Component 1 of Fitness 3 Rules of Nutrition

Part 10 of 10 Healthy Fruits (Grapes)

Grapes have been shown to exhibit coronary benefits similar to those associated with drinking wine. Antioxidants called flavonoids are responsible for giving grapes their color, and they are also know to lower cholesterol, reduce blood clots, and decrease the risk of heart disease. Flavonoids mostly are found in darker-colored grapes.

Part 9 of 10 Healthy Fruits (Bananas)

Bananas are one of the best dietary sources of potassium and vitamin B6. Potassium is a nutrient involved in blood pressure, muscle control, and nerve function. Increasing potassium in the diet may protect against hypertension, especially in people who are sensitive to high levels of sodium

5 Components For Fat Loss.mp4

Part 8 of 10 Healthy Fruits (Kiwi Fruit)

Kiwifruit contain more vitamin C than oranges, and are a good source of potassium, copper, and magnesium. The peak of kiwi season in the United States runs from November through May. For best tasting fruit, look for kiwi that yield to gentle pressure, a sign the fruit is fully ripe.

Part 7 of 10 Healthy Fruits (Pineapples)

Pineapples have a unique group of enzymes that break down proteins and act as a digestive aid that may help reduce tumor growth and inflammation. It is these strong enzymes that work to tenderize meat when pineapple juice is used as a marinade. Pineapples are also an excellent source of manganese and vitamin C.

Part 6 of 10 Healthy Fruits (Pears)

Pears like most fruits, are a great source of dietary fiber. Fiber not only prevents constipation and ensures regularity of the digestive tract, it also binds cancer-causing chemicals in the colon and inhibits them from damaging colon cells. One medium to large pear can contain as much as 20 percent of the daily recommended amount of fiber. Pears typically also are hypo-allergenic and often are recommended as the first fruit given to infants.

Why Diets Don't Work

Part 5 of 10 Healthy Fruits (Papaya)

Papaya contains several nutrients and enzymes - specifically vitamins C and E, beta-carotene, and chymopapain - that have been shown to help reduce inflammation. People with diseases that worsen with inflammation, such as asthma and arthritis, often find that their symptoms are lessened when they eat foods containing these nutrients. Most papayas have a green-yellow outer skin that turns yellow when ripe.

Part 4 of 10 Healthy Fruits (Cantaloupe)

Cantaloupe contains many nutrients that promote cardiovascular health, such as potassium, which helps maintain healthy blood-pressure levels and muscle contractions. Cantaloupe also is a good source of folate and vitamin B6 which can prevent damage to artery walls

Part 3 of 10 Healthy Fruits (Berries)

Berries are a very good to excellent source of Vitamin C, fiber, and manganese, and they're full of strong antioxidants. Diets that include fresh berries have been linked to lower rates of cancer, especially cancer of the liver.

Part 2 of 10 Healthy Fruits (Citrus Fruit)

Citrus Fruits are known for their excellent supply of vitamin C, but oranges, grapefruits, lemons, and limes also contain more than 60 flavonoids that can discourage inflammation and provide powerful antioxidant protection. Though most citrus fruits are available year-round, their peak season runs from December through May.

Part 1 of 10 Healthy Fruits (Apples)

Apples are good sources of vitamin C, fiber, and phytonutrients, which give apple skins their color. The old adage "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" is validated in numerous studies. Apples are very high in pectin, which helps lower cholesterol. For best nutrition, leave skins on.

