My solution to the lack of vegetables for lunch is breaking tradition and adding some greens to my eggs and ham.  I know it’s strange to have a cucumber with breakfast but after a couple of days with breakfast vegetables I started to wonder how I ever went without them.  I started to understand why the Israelis eat salad for breakfast consisting of finely chopped cucumbers, tomatoes and whatever else is on hand in a light oil and vinegar dressing.

Now I don’t worry when I have the occasional non-veggied lunch because there is always a supply of immune-pumping, fiber-rich, heart-healthy, anti-cancer veggies still surging through my body from my last meal.

Here are some tips for adding vegetables to your breakfast :

Raw kale is definitely a breakfast favorite of mine.  I just love to munch the leaves of washed raw kale like cotton candy—pulling off pieces with my fingers. The leaves have a tangy taste, and I can feel their antioxidants surging through my body.  Then I simply toss out the tough stalk like the core of an apple.    

Canned spinach is also a great choice when you don’t have fresh veggies in the house.  It makes me feel like Popeye and its quick and easy.

And pull-top cans of V-8 juice, dehydrated green peas, and chewy sun-dried tomatoes survive hot Los Angeles days in my car and are great emergency vegetables if I’m walking out the door with pancakes in hand. 

Canned pumpkin and artichokes hearts can feel delightfully indulgent for someone who aims for the fresher feel to their long lasting food. 

So don’t stop worrying about getting enough greens into you lunch and put them into your breakfast and you will find that you do like greens with your eggs and ham. 

Image Thanks To Miss Pupik

Stretching before working out is a staple of every active person’s life.  It’s a must do like looking both ways before you cross the street or drinking a cup of coffee before you start work.  Most people stretch to warm up their muscles so they are stronger and less likely to be injured while exercising.  New research has shown that the way people stretch is actually making them weaker and not protecting them from injury.

 A recent study out of University of Nevada, Las Vegas compared strength between athletes who stretched using static stretching such as touching your toes for 30 seconds and those who did not stretch.  The researchers found that after stretching, athletes were as much as 30% weaker than before they stretched.

The lack of strength is attributed to the strain put on the muscles during static stretching.  The muscles that were just stretched, in order to protect themselves from further damage, become weaker.  This effect can last for up to 30 min, a crucial amount of time for any athlete.

The solution many athletic trainers and coaches have found is dynamic stretching – warming up through movement such as light jogging or lunges.  Most of the dynamic stenches make an athlete look very foolish such as “climbing” the court as though it were a rock wall but it gets their muscles warmed up in a healthy productive way.  I had the pleasure of stretching dynamically before volleyball matches and the warmed up feeling I received from the walking over imaginary walls was well worth the laughter from the other teams.

So take Hanz and Franz’s example from Saturday Night Live and skip the stretching or stretch dynamically, it will really “Pump You Up.”
Picture From Army.mil

Well, we’ve had enough of it! Until we read this latest study, of course. The mainstream wisdom these days has it that parents should protect their kids from peanuts until they’re at least two years old — even in utero by avoiding peanuts throughout pregnancy — or else the little ones will be at great risk of developing a severe allergy to the delicious food.

But a new study, the results of which were just published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, turns that advice on its head. Researchers interviewed the mothers of 8,600 school children in Britain and Israel, and found that those tots who had been exposed to peanuts when they were between four months and two years old were actually half as likely to have a peanut allergy as those who hadn’t been exposed.

Now, we’re hardly suggesting that this new study is any more reliable than those that came before with opposite findings. But we think its proof of one important truth: take all that well-intentioned advice for parents with the same seasoning that you take your peanuts… a grain (or two) of salt.

Cinnamon is fast becoming the new buzz food in the nutrition community. Although research on the spice is still sprinkled thin around the world, a growing number of scientists are starting to theorize that it could boost humans’ capacity to process sugar.

Don Graves, an adjunct professor of biochemistry at the University of California in Santa Barbara who has studied how cinnamon works in the body, recently told the Boston Globe that cinnamon might one day be able to help treat diabetics.

