Way to lose fat & prevent cancer too….

Today's Post: Thursday, 6-18-2009

To lose fat & keep it off, one of the most powerful methods is to eat frequent servings of nonstarchy vegetables every day. And, eating some of the crunchy ones raw each day may even work better.

They have so much fiber and so little sugar, they have very few calories and the fiber takes enough calories to digest, nonstarchy vegetables wind up with close to zero effective calories. Weight Watchers literally lists them as having zero points.

Yet, nonstarchy vegetables both turn off hunger by filling you up AND give you astoundingly good and health supporting nutrition. (This enables you to eat less of foods with more calories with virtually no effort as well. That’s a great benefit!)

Not only that, many nonstarchy vegetables have powerful cancer preventing components. This works much better with organically grown vegetables repeated research has found.

Raw broccoli, raw cauliflower, broccoli sprouts, and most of the other cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, water cress, and radishes help prevent cancer.

Raw broccoli florets, raw cauliflower chopped up or eaten as florets, and radishes are all crunchy. That makes them even more hunger cancelling!

Cooked tomatoes and other carotene containing vegetables such as carrots work best if you eat them with extra virgin olive oil by contrast. That makes their carotenoids more bioavailable and you wind up with more in your bloodstream to protect you.

Other than French fries, which are NOT starch free and are so processed, it’s a stretch to call them vegetables, many people eat no vegetables at all.

So they are a good bit fatter and more likely to get many kinds of cancer.

(Warning, if you go in one day from eating hardly any nonstarchy vegetables to 5 or 6 servings a day, your body will rebel. But if you start with one a day for a week and add one more a day at the end of each week, after you wind up eating 5 or 6 servings a day after several weeks, your body will handle it just fine.)

Now, just today, I saw two health items with great, related news.

1. “Whole-cooked carrots "better for fighting cancer" Reuters Weds, 6-17-2009” was an online story that reported research finding that the anti-cancer properties of carrots were 25% greater if they were cooked whole instead of cooked after being diced up. And 80 % of the people tested found the carrots cooked whole tasted better. This was true even if the whole carrots were diced up after cooking.

Apparently less of the cancer preventing nutrient and flavor was washed away or heated away since the whole carrot was less exposed to water and likely cooked at a slightly lower internal temperature.

But wait a minute! How long have they known that something in CARROTS prevented cancer?

The news article had that info too. Dr Kirsten Brandt & professional colleagues at the University of Denmark, discovered the anti-cancer substance falcarinol in carrots 4 years ago.

I checked on Wikipedia and falcarinol is in carrots and real panax ginseng and is a plant based antifungal compound. (Organic produce is likely to have far higher levels of it.)

Here’s a quote from Wikipedia: “Falcarinol is thought to reduce the risk of developing cancer, as a research team from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and Danish Universities found in February 2005.”

So, you could have a snack with carrot sticks, broccoli florets, and radishes and get plenty of crunch plus a decent amount of cancer prevention at the same time.

2. Today Dr Dharma Singh Khalsa’s health email had a reminder that recent research found that drinking only one glass of low-sodium vegetable juice a day helps you lose weight.

In one study, adults who drank at least 8 ounces of low sodium vegetable juice a day lost 4 pounds more than people who ate the same way but didn't drink the juice.

He also had a reminder that Research has found that people whose diets are highest in phytonutrients from plants have the lowest incidence of cancer.

His specialty is treating and preventing Alzheimer's disease; and he also noted that people who drink juice more than 3 times a week are 76% less likely to develop Alzheimer's.

He suggests you go with organic vegetables you juice yourself.

Organic vegetables will prevent cancer better. And by doing it yourself you can juice broccoli, broccoli sprouts, carrots, or kale to get a really healthful drink with no salt added.

(Vitamix makes the best juicer; but any good juicer works.)

But if you eat a very low salt diet otherwise, V8 or regular tomato juice works too for fat loss. They aren’t organic and do have added salt. But you may not have time every day to use and clean a juicer. Those juices will give you the fat loss benefit. And, they can be really easy to add to your diet. (I like the SNAPeTom juice that has the added hot spices.)

You can even get a Bloody Mary or Virgin Mary drink at a bar that has tomato juice. (That would work best for fat loss if you stuck with only one Bloody Mary or ordered a Virgin Mary.)

And, the same day, you can eat raw organic broccoli florets and organic carrots both cooked and raw to add to the fat loss benefit and add the cancer prevention.

You can also get freshly made vegetable juice drinks at many Whole Foods Markets.