionally rich and delicious spread
Refined oils: Refining processes denature the oil through heat and chemical exposure and hence damage the liver and immune system. They are also linked with cancer, diabetics, infertility, increased blood lipids and other complications.
Related Articles
1. How to go meatless and stay healthy
2. Low carb diets are all the rage, but do they work?
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How to tone your ab muscles using Yoga
February 12, 2007
As someone who recently am experiencing the power of Yoga to both mind and body, I want to share with the rest of the community the power of Yoga which helped me tone down my ab muscles.
The Yoga Asana we are going to perform is called “Janusirasana” where Janu means Knee and Sira means head or the posture where we touch our knees with our head. The benefits of this Yoga Asana besides toning your ab muscles, helps stimulate your liver and spleen. It also stretches your hamstring muscles and also brings increased flexibility of the hips.
Method:
Step # 1: Sit with your legs stretched out and your feet together
Step # 2: Now, bend your left leg and place the heel of your left foot against the perineum and the sole against the inside of your right thigh
Step # 3: During this time, make sure your right leg is towards your right side.
Step # 4: Now, slowly raise your hands from the side while inhaling at the same time
Step # 5: Bend towards the right while exhaling.
Step # 6: While bending, try to catch your right big toe or ankle or any part of your leg with your fingers
Step # 7: When stretching, touch your right knee with your forehead while bending the elbows
Step # 8: Breathe out completely and squeeze your abdomen and hold for 5-10 seconds
Step # 9: Repeat this same procedure for the left side too
Step # 10: For best results, try to repeat this procedure atleast 5 times.
Caution: Do not perform this asana if you are a patient of slip disc/hernia/sciatica/ cervical spondylitis.
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!Benefits of Drinking Alcohol: Alcohol in moderation may extend your life
December 21, 2006
MSNBC has an interesting article on an Italian study on alcoholism.
While the obvious notion of overconsumption of alcohol being detrimental to one’s health is supported, apparently drinking it in moderation can actually extend your lifespan.
A study on over 1 million drinkers and 94,000 deaths yielded the results: “According to the data, drinking a moderate amount of alcohol — up to four drinks per day in men and two drinks per day in women — reduces the risk of death from any cause by roughly 18 percent, the team reports in the Archives of Internal Medicine. However, “things radically change” when consumption goes beyond these levels, study leader Dr. Augusto Di Castelnuovo, from Catholic University of Campobasso, said in a statement. Men who have more than four drinks per day and women who have more than two drinks per day not only lose the protection that alcohol affords, but they increase their risk of death, the data indicates.”
The things I do for my health … *hic*
Link to MSNBC article: Want to live longer? Toss back a few cocktails
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!What causes headaches? How to avoid and treat an Headache?
December 19, 2006
It’s one in the morning, your ten-page paper is missing ten pages, and your neighbor has the latest N’SYNC hit on repeat. What could make this scenario worse? How about if your head hurts like crazy, so bad that it feels like someone pounded you a couple of times with a baseball bat. Headaches can, at times, make you totally unable to think coherently. Luckily, there are ways both to avoid and treat them.”Nearly all cases of headaches for college-aged people can be classified as tension-induced headaches,” says Jennifer Perrone, MD, a resident in a New York City hospital. It’s not surprising that the number one cause of your headache is stress. Stress from the professor who won’t bump up your grade. Stress from your high-maintenance significant other. Stress from your parents.
There could be other causes of your ill-timed headache, too. If you’re a heavy coffee drinker or ritually down a couple Diet Pepsis a day, you may be more inclined to have late night head pains. Surprisingly, the pains don’t come from too much caffeine, but a lack of it. “If you’re used to having lots of coffee or soda and then you go without any for a day,” Perrone says, “you probably will get some sort of headache as a result.”
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!Meditation for Beginners, benefits of meditation
December 8, 2006
Meditation can bring relaxation, focus, and clarity to your life — just don’t expect it all right away.
For many, the word ‘meditation’ evokes thoughts of inner peace, true wisdom, spiritual enlightenment, and even extra sensory perception. However, my first piece of advice for anyone interested in meditation is to forget all that mystic mumbo jumbo.
Put all such notions completely out of your mind. Instead, think of meditation the same way you think of brushing your teeth: It’s good for you and you should do it at least once a day. The reason behind this line of thinking is simple: Clouding your mind with expectations of the fantastic will only serve to prevent you from truly focusing on the task at hand. Namely, meditating.
The startling and revelatory tooth brushing analogy doesn’t end there. Brushing your teeth is probably one of the few things you do with your full attention and concentration. You don’t brush your teeth while scarfing down breakfast on the way to class, or while you’re Napstering the Bee Gee’s “Saturday Night Fever” (arguably, their finest work).
Your sole concern is polishing those ivories — and if it’s not, it should be. In a very real way, if you’ve ever brushed your teeth like this, you’ve meditated. Mission accomplished! Anytime you do something with single-mindedness, full concentration and participation, you’re meditating.
For anyone interested in meditating without a toothbrush, here’s an exercise to get you started:
1. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. Bend your knees slightly and shift forward so the balance of your weight falls 40% on your heels and 60% on the balls of your feet.
2. Place your hands, palms flat, on your abdomen. The tips of your thumbs should touch just below your belly button and the tips of your index fingers meet just above your pubic region. Basically, you’re forming a triangle with your thumbs and index fingers that points towards your “fun zone.”
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!Are you drinking enough Water?
December 8, 2006
What do you drink when you get thirsty? In most college dining halls and snack bars, you’re faced with an astounding selection of sodas, juices, and the like. And a lot of them are spiked with caffeine and taste nice and sweet.
Then there’s water. It contains no legal stimulants, and doesn’t come in funky flavors. It seems kinda boring. But when it comes to liquid consumption, water’s the best thing for you.
In fact, water is necessary for survival. “[The human] body is composed of 50 to 60% water, and you need to keep the body’s water balance at that level,” says Jean Bigaouette, a nutritionist in Albany, NY. Every day the body loses water through sweating and breathing, and you need to replace it. By the time you get thirsty, you’re body is crying for more water.
Everybody should aim to take in 64 ounces of fluids each day (that’s eight cups). It’s not as hard as it sounds.
“Have two glasses at each meal and one in between,” Bigaouette suggests. Or try carrying a bottle of water with you at all times, and take a gulp whenever the urge strikes. It’s easy to go through several 16 or 20-ounce bottles in a day.
Whatever your sipping strategy, “spread [water consumption] out over a day, don’t just guzzle it all at once,” Bigaouette says. Your body needs constant water replenishment, and having all 64 ounces in one sitting won’t do much good — and you’ll have to pee pretty bad.
If you need a little inspiration to get all that water into your system, consider everything water does for you.
Advantages of drinking water
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!How to go Meatless and Stay Healthy
December 8, 2006
A vegetarian diet can be healthy and easy — if you do it right.
When you go away to college and leave behind home-cooked meals, there’s no one forcing you to eat a healthy, balanced diet. College dining halls present a challenge for all students, but vegetarians can have a particularly hard time getting all the necessary nutrients while at school, especially with the limited offerings at many slop, er, dining halls.
Vegetarianism can be a very healthy lifestyle choice. Complete vegetarian diets provide all the vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein and fats a person needs, and can be filling without too many calories. They can also be cheaper than diets including meat — an important consideration for poor college students paying for their own food.
Disease prevention is another benefit of vegetarian diets — which generally include less saturated fat, cholesterol, and animal protein than non-vegetarian diets. Lower incidences of high blood pressure and certain types of cancer have been found in vegetarians.
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