Cinnamon “does much the same thing as insulin” biochemically, he said in the interview, by making human “cells more sensitive to the insulin that is available.”

A small, but impressive, study out of Pakistan suggests that he’s right. Researchers there looked at 60 diabetics over 40 days. The scientists gave half their subjects up to six grams of cinnamon a day, while giving the other half a placebo.  At the end of the 40 days, the cinnamon scoffers were found to have lower levels of fasting glucose, LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol — all key indicators of improved health — than their cinnamon shunning counterparts.

So, with the holiday season just around the corner, we’ll be looking forward to traditional pumpkin pie — with extra cinnamon on top of course — even more than usual!

A recent study in England showed that women care more about keeping up with the latest celebrities than taking care of their own health.

In a survey of 1,000 British women 80% of them could name the wife of famous soccer player Wayne Rooney whereas only 50% said they check themselves for breast cancer every month.

This discovery, while scary, may provide some insight as to how to go about getting more women to check for breast cancer- use celebrities.  Recently many celebrities have helped spearhead the fight against breast cancer including Sheryl Crow, who recently spoke before the U.S. Congressional Subcommittee on Health about the need to pass the Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Act. This act would provide $200 million towards researching the environmental factors contributing to breast cancer.

Next time you pick up a magazine with the latest celebrity gossip, put it down for a second and check yourself.  It could save your life.

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A recent study published in the British Medical Journal found that people who eat at a leisurely pace are significantly less likely to be overweight than their fast-paced counterparts.

The study, conducted at Osaka University in Japan, took 3,000 men and women and told half to eat quickly and the other half to eat slowly.  The study found that the men who ate quickly were 83% more likely to be overweight and women were twice as likely to be overweight than those who were told to eat slowly.

Researchers believe that the fast eaters gained weight because of the slow reaction time of their stomachs.  The fast eaters did not allow their stomachs enough time to send to their brains the message that they were full. The time between eating enough to be full and feeling full was enough time to overeat and cause obesity. So, slow down your eating.  Meals are a journey and not a destination.

 The faster you run to the end of a meal the slower you will be able to run to the end of the block. 

Image From Matt

Imagine a world where you took a tea break instead of a water break during a basketball game.  Although that sounds like something only British boarding school students would do, it may soon become a more world-wide practice.

A recent study out of Kings College in London, England have found that tea is better than water.  The study analyzed published studies and found that, unlike water, tea also replaces antioxidants in your body in addition to quenching thirst.  Those antioxidants reduce the risk of having a heart attack and possibly developing cancer. 

Although tea contains caffeine which is known to dehydrate people, the drink is actually thirst quenching because of the low caffeine to fluid ratio.  Aim for 3-4 cups per day.  Next time you decide to run a marathon, pack a nice thermos of tea.  Water is so last season.

What do white bread, potatoes and whisky have in common?  They all kill your liver. A new study out of Boston Children’s Hospital found that High-glycemic foods cause a condition known as fatty liver – a buildup of fat in your liver eventually causing liver failure later on in life. 

The study took mice and gave them the same daily caloric intake but fed one group high glycaemic foods and the other low glycaemic foods.  After 6 months the mice on the low glycaemic diet weighed the same whereas the mice on the high glycemic had twice as much fat on them.

So if you are worried about the dreaded fatty liver eat more nuts, beans, whole wheat bread and brown rice.  Your liver will thank you for it.

For most dieters, finding a natural, healthy appetite suppressant would be like finding the Holy Grail.

Their search may be over! A new study out of the University of California in Irvine has found that unsaturated fats — the type that run wild in things like nuts, avocados and olive oil — contain oleic acid, which naturally decrease the eater’s appetite.

Fatty foods are generally avoided by people who are trying to lose weight and stay healthy. But it turns out that’s misguided. Because good fatty foods tell your brain that you’re full much more effectively than low fat foods, a handful of nuts can effectively do the same belly-filling job as a whole pack of carbohydrate heavy fat-free cookies. 

In other words: if you want to banish fat from your paunch — add a little to your lunch!