source: http://medcitynews.com/2015/06/in-what-areas-of-the-world-to-people-consume-the-most-alcohol-and-more-frequently-battle-addiction/
Category: diet
Urban Gardening: You- Yes, YOU- Can Grow Food ANYwhere!
The whos, whats, whens, wheres, whys and hows of urban gardening… with picture proof that you can do it!
Who?
YOU! Your family, neighbors and friends.
What?
- Growing your own food, herbs, spices and medicine
- Supporting bee populations by planting flowers they can collect pollen from, and trees they can build hives in (Bee populations are collapsing, and without them plants can’t cross-pollinate)
- Mulching and Composting to create fertile soil to use in garden beds or potted plants
When?
Why not now?
Where?
Any place you can find or put dirt.
- If you have a yard, you’re already good to go.
- If you live in an apartment or condo, you should be able to ask the property owner for permission to use a plot for growing.
- If all else fails, buy some pots or make them out of used buckets or bottles. You could also buy a large bin from a local home supply store.
- Make the garden in your house, or on your porch or patio!
Why?
- To eat better food- the radishes we grew last year were so much more sweeter and tangier than the ones I bought yesterday.
- To avoid pesticides and GMO: If you don’t put them, no one else will. Growing your own food gives you knowledge and control over what you and your loved ones put in and on their bodies
- To save money- You can’t believe how many tomatoes a tomato patch can yield. When we harvested, we HAD to give some away, eat some, then freeze the rest for later.
- A new, healthy hobby- Gardening is VERY fulfilling, and hard work = good exercise! Remember how fun it was play in the mud as a kid? It still is!
- Learn about nature and connect with the earth
- Have food supplies in times of crisis- You never know!
- Extra income- Sell your surplus at a farmer’s market!
- Interior decorating- Beautify your living/work space with flowers, and remember that indoor plants naturally purify the air and increase oxygen!
How?
- Tools you’ll need: shovel, hoe, rake
- Pots: Buy some, or use any used buckets or bottles (a great way to recycle by the way)
- Study the local climate to learn when is the best time to plant what, and how to plant it. Ask a neighbor, elderly family member or anyone with experience farming or gardening for advice (a great way to make friends). Buy the appropriate seeds and plant them!
- To create the right soil, you could mulch or compost. This basically means letting organic waste decompose in dirt, and then using that dirt, which will be very rich in nutrients, to plant in. You can start by collecting all your organic waste- eggshells, food that has gone bad, coffee grounds, tea leaves, plant rinds, etc.- and burying it at the end of the day. This should be done AWAY from your house, because it will attract bugs. Make sure you cover each deposit well, so it will actually decompose, and not smell.
Our Experience with Urban Gardening
I live in an apartment complex in Saudi Arabia- not exactly the place you’d expect to be able to plant crops. But you’d be surprised what you can grow here:
We’ve successfully planted and grown orange trees, lemon trees, garlic, potatoes, eggplant, chili peppers, radish, onions, tomatoes, coriander, aloe vera, basil, and various flowers.
A year ago this month I had two major setbacks: tearing my achilles (unable to do work for 5 months) and was moved by my university from a house on the compound that had a yard, to an apartment complex. At the same time, my wife was also pregnant with our 4th child, and summer was coming. It wasn’t looking good for our garden…
But we found a few solutions.
1) Potted plants
When we tried to move our lemon and orange trees from the ground to pots, they died. But we bought new ones, and they’re coming along:
We also have flowers and aloe vera in pots inside our house and on our patios:
Aloe vera, by the way, is a very effective medicine. We use its juice for cuts, sunburn, rashes, and aftershave (no more razor bumps!) It’s a hardy plant that just needs water, so I recommend it to everyone.
2) Find potential garden beds and use them
There are a lot of empty plots in the concrete around our house that weren’t being used. The one right below our apartment is now growing flowers, coriander (which we just harvested), and eggplant.
Another one nearby has chili peppers, garlic, onion, coriander, peppermint, and tomatoes.
