– USDA ChooseMyPlate.gov

Whether going to your local coffee shop is a daily ritual or a special weekend outing, consider the ways you can move toward better choices.
Please view the following:  Coffee

by Stephanie Stephens* – see article at Health Central – Aug 1, 2019

Not only do they taste great, but they might also help slow aging and protect you against cancer. We are talking about blueberries here, and what is not to like about them? Besides, there is something fun about eating a blue fruit that contains only 80 calories per cup, nearly 4 grams of fiber, along with vitamins C, K, B6, and some major minerals.

Now, several new studies are popping up to support something we’ve known for a while: blueberries are a true “superfood.” The research is so positive that The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences devoted an entire special section to the wonderfulness of this cute, colorful fruit.

In an editorial introduction to four journal articles about blueberries, Donald K. Ingram, Ph.D., reiterates that the fruit does indeed have one of the highest antioxidant compositions of most popular fruits, as well as documented anti-inflammatory properties. Here are the key takeaways from the reports:

• Anthocyanins are responsible for blueberries’ blue color, and this study found that eating a cup of the berries, or 200 grams, boosted blood vessel function and lowered systolic blood pressure (that is the top number on your BP reading).

• This study found that, in short, eating blueberries may preserve and even reverse some age-related deficits in cognitive function. #brainpower

This study’s findings indicate benefits for memory and executive functions (things like setting goals) in children and adults, with the additional benefit of improving psychomotor function—that’s the relationship between your brain and muscle function—in older healthy adults and adults with mild cognitive impairment.

• Polyphenols in a particular extract from grapes and blueberries called PEGB were found to improve age-related episodic memory decline in people who have the highest cognitive impairments.

So go ahead and fill up on these memory-boosting, heart-helping berries and reap the benefits.

How to Eat More Berries – Blueberries are simply scrumptious right from your hand to your mouth, plain and simple. However, if you are looking for other ways to consume this highly nutritious fruit, why not try eating them these ways?

• Frozen: On a hot summer’s day, grab some frozen blueberries and crunch ’em right out of the bag.
• Blended into smoothies: The texture and color are sure to please your palate. Use fresh or frozen, and mix with spinach or kale for an extra nutritious treat..
• Tossed over salads: Sure, they aren’t your standard salad ingredient, but they work beautifully in a fruit salad, of course, as well as tossed into your typically traditional salad of greens—whether romaine or arugula. Go ahead and be adventurous here—maybe add some toasted nuts as well!
• Sprinkled over cereal: They are right at home on cold and hot whole-grain cereals and steel-cut oatmeal.
• Mixed into yogurt: You can buy blueberry yogurt, so add a few more to that, as well as to other fruit flavors, vanilla, and plain. Go for low-fat, fat-free, and Greek varieties for the best health benefits, according to the AHA.

*Stephanie Stephens – digital journalist, audio/video producer and host who covers health, healthcare and health policy, along with celebrities and their health, for a variety of publications, websites, networks, content agencies and other distinctive clients.

see full article by Audrey Bruno – Self magazine – July 23, 2019 at
https://www.self.com/story/how-gross-is-it-to-not-wash-produce

Back away from the veggie spray.

When it comes to fruits and veggies, it’s never totally clear how deeply they need to be cleaned to be safe to eat. When something is covered in visible dirt—like carrots, potatoes, and other things typically pulled from the ground—I always instinctively give them a good scrub before I cook with them. But when something appears to be relatively clean, like apples or berries, I’m never sure if a simple rinse is enough or if I technically should be doing more.

So we decided to break down what might actually be on unwashed produce, how much good washing really does, and how to clean different types of produce effectively.

Here’s what could be on your produce before you wash it.

Even when a piece of produce appears to be squeaky clean, it probably isn’t, Philip Tierno, Ph.D., a clinical professor of microbiology and pathology at NYU Langone Medical Center, tells SELF. Just because there’s no visible dirt doesn’t mean it’s not covered in microbes and potentially harmful pathogens that it picked up somewhere along the way.

The FDA reports that around 48 million people contract food-borne illnesses from food products contaminated with harmful pathogens each year, most commonly listeria, E. coli, and salmonella bacteria as well as viruses like hepatitis A and norovirus.

