Nutrition

Health and Beauty Benefits of Green Tea

Though green tea may only seem like a new concept to some of us on the Western side of the pond, green tea has been used for centuries by other countries that long ago recognized its health and beautiful benefits. The benefits of green tea can be had simply by sipping on it each morning as you take the dog for a stroll. Or you can also enjoy the benefits of green tea by rubbing it on your skin through a body lotion or a lip balm. There are even green tea supplements that help with your indigestion and weight loss.

Why Green Tea is Naturally Healthy for Us

What green tea really has going for it are its antioxidant properties. Antioxidants are important as they help protect us from the “free radicals” that we have both in our atmosphere and in our bodies. Free radicals are naturally occurring, but they are detrimental to our health as they can cause cancer, heart disease, and they accelerate the aging process. Having a regular intake of antioxidants has repeatedly shown that the numbers of free radicals are reduced. Cholesterol is reduced with regular intake of green tea. The chance of developing any cancers and heart disease decreases. Even those who suffer from arthritis will notice a difference shortly after they start sipping on some green tea.

Weight Loss Benefits of Green Tea

Here’s what a lot of us are looking for: a magical cure to help us lose weight faster! So how does green tea do this? Green tea is a natural substance that contains ingredients that are able to flush out toxins that cause our bodies to cling on to our fat cells, and it has the ability to speed up our metabolic rate. This means that we are burning more fat than we would be otherwise. As an added benefit, green tea also enhances the oxidization of our fat cells, and it provides us with more energy than more highly caffeinated beverages.

Anti-Aging Benefits of Green Tea

A lot of things can cause for our skin to look older than we feel: pollution, smoking, sun exposure, and diet are all popular offenders. The good news is that those fine lines, wrinkles and sun spots can all be treated with a touch of green tea. When ever you are on the hunt for anti aging products in the stores, make sure you do choose ones that use green leaf extracts as this will help naturally erase any fine lines and age spots that you may have.

Dental Benefits to Green Tea

Something that you don’t hear about every day is that there are actual dental benefits to green tea. Green tea naturally has fluoride in it, albeit low levels, but this does help prevent cavities. It also will get rid of the bad-breath causing bacteria in our mouth, so after sipping on a cup, you will have fresher breath.

Health And Beauty Benefits Of Aloe Vera

For centuries aloe vera has been recognized as being good for our health, but just how good for our health is often not known to most. Apart from using aloe vera on our sun burns to help soothe and heal them, most of us don’t come in contact with aloe vera apart from perhaps seeing it as an additive in some sort of moisturizing product.

The amount of health and beauty benefits that we can enjoy from aloe vera is astonishing. Aloe vera is not only hydrating, it’s regenerating, meaning that it does have anti aging properties contained within it. Many people who drink aloe vera juice on a regular basis swear that they are not nearly as ill as they used to be, and they feel more positive as a result of drinking it.

How Aloe Vera can Improve our Immune System

Aloe vera is a natural detoxifying agent. What this means is that drinking or consuming aloe vera in any form will help get rid of the free radicals in our body that are responsible for making us ill.

Aloe vera also helps cleanse out both our digestive system and our circulatory system. By drinking aloe vera, our body is better able to absorb nutrients into the blood stream and transport those nutrients to other areas of our body. This nutrient and oxygen-rich blood helps support the cells that dictate how healthy our body’s are, and it keeps our bodies looking young. Aloe vera also helps:

• Fight off infections
• Kill off harmful bacteria that may be in the body
• Rejuvenate our body

How Aloe Vera will Make you Younger

As mentioned earlier, aloe vera will naturally help your body dispel any free radicals that are in our bodies. Free radicals cause a number of health issues, such as cancer, but they also cause premature aging. By getting rid of these free radicals, you are helping free yourself of toxic agents that would otherwise be significantly aging your entire body.

But you don’t only have to consume aloe vera to enjoy the anti aging benefits of it. You can apply it directly to your skin too to make yourself look more youthful and refreshed. Any sort of aloe vera cream or aloe vera lotion will quickly penetrate through several layers of skin and hydrate it, thus keeping it more youthful in appearance.

You don’t only have to use some commercially made aloe vera cream on your skin, though. The best way to use aloe vera is to use it straight from the source: directly from the aloe vera plant. Snipping off a leaf and exposing the inner gel of the leaf will provide you with the aloe vera you need to apply to your skin to keep it youthful and refreshed. Remember that if you do suffer any degree of sunburn that you should also take an aloe vera leaf and apply it to that skin to not only instantly cool it down, but to hydrate it and to expedite the healing process.

Health And Beauty Benefits Of Manuka Honey

Manuka honey isn’t just any honey that you can find lining the shelves of your grocery story. Manuka honey has been renowned for its beauty and medicinal properties for centuries, though in this day in age we tend to rely more on treatments and creams that are stuffed full of lab-created chemicals that often do more damage to our skin than good.

Manuka honey has been known to cure several heath and beauty issues, such as:

• Dermatitis
• Staph infections
• Inflammation
• Wounds

Any where that bacteria, fungi or protozoa may be causing an issue for you, manuka honey can cure it. Why? This nectar is loaded with antibacterial properties. Unlike the normal table honey that you can find in stores, manuka honey is far higher in both UMF and MGO ratings. These ratings help determine the intensity and the strength of any particular nectar on the market. UMF, which stands for Unique Manuka Factor, helps estimate the non-hydrogen peroxide antibacterial properties of any nectar. The MGO, also known as methylglyoxal, refers to a procedure that is used to help and determine just how efficient the nectar is, and how concentrated it is as well.

