Everyone has heard the news about antioxidants and their importance to good health and proper nutrition. As science learns more about antioxidants, their value and potential increases.  Indeed, antioxidants have shown promise in everything from preventing heart disease to slowing the degeneration of the eyes and brain.  Antioxidants work in a fairly straightforward way.  What makes them so effective is their ability to neutralize a group of highly reactive, highly destructive compounds known as free radicals.

The production of free radicals is a normal bodily process, and it’s part of the process of breathing and living.  Free radicals are usually controlled by our body’s defense system.  But, anything that weakens the body’s natural defenses weakens its ability to  fight off these free radicals.  Some of the weakening agents include environmental pollution, excess UV radiation, consumption of alcohol, too much stress, and wrong diet.  When the body becomes too full of free radicals, it is more likely to get sick.  Free radicals can damage the structure and function of cells in the body.   Free radicals may also contribute to the aging process and may play a role in a great many illnesses, including cancer and heart disease. A fast and easy way of getting antioxidants is through fruit and vegetable juices. Wailana Yoga has over 60 different exotic fruit and vegetable juice and smoothie recipes you will surely enjoy.

While vitamin supplements containing antioxidants such as vitamin C can be important, there is no substitute for a healthy diet.  It’s estimated that foods contain more than 4,000 compounds that have antioxidant qualities so eating a healthy diet is the only way to take advantage of these antioxidant
properties.  In addition to the well known antioxidants like vitamin C and vitamin E, healthy foods like fruits, vegetables and whole grains also contain a lot of lesser known antioxidants.  We are only just discovering the real role antioxidants have in keeping the body healthy.

Here are some of the major antioxidants:

Vitamin C

Vitamin C is probably the most studied of all the antioxidant vitamins.  Also known as ascorbic acid, vitamin C is a water soluble vitamin found in all bodily fluids, and it’s thought to be one of body’s first lines of defense against infection and disease.  Since vitamin C is a water soluble vitamin, it is not stored and must be consumed in adequate quantities every day.  Good dietary sources of vitamin C include citrus fruits such as oranges and grapefruits, green peppers, broccoli and other green leafy vegetables, strawberries, cabbage and potatoes.

Vitamin E

Vitamin E is a fat soluble vitamin that is stored in the liver and other tissues.  Vitamin E has been studied for its effects on everything from delaying the aging process to healing a sunburn.  While vitamin E is not a miracle worker, it is an important antioxidant, and it’s important that the diet contain sufficient amounts of vitamin E.  Good dietary sources of this important nutrient include wheat germ, nuts, seeds, whole grains, vegetable oil, fish liver oil and green leafy veggies.

Beta-carotene

Beta-carotene is the nutrient that gives flamingos their distinctive pink color (they get it from the shrimp they eat).  In the human world, beta-carotene is the most widely studied of over 600 carotenoids that have thus far been discovered.  The role of beta-carotene in nature is to protect the skins of dark green, yellow and orange fruits from the damaging effects of solar radiation.  Scientists believe that beta-carotene plays a similar protective role in the human body.  Sources of beta-carotene in the diet include such foods as carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, broccoli, tomatoes, collard greens, kale, cantaloupe, peaches and apricots.

Selenium

Selenium is one of the most important minerals in a healthy diet, and it has been studied for its ability to prevent cell damage.  Scientists see this ability to protect cells from damage as possibly important in the prevention of cancer, and selenium is being studied for possible cancer preventative properties.  It is important to get the selenium you need from your diet, since large doses of selenium supplements can be toxic.  Fortunately, selenium is easily found in a healthy diet.  Good sources of dietary selenium include fish and shellfish, red meat, whole grains, poultry and eggs, and garlic.  Vegetables grown in selenium rich soils are also good sources of dietary selenium.

Eating well balanced meals, exercising right, and de-stressing is key to helping your body detoxify itself and get the antioxidants it needs.  Wailana Yoga Mats has many varieties of mats for yoga practice.

