Tag: Health

Please Exercise!

Exercise is one of the few activities in life that is indisputably good for us—an undertaking that extends enormous benefits but extracts few costs. Exercise helps us live longer. It fends off heart disease and diabetes. It reduces our weight and improves our strength. And its psychological value is enormous. For people suffering from depression, it can be just as effective as medication. For healthy people, it’s an instant and long-lasting mood booster. Anyone who examines the science on exercise reaches the same conclusion: People would be silly not to do it.

—Dan Pink, in When

Nutrition tip from a top swimmer

Swimmers are endlessly hungry. I could eat a big meal and be hungry within an hour. Instead of eating a lot during one sitting, I learned to eat small and eat often. You should feel like you could go for a run after a meal.

Rebecca Soni (6-time Olympic medallist), in Eight top athletes share their nutrition tricks for a high-performing new year

Bring me my fat soaked steak!

The research team thought that patients who ate diets with plant fat would have lower cholesterol—and they did, by about 14% overall. But they actually had higher risks of any kind of death than their animal-fat-eating peers. For every 30 points total cholesterol was lowered, the risk of death increased by 22%.

For years, we’ve been told fat clogs our arteries. Now, scientists say that’s all wrong., April 27, 2017, at 07:35 PM

Running, is good.

Cumulatively, the data indicated that running, whatever someone’s pace or mileage, dropped a person’s risk of premature death by almost 40 percent, a benefit that held true even when the researchers controlled for smoking, drinking and a history of health problems such as hypertension or obesity.

An Hour of Running May Add 7 Hours to Your Life, April 13, 2017 at 11:20AM

One caveat: the participants in those studies were mostly white and middle class.

You healthy thing!

Men’s Fitness has a handy list of the “dirtiest menu words“: Alfredo, butter, breaded, battered, crispy, fritters, golden, refried, loaded, pan-fried, covered and — worst of all — smothered.

The (c)leanest menu words: grilled, baked, lightly sautéed, primavera, marinara, roasted and — best of all — steamed.

10. 1 healthy thing, March 31, 2017 at 02:54 PM

Fruit = Sugar + whole lot of good stuff!

Don’t get the idea that because the sugar composition is the same in fruit and cake, they’re interchangeable.

For one thing, fruit offers good stuff like vitamins, antioxidants and water, while candy and desserts are nutritionally void.

Fruit also tends to have less sugar by volume. Half a cup of strawberries: 3.5 grams of sugar. Half a cup of strawberry ice cream: 15 grams.

Plus, whole fruit has a lot of fiber, which actually slows down your body’s digestion of glucose, so you don’t get the crazy insulin spike (and subsequent crash) that candy causes.

That also means your body has more time to use up glucose as fuel before storing it — as fat.

Is Sugar From Fruit Better For You Than White Sugar?, January 24, 2017 at 03:23PM

Running: Frequency trumps pure distance

Once you work up to running three miles at once, “frequency is your friend,” Dollar says.

“Running 10–15 miles a week split into 4–5 runs is safer and more beneficial than running 10–15 miles split into only two runs.”

How To Start (Or Get Back To) Consistent Running, January 10, 2017 at 12:09AM

In other news, I’ve so far run 10 of 11 days this year. Only 5K (3.1 mi) runs, but (nearly) every day. Good for me 🙂