4 Weight Loss Tips for the Family

As a parent or grandparent, setting a good example is important. This is especially true around the dinner table, since children tend to pick up eating habits from the family routine. Try the following - your family may not even know they are eating more healthful meals

1. Incorporate a vegetable into every meal. Peas, broccoli, asparagus, red, yellow or green bell peppers, spinach - you name it, vegetables provide nutrients and fiber.
2. Use more beans and legumes, and less meat. Chickpeas, lentils and beans of all types are good sources of fiber and protein. Use the Anti-Inflammatory Food Pyramid below.
3. Serve up whole grains. Brown rice and bulgur wheat provide a delicious, grainy taste and texture - and have more fiber and protein than their white counterparts. Choose true, relatively intact whole grains like these over grains that have been ground into flour.
4. Switch sweets. Instead of soda, stock the pantry with sparkling waters. Pour fruit juice into a pitcher and dilute it to lessen the sugar content. Stock your kitchen with fresh, whole fruits, and leave the cookies in the store.

3 Reasons to Eat Tomatoes

This fruit, which many still consider to be a vegetable due to its lack of sweetness, is a seasonal staple. Chopped in salads, sliced with fresh buffalo mozzarella, pureed for gazpacho or eaten fresh off the vine, a ripe tomato in summertime is a delicious and healthful treat. Tomatoes are:

1. Low in calories.
2. Excellent sources of vitamin C, and provide vitamins A and K, potassium, manganese and fiber.
3. A source of lycopene - researchers have linked the lycopene (a carotenoid that gives tomatoes their color) with a lowered risk of heart disease and cancer (including prostate, breast, colorectal and lung), as well as being helpful in lowering high cholesterol.

To get the full health benefit of tomatoes, including their anti-cancer potential, remember that carotenoids are fat-soluble and are better absorbed when eaten lightly cooked and paired with fats such as extra-virgin olive oil.

What items should you throw out when cleaning your Kitchen.

An important step in creating a healthy kitchen is to read and understand food labels. When you begin restocking your pantry, food labels are your best resource to assess what to keep and what to toss. This practice will also give you an overview of your choices in the supermarket, and is a good starting point to modify your shopping habits. Use the list below to determine which items to discard. Many of these ingredients are considered pro-inflammatory and therefore unfavorable to healthy aging. If the list of ingredients contains one or more of these undesirables, toss and don't buy again!

1. Animal fat, such as lard
2. Artificial sweeteners or non-nutritive sweeteners
3. Coconut oil
4. Corn oil
5. Cottonseed oil
6. Fractionated oil
7. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS)
8. Hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oil or vegetable shortening
9. Margarine
10. Palm or palm kernel oil
11. Blended vegetable oils
12. Safflower oil
13. Soybean oil
14. Sunflower oil

Note that high-oleic versions of sunflower or safflower oils are acceptable, as they have fatty acid profiles closer to that of olive oil.

Supplementing Your Diet
Diet For life has long considered taking supplements to be good insurance against those times when you can't eat right. Visit www.dietforlife.biz to receive FREE shipping with any Supplement purchase totaling $60.oo or above.

How to Avoid Transfats!

Trans fats have been linked to many health issues, especially heart disease. If you want to avoid trans fats when dining out or cooking at home, follow these simple rules:

• Avoid margarines. Most contain trans fats. Good Alternative Butters are Earth's Balance or Smart Balance with Omega 3.

• Read snack food labels carefully. Stay away from items that list "partially hydrogenated oil" or " partially hydrogenated soy bean oil" on the label, and opt for baked or air-popped versions instead.

• Limit heavily processed foods and focus on fresh, whole foods.

I recommend using extra virgin olive oil as your main cooking oil or Grapeseed oil. For a neutral-tasting oil, use expeller pressed, organic canola oil.

Are you getting enough sleep?

Getting enough sleep can help you re-learn tasks that you might have forgotten. Research at the University of Chicago showed for the first time that people who had "forgotten" how to perform a complex task 12 hours after training found that those abilities were restored after a night's sleep.*

"Sleep consolidated learning by restoring what was lost over the course of a day following training and by protecting what was learned against subsequent loss," said Howard Nusbaum, Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, and a researcher in the study. "These findings suggest that sleep has an important role in learning generalized skills in stabilizing and protecting memory."