The good news is that there are agricultural standards in place to minimize the amount of pathogens entering the produce system, Randy Worobo, Ph.D., professor of food microbiology at Cornell University, tells SELF, so the odds of actually buying contaminated produce in the first place are typically pretty low. But while the chance you’ll contract a foodborne illness from fresh produce is relatively slim, it is always a possibility, depending on what your fruits and veggies came into contact with on their journey to you. Things like salmonella, E. coli, and listeria may be present on produce as a result of poor farming practices, but it’s also possible for produce to be contaminated with a virus that was spread by humans, like norovirus and hepatitis A.

“There’s a whole host of people that handle raw fruits and vegetables,” Tierno says, “including the growers, the pickers, the truckers—many hands which contain different types of germs, potentially pathogens.”

And if you’re worried about pesticides, know that the Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration work together to first establish what level of pesticide residue is safe for human consumption, and then enforce those rules (if you’re interested in getting more details on that, you can read this recent FDA report. Rinsing your produce will remove some of that residue, Worobo says, adding that after washing there may still be some pesticide residue on your produce, but the amount is so small that it doesn’t pose any real threat.

How much does rinsing really do?

The reality is that washing produce with water is usually enough to remove most stray pathogens, and at the end of the day, consuming something with a few germs on it likely won’t make you sick anyway, so you’ll never know the difference. Unless you are immunocompromised, your body does a good job of dealing with a few unsavory microbes here and there, says Worobo.

When it comes to big outbreaks, like the recent romaine lettuce one, it’s sort of out of your hands as the consumer. Outbreaks typically depend way more on whether or not farmers are using proper practices, says Worobo. If a food has become so contaminated that it’s making people sick, chances are there are a lot of pathogens on it—way more than normal—and those pathogens are likely deeply entrenched in the fruit or veggie, versus just sitting on the surface. In these cases, rinsing won’t be enough to get them off and make them safe, Worobo says, which is why health officials err on the side of caution and simply advise consumers to throw out potentially contaminated foods. (Worobo also says it’s a good idea to avoid buying anything with a visible bruise or cut because that can be an entry point for pathogens to infect the produce from the inside.)

Here’s how you should be washing *most* of your produce.

For the majority of produce, just rinsing it off with water and rubbing it with your hands is sufficient. In fact, in most cases—we’re talking your average fruit or vegetable that was grown and handled properly and may have just a few surface germs on it—it’s enough to get rid of 90 to 99 percent of the bacteria present, according to the FDA. (If something is recalled because of an outbreak, always follow instructions to throw it away.)

But first things first: Before you do anything with your produce, make sure to wash your hands. “Whatever bacteria are present on your hands will easily be transferred to the food you are preparing unless you wash them first,” Mary Liz Wright, M.S., food safety expert and nutrition and wellness educator at the University of Illinois Extension College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences, tells SELF. Wash your hands for at least 20 seconds with soap under warm running water to be on the safe side.

Also, no matter what fruit or vegetable you’re cooking with, Worobo says, you should wait to wash it until just before you eat it. Washing produce adds excess moisture and creates an environment that’s more conducive to breeding harmful bacteria, especially in the case of fruits and vegetables that soak up a lot of water, he says. That’s why, in general, it’s best to avoid washing anything right when you get home from the store. If you’ve purchased something at the supermarket that’s particularly dirty and you’d rather wash it before storing it, just be sure to dry it thoroughly before transferring it to the refrigerator, says Wright.

Then, usually, all you need to do is rinse your fruits and veggies under cold running water and give them a good rub. There’s no need to whip up a vinegar wash or waste money on a fancy produce spray. In fact, the FDA actually does not recommend using any kind of soaps, detergents, or special washes to clean produce.

Even though produce with hard exteriors or peels—like melons, pineapples, and oranges—don’t seem as though they need to be washed, they should be, says Worobo. That’s because “as you cut into the fruit, you could force the surface bacteria into the flesh of the fruit.” Always wash hard-skinned produce or anything with a peel *before* you start peeling so there’s less of a chance you’ll transfer bacteria from the outside to the inside. The FDA recommends using a clean produce brush to effectively scrub any potential pathogens from the skin.

You don’t need to worry about washing any prewashed ready-to-eat items, though. According to the FDA, if a package states that the contents are prewashed, there’s no need to waste time (or water!) rinsing them again.

