Archive for the ‘Plant-based nutrition’ Category

Linking Nutrition and Health: 25 Expert Tips

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

Useful News from the Vital Signs Workshop

Five pioneering researchers with one critical message shared their knowledge at the Vital Signs workshop on April 10, 2010. This event, put together by the awesome nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) was packed with compelling new information in nutrition and health.

A food as simple and tasty as oatmeal with fruit, nuts, and dairy-free milk will set you strong on the road to health

A food as simple and tasty as oatmeal with fruit, nuts, and dairy-free milk will set you strong on the road to health

Here are highlights of five useful tips from each of the five presenters. If you missed the workshop and want to learn more, PCRM has generously posted the slides.

Lawrence H. Kushi, Sc.D. summarized the findings of thousands of studies.

1. The American Cancer Society emphasizes whole plant foods (including five or more servings daily of fruits and vegetables), exercise, and a healthy weight to prevent cancer.

2. The World Cancer Research Fund/American Institute for Cancer Research report reinforces the importance of a varied whole foods, plant-based diet, physical activity, and lean weight in preventing and fighting cancer.

3. This report also recommends avoiding red meat, processed meat, alcohol, and salty foods.

4. Eating lots of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains helps prevent obesity and weight gain.

5. It’s silly to put meat and beans in the same food group. You are best off just eating the beans. We (more…)

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Eat More, Wrinkle Less

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

Prevent Wrinkles with Whole Foods – And Protect Your Health in the Process

Your skin, your largest and heaviest organ, mirrors the health of your body. Your 20 pounds or more of skin protect you, regulate body temperature, make essential chemicals, and allow you to feel touch, temperature, and pressure.

Changes in skin with aging are normal. Premature wrinkles, though, can be a marker for a poor diet.

Changes in skin with aging are normal. Premature wrinkles, though, can be a marker for a poor diet.

The complexity of your skin is dazzling and important to appreciate. In just one square inch of skin you have about 500 sweat glands, 1,000 nerve endings, yards of tiny blood vessels for nourishment, 100 oil glands, 150 pressure sensors, and millions of cells. This intricate structure is separated into an inner and outer layer of skin. Each layer, in turn, has its own distinct architecture of many additional layers.

The deeper skin layer has both tough and stretchy protein fibers. As you age, your skin becomes thinner and less elastic. The protein fibers have less ability to bind water to keep your skin plumped.

Wrinkles form. While these marks of long life can be beautiful, the larger concern is that premature skin aging signals poor eating habits that can impair longevity and enjoyment of life. A diet rich in whole plant foods shields your skin from damage that can lead to wrinkling. Here’s why.

Radiation from the sun or a tanning booth causes free radicals to form. These are electrically charged particles that can damage cells in your skin.

Note free radicals emerge as part of normal metabolism, so all your cells (skin included) are bombarded by these hazardous particles even without (more…)

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10 Tips for a Healthy Foods Diet When Traveling

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Enjoying Whole Foods on a Trip Does Not Have to be Difficult

While some people find travel to be the high point of the year, others loathe it as a necessary evil. Regardless of where you fall on this spectrum (I’m about in the middle), you may dread the hunt for healthy food when traveling. You may be tempted to just grab

You may be traveling far from home. You can do a lot better than the usual airline or airport food by bringing your own.

You may be traveling far from home. You can do a lot better than the usual airline or airport food by bringing your own.

whatever is convenient, even if you are usually on a whole foods diet.

At home, you have all the advantages. You’ll probably get hungry at predictable times, and can stock your pantry and refrigerator in advance. You know where to shop to get the vegetables, fruits, beans, potatoes, and whole grains that are the foundation for satisfying whole foods throughout the day. You can cook in familiar surroundings with all the pots, pans, and kitchen knick knacks you want. Your favorite restaurants with the food choices you like are nearby.

You may think it’s not a problem to just eat whatever is handy when away from home. The thinking is that the trip is only temporary, so you will restart healthy eating when it’s convenient. The problems with this reasoning (more…)

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Science-Based Nutrition and Health

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

The Perfect Formula Diet and Why It Works

Your body operates according to biological laws you can’t simply wish away. All the food plates and pyramids, diet books, and media outlets in the world cannot change the fact that you are meant to thrive on a whole foods, plant-based diet. Good nutrition is simple, just the way nature meant it to be.

Burritos andbrown rice are great whole foods on the Perfect Formula Diet. Enjoy.

Burritos and brown rice are great whole foods on the Perfect Formula Diet. Enjoy.

Every trip to the supermarket or restaurant gives you three choices. You can select animal foods, manufactured foods, or Perfect Foods.

