Tag Archives: calories

Eat the Right Nutrients when Aging

When we age, we have to eat well and adjust our eating habits. As we get older, our needs for certain nutrients will change significantly. We produce less saliva, and our swallowing reflexes slow down.
As a result, food may not be as easy to digest and to swallow. Many of us experience changes in taste and appetite as we get older, so we may eat less.
We also have less stomach acid, that means, we don’t digest foods or absorb some nutrients as well as we used to.

An Israeli study that looked at 414 elderly patients in hospitals found that less than 20%
were well nourished. The study also found that those with poor dietary habits had less successful outcomes from their visit to the hospital. But even with this information and other studies available, doctors don’t always think to check for nutritional deficiencies in older adults.
This is unfortunately, because a simple lack of nutrients can easy be mistaken for a more serious illness. Nutritional deficiencies in older people can even be misdiagnosed as dementia.

Vitamin B12 is essential for maintaining healthy blood and nerve function. It’s also one of
the nutrients that requires adequate amounts of stomach secretions in order to be absorbed.
when acid levels decline, getting enough vitamin B12 can be a problem.
This is of particular concern for people who use antacids. You can get plenty of vitamin B12 from meats and other animal foods. Clams are the best source of vitamin B12.
One small steamed clam provides an astonishing 9 micrograms of vitamin B12, more than
100% of the DV.

Apart from vitamin B12 deficiency, many people in their late fifties and older may be deficient in vitamin B6. Chickpies and potatoes are good sources of vitamin B6.
One cup of chickpeas contains 1.1 milligrams, slightly more than halve of the DV.
A baked potato provides 0.6 milligram, or about 1/3 of the DV.

Another B vitamin that’s important for protecting the cardiovascular and nervous systems
is folate, which is found in green vegetables, beans and whole grains. A cup of canned pinto beans, for example, provides 144 milligrams of folate, or more than 33% of the DV.
Asparagus is also a good source of folate. One cup of cooked asparagus contain
263 milligram of folate.

As your bones get older, it’s essential to get extra calcium and vitamin D to prevent them
from becoming brittle. Many older people think that they can’t eat dairy foods because they are ‘lactose tolerant’, but in fact, most people can eat moderate amounts of dairy without trouble.
Low-fat and fat-free (skim) milk, cheese, and yogurt are your best sources of calcium.
One cup of fat-free yogurt contains 415 milligrams of calcium, or 41% of the DV.
One glass of fat-free milk provides 302 milligrams or 30% of the DV.

Iron is one of several minerals that can be hard to get in the correct amount. Some people
don’t get enough, while others get too much. Women’s need for iron declines in their later years after they stop menstruating.

To ensure that you’re getting the right amount of nutrients for your particular needs, i
t’s best to talk to your doctor to find out whether or not you need to take supplements of certain nutrients, such as iron, calcium, vitamin D and vitamin B12.

Even though we may need to eat more of certain foods in order to live longer, researchers
are finding that the opposite can also be true: people who eat less may live more years.

A Louisiana State University study followed 48 people for 6 months as they either followed
a normal diet or different types of calorie restricted diets. It found that prolonged
calorie restriction can lower people’s fasting insulin levels and their body temperature,
which are both markers of longevity.

Experts think that calorie restriction “resets” your metabolism so it works more efficiently,
and your body shifts its focus from growth and reproduction to long term survival.
and when you take less calories, your body produces less free radicals as it turns food
into energy.

However, it’s hard for humans to reap the benefits from calorie reduction that lab animals
have shown. For those among us who like to eat, it’s probably not a viable strategy.
In addition, drastically reducing your calories without medical supervision can leave you
malnourished.

While life can throw many challenges at us, health and independence are possible to the very end of our days. However, it requires an understanding of how our nutrition and health needs change in our later years.
https://www.compass.info/featured-topics/health-wellbeing

For now, a good way to get some benefit from calorie reduction is to make sure that you
eat a “prudent” diet that provide the nutrients you need without excessive calories.
If you do decide to restrict your calories, talk to your doctor to make sure your diet
meets your nutritional needs. See also my article about Flavonoids

Lean for Life

It might be true that running burns more calories than walking and cross-country skiing
burns most calories of all, but fat loss has little to do with calories used during an
exercise session.
Many recent studies show that the right exercise raises your metabolic rate for up to
18 hours afterwards.

However, if you exercise in the evening and then go to bed, you lose most of the
fat loss effect, because sleep causes your metabolism rate to drop rapidly.
The best time to exercise is in the mornings, the earlier the better.