These fruits and veggies are the exception to the rinse ’n’ rub rule:

Root veggies – When it comes to produce that’s pulled directly from the ground and is usually covered in soil—such as potatoes, carrots, and any other kind of root veggie—a rinse and gentle rub often isn’t enough to completely remove dirt or soil, which can be a source of pesticides and additional bacteria including pathogens, says Worobo. You can use a dish rag or a sponge to scrub them clean, but Wright says that no tool does the job better than a vegetable brush with firm bristles. Using the brush, scrub while holding the item under running water, making sure to brush off any visible dirt, and you’ll be good to go, she says.

Berries – It’s no secret that berries are extremely fragile. In most cases I can’t even make it home from the supermarket without smushing some of them. With that in mind, it’s important to be extremely gentle with them—so, the opposite of what you should do with the root veggies. The easiest way to wash berries is to place them in a colander and rinse them under a slow stream of running water.  You should absolutely never soak berries, because they act like a sponge and soak up a lot of water, which negatively impacts both their flavor and texture. You also don’t want to remove stems before washing (in the case of strawberries) as that will create another way for the berry to absorb water, Wright explains.

Leafy greens – The tricky thing with lettuce or other leafy greens is that soil can get stuck on each individual leaf, so a simple rinse usually won’t be enough to ensure they’re all totally clean. Instead, Worobo says it’s better to fill a bowl with cold water and gently toss the leaves back and forth in it until you can’t find anymore dirt, because this method allows you to ensure that all the soil is totally gone. Then, give it one last rinse under running water to ensure everything you don’t want to be eating gets washed down the drain. And if the lettuce you purchase has been recalled due to a contamination, simply throw it out—washing it will not be enough to prevent you from getting sick.

1. You feel satisfied after meals.
2. You have more energy.
3. You’re sleeping better.
4. Your clothes feel just a little looser (or tighter).
5. You’re in a better mood
6. You’re stronger and have more endurance.
7. It feels more like a lifestyle than a “diet.”

Please see full article: https://www.24life.com/seven-ways-to-know-whether-your-nutrition-plan-is-working-sans-scale/

Of all the faces we can make, only 35 express the same emotions across cultures.
BY JESSE HICKS – Jan. 16, 2019 – Men’s Health

You don’t have to be Jim Carrey to recognize that the human face is amazingly elastic and expressive. We can squint, flare our nostrils, purse our lips—yeah, it’s a lengthy list, and all of those moves can reveal how we’re feeling. But of all the thousands of faces we can make, a new study suggests only 35 express the same emotions across cultures.

What’s more, certain emotions can be expressed in more ways than others. Disgust, for example, only needs one facial expression to be understood around the world. There are three expressions that can convey fear, while surprise has four. Sadness and anger both have five expressions. (It’s fine if you’re making faces while reading.)

Happiness, though, is the big winner, signified by 17 different expressions that are “readable” across cultures. That suggests there’s something special about the subtlety with which our faces show happiness.

“This was delightful to discover, because it speaks to the complex nature of happiness,” Aleix Martinez, study co-author and professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University, said in a statement.

To reach that conclusion, researchers began with a list of 821 English words describing feelings, then translated them into Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Farsi, and Russian. The resulting word list was fed into search engines popular in 31 countries across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, creating a collection of about 7.2 million pictures of facial expressions. (Africa and some remote parts of the world were excluded for having too few candid images available.)

That massive store of images was sorted into categories, with researchers looking for those that expressed emotion across cultures. They’d calculated that the human face has about 16,384 unique configurations, so expected to find at least a few hundred emotions expressible across cultures.

Instead, they found only 35, and they were heavily skewed toward expressing happiness. The study showed that small facial details such as the size of a smile and the crinkles near our eyes can alter expressions of happiness. (Remember “smizing”?) “Happiness acts as a social glue and needs the complexity of different facial expressions,” Martinez notes, and even across cultures we notice these small differences. Happiness, in all its many forms, is a glue that brings us together.

by Kristin Canning – Health.com

It’s easy to diagnose yourself with a cold when you’re feeling unwell. But a cold isn’t always just a cold. It’s important to be able to tell the difference between the common cold and something more serious so you can get the medical attention you need.

If you think you have “just a cold” but are concerned it could be something more, it’s best to err on the safe side and visit your doctor. This is especially true if you have a chronic condition such as asthma, severe allergies, diabetes, kidney disease, HIV, or an autoimmune disease. The same goes for pregnant women and anyone under age six or over 65—the common cold affects these groups of people differently and can be more serious than it is for healthy individuals.

