Healthy Diet Includes Eggs

This is such a broad subject that it is impossible to answer it in any one article.

To create a healthy, balanced diet menu, it may be good to focus on individual food items first and determining whether they are a good candidate to be included.

This time we will focus our attention on eggs.

Eggs Nutritional Value  

People love them and people hate them. They have been praised and maligned and praised again. Some experts say egg must be a part of any healthy diet.
Others would ban them altogether.

You will probably agree that this is quite confusing. Who is right? Is it the chicken farmer and the egg industry or the doctors who believe that no cholesterol in food is the best choice?

We are not making any rash judgments. The jury is still at least partially out. Some studies of free range chicken eggs seem to point out that along with the cholesterol inside the eggs there are compounds to neutralize it.

The issue of how chicken are raised, fed and their living environment is a matter that needs to be dealt with elsewhere.

The point on which all experts agree is that eggs contain a variety of indispensable nutrients. So the only issue with eggs seems to be that they contain some cholesterol.

 Eggs have a lot of cholesterol, so for a long time it was considered unhealthy to eat too many. However, advice is changing on this as more research comes out. To my knowledge, no evidence shows that eggs are in any way harmful to our health. In fact, some studies show an improvement in blood lipids from eating eggs. It seems that this high-cholesterol food raises our "good" cholesterol rather than the "bad

But cholesterol is absolutely necessary for the body. That there are at least two kinds of cholesterol one good and one bad is becoming quite well known now. A new school of thought on cholesterol says that if the body has no intake of cholesterol it will manufacture it.

It seems that no definitive conclusion about eggs being healthy or not has been reached by science because of the controversial cholesterol issue. Otherwise, from a nutritional point of view eggs are a super food fit for any balanced diet menu.

Unless you are a vegetarian or have other moral objections to eating eggs you may want to consider including them sparingly in your diet plan.

Authored by http://healthydietweightloss.org

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Obesity is Life Shortening

The headline is not news but this article puts a quantitative face on the truth of it.

Today we would like to share with you some sobering news from Heathday News a publication that often provides us with valuable information regarding our better self care.

TUESDAY, March 17 (HealthDay News) — Being obese can shorten your life, a new study shows.

"Moderate obesity typically shortens life span by about three years," said researcher Gary Whitlock, from the Clinical Trial Service Unit at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. "By moderate obesity, I mean weighing about a third more than is ideal, which for most people would mean being about 50 or 60 pounds overweight."

More than one in three middle-aged Americans are now in this category, Whitlock said. "By contrast, weighing twice your ideal weight — say, an extra 150 pounds — shortens life span by about 10 years," he added.

This obesity level is still not common, but it equals the known 10-year reduction in life span caused by smoking. "So, smoking is about as dangerous as being severely obese, and about three times as dangerous as being moderately obese," he said.

The report is published in the March 18 online edition of The Lancet.

For the study, Whitlock and other members of the Prospective Studies Collaboration collected data on 894,576 men and women who participated in 57 studies. The people in these studies came primarily from western Europe and North America. Their average body-mass index (BMI) was 25.

BMI is a calculation that expresses a relationship between height and weight. People are considered underweight if their BMI is less than 18.5, normal weight when the BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9, overweight when BMI is between 25 and 29.9, and obese when BMI is 30 or more, according to the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

The researchers found that men and women whose BMI was between 22.5 and 25 lived the longest. For a person 5 feet 7 inches tall, his or her optimum weight would be about 154 pounds, they noted.

For those with a BMI over 25, every 10 to 12 pound increase translated to about a 30 percent increased risk of dying. In addition, there was a 40 percent increase in the risk for heart disease, stroke and other vascular disease, a 60 percent to 120 percent increased risk of diabetes, liver disease or kidney disease, a 10 percent increased risk of cancer, and a 20 percent increased risk for lung disease, the researchers reported.

"Obesity causes kidney disease, liver disease and several types of cancer, but the most common way it kills is by causing stroke and, most importantly, heart disease. Obesity causes heart disease by pushing up blood pressure, by interfering with blood cholesterol levels, and by bringing on diabetes," Whitlock said.

People who are moderately obese with a BMI in the 30 to 35 range reduced their life span by two and four years. For those who are severely obese with BMIs between 40 and 45, their life span was reduced by eight to 10 years. That’s comparable to the effects of smoking, Whitlock said.

In fact, people whose weight was below normal also died earlier, due mainly to smoking-related diseases, the researchers noted.

"If you are obese and smoke, then, above all else, quit smoking," Whitlock said. "If you are obese and don’t smoke, then don’t start, and do what you can to avoid further weight gain. By avoiding further weight gain, you may well live a few years longer than you otherwise would do. By quitting smoking, a smoker can expect to gain several extra years of life — about as many as a severely obese person might gain by shedding half of his or her body weight."

Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said this study confirms that the obesity epidemic is "the clear and present danger many of us knew it to be."

The association between BMI and mortality has been challenged in the scientific community, due in part to uncertainty about weight estimates and debate about measurement methods. "Here we have an emphatic reaffirmation of the fundamental issue: Overweight and obesity take years from life," Katz said.

"We know that, in many ways, BMI is a crude measure of the health risks associated with obesity, since not all excess body fat is created equal," he said. "Weight gained around the middle tends to be most dangerous, so for those subject to this pattern, risks may indeed be higher than this study suggests. For those with lower body weight gain, risks may be lower."

A study published in the Nov. 13 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine also found that where weight is centered is a risk factor. Men with the largest waist circumference had more than double the risk of death, and women with the largest waist circumference increased their risk of death by 78 percent.

SOURCES: Gary Whitlock, Ph.D., Clinical Trial Service Unit, University of Oxford, U.K.; David L. Katz, M.D., M.P.H., director, Prevention Research Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn.; March 18, 2009, The Lancet, online 
 

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