Eat Fruit Just Not By Itself
Our Pritikin doctors and dietitians want you to eat fruit . Our only recommendation is that you combine your fruit with something else. For example, in the morning add some berries to hot, whole-grain cereal. In the afternoon, pair a piece of fruit with veggie sticks. After dinner, make fruit your dessert. These extra foods add extra fiber, which can help stabilize blood sugar after a meal.
Is Caffeine Good For You
The health experts at the Pritikin Center are often asked about caffeine. Is caffeine good for you? Bad for you? Should you drink coffee or tea?
Caffeine itself has no nutritional value, but is coffee or tea good for you in other ways? Find out.
In addition to the physicians and faculty at the Pritikin Longevity Center, members of the board include James Barnard, PhD, UCLA School of Physiological Science Robert Vogel, MD, University of Maryland School of Medicine William McCarthy, PhD, UCLA School of Public Health Tom Rifai, MD, Medical Director of Metabolic Nutrition & Weight Management at St Joseph Mercy in Michigan and Stephen Inkeles, MD, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Below are the Pritikin Scientific Advisory Boards conclusions.
Tips For Controlling Holiday Binge Eating
And Having a Great Time To Boot
Losing control and losing your mind? Not to mention your waistline? Here are 9 tips for controlling holiday binges from the faculty at the renowned Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa, which has been teaching healthy living skills to thousands worldwide since 1975.
This year, take the edge off. Well show you how. Not only will you better master those buffets, youll end up much happier the following morning and all through the holiday season.
Here are nine tips for holiday-stress-busting success:
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Normal Weight And Pre
What the physicians and other educators at Pritikin have found is that many normal-weight kids, like 13-year-old Sarah who was recently at Pritikin, are not normal within.
Sarahs blood glucose revealed she was pre-diabetic. Her insulin was more than double normal levels. Though competing on her school track team helped keep her thin, it wasnt enough to fight the damage her daily diet of fast food, Cokes, and candy bars was doing to her blood sugar.
Its Time To Shed The Pounds
And when you connect all of this together, you get the extra benefit of weight loss. Remember, youre not getting the extra calories that occur from drinking alcoholespecially empty calories. People have seen a 2% weight loss just by not drinking alcohol .
Reducing your weight brings a lot of other benefits. You help to reduce further your risk of developing Type II diabetes and lower your risk of heart disease and stroke. Your blood pressure drops, and you will find pain on your joints reduces as the body isnt trying to hold up as much weight.
You can lose more weight by thinking carefully about what youre doing in place of the drinking. This isnt the time to start consuming more chocolate or reaching for the sugary drinks. Switch to water and healthy foods.
Its also worth exercising moreand youll feel like you have more energy by not drinking alcohol . The extra exercise will help to burn more calories so you lose the weight.
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Want Dry Cereal Period
All right. Just make sure youre choosing varieties, like shredded wheat and puffed whole grain . A shopping tip: Scan the ingredient list. The fewer the ingredients, the better. Shredded wheat, for example, has just one ingredient shredded whole wheat, which means youre not getting all the added sodium and sugar that a lot of dry cereals contain. Yes, you want shredded wheat, not frosted shredded wheat.
Make your dry cereal better for your waistline by pouring less of it in your bowl and filling half your bowl with lots of fruit. The fruit fills you up and keeps you from eating too much of the calorie-concentrated cereal. And be sure to choose nonfat dairy milk or soymilk as a topper.
Heres another tip from another Pritikin member. He was responding to a member who said that oatmeal made her gag. If you cook up a batch of Chef Anthonys Oatmeal Supreme on Saturday morning, youll never say oatmeal makes you gag again. I hated oatmeal myself, and now its my favorite. Both a great breakfast and weight loss are happening.
Music And Your Health Lowering Blood Pressure
We often think of music and its bond with our souls. Research is now finding that music and your health are also an important duet.
For optimal blood pressure control, its important to add music and relaxation to healthful nutrition and exercise like the Pritikin Program.
In the study, 28 adults who were taking medication to control mild hypertension listened to 30 minutes of music while practicing slow, controlled breathing exercises for a total of four weeks. A control group, 20 mild hypertensives, made no changes to their lifestyle.
The systolic blood pressure dropped significantly in the music-and-relaxation participants while the control group netted small, non-significant reductions.
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Plan A Party Thats Focused More On Fun And Less On Food
Get the kids up and moving with party activities. Set up dunking for apples, a costume/dance contest, a pumpkin hunt , pinning a heart on a scarecrow, or musical chairs.
And, of course, they never tire of running from the big bad boogie man in a game of Halloween hide and seek. Lots of calories burned. Lots of fun!
Set New Limits For Television Viewing Especially Of Kids Shows
Almost every commercial is for something they should not eat or do not need. For TV shows that they insist on watching, use the DVR and record them. That way, you can speed through all the commercials and all the sugary, fatty, salty temptations.
Try to put a lid on other screen time, too, from Wii games to Facebook. The less time they spend on the couch, the better.
