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THE WORST FAST-FOODS FOR SODIUM, AND BETTER OPTIONS

January 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

The first week of the new year has come to an end. Remember that fitness is a life long journey. Fast food is convenient, but it can be salty. Americans eat about 3,400 milligrams of sodium a day, more than the suggested 2,300 milligrams and double the 1,500 mg for people who are over 50, are African-American, or who have hypertension, diabetes or kidney disease.

While “fast food isn’t going to wreck anyone’s diet if consumed on occasion,” sodium consumption must be controlled.

Here are some of the worst fast-food meals for sodium, and better options.

Quiznos’ Large French Dip: While it sounds good — sliced prime rib with mozzarella, roasted peppers and onions, and mild peppercorn sauce on artisan bread with a side of au jus — this sandwich is a sodium-delivering bomb. Even without the cheese, sauce, and juice for dipping, you’ll be consuming 2,240 milligrams. With the works, it packs a whopping 3,610 mg of sodium and 1,200 calories. (The au jus adds 850 mg of sodium).
Choose this instead: Create your own flatbread. Try roast beef and Swiss with lettuce, tomato, onion, cucumber, and honey-dijon dressing. Sodium: 995 mg. Calories: 410.

Dunkin’ Donuts’ Salt Bagel: Is a bagel better for you than a donut? Not when the word “salt” is in it. Dunkin’s version packs 3,350 milligrams of sodium and 310 calories.
Choose this instead: A 320-calorie Cinnamon Raisin Bagel. It has 500 mg of sodium.

Chipotle’s Burrito: Salt adds up pretty quickly when you’re building a burrito from scratch. A Carnitas, or pork, burrito with white rice, pinto beans, Tomatillo-red chili sauce, Romaine lettuce, sour cream, cheese and guacamole has 2,650 milligrams of sodium, not to mention 1,185 calories. Surprise: the saltiest item is the soft flour tortilla that holds it all together (at 670 mg of sodium).
Choose this instead: A Burrito Bowl. Skip the tortilla and dish up lower-salt fillings like chicken, brown rice, fajita veggies, and green tomatillo salsa. The total comes to 920 mg of sodium and 385 calories.

Jack in the Box’s Deli Trio: This roasted turkey sandwich on artisan bread is layered with salty Genoa salami, ham, Provolone, and pickles and slathered in a creamy Italian dressing. Surprise! The saltiest ingredients are actually the turkey (455 milligrams of sodium) and the bread (596 mg). The Deli Trio packs 2,442 mg of sodium and 624 calories.
Choose this instead: A Chicken Fajita Pita. You’ll cut your sodium intake by nearly two-thirds, to 870 mg. Calories: 320.

Arby’s Mozzarella Sticks: Six battered-and-fried sticks contain 2,530 milligrams of sodium, more than a day’s worth , and 620 calories. Whole-milk mozzarella isn’t the saltiest cheese around. It contains 178 mg of sodium per 1 ounce, according to CalorieLab.com, versus nearly 272 mg for a Kraft nonfat American single. “Typically, a lot of salt is added to the breading mixture, which drives up the sodium content of the fried mozzarella sticks,” Kleiner says.
Choose this instead: A serving of three Potato Cakes contains 700 mg of sodium and 340 calories.

Hardee’s 2/3-lb Monster Thickburger: This two-patty monstrosity is a beef-lover’s dietary downfall. With three slices of American cheese and four bacon strips, it has 1,300 calories, 93 grams of fat and 2,860 milligrams of sodium. That’s without a soda or fries.
Choose this instead: A Double Cheeseburger. It’s beefy, cheesy, and has a fraction of the calories (410), fat (21 grams) and sodium (900 mg).

Popeye’s Chicken Po’ Boy: This Southern favorite nestles two battered, fried chicken tenders in a French baguette with pickles and mayo. This fatty, salty combo has 2,120 milligrams of sodium and 635 calories. You can do better.
Choose this instead: Naked Chicken Wrap. “Naked” because the chicken is prepared without breading, slashing the sodium count to 580 mg and skinnying up the calorie count to 200.

Papa John’s Buffalo Chicken Pizza: Creamy ranch and buffalo sauce, cheese, bacon, and pizza dough are the likely sodium culprits in this chicken-encrusted pie. One slice of a large, original crust — 1/8th of an order — has 1,050 milligrams of sodium and 370 calories. But you know you’ll go for two slices, if not more.
Choose this instead: Papa John’s Garden Fresh is loaded with fresh veggies. A large, thin-crust pie has just 360 mg of sodium and 220 calories per slice.

