Butter or Margarine? Hmmmmm...

This is interesting ...

Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into this wonderful stuff wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back. It was a white substance with no food appeal, so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter. How do you like it? They have come out with some clever new flavorings.

DO YOU KNOW.. the REAL difference between margarine and butter? Read on to the end...this is just starting to get interesting!

Both have the same amount of calories.

Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams compared to 5 grams.

Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study.

Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods.

Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few, and only
because they are added!

Butter tastes much better than margarine and it can enhance the flavors of other foods.

Butter has been around for centuries while margarine has been around for less
than 100 years.


And now, for Margarine…

Very high in trans fatty acids.

Triple risk of coronary heart disease.

Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers
HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol)
Increases the risk of cancers up to five fold.
Lowers quality of breast milk.
Decreases immune response.
Decreases insulin response.

And here's the most disturbing fact.... HERE IS THE PART THAT
IS VERY INTERESTING!

Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC!!!

This fact alone was enough to have me avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is hydrogenated (this means hydrogen is used to change the molecular structure)

You can try this yourself: Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or
shaded area. (open) Within a couple of days you will note a couple of things:

Ø no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something)
Ø it does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value.
Ø nothing will grow on it. Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not find a home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic.

Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?

Regular readers,
If you have been keeping up with me for the last few years you already know a lot of this. I don’t use butter OR margarine. I use something better than either of those. If you want to know what, send me an e-mail.

I posted this almost the way I received it. I had to do a little editing and cleanup, but the text is mostly the way it came to me. This might be the seventh or even the twenty-seventh time I’ve received this, but I don’t believe I’ve ever posted it anywhere.

Weight Loss Project - update

Tomorrow evening will mark 7 full days on my modified juicing fast, so I'll weigh in and let you know how the first week went. I actually started my project on a Friday, but didn't add the juice fast to it until last Wednesday morning.

Now I must 'fess up. I broke my own rules this last weekend while watching the NFL playoffs, and devoured an order of boneless, skinless wings. Still, I think they were fairly low-fat, and besides, the weight loss has continued fairly well, so I don't feel too guilty. No, that's not accurate. I don't feel even a little bit guilty. I want to be consistent with everything I've said in the past about dieting. DON'T go on a diet. Just don't waste your time. Instead, change your eating habits. If one certain day you just have an urge, and you keep it in moderation, so what? It is the day to day habitual pattern that will make all the difference in your life. If you are in the habit of eating a big bowl of ice cream each evening, that is likely to be a big problem for you eventually. However, if your daily routine is to eat a healthy, balanced meal each evening and you usually refrain from eating dessert, one bowl of ice cream should be yours to enjoy with no guilt. Just not every night.

Make it your goal to eat a well balanced, varied diet, with lots of brightly colored fresh fruits and vegetables in it. Try to avoid too many meals that fit the traditional pattern of meat, veggie, and a carbohydrate. The typical "white, brown, and green" meal of a baked potato, steak, and string beans. Not good. You would be better off to eat the potatoe and skip the meat, or eat the meat and skip the potato. Also, forget about three square meals a day, and shoot for five smaller meals a day. If you eat every three hours or so, smaller meals each time, you will more completely digest each meal and maintain a healthier glucose level in your system. Just make sure your last meal is at leat three to four hours before bedtime. Don't drink cold drinks with your meal either. A quick fast food burger with greasy fries and a soft drink will not do your long term health much good. Better to skip all drinks during and right after a meal.

Tommorow night - the weigh in!

Vegetable juice

My recipe is very flexible, but it always seems to include at least these items. Quantities of each vary a bit. If you want specific juice recipes for specific purposes e-mail me @ thenew50@gmail.com and I will try to help with that. Many conditions respond well to juicing. But for general health and specifically right now for weight loss with juice fasting, here's what I throw in the juicer.

1 bunch of broccoli stems and all - just cut off the dried ends
8 large carrots - cut off about an inch of the top, juice the rest
6 or 8 stalks of celery - the whole thing
1 or two stalks of fennel - the whole thing
leaf spinach - about three handfuls, squeezed together, pushed thru with some carrot

Here is where the juicing purists and I will differ. I don't feel like growing and juicing my own barley grass or wheat grass. Actually I like barley grass juice better because it is not as bitter as wheat grass. But what my wife and I decided to do is purchase some commercially prepared green juice that includes wheat grass, barley grass, kiwi, spirulina, blue/green algae, etc, and just pour that into our vegetable juice pitcher along with the rest. To juice the grasses properly requires a different type of juicer (press type) and I don't want to buy one. Besides, although I can buy bags of wheat grass at the farmers market, half of it will rot before I can use it. They don't seem to ever have barley grass. There are some excellent sites online that can help you set up your own growing flats if you really want to grow your own.

