Have you ever wondered what is the thing attracting you to eat more chocolate bars and various snacks? The answer is Inulin, a carbohydrate fiber that stimulates so called ‘good bacteria’ in the colon and is able to cause body gases, flatulence, bloating and diarrhea. Naturally Inulin can be found in bananas, onions, garlic and wheat.
A negative outcome may arise from consuming Inulin food too often. Its addictive nature causes gastrointestinal problems in the digestive body system. Joanne Slavin form the University of Minnesota at St. Paul, department of food science and nutrition, has conveyed a study that involved healthy 26 men and women from 18 to 60 years old. In five weeks time, once a week they were give breakfast with cream cheese bagel and orange juice.
The breakfast meal was served on an empty stomach without a previous night dinner. The orange juice contained 5 to 10 grams dose of normal inulin products – shorter-chain oligofructose and native inulin; or a placebo.
Over two days the participants were asked weather they have felt any symptoms from this type of fiber consumptions; symptoms like nausea, flatulence, diarrhea, gas, GI rumbling and constipation. Results came in with mild symptoms from those that had inulin in their nutrition, mainly from the 10 grams of oligofructose dosage. The most common symptom was flatulence – yeah, pretty embarrassing!
From the research it has come to the conclusion that consuming 5 grams of “sweet” inulin and 10 grams of native inulin a day are tolerable for healthy people. With a target of reducing calories and fat in food products; and increasing the amount of fiber and flavor; food production has found a way of chemically structuring inulin in order to perform its “addictive seduction” role.
High calorie food tends to be more addictive then a normal nutritious type of fruit. People chose Chocolate bars over fiber bars. The taste of a sweet chocolate bar works great for the appetite, reaching a point that a fiber bar is unable achieve. But a fiber bar is far more nutritious and healthy then a high calorie chocolate bar. The heart and stomach don’t have to work overtime in order for fiber to be distributed through the blood flow.
To start fighting the addictive nature of products containing inulin, people need to start with making firm decisions about what to consume. It is always difficult at the beginning when you change a habit. Start slow and finish strong.
The human body has a necessity of sleep, quite logically, in order for it to function properly. You don’t want to ‘overheat’ the body’s mechanism by avoiding time required for rest with sleep included. During those approximate 7 hours of sleep there is a possibility of gaining weight, but not much and not overnight though.
A study in Finland that was made over 7.300 people among the age of 40 to 60 years showed that women are more likely to gain weight due to less sleeping time. The survey lasted 2 years and gave the results that women who had problems falling a sleep and then waking up just couple of hours later, gained about 11 pounds.
The situation is entirely different about men. They seem to not gain any weight at all if they have problems with sleeping. This is probably due to the fact that the male body has a long history of physical strength and mobile capabilities. Since men, statistically, are more included in sports and activities, their body hardly waits for night to fall in order to get its proper rest.
It still stay unclear how could the male body stay unaffected by the sleeping problem. Probably because the number of men surveyed in the study is three times less than women (women 5.700 and men 1.300). But still, the number of men gaining weight in this group is almost zero.
However, many factors come in to play when it comes to weight loss or weight gain during sleep. The normal time of sleep is 7 hours in a 24 hour day. Many nutritionists recommend not eating before going to bed; in fact, not to eat after 7 PM. If you eat before sleep, the body must work to process the food. No quality sleep comes from a full stomach when the body is working and your eyes and brain try to sleep.
So sleeping under these circumstances can cause weight gain in time, but not overnight. The problem is that instead of waking up felling rested, you will wake up even more tired than when you went to bed.
Shifting the time of sleep, cutting the time of sleep, even continuing the time of sleep affects the metabolism and the appetite. Probably the worst combination is when you can’t fall a sleep on an empty stomach, which is very normal.
People in this situation must have a bite before going to bed, and then wake up the next morning feeling very tired. Even if they sleep for 9 hours they still need more time to sleep in order to have a fresh start.
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There are many proverbs in the world about getting healthy nutrition during the day. The most popular one being: “Eat breakfast like a king, eat lunch like a merchant, and eat dinner like a poor man.” It is far better not to skip breakfast than to think that morning cereal containing more sugar is bad for your health.