  • Animal foods are the muscles, organs, reproductive materials, and secretions of animals
  • Manufactured foods are factory products made by processing or genetically modifying plants. Some manufactured foods skip the plants altogether and are simply chemicals
  • Perfect foods are whole plant foods in their natural form or else cooked and combined in someones kitchen

The Perfect Formula Diet gives you a specific method to combine six kinds of whole foods to assure (more…)

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Can “Natural” and “Product” Really Coexist?

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

Natural Product Expo West Is 300,000 Square Feet of Contradictions

The Anaheim Convention Center is host this weekend to Natural Product Expo West, an extravaganza of almost 2,000 exhibitors capitalizing on people’s desire to reconnect with nature and save the planet. While consumers have pure motives, the marketers and their offerings are a contradictory group.

This is nature

This is nature

I attended the Expo to see if the concepts of “natural” and “product” can really be married. After all, natural is from nature – that much is obvious. But a product, by definition, is manmade and saleable. So it seems a natural product would be an oxymoron.

This is nature packaged

This is nature packaged

The exhibitors with the easiest job of realizing the natural product concept were the clothing companies. Humans do need to wear clothes to survive in most climates (and avoid arrest). The range of organic cotton, hemp, and other plant fibers was heartening. Hopefully we will find more choices made from these fabrics in mainstream clothing stores.

The range of personal care and cleaning products made solely or mostly from natural ingredients (as (more…)

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Whole Foods: The Secret You Discover for Yourself

Friday, March 12th, 2010

A Healthy Foods Diet Doesn’t Stoke Industry Profits, Hence the Orthorexia Label

Vegetables. Fruits. Tasty beans. Satisfying baked potatoes and whole grains. Crunchy fresh nuts. Fragrant herbs and spices. Are you forming a picture of a delicious day of eating? Are you imagining vibrant health, a trim figure, and a sustainable garden or small family farm?

Wouldn't you think this is a healthy, delicious choice?

Wouldn't you think this is a healthy, delicious choice?

Well, according to certain “experts,” this kind of diet is downright sick. Believe it or not, there is increased media attention on a fake “eating disorder” called orthorexia. Sufferers of this “disorder” are accused of eating the most unprofitable foods – fresh from the soil, cooked at home, simple and naturally appealing. Such whole foods provide little opportunity for big business to make a buck on your ruining your health or big pharma to make a buck (or several billion of them) selling you the pills to fix the effects of the manufactured foods.

When I first read about this “disorder,” quite honestly I thought it was a joke. However, although not an official medical diagnosis, medical sources do discuss and debate orthorexia and (more…)

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Whole Foods Fuel Your Own Olympic Performance

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

Why Athletics, Nutrition, and Health Hang Together with a Plant-Based Diet

The current parade of Olympic athletes can make those of us with ordinary abilities a bit ambivalent. On the one hand, we admire the limits to which people can push the human body. Finely honed and trained athletes set the standard for physical achievement.

However, you can also feel discouraged. After all, an Olympic gold medal can feel life a project for another lifetime.

Snowboarding Is physically demanding

Snowboarding Is physically demanding

Be encouraged instead. You can achieve your physical potential. Land in first place with vigorous longevity and superb health. Your key is a whole foods, plant-based diet and regular exercise. Don’t try too much at first in the way of training. Make sure your doctor agrees with the exercise plan you have in mind, especially if you are overweight, out of shape, or have a chronic disease. If you persist, you will be amazed at your achievements.

Here’s a small sample of inspiring, 100% plant-based champs.

  • Carl Lewis won 10 Olympic medals in track and field – nine of them gold! His best year as an athlete was the year he stopped eating animal foods.
  • Edwin Moses, another Olympic gold medal champ, won the 400-meter hurdle competition for eight years in a row.
  • Brendan Brazier is an ultra marathon and triathlon winner.
  • Dr. Ruth Heidrich won more than 900 first place running and triathlon ribbons after she gained the (more…)

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Health Care Costs Continue Relentless Climb -You Pay

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

A Whole Foods Diet is the Best and Quickest Answer To Our National Black Hole for Money

Did you ever wonder why pharmacies are so conveniently found in supermarkets? You may take this so much for granted that even the question sounds strange. Here’s the connection.

The highest profit margin items in the supermarket are animal foods and manufactured foods. This is why industry pushes these

Put whole foods in your cart for health and savings

Put whole foods in your cart for health and savings

products with heavy advertising, coupons, and funds to develop ever more offerings. How often do you see an ad for fresh, unprocessed carrots or potatoes, or for dried beans or bulk brown rice? Industry makes few profits off these whole foods.

The animal protein, oils, and chemicals in animal and manufactured foods then contribute to chronic inflammation throughout your body. This ongoing inflammatory process underlies most chronic illnesses, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, migraines, sinusitis, allergies, depression, and more.