In the highest terrace, we just put two trees of a local species that bees like to use for hives. We hope that they’ll also provide shade in the extremely hot Arabian summers when they mature.
They don’t look like they’re doing too well, but that usually happens when you re-pot plants. As long as they bounce back before summertime, they should be fine. If they don’t, we’ll try again. You win some, you lose some, especially starting off. It takes patience…
3) DIY Compost Heap
I just dug a compost bed this morning. It was a sand bed full of rocks, concrete, glass, and some scary-looking red beetles! My girls and I dumped out all the rocks and glass.
I had to take a hammer to the concrete (dumped there by local workers) and before shoveling it all out. Then I dug up half of it, dumping the sand on the other side.
To compost, I’ll just take our day’s- or meal’s- organic leftovers or garbage, dump it on the sand, then bury it, like so:
By this fall- which is planting season here due to the extreme heat of summer- the waste should be decomposed. We may or may not have to add dirt to it before using. We’ll see.
4) Hire a gardener
OK, I cheated.
With me in crutches and then a cane, my wife in late pregnancy and then postpartum, we really couldn’t do anything. Luckily, for us, we met a very man with an honorable disposition named Muhi adDeen who works as a groundskeeper on campus. His expertise and willingness to help have been essential, and we hope he will continue to share his expertise with us and our children.
5) Use House Plants
These are usually very low maintenance- just flowers or vines that you have to water a few times a week. If you travel, make sure you have a reliable neighbor take over while you’re gone.
6) Harvest!
Look at the peppers my wife picked this afternoon (an essential ingredient in her native Punjabi cuisine):
It’s already paying off!
We’re open to suggestions. Send yours in the comments and I’ll put them into the article. Let’s learn and grow together!
Why You Should Never Throw Away Orange or Banana Peels
Did you know the peels of some fruits hold some of the most powerful nutrients in the world? There are many uses, both medicinal and practical, for orange and banana peels that aren’t known by many. So, next time you think about throwing away one of these peels, you may want to remember this information. [READ MORE…]
This Is Your Brain on Junk Food
There are a range of factors that scientists and food manufacturers use to make food more addictive.
Dynamic contrast. Dynamic contrast refers to a combination of different sensations in the same food. In the words of Witherly, foods with dynamic contrast have:
… an edible shell that goes crunch followed by something soft or creamy and full of taste-active compounds. This rule applies to a variety of our favorite food structures — thecaramelized top of a cremebrulee, a slice of pizza, oran Oreo cookie — the brain finds crunching through something like this very novel and thrilling.
Salivary response. Salivation is part of the experience of eating food, and the more that a food causes you to salivate, the more it will swim throughout your mouth and cover your taste buds. For example, emulsified foods like butter, chocolate, salad dressing, ice cream, and mayonnaise promote a salivary response that helps to lather your taste buds with goodness. This is one reason why many people enjoy foods that have sauces or glazes on them. The result is that foods that promote salivation do a happy little tap dance on your brain and taste better than ones that don’t.
Rapid food meltdown and vanishing caloric density. Foods that rapidly vanish or “melt in your mouth” signal to your brain that you’re not eating as much as you actually are. In other words, these foods literally tell your brain that you’re not full, even though you’re eating a lot of calories.
The result: You tend to overeat.
In his best-selling book Salt Sugar Fat, author Michael Moss describes a conversation with Witherly that explains vanishing caloric density perfectly…
I brought him two shopping bags filled with a variety of chips to taste. He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,”Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,”Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it … you can just keep eating it forever.”
Sensory specific response. Your brain likes variety. When it comes to food, if you experience the same taste over and over again, then you start to get less pleasure from it. In other words, the sensitivity of that specific sensor will decrease over time. This can happen in just minutes.
Junk foods, however, are designed to avoid this sensory specific response. They provide enough taste to be interesting (your brain doesn’t get tired of eating them), but it’s not so stimulating that your sensory response is dulled. This is why you can swallow an entire bag of potato chips and still be ready to eat another. To your brain, the crunch and sensation of eating Doritos is novel and interesting every time.
