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10 Tips To Healthy Eating
- Eat a variety of nutrient-rich foods. You need more than 40 different nutrients for good health, and no single food supplies them all. Your daily food selection should include bread and other whole-grain products; fruits; vegetables; dairy products; and meat, poultry, fish and other protein foods. How much you should eat depends on your calorie needs. Use the Food Guide Pyramid and the Nutrition Facts panel on food labels as handy references.
- Enjoy plenty of whole grains, fruits and vegetables. Surveys show most Americans don’t eat enough of these foods. Do you eat 6-11 servings from the bread, rice, cereal and pasta group, 3 of which should be whole grains? Do you eat 2-4 servings of fruit and 3-5 servings of vegetables? If you don’t enjoy some of these at first, give them another chance. Look through cookbooks for tasty ways to prepare unfamiliar foods.
- Maintain a healthy weight. The weight that’s right for you depends on many factors including your sex, height, age and heredity. Excess body fat increases your chances for high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, some types of cancer and other illnesses. But being too thin can increase your risk for osteoporosis, menstrual irregularities and other health problems. If you’re constantly losing and regaining weight, a registered dietitian can help you develop sensible eating habits for successful weight management. Regular exercise is also important to maintaining a healthy weight.
- Eat moderate portions. If you keep portion sizes reasonable, it’s easier to eat the foods you want and stay healthy. Did you know the recommended serving of cooked meat is 3 ounces, similar in size to a deck of playing cards? A medium piece of fruit is 1 serving and a cup of pasta equals 2 servings. A pint of ice cream contains 4 servings. Refer to the Food Guide Pyramid for information on recommended serving sizes.
- Eat regular meals. Skipping meals can lead to out-of-control hunger, often resulting in overeating. When you’re very hungry, it’s also tempting to forget about good nutrition. Snacking between meals can help curb hunger, but don’t eat so much that your snack becomes an entire meal.
- Reduce, don’t eliminate certain foods. Most people eat for pleasure as well as nutrition. If your favorite foods are high in fat, salt or sugar, the key is moderating how much of these foods you eat and how often you eat them.
Identify major sources of these ingredients in your diet and make changes, if necessary. Adults who eat high-fat meats or whole-milk dairy products at every meal are probably eating too much fat. Use the Nutrition Facts panel on the food label to help balance your choices.
Choosing skim or low-fat dairy products and lean cuts of meat such as flank steak and beef round can reduce fat intake significantly.
If you love fried chicken, however, you don’t have to give it up. Just eat it less often. When dining out, share it with a friend, ask for a take-home bag or a smaller portion.- Balance your food choices over time. Not every food has to be “perfect.” When eating a food high in fat, salt or sugar, select other foods that are low in these ingredients. If you miss out on any food group one day, make up for it the next. Your food choices over several days should fit together into a healthy pattern.
- Know your diet pitfalls. To improve your eating habits, you first have to know what’s wrong with them. Write down everything you eat for three days. Then check your list according to the rest of these tips. Do you add a lot of butter, creamy sauces or salad dressings? Rather than eliminating these foods, just cut back your portions. Are you getting enough fruits and vegetables? If not, you may be missing out on vital nutrients.
- Make changes gradually. Just as there are no “superfoods” or easy answers to a healthy diet, don’t expect to totally revamp your eating habits overnight. Changing too much, too fast can get in the way of success. Begin to remedy excesses or deficiencies with modest changes that can add up to positive, lifelong eating habits. For instance, if you don’t like the taste of skim milk, try low-fat. Eventually you may find you like skim, too.
- Remember, foods are not good or bad. Select foods based on your total eating patterns, not whether any individual food is “good” or “bad.” Don’t feel guilty if you love foods such as apple pie, potato chips, candy bars or ice cream. Eat them in moderation, and choose other foods to provide the balance and variety that are vital to good health.
ORIGINAL POSTED BY : www.realtime.net
Jessica Simpson Describes Her ‘Therapy’
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger: That’s one lesson Jessica Simpson has taken to heart.