After the morning glass of water followed about 45 minutes later by fresh fruit juice, I drink an 8 oz serving of vegetable juice every two hours. I drink one more glass of fruit juice in the afternoon in place of the veggie juice. Then we have a fairly healthy, fairly low-fat evening meal. This is a variation of the juicing fast that makes it more tolerable for my wife and I both. The results are not as rapid or dramatic, but that is fine with us. I suspect that many people shy away from more extreme measures and so do nothing at all. If you decide to try this for up to 21 days, be sure you take a good multi-vitamin every day just to be sure you are getting all the basic nutrients, including folic acid, B6 and B12. These can help keep you homocysteine at a safe level. You may want to read my article on homocysteine posted @ http://wellnessafter50.blogspot.com/.

You will probably really look forward to your evening meals if you follow this plan. I know I do!
If at any time during the day you feel a little hungry, do not drink additional juice. You don't want or need the added calories. Just get a drink of cold filtered water.

Let us know how this works for you. Your comments might inspire others to do something healthy for themselves.

Fruit juice recipe

For my morning fruit juice I use the following:
4 to 6 apples
1 pear
grapes - a bunch about the size of my fist
1/3 of a pineapple
1/2 cup blueberries

I juice these items, finishing with the apple because it is most firm and helps push through the softer fruits. I find this blend to be delicious and sweet, but as I mentioned in an earlier article, it is rich in calories, so I dilute it with 1/3 water. This gives me enough for about three days, drinking an 8 ounce glass in the morning and one in the afternoon. tomorrow we'll talk about the vegetable juice recipe.

Weight Loss Project - The Juice

I want to tell you a bit about today's trip to the farmers market for fresh fruits and vegetables to juice. But first let me say that I understand that for some of you, buying and using a juicer is not practical or possible. A good juicer is not inexpensive, and it does take some time to clean and cut and juice the fruits and vegetables, and there is a good bit of cleanup as well. So if it is a matter of cost, we'll talk about some alternatives to buying your own juicer. Ask friends and relatives if they have a juicer you can borrow. You might be surprised how many people own juicers they never use. But if it is a matter of the time it takes to do this, remember that drinking your meals means you don't have to spend time preparing those meals or washing dishes. So don't talk your self out of this because you think you don't have time. You do. You have time for everything you believe is important, whatever it is. Shouldn't your health be pretty high on your list of priorities?

If buying a juicer is not in your budget, can you go to a health food store or natural foods grocery, or maybe a large farmers market? At the very least, can you take some extra time on your next trip to the grocery store to look in the produce area for bottled juices? There are now several companies that grow their own produce and market their own labels of juices, and I'm not talking about orange juice from concentrates. In our local chain grocery store there are many juices with no added sugar or preservatives that contain what juice, barley juice, spirulina, kiwi, celery, you name it. In the farmers market we found fresh wheat grass juice in addition to a number of other interesting choices. The only drawbacks to some of the bottled juices have to do with the inability to add or leave out certain things according to your individual needs or personal taste, and the fact that some are calorically very dense. To reduce the number calories in a single 8 ounce glass of juice, you can dilute it with filtered water. Lets say that you determine that one serving is 280 calories. Why not mix a half glass of water with a half glass of juice and only take in 140 calories? Easy enough. My point is that you can find ways to do this if you really want to. You might not be one of those folks whose results are not typical, losing 30 pounds in 30 days. But would you be happy to lose 30 pounds in the next 90 days?

Ok, back to the farmers market. Where we live there is a huge international market, and I love going there because you can find fruits and vegetables you've never seen before. I like to try new things, so when I see someone selecting some strange looking fruit or vegetable, I politely ask them how they prepare it and what it tastes like. they are always happy to comply. For my weight loss project though, I'm going to stick to what I know for the next few weeks. My goal is not to follow some published book or online system, but to create my own based on all I've read. The principle of of weight loss or weight gain is simple: to lose, consume fewer calories than you burn; to gain, put in more than you burn. Works pretty much like your bank account.

As you decide what juices to prepare, remember this simple guideline. Fruit juices to cleanse, vegetables juices to repair or build. But be sure to drink a good combination of both. If you are trying to lose weight, you will want to drink more vegetable juices than fruit juices. And remember that fruit juices usually have more calories per ounce than vegetable.

My shopping list today looked like this:
BROCCOLI
CARROTS
CELERY
CUCUMBER
FENNEL
SPINACH
WHEAT GRASS/BARLEY GRASS

APPLES
BLUEBERRY
GRAPES
PEAR
PINEAPPLE
GRAPEFRUIT
ORANGE
STRAWBERRY

My total bill today was about $38. I will make two pitchers of juice this evening. Including cleanup time it might take me 2 hours. I will have enough juice for the next four days, or maybe five. Each of those days I will begin with a 10 ounce glass of cold, filtered water. 45 minutes or so after that I will have a glass off fruit juice consisting of apple, carrot, parsley, blueberry, and strawberry most of the time. For variety, I will make grapefruit juice by peeling a thin layer of skin off, leaving as much white pulp as possible, and maybe throwing in half an apple. Same thing with orange juice. It taste nothing like the orange juice you've been drinking! It is thicker and creamier and a lot healthier. Every two hours I will have an 8 oz. to 10 oz. glass of juice. The water first, then fruit juice, then every two hours another glass of juice. Here's the important part, as far as I'm concerned. Each time I drink a glass of fruit juice, the next TWO times I drink vegetable juice. Perhaps because I lack discipline, or maybe because I'm not in a rush to reach my goal, I will eat a relatively "normal" meal each evening. Tonight it is a nice filet of wild caught salmon in an orange juice reduction with some steamed broccoli. Oh, and I will admit to a couple of cookies. See! You can do this! More tomorrow. If you have questions, let me know. Comments are welcome.

