Healthy Lifestyle

Welcome back to the healthy blog that gives it to you straight! This time out I’m going to be a real killjoy and call out soda - yes, the fizzy canned or bottled drinks that everyone loves! Guess what?

Soda is bad for you!

Well, maybe deep down inside you’d already guessed that was the case, but the problem is that television advertising is so good these days they have you believing that soda makes you happy, goes with having fun, makes relationships buzz, brings friends together… ok, you get the way they get inside your brain. Its all a bunch of carefully orchestrated lies, of course. The reality is that if you drink two or three (or more) cans of soda a day, you are staring obesity city in the face and a whole heap of health problems queuing up to get you in the future.

Why is soda so bad for you?

There are two major reasons why soda is bad for you. First of all, regular soda contains far too much sugar. It raises blood sugar levels and makes your pancreas work like crazy to produce enough insulin to counteract it. Over time, your pancreas will lose the fight and you’ll be staring type II diabetes squarely in the face. All that raising and countering of blood sugar levels makes your body store all the excess as fat. Right where you don’t want it. On your belly, that is! This is one of the better known weight loss tips which is to avoid belly fat production. That is dangerous because not only does this make you overweight, increased levels of belly fat is now linked with, wait for it… cancer!

So what about sugar free soda? Surely that is better to drink?

Wrong. Sugar free soda, like all other sugar free products contains artificial sweeteners such as aspartame and sorbitol. Both these substances interfere with the brain’s function when it comes to registering hunger. Yep, they make you feel hungry even when you’re not. What do you automatically reach for when you’re drinking sugar free soda? Potato chips, slices of pizza, burgers, fries, chocolate or candy bars, pretzels, corn snacks, the list is pretty long but you can bet they’re all loaded with calories. All those extra calories add up to that well trodden road leading to Obesity City!

But that’s not all. Sugar free soda containing aspartame has one last health destroying property lurking in the shadows for you. Cancer! Yes, aspartame has been linked with cancer in so many trials and medical researches that you wouldn’t believe, yet governments repeatedly deny there is anything wrong with the stuff. But don’t take my word for it. Go ahead and Google “dangers of aspartame” and read the evidence for yourself, understand it and make sure you can see both sides of the argument. Go do it now, I’ll wait…

Ok, who do you believe? Government denials or your verifiable research and your own common sense?

Whatever you believe, believe this. Soda, whether it contains sugar or artificial sweeteners, will make you gain weight and can lead to cancer later on down the road.

That’s why it is so bad for you.

Tiredness is something that affects the vast majority of us at one stage or another and when it does strike, it can have lots of knock on effects in our daily lives as well as our overall levels of health. So this Hhealthy Lifestyle blog is going to take a look at this and see what can be done.

It won’t surprise anyone to hear that lack of sleep is the biggest cause of tiredness, but many people still suffer this condition even though they believe they are getting enough sleep. Well, there are many reasons why that may not be true, such as disturbed sleep where a person is woken briefly several times every night, but as they go straight back to sleep again, they generally don’t remember being woken and then wonder why they feel tired and lethargic the following day.

Whatever the cause of the lack of quality, undisturbed nightly sleep, the result is a day that is difficult to get through because everything seems like such hard work when your brain feels a little fuzzy and you don’t seem to be able to concentrate properly or to have the patience to work out simple problems or deal with problematic people diplomatically.

All this can affect overall health in many ways, from the obvious lethargy and listlessness to more serious problems where the daytime tiredness persists for a long time. It begets a cycle of being tired all day and then not being able to get to sleep at night because you’re worrying about not being able to sleep!

This is where self relaxation techniques come in very useful, such as meditation to calm stress and eliminate the constant thoughts that invade the time when we need to be still, quiet and silent in mind. Yoga and other similar forms of breathing exercises also help, as does the oriental exercise routine Tai Chi.

It helps to avoid caffeine and alcohol for several hours before going to bed and instead drinking a herbal tea such as camomile, lemon balm (melissa), or valerian and hops as these are natural sleep inducements that are gentle on the system and harmless.

Pleasant dreams!

The old ad slogan from many years ago that stated tea was the best drink of the day was actually right on the nail when it comes to the many health benefits that come with drinking tea. I’m not talking about green tea here, but the favoured drink of the British (and plenty of other nations besides, although they may not want to admit it), which is black tea commonly taken with a little milk and even sugar! So what did our grandmothers know that a whole generation seemed to forget, or at least not notice?

Well, for starters, tea has always been associated with relaxing and of all things this is probably the only aspect of tea that is not quite accurate. That’s because tea contains caffeine and lots of it. In actual fact, ounce for ounce, or gram for gram depending upon where you live, tea contains a lot more caffeine than coffee. The only reason that cup of Java sends you into orbit and the tea doesn’t is because tea is brewed a lot weaker than coffee.