KFC’s Variety Big Box Meal: KFC provides nutritional information for individual items. We figure this meal — a drumstick, a Crispy Strip, an individual box of Popcorn Chicken, two Homestyle sides (we chose mashed potatoes with gravy and cole slaw), a biscuit and a 32-oz. drink (Pepsi) — blasts the daily sodium maximum, with more than 3,000 milligrams of salt and more than 1,400 calories.
Choose this instead: The Honey BBQ Snacker with a large corn on the cob, House Side Salad with buttermilk dressing and a 16-ounce Lipton Brisk Lemon Tea. This meal has less than quarter of the sodium (725 mg) and 505 calories. Kleiner’s tip: Do dressing on the side. Dip your fork in it to get the taste of it without all the sodium.

Taco Bell’s Volcano Nachos: These molten cheese-laden nachos with spicy ground beef, pinto beans, and jalapeños break the nutrition bank with 970 calories and 58 grams of fat — more calories and fat than any other single item on the menu — plus 1,670 milligrams of sodium.
Choose this instead: Nachos Supreme comes with spicy beef, beans, nacho cheese, diced tomatoes and reduced fat sour cream, but has only 430 calories, 23 grams of fat, and 690 mg of salt.

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HOW MUCH WEIGHT CAN YOU LOSE IN A WEEK…SAFELY?

October 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

How much can I lose in a week? This is a question that people ask their personal trainer everyday. It’s always a major emergency!! They don’t ask about safety, they just want to lose the weight. Well, for me, it’s safety first. This summer, Matthew McConaughey dropped nearly 30 pounds to go from a ripped stripper in Magic Mike to a drug-dealing HIV patient for an upcoming role. And contestants on The Biggest Loser often shed double digits’ worth of weight in a week.

But when it comes to your own weight loss, experts recommend you aim for a measly one to two pounds a week. It’s fair to wonder: Why?

The above examples and a little math confirm you certainly can lose a lot more. If you start at a weight of 250, cut back to 500 to 800 calories, and work out for two hours daily, you could expect to drop seven to nine pounds a week, says obesity expert Yoni Freedhoff, M.D., author of the forthcoming book Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work.

But besides making your life a living hell, dropping weight this quickly has other downsides: Muscle loss, nutritional deficiencies, and loose skin, just to name a few. And don’t forget gallstones and even potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmias, Dr. Freedhoff warns.

OK, fine, so losing 9 pounds a week isn’t reasonable or healthy. But can you aim for three or four while still preserving your hard-earned muscles—and your health?

Could you become a similar success story? Research does tell us that your fat-burning potential depends on a few factors, some you can control and some you can’t. Namely:

Your starting point. The flabbier you are at first, the larger the percentage of lost weight will come from fat, says Kevin Hall, Ph.D., a researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Say you start at 300 pounds—a modest goal of 1 percent fat loss per week means you’ll shed three pounds in a week, Perry says. But if you’re just looking to drop 10 pounds from a relatively lean frame, you’ll probably have a harder time hanging on to all your muscle.

Your workout. You’ve heard us say it before: Resistance training is key to keeping muscle while burning fat. In one Columbia University study, participants cut calories and were assigned either to strength-train or do cardio three times a week. After eight weeks, everyone lost more than 9 percent of their body weight. But in the aerobic group, 20 percent of that came from lean tissue (mostly muscle), while the resistance group limited lean-tissue loss to 8 percent.

Your protein intake. Protein provides essential amino acids that your body uses to make muscle. Skimp and you’ll lose more muscle. In one study, athletes who cut calories by 60 percent were told to eat either 35 percent or 15 percent of their calories from protein; the high-protein group lost 20 percent less muscle over two weeks.

Your sleep habits. Not getting enough shut-eye throws hunger and metabolism hormones like leptin and ghrelin out of whack, Perry says. In a small study published last year in Annals of Internal Medicine, volunteers on a reduced-calorie diet slept either 5.5 or 8.5 hours a night. In two weeks, they both lost a little more than 6.5 pounds—but those who slept more lost twice as much of that from fat.

How much you’ve already lost. The smaller you are, the fewer calories you’ll burn, Dr. Freedhoff says. But there are even more complex hormonal and metabolic shifts at work, making it harder to burn fat the longer you’re losing. Scientists are still working to understand the mechanisms, but a paper Hall published last year in The Lancet outlines the results: Say you start at 220 pounds and cut 480 calories at day. You’d eventually hit 165, but it’d take you a year to get halfway there, and another two to lose the rest. Things get even wonkier the faster you lose. Hall’s group studied contestants on The Biggest Loser season 8, who after 30 weeks had lost more than one-third of their body weight, more than three-fourths of that from fat. However, their resting metabolisms dropped so much that they were torching 500 fewer calories daily than would be expected given their new weight.

From Menshealth.com

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VIDEO: HOW TO KEEP YOUR BRAIN SMART!

August 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Check out this video clip which shows

HLN’s Susan Hendricks taking a look at what people can do to keep their minds sharp and working smart.
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HEALTHY GRILLING OPTIONS THAT WILL KEEP YOU LOOKING GOOD

May 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It’s so easy to overeat in the summer. We fire up the grill at every opportunity and cook countless steaks, hot dogs and burgers; we prepare mounds of potato salad and macaroni salad; and we offer big plates of decadent fudgy brownies and ice cream for dessert. Yet it is possible to have low fat cookouts and picnics without compromising on flavor. So get ready to grill, or spread your picnic blanket, and enjoy some healthier, low fat summer foods.