Getting up in the morning doesn’t just start the day; it also starts your activity after a good nights rest. So, having a good nutritious breakfast cereal, full with healthy fibers, is great boosting fuel for the body.
In the morning, when people are preparing to go to work or school, there isn’t much time for cooking; and the easiest way to ‘eat like a king’ is a bowl full of cereal with milk. Cereals are full of nutritious healthy fibers low in fat, minerals, and vitamins. They fill the body with energy that it needs throughout the day.
Now, there are some that question the nutritional characteristics of good cereal meal, stating that some cereals contain more sugar than usual. Thus, giving more answers to the appetite then the nutritional body needs.
Cereals with a little more sugar is not that dangerous at all, not to the small children either. The logic of it is that when you metabolize proteins and fibers in the morning, you will definitely spend it throughout the daily activities. Skipping breakfast is more dangerous then that.
Almost 10.000 children between the age of 9 and 18 participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 1999 and 2006. 20 percent of children between 9 to 13 years old and third of children between 14 to 18 years old are ‘breakfast skippers’.
Why do children skip breakfast? The number one reason for it is weight. Children think that skipping breakfast will lower their chances of getting fat or lose fat. Skipping breakfast makes quite the opposite. Having lunch on an empty stomach makes the body put calories and proteins ‘in stash’; keeping it there to the next time it is left without breakfast. The car won’t drive if it has no fuel in it. The same goes for the body.
Another reason why children don’t have cereal breakfast in the morning is the fact that some families have low-income status and cannot afford cereals every day. This situation is more common in the minority families.
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I read something very interesting the other day. It was about a study that showed that people who ate a half of a grapefruit with every meal lost about 3.5 pounds in three months that were trying to lose weight. Now granted, the piece I read actually didn’t give specifics, like if these people were eating light all the way around, but I assume they were. I also made the assumption that the grapefruit sort of helped to satiate these people when eaten with every meal.
A sort of “built in dessert”, if you will, that helped them feel like they had all their essential fat, salt and sweets all in one meal, and therefore made them not crave any of the three major flavors after they were done. Grapefruit has almost always been considered a “diet fruit”. It has long been speculated that grapefruits possess unique properties that help us to burn fat more readily and may also stabilize our blood sugar, which helps us to not eat as much food.
It helps us not eat as much food, or even crave it throughout the day because instead of eating more to stabilize our blood sugar, we can just have stable blood sugar by eating grapefruit with our meals.
Grapefruits apparently help you to burn fat and stabilize insulin levels because they lower your insulin levels after you consume a meal. Insulin spikes are known for causing cravings and increases in appetite, and are a major reason that people tend to over eat. That and a pesky little hormone called ghrelin, whose properties are just now being studied and better understood, are the major factors behind bingeing, over eating, and craving the worst kinds of food for weight management.
In other words, if someone could find the magic potion to kick ghrelin out of the picture, and minimize it’s effect on our bodies, would become instantly wealthy. Who knows, maybe one of those new prescription weightloss meds that are going through the FDA in the next year or two for approval will fit that bill!
Well, it looks like there may be some interesting prescription weight loss drug offerings brewing right now. That is, if they can pass the rigorous FDA scrutiny they are about to endure. The FDA has been very careful about weight loss drugs in particular, especially after the Phen-Fen debacle, where there were even deaths correlated with the drug, and also since multiple other prescription weight loss drugs were either banned or made to put serious warning labels on them after they were associated with serious, and potentially life threatening side effects.
There has not been a new weight loss drug released in several years, and part of it may be because companies know how hard it is to get one pushed through the FDA for approval to mass market, and they don’t want to waste the R&D time and money on developing new drugs for losing weight if the FDA is just going to shoot them down. That equals a lot of wasted time and money for drug companies.
Some of the drugs that are vying for approval actually sound quite promising. That is, if they don’t come with the nasty side effects that so many of their predecessors have been rife with. One drug is an anti convulsant that is known to suppress the appetite. Yikes, an anti convulsant drug, just to lose a few pounds!? That one is actually Topomax, which is sold by Johnson and Johnson. I believe there is another one that is based on this idea that is going through approval now too.
