Functional foods: healthy choice or hype?

Functional foods, foods with extra 'healthy' ingredients added, are being touted as the answer to a range of conditions from high cholesterol to iodine deficiency. But are they real health food or just hype?

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For much of human existence, food has been a source of nourishment, nutrients and, if you're lucky, some enjoyable flavours.

But in a quest for better health, scientists are now stripping food back to its bare essentials to identify what it is about certain foods that make them so good for you.

These discoveries have led to the rise of so-called 'functional foods' – processed foods that have additional ingredients added to them to enhance their health benefits.

As you walk around the supermarket, you will find plenty of examples of functional foods: orange juice with added calcium, pasta fortified with iron, bread fortified with iodine and folate, margarine that helps lower cholesterol, and yoghurt cultivated with specific bacterial strains.

There is plenty of health hype around functional foods, and their price often reflects this, but how much of a health kick do functional foods really give?

Nutritionist Dr Rosemary Stanton believes functional foods are overwhelmingly a marketing exercise, and have no place in a healthy, balanced diet.

"Many functional foods are designed to replace something that … you would normally get in fruits and vegetables," says Stanton, citing one example of a cracker enriched with lycopene – a chemical found naturally in tomatoes – that can reduce the risk of some cancers.

"They often try to produce something as good as fruit and vegetables, which I think is crazy when we've already got fruit and vegetables."

(W.F.Net - by Bianca Nogrady )

5 Simple Ways to Help You in Good Health

To get started, but habits have a good health is not problematic. We simply change the old habits with these new habits have more health benefits.

Do not skip breakfast 
make your health better 

Here are 5 simple ways to help you in good health:

1. Or exercise capacity : But regular physical activity will help you burn calories and create muscle, which makes you look better and have a hefty body balancing.Exercise could be jogging in the park every morning, cycling to school, take the stairs instead of elevators ...If you want to burn more calories than another, or strengthening exercises and increasing strength.

2. Reduce watching TV :

One of the reasons we sometimes delay the gym is because spent too much time watching TV, playing games, computers ...Should restrict the view but the entertainm

ent it more than 2 hours a day.

3. Reduce fast food : Foods high in calories just contribute to making you more obese. But much to drink or too.

4. Eat five fruits and vegetables per day : In fruits and vegetables contain many vitamins and minerals.

5. Do not skip breakfast : Breakfast helps you start a new day active and alert. If you skip breakfast, you will work in ice cream languid state of focus.Additionally, those who do not eat to fast will feel hungry, so they will eat much at lunch, if the joint followed by a nap competition will absolutely no benefit to stomach.

(W.F.Net) 

Why People Must Be Vegetarian

"A fully divine person is a fully human being. A fully human being is fully divine. Right now we are only half a human being. We do things with hesitation, we do things with ego. We don't believe that it is God who arranges all this for our enjoyment, for our experience. We separate sin and virtue. We make a big deal out of everything, and accordingly judge ourselves and other people. We suffer from our own limitations about what God should do. Understand? Actually, God is inside us and we limit Him. We like to enjoy ourselves and play, but we don't know how. We just say to others, 'Ah! You shouldn't do that,' and to ourselves, 'I shouldn't do that. I must not do this. So,why should I be vegetarian?' Yeah! I know. I am vegetarian because the God inside me wants it." "When we are pure in our deeds, speech and thought, even for a second, all the deities, the gods, and the guardian angels will support us. At that moment, the entire universe belongs to us and supports us, and the throne is there for us to reign upon."