After some rough patches, the star who recently turned 30 and is dating former NFL player Eric Johnson, finally feels on top of the world.
“I’m very happy. Right now in my life, I’m the most confident I’ve ever been. I can make that statement,” she told PEOPLE candidly at a private dinner in L.A. this week celebrating her appearance on September cover of Lucky magazine.
Yes, it’s been a road of ups and downs, but the star – who has also designed a clothing line called the Jessica Simpson Collection – has worked through issues that previously plagued her.
“I really believe that somebody should just sit in front of their best friend in the world and have their friend ask any and every question – offensive or not. And whatever it is, answer it,” she advises. “That’s your therapy. Really tackling those issues inside and out.”
And that’s exactly what Simpson has done to get herself to a good place (and past those mom jeans!).
Click Here To Continue Reading (people.com)
6 Jellyfish Facts
Jellyfish fact: Different species of jellyfish can be found in all the worlds’ oceans. A type of jellyfish (that isn’t considered “true” jellyfish by science) can even be found in freshwater.
Jellyfish fact: A species of jellyfish, the Box jellyfish (sea wasp) kills more people than any other marine creature each year.
Jellyfish fact: The worlds largest known jellyfish can reach a diameter of 2.5 m / 8ft and its tentacles can grow to be half the length of a football field.
Jellyfish fact: Jellyfishes uses jet propulsion to make their way through to the oceans of the world. Some jellyfish are avid swimmers while other mostly drifts with the currents.
Jellyfish fact: Some species of jellyfish contains a lot of protein and are thought to be able to play a large role in ending hunger and malnutrition in poor areas around the world.
Jellyfish fact: Jellyfish are able to reproduce both sexually and asexually during different parts of their life cycle.
13 AMAZING Google Facts You Don’t Know
1. Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica.
2. Google’s Home Page Has 63 Validation Errors. Check Google Validation
3. The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day.
4. The infamous “I’m feeling lucky” button is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
5. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.
6. The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’.
7. Google has the largest network of translators in the world.
8. Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.
9. Google consists of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.
10. Google started in January, 1996 as a research project at Stanford University, by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.
11. Google is a mathematical term 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasne.
12. Number of languages in which you can have the Google home page set up, including Urdu, Latin and Klingon: 88
13. Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices.
Original Posted By: deanhunt.com
9 Strange Facts About Mars
1. Mars has the biggest mountain in the solar system.
It’s called “Olympus Mons” and it’s actually a dormant volcano. Olympus Mons is 15.5 miles high and 372 miles across. To give you an idea, Mt. Everest is between 5 and 6 miles tall. Mars also has the biggest canyon system in the known universe, the “Valles Marineris,” which is 2,500 miles long and 4 miles deep.
2. People have always wondered about life on mars because of the “canals” first seen by early astronomers.
This is why we have always imagined alien invaders coming from there, and not Jupiter or Venus. Actually, Mars is one of the least habitable planets, with freezing temperatures, solar winds, and almost no atmosphere. It is far more likely for there to be life on Venus. The canals seen by early observers are long, straight lines on the planet’s surface that scientists believe are evidence of water.
3. Mars is named after the Roman god of war because its red color reminded early observers of blood.
The reason for the red color is that the soil is composed of iron oxide, or what we commonly call rust.
4. Compared to the other planets in the solar system, Mars is quite small.
It is half the size of earth. Mars has about a third of the earth’s gravity, which means that you can jump three times as high.
5. In the 1970’s, the Viking orbiter took pictures of what appear to be giant faces and pyramids carved into the planet’s surface in the Cydonia region.
The biggest looks like the Sphinx of Egypt and is 2,000 feet high and miles across. While this discovery has gotten UFOlogists excited, scientists say they are just eroded mesas. Many still believe that the faces are too symmetrical to be natural, and that they are evidence of ancient alien civilizations.
