Another food that gets touted as heart healthy is margarine. It’s claimed that margarine is a healthy alternative to butter – as butter is full of the heart damaging saturated fat that raises cholesterol (however remember my blog post earlier this week that dispels the myth that saturated fat contributes to heart disease) and margarine … Read more
This week I’m going to discuss some common misconceptions concerning healthy eating – I’m going to talk about saturated fat, red meat consumption, margarine, fruit consumption and fruit juice. Current dietary wisdom would have us believe that saturated fat and red meat are bad for us and things like margarine, fruit and fruit juice are good … Read more
So you can see from the tables and classifications of carbohydrates it is sensible to eat low GL foods for the majority of the time, the book – The Low GL Diet, by Patrick Holford explains all you need to know. But I want to finish this piece with a little bit of contention. The … Read more
The next step in the evolution of these carbohydrate ranking systems is the Insulin Load (IL). The IL is a measure used to quantify the amount of insulin the pancreas releases in response to various foods – remarkably not just carbohydrates. The IL is similar to the GI and GL but instead of measuring how … Read more
To solve the problems of the GI, researchers came up the Glycemic load (GL) ranking system. This is based on how quickly the carbohydrate in a food releases its carbohydrate into the blood stream (The GI) and the amount of carbohydrate in a portion of that particular food. So the GL takes in to account … Read more
The Glycemic index (GI) is a measure of how quickly 50g of carbohydrate from a given food raises blood sugar levels compared to 50g of glucose.
Many of you will have heard of the hormone insulin, perhaps some of you know a person with type 1 diabetes who has to inject insulin many times a day to keep their blood sugar stable, or perhaps you may be or know a person with type 2 diabetes who has been told they have … Read more
Today I’m going to discuss how inflammation might be a cause for type 2 diabetes. This type of diabetes is generally considered to be the results of being overweight and from eating too much sugar which makes the cells resistant to the effects of insulin.
Today I’m going to discuss how inflammation may be a cause for cancer. A growing number of cancer researchers are coming to the conclusion that cancer is basically an inflammatory disease and that the longer there is inflammation present in a tissue or an organ, the higher the risk of associated carcinogenesis.
Today I’m going to discuss how what Dr Barry Sears calls “silent inflammation” can contribute not only to heart disease but also to high blood pressure or what is sometimes referred to as hypertension. Now, hypertension is somewhat of a unique disease as there aren’t any noticeable symptoms in the early stages, so it’s a … Read more
Yesterday I told you about two different types of inflammation – classic inflammation, the type of inflammation that happens when you stub your toe or get a splinter in your finger and silent inflammation that results from chronic low level damage to cells. Today I’m going to tell you how this low level inflammation can … Read more
This week I’m going to tell you about a process in the body that is now believed by medical experts to be involved in all known disease processes from heart disease to cancer to Alzheimer’s disease – inflammation. Most of you will have experienced inflammation before. Have you ever got a splinter in your finger? … Read more