I may be giving away a bit about my age here, but I remember when my Mom used to feed us cod liver oil every morning at breakfast. And, I remember it, because it was long before the capsule form was all that popular. Boy, does that stuff taste nasty. Continue reading
Protein powder is sometimes a necessary supplement for athletes, especially those who train for hours a day. This includes boxers, MMA fighters, and bodybuilders. Three of the most common types of protein powder are based from milk, egg, and soy. The following guidelines will help you to choose which one(s) might be the best for you and your own dietary needs.
Milk Protein (Casein and Whey). Casein and whey protein are two milk-based powders. The biggest advantage to casein protein powder is the fact that it contains more glutamine than other supplements. This amino acid not only helps the muscles recover properly after a strenuous workout, but it also helps keep the immune system in optimum shape.
Many athletes, however, appreciate the fact that whey protein is the most readily absorbed of all protein powders. This means that when your body needs it most, whey protein can help your body start the recovery process almost instantly after a workout. Continue reading
The title to this blog post is sort of a loaded question—the answer is, it depends. If you eat a healthy and balanced diet, with lots of variety and ample fruits and vegetables in addition to lean meats and dairy products, and healthy whole grain bread, your body may be getting all of the nutrition that it needs.
However, if you are ever guilty of skipping meals, eating a considerable amount of either fast food takeout or frozen and prepared foods, you likely are not getting the proper nutrients, even while consuming far too many calories per day.
The choice to be made is whether to commit to eating only those foods which will lead to optimal health- largely unprocessed foods, without trans-fats and preservatives. If you believe that you can change your diet immediately to a more natural, whole foods approach, then by all means you should do so. The body processes real and natural foods best, and utilizes the vitamins and minerals from whole foods better than any other source.
Then again, if you feel that would be difficult, or that it would take you some time to re-train your thought patterns until you will be able to eat healthily enough to support all of your body’s systems adequately, then supplementing is a great alternative to ensure your body gets what it needs.
By Denise Gabbard for Discount Vouchers, where you can find coupons and promos for Healthy Direct and order the supplements right for you.
You may have heard of maca (also called la maca, macca or peruvian maca) powder and its purported health benefits. It has become a very popular health supplement and natural remedy during the last 5 years or so in the USA for providing potent energy levels, raising libido, counteracting negative menopausal symptoms, combating stress and anxiety and for providing overall balance and well being. Maca powder is commonly available in most natural health stores but due to geographical difficulty it is rare to come across the actual fresh ‘la maca‘ root vegetable – it only grows at very high altitudes in the Peruvian Andes!
Maca Powder Health Benefits
One of the fundamental ways that maca powder benefits us is through its profound ability to help balance our glands and the hormones they produce. Properly functioning glands are essential to our well being and when just one of them is over or under functioning then we will experience emotional and/or physical health problems.
Helping to balance the thymus gland, which is in the chest near to the heart, maca powder also helps us to maintain a healthy immune system. One of the main purposes of the thymus gland is to secrete hormones that ‘instruct’ our antibodies when and where to attack bacteria, viruses and other pathogens. If the thymus is not functioning optimally then it may send mixed, incorrect or no messages to our antibodies which can result in them attacking our own healthy cells instead of genuine foreign invaders. This dysfunction is the basis for autoimmune disease like arthritis, diabetes and mutiplesclerosis.
Helping to balance the adrenal glands is one of the major benefits of taking maca powder on a regular basis. Balanced adrenals are important for helping us maintain solid and even energy levels throughout the day and for helping us combat stress and anxiety. It is when the adrenals secrete too much stress hormone that stress, anxiety and erratic energy levels result.
Green tea extract has become one of the most popular weight loss supplements available, if not the most popular. One of the main reasons behind this popularity is that it works! There has now been many studies showing us that green tea actually does burn fat and helps us lose weight.
EGCG and Caffeine
The caffeine content of green tea explains the weight loss effects of green tea to a small degree because caffeine has been known for decades to increase the metabolism and therefore burn energy. However, scientists soon realized there must be something else in green tea to explain its potent weight loss effects up and above its caffeine content. They discovered that the ingredient is an antioxidant called EGCG and it has a profound effect at stimulating the central nervous system to increase the basal metabolic rate of the body. In other words the body burns more calories to carry out its usually daily duties like digestion and pumping blood around the body.
Japanese Study
Research for green tea weight loss that was conducted in Japan was published in the American Journal of Nutrition in 2005 and tested the effects of EGCG or a placebo on a group of overweight Japanese men. The placebo group where given a daily bottle of oolong tea that contained 22mg EGCG for a period of 2 weeks and the other group were given a daily green tea extract supplement that contained 690mg of EGCG. The results were that the men given the green tea extract displayed a significant reduction in body weight, body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, body fat mass and subcutaneous fat compared with the placebo group!
Another Japanese Study
In another Japanese based study green tea extract was tested to see if it aided in weight loss during an exercise program. A total of 107 volunteers were split into two groups and put into a moderate exercise program that consisted of 3 x 30 minute cardio sessions per week. One half of the men were given a daily drink that contained just 39mg of caffeine and the other group were give a drink that contained 39mg of caffeine plus 690mg of EGCG. The study lasted for 12 weeks and the results found that those who were given the drink containing caffeine and EGCG lost significant more abdominal fat than the group that was only given the caffeine based drink! This just goes to show how effective EGCG is aiding weight loss compared to caffeine.
The history of Green Tea is a long and exotic one, with the ancient Chinese long extolling the virtues of the drink and placing great faith in its life giving and healing properties. It wasn’t until the 1700′s that tea found its way to European shores, but only recently have the benefits of green tea been fully realised in the western world.