6. Mars has some of the wildest weather in the solar system.
It has tremendous wind storms, dust storms and small tornadoes (dust devils). In 2001, a huge dust storm covered the entire planet for several earth days. Scientists are puzzled that a planet with so little atmosphere could have raging storms such as these. They don’t know what causes them, but there are more storms when Mars is close to the sun. When it’s on the farther end of its orbit, there are icy clouds made of carbon dioxide and dust. This is also strange because Mars has no surface water.
7. There has been a search for life on mars, and also a search for water.
After years of studying every crack on the planet’s surface for evidence of water, scientists have finally found it. The Phoenix mission found that there are huge deposits of ice underneath the planet’s surface.
8. Mars has two moons, and one of it is going to crash into it.
The moon Phobos orbits dangerously close to Mars’ atmosphere. Someday, the gravitational pull with smash the moon to bits. The debris will stay in Mars’ orbit, making a ring like the rings of Saturn. Eventually, it will rain down on Mars. Scientists don’t know when this will happen, but predict it will be in the next 50 years.
9. Only 1/3 of all the missions to Mars have been successful.
So many missions have disappeared that it has led scientists to wonder if something strange is happening. They refer to Mars as the “Bermuda Triangle” of the solar system
Original Posted by The Most Interesting Facts About Mars (factsaboutmars.net)
10 Facts about Chocolate that you didnt know
Chocolate is one of the most popular and yummiest types of foods that will likely stay at the top of most peoples favorite food lists. Chocolate is something most of us have grown up enjoying, but very few of us have taken the time to learn the many facts that are associated with Chocolate. There are actually hundreds of facts that are associated with Chocolate and I have created a list of the ones that I find most interesting. If you want to know the nutritional values in the different types of chocolate, check out thesechocolate nutrition facts.
1. It is a known fact that chocolate has caffeine in it. But did you know that you would have to eat more then a dozen chocolate bars to get the same amount of caffeine from a cup of coffee? There are about 5 to 10 mg’s of caffeine in one ounce of bitter chocolate, 5 mgs in milk chocolate, and 10mgs in a six-ounce cup of cocoa.
2. Chocolate is actually a valuable energy source. A single chocolate chip can provide enough energy for an adult human to walk 150 ft.
3. Chocolate has great health benefits. It helps with depression, high blood pressure, Tumors and Pre-menstrual syndromes.
4. Chocolate does not cause or aggravate acne, this is a myth.
5. One ounce of baking chocolate or cocoa contains 10% of the daily recommended intake of iron.
6. Chocolate can be deadly for dogs. Chocolate contains an ingredient called “Theobromine” which can be toxic to a dogscentral nervous system and cardiac muscles.
7. People spend more than $7 billion dollars a year on chocolate.
8. The per capita consumption of chocolate indicates that each person consumes 12 pounds of chocolate each year.
9. Milk Chocolate is the most preferred type of chocolate, however dark chocolate is especially popular among men.
10. In Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “Psycho” chocolate syrup was used to indicate blood in the famous shower scene.
Tropical Storm Bonnie forms near the Bahamas
(Reuters) – A tropical storm formed near the Bahamas on Thursday on a track that could take it over BP’s oil spill site in the Gulf of Mexico.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Tropical Storm Bonnie, the second named storm of the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, was packing maximum sustained winds of 40 miles per hour.
Weather models project the storm will skirt south of Florida and swirl northwest across the oil-rich central Gulf of Mexico, near where BP is cleaning up its massive oil spill, before hitting the Louisiana or Texas coasts.
Forecasters say this year’s hurricane season could be the worst since 2005, when Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma caused havoc in the Gulf Coast, damaging oil rigs and refineries and forcing sharp cuts in production.
Katrina was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history when in flooded New Orleans, as well as one of the country’s deadliest hurricanes.
The hurricane season runs from June 1 through November 30 and often affects the Gulf of Mexico, home to about 30 percent of U.S. oil production, 11 percent of natural gas production, and more than 43 percent of U.S. refinery capacity.
Hurricane Alex, the season’s first hurricane, drenched the Texas-Mexicoborder on April 1 as it made landfall as a Category 2 storm, spawning tornadoes and flooding towns, but it spared U.S. oil wells.