Being Obese Can Cost a Man Eight Years

Men who are obese at age 20 die about eight years earlier than other men, a new study in Denmark suggests.
Researchers tracked more than 5,000 men starting at the age of 20 until up to age 80. They found that at any given age, an obese man was twice as likely to die as a man who was not obese, and that obesity at age 20 appeared to be a constant factor in death rates up to 60 years later.
"As the obesity epidemic is still progressing rapidly, especially among children and adolescents, it is important to find out if obesity in early adulthood has lifelong mortality effects," said the study's leader, Esther Zimmermann, a researcher at the Institute of Preventive Medicine, Copenhagen University Hospital and the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen.
Zimmermann told LiveScience she isn't sure whether the results would hold for Americans, but that a recent study in Sweden echoed her study results. The study will be presented Tuesday at the International Congress on Obesity in Stockholm.
BMI and death risk
Zimmermann and her colleagues compared mortality among military draftees, including 1,930 obese men and a random sample of 3,601 non-obese men. (Zimmermann said she wasn't sure which men actually were accepted into the military.) They looked at participants' body mass index, or BMI, at the average ages of 20, 35 and 46 and then matched the results with death rates in the next follow-up period.
BMI is an indicator of body-fat calculated from height and weight. According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a BMI below 18.5 means the person is underweight; between 18.5 and 24.9 is considered normal; 25 to 29, overweight; and anything higher, obese.
The results were adjusted to eliminate any influence on the findings from year of birth, education and smoking.
A total of 1,191 men died during the follow-up period of up to 60 years. Of the survivors at age 70, about 70 percent had not been obese at age 20. Though the other 70-year-old survivors had been obese, just as many obese men had died by then.
Results showed men with a BMI of 25 at age 20 had the lowest death risk. Underweight men had a slightly elevated risk, and the risk of early death crept up steadily by 10 percent for each BMI unit above 25.
Obesity is persistent
Zimmermann said it is unclear whether the higher death risk was a result of being obese at age 20 or of remaining obese for many years afterward.
"More than 70 percent of the obese young men were still obese at the follow-up examinations, whereas only 4 percent of the men in comparison group developed obesity during follow-up," Zimmermann said. "Obesity seems to be a persistent condition, and it appears that if it has not occurred in men by the age of 20, the chance[s] of it developing later are quite low."
Zimmermann said her group planned to study what diseases might be responsible for the early deaths in the obese group. She suspects the known obesity-linked diseases played a role, including cardiovascular diseases, endocrine disorders and some cancers. In addition, looking at these diseases over time could shed some light on the mechanisms through which obesity works at different ages.
Her study was funded by grants from the Cluster for Endocrinology and Metabolism at the University of Copenhagen.

Fish Oil May Fight Breast Cancer

A large survey of postmenopausal women has found that fish oil may guard against breast cancer. Although the study wasn’t designed to show a cause-and-effect relationship, it sets the stage for an upcoming trial of fish oil consumption that may clarify the issue.

Meanwhile, 14 other over-the-counter dietary supplements had their hopes dashed, showing no apparent benefit against breast cancer, researchers report in the July Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

While other studies have found that fish oil supplements or a diet high in fish shows promise against cardiovascular ailments, (SN: 2/15/97, p. 101) the new study is the first to suggest a link between fish oil and a lower risk of breast cancer, says study coauthor Emily White, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

White and her colleagues used data from a massive survey of women in western Washington who filled out questionnaires between 2000 and 2002 regarding their diet, supplement intake, exercise habits and overall health and lifestyle. The analysis included more than 35,000 postmenopausal women ages 50 to 76 who didn’t have breast cancer at the study outset. By the end of 2007, 880 of these women had developed breast cancer.

Women who reported taking fish oil at the start of the study were roughly half as likely to develop ductal carcinoma of the breast, the most common form of breast cancer, during the follow-up years. Women taking fish oil showed no reduced risk of the less-common lobular breast cancer.

The scientists accounted for factors that might have influenced the women’s cancer risk such as age, body weight, fruit and vegetable consumption, aspirin use, smoking status, age at which they first gave birth and age at menarche.

“It seems to me that this is not a fluke or a false positive finding, as least with respect to the methods — it’s pretty solid work,” says Timothy Rebbeck, an epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “Short of a randomized trial, this is as about as well as you can do. This is really something that has to be followed up.”

Researchers at Harvard Medical School are now beginning a five-year randomized trial of 20,000 people to examine the effects of fish oil and vitamin D on the risks of cancer, heart disease and other ills.

Other supplements showed no anticancer benefit in the new study. These included glucosamine, chondroitin, grapeseed, black cohosh, soy, dong quai, St. John’s wort, coenzyme Q10, garlic pills, ginkgo biloba, ginseng, melatonin, acidophilus and methylsulfonylmethane.

