Healthy Lifestyle

Well, my last post Now For The Healthy Part, signaled a slight change in direction in the subjects of my future posts, so this one will start off by taking a look at a healthy item of food and dissecting it into its component parts. Ok, maybe not so scientific and boring, but I’ll try to get across the importance of a particular item of food and why its healthy for us.

My first victim has to be the superfood broccoli.

Broccoli as sold and seen in many supermarkets and greengrocer’s is actually not true broccoli, but a closely related plant called calibrese. True broccoli is the smaller purple coloured immature flower head of Purple Sprouting Broccoli. Calibrese is a member of the Brassica family and is related to cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale, turnips, radishes and a whole host of others. But as everyone knows this vegetable as broccoli, I’ll stick to that name.

So why is broccoli so healthy and the number one most popular vegetable in the USA?

Amongst its many health giving properties, broccoli is rich in vitamin C, for boosting the immune system and aiding the body’s ability to absorb iron from other foods.

It contains folic acid, which is beneficial to women as it aids the building of healthy tissue.

It also contains potassium which helps lower blood pressure.

Its large calcium content helps combat osteoporosis.

Also it contains high levels of the cancer busting indole-3-carbinol, which has recently been shown to help reduce the size of certain types of tumor, notably in cases of breast and prostate cancers.

The sulforaphane contained in broccoli helps to increase level of certain enzymes that block cancer.

Beta-carotene in broccoli transforms in the body into vitamin A, which has been found to be another antioxidant (as is vitamin c) which helps in mopping up harmful free radicals in the body.

So overall, broccoli richly deserves its label as a superfood and is one that should be a regular part of any good healthy diet.

Ok, that’s it for today’s post. I’ll cover another healthy food item in my next, so don’t be a stranger…

Now that I’ve gone through just about every aspect of unhealthy living that we on this planet are battling against every day in this blog, with my last post The Air That We Breathe, hammering the final nail in the coffin of mankind, its time to change tack and write about some healthy ways we can hit back and lead a more fulfilling lifestyle.

So where do we go and what do we do to counter all the pollution and chemical poisons that surround us and invade our lives in more ways than most of us could possibly imagine? Well, while we can’t avoid it completely, unless we’re willing to move to Antarctica (and even there the air will follow us!) we can exercise some damage limitation that can really be quite effective.

The first things we can do in the home are the most simple and yet are effective. When it comes to water pollution in the stuff we need to drink, a filter jug is a great way to remove most of the nasties from the drinking water. The best part is that they are relatively cheap to buy and do a pretty good job of removing excess chlorine, calcium, heavy metals and fertilizer residues as well as a good number of harmful bacteria. They won’t get rid of it all, but the body needs something to continually fight against to keep its immune system in peak condition!

There’s not much we can do about the air that we breathe, but if the option exists to get out of the city and into the countryside, take it as the quality of the air is infinitely better away from so much traffic.

When it comes to our food, there is a lot we can do with the many healthy plants that grow in abundance and that’s what I’ll be looking at in my next post here at Healthy Lifestyle.

With the last post looking at the problems associated with drinking water in Drinking Water and Health, and all the previous instalments taking the many aspects of life and finding health faults with them all, there remains yet one last element to turn my accusing eye upon before I change tack and start writing on more positive healthy lifestyle issues.

The air we breathe.

Now this one really does depend on where you live on our planet, but increasingly as the unstoppable march of human industry leave no stone unturned, anyone’s geographical location is placing them closer and closer to the pollution that we as a race have created for ourselves.

If you already live in almost any major city, you will not fail to notice the hazy air at dawn as the sun struggles to filter its way through not cloud or high precipitous misty haze, but the polluted and contaminated air that so many thousands of petroleum fuelled vehicles have blasted into the air via their tail pipes. Whatever your governments might tell you to try to placate you, this haze is chiefly made up of carbon monoxide mixed with benzene and a cocktail of other carcinogenic gasses that are the by-product of the combustion of oil-based fuel.

