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Showing posts from January, 2011

Obesity: Nature Vs. Nurture

Are there answers to the great obesity debate? For a long time, there was no question regarding the cause of obesity. It was accepted that people who did not watch what they eat and never got physical exercise were putting themselves at great risk for becoming overweight or obese. And then medical science stepped in, evaluated the various cause of obesity, and found that some people may be genetically disposed to becoming overweight or obese. So what is the real answer? Is obesity brought on by genetics or what the individual eats and how much exercise he or she gets? Nature Much ado has been made recently over the finding of what has been politically incorrectly named the "Fat Gene." Supposed to indicate an individual's likelihood to wind up obese, the fat gene is at once a major scientific breakthrough and the cause of heartbreak for everyone found to have inherited this seeming inescapable fate of obesity. However, this new finding isn't the only known reason for

Green Tea & Fat Oxidation

A human study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows findings that a purified extract of green tea may increase energy expenditure and increase fat oxidation by 33%. The World Health Organization estimates that by 2015, there will be more than 1.5 billion overweight people adding to healthy costs above $117 billion per year. This is just in the US alone. Green tea has been studied intensely for a little while now and the focus has been on the compound epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). The three ways they are studying EGCG to help with weight loss is with increased energy metabolism and fat oxidation, inhibit fat cell development, or reduce lipid absorption and increase your fat excretion. Some scientists have reported that caffeine must also be present for EGCG to be beneficial to weight loss. Research that was performed in collaboration with researchers from the University of Medicine Berlin confirm that there is a link between caffeine and EGCG.

Aging Healthfully

Over the past century, life expectancy has grown tremendously to nearly 80 years of age. This increase has led to a surge in interest on the best methods of maintaining our youth, and age as gracefully & healthfully as possible. This is probably due to the fact that we now die less from infectious disease, and more from chronic, degenerative diseases. People don’t want to live longer with a poor quality of life; we want to live longer while maintaining a high level of functional capacity and high quality of life. This is where eating a balanced diet rich in real, whole, minimally processed foods, exercising regularly, minimizing stress and supplementing appropriately comes into play. There is an absolute boatload of information out there on how to maximize your nutrition, exercise to improve your health and steps you can take to minimize stress. But what about proper supplementation? Unfortunately there is also a lot of hyperbole and misinformation on supplementati