“People don’t just want to live longer,” says Frank Hu, chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “They want to live longer without…
Tag: alcohol
A leading expert explains how the wrong combo could dampen a drug’s effect…or deliver a heftier dose. Joseph Boullata is a professor of clinical nutrition at Drexel University and a…
If you’re going to order a drink with dinner, which does less damage: wine, beer, or a cocktail? Any alcohol is empty calories. But wine or beer beats a cocktail…
Get Life-Saving Information on Diet and Nutrition Right Now! Dear Friend, You’ve always wanted life-saving information about the foods you eat. You should know, for example, that Marie Callender’s Chicken…
“Say cheese! It’s yummier than yogurt!” says the label of Elli Quark. Quark may be new to Americans (so new that Elli may not have reached your area yet), but Europeans…
Most people know that calcium is good for bones, fiber is good for constipation, and iron is good for blood, to name a few. But once you go beyond the basics, the picture gets murky.
Here’s a healthy food quiz (questions and answers included) to see how well you know which foods or nutrients can prevent or promote which diseases.
Feel free to cheat. The questions aren’t really a test of how well you read (and remember) every issue of Nutrition Action. They’re just a sneaky way to get you to look at the answers, which contain a wealth of information on how your diet affects your health.
Beans, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, milk, bran. Those are some of the usual suspects when people are trying to figure out, ahem, what foods cause gas. And those foods can cause gas.
But most of us overlook a growing source of the problem: inulin, or chicory root extract, one of the most popular ingredients in “high-fiber” foods.
The best and safest artificial sweeteners are erythritol, xylitol, stevia leaf extracts, neotame, and mon fruit extract—with some caveats:
• Erythritol: Large amounts (more than about 40 or 50 grams or 10 or 12 teaspoons) of this sugar alcohol sometimes cause nausea, but smaller amounts are fine. (Sensitivities vary among individuals.) Erythritol, small amounts of which occur naturally in some fruits, is about 60 to 70 percent as sweet as table sugar and has at most one-twentieth as many calories. Unlike the high-potency sweeteners, erythritol provides the bulk and “mouth feel” of sugar.
• Xylitol: This sugar alcohol, which occurs naturally in birch and some other plants, is about as sweet as table sugar and has about three quarters of the calories. Too much xylitol (about 30–40 grams or 7–10 teaspoons, although sensitivities vary) could produce a laxative effect and/or gastrointestinal distress.
“If it wasn’t on a caveman’s menu, it shouldn’t be on yours.” That’s the basic premise of a Paleo diet. The question remains, as it should for any diet—is Paleo healthy?
Maybe you’ve heard of the Nordic diet, the Mediterranean diet, and more recently, the gluten-free diet, but these are all very different from the primal diet known as Paleo.
But is the Paleo diet healthy?
“Mediterranean diet fights heart disease,” announced ABC News. “Mediterranean diet cuts risk of stroke,” said USA Today. “Mediterranean diet over low fat? Well, at least it’s more fun,” quipped the Los Angeles Times. A study published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine set off a media frenzy in February. Its findings were striking, but the press reports may have misled many. Here’s what the study actually found…and how it should (or shouldn’t) alter what you eat.