It’s healthy for you…and their future What diet can protect both our health and our children’s and grandchildren’s future? In January, the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, and Health unveiled…
Tag: red meat
True enough. Almost any chicken or turkey burger is leaner than one made of “regular” (30% fat) ground beef. Regular ground beef has 230 calories and 6 grams of saturated…
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.
The benefits of polyunsaturated fats in your diet may include lower levels of inflammation and less buildup of plaque in arteries. This is important, because “Inflammation plays two key roles in coronary heart disease,” explains Penny Kris-Etherton of Pennsylvania State University.
First, it helps build the plaque that narrows arteries. The process starts when the immune system mobilizes to heal an “injury” in the artery wall, often caused by oxidized LDL cholesterol. Smoking, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar can also damage the arteries and lead to plaque buildup.“
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And every single step of the way, inflammatory signals produced in the plaque fuel the process,” says Kris-Etherton. After decades, the plaque—now filled with cholesterol, calcium, and cell debris—gets covered with a fibrous cap of smooth muscle cells. Then, once again, inflammation wreaks havoc.
“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?
“We’ve known for a long time that if you reduce the calorie intake of rats or mice, they live much longer,” says Mark Mattson, chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) in Baltimore. Do these intermittent fasting benefits carry over to humans?
What happens in species closer to humans is more complicated. Rhesus monkeys fed 30 percent fewer calories lived longer in a study at the University of Wisconsin, but not in a study at the NIA.
Despite Americans’ longtime love affair with steaks and burgers, we’re slowly giving up our red-meat habit. Consumption of beef has declined steadily since its heyday in the 1970s. We ate…
“It takes 7 to 8 pounds of feed to produce a pound of beef and 5½ to 6 pounds of feed to produce a pound of pork,” says Robert Lawrence,…
“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.
“Stop eating carbs and you can control your destiny and avoid Alzheimer’s,” promised Dr. Mehmet Oz on his TV show in 2013. “Eating carbs eats away at your brain.” His…