Lets start with low fat ideas for summer cookouts:

Hot Dogs or Hamburgers?

Preferably neither—unless the hot dog is a lower fat, lower sodium, nitrite-free turkey dog, or the burger is made from lean ground beef or lean ground turkey. Here’s how to make low fat burgers. Or why not try vegetarian burgers?

Top your low-fat burgers with reduced-fat cheeses or a small amount of strong-flavored cheese. Have plenty of dark, leafy lettuce leaves, tomatoes, onions, avocado and salsa toppings available. For condiments, have light or fat-free mayo on hand, as well as mustard, ketchup, steak sauce, hot sauce, pickles and relish. Use whole-grain buns.

Choose Lean Meats or Fish

Marinated chicken breast, halibut, scallops or shrimp are delicious low-fat grilling fare. Salmon is another great option. While fattier than other fish, it has heart-healthy fats that can easily fit in with our low-fat eating plans. Just monitor portion sizes, and eat lowe-fat side dishes and condiments. If you’re eating chicken, cook it with the skin on, but remove it before eating.

Opt for lean cuts of beef. Flank steak, filet mignon, top loin or round are good choices. Use marinades to add flavor and also to tenderize the meat. Lean cuts of pork and lamb are fine, too. For lean, read “loin.” Trim all visible fat before cooking.

As important as it is not to undercook your food, be careful not to char your meat either, as two cancer-causing agents, Heterocyclic Amines (HCAs) and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PCAs), can form in the presence of fat and extreme heat. This is another good reason to use marinades, as the marinade forms a barrier between the meat and the heat.

Marinades and Rubs

The key to succulent, flavorful meat is the marinade or rub. Use heart-healthy monounsaturated oils in your marinades or for brushing food. Olive oil and canola oil are excellent choices.

Make your own marinades where possible. This helps control the fat and sodium content. It needn’t be complicated—a basic blend of oil, lemon or lime juice and herbs is all you need as a base. For an Asian accent, use some reduced-sodium soy sauce, grated ginger and garlic. For a Southwestern flavor, use cumin, chiles, and cilantro. Honey with mustard is another simple yet flavorful option. If you’ve got ketchup, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce and molasses, make your own barbecue sauce, too. Give it some heat with some hot sauce.

One caveat, however: be sure to remove excess marinade from the meat, as too much can cause flare-ups on the grill and burn the meat, which negates the protective benefit of the marinade. Marinades with a high sugar content—yep, that Barbecue sauce, for instance, should be used only in the last 5-10 minutes of cooking.

Kebabs

Not only are kebabs delicious, they are also a great way to eat vegetables and balance your meat consumption. You can eat your steak, but perhaps less of it when it’s competing for space with some delicious chunks of vegetables. Thread pre-soaked wooden skewers with your choice of meat or firm fish, alternating with vegetables such as zucchini, cherry tomatoes, peppers, red onion and mushrooms. Brush with a low fat marinade of your choice and grill away. Grill vegetables by themselves, either on skewers or in a basket. Brush with a little balsamic vinegar to enhance the flavor.

By

Ngo Okafor

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THE BEST BREAKFAST EVER FOR MEN

May 24, 2012 By 1 Comment

Go ahead guys, and scramble those eggs, yolk and all—there’s new evidence that it may lower your risk of heart disease.

Two new studies from the University of Connecticut recently presented at the Experimental Biology conference found that eating eggs actually improved cholesterol levels and reduced disease-producing inflammation in the body.

In one study, researchers asked participants following a carbohydrate-restricted diet to eat three whole eggs per day while another group ate an equivalent amount of egg substitute. After 12 weeks, the whole egg group experienced increases in levels of “good” HDL cholesterol, from 50 mg/dL to 59 mg/dL. (Doctors say men should aim for HDL levels over 40 mg/dL.) Their LDL (“bad”) cholesterol levels didn’t change at all.

How? Lecithin, a substance found in the egg yolk, might increase HDL cholesterol. “Lecithin helps remove cholesterol from tissue and transport it to the liver, so it doesn’t build up in blood vessels,” says study coauthor Maria Luz Fernandez, Ph.D., a nutrition professor at the University of Connecticut.

In a second similar study, people on a carbohydrate-restricted diet with metabolic disease who ate three eggs for 12 weeks showed a decrease in inflammatory markers in the body, suggesting that their risk for heart disease dropped. Lutein, an antioxidant caroteinoid found in the yolk, likely helped reduce this inflammation.

Though both studies were done on people on restricted-carbohydrate diets, you could expect similar benefits by making eggs part of a regular healthy diet. “People are concerned that eating eggs causes heart disease but they really do the opposite.

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Ngo okafor

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