Superfoods & Honor Roll Foods, part 2
Welcome to our health & self help blog.
In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective.
Today’s post: Monday, 4-17-2006
If a food is super nutritious or promotes or protects your health, it belongs on the list of Superfoods & Honor Roll Foods.
Here are two more.:
Dark Chocolate. It’s beginning to be widely reported that dark chocolate is high in antioxidants & that eating it by itself as a snack actually reduces high blood pressure & improves the health of your blood vessels.
Unfortunately, eating it with milk seems to cancel the health effects by binding to its antioxidants in some way. So milk chocolate candy bars & chocolate milk, while fun taste treats, don’t have the health benefits of dark chocolate eaten by itself.
Secondly, it is possible to eat enough of it as a snack to gain undesirable fat weight. (I’ve lost the 6 pounds I gained last December doing exactly that.)
The good news is that only ONE of the bite-sized candy bars will produce the health effect -- as will about a quarter of one of the full sized or larger ones. And, unless you are exercising for several hours a day each day, one a day is probably the limit without eating it producing an unplanned weight gain.
(An article I saw recently found that the Newman’s Own Dark Chocolate bars had the highest level of antioxidants of the brands they tested.
Also, make sure to check the label of any candy bars you buy to be sure they do NOT contain any partially hydrogenated oil or list any transfat content above 0. Until recently, some of the more popular ones have contained partially hydrogenated oil & said so on the label. Such transfats are worse for you than the dark chocolate is good !!
A good way to get a very solid chocolate experience with NO added sugar is to add two heaping spoonfuls of unsweetened cocoa to a cup of hot water.
(I’ve found that if you put the cocoa in the middle & very carefully swish it around for a bit, you can get the spoon in between the cocoa lump & the side of the cup. Once you do that, it’s possible to stir vigorously until the cocoa dissolves without getting a glob on the spoon that doesn’t mix as well.)
Oatmeal. If you fix it & get used to eating it with no added salt or sugar, it’s very good for you.
In particular, the soluble fiber in it has been shown to help reduce the level of undesirable LDL cholesterol. Plus, it is reasonably high in protein & B vitamins.
And, if you eat it with a glass of nonfat or 1 % fat milk for breakfast, you get enough protein to substitute for the ham & eggs you might have otherwise eaten, which cuts your LDL cholesterol even more.
In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective.
Today’s post: Monday, 4-17-2006
If a food is super nutritious or promotes or protects your health, it belongs on the list of Superfoods & Honor Roll Foods.
Here are two more.:
Dark Chocolate. It’s beginning to be widely reported that dark chocolate is high in antioxidants & that eating it by itself as a snack actually reduces high blood pressure & improves the health of your blood vessels.
Unfortunately, eating it with milk seems to cancel the health effects by binding to its antioxidants in some way. So milk chocolate candy bars & chocolate milk, while fun taste treats, don’t have the health benefits of dark chocolate eaten by itself.
Secondly, it is possible to eat enough of it as a snack to gain undesirable fat weight. (I’ve lost the 6 pounds I gained last December doing exactly that.)
The good news is that only ONE of the bite-sized candy bars will produce the health effect -- as will about a quarter of one of the full sized or larger ones. And, unless you are exercising for several hours a day each day, one a day is probably the limit without eating it producing an unplanned weight gain.
(An article I saw recently found that the Newman’s Own Dark Chocolate bars had the highest level of antioxidants of the brands they tested.
Also, make sure to check the label of any candy bars you buy to be sure they do NOT contain any partially hydrogenated oil or list any transfat content above 0. Until recently, some of the more popular ones have contained partially hydrogenated oil & said so on the label. Such transfats are worse for you than the dark chocolate is good !!
A good way to get a very solid chocolate experience with NO added sugar is to add two heaping spoonfuls of unsweetened cocoa to a cup of hot water.
(I’ve found that if you put the cocoa in the middle & very carefully swish it around for a bit, you can get the spoon in between the cocoa lump & the side of the cup. Once you do that, it’s possible to stir vigorously until the cocoa dissolves without getting a glob on the spoon that doesn’t mix as well.)
Oatmeal. If you fix it & get used to eating it with no added salt or sugar, it’s very good for you.
In particular, the soluble fiber in it has been shown to help reduce the level of undesirable LDL cholesterol. Plus, it is reasonably high in protein & B vitamins.
And, if you eat it with a glass of nonfat or 1 % fat milk for breakfast, you get enough protein to substitute for the ham & eggs you might have otherwise eaten, which cuts your LDL cholesterol even more.
posted by David at 12:11 PM
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