As you look over this month’s calendar are your weekends filling up with social events which will involve the gathering of friends and family, not to mention a variety of tasty morsels and assorted bubbly or creamy drinks.
Have past holiday seasons left you with extra pounds displayed on your scale, a pesky foggy brain, lagging energy, and a nagging sense of “oops, I’ve done it again”?
What scares you most about Halloween – images of scary costumes and horror movies, or the effect that the sugar overload will have on the children you know?
When I was a child decades ago, candy was a part of birthday parties and holidays scattered throughout the year, but it wasn’t a daily source of calories as it is for children today. Few children come home from school each day without having eaten some sort of chocolate, lollipop, or sugary substance. It may even have come to them as part of their school lunch in the form of fruit juice or chicken nuggets with ketchup, to name a few options. Read more
In prior articles, I have outlined the path that our food takes when we eat a bite. Starting with chewing, and then swallowing to send the food down the esophagus into the stomach, where it meets with stomach acid to aid in the next stages of digestion.
We aren’t aware of the intricate process that our food goes through once we swallow a bite. You may have heard the phrase “you are what you eat,” yet I would say that is not a complete statement. Simply eating doesn’t make the food become a part of you. It must be broken down into its constituent components – proteins into amino acids, carbohydrates into starches and glucose, and fats into fatty acids – in order for your body to absorb them. Read more
Does your day revolve around the meals you eat, or is your schedule so tight that you give food little thought? Whatever your situation, you don’t likely put much thought into what happens as you eat.
That bite you take is just the beginning of digestion. Chewing the bite not only breaks up the food but mixes it with digestive juices. Swallowing sends the food down your esophagus into your stomach where it meets highly acidic stomach acid to continue the process of breaking the food down into constituents that can eventually be absorbed. When liquefied, the food (now called chyme) passes into the small intestine where it is joined by digestive enzymes from the pancreas and bile from the gallbladder. The small intestine is where absorption begins, finishing in the colon before excretion of waste. Read more
We’ve lived with messages promoting eating low-fat or fat free foods for decades. Saturated fats seem to have drawn the majority of disparaging remarks, and many doctors continue to echo the theory that they should be avoided, despite many studies disproving the idea.
Would you like to feel free to consume foods containing fat without fear that you will get fat? Read on, and I will share what fat sources are beneficial, what to avoid, and how to ensure that they are able to be used properly for fuel in your body. Read more
Let’s explore additional ways you can take the nutrition of your meals to the next level. Doing so will involve adjustments related to choosing, cooking and serving.
Have you ever been put on a bland diet for medical reasons? Perhaps you had surgery or your digestive system needed a break, I have no doubt that you found the foods you were allowed to eat to be less than exciting.
Let’s face it. We like favor. Food manufacturers focus on that fact, often using it against us by creating foods with chemical additives that are designed to make us want to eat more than normal. This would include products with slogans such as “nobody can eat just one.”
No matter what your ancestry, blood type, height or personality, there is one prominent feature that your body shares with all humanity. Your body is 50-65% water. How simple could it be?
Water is a primary feature in your body’s many functions. That makes it vital for your health.
What do you drink on a regular basis? Most of us would say that all of our beverages are water-based. Coffee and tea are made with water. Even fruit has a high percentage of water, so fruit juice has a water base. These fill the need, right? But are all beverages recognized by your body as water? Read more
We’ve been talking about different ways you can edit your foods, as well as the way you approach meals, for a while now. Most recently, the topic has been ways to edit the flavor of your food beyond using the salt and pepper shakers that are commonly found on our tables. What edits have you tried recently? Have you found a new flavor you like? Let’s explore some more options …. Read more
What is a standard feature of your kitchen or dining room table? Do you have salt and pepper shakers on your table at home, or are you nervous about the effect of salt on your health?
I would agree that too much salt is not good for you, provided we are talking about the chemically-produced table salt that is added to most processed foods, meats and snacks.
Table salt – which is 97% sodium chloride – is chemically produced, bleached and devoid of most other nutrients. Would you be surprised to know that table salt also contains aluminum, which is counted among the heavy metals that can wreak havoc in the body? Table salt is not naturally occurring, and in fact, when salt-water fish are placed in salt water made with table salt … they die.
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