Snacking-The Enemy Of Balanced Eating

If you have no idea how you keep gaining weight, then it is time to list what all you eat during the day, especially the in-between meals.

Reasons For Snacking:

1) Many people unknowingly snack because it helps them to release stress. Work pressure, family problems and many everyday stress related activities quietly encourages them to grab the nearest sugary or salty treat.

2) Sometimes you snack because you feel tempted because someone else is eating a bar of chocolate. This temptation leads you to snacking even though you are not hungry. Peer pressure is known to deter the dieter from sticking to his diet.

3) Alcohol can make many people hungry. Peanuts and other forms of crunchy delights are known to accompany drinks. These assist in packing empty calories and girth.

4) Boredom is another reason for snacking. Watching TV for long hours that tends to showcase food advertisements automatically makes us feel like munching on anything. Soon the fridge is raided.

How To Control Snacking Snacking can occur due to various reasons but it is crucial that we learn to identify them and find out ways to curb them. It is not easy to stop it altogether in the beginning. There are some people who are used to snacking at a particular time so they feel hungry. At this time, it is best to indulge in some homemade soup and not canned ones, eat a bowl of fruits and slowly you will know that you are in-charge and not the snacks.

Crunchy salads without dressing, low fat fruit yoghurt, whole wheat toasted bread all work wonderfully in our diet and keeps snacking healthy. Vegetable juices are great fillers to control hunger pangs. Identify when you feel like snacking and what triggers it then you will be more aware and in control of your emotions and your fat intake. Fasting and starvation won’t curb the habit of snacking instead you will land up eating more than usual. More Details

The Need To Give-Up High Calorie Foods

An important corollary to the principle of limiting high-calorie food is that the only way for a human being to safely achieve the benefits of caloric restriction while ensuring that the diet is nutritionally adequate is to avoid as much as possible those foods that are nutrient poor.

Indeed, this is the crucial consideration in deciding what to eat. We need to eat foods with adequate nutrients so we won’t need to consume excess “empty” calories to reach our nutritional requirements. Eating foods that are rich in nutrients and fiber, and low in calories, “fills us up,” so to speak, thus preventing us from overeating. To grasp why this works, let us look at how the brain controls our dietary drive. A complicated system of chemoreceptors in the nerves lining the digestive tract carefully monitor the calorie and nutrient density of every mouthful and send such information to the hypothalamus in the brain, which controls dietary drive.

 

There are also stretch receptors in the stomach to signal satiety by detecting the volume of food eaten, not the weight of the food. If you are not filled up with nutrients and fiber, the brain will send out signals telling you to eat more food, or overeat. In fact, if you consume sufficient nutrients and fiber, you will become biochemically filled (nutrients) and mechanically filled (fiber), and your desire to consume calories will be blunted or turned down. One key factor that determines whether you will be overweight is your failure to consume sufficient fiber and nutrients. This has been illustrated in scientific studies.

How does this work in practice? Let’s say we conduct a scientific experiment and observe a group of people by measuring the average number of calories they consumed at each dinner. Next, we give them a whole orange and a whole apple prior to dinner. The result would be that the participants would reduce their caloric intake, on the average, by the amount of calories in the fruit. Now, instead of giving them two fruits, give them the same amount of calories from fruit juice.

 

What will happen? They will eat the same amount of food as they did when they had nothing at the beginning of their meal. In other words, the juice did not reduce the calories consumed in the meal – instead, the juice became additional calories. This has been shown to occur with beer, soft drinks, and other sources of liquid calories.

 

Liquid calories, without the fiber present in the whole food, have little effect at blunting our caloric drive. Studies show that fruit juice and other sweet beverages lead to obesity in children as well. If you are serious about losing weight, don’t drink your fruit – eat it. Too much fiber and too many nutrients are removed during juicing, and many of the remaining nutrients are lost through processing, heat, and storage time. If you are not overweight, drinking fresh-prepared juice is acceptable as long as it does not serve as a substitute for eating those fresh fruits and vegetables. There is no substitute for natural whole foods.

 

There is a tendency for many of us to want to believe in magic. People want to believe that in spite of our indiscretions and excesses, we can still maintain optimal health by taking a pill, powder, or other potion. However, this is a false hope, a hope that has been silenced by too much scientific evidence. There is no magic. There is no miracle weight-loss pill. There is only the natural world of law and order, of cause and effect. If you want optimal health and longevity, you must engage the cause. And if you want to lose fat weight safely, you must eat a diet of predominantly unrefined foods that are nutrientand fiber-rich.

