The Anti-Inflammatory Diet: Tape this list to your fridge!
An important step in creating a healthy kitchen is to read and understand food labels. When you begin restocking your pantry, food labels are your best resource to assess what to keep and what to toss. This practice will also give you an overview of your choices in the supermarket, and is a good starting point to modify your shopping habits. Use the list below to determine which items to discard. Many of these ingredients are considered pro-inflammatory and therefore unfavorable to healthy aging. If the list of ingredients contains one or more of these undesirables, toss and don't buy again!
Polenta, or cornmeal, is made from dried corn kernels that have been ground into fine, medium and coarse textures. It is cooked to a thick and moist consistency and either served hot - right out of the cooking pot - or cooled in a baking pan and cut into triangles. Here it is cooked with cheese to give it added flavor. The simple act of roasting peppers for the puree spread gives them a sweet, smoky taste - just right for mild-tasting polenta.
Yesterday we discussed four unhealthy drinks that you should minimize or avoid. Today we cover four healthy beverages - experiment to find the best ways to incorporate them into your daily routine:
A new study from Northwestern University suggests that late-night snacks or eating when you should be asleep can pile on pounds. The researchers were investigating why shift workers who are on the job at irregular hours tend to be overweight. So they fed mice a high fat diet during normal mouse sleeping time and fed the same diet to a control group of mice during the hours when the animals are naturally awake. All the mice gained, but the ones fed when they should have been asleep increased their weight by 48 percent compared to the others whose weight went up only 20 percent. All the mice ate the same number of calories and performed equal amounts of exercise. This suggests that the timing of meals matters to weight control. Earlier research found that our circadian clock regulates energy use, which implies that when we eat may affect the balance between calories consumed and the number of calories burned daily. The study was published online Sept. 3, 2009 by the journal Obesity.
Who's counting? Researchers from the Mayo Clinic looked at smoking history and other risk factors for breast cancer in 1,225 women who developed the disease and more than 6,800 who did not.
They noted that earlier studies didn’t clearly define whether participating women were current or former smokers or had never smoked at all. For this study, the researchers defined "smokers" - current or former - as anyone who had cumulatively smoked more than 100 cigarettes at any time. They found that just over 10 percent of the women in their study were current smokers; almost 9 percent had quit smoking and 81 percent never smoked.
Those who had smoked more than 100 cigarettes proved at substantially increased risk for breast cancer; but the study also demonstrated that quitting reduces this risk. The researchers also found that women who had used birth control pills for 11 years or longer had a 200 percent increased risk of breast cancer, that those who took post-menopausal hormone replacement therapy had an increased risk of 81 percent and that women who had had hysterectomies had a reduced risk of 35 percent. The study was published in the September/October, 2009 issue of The Breast Journal.
