We all know how important it is to eat foods that keep your body and mind healthy. But it’s quite easy to focus on your body and forget about the importance of keeping your brain as healthy as possible.

One excellent food you can include in your diet to improve brain function is fatty fish. Omega-3 fatty acids are found in a variety of seafood including sardines, salmon, mackerel and herring. Sardines are actually one of the highest sources of Omega-3 so if you can include in your diet you will be helping out your brain along with your heart and eye health.

A recent study has found that people who eat omega-3 rich fish three or more times per week are at a lower risk of developing memory issues including dementia.

It should be pointed out that fried fish does not appear to offer the same health benefits.

So tell me something I didn’t already know.

Researchers have reviewed almost 200 sausages including bread and sauce from your local supermarket shelves and found that one sandwich contains your daily recommended dose of salt, double for a child.

I am pretty sure that most people already know that having a sausage in a white roll with onions, mustard, ketchup or tomato sauce probably isn’t a healthy snack.
Look at any sausage sizzle run at local sporting events these days and you can see from just looking at the BBQ that it isn’t healthy.

However, the smell of those snags and onions cooking is hard to resist.

I can remember growing up that we would have one on the weekend watching our local football clubs play. The weather was so cold you could barely feel your fingers. You would buy your sausage and immediately start to drool staring at the steaming pile of snag, onion and sauce. Your first bite creating a stream of warm mixed sauce that would run down your arms. I always managed to get some on my jumper, face, hair and so on. Oh how I loved the simple sausage sizzle.

With this new found knowledge will I stop indulging from time to time? Probably not. What is life without a little indulgence after all :)

Most of us know that certain foods work really well together. For instance, tomato and feta cheese are a match made in heaven but did you know that pairing foods can turn them into super foods? Well here is a short list of foods that work when paired offer you many health benefits and a few that actually lose their super powers.

The good first

Eat tomatoes and avocado together and you have yourself a super food. Tomatoes contain lycopene (potent antioxidant), when eaten with avocado the fat helps your body absorb seven times more lycopene.

Fancy a side of brussel sprouts with your grilled steak? Most of you are probably shaking your head saying No! Well, give it a shot because brussel sprouts may rid your body of carcinogens that can form on meat when grilled. Carcinogens can promote nasty things like cancers. That doesn’t mean you should go ahead and char your meat on purpose thinking that eating brussel sprouts will stop any potential health problems but it is handy to know, if you can stomach sprouts.

Drizzle a little extra-virgin olive oil over your zucchini, spinach or other dark green vegetables and you unleash another powerful antioxidant (carotenoid lutein), which may help protect against age related macular degeneration. Replace your low-fat dressing with an olive oil based option for your salads and the same benefits apply.

Now for the bad

Mixing alcohol and diet soda is no good. I know what you are saying, I can’t win! You do the right thing and reduce your high calorie soda with a diet version to be healthier and now you find out it’s not a good mix. It’s rough, I hear you. Here’s the deal though, diet soda’s when mixed with alcohol may actually make you get drunk faster.
Apparently sugary soda’s slow the emptying of your stomach so you get drunk less rapidly. I’d stick with diet soda but have a small snack before you drink, something like a bit of cheese and crackers which contain a good mix of fat, protein and carbohydrates which should help slow your stomach emptying. My message, moderation people, both with your drink and food!

This one just hurts, don’t mix coffee and breakfast cereal. I love coffee with my cereal. If I could combine them I probably would. Coffee bran flakes anyone?
It turns out that many cereals are fortified with iron, that’s good. The bad is that when you drink your coffee while eating cereal, an antioxidant called polyphenols can hamper your body’s ability to absorb the iron. That’s not so good. So give the coffee a miss while eating your cereal.

Speaking of coffee, you have to watch this commercial. Life as a 50′s housewife must have been so much fun

ABC News reported Lose Weight on the Carb-Packed “Big Breakfast” Diet

” To lose weight and keep it off, eat a big breakfast packed with carbohydrates and protein, then follow a low-carb, low-calorie diet the rest of the day, a small study suggests.

The “big breakfast” diet works, researchers say, because it controls appetite and satisfies cravings for sweets and starches. It’s also healthier than popular low-carb diets because it allows people to eat more fiber- and vitamin-rich fruit, according to Dr. Daniela Jakubowicz, of the Hospital de Clinicas in Caracas, Venezuela.”

Could it be that we can have our cake and eat it too? Well, should I say bacon and eggs? I won’t feel quite so guilty about having a big breakfast, something I rarely do anyway.

It should be pointed out that you need to be careful what you eat for the rest of the day but I know many of you will be focusing on the fact you can eat bacon and potentially not grow bigger than a house.

I had an interesting conversation with one of my Aunties on Saturday who has struggled all her life with weight problems.