Joel Fuhrman, M.D., is a board-certified family physician who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. He is the author of Fasting and Eating for Health and a former member of the U.S. World Figure Skating Team. He lives with his wife and four children in Flemington, New Jersey. For more information please visit www.drfuhrman.com

Lite Word On Food Labels

The law doesn’t even say what ‘light’ or ‘lite’ means, and so manufacturers can use these terms to convey pretty much whatever they want. There are absolutely no rules to say how much less fat or calories ‘lite’ foods must contain. With this in mind you’ll not be surprised to learn that there may be little or no difference between foods that say they are lite and those that don’t. Both the standard and the lite versions often contain the same amount of fat or calories.

The whole concept of lite is aimed at anyone feeling a tad insecure, you may not be 100% happy with the way you look, or think that eating lite will combat the effects of smoking and drinking and too many all-nighters. Now while there is nothing wrong with wanting to be healthy, buying lite food in the hope of a quick fix cure is more than naive, it is plain idiotic. You are paying through the nose for a lifestyle dream that will only be achieved by gaining confidence in yourself, and getting out there and exercising. Giving up on real food is not the way forward, and life without chocolate will make you even more depressed. In fact life without chocolate would be hell.

High Protein-High Calorie Diet

The treatment of cancer can be difficult for individuals of any age. It is important that children with cancer receive supportive care from the entire healthcare team, such as physicians, dietitians, and child life therapists, to make the nutritional aspects of treatment less difficult. Suggestions such as creating a child-centered environment, making tasty high-calorie snacks, and offering alternatives to oral nutrition are all part of supportive care. If your child is having trouble eating enough calories and protein, your child’s physician or dietitian may suggest serving a high-calorie and high-protein diet. This will ensure that each bite has the highest nutritional value possible.

Foods high in protein include:

• meats – such as beef, chicken, fish, turkey, and lamb
• milk, cheese, eggs – including cottage cheese, yogurt, and cream cheese
• peanut butter

Puddings and yogurts packed for children typically contain high amounts of protein and are often appealing to your child. Dried beans and peas are also high in protein, but because they cause gas they may not be the best food choice for your child.

Listed below are foods to use to add calories and protein to your child’s meals and snacks:

• Add powdered milk (adds 33 calories and 3 grams protein per tablespoon):
  • to foods and beverages.
  • to puddings, potatoes, cream soups, ground meats, vegetables, cooked cereal, milkshakes, yogurt, and pancake batter.
• Add eggs or egg substitute (adds 80 calories and 6 grams protein per egg):
  • to casseroles, meat loaf, mashed potatoes, cooked cereal, macaroni and cheese, and chicken or tuna salads.
  • to French toast and pancake batter. Add more eggs than you normally would.

Warning:

Add raw eggs and egg substitutes only to dishes that will be cooked. Do not use raw eggs or egg substitutes in uncooked dishes for children, especially those whose immune systems have been compromised.

Egg Beaters® add 25 calories and 5 grams protein per 1/4 cup. Do not use raw eggs or egg substitutes in uncooked items.

• Add butter or margarine (45 calories and 0 grams protein per teaspoon) to puddings, casseroles, sandwiches, vegetables, cooked cereals, breads, and pasta.
• Use cheese (100 calories and 7 grams protein per ounce) as tolerated:
  • as snacks, or on sandwiches. String cheese can be fun for kids to eat.
  • in casseroles, potatoes, vegetables, and soups.
• Add wheat germ (25 calories and 2 grams protein per tablespoon):
  • to hot cereals.
  • to meat dishes, cookie batter, and casseroles.

Wheat germ is fiber. It is okay as long as the child’s gastrointestinal condition does not preclude its use. It should only be taken orally – not in a tube feeding. To determine the amount of fiber your child needs per day, consider their “age plus 5.” For example, if child is10 years old the recommendation would be 15 grams of fiber per day. Fiber should be encouraged especially if cancer drugs are constipating or the child is not very active. More

How To Manage The Calorie Intake

1. Eat local fruits and vegetables in season, when possible. Local foods are fresh and alive with enzymes, have the highest levels of nutrients and contain fewer pesticides than produce imported from foreign countries. Ask the produce manager at your supermarket to purchase locally grown products. Shop at local farm stands and farmer’s markets.

2. Eat foods that are alive. Foods that have enzyme activity (fresh fruits and vegetables) are nutritionally rich and add life to the body. Biologically dead foods, such as high-sugar, processed snacks, don’t provide any nutritional benefit except calories, and actually steal such nutrients as chromium and B-complex vitamins from our bodies to metabolize them.

3. Plan ahead. Carry food with you. These are two of the greatest tools for healthful eating. If you carry a healthful homemade bag lunch, you will avoid eating unhealthy fast food or snacks during the day. Just put some leftovers or a sandwich with a salad and/or a piece of fruit in a bag. Be sure to have plenty of zipper-lock bags and small containers on hand to simplify the process. Planning meals this way saves both money and time.

