Getting started with the Paleo diet

by | May 14, 2014 | Nutrition | 0 comments

Paleo So you’ve decided to commit to eating like a caveman have you? Well put down your club, lose the loin cloth, and stand up straight, cuz’ you’re in for a wild ride!

If you’re switching from eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) to Paleo, then yeah, cutting out all grains, dairy, legumes and pre-packaged foods is going to be a challenge. But start dropping pant sizes and notice that your arthritis has suddenly became non-existent and we’ll be doing a virtual high-five!

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Is Juice Worse For You Than Soda?

by | May 9, 2014 | Nutrition, Sugars | 0 comments

Drinks You know orange juice has a lot of sugar — 21 grams in one small cup — but is it worse than a cola?

1. The dark secret in your glass of sunshine.

When fruit is stripped of its skin, pulp, flesh and other fibrous parts, it’s distilled down to its sweet essence. That means that orange juice has roughly the same amount of sugar as the demon of the nutritional world, soda — about 5 to 8 teaspoons per cup. Add to this: the sugar in pure, natural juice and the sugar in sugar-sweetened beverages are both densely packed with calories, say Naveed Sattar, MD, PhD, a professor of metabolic medicine at the University of Glasgow. In a recent article inThe Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology journal, Sattar points out that eating whole fruit is associated with a reduced (or neutral) risk of diabetes, but drinking fruit juice is associated with an increased risk.

2. The cold truth.

The marquee vitamin in orange juice, vitamin C, is good for your immune system, and it’s an antioxidant that protects cells from free radicals. But some of its benefits are overrated: No studies have been able to conclude that vitamin C helps cure colds. Further, you may not realize that the information on the label of your store-bought juice (even not-from-concentrate brands) refers to the amount of vitamin C that was present when the product was packaged, explains Alissa Hamilton, PhD, a former Food and Society Policy Fellow with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and the author of Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice. All juice loses nutrients over time (that’s why the people at the juice bar urge you to drink their blends ASAP), and modern storage technology has radically extended the shelf life of mass-market juices. For example, today’s more efficient mode of storage is to strip the liquid of oxygen and then keep it in million-gallon tanks. The juice can remain in those tanks for upwards of a year. Then after it goes into the carton, it can sit on a truck, in a supermarket, and in your fridge, steadily losing vitamins.

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Interview with Tina Turbin

by | Apr 21, 2014 | Diet, How Your Body Works, Nutrition | 0 comments

2014-04-21_1001I had the pleasure to chat with author Tina Turbin the other day. She’s an author and campaigner and her main area of interest is in the treatment of celiac disease using dietary changes. Lowcarb and Paleo type diets could well make a good starting point for many.

MM: How did you get to know about paleo and what was it that attracted you to it in the first place?

TT: Okay for me those are two different questions so as far as the first question is concerned, I am celiac and I could not have gluten. There’s just no question about it.

MM: Right!

TT: I’m a very sensitive celiac and also two of my three children have been diagnosed with celiac and one of them has the gene. You have to have the gene to even be able to have celiac. If you don’t have the gene you’ll never have celiac disease so for anybody without the gene – you know – all the better for them.

MM: Okay.

TT: It doesn’t mean you can’t be sensitive or have allergies or react to gluten but you will never have the autoimmune disease,
celiac disease. I had this after close to seven years of being misdiagnosed and once I was diagnosed I went into the field aggressively to
raise awareness as an advocate working with over 200 of the gluten free companies, many of the surgeons, the doctors, the research scientists at the university, the restaurants, the gluten free groups, the celiac groups, the various chapters around, radio shows, you name it I was out there full fledge because I’m a children author as well. So, I really wanted to make this known. There’s an issue here. There’s a real issue and I wanted to really make it known, I wanted to be supportive in raising awareness to getting people properly tested and have doctors know what those indicators are because they’re not taught that in the university well enough. If they’re taught it at all – it might be just a one day or half a day crash course you know, as part of their program over years of study. You know it’s just not right and over I felt that it needed more. So here I am out here promoting that the diet, working with all these people and I went on the standard gluten free diet and did I make improvements?

Absolutely!

There’s no question about it but I was still not thriving healthwise and even though my kitchen had been a dedicated a gluten free kitchen – so I no longer had the toasters, the old pots and pans in fact, every-thing was thrown out and it was deep cleaned. Yet, I would still come home having
eaten and say “Gosh! Maybe that (meal) had some cross contami-nation in it and I’d look at the packages – and you know they had the gluten
free certification. But I was still reacting. The answer came from the fact that I had done a review and worked with Dr. Lefler who wrote a
book – which is phenomenal by the way – and in one of his chapters he ended up discussing refractory celiac disease or what you could call nonresponsive celiac.

So, once again I find myself doing my own homework… I was like okay, here are the various reasons of why somebody with celiac disease might
not be responding to this diet favorably so I called Dr. Lefler and I said you know I am not getting cross contamination, I’m out here on big fronts making big strikes but I feel like I’m kind of in a little corner all by myself and that I maybe one of these people who are not responding. I was basically told “you know Tina there’s many,many like you”.

So I started talking to people on my own and finding out that – I would say – one out of three people I was speaking to who are celiacs were in the same boat as me but they had never said anything. Those are my own statistics, one out of three people I was speaking to.

And as a result of that I started looking at what could it be. I narrowed it down to “I think I am still responding to grains”. Then what happened was that I was doing another review for a diet called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet which eliminate the grains, but does allow some legumes and does allow at some point of the healing some dairy. Well my husband was gone for a week and I thought well instead of just reviewing this – I’m going to put it to a test.