The carbon monoxide alone is a silent killer, slowly but surely killing vital organ cells as it invades the human body. Its the same killer by-product of cigarette smoke, so if you smoke as well as live in a city, perhaps you should consider that it’s time to stop smoking!

If you’ve ever had the misfortune to sit in a room with a gas fire that wasn’t properly flued to pass the gases into the outside air, then you’ll recognise the soporific feeling and the intense headache that follows once you open the door and go outside. This is carbon monoxide poisoning and it kills and has killed many people in this situation, where they have literally fallen into a dead sleep, never to reawaken.

That same gas is emitted by car exhausts every day by the thousands of metric tons in cities all over the world.

So if you want to lead a healthy lifestyle, one of the first things you need to do is to get out of the city, ditch the gas guzzling SUVs and make a change for the better.

Then you can start to look forward to a healthier lifestyle where my future posts will have something of an impact! Until then.

Let’s move on now from where we were in the last post Something Fishy?, to looking at the stuff they swim in: water.

I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence by going on about how much we need water to live. Most of us are aware that when it comes to knowing how to stay healthy, drinking plenty of water comes very high on the agenda. But just as the theme of this blog in its early stages seems to have taken on a “let’s expose all the health aspects of everything” perspective, I can’t miss out on having a dig at the stuff we drink!

So how clean and healthy do you believe your drinking water is that comes out of your tap?

Well, for most countries in the Western world it is surprisingly clean, although not without a few additions that you might not like to hear about. If you do, read on!

Most drinking water passed through a filtration system that takes out most of the nasties, but depending upon where you live, there can be more or less of the things you don’t want in that water. I’m not going to get country specific as they all differ to a greater or lesser extent, but some things are common, such as the addition of chlorine to kill harmful bacteria that gets through the filtration system. Mostly chlorine is present but in low enough measures as not to present any problems, but in some places that level is quite high, especially in warmer climates where certain bacteria can multiply faster.

Then the chlorine itself can become a health problem and when mixed with fluorine and certain other contaminates such as particulates of heavy metals has been linked with the big C (cancer). There is also a growing fear that the heavy use of those good old pesticides by over zealous farmers is causing the residues to leach through the soil into the water table. They and chemical fertilizer residues already pollute many rivers, often those that act as many a city’s source of drinking water.

So next time you take a glass of water from the tap and raise it to your lips, bear in mind that while it is most often safe to drink, it’s not always as safe as you might like it to be…

The previous post Heavy Metal Fish!, set the waters ablaze with some not do tasty revelations about the fish that we like to eat! Well, let’s not stop there!

While I’m on the soap box thumping the podium about the perils of getting too much heavy metal with your fish, I’d like to bring up the subject of farmed fish, most notably salmon. Salmon is a firm favourite with many people and thanks to modern salmon farming methods the price has been reduced sufficiently for everyone to be able to afford to enjoy it on a regular basis.

But the very methods that allow many more people to include salmon on their weekly shopping lists are also causing as many problems as they are solving.

You see, salmon are a naturally migratory fish that return as adults to the rivers whence they were spawned after spending a period of time many miles away in the open seas. This makes for healthy fish that upon returning to the rivers of their infancy to mate, provide a source of food to animals, not least of those to man himself. The salmon that are caught in rivers have several advantages over their farmed opposite number.

Farmed salmon are trapped in lakes and cannot migrate. In fact the lakes are so full of salmon that the water is filthy and saturated with their faeces, which they have to swim in. Pollutants drain into these lakes form surrounding farms in the form of chemical fertilizers, particularly nitrates as well as pesticide residues. This is absorbed into the fish and their inability to swim naturally causes a build up of fat that is not present in their free swimming cousins.

All of a sudden, that great salmon steak isn’t looking so mouth watering!

I’ll get on to other food related health issues in future posts.