Calorie density. Junk foods are designed to convince your brain that it is getting nutrition, but to not fill you up. Receptors in your mouth and stomach tell your brain about the mixture of proteins, fats, carbohydrates in a particular food, and how filling that food is for your body. Junk food provides just enough calories that your brain says, “Yes, this will give you some energy,” but not so many calories that you think, “That’s enough, I’m full.” The result is that you crave the food to begin with, but it takes quite some time to feel full from it.
Memories of past eating experiences. This is where the psychobiology of junk food really works against you. When you eat something tasty (say, a bag of potato chips), your brain registers that feeling. The next time you see that food, smell that food, or even read about that food, your brain starts to trigger the memories and responses that came when you ate it. These memories can actually cause physical responses like salivation and create the “mouth-watering” craving that you get when thinking about your favorite foods.
All of this brings us to the most important question of all.
Food companies are spending millions of dollars to design foods with addictive sensations. What can you and I do about it? Is there any way to counteract the money, the science, and the advertising behind the junk food industry?
How to Kick the Junk Food Habit and Eat Healthy
The good news is that the research shows that the less junk food you eat, the less you crave it. My own experiences have mirrored this. As I’ve slowly begun to eat healthier, I’ve noticed myself wanting pizza and candy and ice cream less and less. Some people refer to this transition period as “gene reprogramming.”
Whatever you want to call it, the lesson is the same: If you can find ways to gradually eat healthier, you’ll start to experience the cravings of junk food less and less. I’ve never claimed to have all the answers (or any, really), but here are three strategies that might help.
1. Use the “outer ring” strategy and the “5 ingredient rule” to buy healthier food.
The best course of action is to avoid buying processed and packaged foods. If you don’t own it, you can’t eat it. Furthermore, if you don’t think about it, you can’t be lured by it.
We’ve talked about the power of junk food to pull you in and how memories of tasty food in the past can cause you to crave more of it in the future. Obviously, you can’t prevent yourself from ever thinking about junk food, but there are ways to reduce your cravings.
First, you can use my “outer ring” strategy to avoid processed and packaged foods at the grocery store. If you limit yourself to purchasing foods that are on the outer ring of the store, then you will generally buy whole foods (fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, etc.). Not everything on the outer ring is healthy, but you will avoid a lot of unhealthy foods.
You can also follow the “5 ingredient rule” when buying foods at the store. If something has more than 5 ingredients in it, don’t buy it. Odds are, it has been designed to fool you into eating more of it. Avoid those products and stick with the more natural options.
2. Eat a variety of foods.
As we covered earlier, the brain craves novelty.
While you may not be able to replicate the crunchy/creamy contrast of an Oreo, you can vary your diet enough to keep things interesting. For example, you could dip a carrot (crunchy) in some hummus (creamy) and get a novel sensation. Similarly, finding ways to add new spices and flavors to your dishes can make eating healthy foods a more desirable experience.
Moral of the story: Eating healthy doesn’t have to be bland. Mix up your foods to get different sensations and you may find it easier than eating the same foods over and over again. (At some point, however, you may have to fall in love with boredom.)
3. Find a better way to deal with your stress.
There’s a reason why many people eat as a way to cope with stress. Stress causes certain regions of the brain to release chemicals (specifically, opiates and neuropeptide Y). These chemicals can trigger mechanisms that are similar to the cravings you get from fat and sugar. In other words, when you get stressed, your brain feels the addictive call of fat and sugar and you’re pulled back to junk food.
We all have stressful situations that arise in our lives. Learning to deal with stress in a different way can help you overcome the addictive pull of junk food. This could includesimple breathing techniques or a short guided meditation. Or something more physical like exercise or making art.
With that said, if you’re looking for a better written and more detailed analysis of the science of junk food, I recommend reading the #1 New York Times best-seller Salt Sugar Fat.