Some of the more medical ways which manuka honey can help you include:

• Treating a cold and a sore throat
• Heals any skin boils, wounds and ulcers
• Heals stomach ulcers
• Burns and pressure sores are soothed and cured
• Treating MSRA and any other infections

But not only is manuka honey fantastic for our health; it is also fantastic for our skin! Applying manuka honey to the skin’s surface will most definitely help improve the quality of your skin, and provide the following benefits:

Your skin will become more nourished and hydrated.

It helps produce collagen, a key factor in keeping our skin elastic and youthful in appearance.

It contains anti-aging properties that help smooth out those fine lines that we develop over time, making them far less noticeable.

It will fight off free radicals (these are responsible for a number of health issues, such as cancer, and they accelerate the aging process).

It will help treat any skin that has been damaged, including underlying skin cells that other skin products cannot reach.

It will help anyone who has acne, blemishes, eczema, or psoriasis.

You will be left with a beautiful, glowing complexion.

Though you may not be able to find manuka honey in your grocery store, you can definitely find it in natural health food stores. Some supermarkets that are more geared towards natural health and organic products also often carry manuka honey. If all else fails, your best resource is searching for it online. Manuka honey may have been under everyone’s radar for a while now, but it’s making a comeback in a big way as scientists discover all the more how beneficial it is to not only our health, but our beauty.

Keeping a Food Diary To Lose Weight

 

If you are thinking of beginning your very own weight loss journey, then it’s also a good idea to start keeping a food diary. A food diary is a place where you can write down what you have consumed in a day, the calories that you have eaten, and other nutritional facts that you may find of importance (such as your intake of vitamins and minerals, fats, and carbohydrates). A food diary is a way to remind yourself about what you have eaten in a day, how you can best fulfill your nutritional and weight loss goals, and it gives you a chance to take a good hard look at your eating habits.

To make your own diary, you will need:

• A book, or preferably a three-ring binder
• A three-hole ring paper puncher
• Paper
• A computer
• A printer

The best way to get started is to open up a word processing program on the computer and design sheets that you will be inserting into your food diary binder. For instance, you will definitely want to have the type of food you are eating, the serving size, and the caloric content of that food and serving. You may also want to include total fats, carbohydrates, and any other dietary information you may find important.

To help keep accurate numbers, you may need to purchase a kitchen scale, measuring cups and measuring spoons so that you know just how much of any certain food when you are eating. These will also come in handy when learning portion control, another important part of sustainable weight loss.

You may also want to keep an insert at the front of your binder that includes information on how to read a nutritional facts label, as well as how much of any given nutrient we require per day.

Getting Started

To kick off your food diary, break out the scale and weigh yourself. Write down your current weight, your ideal or “goal” weight, and any other sort of health goals you may have, such as cutting down on sugars or carbohydrates, lowering your cholesterol, or your blood pressure. Also be sure to add in your daily caloric intake goal and your current caloric intake.

Before you start your weight loss regime, it may be a good idea to record your current eating habits for a few days. This way you will have that information to look back and reflect on as you progress on your weight loss journey.

Tallying Up your Calories

You can choose to calculate your calories on a daily or a weekly basis. It’s also a good idea to weigh yourself and to make a comment on any other achievements or set backs that you experienced. For example, if your doctor has noticed a decrease in your blood pressure, make sure you make note of that in your diary and feel proud of yourself! Old habits die hard, and that is particularly true when it comes to diet and activity. The food diary will help you stay on track and remind yourself of the great progress you have made.

Decoding The Nutritional Facts Food Labels 

Have you ever walked through a grocery store and noticed a shopper staring down at the nutritional facts of two products and comparing the two? Some things are easy for us to see immediately: serving size, the calories, and the total fat, but what does this all mean?

Serving Size

One thing that people often fail to take into account when they look at and compare two different products is the serving size. The serving size is listed right at the very top of the label. This is perhaps the most important thing to take into account as all of the rest of the nutritional information is based solely upon how large the serving size is. You may also see information regarding the “servings per container”. It’s important to remember that the serving size is what the nutritional information is based on, and not the servings per container.

The Calories, Fat, Carbs and Proteins

In the section under the amount of calories per serving, you will also find the fat content, the different types of carbohydrates and their amounts, as well as the amount of protein that is in this product. Listed beside each are the grams (g) or milligrams (mg) of each product, as well as a percentage amount which indicates how much of this serving is part of your recommended daily caloric intake. For example, if the food you are eating is 5% protein, this means that you are obtaining 5% of your daily protein intake from this particular serving. You will need to have 95% more protein in your diet on that given day to meet the daily requirements.

So what is the daily requirement? This information is based on a diet of 2000 calories, though this may differ from country to country. If you are currently not consuming 2000 calories a day, then the percentages that are provided will not be “true” to your current diet.

Vitamins and Minerals

Some of the vitamins and minerals that are within the product are also listed on the nutritional label. In most countries, it is required that that Vitamin A, Vitamin C, calcium and iron content are included on the nutritional label, though some other nutrients may be included if a significant amount of a nutrient is in the product (such as folic acid and niacin). The amount of each of these nutrients and minerals is displayed in percentages which are again based on a 2000 calorie diet. This means that the percentage amounts are not true to you if your caloric intake is higher or lower than 2000 a day.

The Suggested Daily Requirements

At the bottom of the label, you will find the suggested daily requirements. Often there will be two different daily caloric intake diets presented: a 2000 calorie a day diet, and a 2500 calorie a day diet. This general information is a good reminder of how much fat, cholesterol, sodium and carbohydrates your body needs on a daily basis and will help you plan your diet and nutritional needs.