And modern bread breaks all of them.
Modern-day bread is the consequence of shortcuts made at every stage of its production. As a result, the human staple for millennia has now become junk food. It’s low in nutrients, high in energy, easy to eat, cheap to buy, and ubiquitous. Modern bread is also hard to digest and problematic for a burgeoning group of people. The old fashioned, ancient food is none of those things, for a whole host of reasons.
When the soil is rich, and the grains are processed appropriately; the end-product is a world apart from the highly processed, hyper-palatable pap you see on the shelves today. For many, bread can be nutritious if we use the keys, handed down to us by our ancestors to unlock the nutrients inside the grains, and banish their chemical defenses. …
When your attention is on adding and subtracting calories, you may be missing the most important thing.
Since Charles Atwater combusted different foods one by one in his patented Bomb Calorimeter, we’ve been led astray by the shakey science of Calorie counting. It’s always the simple idea that catches on: Add the Calories we consume, then minus the ones we ‘burn’, and hey-presto you have total control over your body fat. If only.
Taking in more energy than your body uses will result in fat storage. Taking in less energy than your body requires will result in weight loss. This is a universal truth, but there are a few problems. It’s impossible to be accurate when counting Calories, because of the huge margins of error at every turn. For starters, the human body is more complex than the addition of your basal metabolic rate (estimated with the bluntest of equations) + the amount you’ve moved today. …
Lift yourself out of a funk in a second with this simple act.
It was a bad day to be inside my head, and I was wallowing inside it. I had locked up the shutters of my mind and was sitting in the darkness. To me, the day felt like it wanted to close early. No one had uttered the word merry for at least a fortnight, and my mood had dropped the temperature by ten degrees at least. Everything was grey. I was the unvisited Ebeneezer Scrooge.
As if on rails, I headed towards my usual coffee house. A pair of well-worn, stone steps were a poor windbreak for the homeless man sitting next to them on a flattened box. He muttered something to me without conviction. He was a man used to being ignored. I crossed into the warmth and stood in the queue. A thought trickled through my foggy mind. Weeks earlier, I witnessed a woman buying something for a man in a similar pickle. I ordered my usual drink and gestured that I was staying inside. …
Are junk food manufacturers partly responsible for the swelling obesity epidemic that’s shortening lives, or is the onus on us?
Since 2009, there has been a 62% increase in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in children. This serious malady is very strongly associated with obesity. In 2017, 8% of global deaths were attributed to obesity-related diseases. Today, more than half the world’s population are classified as overweight. Lives are being prematurely snuffed out, and our quality of life is being eroded as a direct result of overeating.
Data from the Pew Research Centre shows that 60% of Americans know they overeat. The largest slice of the country admits to eating ‘more junk food than they should’. 85%, of the two thousand strong group, believed that Americans were more overweight in 2006 than they were five years before. …
It’s cheap, passive, and may improve your sleep beyond what you can imagine. It has for me.
I’ve been a mouth-breather all my life. A lifelong asthmatic, who as a child, might awaken in the middle of the night gasping and clawing for air. It was frightening. Not just for me, but for my Mum, who could only look on in horror, and pray for calm.
Since those times, I’ve managed to control my symptoms. Firstly with medications, and then with a healthy diet and lifestyle. But, I’ve never been a good breather. I remember waking up next to a new girlfriend, over twenty years ago, who half-cheerily said, “Morning Darth Vadar!”. We didn’t last long.
If you haven’t guessed already, this post is about the new craze of mouth-taping. I had avoided jumping on this bandwagon for years as one social media guru after another taped their mouths shut on video. I just scrolled on through. But I wish I’d given it a chance earlier because I absolutely love it. …
One simple intervention at home can improve your metabolism while you sleep, and the positive benefits don’t end there.
The quality of our sleep is declining, which is a disaster for our health. As we toss and turn our nights away, we conjure more symptoms that force us into a vicious circle of poor sleep, metabolic dysfunction and weight gain. But, there is a way we can help break out of this destructive cycle and create one that, rather than worsens dysfunction and disease, feeds back into health. The good news is, it’s simple, and you can start tonight.
