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How to Boost Your Immune System at Every Meal

December 19, 2016 Srijitaat, boost, Every, How, immune, Meal, System, to, Your

Your immune system’s not a muscle, but you should treat it like one. The same things you focus on when it comes to bulking up, like diet, exercise, and sleep, also play a big role in fending off colds and the flu. But, unlike the radical diet you might adopt to help speed up the six-pack process, the trick to using food to keep your immune system strong is balance, says Heidi Skolnik, a sports nutritionist and author of Nutrient Timing for Peak Performance. Foods with Vitamin C: 5 Nutrient-Rich Dishes…

Trick Your Brain into Craving Healthy Food

December 19, 2016 SrijitaBrain, Craving, Food., Healthy, Into, Trick, Your

You can teach your brain’s reward centers to crave healthier, lower-calorie foods over junk, research at Harvard and Tufts U. recently found. And it’s easier than you think. For six months, obese adults followed the scientifically designed “iDiet,” which prescribes healthy foods and helps eaters understand their “food instincts”—e.g., hunger, availability, familiarity—and learn to control them. At the end, MRIs showed that the reward center in the dieters’ brains “lit up” more intensely at photos of healthy food than at shots of the unhealthy crap that used to excite it. One of the biggest keys to retraining your…

Amelia Freer: What to eat to boost your immune system for winter

December 19, 2016 SrijitaAmelia, boost, Eat, for, Freer:, immune, System, to, What, Winter, Your

Time to bulk up (in a good way): don’t scrimp on food and keep your vitamin intake topped up to avoid coughs and colds As the weather turns colder and the nights draw in, the season of coughs and colds begins. Now is the perfect time to build up your body’s natural defences, by following my simple tips: Are you eating enough food? Under-nutrition (often a result of juice fasts and crash diets) suppresses normal immune function. Don’t gorge, but eat a well-balanced, adequate and nourishing diet full of hearty…

Taste this: Your salt intake is double and dangerous

December 19, 2016 Srijitaand, dangerous, Double, Intake, Is, Salt, Taste, This, Your

Many know they have to worry about salt, particularly if they have hypertension and abnormal amounts of lipids and fats in the blood. Scientists, however, have found that even patients with these diseases take more than two times the quantity recommended for a normal person. The National Institute of Nutrition’s dietary guidelines for Indians say salt intake higher than 8 gm/day is considered a risk factor for hypertension. Yet, a multi-centric study done on 500 patients in five metros showed that the mean total daily salt consumption was 10.9gm, with…

Can social jetlag harm your health?

December 19, 2016 SrijitaCan, harm, Health, jetlag, Social, Your

There are times when you wake up bright and happy but through the day end up feeling tired and sleepy, thus compensating for those lost hours of sleep on weekends. This, in turn, causes a sleep deficit during the weekdays. According to a study, researchers in Europe have coined the term ‘social jetlag’ to describe the all too-common practice of following a different sleep schedule on weekdays versus the weekend. “Sleep plays an important role both in the physiological and psychological development of an individual’s body,” says sleep expert Dr…

Tired and Weak? Don’t Assume it’s Just Your Age

December 19, 2016 SrijitaAge, and, Assume, Don't, Its, Just, Tired, Weak?, Your

When Christopher Callahan examines older patients, he often hears a similar refrain. “I’m tired, doctor. It’s hard to get up and about. I’ve been feeling kind of down, but I know I’m getting old and I just have to live with it.” This fatalistic stance relies on widely held but mistaken assumptions about what constitutes normal aging. In fact, fatigue, weakness and depression aren’t to-be-expected consequences of growing older, said Callahan, director of the Center for Aging Research at Indiana University’s School of Medicine. Instead, they’re a signal that something…