Well, my last post How Healthy is Milk?, gave the dairy industry a tongue lashing and maybe got the message across that milk isn’t all its cracked up to be. In this post, I’m turning a baleful eye towards the seas in a look at another of our sources of nourishment, fish.

On the surface of it, fish caught in the oceans of the world must appear to be the least affected by our polluting ways and in many cases this is true. But there are some fish, especially those that sit near the top of the food chain, that are not quite as healthy as they appear.

Tuna is one such offender when it comes to providing us with more than we were bargaining for in the form of elevated levels of mercury. This happens because tuna, like many other carnivorous fish, sit high in the food chain. That means that they eat other big fish, which in turn have eaten smaller fish, which have eaten still smaller fish and so on. The small fry at the other end of the food chain will pick up mercury from our polluting ways, as they filter the waters for nutrients and scavenge for food on the sea bed, where they will encounter the highest levels of mercury and other heavy metals.

Larger predators eat them and inherit their load of unwanted heavy metals, because the fish’s digestive system cannot expel them, in a similar way to us humans. So the levels of heavy metals such as mercury, aluminium and lead can only increase in the body. Of course, the more mercury laden prey each fish eats, the more they contain themselves, which is passed on right up through the food chain until it finds its way into the larger fish that our trawlers catch for our consumption.

Bearing this in mind, the official WHO recommendations for adults, is that we should eat no more than two portions of tuna per week. That goes for other predatory fish as well. In future posts I’ll be looking more at the health aspects fish in our diets.

In my last post The Health of the Meat We Eat, I took the meat industry by the horns and spoke a few home truths! Well, now its the turn of the dairy industry, as if you aren’t still reeling from all this stunning knowledge!

We’ve all grown up on cow’s milk and its derivatives such as yoghurt, cream, butter and cheese, but is it as good for you as the so-called experts make out? Well, not to deflate you any more after learning that meat and vegetables are not up to scratch, but there are one or two thing you need to know about cow’s milk and what use it is in our daily diet.

First out of the gate is the well documented fact that we humans actually can’t metabolise cow’s milk and the lactose it contains very well. In fact many of us are actually lactose intolerant, meaning those people can’t metabolise it at all.

But we hear that it is necessary to enrich our diet with much needed calcium.

The fact that we need calcium for strong healthy teeth and bones is true, but we don’t get it from cow’s milk, because we can’t metabolise it very well, remember? The truth is that we derive most of our calcium from green leafy vegetables as we can metabolise them perfectly well and get all the nutrients we need easily, because that’s how our bodies are designed to work.

It gets worse…

The cows that provide the milk are pumped full of steroids, growth hormones and antibiotics, as you will have gleaned from my last post. Well, those nasties find their way into the cow’s milk, and are not destroyed during the pasteurisation process. So we get to consume these hormones and antibiotics which of course reduce the effectiveness of our own natural immune system’s defenses.

So there are just a few reasons not to consume dairy products, or at least cut down on them drastically. A glimmer of hope lies in the organic food industry as organically reared dairy cows are not fed all these antibiotics and hormones, but access to organic dairy produce is still not as widespread as it could be, but it is improving.

Remember, one billion Chinese have practically no dairy produce in their diets and they’re pretty healthy despite its absence!

My next post will take us to the waters…

In my previous post The Health of the Crops We Eat, I looked a little more closely at organically grown fruit and vegetables and hinted on their meaty relatives. So here, I’ll look at the benefits of eating organically produced meat and poultry.

First, let’s look at what we already know about intensively farmed livestock. Knowing exactly what is in your food can make a big difference to your overall health. Cows and pigs, which are herbivores, are fed with protein rich feed that can also contain ground up flesh and bones of dead farmyard animals. If this isn’t bad enough, they are also regularly fed a diet rich in growth hormones and antibiotics which make the animals reach maturity much faster than they would naturally.