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Low Carb Mag April Edition

by | Apr 4, 2014 | Diet, Exercise, Low carb diet, Natural food, Nutrition, Weight Loss | 0 comments

Cover_PageHello and welcome to another new edition of Low-Carb Mag

Since making the magazine free last month we have been absolutely astounded at the amount of people who are now downloading it.

Our daily download rates have gone up by nearly 10 times which is phenomenal. I am really, really pleased that we have managed to get to the free download stage of our evolution sooner than expected as that means so many more people who want this information will
be able to get it.

Also – this month we’ve taken away the need to give your email address or anything like that in order to download the magazine – it is totally free and open for everybody to download from anywhere you want.

If you have a website please feel free to use the embed code on your website. And if you’d like us to make you an official partner just send me an email and we’ll put you on our official partners list – with a link back to your website. There are some serious advantages
of becoming an official partner.

Our next great piece of news is the Low-Carb Paleo Show has finally started. This is a light hearted look at the world of Low-Carb and Paleo – but with some seriously useful information all mixed into the format.

You won’t want to miss it!

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Mediterranean Diet Breakfast

by | Apr 1, 2014 | Low carb diet, Nutrition | 0 comments

Fruit In Greece, they have a saying: “Eat like a king in the morning, like a lord at lunch and like a beggar at dinner”. This proverb stresses the importance of breakfast in our diet, and yet a lot of people still skip it as a meal.

Breakfast is the first meal we have after a long fast. The etymology of the word breakfast means literally “to break the fast”, meaning that it is the meal which interrupts the night fasting, i.e. the period of the night, during which we do not consume any food.

After 8-10 hours of sleeping without food, the energy reserves in our body have diminished and certainly our brain and body need “fuel” to function correctly.

The importance of breakfast is major, when we want to increase our efficiency at work and at school, as it seems that people who have eaten breakfast are more concentrated and more vigilant. On the other hand, people who don’t have breakfast tend to be more tired and lazy. This is due to the reduction of the blood glucose levels. We should also know that glucose is the food of the brain.

Unfortunately, a lot of people, young and older, don’t eat breakfast, either because they underestimate or ignore its value, or because they think that the daily stress and lack of time keep them from dedicating a few minutes of their day in their nutrition and in themselves. Many people think that having a large breakfast will make them gain weight. However, scientific studies disprove them, since they suggest that people who eat breakfast are more likely to lose weight and tend to keep this lost weight. On the other hand, skipping breakfast leads to excessive food intake later throughout the day, less control over the quantity and quality of the foods that are consumed, as well as wrong messages of satiety.

Breakfast is that meal of the day which should provide us the necessary energy to have a kick start in our day. Therefore, if you are interested in having a better performance at work or at school, a good breakfast will help you “wake up”. According to research, people who eat breakfast are more energetic and do better at tests or their work than those who skip breakfast. Furthermore, studies in children have shown that consumption of breakfast improve memory and have a positive effect in the processes required to retain new information. On the contrary, a hungry person can be apathetic, indifferent or even lazy, when assigned with difficult tasks. Adults and mostly children who skip breakfast are more likely to be obese, since they eat larger portions at lunch or tend to nibble snacks that are usually unhealthy and rich in fat and calories.

Impressive findings of many studies show that people who have breakfast make more balanced choices for their diet throughout the day. Specifically, it has been shown that the percentage of fat they take is significantly lower. These traits of a balanced diet where also apparent in laboratory test – people who did not have breakfast had higher concentrations of blood cholesterol.

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Tax a Cola, Save the Planet

by | Mar 28, 2014 | Nutrition | 0 comments

Soda

The Soda Tax is most clearly a health issue. Science now has shown that sugary drinks kill by causing diabetes (amputations, blindness, kidney failure), heart attacksand cancer. We now know that you do not need to be overweight or obese to be at risk.

But the Soda Tax is also a social justice issue. Big Soda’s advertising targets poor and minority communities, where residents suffer both high soda consumption and high rates of type-2 diabetes.

But wait, there’s more. The Soda Tax is more than a health issue and more than a social justice issue. It is also an environmental issue of vast importance.

Ironically, the soda industry, which we turn to for quenching our thirst and restoring needed fluids, wastes shockingly huge amounts of water. It also produces unnecessary green house gases (GHGs) and requires extensive use of resources for packaging.

In California, we live in a water-stressed region suffering from the worst drought in memory. It is feared that with climate change even a 2 degree C rise will result in loss of half of the Sierra snowpack. That means loss of half of the water supply for much of the San Francisco Bay area. We are not alone. According to the United Nations, two-thirds of the world’s population is projected to face water scarcity by 2025.

How much water is used in the production of a bottle of soda? If we include the water used in the production of the ingredients, such as sugar or high fructose corn syrup,the amount of water actually used to produce a half-liter of soda (about 16 oz.) varies from 150 to 300 liters of water. That’s a ratio of 300-600: 1.

A typical bathtub holds about 90 liters of water. So each time you drink a 16-ounce soda, you have wasted two or three bathtubs full of fresh water in the process.

The issue of water wastage in soda production has been most acutely felt in India where farmers have been battling Coca-Cola and Pepsi for years. Indian farmers have accused the soda giants of depleting the water table and leaving local farmers without enough water for their crops. Neither company pays for the water it extracts. Well-known environmental activist and winner of the Right Livelihood Award, Vandana Shiva of the Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology put it this way: “Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are engaged in a water war against the people of India. Their bottling plants are daily stealing millions of litres of water, thereby denying local communities their fundamental right to water.”

How big a problem is Big Soda’s big appetite for fresh water? Consider this: Coca-Cola uses enough fresh water every day to meet the world’s drinking water requirement for10 days.

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