Food

Source: Succeed With This

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”…but why? Do you really know what makes an apple so special? Why is it that we never hear an orange or a banana a day keeps the doctor away? Apples have properties that no other fruits have and its benefits have been proven overtime. You will be able to get the benefits of these properties individually with other fruits, but an apple combines everything and makes it simpler. It has been shown over and over that if it’s not simple, easy and fast, people won’t take care of their health.

1. Apple contains Vitamin C. Vitamin C helps greatly your immune system. A lot of people who lack Vitamin C in their diet have poor healing, bruise easily and have bleeding gums.
2. Prevent Heart Diseases. The reason it can prevent both coronary heart disease and cardiovascular disease is because apples are rich in flavonoid. Flavonoids are also known for their antioxidant effects.
3. Low in calories. A regular size apple has between 70-100 calories. Eating an apple when craving for candy or chocolate can make the desire disappear since apple in itself contains sugar, but gives you only ¼ of the calories.

Gary Null examines the increasingly common practice of prescribing psychotropic drugs for children - including preschoolers as young as age 2 to 4 - who have been diagnosed with ADD, or ADHD.

In the absence of any objective medical tests to determine who has ADD or ADHD, doctors rely in part on standardized assessments and the impressions of teachers and guardians while the they administer leave little room for other causes or aggravating factors, such as diet, or environment.

Following the recent food scare from China, 92% of consumers now want "Country of Origin" labels on their food, found the latest poll in Consumer Reports.

What a lot of people don't realize is that even food made in the U.S. provides no guarantee against being duped.

In an attempt to make healthier choices, many consumers pick food items with the label "Natural" in the grocery store.

A 2002 study by the National Consumers League (NCL) showed that 76% of the surveyed believed that foods with "natural" on the package contain at least 90% natural ingredients; another 80% thought "natural" products were good for them.

NCL President Linda Golodner begs to differ: "Products with the 'natural' labeling are not required by law to contain only natural ingredients."

In fact, in most cases "natural" doesn't mean anything, because ­ unlike the label "organic" ­ it has no definition in law or regulation.

There are only two exceptions: "Natural flavors" means by law that a flavor has to be derived from natural sources like fruit juice, spices, herbs, etc. And in meat, the USDA allows the word only for minimally processed meat and poultry products without artificial ingredients or added colors.

Source: CNN

People who drink one or more soft drinks a day have a more than 50 percent higher risk of developing the heart disease precursor metabolic syndrome than people who drink less than one soda a day, a new study has found. And it didn't matter if it was a regular soda or a diet soda.

Metabolic syndrome is a constellation of health problems -- high waist circumference, high blood pressure, low levels of "good" cholesterol," and other health problems -- that have been strongly linked to developing heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.

The study, in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, looked at more than 6,000 healthy people, who showed no signs of metabolic syndrome, and then followed up. After four years, 53 percent of people who drank an average of one or more soft drinks per day developed metabolic syndrome. Those who drank one or more diet soft drinks a day were at a 44 percent higher risk.

"The point is that the risk is high no matter how many soft drinks one consumes and no matter what type of soft drink one consumes," said Dr. Ramachandran S. Vasan, associate professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and one of the study authors. "This adds to what we already know about how soft drinks may be associated with weight gain and metabolic risk."