These force-grown animals see little of the beautiful fields that we associate with grazing animals. They spend nearly all of their miserable and thankfully short lives in small pens where their movements are restricted to prevent them from harming themselves and others. For this read to avoid damaging the supermarket shrink wrapped and neatly packaged meat they will become. Poultry are kept in tiny cages for similar reasons and are also fed steroids, growth hormones and a cocktail of antibiotics to prevent the infections that would surely wipe out so many birds kept in such close quarters.

Ok, if this is staring to sound like an animal rights tirade, I apologize. It’s just the plain old truth. And no one likes to hear that, do they!

Well guess what their organically raised cousins get. Yep, they get to roam around the farmyard and graze in those fields, at least having a life before being shipped off to the abattoir. They also are not pumped full of hormones and antibiotics as their lifestyle is more healthy.

Now which meat would you rather take home from the supermarket and feed to your family? The cheaper stuff that still contains residues of all those hormones and antibiotics, knowing how those animals were treated before their miserable existences were snuffed out? Or the more expensive organic stuff that is just meat?

Not only that, but which do you imagine might be the more healthy choice?

Oh yeah, no contest! In my next post I’ll ruffle a few more feathers with a look at how healthy the dairy industry is.

My last post Healthy Despite It All, touched on the growing availability of organic produce which can tip the balance back in your favor when it comes to eating healthily. So let’s carry this subject further here.

With better soil to grow in and far fewer chemicals to leech into their flesh, organically grown vegetables herald in an era where slowly but surely, farmers are realizing that they can return to traditional farming methods whilst still employing modern technology to make it all easier.

Transforming previously intensively farmed land back to organic methods takes time and several years may need to pass before it can certified organic. This is because chemicals that used to be sprayed on the crops and were therefore dissolved into the soil have to dissipate either with rainfall or being naturally broken down by the re-introduction of organic matter and good bacteria and fauna. But in the interim, the farmer can still work the soil and gradually produce better and healthier crops year upon year.

Organically grown fruit and vegetables not only contain more nutrients than their starved intensively grown cousins, but they also taste better as there is no chemical residue to taint the flavor. Of course, the agriculture industry are swift to counter any claims that their produce does contain any chemical residues, but come on, we are intelligent human beings and we know what our own common sense tells us. We know that organic food is far healthier for us and our families, there can be no argument about that!

But there is also organically farmed meat and poultry to consider in this healthy equation, and it is that which I’ll be looking at in my next post.

The previous post The Health of the Soil, looked at the second problem associated with mineral deficiency in the soil used for intensive farming methods and what that meant, in general terms to people’s health. In this post, I’d like to talk about how we can stay healthy despite it all.

The mineral and nutrient deficiency in the vast majority of food that we buy is a serious problem that the enlightened amongst us can do quite a lot about. First thing that needs to happen is for more people to stand up and tell the food industry that this is just not good enough. Unfortunately, the food industry as a whole is extremely powerful and has a veritable army of PR people who are very good at swaying public opinion away from the important issues. They have managed to force the US Congress to U turn on several additive bans and health issues over the decades, such is their reach and power of persuasion.

You have to see past this.

A minor revolution that is going to be good for the general health of people is already happening in the farming industry with smaller, breakaway farmers returning to traditional farming methods and turning their backs on the lethal cocktails of chemical fertilizers, pesticides etc that intensive farming methods employ. They are, instead, turning to organic farming methods that drastically cut the need for the vast majority of these chemicals. They are once again treating the soil with the respect it deserves and being repaid with healthier crops that are regaining their nutrient levels.

This is extremely good news for you and your family’s health.

It means that you can buy organically grown fruit and vegetables that are virtually free of chemicals (the UK Soil Association allows a maximum of 6 chemical pest control substances to be used on crops that can then be labeled “organic”).

By using natural organic matter to enrich the soil (instead of chemical fertilizer) the friendly bugs along with the worms return to play their part in the overall scheme of things. Together, this produces healthier crops that taste better. The downside is they cost more, but what price are you going to place on your children’s health?

I’ll carry this discussion on in tomorrow’s post.