Oatmeal is at the top of the list with some really great foods that you can include in your diet, if you haven’t already. Yum!

cnn.com reports:

Simple food choices go a long way when it comes to your heart’s health. Focusing on fresh foods full of heart-healthy fats and antioxidants can decrease your risk of developing heart disease and cut your chances of a heart attack. These 10 foods will help keep your ticker in top shape.

Oatmeal
Start your day with a steaming bowl of oats, which are full of omega-3 fatty acids, folate, and potassium. This fiber-rich superfood can lower levels of LDL (or bad) cholesterol and help keep arteries clear.

Opt for coarse or steel-cut oats over instant varieties — the coarse and steel-cut contain more fiber — and top your bowl off with a banana for another four grams of fiber.

Salmon
Super-rich in omega-3 fatty acids, salmon can effectively reduce blood pressure and keep clotting at bay. Aim for two servings per week, which may reduce your risk of dying of a heart attack by up to one-third.

“Salmon contains the carotenoid astaxanthin, which is a very powerful antioxidant,” says cardiologist Stephen T. Sinatra, MD, the author of “Lower Your Blood Pressure In Eight Weeks.” But be sure to choose wild salmon over farm-raised fish, which can be packed with insecticides, pesticides, and heavy metals.

Not a fan of salmon? Other oily fish like mackerel, tuna, herring, and sardines will give your heart the same boost.

Avocado
Add a bit of avocado to a sandwich or spinach salad to increase the amount of heart-healthy fats in your diet. Packed with monounsaturated fat, avocados can help lower LDL levels while raising the amount of HDL cholesterol in your body.

Continue reading.

It’s a nice article that lists 5 foods that are very good for your muscles and no, spinach is not mentioned ;)

Check it out: 5 Foods to Maximize Your Muscle Power

Facts:
They are a great source of folate, vitamins A, B-6, C and E, potassium and fiber.
Sweet potatoes can be baked, boiled, fried, broiled, canned or frozen. They can also be cooked in the microwave oven.

Better still, they are very low in Saturated Fat, Sodium and Cholesterol.

Recipe:

Grilled fish with chickpea salad

Ingredients (serves 4)

* 300g orange sweet potato, peeled, chopped into 2cm cubes
* 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
* 1 garlic clove, crushed
* olive oil cooking spray
* 250g cherry tomatoes
* 600g firm white fish fillets (such as snapper or barramundi)
* 40g low-fat feta cheese, crumbled
* 1/2 cup canned chickpeas, drained, rinsed
* 100g baby spinach

Yoghurt dressing
* 1/2 cup low-fat yoghurt
* 1/2 lemon, juiced
* 1 small garlic clove, crushed
* 2 tablespoons coriander leaves,
* finely chopped

Method

1. Preheat oven to 200°C (Aus) or 400°F (US). Combine sweet potato, cumin and garlic in a large roasting pan. Season with salt and pepper. Spray with oil. Toss to coat. Roast for 30 minutes. Add tomatoes. Roast for a further 15 to 20 minutes or until sweet potato is tender. Set aside.
2. Make yoghurt dressing: Combine yoghurt, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, garlic, coriander and salt and pepper in a bowl.
3. Preheat barbecue plate on high heat. Season fish with salt and pepper. Spray lightly with oil. Barbecue for 4 to 5 minutes each side or until just cooked through.
4. Crumble feta over warm vegetables. Add chickpeas and spinach. Toss to combine. Spoon salad onto plates. Top with fish. Serve with yoghurt dressing.

Notes & tips

* When barbecuing fish fillets, pat fish surface dry with paper towel before spraying with oil and seasoning. This will help prevent fish sticking to the barbecue plate during cooking.

Source: Taste.com.au

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

I always struggle a little bit over an extended break not to eat a little more than usual and drink the odd glass of wine.

This long weekend was actually really nice. I did a little bit of photography on Saturday. Took my partner and our dog to a bush area and I snapped away for a couple of hours. The place I took them to is right opposite where I work and I often see kangaroos feeding first thing in the morning.

I had hoped to catch a few on film but is always the case, whenever you want to find the roos, they are NEVER around! Still, I got some good shots of some native trees which was great.

I’ve posted a couple of my pics, one of a tree I look at almost everyday from my office window. It’s a dead tree but I just love it for some reason. The other is of our local beach and was taken at sunset after we took our dog for a run.

We had a steak dinner which I made. It was a scotch fillet, potato bake and garlic prawns. Really nice although a bit disappointed in the steak.

Sunday I spent the day painting so felt like I got a bit of a workout. We had a friend over for dinner and my partner, being from Texas had been craving chicken fried steak. Soooo, I made that. I had a very small portion but obviously it’s not so good health wise.

Today we did a bit of gardening, went for a nice long walk with our dog down the beach and played some wall ball. This is a game we play with our dog and is essentially a case of throwing the ball at the wall and trying to catch it before the dog. He is small but fast. He rarely misses his chance to get the ball before we do!