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Diets That Work Diets That Dont
Published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the report reviewed 17 studies in adults from the U.S. and worldwide. It concluded that there is strong and consistent evidence showing that consuming a diet higher in calorie density is linked with increased body weight, while a diet that is relatively low in calorie density improves weight loss and weight maintenance. *
What many Americans need, I believe, is an education at the Pritikin Longevity Center. Kimberly Gomer, Director of Nutrition
Lead investigator Rafael Perez-Escamilla of Yale University stated that his review supports the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 recommendations to consume a low-calorie-dense-diet. But he recognized that many Americans do not understand which foods are low in calorie density, how they lead to weight loss, and how they can be incorporated into a consistent, long-term eating plan.
What many Americans need, I believe, is an education at the Pritikin Longevity Center, where the value of low-calorie-dense eating and its practical application into everyday life has been taught for more than 20 years.
Below is a summary of the relationship between low-calorie-dense eating and weight control, or what we dietitians and physicians at Pritikin refer to as eating more and weighing less.
What do all these low-calorie-dense foods have in common? They tend to be high in water and fiber, which means they take up a lot of space in our stomachs.
Here is a good example:
Gastric Bypass Surgery For Diabetes
Is gastric bypass surgery a good idea for people with diabetes?
Yes, you can get abs from losing weight through a safe and consistent exercise plan and a healthy eating strategy. However, perhaps youd benefit most from making a shift in your mindset.
Why have your digestive tract mutilated and risk long-term complications from the surgery, including nutritional deficiencies, when you can just follow the Pritikin Program, lose weight without hunger, and still reverse insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes?
To be sure, a commitment to lifestyle changes like the Pritikin Program is no small task. But surgery is no easy solution either. After surgery, doctors routinely advise patients to make a complete change in lifestyle. Foods to be avoided include sugary foods, red meat, high-fat foods, high-fiber foods, and milk because they commonly provoke nausea, cramping, diarrhea, overall weakness and other nasty side effects.
And because most forms of weight-loss surgery leave patients with a stomach the size of an egg, post-surgery life means very small meals, eaten very slowly and chewed thoroughly, for the rest of ones life. Overeating may cause vomiting, expansion of the stomach pouch, weight gain, or even rupture of the stomach.
And the only side effect of Pritikin living is better health, better blood pressure, better cholesterol, freedom from angina pain and heart surgeries, and certainly, better diabetes control. Yes, its all good news.
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Supplements To Reduce Elevated Ldl Cholesterol
While diet and exercise should be your two main options for fighting off LDL cholesterol, you can also look into the various dietary supplements that are on the market today.
Keep in mind that these natural products have not been fully proven to reduce your level of LDL cholesterol, but they may be able to help along the way. They may lower LDL but what about increasing HDL if their levels are low.
Ideally the supplement should also increase HDL levels if their levels are low. Only then we can have normal lipid levels. When only LDL levels are lowered and HDL levels are low then we cannot have normal cholesterol levels.
According to recent research certain vitamins like vitamin c have the ability to lower LDL and increase HDL levels. These vitamins also have the ability to lower lipoprotein, a kind of cholesterol which is more atherogenic than LDL.
Supplements that remove cholesterol by adsorption:
A variety of herbal supplements like plant sterols and stanols are used for reducing LDL cholesterol. These supplements adsorb excess cholesterol from the intestine and send it to liver for excretion from the body.
These Sterols and Stanol type of phytochemicals cannot lower lp.
Statins :
Statins lower cholesterol by inhibiting cholesterol synthesis. They do not increase HDL. It is observed that people who are on statins generally have low HDL levels.
Statins do not reduce lipoprotein. Statins do not increase HDL levels.
Niacin ER:
Fish Oil:
For Many A Healthy Lifestyle Alone Can Prevent Or Control Diabetes
In fact, a healthy lifestyle has been found to be more effective than medications. In a landmark study, the NIH-sponsored Diabetes Prevention Program, scientists tracked 3,234 pre-diabetic men and women for three years.
A third of them adopted lifestyle changes. Another third took a drug metformin . The remaining third, the control group, took a placebo.
Those on the lifestyle-change plan reduced the progression to full-blown type 2 diabetes by 58% compared to the control group. The reduction was even greater 71% among adults aged 60 years or older. Treatment with the drug metformin reduced the risk by just 31% overall.1
The lifestyle changes in the study were similar to the Pritikin Program and focused on eating low-calorie-dense, high-fiber foods, exercising five days weekly for at least 30 minutes, and a 7% weight loss.
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Your Workouts Will Improve
Regular consumption of alcohol could have detrimental effects on your workout routine because when you drink, your body isnt picking up the vital vitamins and minerals it needs, Delbridge says. With your body preoccupied with digesting and absorbing the alcohol from last night, you might not be building the lean muscles youre aiming for at the gym. Heres what to choose at the bar if your goal is to lose weight.
Saving Money On Food 3 Healthy Tips
Want to be saving money on food but still eating a lot of tasty, healthy food?
Yes, you can get abs from losing weight through a safe and consistent exercise plan and a healthy eating strategy. However, perhaps youd benefit most from making a shift in your mindset.