Black tea contains less nutrients and antioxidants than its green cousin, but most of those present in green tea are also there in black tea. In fact drinking three cups of black tea a day will bring all the health benefits you’ll get from one or two cups of green, depending upon how you brew it and how big your cups are!

Why do we put milk in black tea?

The bitter taste you get from drinking black tea, well… black, comes from substances called tannins. Tannins are not so good for you in large amounts, but by adding milk to your cup, the enzymes in the milk break down the tannins rendering them harmless. It also mellows the taste of the brew which makes it much more palatable.

So why do we add sugar to tea?

If you want to be healthy, don’t add sugar. Its purely a sweet tooth thing and not necessary for improving the flavour of tea. In fact tea tastes better without sugar, once your taste buds have adjusted to it. Its true!

Is drinking too much tea harmful?

It can be in large amounts, just as drinking too much coffee is bad for you. Too much caffeine causes high blood pressure with increased risk of strokes and coronary problems. It also makes you want to urinate more often, which dehydrates the body. It can also disrupt sleep, so its always a good idea to avoid anything containing caffeine for a few hours before going to bed.

The general rule of thumb is if you enjoy a cup of tea, then drink it! If you like 4 or 5 cups a day, that’s also ok but don’t go too crazy and you’ll be fine.!

When it comes to living a healthy lifestyle, we are all often bombarded with well meaning warnings about spending too much time in the sun, what with skin cancer and premature aging among the things that no one really wants to be getting. But that doesn’t mean you have to hide under a wide brimmed hat the whole time you are out of doors, nor does it mean that you have to stay indoors all the time there is daylight. Unless of course you are a vampire…

So what is the reality here?Is the sun really so bad for us, or are we turning our backs on a free source of health and vitality?

The truth of the matter is that we all need to get some exposure to the sun and preferably daily to enable our bodies to manufacture our daily needs of vitamin D. Without this vital vitamin we risk a whole range of health problems from brittle bones to kidney stones through the resultant lack of ability to absorb calcium properly. Sure, you can top up your body’s supply of vitamin D through supplements, but why would you want to spend money on pills to pop when you can get it for free for the sake of 20 minutes exposure to the sun a day?

That’s right, in 20 minutes, you’ll get enough exposure for your body to produce its own vitamin D, which some say is highly superior to what you have to try to absorb from a pill. In 20 minutes, even in the hottest sunshine, you are unlikely to risk burning or damaging your skin through harmful UV exposure, because of the short time spent in the sun. The best part is that you don’t even need to strip off to a bikini or pair of swim shorts as just getting the sun to your face and arms in that time is sufficient.

Apart from the obvious vitamin boost to health from exposure to the sun, it also helps lift your mood by boosting the production of serotonin in the brain which gives you a feel good factor that you won’t get stuck indoors all day. When you’re in a good mood, life always seems better, making you more positive.

And when you’re in a positive frame of mind, your health reflects your mood. So get out in the sunshine for a while each day (weather permitting) and do yourself a big favour!

Keeping the theme of healthy food going as per my last post Healthy Foods: Garlic, I thought I’d take one of the great accompaniments to the smelly bulb and write about the health benefits of ginger.

Ginger is not actually a root, as many people believe, but its actually the stem of the plant that lies beneath the soil and from which the plant’s leaves grow. The swollen dull yellowish stem is the part that provides us with the bulk of the nutrients that we use.

A common flavouring in curries, many Chinese, Thai and other Far Eastern dishes as well as sweetmeats, cakes biscuits and puddings, ginger is a big all-rounder for flavour as well as being a healthy food in its own right.

Medicinally, ginger is classified as both a stimulant and carminative and as such is used frequently for dyspepsia and colic. It stimulates the gallbladder to release bile and is often prescribed to deal with gallstones. Ginger has been shown to decrease pain in the joints from arthritis, though studies have shown inconsistent results.

Ginger may also have blood thinning and cholesterol lowering properties, although more studies need to be done in this area, which should prove its usefulness in treating heart disease.

The warming properties of ginger make it useful when brewed as a tea for reducing the symptoms of colds. It is also useful as a stomach settler and digestive aid. More recent studies have shown promising results in the field of treating diabetes, although more studies need to be carried out to be conclusive.

All in all, ginger is a very useful health promoting food that everyone should keep in their larder. Here’s a tip - keep a piece of ginger in the freezer for those times when you run out and the shops are closed. You can take it out frozen and grate it over food, then pop it straight back in the freezer again for another day!

See you again soon…

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…