We spoke to doctors to find out what symptoms tip them off that it’s more than a cold. Here, the red flags they look for.

Read more

Even when people know that exercise is desirable and plan to work out, electrical signals within their brains may be nudging them toward being sedentary.

By Gretchen Reynolds – The New York Times – Sept. 26, 2018

Are we born to be physically lazy?

A sophisticated if disconcerting new neurological study suggests that we probably are. It finds that even when people know that exercise is desirable and plan to work out, certain electrical signals within their brains may be nudging them toward being sedentary.

The study’s authors hope, though, that learning how our minds may undermine our exercise intentions could give us renewed motivation to move.

Exercise physiologists, psychologists and practitioners have long been flummoxed by the difference between people’s plans and desires to be physically active and their actual behavior, which usually involves doing the opposite. Few of us exercise regularly, even though we know that it is important for health and well-being.

Typically, we blame lack of time, facilities or ability.

But recently an international group of researchers began to wonder whether part of the cause might lie deeper, in how we think.

For an earlier review, these scientists had examined past research about exercise attitudes and behavior and found that much of it showed that people sincerely wished to be active. In computer-based studies, for example, they would direct their attention to images of physical activity and away from images related to sitting and similar languor.

But, as the scientists knew, few people followed through on their aims to be active.

So maybe, the scientists thought, something was going on inside their skulls that dampened their enthusiasm for exercise.

To find out, they recruited 29 healthy young men and women.

All of the volunteers told the scientists that they wanted to be physically active, although only a few of them regularly were.

The researchers fitted each of their volunteers with a cap containing multiple electrodes that read and recorded the brain’s electrical activity.

Then they had the men and women complete an elaborate computer test designed to probe how they felt about exercise.

In the test, the volunteers were assigned an avatar, shaped like a stick figure. Their avatar, which they could control by pressing keys, could interact on the screen with other, individual stick-figure images related to being active or physically inert.

For instance, an image of a figure hiking or biking might pop up, representing activity, followed almost instantly by a depiction of a different figure reclining on a couch or in a hammock.

In alternating portions of the test, the volunteers were told to move their avatars as rapidly as possible toward the active images and away from the sedentary ones, and then vice versa.

This test is known as an “approach-avoidance task” and is thought to be a reliable indicator of how people consciously feel about whatever is depicted on the screen.

If people respond more avidly to one kind of image, moving their avatars to it more quickly than they move them away from other types of images, presumably they are drawn to that subject.

And the volunteers in this study were almost uniformly quicker to move toward the active images than the sedentary ones and slower to avoid those same active stick figures.

They all consciously preferred the figures that were in motion.

But at an unconscious level, their brains did not seem to agree. According to the readouts of electrical brain activity, the volunteers had to deploy far more brain resources to move toward physically active images than toward sedentary ones, especially in parts of the brain related to inhibiting actions.

Brain activity there was much slighter when people moved toward couches and hammocks, suggesting that, as far as the brain was concerned, those images called to it more strongly than the images of cycling and climbing hills, whatever people told themselves consciously.

“To me, these findings would seem to indicate that our brains are innately attracted to being sedentary,” says Matthieu Boisgontier, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who led the study in conjunction with Boris Cheval at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

The results make sense from an evolutionary standpoint, Dr. Boisgontier says.

“Conserving energy was necessary” for us as a species in our early days, he says. The fewer calories that atavistic humans burned, the fewer they had to replace at a time when food was not readily available.

So sitting quietly was a useful survival strategy and may have built a predilection for being sedentary into the architecture of our brains, he says.

“You see people go to the gym and take the elevator instead of the stairs” to reach the workout space, he says.

Of course, this study was small and looked only at electrical activity in the brain.

It cannot tell us directly how differences in brain activity might affect people’s thinking.

The volunteers also were all young, healthy and planning to be active. Whether other people would show similar brain activity is unknown.

Dr. Boisgontier and his colleagues hope to study children and older people in future studies.

But the lesson of the current experiment is, in its way, empowering, he says.

People who are reluctant to exercise “should maybe know that it is not just them,” he says. Humans may have a natural bias toward inactivity.

But we also can consciously choose to move, he says, despite what our brains may think.

https://www.self.com/gallery/best-healthy-cookbooks