Take a look at our three tips below, plus more cost-cutting ideas, for everything from everyday cooking to holidays like Thanksgiving Day.
Soup Saving Money On Food
Soups in your grocery aisle are often about $3 a can. So if you buy 4 cans , youre dropping about $12.
You can whip up 8 tasty, healthy cups of soup for half that amount yes, just $6. Thats what we discovered when we priced out the ingredients for Pritikin soup recipes like our Pritikin Black Bean Soup. A bag of black beans is only about $1.50, two red onions are about $1, a half cup of chopped garlic is not more than 50 cents, and the remaining ingredients spices, a carrot, and a chipotle pepper are just a couple dollars more.
And wow, what flavor! So much tastier than anything youd open up from a can.
Sure, it takes a little time to make your own soup. But not much more time thats the amazing discovery! Think about it. You still have to go to the grocery store whether youre buying cans of soup or soup ingredients. And when you get home, all youre really doing is spending a few more minutes dumping a few ingredients in a pot and stirring. Thats how easy soup-making is.
Salad Dressing Saving Money On Food
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Sex Nitric Oxide And An Unhealthy Lifestyle
Conversely, when the endothelium senses high cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, or emotional distress, it releases less nitric oxide, and atherosclerosis accelerates.
Penile erection depends on the release of nitric oxide. Viagra and other drugs like it that reduce erectile dysfunction work on the next step of the nitric oxide pathway
Banana Leaf Wrapped Fish With Tomatillo Salsa
HEALTHY RECIPE FROM THE PRITIKIN COOKING SCHOOL
The healthiest animal food choices are omega-3-rich fish such as salmon, sardines, herring, mackerel, and trout, advises the Pritikin Eating Plan. Most other fish, plus shelled mollusks like clams and scallops, are healthy choices, too. Enjoy fish tonight with this yummy recipe.
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How Does Alcohol Affect Cholesterol
While alcohol itself doesnt contain cholesterol, it can still affect your cholesterol levels in several ways.
To begin with, alcohol is processed through your liver, which also makes and eliminates cholesterol. When you drink excessively, your liver focuses on getting rid of the alcohol and becomes less efficient at other tasksincluding managing your cholesterol levels.
Your liver also processes fat and sugar more slowly when dealing with alcohol, leading to higher fat storage. Triglyceridesthe most common type of fat stored in the bodyare also linked to fatty buildup in the arteries. The extra calories in many alcoholic drinks can worsen this problem, even contributing to fatty liver disease, further affecting how well you process cholesterol.
Overall, higher alcohol consumptioneven occasional binge drinkingseems to increase lipid levels in the bloodstream, and is generally not good for heart health5.
Cholesterol And Triglyceride Basics
Cholesterol comes in two main forms, known as LDL cholesterol and HDL cholesterol. The human body needs some LDL cholesterol in circulation in order to remain healthy however, many people get much more of this substance than they require from dietary sources. HDL cholesterol helps diminish the risks associated with LDL cholesterol by removing some of the overage of this bad cholesterol from the bloodstream. People who have high amounts of LDL cholesterol and low amounts of HDL cholesterol in circulation typically have heightened chances of developing heart- and blood vessel-related ailments such as strokes, heart attacks and heart disease. Triglycerides are the main form of fat found in both foods in the human diet and in the human body itself. They appear in large amounts in the bloodstream when a person regularly consumes more fat than he or she requires at any given point in time, or as a consequence of certain uncontrolled physical ailments. Technically speaking, people with high triglyceride levels in their blood have a condition known as hypertriglyceridemia the presence of this condition may contribute to the onset of a form of heart disease called coronary artery disease. Many of the foods with a high triglyceride content also have a high LDL cholesterol content.
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Special Recommendationfor Cancer Survivors Follow The Recommendations For Cancer Prevention
If able to do so, and unless otherwise advised, the WCRF/AICR report recommends that cancer survivors lifestyle guidelines outlined in its report.
There is evidence that people whove had colon cancer are significantly less likely to suffer a recurrence if they adopt a healthier diet and lifestyle. This also appears to be the case for cancers of the breast and prostate.
Finally, throughout its report, the expert panel emphasizes the importance of not smoking and avoiding exposure to tobacco smoke.
Now For Some Good News
You can make delicious pizza thats also healthy using fantastic whole-wheat pizza crust, refreshingly low amounts of sodium, and, best of all, innovative toppings. Its all about thinking outside the pizza box, which allows you to create a whole new world of flavors and fun, smiles Pritikins Executive Chef Vincent Della Polla.
Always keep in mind that if youre trying to lose weight, you dont want to go overboard on pizza eating, even Pritikin-style pizzas, because dry pizza crust and cheese are calorie-dense foods, reminds Pritikin Director of Nutrition Kimberly Gomer, MS, RD, LDN. One suggestion: To keep your pizza portions small, pair your pizza with a nice big salad full of the seasons finest veggies.
Here are tips for scrumptious Pritikin pizzas, many from people who are frequent vacationers at the Pritikin health resort and soak up all the secrets of healthy cooking in Pritikins cooking classes. Watch out, Giada De Laurentiis!
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