(Reporting by Tom Brown, Editing by Philip Barbara).
Original Posted By Reuters.com
Samantha Ronson Visits Lindsay Lohan in Jail
A day after Lindsay Lohan’s mom Dina, sister Ali and business manager Lou Taylor visited her in jail, the actress got to see another familiar face: ex-girlfriend Samantha Ronson.
The DJ, 32, arrived at Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood, Calif., around 1:40 p.m. on Thursday and stayed about an hour. While leaving the all-women’s jail, Ronson snapped at a reporter who asked how Lohan, 24, was holding up.
“How do you think she’s doing?” Ronson replied.
Later, on her Twitter page, Ronson wrote: “Song Of The Day: Rolling Stones – Waiting on A Friend.”
Lohan’s attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley, also dropped by and her former attorney Blair Berk visited her earlier in the day. “She’s good. She’s (doing) better every day,” Chapman Holley says.
Though visiting hours at the jail are on the weekend for family and friends, Lohan has been able to see visitors “for security reasons. It’s for the safety of everyone,” law enforcement officials told local TV station KTLA.
Click Here To Continue Reading (people.com)
Some caffeine okay during pregnancy: obstetricians
(Reuters Health) – A cup of coffee a day during pregnancy probably won’t increase a woman’s risk of miscarriage or premature birth, The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said today.
Until recently, studies have had conflicting findings about the effect of moderate caffeine consumption on pregnancy complications.
But, “I think it’s time to comfortably say that it’s okay to have a cup of coffee during pregnancy,” Dr. William Barth, the chair of a College committee which reviewed the evidence, told Reuters Health.
The College’s Committee on Obstetric Practice said that 200 milligrams of caffeine a day, about the amount in a 12-ounce cup of coffee, doesn’t significantly contribute to miscarriages or premature births. That definition of “moderate caffeine consumption” would also include drinking about four 8-ounce cups of tea or more than five 12-ounce cans of soda a day, or eating six or seven dark chocolate bars.
The committee said the evidence was not clear on whether consuming more than 200 mg of caffeine a day might increase pregnancy risks.
The group considered two recent studies, each of which followed more than 1,000 pregnant women. One study, led by Dr. David Savitz of The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, found no increased rate of miscarriage for women who consumed low, moderate, or high levels of caffeine at different points in their pregnancy.
In the other, Dr. De-Kun Li and his colleagues at Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research in Oakland found a higher risk of miscarriage in women who consumed more than 200 mg of caffeine per day, but no extra risk at lower levels.
The committee also pointed to two other studies that found that a mother’s moderate caffeine intake did not make it any more likely she would deliver a baby prematurely.
Research has shown that caffeine is able to cross the placenta, which led to worries that it could cause miscarriage or premature birth. “It’s not inert, it does have drug-like properties,” Savitz, who was not involved in producing the guidelines, told Reuters Health. And, he said, “it justifiably deserves a close look because it’s so widely used.”
In the U.S., about 16 percent of all pregnancies end in miscarriage and about 12 percent of babies are born prematurely.
Previous studies, Barth said, were mixed and unclear about the link between caffeine and pregnancy risks. It was the new findings from large groups of women that allowed the committee to feel confident that moderate caffeine intake was safe, and “try to bring some conclusion to the subject,” he said.
The committee statement goes along with the thinking that caffeine is “not an all-or-nothing sort of thing,” Savitz said. While some women may choose to cut out caffeine altogether during pregnancy, others might care a lot about that daily cup of coffee and just try to cut back a little – and both options are okay, he said.
Li said that while the committee report is balanced, he would recommend erring on the side of safety – even for low levels of caffeine consumption.
The committee’s opinion could help women make choices during pregnancy, Savitz said. “It’s not either shocking or alarmist or changing radically what we thought before,” he said. “But sometimes I think it’s important for authoritative groups to issue these kinds of statements. I think it can be a helpful guideline to physicians and I also think it can be helpful to women themselves.”
SOURCE: link.reuters.com/tyx58m Obstetrics & Gynecology, online July 21, 2010.