4. Eat small, frequent meals to sustain energy levels. When your brain gets foggy or you feel sleepy during the day, have a healthy snack for an immediate boost. Quick snack ideas: half a sandwich saved from lunch, plus a piece of fruit; a bagel and cream cheese with tomatoes; a rice cake with peanut butter and apples; a cup of soup and several pretzels; or a handful of nuts and raisins.

5. Eat when hungry; stop when satisfied. This sounds like a simple statement, but often we eat when we aren’t hungry because we’re lonely, angry, depressed, bored or because we’re at a social event and everyone else is eating. Eating when you’re not hungry contributes to poor digestion. Let your body use what it has before you put more into it. Before you eat anything, ask: Am I hungry? If not, divert your attention to other activities. More

The Need For Low Calorie Diet

Scientists may now have a new clue about how calorie restriction prolongs life, by finding that certain genes may be the link between calorie restriction and cell survival. Previous research has linked calorie restriction to longevity, but getting to the core of the molecular machinery that drives this longevity has remained elusive.

Now, researchers from Harvard Medical School, in collaboration with scientists from Cornell Medical school and the National Institutes of Health have discovered two genes in mammalian cells that act as caretakers for cellular longevity. When cells experience certain kinds of stress, such as caloric restriction, these genes rev up and help protect cells from diseases of aging.”We’ve reason to believe now that these two genes may be potential drug targets for diseases associated with aging,” says David Sinclair, associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and senior author on the paper.

Sinclair says that the genes, which are called SIRT3 and SIRT4 and are members of a larger class of genes called sirtuins, might be targets for drugs to treat age-related diseases in the long run.

In the study, the newly discovered role of SIRT3 and SIRT4 elucidates something scientists have suspected for a long time – mitochondria, a kind of cellular organ that lives in the cytoplasm, are essential for sustaining the health and longevity of a cell. Sinclair and his collaborators discovered that SIRT3 and SIRT4 play a vital role in a longevity network that maintains the vitality of mitochondria and keeps cells healthy when they would otherwise die. More

How To Avoid High Calorie Food

An important corollary to the principle of limiting high-calorie food is that the only way for a human being to safely achieve the benefits of caloric restriction while ensuring that the diet is nutritionally adequate is to avoid as much as possible those foods that are nutrient poor. Indeed, this is the crucial consideration in deciding what to eat. We need to eat foods with adequate nutrients so we won’t need to consume excess “empty” calories to reach our nutritional requirements. Eating foods that are rich in nutrients and fiber, and low in calories, “fills us up,” so to speak, thus preventing us from overeating. To grasp why this works, let us look at how the brain controls our dietary drive.

A complicated system of chemo-receptors in the nerves lining the digestive tract carefully monitor the calorie and nutrient density of every mouthful and send such information to the hypothalamus in the brain, which controls dietary drive. There are also stretch receptors in the stomach to signal satiety by detecting the volume of food eaten, not the weight of the food. If you are not filled up with nutrients and fiber, the brain will send out signals telling you to eat more food, or overeat. In fact, if you consume sufficient nutrients and fiber, you will become bio-chemically filled (nutrients) and mechanically filled (fiber), and your desire to consume calories will be blunted or turned down. One key factor that determines whether you will be overweight is your failure to consume sufficient fiber and nutrients. This has been illustrated in scientific studies. How does this work in practice? Let’s say we conduct a scientific experiment and observe a group of people by measuring the average number of calories they consumed at each dinner.

Next, we give them a whole orange and a whole apple prior to dinner. The result would be that the participants would reduce their caloric intake, on the average, by the amount of calories in the fruit. Now, instead of giving them two fruits, give them the same amount of calories from fruit juice.

What will happen? They will eat the same amount of food as they did when they had nothing at the beginning of their meal. In other words, the juice did not reduce the calories consumed in the meal – instead, the juice became additional calories. This has been shown to occur with beer, soft drinks, and other sources of liquid calories. Liquid calories, without the fiber present in the whole food, have little effect at blunting our caloric drive. Studies show that fruit juice and other sweet beverages lead to obesity in children as well. If you are serious about losing weight, don’t drink your fruit – eat it. Too much fiber and too many nutrients are removed during juicing, and many of the remaining nutrients are lost through processing, heat, and storage time. If you are not overweight, drinking fresh-prepared juice is acceptable as long as it does not serve as a substitute for eating those fresh fruits and vegetables. There is no substitute for natural whole foods. There is a tendency for many of us to want to believe in magic.

People want to believe that in spite of our indiscretions and excesses, we can still maintain optimal health by taking a pill, powder, or other potion. However, this is a false hope, a hope that has been silenced by too much scientific evidence. There is no magic. There is no miracle weight-loss pill. There is only the natural world of law and order, of cause and effect. If you want optimal health and longevity, you must engage the cause. And if you want to lose fat weight safely, you must eat a diet of predominantly unrefined foods that are nutrient and fiber-rich.