Exercise five mornings weekly for a minimum of 30 minutes
Dr. Leonard Epstein analysed all the published studies on exercise and fat loss
and showed that people who exercise five times per week lose three times as much
fat as those who exercise only twice or three times per week, even if they exercise for
a longer period.Those who exercise only once per week lost no fat at all.

For  fat loss, five days weekly exercise of 30 minutes is much superior to three days
weekly of 70 minutes, even though the total weekly exercise time of the three day
people is an hour longer.
In order to keep that metabolic rate churning, frequent exercise is the key.

Take a multiple anti-oxidant every day.
As you can read in my article about exercise, oxidation is the primary cause
of human degeneration.
Because exercise uses 12 – 20 times more oxygen than sitting in a chair, it also creates
masses of free radicals that causes a lot of oxidation damage.

Without additional anti-oxidants you are slowly killing yourself.
You can prevent exercise oxidation  damage by taking antioxidant supplements.

The first strategy in your fight against body fat is to reduce your appetite.
Phenylpropanolamine helps a little. Better is ephedrine hydrochloride and its original
source: Ma huang or Ephedra sinica.

But you should be very sensible in the use of these compounds.
Don’t use more than 25 – 50 mg per day, otherwise it lose it’s effect  and can cause
many side-effects, including raised blood pressure, anxiety and insomnia.

The second strategy is to reduce the taste of food, especially sweet tastes.
The herb Gymnema silvestre has been used for this purpose for thousands
of years in Ayurvedic medicine. It works a bit.

The third strategy is to reduce your body’s tendency  to store fat.
The herb Garcinia cambogia, a specific variant of the English brindleberry
is used in Ayurvedic medicine for this purpose.
The active ingredient is hydroxy citrate.

Ongoing studies by DR. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona indicate
that 500 mg of garcinia may reduce fat storage from a high-fat meal by up to 30%.
As a bonus, it may also reduce appetite.

The final strategy is to raise metabolic rate so that your body burns more calories
during the day. It’s called thermogenesis, which means: it raises body temperature.
To maintain the increased temperature, the body has to burn more calories to make
the heat – lots of calories. And because it is low level activation, the calories burned
come mainly from fat.

There are a lot of drugs that does the job, but all of them causes side effects.
It doesn’t make sense to make yourself unhealthy while trying to lose fat.

Least damaging are the beta-adrenergic agonists and most harmless of these
is ephedrine or its herbal source: Ma huang. These compounds work by inceasing
bodely output of noradrenalin, one of our “fight-or-flight” hormones.
That warns you right away not to use too much,(25-50 mg per day max.) or you
run into severe anxiety, irritability, headache and insomnia.

The FDA are against ephedrine, because folk have used larger doses and
caused real damage to the thyroid gland and other organs.

However, ephedrine on its own is not effective, because your body quickly
defends itself with multiple mechanisms that turn off the extra noradrenalin.
The three main defences your body uses against a sensible ephedrine
regimen (25–50 mg/day) are: increasing output of phosphodiesterase enzymes,
and increasing prostaglandin production.

These defenses can be overcome respectively by using caffeine, theophylline
(from tea) and acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin).
Herbal sources can also supply the caffeine, theophyline and aspirin.
Standardized extracts of kola nut, guarana, black tea and white willow are good
sources. And you can prolong the effect of caffeine, which is mildly thermogenic
by itself, by using naringenin, a compound found in grapefruit.

.Another effective chemical to use in conjunction with beta-receptor agonists
is yohimbine, a compound from the bark of the yohimbe tree.
Yohimbe is one of the class of compounds called selective antagonists
of alpha-2 receptors. This action of yohimbine has shown to cause long- term
thermogenesis and fat loss in animals.

Use the right herbal fat loss supplement every day
Controlling excess body water is the last thing you can do to lose body fat.
Especially for women, who have this problem. Bloating and edema prevent
your Lean For Life program, because they make you feel blah and make you
to sit like a slug and avoid exercise.

Diuretic drugs are not the solution, but mildly diuretic foods like melons,
cucumber, grapes, apples, parsley, pineapple and cooked asparagus
all help to shed excess water.
Mil diuretic herbs, like Uva ursi and Sarsaparilla also have a use in this
phase of fat loss.

Form specific, measurable, public, rewarded fat loss goals.
Success is always achieved by setting goals. To improve your performance,
you should set  specific goals and sub-goals and write them down and post
them on the fridge, for example, so that everybody can see them.

Goals have to be specific, measurable and time limited.
“To lose weight” is to vague. Instead for example: to lose 10 lbs of fat by
my next birthday is a good goal.
Lean for Life is a very long-term goal, so you have to use sub-goals to be able
to check your progress.

Finally, you have to make your goals public, so that your  family and friends
can blame you for failure, but praise & reward you for success.