One targets the center of the brain that controls appetite and metabolism, and is supposed to suppress the appetite while also helping to raise the metabolism. Another drug vying for approval and the possibility of blockbuster sales is one that combines a drug used for addictions to alcohol and drugs, combined with an antidepressant. The idea behind this one is mostly to suppress hunger to reach the end goal of weight loss.
The projections for sales for any one of these new drugs would be phenomenal. People are hungry (no pun intended) for new prescription weight loss drugs like Xenical, which was one of the last ones approved, which helps you to get rid of excess fat via flushing it out of your system. Alli, it’s less potent sister drug which does not require a prescription, has also been a big seller, but people are looking for ways to lose weight that target appetite first. Should be an interesting outcome! I’ll keep you posted.
It has been a long held belief that, like fast versus slow cooking oatmeal, that slow cooking brown rice is healthier and may maintain more nutrients and fiber as well as have a lower glycemic index than it’s sister, the quick cooking brown rice. Fast cooking brown rice pretty much cuts the cook time down less than half the time it takes to cook whole brown rice, which is about one hour or a little less to get it cooked until it’s just right and tender enough to eat.
Studies were actually done by independent labs that showed that fast cooking and slow cooking brown rice really did not differ in the vitamins and minerals they contained, and they also had a somewhat surprising find as well. They found that fast cooking brown rice actually had a slightly lower glycemic index than it’s slower cooking counterpart. Why that would be, who knows!
However, it’s important to note that it was a really significant amount, so go ahead and keep slow cooking your brown rice if that’s the way you prefer it. I know that I like slow cooking brown rice because it is easy to throw in a rice cooker and get a fantastic tasting, just right and tender outcome, and you just throw it in that rice cooker does it all for you.
I actually also like to slow cook my brown rice because I put some seasonings in the water it’s being cooked in, and this allows those savory spices to better soak into the rice and make a more flavorful side dish.
Brown rice is a great way to get several nutrients into your diet, and it has actually been studied and proven that it is beneficial compared to white rice because it lowers the overall rate of diabetes in people that consume it, while white rice does the opposite, it actually increases blood sugar rates and therefore raises risk of diabetes.
The vitamins and minerals that brown rice offers, whether slow of fast cooked are manganese, magnesium which is excellent for keeping your ticker going at the right amount of beats and keeping it “well timed” shall we say, selenium, which is only found in trace amounts in most foods, and of course, dietary fiber, which brown rice is a great source of.
Brown rice, while healthy, is still a significant source of carbohydrates though, so you don’t want to totally over do it on the stuff. Reasonable portions, maybe once or twice a week are good enough to provide you with the potential health benefits it offers. It makes a great side dish to things like lean grilled fish or chicken and a big pile of veggies too, and it’s very satiating to the appetite and can help suppress hunger for hours after consumption.
I got this interesting email recently that I thought I’d share with our readers. Who wouldn’t want that chewy, chocolaty taste of real brownies, but also packed with muscle-building, lean-making protein? Well, if you’re into protein bars and protein shakes and things like that, you may want to read about these. I’ve included all the information for these brownies here so if you want to check them out and try them, go ahead.
What caught my eye is that they have no sugar alcohols. Those are the sugar substitutes that make a lot of people’s stomachs upset, including mine. They have been shown to cause excessive gas and diarrhea in some people as well, and these brownies supposedly capture a sweet taste without these little nasty sugar alcohols, which is interesting. I have not tried them yet, so if you try them out, please leave a comment for other readers to enjoy. Thanks!
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Apparently our war on obesity here in the US is yielding smoe pretty lackluster results as far as actual effectiveness at reducing people’s body weight. You’d think with the awareness of how important it is to stay trim and fit being at all time that we would all be walking around eating the healthiest, lowest cal fare we can get our hands on. However, that is not the case. Americans are still battling the bulge, and it seems that we are actually getting fatter, not thinner as desired.
Not only that, there is a definite disparity between races and also between socioeconomic class when it comes to obesity. The poorer experience obesity more, and it appears that african americans and those with hispanic background tend to be obese more often. This may have everything to do with income, however, there are also plenty of people who are wealthy or in the middle class as well who are obese or overweight, it just happens to be in higher concentrations in certain populations.
