FitnessMantra Quotes #3: Every Bite You Eat
A simple concept about the food we eat and what it does for us. But I haven’t seen it expressed quite so succinctly:
“Every bite you eat is an act of nourishment or an act of suicide.” - Dr. Bruce Bond
So, what do you choose? Good or bad? Fitness or Inactive Tiredness? Health or Disease?
Life or Death?
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Is Soup The Best-Kept Diet Secret Of All?
Consider two simple scenarios you could be facing at lunchtime: when you have a solid food and water, you could eat those separately or you could premix them into a soup and drink the whole thing together. Which of the two techniques do you think will keep you full longer hence preventing you from snacking often and gaining weight? If you said “The soup!” then it just shows you have read the title of this blog post!
But seriously, BBC News Magazine reports that eating the same food and water combined together as a soup will help keep you full much longer than if you ate them separately. The secret lies in the way food passes from the stomach to the intestines:
After you eat a meal, the pyloric sphincter valve at the bottom of your stomach holds food back so that the digestive juices can get to work. Water, however, passes straight through the sphincter to your intestines, so drinking water does not contribute to “filling you up”.
When you eat the same meal as a soup, the whole mixture remains in the stomach, because the water and food are blended together. The scientists’ scans confirm that the stomach stays fuller for longer, staving off those hunger pangs. [BBC]
Ghrelin and the suppression of hunger:
Ghelin is a hormone released by the stomach walls when the stomach is empty. This hormone triggers a response in the brains hypothalamus region that causes us to “feel hungry” and we start to look for food. But when the stomach walls are stretched as a result of eating food, ghrelin production is stopped and we “feel full”. So one easy way to keep the feeling of fullness for longer periods of time is to eat foods that stay in eh stomach longer.
But as you saw eating food and drinking water separately causes the water to leave the stomach first and the food left behind is not there long enough to keep you satisfied. Soups on the other hand stay in the stomach in their entirety and are only slowly removed causing you to avoid the dreaded 3:00 p.m. snack craving.
What has been your own experience with soups? Have you ever felt full for a longer period of time when you drank soup for lunch? Do comment your thoughts on this study and head on to BBC to read the entore article also.
[Via Lew Rockwell]
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Restaurant Meals Are Still Very High In Calories
If you are a person who regularly eats out then this news item should come as no surprise at all. With portion sizes constantly on the increase and restaurants forever trying to figure out how to increase the taste in their dishes, is it any wonder that the first casualty in this war on portion-sense is the number of calories in your food?
“Sky-high Calories In Some Restaurant Meals“, on WebMD explores this continuing phenomenon of ever-higher portion sizes. The Center For Science In The Public Interest (CSPI) studied the calorie and ingredient information for some of the popular meals from large restaurants and found saturated fat and sodium so high that it would be enough for three days!
Here are just a few of the major offenders:
- Chili’s Big Mouth Bites with French fries (four mini bacon cheeseburgers with fried onion strings): 2,350 calories, 38 grams saturated fat, 3,940 milligrams sodium.
- Olive Garden Tour of Italy, with lasagna, chicken parmigiana, and fettuccine alfredo: 1,450 calories, 33 grams saturated fat, 3,830 milligrams sodium.
- The Cheesecake Factory Fried Macaroni and Cheese: 1,570 calories, 69 grams saturated fat, 1,860 milligrams sodium. [WebMD]
Even an average meal at a restaurant can run close to 3000 calories when you realize that the entree, main course and dessert could each be close to a 1000 calories apiece. And some are just way worse than others:
Hurley believes diners don’t realize just how indulgent some items are. It’s a given that you’re splurging when you order Uno Chicago Grill’s Mega-Sized Deep Dish Sundae, a chocolate-chip cookie baked in a pizza pan and topped with ice cream, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce, she says.
“But how many people would guess there are 2,800 calories and 72 grams of saturated fat when that sundae hits the table?” [WebMD]
The CSPI is petitioning for a law requiring more easily available nutrition information on restaurat menus, menu boards etc. In the meantime, however, it’s upto the consumer to be wary of which dishes are high-calorie ad which ones are (relatively) more healthful.
For more examples of dishes-gone-wild and some tips on choosing good meals at restaurants head on to WebMD to read the entire new article.
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FitnessMantra Quotes #2: Make Time For Exercise
Another little fitness-quotation gem I came across yesterday and thought it worth sharing:
Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness. -Edward Stanley
It’s a choice we make everyday: be healthy or not, stick to our diets or not, exercise or not. Well, whatever you choose, just know this: there are always consequences.
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Is Salt Really That Bad For You?
Salt, how do we hate thee, let me count the ways! Sometimes the public is so quick to get on the nutrition bandwagon and demonize a perceived common enemy, that common sense and due diligence are often shown the door (case in point: our fear of saturated fat, cholesterol, … I could go on, but those are rants for some other day). Today we shall talk about salt. Yes, that very same white powder which was once apparently given to the Gods as an offering, without which food is often tasteless, heck, without which we could not even survive.
Today it is not far from the truth if I say salt is close to being public enemy #1. With the sodium content prominently displayed on all food-nutrition labels, salt is the bane of many a food-processor who just wants to preserve the food until it gets to you and wants to add some flavor while at it. Before you think I am all for excessive salt consumption, let me make it clear that anything in excess is bound to create an imbalance in our bodies that will then have to be taken care of, a process that uses up valuable resources and could lead to other complications. But to vilify one particular ingredient to the extent it is being done these days is overkill and probably incorrect as well.
“The neverending war on the white stuff” posted on Spiked-Online discusses the campaign against salt waged by the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA). By 2012, the FSA would like to bring the salt consumption of UK residents down to just 6g a day. Almost 80 categories of foods like bread and cereals have been affected by this new mandate.
As can be expected, the food manufacturers are up in arms over these new rules. Yes, the primary concern is that the foods being packaged with less salt will have a lot less appeal to consumers. But there is something else: the relationship between salt consumption and our health is not even conclusive! From Spiked:
When it comes to actual research on the effects of salt reduction, the results are inconsistent and any benefits are generally very small. A review in the British Medical Journal in 2002 concluded: ‘Intensive interventions, unsuited to primary care or population prevention programmes, provide only small reductions in blood pressure and sodium excretion, and effects on deaths and cardiovascular events are unclear. Advice to reduce sodium intake may help people on antihypertensive drugs to stop their medication while maintaining good blood pressure control.’ In other words, if you’ve already got high blood pressure, salt reduction might help, but for everyone else it is probably pointless. [Spiked]
And irrespective of what excessive salt could or could not do to our bodies, regular consumption of salt is not only OK, it is actually vital to our very survival. Our bodies are certainly capable or handling any little extra quantities of salt we might unknowingly consume (no one I know would consume spoonfuls of salt - our mouths pretty much makes sure we eat things in the right quantities and proportions). There is even a theory that our mouths react to salt in a favorable way because from an evolutionary point of view it was known to be good for health.
As the article concludes, while politicians try to “save us from ourselves” by giving us one mandate after another and invading our privacy with faulty research, it’s up to us to read more, get educated and not give into the hype.
[Via Lew Rockwell]
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