So high-profit-margin drugs and over-the-counter remedies are a natural complement to the bulk of the foods that line aisle after aisle in the supermarket. You can find whole food choices, though, in the produce section and scattered throughout the store. Look closely and you will see whole wheat bread made without animal products or hydrogenated oils, whole grain cereals and oatmeal, dried and canned beans, salsas, dairy-free milks, corn tortillas, and many other tasty options.

As supermarkets get larger and the dizzying menu of manufactured foods grows, it’s little surprise that health care costs reached a (more…)

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Do-It-Yourself Vegetable Oil

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

It’s Easy…As Long as You Own a Factory

Did you ever try to make your own cooking oil at home? Say, for example, you wanted corn oil. Take a few kernels of corn and try pressing them in a mortar and pestle, or squeezing them with a binder clip, or even stepping on them. What do you get? A big mess – smashed corn and a clean-up job. But you won’t find any corn oil in your experiment.

Would you rather eat whole corn right off a healthy plant in the field, or...

Would you rather eat whole corn right off a healthy plant in the field, or...

The oil in your kernel is tightly bound with all the fiber in the whole corn, not to mention the protein, complex carbs, and other nutrients that make corn so yummy and filling. All these components are required for the kernel to do the job nature intended, which is to grow a baby corn plant. So the oil needs to hang in there pretty tight as part of nature’s complete plan for the next corn generation.

Here is the short version of how factories “refine” most oils from whole seeds – corn, soy, nuts, palm, and others. (Olive oil may require a less complex process.)

Step 1. Extraction. The “crude oil” is separated from the rest of the seed through use of a very strong press or solvents. In fact, even if some oil is obtained through mechanical pressure, solvents may be used to extract more. Hexane, a toxic, explosive chemical made from petroleum and also found is gasoline, is often used as the solvent.

Step 2. Degumming. “Impurities,” which are other natural plant components suspended in the crude oil, are separated by mixing water with warm oil and spinning the resulting mixture in a centrifugal separator revolving at high speeds.

Step 3. Neutralizing. Acids in the oil are now neutralized with caustic soda, which converts the fatty acids into an insoluble soap. Some factories may need to further wash and dry the oil to remove the rest of the soap after some settles out. The oil still is a bit yellow, though, and has smell most people would not like.

Step 4. Bleaching. The oil is bleached to make it the colorless liquid that consumers expect.

Step 5. Deodorizing. The factory uses various methods to get rid of remaining smells in the oil.

Would you rather eat the oil extracted with a chemical solvent, then bleached and deodorized?

Would you rather eat the oil extracted with a chemical solvent, then bleached and deodorized?

The oil must be kept away from air so it does not immediately oxidize, becoming rancid and (more…)

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Healthy People 2010: The Decade that Wasn’t

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Let’s Reach Our Goals, Not Lower Them

Imagine you are on a team that is not winning nearly as many games as you’d like to. So you set some goals that will get you to first place if you achieve them. But your team has no game plan and just practices at random. When the big game comes, your score has actually deteriorated.

What do you do now? Revisit how to achieve your goals? Set up a realistic plan? Imagine that instead of continuing to pursue your dreams, you decide to simply pick less able teams to play against so your problems won’t be so obvious.

Few would want to play on such a lackluster team. This strategy of diminishing goals does seem to appeal to the nation’s health navigators, though.

Every ten years, the federal government sets health goals for the upcoming decade. From 2000 through 2010 though, the country did not fare very well in getting to optimum health. In fact, only about one in five of the goals for Healthy People 2010 appears to have been met.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for the Healthy People program that started in the 1970s, will likely set lower goals for 2020 than it did for 2010. This is the official response to the nation’s poor performance in achieving the targets set for 2010.

Our children rely on us to point the way to lifelong health and vigor

Our children rely on us to point the way to lifelong health and vigor

As a country, we ended up going downhill on critical goals. Most importantly, obesity increased from about a quarter of all adults in 2000 to 34 percent in 2010. Obesity is the result of poor food choices, and there is no coordinated effort to educate people on the power of whole foods.

Our children are relying on us to shoot for optimum health. Let’s aim high and make a plan to get there. Plant-based nutrition is a major part of the solution, and would address virtually all goals to reduce chronic illness and risk factors. With such a straightforward way to get to the top, why settle for anything less? In the meantime, why wait for the government to wake up. You can move forward and improve your health, and your family’s, today.  Your next meal is the starting point for your own Healthy People program.

Intrigued? Now you can use our Whole Foods Blog Finder to target informative, fun postings on plant-based nutrition. Quick information at no cost!

Blog by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, a nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.

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