What might help explain this disparity is the fact that cheap food is usually higher in fat, preservatives, and sodium and sugar. This may account for part of the fact why those that cannot afford the better, healthier foods like organic veggies and less process, more “whole” foods turn to less expensive, and much lower quality foods that tend to lend themselves to obesity.
It also may be more accepted in these populations to be obese or overweight, but that is probably it’s own study!
We tend to focus so much on natural appetite suppressing supplements and dietary aids to help us lower our ravenous appetites, that we don’t really stop too much to think about what foods we can be eating that naturally suppress hunger on their own, or at least suppress your urge to eat more junk.
There are in fact foods that do that very well, and that’s why people who have diets high in foods like this tend to maintain a slimmer physique more easily, while those that load up on appetite fueling foods like chips, pretzels, refined sweets and carbohydrates tend to be heavier and be hungrier a lot of the time, for the wrong kinds of foods.
One of the surprise foods that is on the “good” list in helping to maintain a lower appetite are actually strawberries, which happen to be perfectly in season right now and available on supermarket stores shelves pretty much everywhere. However, you may want to only purchase organic when it comes to strawberries.
More and more evidence is pointing to strawberries as being major toxin carriers when they are not grown organically, because they are not something that you peel to eat, you just pop the whole thing in your mouth. Sure, you can wash them off for extra precaution to get the pesticides and chemicals used to grow them non organically off, but they still have them to some degree, so it’s best to just be safe and buy organic if you can.
New evidence is showing that strawberries may help control your appetite by helping to regulate your blood sugar. Another food that helps do this is cinnamon, and hot peppers and cayenne pepper. I have found that adding fresh, raw walnuts to my breakfast in the morning not only adds nutritious protein and omega 3 fatty acids, but the fiber in them as well as they healthy fats found in them helps control my hunger much longer into the morning and early noon than without them.
Almonds are a great food to snack on to keep hunger at bay. Also eating light soups made exclusively with broth and veggies with your meals, and eating a large salad with light dressing or a bit of olive oil and lemon juice and garlic are a great way to help ensure your appetite is gone for a long time. I know that there is some debate on this one, but I find that a banana holds me over for a long time. Bananas are very filling, and they actually are one of the easiest and most portable forms of fast nutrition out there that help dampen the appetite.
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Here’s to healthy grilling on the fourth of July, Independence Day, the birth of our nation! Can you believe that it happened only a little over two hundred years ago? That’s kind of crazy if you think about it in the sense that many people can live over 100 years today, that’s only two lifetimes really! We’ve come a long way, and the fourth is always a fun holiday to celebrate. It has always had the reputation of being one of the most carefree, cookout driven holidays there are. That and memorial day usually compete for the title of biggest grilling out day.
It’s a day to be with friends or family, grill out some healthy eats on the grill, or even some slightly unhealthy ones if that’s what floats your boat that day, and maybe even toss back a few high quality beers or some wine if that’s your poison. I know for us, we will be taking it easy with some friends, definitely grilling out, and enjoying fresh foods, including the latest fresh produce on the grill.
Here are some fun, healthy ideas to cook out today.
Grill some pineapple. Grilled pineapple tastes delicious, and you can pair it with a steak or some chicken that’s been marinated. Meat and pineapple make a great combo, especially if you marinate the meat with the pineapple for a few hours before you pop it on the grill. The enzymes and natural acids of the fruit actually break down the toughness of the meat and make it more tender and flavorful, all without adding any fat or sodium – yum!
Marinating chicken in some easy to make tequila lime marinade is always awesome. Just mix some tequila, lime juice, garlic and a little sea salt, and you pretty much have a ready made tequila lime marinade that has no fat – unless you add a bit of healthy olive oil, but it’s all good!
Then, for dessert, you can make a low fat strawberry shortcake. Get some angel food cake, which is super low in calories and fat, then slice up oodles of strawberries, and spray or spread some cool whip or other low fat whipped topping on top – voila – cool, refreshing, and low fat and low cal dessert for your fourth cookout folks! Whatever you end up doing today, do it safely and most important have yourself some fun before you start that work week again – you deserve it!
