Eating For Health

Everyone knows you can eat for a healthier body.   But can you eat foods to improve your mind or to keep your brain healthier?   Yes.   Actually, there is a diet called the MIND diet specifically designed to keep your brain healthier.   The MIND diet is a combination of two other highly recommended diets – the DASH diet designed to prevent high blood pressure and the Mediterranean diet for overall good health.   U.S. News & World Report ranks the MIND diet as 5 th in their rankings of Best Diets Overall .   They describe this diet as one that aims to prevent mental decline, especially designed to help prevent Alzheimer’s disease .   Rush University researchers found that following the MIND diet can reduce Alzheimer risk by 53% for those who strictly followed the diet plan.   And the good news is, you can benefit your brain health without even sticking rigidly to this diet plan.   For those who followed the diet only moderately well, their risk was lowered by 35%.  What a

Who doesn’t want to slow down the aging process? Are there foods you can eat to slow down Father Time?  WebMD has an article called, 7 anti-Aging Foods for Your Skin .   In this article, dietitian Kerri-Ann Jennings is quoted, “Everyone wants smooth, radiant skin.   What you eat can bring you closer to that goal.”    The Dietary Basics for Slowing the Aging Process: 1.       Eat foods full of nutrients, called nutrient dense foods, which pack in the vitamins and minerals your skin needs.   These include fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and fish. 2.       Change it up.   Go for variety – lots of color, lots of different fruits and vegetables.   Each color delivers different antioxidants so mixing up colors means you are getting a lot of antioxidants which means a healthier you. Eat a variety of colors 3.       Go beyond food – get enough sleep and exercise and don’t forget the sunscreen.   (I use sunscreen on my face 365 days a year.) The author of Younger Next

Last week we discussed probiotics and how important it is to have probiotics like yogurt in your diet.   But we also noted that you have to feed the probiotics, the healthy bacteria.   One way to “feed” the healthy bacteria in your gut is to add fiber to your day.   Although our bodies can’t digest fiber, the good bacteria need it.   Fiber also plays many healthy roles in our body.    Why add fiber to your day ?                                      1.        Weight loss – fiber helps fill you up.   Fiber has no calories so adding it to your meal fills you up without filling you out.   Fiber also takes longer to digest so when you have fiber in your meal, you will fill fuller longer. 2.        Lower your cholesterol – ever see the Cheerios commercials?   Cheerios are advertised as being “heart healthy”.   That is true.   The fiber in Cheerios grabs onto cholesterol and takes it out of your body.   That is why Cheerios can say it has “a soluble fiber proven to help lower c