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Duration : 0:6:14

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http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/gram_calc.htm

Filmed, directed and edited by my son Tomas Martinsen-Hickman – http://www.youtube.com/user/TomasAMH To order a copy of the book “A Recipe for Health by Anette Martinsen” go to www.amazon.co.uk or from www.anettemartinsen.com Credit: Moby – In My Heart

Duration : 0:9:35

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Last month we had the pleasure of
taking a vacation in Catalina with
bestselling author Jeffrey Masson, and
his pediatrician wife, Leila Masson MD.

While there, we interviewed both of them
on a number of topics, one of them being
whether kids should be raised on a vegan
diet.

You may be interested to hear what Dr. Leila
has to say on this subject.

And your friends who ask questions like:

“How do your kids get their protein?”

“Isn’t the vegan diet dangerous for children?”

“Don’t your kids just want to be like normal
kids?”

Those friends of yours might want to watch
this, too.

More info at http://www.vegsource.com

Duration : 0:3:12

Technorati Tags: children, diet, disease, health, obesity, prevention, vegan, vegetarian

The transcript of the conversation between Nikki and now president-elect Obama appears below…

Senator Barack Obama: The young lady in the t-shirt, right there.

Nikki Benoit: Thank you, Senator, very much for your strong environmental position.

The United Nations actually has reiterated that factory farming is contributing more to global greenhouse gas emissions than all of transportation. I think that as a global community we really need to be the leader and moving more towards non-factory farming animal agriculture. It’s very egregious. There’s 10 billion land animals that we are funnelling our precious water and grain through when 70 per cent of all of our grain could help feed the world’s hungry. So, as the next leader of the most amazing nation in the world, how can we set the example on the more nutritional, plant-based diet that’s more eco-friendly and sustainable, that can maintain our water resources and all of our grain. Thank you very much.

Senator Barack Obama: Okay. Well, it’s a great question.

Now, I have to say in the interests of full disclosure, that I do like a steak once in a while. I’m just being honest. I like barbecue. I’m not going to lie. But the young lady makes a very important point and that is this: right now, our food system world-wide is under enormous pressure. It’s under enormous pressure because as a consequence of climate change, you’ve had severe changes in weather patterns. We don’t fully understand what these effects are. But, for example, Australia’s had huge drought which has taken a lot of crops. Grain production has been much lower. And supplies are tight. You’re starting to see riots around food in places like Haiti and other poor countries around the world. And what is also true is that as countries like China and India become wealthier, they start changing their food habits; they start eating more meat, more animals. And what happens then is because it takes more grain to produce a pound of beef than if they were just eating the grain, what ends up happening is that it puts huge pressure on food supplies.

Americans would actually benefit from a change in diet. I don’t think that that’s something that we should legislate but I think that it is something that, as part of our overall health care system, we should encourage because, for example if we reduced obesity down to the rates that existed in 1980, we would save the medicare system a trillion dollars. We would reduce diabetes rates. We would reduce heart disease. So, the fact that we subsidise some of these big agribusiness operations that are not necessarily producing healthy food and we discourage, or we don’t subsidise, farmers who are producing fruits and vegetables and small scale farming that gets produce immediately to consumers as opposed to having it processed. The fact that we are not doing more to make sure that healthy food is in the schools. All those things don’t make sense. It is important for us to re-examine our overall food policy so that we’re encouraging good habits and not bad habits. For example, just making sure there are more fruits and vegetables in school lunch programs. That would make an enormous difference in how our children’s diets develop. That would make us healthier over the long term. It would cut our health care costs and maybe it would help people elsewhere in the world, who are in less wealthy countries, feed themselves as well. So, it’s a great question. It’s important.

Websites:
Barack Obama – www.barackobama.com
Nikki Benoit – www.myspace.com/nikki1sky
Vegan Future – www.myspace.com/veganfuture

Duration : 0:5:0

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