“a single poor nights sleep makes people more insulin resistant — a mechanism behind metabolic and cardiovascular disease.”
The Vicious Circle
Scientists demonstrated a decade ago that a single poor nights sleep makes people more insulin resistant—a mechanism behind metabolic and cardiovascular disease. Since then, more robust research has been added to the pile confirming a restless night’s negative effect on our metabolism. But the cherry on top is that just one night tossing and turning sabotages your dietary efforts the very next day by gravitating you towards junk foods. This combination increases your chances of becoming overweight and obese, which carries with it more problems for sleep. …
Stop blaming your balls for what your fat cells are doing; here’s what you can do.
If we could distill ‘manliness’ it would be the sex hormone testosterone. The fact that this critical male hormone has been steadily declining for decades, has been shrouded by a lengthened life-expectancy. As men age, their ‘manly’ hormone naturally reduces and therefore shrinks the average. However, a new study has disrobed the truth: Young men are being afflicted at a rate that will likely make you gape. Make no mistake, low testosterone in men is a grave dilemma because it spells more dysfunction, disease, and premature death.
There are theories about our drooping total testosterone (TT) levels. A lack of exercise, dietary phytoestrogens, frequent marijuana use, genetics, and environmental toxins all contributing. But, as the evidence mounts, it may well be something simpler than that lot. …
5 things you can do to keep enjoying it.
We shouldn’t like coffee, but we do. Nature’s warning, bitterness, should make us reel away from it but something calls us back, day after day, flipping the alarm and triggering pleasure within us.
One day we’re told coffee is a health drink, and the next it’s something we should be cutting back on. Each day, westerners chug down between two and four cups, but your cups-per-day may be determined by DNA more than anything else. The ground black bean is the most consumed psychoactive compound on the planet; an everyday addiction many of us can become defensive about when questioned.
Coffee is associated with reduced risk across many diseases: Type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, liver cancer, Parkinson’s, and even early death. Drinking coffee is also linked to reduced body fat in women. Without a doubt, coffee is full of antioxidants, providing people with more than any other single source. Antioxidants are like nano-soldiers defending our bodies from an enemy, free radicals. …
We spend an insane amount of money on skincare products and forget the major culprit.
Skin diseases affect a staggering amount of people. From acne to warts and everything in between. In the U.S. more than 85 million people see their doctors for skin complaints every year. That’s more than cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and end-stage kidney disease combined. 1 in 4 Americans received treatment for skin disease in 2013 spending US$75 billion on treating and preventing flare-ups. In 2018, the global skincare product market was valued at US$124 billion projected to surpass $180 billion by 2027.
It’s said that the skin reflects our inner health and aging. I struggled with skin problems of all kinds; they preceded far greater health troubles. Red blotchy eczema all over my face, keeping me up all night and destroying my confidence during the day. Rosacea came out of nowhere minutes before a party. I turned beetroot red from my shoulders to the top of my head. I was so ruddy people couldn’t help but ask what had happened to me. I told them I was sunburnt, and we all had a laugh about it. …
But you don’t have to volunteer for a drug trial to get it working for you today.
The world is in the grip of an obesity epidemic. Since 2016, it’s accurate to state that most people are now overweight. Obesity, a chronic inflammatory state, is a major factor in the genesis of some of the most common and serious diseases that affect almost every household within developed countries; cardiovascular disease, diabetes type 2, dementia and some cancers. In 2017, 8% of all deaths globally were directly attributable to obesity.
However you look at it, the outlook is bleak. One school of thought says obesity and its related diseases will bankrupt our health services, but another says that because obese people die so much younger, the cost balances out. The sad thing about this is that it’s preventable with diet and lifestyle changes, but many people cannot engage the alterations to turn their own health around and potentially save their lives and the quality of it. …
