The Star Online: Lifestyle: Health
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Health |
- Cut salt, boost potassium for heart health, study says
- Scientists create rich, velvety chocolate with half the fat
- Lifting weights may help diabetics keep blood sugar in check
| Cut salt, boost potassium for heart health, study says Posted: 08 Apr 2013 11:19 PM PDT New research from the British Medical Journal recommends the following diet tweak: increase potassium by eating more bananas and vegetables and cut down on salt to reduce blood pressure and risk of stroke. One study review found that consuming an extra two or three servings of fruits or vegetables per day would do the trick. The researchers added that a combination of increased potassium and reduced salt had a bigger effect than changing just one of these factors alone. Scientists from the UN World Food Programme, Imperial College London and Warwick Medical School, among others, looked at 22 controlled trials and another 11 studies involving more than 128,000 subjects. Potassium-rich foods include vegetables, nuts and seeds, milk, fish, chicken and bread. The Mayo Clinic reports that most adults need 4,700 mg of potassium a day, but that is not always an easy feat, since you'd need to eat 11 bananas a day to meet those requirements. However, a healthy diet packed with fruits and vegetables should provide ample levels of this important nutrient, they add. A baked potato with the skin has 1,081 mg of potassium, while just one cup of cooked spinach has 839 mg. A separate study on salt intake, led by researchers at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Queen Mary, University of London, analyzed the results of 34 previous trials involving more than 3,000 people. Results found that modestly cutting your salt intake for four or more weeks promoted significant drops in blood pressure in adults with both high and normal blood pressure. Both studies were published April 4 in the British Medical Journal. -- AFPRelaxnews |
| Scientists create rich, velvety chocolate with half the fat Posted: 08 Apr 2013 11:13 PM PDT British scientists have figured out a way to make chocolate taste delicious and velvety but with half of the fat: add a little fruit juice. Dr. Stefan Bon, who led the research at the University of Warwick in the UK, said the new technology would allow manufacturers to make chocolate with fruit juice, vitamin C water, or even diet soda. "We have established the chemistry that is a starting point for healthier chocolate confectionary," said Bon. "This approach maintains the things that make chocolate 'chocolatey', but with fruit juice instead of fat." He added: "Now we're hoping the food industry will take the next steps and use the technology to make tasty, lower-fat chocolate bars and other candy." Bonn presented the work, announced April 7, at the American Chemical Society's meeting in New Orleans. To create the chocolate, the fruit juice is added in the form of micro-bubbles, which keep the texture firm but allow the chocolate to maintain its melt-in-your-mouth feel. The technology works with dark, milk and white chocolate and also prevents "sugar bloom," the unappealing white film that coats the surface of chocolate when it's left on the shelf too long. Traditional chocolate's high fat and sugar level is a big downside, compared to its high levels of healthy plant-based antioxidants or flavonoids. A 20 oz. serving, for example, could contain 13 grams of fat -- 20 percent of the daily fat recommended for a person who eats 2,000 calories per day. -- AFPRelaxnews |
| Lifting weights may help diabetics keep blood sugar in check Posted: 08 Apr 2013 09:53 PM PDT A new study suggests that lifting weights may help diabetics keep their blood glucose levels under control. Researchers from the University of Michigan say that lifting weights can increase white muscle -- the type of muscles found in athletes requiring short, intense bursts of energy -- which in turn may help keep diabetes in check. "We wanted to figure out the relationship between muscle types and body metabolism, how the muscles were made, and also what kind of influence they have on diseases like type 2 diabetes," said head researcher Jiandie Lin. Like poultry has light and dark meat, humans also have a range of muscles: red, white and those in between. Red muscle, which gets its colour in part from mitochondria, prevails in people who engage in endurance training, such as marathon runners. Sprinters and weight lifters tend to have a lot of white muscle. "Most people are in the middle and have a mix of red and white," Lin said. While resistance training in humans can increase white muscle, interestingly, diabetics and aging also tend to induce a whitening of the mix of muscles as well. "For a long time, the red-to-white shift was thought to make muscle less responsive to insulin, a hormone that lowers blood sugar," Lin said. "But this idea is far from proven. You lose red muscle when you age or develop diabetes, but is that really the culprit?" To find out, the team set out to find a protein that drives the formation of white muscle in mice studies. After finding the protein, called BAF60c, Lin's team made a transgenic mouse model to increase BAF60c only in the skeletal muscle, essentially meaning they had more white muscle. Testing the transgenic mice, the researchers found that they could run longer for short distances, but tired quickly, compared to normal mice. Then, the researchers fed one group of transgenic mice a "Super Size Me" diet, causing them to double their body weight in two to three months. When compared to both a group of normal mice who ate the "Super Size Me" diet and a group of transgenic mice who ate normal diets, the obese transgenic mice were found to be better at controlling blood glucose. Findings were published online April 7 in Nature Medicine. -- AFPRelaxnews |
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