Natural Good Health And Wellness

Consuming Green Tea To Aid Weight Loss

Medical research is currently being carried out in an attempt to substantiate the many uses of green tea, but the results will take years to obtain. One simple use we can tease out of the complicated benefits is the use of green tea as an antioxidant. It is believed that drinking green tea or ingesting it in liquid or tablet form will provide your body with the antioxidants that will enable you to burn calories in a natural manner and thus achieve weight loss.

Green tea has superior anti-aging qualities, on top of being highly beneficial to a person’s metabolism. Green tea increases the rate that the human body regenerates its cells and slows down the oxidation of the cells. When using green tea for weight loss it is counted on for its laxative properties as well as toxin purging, these effects benefit the metabolism. Products using green tea hasten our normal metabolic rate and increase the number of calories that we burn.

Green tea for weight loss will not work if the person using if for weight loss refuses to eat healthily or incorporate exercise into their weight loss plan. To use green tea to its best advantage the person needs to adjust their mental attitude and their basic diet into a healthier mode.

If you drink your green tea, you should enjoy it in the evening as part of your bedtime ritual. For a few days after first starting this regimen, some may notice a bit of mild bowel and stomach discomfort as the body adjusts to its faster metabolic rate. This is a normal and temporary effect. You will begin to see positive effects within a week as long as you stick to your program of taking in lots of fluids, eating vegetables, and exercising moderately.

A common additive to green tea is ginseng root extract, as the combination makes both ingredients work more effectively. Ginseng root not only provides minerals and vitamins the body desperately needs during a detox regimen, but it has long been called the ‘root of life’ in Tibet and China.

Ginseng is also a great source of energy when you add it to the green tea products and is very apparent when a person is dieting to lose weight, for it helps them keep their energy levels up. Ginseng also has properties that increase the efficiency of a dieter’s immune system. Ginseng and green tea are natural substances that are safe to use, even if you plan to be dieting for as long as twenty-six weeks.

Source: Exercise

Attack Of The Killer Tomatos

clipped from www.blinkx.com

Is Grape Juice Good For You?

clipped from www.webmd.com The participants were assigned to drink either purple Concord grape juice or a placebo beverage for 14 days. Afterward, they abstained from both drinks for 14 days. Finally, they repeated the test using whichever drink they hadn’t already tried. “Good” HDL levels “significantly increased” in participants when they drank grape juice, write the researchers. Grape juice drinkers had HDL levels of 50 mg/dL, compared with almost 45 mg/dL in the placebo group. An HDL level below 40 mg/dL is considered a risk factor for heart disease. The grape juice group also had lower levels of two indicators of inflammation: superoxide and soluble CD40 ligand. Inflammation plays a key role in atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. Soluble CD40 ligand is thought to contribute to the development of atherosclerosis and vascular inflammation, says Freedman in a news release. The results suggest that alcohol-free grape juice might provide some of the cardiovascular benefits seen in studies of wine.

Is The Mediterranean Diet Rubbish?

clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk Last year, in an exceptional case in the northern region of Asturias, social services removed a 10-year-old boy weighing 100 kg from the care of his grandparents because they would not stop overfeeding him. Yet, Spain’s problem with obesity does not undermine its case to have its traditional diet internationally recognised, says Chef Ferran Adria whose restaurant El Bulli was named best in the world by Restaurant Magazine. However, the diet it recommends is “based on the dietary traditions of Crete, Greece and southern Italy circa 1960 at a time when the rates of chronic disease were among the lowest in the world, and adult life expectancy was among the highest, even though medical services were limited”.

Top 10 Food Sources Of Zinc

Zinc is an amazing mineral, but sadly quite a few people are deficient in it.

Zinc, for men, helps with sperm quality and also sperm count as well as maintaining levels of testosterone.

As an all rounder for men and women it is believed to help with vision. But it’s main strength is in boosting the immune system.

Now of course zinc is available in supplements, but it is also in food, so if you feel you are getting lots of colds, or you are a bloke trying for a child with your partner then you should try and get the following into your diet.

1. Oysters, 6 cooked will give you 43mg of zinc

2. Beef, 85g which is about the size of a deck of cards will give you 5.8mg

3. Chicken, particularly the dark meat if you have 85g of this you will get 2.4mg of zinc

4. Pork, 85g of this will give you 2.2mg

5. Cheddar cheese, people keep slamming dairy products but they shouldn’t - 30g= 1.2mg of zinc

6. Chickpeas, 200g = 2.8mg

7. Baked beans, (beans also have a low GI) 225g gives 1.6mg

8. Brazil nuts (also high in EFA’s) 30g = 1.4mg

9. Pumpkin seeds, 20g amounts to 1.3mg

10. Muesli 60g gives 1.3mg

The recommended amount for men is 5.5mg to 9.5mg per day and for women it is between 4 and 7mg, so as you can see by eating a balanced diet and including the superfoods above, you should easily be able to manage that.

Diabetic From Bacon?

It’s interesting what you can learn when you are surfing around the net.

For instance I came across a post at http://www.mrcabbagehead.com/2008/02/19/throw-away-your-diabetes and some of the stuff I knew but there was a little bit in there about bacon and how it can have a damaging effect on pancreas and other organs.

Now I try to live a healthy lifestyle but I still like to enjoy my food and have fun with life too, and although I knew bacon was not a superfood by any stretch of the imagination, I really did not think it was possible for it to be doing that kind of damage.

You live and learn.

Why You Should Love Tomatoes

More often now, some of our fruit and veg that we have taken for granted are now being classed as super foods, and tomatoes are no exception.

Besides being a super food, tomatoes are, in my opinion, mega tasty to eat as well and also  an extremely useful cooking ingredient for many dishes.

Now with most veg it is best to have them raw, but the guys over at http://homeremedy.blogsome.com have put raised an interesting point about them being more powerful when they are cooked.

It’s not a long post, but worth checking out.