Eating For Health

One can hardly watch any TV without seeing a commercial for probiotics or a yogurt touting the benefits of probiotics. Do you need probiotics? Is there anything to the hype in these commercials? What are probiotics anyway? What are probiotics? Basically, probiotics are foods that provide "good" bacteria. We have huge colonies of bacteria living in our intestines and we want to populate these bacteria with "good" for us bacteria. Probiotics include many foods, not just yogurt. There is fermented milk, soy beverages, some juices with probiotics and pills providing the "good" bacteria. Some of these foods have the bacteria in them naturally and some have the bacteria added in processing. Probiotics are considered food and not a medicine but there are many claims to beneficial health effects from eating probiotics. The Federal Trade Commission regulates and oversees these health claims. What are the "good" bacteria? Two of the most...

A new year and for many of us, new resolutions to keep. Probably the most popular New Year's Resolution is to lose weight. Or you may want to eat healthier for your heart, because you have high blood pressure, or you just want to eat a better, healthier diet in 2012. If you are serious and really want to focus on improving your diet and health, how do you choose a "diet"? Well, to help everyone along, the U.S. News & World Report just published its second ranking of many popular diets. They asked a group of 22 experts in their fields to rate the various diets. So what are some of the top diets and what are some failures? In this blog post we will focus on their top ranked diets. Top Diets – based on being easy to follow, safe for your health, effective in losing weight, nutritious and good for those with heart disease or diabetes. DASH – for those who haven't heard of it, the DASH diet stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. Thus, it is a ...

Many parents worry about their child's eating habits. Children go through food jags, refuse foods and often reject good, healthy foods like vegetables. An interesting article appeared in our local paper with the title, "Market Veggies to Your Children" (Free Lance Star, Nov. 28, 2011). Surprisingly, the advice to get kids to eat more veggies comes from an economist, Brian Wansink, at Cornell University. Some of his suggestions include:      Focus on the good – such as saying a vegetable is a relatives favorite. Aunt Joan just loves green beans cooked this way.      Focus on some aspect of the vegetable : These green beans are grown in North Carolina. Have you been to North Carolina?      Give kids a choice : do you want peas or corn with your meal? Kids then think they are the ones making the decision to eat the vegetable.     Or focus on the health benefit of the food and give it a fun name. Mr. Wansi...