The benefits of a Mediterranean diet

by | Oct 23, 2013 | High Fat Diet, High Protein Diet, Low carb diet | 0 comments

Olive Oil Many believe that diet and lifestyle are contributing factors to your health experience, but it is your genetics that will ultimately determine your fate. Some people even neglect their own nutrition, believing that their health in later years is already decided regardless of what they eat or how active they are.

However, new evidence suggests the determining force of our genetics is not absolute.

A study conducted at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University and the CIBER Fisiopatología de la Obesidad y Nutrición in Spain has yielded what looks to be a significant leap forward for nutrigenomics, or the study of how nutrition and gene function affect our health and risk of getting chronic and degenerative diseases.

The study followed 7,000 men and women over five years as they were given either a Mediterranean diet or a low-fat control diet and then monitored for cardiovascular disease, stroke and heart attack. Within the sample about 900 individuals had genetic variations that typically put them in a higher risk category for heart disease, which is usually preceded by type two diabetes.

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The Huge, Hidden Benefits Of An Extra Hour Of Sleep

by | Oct 18, 2013 | General Health | 0 comments

Sleep It’s weird that we sometimes think we can go without sleep–since we’d be so much more productive with just a bit more.

The BBC’s Michael Mosley reports that increasing the quanitity of time spent slumbering by a mere hour can upgrade the quality of your sleep. This, in turn, upgrades the quality of your day–in at least three ways.

YOU’LL GET MORE MEMORIES.

One of the first phases of sleep is deep sleep, which, as Mosley reports, is a super active time:

Deep sleep sounds restful, but that’s when our brains are actually working hard. One of the main things the brain is doing is moving memories from short-term storage into long-term storage, allowing us more short-term memory space for the next day. If you don’t get adequate deep sleep then these memories will be lost.

Which is scary because memories are important. And what we must note here is that there is such a thing as banking sleep–where you get a ton of sleep for a few nights if you know you won’t get any sleep on another night–you can’t bank you memories. They need to be committed within 24 hours of forming.

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Improve health with avocado – Research

by | Oct 16, 2013 | Low carb diet | 0 comments

Avocado Health conscious Kiwis and foodies alike now have even more reason to celebrate the arrival of the New Zealand avocado season – latest research proves they can make a vast improvement to overall health and well being.

As well as being a delicious addition to many meals, avocados are one of the most nutritionally complete foods in the world and new international research published in the Nutrition Journal shows that people who regularly eat them weigh 3.4 kilograms less on average and have waistlines around four centimetres smaller, than those who don’t.

Avocado consumers also have significantly lower BMIs than non-consumers; significantly higher intakes of important nutrients (such as fibre, vitamin E, magnesium, potassium and vitamin K), plus more good fats and a lower intake of added sugars.

The findings of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) in the United States, published in the Nutrition Journal, proved eating avocado every day boosted people’s HDL (“good”) cholesterol levels and resulted in a 50 per cent less chance of metabolic syndrome (a group of risk factors that occur together and increase the risk for coronary artery disease, stroke, and type-2 diabetes).

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