These practical tips cover the basics of healthy eating, and can help you make healthier choices:
Base your meals on starchy foods
Starchy foods should make up around one third of the foods you eat. Starchy foods include potatoes, cereals, pasta, rice and bread. Choose wholegrain varieties (or eat potatoes with their skins on) when you can: they contain more fibre, and can help you feel full.
Most of us should eat more starchy foods: try to include at least one starchy food with each main meal. Some people think starchy foods are fattening, but gram for gram the carbohydrate they contain provides fewer than half the calories of fat.
Eat lots of fruit and veg
It’s recommended that we eat at least five portions of different types of fruit and veg a day. It’s easier than it sounds. A glass of unsweetened 100% fruit juice (150ml) can count as one portion, and vegetables cooked into dishes also count. Why not chop a banana over your breakfast cereal, or swap your usual mid-morning snack for a piece of fresh fruit?
Eat more fish
Fish is a good
At the same hospital in 2004, Rumaisa Rahman took over the title of world’s tiniest infant, weighing in at 0.57 pounds. She was one of twins, and she spent 50 days on a ventilator in the neonatal intensive care unit at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill.
At her five-year checkup, Rumaisa weighed 34 pounds and had grown to 3 feet, 3 inches. She was attending first-grade on an individual learning plan. She wears glasses because of retinopathy of prematurity, an eye problem common in preemies.
Madeline, whose mother had been treated for infertility, was the only survivor among triplets. Her mother, like Rumaisa’s, had severe preeclampsia, a life-threatening condition in pregnant women that can only be cured by delivering the baby or babies. Madeline was on a ventilator for 65 days. She had a heart condition and also had retinopathy.
Madeline also wears corrective lenses, but she drives and is in good health. At 65 pounds and 4 feet, 6 inches, she’s still small. Now a college senior, she’s an honors student majoring in psychology.
Both girls are living proof that even the
In the new study, lead researcher Christina Roberto and her colleagues conducted an online survey of nearly 2,400 parents who had at least one child aged 6 to 11 years.
In a simulated online shopping experiment, parents were divided into six groups to “buy” drinks for their kids. One group saw no warning label on the beverages they would buy; another saw a label listing calories. The other four groups saw various warning labels about the potential health effects of sugary beverage intake, including weight gain, obesity, type 2 diabetes and tooth decay.
Overall, only 40 percent of those who looked at the health warning labels chose a sugary drink. But, 60 percent of those who saw no label chose a sugary drink, as did 53 percent of those who saw the calorie-only label did.
There were no significant buying differences between the groups seeing the calorie-only label and no label, the findings showed.
“The warning labels seem to help in a way that the calorie labels do not,” said Roberto, an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.
If you work in an office environment and spend most of your day hunched over in front of a screen, you can be sure that your posture is probably atrocious.
The ill effects of sitting too long affect pretty much every part of our body. From organ damage (heart disease, over productive pancreas and even colon cancer) and muscle degeneration (mushy abs & limp glutes) to foggy brains, strained necks and back ache, sitting at your desk all day increases your mortality risk and has a detrimental effect on your overall health.
But do not worry! Thanks to a new product called BackGenie you’ll be able to fix the problem without spending gazillions of dollars on one of those new-age ergonomic office chairs.
BackGenie is a device that passively and effortlessly forces you to sit with perfect posture. It’s about as low-tech as a chair, and that’s exactly what makes it so brilliant.
BackGenie takes a practical approach to helping you sit straight and retain a healthy back, free of pain. Instead of using expensive high tech gadgets or super expensive chairs, BackGenie uses a set of simple, adjustable straps to keep your spine
Healthy eating tip 1: Set yourself up for success
To set yourself up for success, think about planning a healthy diet as a number of small, manageable steps—like adding a salad to your diet once a day—rather than one big drastic change. As your small changes become habit, you can continue to add more healthy choices.
- Prepare more of your own meals. Cooking more meals at home can help you take charge of what you’re eating and better monitor exactly what goes into your food.
- Make the right changes. When cutting back on unhealthy foods in your diet, it’s important to replace them with healthy alternatives. Replacing dangerous trans fats with healthy fats (such as switching fried chicken for grilled fish) will make a positive difference to your health. Switching animal fats for refined carbohydrates, though (such as switching your breakfast bacon for a donut), won’t lower your risk for heart disease or improve your mood.
- Simplify. Instead of being overly concerned with counting calories, think of your diet in terms of color, variety, and freshness. Focus on avoiding packaged and processed foods and opting for more fresh ingredients.
- Read the labels. It’s important to be aware of what’s in your food