There is a lot written on the web about green tea benefits, much of it anecdotal but also now backed up scientifically and the list of ailments green tea is claimed to be able to cure or prevent is extensive indeed. It includes cures for digestive problems, the ability to improve the time it takes to heal wounds, purification of the blood and detoxification of poisons.
Scientists continue to investigate claims of its health advantages, but study after study has shown that drinking green tea has curative or preventative powers. It is claimed that Green tea can:
Of course these are not guaranteed, but people have reported benefit in all of these areas to varying degrees. How is this possible? Scientists attribute the miraculous healing benefits of green tea to the high concentration of antioxidants found in both the tea leaves in the wild and the steeped tea that we drink.
Antioxidants are vary importing in neutralising the effect of something called free radicals in the human body. Free radicals
are the atoms that are thought to accelerate ageing and damage skin. Ultimately Free radicals have in their place in biology and we should not strive to eliminate them altogether, but we can combat the types of free radicals whose cumulative effect is harmful to our bodies with Antioxidants.
Usually our antioxidant intake come from fruits and vegetables, and, not surprisingly, in tea. But studies show that green tea has 8-10 times more antioxidants than fruits and vegetables, another reason to cultivate the tea-drinking habit.
A big part of succeeding with any kind of plan for losing some weight is in understanding what to expect from it before you go jumping in with both feet and landing with a thump. For the several Nutrisystem diet plans that are available in particular, there will be aspects to them that you may not be expecting. So being ready for what is coming will really help you to not only better understand the diet itself, but to have the very best chances of succeeding in achieving your own weight loss goal. This article will explain some of the aspects that you may not be so well prepared for.
Cost
The cost of the Nutrisystem diets varies depending upon which plan you select, but paying a single payment in one go for a four week diet menu may at first seem quite expensive. But when you offset that cost against what you’d normally spend on all your food for those four weeks, you’ll see it actually works out very reasonable for a quality diet that is simplicity itself to use and will help you lose weight.
Storage
The regular menus consist of three meals plus one dessert and two snacks per day for twenty eight days. That’s quite a collection of food packages, which need to be stored somewhere suitable. Either a cool, dry place or the freezer depending upon the plan you select, so make sure you have space before ordering!
Meal Size
The size of the meals is probably smaller than you are used to. This is partly because you may have gotten used to large meals, which will be part of the reason you are overweight in the first place, and partly because, well, it is a diet and you are meant to eat less in order to lose weight!
Healthy Food
One aspect that you may not be prepared for is the switch from a diet of probably bad food, like junk, processed or fast food to one of healthy food. Your body will need to adapt to the better food and this can produce flatulence. Its just a normal body function, so don’t let it bother you!
Support
There is full customer support with counsellors and nutritionists available to help you via the Nutrisystem website as well as a customer forum where you can chat to other customers for mutual support and motivation. Be sure to use it to get the best from your diet plan and make the most of these Nutrisystem diet tips for fast weight loss to ensure success is yours.
High quality acai juice is very beneficial to our health. It is loaded with antioxidants called anthocyanins along with many other health promoting nutrients that can help protect us from degenerative disease like cancer, macular degeneration, premature aging, arthritis and heart disease. However, the key word here is high quality. Lower quality acai juice products will not provide the same level of health benefits. So when buying acai juice there are some key factors to look out for that will ensure you get the every best from acai. Continue reading
The health benefits of green tea is one of a very few natural remedies in which there is very little dispute to its effectiveness. In Asia, and especially China, green tea has been used for its medicinal benefits for centuries. In China there is even evidence that green tea has been used as a natural medicine as far back as 4000 years. Today, there is a lot of hard scientific evidence to support the long known health benefits of green tea.
Cancer Prevention
One of the benefits of green tea that has been focused on extensively in studies is its potent anti-cancer properties. One such study that was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 1994 released strong evidence that drinking green tea can help protect us from cancer. The study looked at the diets of many men and women in China and found that those who drink the most green tea are 60% less likely to develop cancer of the esophagus. Other studies show that green tea can help protect us from other forms of cancer too, including cancer of the breasts, lungs and prostate.
Research undertaken at the University of Purdue discovered that a lot of the anti-cancer benefits of green tea can be attributed to the antioxidants that are found most abundantly in green tea – catechins. Catechins help to protect our cells form oxidative damage that can lead to cancer development.
Heart health Benefits of Green tea
Many studies show that drinking green tea is very beneficial to our heart and cardiovascular health. Catechins help to protect LDL Cholesterol from oxidative damage that can lead lead to the development of atherosclerosis and the formation of blood clots. This is important for heart health because atherosclerosis and blood clots are key risk factors that can lead to heart attacks.
Not just limited to protecting LDL cholesterol from oxidative damage, studies show that drinking green tea helps to lower blood levels of LDL cholesterol while raising HDL cholesterol levels. This is great for heart health because High HDL cholesterol blood levels are protective against heart disease, while the opposite is true for LDL cholesterol!
Weight Loss
Green tea weight loss is actually one of a very few natural forms of weight loss that is based in solid science. The amazing anti-cancer and heart protective catechins of green tea increase our metabolic rate and therefore helps the body burn more calories just by performing its basic functions. However, studies show that we would need to drink about 12 cups of green tea a day to achieve this effect. That’s a lot of tea! A great alternative is to take a quality green tea extract supplement that can provide the weight loss benefits of many cups of green tea.
We all know how running can be effective when your health is in question. First of all, you increase the flow of oxygen in the blood stream which energizes the entire body and lifts up your mood. Second, it keeps a strong and healthy heart over the years. Also, the muscles are developed, bones and joints are strengthened and the fat is trimmed. Continue reading