To her credit, since deciding to lose weight over 15 years ago, she has kept her size at a fairly consistent level with some small fluctuations from time to time. Considering she was an obese person, she has done remarkably well.
Her weight maintenance is a very strict affair and I must admit that I think I’d struggle to eat the foods she does on a daily basis as they are quite bland.

My Aunty was showing me a new all in one meal she has been buying from the supermarket. I won’t name names but it’s one of those throw in the microwave deals and comes with rice and topping. She was telling me that they are the perfect portion size for her, 99% fat free and really tasty.
I was a bit surprised to see her eating this type of thing because in our family we tend to prefer to cook our meals from scratch.
The reason she is opting for this type of meal is to combat what she calls her danger period. She has identified the time or period of the day that she is most likely to start eating foods without much control. The microwave food is her way of tackling this time of the day. As it turns out, her danger period is when she gets home from work. If she doesn’t eat her dinner at that time, she has a hard time controlling what she eats. By having a quick and easy meal, she has been able to avoid snacking and in the process lost about 4 pounds.

I don’t have a specific time or period of the day but would say that whenever I’m home and a little bored, I do think about snacking.

So with this information in mind, do you know when your danger times are? Have you ever sat down and thought about it? I’d love to know so please feel free to share :)

Build the Healthiest Possible Body with the Primal Blueprint
By: Mark’ s Daily Apple

I get emails every day from people who are changing their lives for the better by following the guidelines I outline on this site. But many are looking for more of what the Primal Blueprint has to offer. That is to say, they want a comprehensive break down of the elements that make up the Blueprint; a Primal primer if you will. In coming weeks I will be going into detail – anthropological evidence, modern research, etc. – regarding this health philosophy, but I first want to offer up this summary of the Blueprint. I think it is a good starting point for what is to come.

Note: This is lengthy article so settle in and enjoy the ride or come back periodically to pick your way through it.

My basic premise is this: The Primal Blueprint is a set of simple instructions (the blueprint) that allows you to control how your genes express themselves in order to build the strongest, leanest, healthiest body possible, taking clues from evolutionary biology (that’s the primal part).

Sometimes we get so lost in the science of human biology we just can’t see the forest for the trees. We overlook the simplicity and ease with which we could all be achieving exceptional health and fitness.

Living in modern society is extremely complex. With daily mind-boggling achievements made in science, technology and medicine, and with an ever-expanding knowledge base that increasingly grows more esoteric and niche, it is no wonder that we often look for complicated scientific solutions to problems that really only require simple answers.

Read the rest of this post >

Hi folks, Michael here, need to tell you about a new diet that I am currently trying.

It’s a formulated diet made up by a chemist, that basically is high protein and low carb, I learned about it from a lady at work who lost 25kgs, and this was a lady who is also an athlete.

I started it at the first week of April, and I was surprised just how much excess weight I was carrying, suffice to say that when I go back to Europe each year I now need to be careful as my mother is a chef and my father an accomplished cook, well except for curries that I manage to do better than him, much to his dismay.

Anyway back to the story, the chemist ran through the do’s and don’t s and I was shocked as my favorite vegetables and Sally’s I might add, were off limits, namely Peas, Pumpkin, Potatoes and Sweetcorn/Potato. Apparently peas are high is sugar. The formula went with 2 litres of water a day, a formulated shake made with water for breakfast, vegetables or fruit for lunch plus their soup and for dinner 220 grams of meat any kind plus three cups of vegetables. I headed off to the butcher and they have a lovely selection of beef, my favourite is the sirloin marinated in red wine and garlic topped with pepper corns and wrapped with bacon, now this is not a cheap cut of meat think $44 per kilo, but well worth it. They also had some lovely pork and lamb, which I must say is also another favorite, as is Salmon, the Atlantic kind not the “tuna” kind we get here in Australia.

Well after two weeks I managed to lose 4kgs, now I must quantify this as I am a winemaker and not a day goes by with out me having my nose in a glass of red, well as Sophie Marceau says, life’s not worth living if you can’t feel alive!, and I must say never put so eloquently. Anyway the nest week I stabilized and nothing came off as was expected, then in the last 2 weeks another 2.1 kgs disappeared.

The weekend brought nice weather so out on the bike and a 40km ride, which I might say lets your legs know your there as today whilst l was walking up a few flights of stairs I could feel the twinge in the thighs letting me know that they had been working.

On the whole the diet is easy to follow and its pure discipline and I guess re-education, however there are a couple of caveats, one is I refuse to give up the Red and the other is Coffee as she tried to convert me to decaf, I tried but I had to have one real cup per day, after that it really was not a problem.

Anyway I’ll sign off, it you want any more details then feel free to post a comment and we will get back to you.

Cheers

Michael