Tonight my parents are visiting and I’m thinking spinach salad and chicken. Should be nice and low fat.

If you look at my weekend, it’s pretty easy to see that I didn’t exercise all that much and I chose some bad options food wise. There’s no excuse for that but I think it’s probably not all that unusual for people to drop off their regular workout routines when on any form of break.

Still, I feel that I was fairly active and I know that from today I need to start eating healthy choices and get back on that treadmill.

And speaking of treadmills, I couldn’t resist showing one of my favorite videos showcasing some pretty nifty treadmill skills.

So does anyone else wish to share their weekend tales? Good and bad welcome!

I just love the rich contrast in colors when mixed in with other salad vegetables plus it’s really good for you.

I decided to find out what health benefits I’m gaining from including spinach in my diet and must say that it was a pleasant surprise.

We all know that Popeye ate vast quantities of spinach to make him strong but did you know that spinach also protects against osteoporosis, heart disease, colon cancer, arthritis, and other diseases?

Researchers have also found that spinach helps fight prostate cancer and reduces the risk of developing ovarian cancer by 40%.

Spinach is also a rich source of vitamin K which is great for keeping your bones strong. You will get around 200% of vitamin K per cup of fresh spinach or about 1000% per cup of boiled spinach, pretty amazing!

If that isn’t enough to convince you to start including spinach in your diet, chew (sorry about that) on this:

Spinach promotes Gastrointestinal Health, provides Anti-Inflammatory Nutrients, reduces the effects of age related decline in brain function, helps prevent eye disease, excellent source of iron and best of all, it’s fat free.

So go online and find some recipes that use spinach, I bet you will be pleasantly surprised at just how versatile spinach is. You might also want to try this recipe I posted about recently:

Roast vegetable salad

We stayed and my parents house and Mum made a fabulous warm vegetable salad which not only tasted and looked wonderful but is also quite low in fat and very easy to make. We had ours with some marinated pork fillet but it will go with pretty much anything.

The best thing about this salad is that you can throw whatever vegetables you have in your fridge so it’s versatile as well, enjoy!

Ingredients

300g butternut pumpkin, peeled and chopped into 2cm cubes
1 capsicum, seeded and cut into large pieces
1 onion, chopped into eighths
100g flat mushrooms, quartered
3 tomatoes, quatered OR handful of cherry tomatoes
1 bunch Asparagus
Olive or canola oil spray
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 bunch English spinach leaves, washed and drained
Feta cheese (optional)
coarse salt

Directions

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (US) or 220 degrees C (Aus, UK, etc). Line a large bak

Toss pumpkin, capsicum, onion, tomato, mushrooms and asparagus together then spread in a single layer over tray. Lightly spray with oil, balsamic vinegar and course salt.

Bake for 30-40 minutes or until all vegetables are cooked through, turning after 20 minutes.

Line serving dish with spinach leaves and pile roast vegetables on top and then add crumbled feta cheese. Serve immediately.

Variation: Try including sweet potato, zucchini, carrots, beetroot, squash and baby eggplant when in season.

The study tested cooked and uncooked, canned, frozen and week-old and fresh vegetables for the contents of certain nutrients.

All canned and frozen vegetables tested contained more or equal percentages of vitamins and anti-oxidants, with the exeption of broccoli. That doesn’t surprise me as I’ve tried frozen broccoli before and thought it tasted and smelt odd. Not scientific, I realise, but my own personal input ;)

It found that frozen english spinach was more nutritious that cooked spinach and canned tomatoes contain 5 times more lycopine which is believed to help prevent heart disease and prostate cancer.

When you think about it, fresh fruit and vegetables can be kept on supermarket shelves for weeks due to the chemicals they use to preserve them. So it’s not fresh and who knows what damage will be done to our bodies in the future. I’ve always felt that we are like test bunnies at the moment. Maybe in another 30+ years we will see the affects of consuming chemicals that we had no idea were in our so called fresh fruit and vegetables.

On the other hand, canned and frozen food is usually taken straight from the field and processed so the natural goodness is snapped in, so to speak .

Now there is a salmonella tainted brand of peanut butter that killed an elderly woman last month and an elderly man from Chicago.

At least 300 people so far have become ill after eating the peanut butter.

You really have to wonder why this sort of thing happens given the variety of Government health laws that cover food production.

The more I hear about these things, the less confident I become in the quality of foods being sold. I’m already one who avoids eating buffets and salad bar food but I don’t often think about canned or jars of food. The problem is that you can’t even tell by looking at or smelling these products whether they might be bad so it’s like russian roulette.

The alert now covers only specific brands packaged on certain dates.

The revision means the spinach warning now applies only to spinach recalled earlier this month by Natural Selection Foods of San Juan Bautista and four other companies that it supplied, said Kevin Reilly, deputy director of prevention services for the California health department.

Related links

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