James Clear writes at JamesClear.com, where he shares ideas about using behavior science to improve your performance and master your habits. For useful ideas on how to live a healthy life, both mentally and physically, join his free newsletter.
Follow James Clear on Twitter: www.twitter.com/james_clear
From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-clear/why-we-crave-junk-food_b_4261415.html?ir=Taste&ref=topbar
Why You Should Never Eat High Fructose Corn Syrup
In recent history, we’ve gone from 20 teaspoons of sugar per person per year to about 150 pounds of sugar per person per year. That’s a half pound a day for every man, woman, and child in America.
The average 20-ounce soda contains 15 teaspoons of sugar, all of it high fructose corn syrup. And when you eat sugar in those doses, it becomes a toxin.
As part of the chemical process used to make high fructose corn syrup, the glucose and fructose — which are naturally bound together — become separated. This allows the fructose to mainline directly into your liver, which turns on a factory of fat production in your liver called lipogenesis.
This leads to fatty liver, the most common disease in America today, affecting 90 million Americans. This, in turn, leads to diabesity — pre-diabetes and Type 2 diabetes. So, high fructose corn syrup is the real driver of the current epidemic of heart attacks, strokes, cancer, dementia, and of course, Type 2 diabetes.
HFCS contains dangerous chemicals and contaminants
Chemical contaminants used during manufacturing end up in the HFCS and in our food. What we know, for example, is that chloralkali is used in making high fructose corn syrup. Chloralkai contains mercury. And there are trace amounts of mercury found in high fructose corn syrup-containing beverages. Over time, these heavy metals can accumulate in the body, causing health problems.
Additionally, when we look at the chemical components of high fructose corn syrup on a spectrograph, we can see that it contains many weird chemicals that we know nothing about.
Look out for the red flag
The main reason you should give up high fructose corn syrup is that it’s a big red flag for very poor quality food. If you see this ingredient on a label, I guarantee you the food is processed junk. So, if high fructose corn syrup is anywhere on the label, put it back on the shelf. You should never eat this food.
If you want to stay healthy, lose weight easily, get rid of chronic disease, and help reduce the obesity epidemic, the single most important thing you can do is eliminate high fructose corn syrup from your diet and from your children’s diet.
Purge your kitchen
I challenge you to go into your kitchen right now, go in the cupboard and refrigerator, and look at every single label. And I want you to count how many products you have right now in your house that contain high fructose corn syrup. Then, I want you to get a big garbage bag and throw them out and find replacements that are free of it.
If you want to have some sugar, that’s fine. Have a little sugar, but add it to your food yourself. Don’t eat food made with added sugar. Cut the high fructose corn syrup from your life forever. You’ll be healthier. Our planet will be healthier. And we’ll have a healthier generation of children.
Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing physician, founder of The UltraWellness Center, a six-time New York Times bestselling author, and an international leader in the field of Functional Medicine. You can follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, watch his videos on YouTube, become a fan on Facebook, and subscribe to hisnewsletter.
For more by Mark Hyman, MD, click here.
For more on personal health, click here.
Follow Mark Hyman, MD on Twitter: www.twitter.com/markhymanmd
from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/high-fructose-corn-syrup_b_4256220.html?ir=Taste&ref=topbar
This Is What Your Meat Eats
Farm nimals are legally allowed to practice cannibalism and eat their own manure. Read on…
When you bite into a juicy hamburger or a lovely steak, it’s easy to forget that piece of meat was once a living, breathing, hungry animal. It also needed nutrients to survive. And while we all want to think that our meat eats according to nature, this is becoming less and less common. Livestock that live in CAFOs(concentrated animal feeding operations) are nourished very differently — and sometimes even dangerously.
Have you ever thought about what your meat eats? Read on to learn about the ingredients fed to most farm animals being raised today.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/31/what-meat-eats_n_4063895.html
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1 Corn. Lots And Lots Of Corn.