DIABETES - TYPE II EPIDEMIC

What’s behind this epidemic? How can you prevent it?

Type II diabetes has reached epidemic proportions in the United States and around the globe. What has led to this? There’s really no mystery. There have been a number of trends in our society, especially in the US, that have led inevitably toward this situation.
Consider that news headlines almost weekly have something to report concerning obesity, especially among children. When the number of super-sized fast food meals exceeds the number of minimally processed home-cooked meals week after week, the result is to be expected. Add to this the trend toward more and more time spent on the phone, in front of the television or playing video games, and less time spent outdoors playing, riding bikes, shooting hoops or exploring, what else could we expect? Now we see a nation of middle age adults and baby boomers who get even less exercise than their children, sitting in front of the television every night with a remote glued to their hand, and we wonder what has gone wrong. We eat over processed food that provides less than adequate nutrition, we walk the equivalent of about 100 yards a day, we park as close to the store as possible, ride elevators and avoid stairs, and use every possible excuse to avoid physical activity of any sort. There seems to be general agreement that obesity and inactivity may both contribute to the onset of type II diabetes for many. But even with all these factors at work against us, there is something else we might have missed…another factor that is far less obvious, but perhaps far more deadly.

Go right now to your food pantry or your refrigerator and look at a few food labels. Look for the words, “partially hydrogenated…….”. If you don’t see that, then look for “shortening”. After you’ve done this tiny bit of personal research, come back and read the rest of this. I’ll wait. . . . . . . . . .

What did you find? If you have cookies or crackers or just about any other baked goods on your shelf, you’ve got this stuff in your house. These are TRANS FATTY ACIDS. We’ll refer to them as TFA’s here. The reason we find them in so many processed foods is because they help keep the food product “fresh”. Instead of going bad in a week to ten days, it might still appear to be edible in ten MONTHS! Great, right? Well, if you are a food manufacturer, yes. You can now make your product in Maine in January and ship it to California and know that when it finally gets on the shelf at the local convenience store it will still look great in April.

Do you have a can of shortening (no brand names here) on your shelf. THAT is a can of trans fatty acids. Partially hydrogenated oil. You can keep this stuff for five years and it won’t go “bad”. But YOU will go bad. Here’s the scoop on TFA’s. Your body has no good use for TFA’s. It cannot digest TFA’s. In fact the safe adult daily intake of trans fatty acids is ZERO milligrams. The TFA’s actually harden the cell walls, making it harder for your cells to absorb nutrients or excrete waste. They also make it harder for your cells to communicate with each other. That’s right! So if you get a little infection over here, and you need a little help from over there, the message doesn’t get through. Like the cavalry in the fort under attack by a band of Indians, you send out a rider to get help from another fort. But he can’t get out the gate, so you’re on your own.
Infection gets worse, spreads, and soon you have a serious medical problem. TFA’s seem to be directly linked to heart disease too. Back in the 50’s we were told to stop eating butter. Switch to margarine!!! Hmm. What is margarine? Partially hydrogenated oil, with a little sodium and coloring and a few other tidbits, so it looks and tastes a little like butter. As the use of margarine and shortening in the home and in food manufacturing increased, along with the spread of our interstate highway system, the incidence of heart disease went…UP, not down. We took the advice of the medical community and made ourselves more vulnerable to illness.

What’s the solution? YOU are. If you buy food, read the label. If it says “partially hydrogenated”….anything, don’t buy it. Is it really that simple? No. You will find
it quite difficult to find ANY label in the cookie and cracker aisle that doesn’t have those words on it. But you can get some really great cookie recipes that use applesauce that you can make at home, with no TFA’s. (here are just a couple of URL’s to get you started)
www.baking911.com/healthy/baking_101.htm
http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/low-fat-baking3.htm

Oh, I know, we just don’t have time to bake cookies any more. But we are killing ourselves, so baking seems like a good alternative, doesn’t it? The more we avoid consuming highly processed foods, the healthier we can be. And it’s not just cookies and crackers that we need to watch out for. It is prepared foods of all sorts. Buy a prepared meatloaf, or some of that delicious lasagna in the frozen food case. Or maybe read the label and then go home and make your own.

Will this alone help you avoid type II diabetes? Perhaps not. But if you are willing to do this much, perhaps you will also be willing to take a little walk, 30 or 40 minutes, a few times a week. Maybe you will also learn something about portion control. And maybe by exercising some self-control we can turn this epidemic around. Good health to you.