The most common advice given to people is to eat a healthy diet. This is such a subjective statement.
What a healthy diet means to me may not be the same to you. Also, what constitutes a healthy diet for one person may not be the same for another. All this is based on taking a person as an individual and looking at their health issues: lifestyle, age and fitness levels. How can we all follow the same diet if we have different health issues and lifestyles?
I have built up a group of food health tips which will generally suit all types of people without having to delve deeply into their backgrounds and therefore should benefit everyone.
What we eat for breakfast is always an issue. I always eat fruit, in the form of a smoothie, or whole fruit. Eating blueberries, with or without your cereal, each day could be all it takes to keep blood pressure at healthy levels and prevent arteries from becoming stiff. A cup of the fruit every day could start having a positive impact on your hearth health in just eight weeks, say researchers from Florida State University.
They gave a group of 48 postmenopausal women 22g, or one 8oz cup, of freeze dried blueberry powder or a placebo powder every day for eight weeks. (Note to conduct a double blind study, it was necessary to reduce the blueberries to a powder format. We would eat them as normal fruit.
By the end of the trial, the women taking the blueberry powder had an average decrease in systolic blood pressure (the first of the two readings) of 7mmHg, which represents a five per cent drop and a 6.3 per cent reduction in diastolic blood pressure levels.
They also recorded a 6.5 per cent reduction in arterial stiffness. Levels of nitric oxide, a marker in the blood involved in relaxing blood vessels, had increased by 68 per cent and might explain the drop in blood pressure. (J. Acad. Nutr. Diet, 2015)
Many people believe that eating avocado every day will put weight on. Well, eating an avocado on a daily basis can help keep levels of the so-called ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol in check, especially if you are obese or overweight.
It is an example of eating ‘good’ unsaturated fatty acids, such as those found in avocados, and replacing the ‘bad’ saturated fatty acids found in the typical western diet. Substituting the two fats makes for a healthy heart and cardiovascular system and has a positive impact on total and LDL cholesterol levels, say researchers from Pennsylvania State University.
How can we all follow the same diet if we have different health issues and lifestyles?
They changed the diets of 45 heart patients three times, with all patients eating a lower fat diet without avocado, and moderate fat diet with and without avocado, for periods of five weeks per diet. The patients were all either overweight or obese.
Eating an avocado every day seemed to make a significant difference among the three diets. However, similar healthy effects would be seen if people adopted more of the Mediterranean type of diet, including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fatty fish and foods rich in monounsaturated fats, such as extra virgin olive oil and nuts, say the researchers (J. Am. Heart Assoc., 2015).
We all know that pure orange juice and other citrus juices are good for us. However, it seems they are even better than we thought. Scientists have discovered a more accurate way of measuring their goodness and found that their antioxidant levels are 10 times higher than in previous results. All the natural, 100 per cent citrus juices that are commonly available, including orange, lemon, grapefruit and mandarin, deliver 10 times the amount of antioxidants than previous tests had suggested.
Researchers at the University of Granada have developed a more accurate way of measuring the goodness of juices. Using their global antioxidant response measure, they can analyse the liquid and fibre in both the small and large intestines. Previous tests had measured only liquid in the small intestine. According to researchers, this test should be able to detect higher antioxidant levels in other foods too.
Back to breakfast. Eating a bowl of porridge, brown rice or quinoa every day will help you to live longer and reduce your chances of dying from heart disease. A daily serving of 28g of whole grains (10oz or just over a cup) reduces the risk of premature death by five per cent and cardiovascular death by nine per cent, researchers from Harvard University have established.
Whole grains retain the bran and germ and contain 25 per cent more protein than refined grains used in white flour, pasta and white rice. The connection was made between whole grains and mortality after the researchers tracked the lives and eating habits of 74,341 women and 43,744 men for 24 years.
During the study, 26,920 participants died, but death was far less likely in those regularly eating whole grains. The grains had a protective effect across all genders, all age groups, body weights and levels of physical activity. They didn’t, however, protect against cancer.
Earlier studies have found the benefits from eating whole grains to be wide. They boost bone strength, lower blood pressure, promote healthy gut bacteria and reduce the risk of diabetes (JAMA, 2015).
kathryn@maltanet.net