How fish oil might prevent cancer remains unknown, but inflammation — linked to cancer in many studies — may play a central role. Fish oil contains omega-3 fatty acids, which impede a compound called nuclear factor kappa-B, White notes. “Fish oil inhibits this major inflammatory molecule,” she says.

TopForm Fish Oil

What Exercise Science Doesn’t Know About Women

~Gretchen Reynolds

Several years ago, Dr. David Rowlands, a senior lecturer with the Institute of Food, Nutrition and Human Health at Massey University in New Zealand, set out to study the role of protein in recovery from hard exercise. He asked a group of male cyclists to ride intensely until their legs were aching and virtually all of their stored muscle fuel had been depleted. The cyclists then consumed bars and drinks that contained either mostly carbohydrates or both carbohydrates and protein. Then, over the next few days, they completed two sessions of hard intervals. One took place the following morning; the next, two days later.

Dr. Rowlands found that the cyclists showed little benefit during the first interval session. But during the second, the men who ingested protein had an overall performance gain of more than 4 percent, compared with the men who took only carbohydrates, “which is huge, in competitive terms,” Dr. Rowlands says. Other researchers’ earlier studies produced similar results. Protein seems to aid in the uptake of carbohydrates from the blood; muscles pack in more fuel after exercise if those calories are accompanied by protein. The protein is also thought to aid in the repair of muscle damage after hard exercise. Dr. Rowlands’s work, which was published in 2008, was right in line with conventional wisdom.
Not so his latest follow-up study, which was published online in May in the journal Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise and should raise eyebrows, especially lightly plucked ones. After his original work was completed, Dr. Rowlands says, “we received inquiries from female cyclists,” asking to be part of any further research. So, almost as an afterthought, Dr. Rowlands and his colleagues repeated the entire experiment with experienced female riders.
This time, though, the results were quite different. The women showed no clear benefit from protein during recovery. They couldn’t ride harder or longer. In fact, the women who received protein said that their legs felt more tired and sore during the intervals than did women who downed only carbohydrates. The results, Dr. Rowlands says, were “something of a surprise.”
Scientists know, of course, that women are not men. But they often rely on male subjects exclusively, particularly in the exercise-science realm, where, numerically, fewer female athletes exist to be studied. But when sports scientists recreate classic men-only experiments with distaff subjects, the women often react quite differently. In a famous series of studies of carbo-loading (the practice of eating a high-carbohydrate diet before a race), researchers found that women did not pack carbohydrates into their muscles as men did. Even when the women upped their total calories as well as the percentage of their diet devoted to carbohydrates, they loaded only about half as much extra fuel into their muscles as the men did.
Why women respond differently seems obvious. Women are, after all, awash in the hormone estrogen, which, some new science suggests, has greater effects on metabolism and muscle health than was once imagined. Some studies have found that postmenopausal women who take estrogen replacement have healthier muscles than postmenopausal women who do not. Even more striking, in several experiments, researchers from McMaster University in Canada gave estrogen to male athletes and then had them complete strenuous bicycling sessions. The men seemed to have developed entirely new metabolisms. They burned more fat and a smaller percentage of protein or carbohydrates to fuel their exertions, just as women do.
What all of this emerging science means for women and the scientists who study (or ignore) them is not yet completely clear. “We need more research” into the differences between male and female athletes, Dr. Rowlands says. In his own study, a particularly intriguing and mysterious finding suggested that the female cyclists somehow sustained less muscle damage during the hard intervals than the men did. Their blood contained lower levels of creatine kinase, a biochemical marker of trauma in muscle tissue. Did estrogen protect the women’s muscles during the riding? And if so, why did the female cyclists who ingested protein complain of sore and tired muscles during the sessions? “Honestly, I don’t know,” Dr. Rowlands says, adding that he does not think that his findings suggest that women should skip protein after exercise. “It’s true that we didn’t see evidence for a benefit,” he says. But his study was one of a kind. The findings need to be replicated.
In the meantime, female athletes should view with skepticism the results from exercise studies that use only male subjects. As Dr. Rowlands says — echoing a chorus of men before him — when it comes to women, there’s a great deal that sports scientists “just don’t understand.”