ShutterstockIn 2011, 84 million acres of corn were harvested in the U.S. According to the National Corn Growers Association, 80 percent of this corn goes straight into the bellies of domestic and overseas livestock and other animals.Although cows and other ruminants are naturally disposed to eating grass, corn is filling and significantly cheaper, allowing farmers to fatten up the meat more efficiently. Just as we humans suffer from a host of food-related ailments when we eat things that aren’t healthy for us, this practice opens animals up to a number of diseases and other health issues.
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2 Soy
Getty ImagesSecond only to corn as the most planted crop in America, 73.8 million acres of soybeans were harvested in the U.S. in 2011. Over 30 million tons of the crop is fed annually to livestock. In fact, soybeans are the largest protein source fed to animals worldwide. -
3 Themselves
GettyBringing a whole new level of discomfort to the term “you are what you eat,” animal feed is legally allowed to contain certain amounts of the animal it is being fed to. Yes, that means sometimes there is dead pig meat and bones in pig feed and ground up chicken in the feed given to chickens. While cattle parts were outlawed from animal feed more than a decade ago thanks to Mad Cow disease, these bits have found their way back into the food system through other unsavory means, such as the next entry on this list. -
4 Manure And Animal Waste
ShutterstockOne component of some animal feeds is something called “poultry litter” — basically, the waste and spilled feed that is swept up from the floor of barns that house chickens. While some researchers argue that this is a cheap and relatively safe method of protein consumption for the animals, these feces can be breeding grounds for infectious bacteria, like the aforementioned Mad Cow Disease, and other germs. (Which is just one reason the next ingredient is considered “necessary” by some.) -
5 Antibiotics
GettyThirty million pounds of antibiotics were given to U.S. livestock in 2011. While some of that was used to treat and heal sick animals, the majority was given to them in low levels in their feed in an effort to speed up growth and keep any natural infections at bay. While that may seem like a preventative measure, pumping animals with antibiotics could actually expose them (and us) to highly dangerous superbugs that cannot be exterminated with these drugs. -
6 Feathers, Hair And Blood
GettyAnother component of poultry litter is the animal parts that are either cast off or left behind after an animal dies. This includes things like hair, feathers, blood and hooves. Sometimes, animals are even fed roadkill. -
7 Fish Meal
WikiMedia:Fishmeal is a byproduct (read: ground up bones and offal) of small fish such as anchovies, menhaden, and more. While it may seem pretty harmless to be serving fish to livestock, keep in mind that ruminants do not naturally eat meats. They are also excused from the seafood advisories put on humans, meaning your meat might be eating the infectious, dirty fish that cannot legally make it onto your plate. In addition, farming for fishmeal has led to significant issues in the global fishing industry, such as depleting resources for the bigger fish, like salmon. -
8 Candy?Although this is not a common practice, some farmers took to feeding animals candy in response to rising corn prices in the U.S. “It has been a practice going on for decades and is a very good way to for producers to reduce feed cost, and to provide less expensive food for consumers,” livestock nutritionist Ki Fanning told CNN Money (apparently with a straight face).
How People REALLY Lived During the Stone Age
A growing movement seeks to reproduce the hunter-gatherer lifestyle: running barefoot, pondering polygamy, relying on a diet of meat. But even our ancestors never lived this way. And besides, modern humans have evolved.
It is hard to argue that a simpler life with more exercise, fewer processed foods, and closer contact with our children may well be good for us, but rather than renouncing modern living for the sake of our Stone Age genes, we need to understand how evolution has—and hasn’t—suited us for the world we inhabit now.
Vitamins: Essential or Not? Studies Inconclusive…
Today more than half of Americans take a multivitamin or supplement of some sort. But five doctors call the benefits of this practice into question in an editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine. They sum up the results of three different vitamin studies included in the most recent issue of the journal.
The Sperm Crisis: A Tough Nut to Crack
Bad food, bad genes, and monogamy are sucking the life out of human sperm. But conceptive gels and stem cells could bring some virility back.
A small hitch: enabling infertile men to procreate perpetuates infertility genes, digging us in even deeper.
knowledge of self 