If you want to take a all natural supplement to improve your sleep try " Health For Life Quick Release Melatonin".

* If you would like to read more about this study Click here:

Is your plastic safe to drink out of?

There is a wide known chemical called Bisphenol-A also known as BPA that has been widely researched and is used in many of our plastics including, sippy cups, the epoxy linings of canned food, baby bottles, nalgene bottles and countless other items (#7 on the bottom).

The FDA just ruled that this chemical is not dangerous when many legitimate scientists and other independently financed studies (unbiased studies) have proved it's direct connection to obesity, developmental problems, risk for heart attack, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and increased risk of type II diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia. This is scary seeing how the FDA should ban any chemical that is linked to any health risk and they haven't. The two most recent studies performed by the FDA were both paid for by the plastic industry.

When the plastic that contains BPA is heated up, ran through the dishwasher, or exposed to boiling water the chemical breaks down and BPA seeps into the food contents in the container.

Last night I just through away about 10 bottles with the #7 on the bottom, containing BPA. I will look through my Tupperware this weekend!

7 Ways to beat BPA, in order of Importance:

1. Ditch the clear plastic baby bottles, right now. All the research that says there are problems point at the effect of the estrogen-like BPA on children as being the most significant.

2. Tin cans are often lined in plastic BPA and sit around a long time; get rid of older tin cans, particularly if they contain tomatoes and other acidic fruits.

3. Don't use your polycarbonate bottle for hot drinks.

4. Polycarbonate bottles get crazed and cracked as they get older; that increases surface area. Get rid of old ones.

5. Replace your Polycarbonate bottle with a Sigg, Kleen Kanteen, or the new BPA free Camelbak, particularly if pregnant or pre-pubescent.

6. Replace jugs where water sits around a long time, like Brita knockoffs. (Brita says they are BPA free)

7. Stop using jugged water cooler water, get a filter and cooler that uses city water. It is a big jug so there probably isn't much of a problem, but why are you drinking bottled water anyways?

Here are just a few of the hundreds of studies that have been done on this chemical:

http://www.chej.org/BPA_Website.htm

http://www.ewg.org/reports/bisphenola

http://www.environmentcalifornia.org/reports/environmental-health/envi ro...

http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Plasticizers/Phthalates-Bisphenol-A-D ev...

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/01/30/bisphenol-study.html

Ap Article and Sources:

http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/NewScience/oncompounds/bisphenola/2005/2005-0921alonso-magdalenaetal.htm

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/fda-decision-on-bpa-outrages-h ea...

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/04/bpa-in-water.php

http://greenopolis.com/myopolis/blogs/david+d/big-plastic-paid-off-the-fda

Miracle Fruit!

MIRACLE FRUIT!

Here is a West African berry that we should all get our tongues on. Local tribes would pick these berries and eat them before meals. Each berry contains an active glycoprotein molecule that binds to the tongue's taste bugs. When the fleshy part of the berry is eaten, it causes bitter and sour foods to taste sweet! The effect lasts between thirty minutes to two hours.


* An attempt was made in the 1970s to commercialize the ability of the fruit to turn non-sweet foods into sweet foods without a caloric penalty, but ended in failure in controversial circumstances with accusations that the project was sabotaged and the research burgled by the sugar industry to prevent loss of business caused by a drop in the need for sugar. The FDA has always denied that pressure was put on it by the sugar industry, but refused to release any files on the subject. Similar arguments are noted for FDA's regulation on Stevia now labeled as a "dietary supplement" instead of a "sweetener".

For a time in the 1970s, US dieters could purchase a pill form of miraculin. It was at this time that the idea of the "miraculin party" was conceived. Recently, this phenomenon has enjoyed some revival in Bacchanalian-like food tasting events, referred to as "flavor tripping parties" by some. The tasters consume sour and bitter foods, such as lemons, radishes, and beer, to experience the taste changes that occur. A blog dedicated to the phenomenon of "flavor tripping" describes the miracle fruit "like a candy WillyWonka would have invented."

*Information from Wikipedia entry on Miracle Fruit

... after eating [miracle fruit] stout beers taste like chocolate milkshakes, grapefruits taste like pixie sticks, cheeses taste like frosting, it will make even the crappiest tequila taste like lemonade (and strangely enough, it will make all wine taste like Manischewitz). - Flavor Tripping blog, entry "mad flavor science".[8]