Now-a-days with all the talk about losing weight, eating too much fat or not enough protein, many restaurants have began gearing their menus toward a healthier way of eating. More people are becoming conscious about what they eat; therefore, finding items on the menus of their favorite restaurants is no longer difficult. Most restaurants will prepare foods the way you request without giving you an unwanted response like, “What, no butter on your potato, it won’t taste very good.” Many chefs nowadays have made substitutions in their cooking to keep the taste in the dishes.

Here is a list of some of your favorite types of restaurants and what to order, what to avoid and how to order to stay in your eating plans:

Mexican

Two very popular dishes when going out for Mexican food are chili rellenos and cheese enchiladas. These dishes should no longer be on your list if you want to eat healthy and not blow your eating plan. You would wind up getting more fat grams in that one meal than you are allowed all day. The main items to avoid at a Mexican Restaurant are: cheese, sour cream, avocado, flour tortillas, refried beans and the fried tortilla chips. If you know where you are going in advance, you can bring some baked chips along with you or ask the waitress for some steamed corn tortillas to dip into the salsa. Most salsa is fine to eat, but avoid the chili con queso dip as an appetizer (its loaded with fat). Remember, it’s not just the fat by itself you want to avoid, it is the fat with the carbohydrates. Here is a comparison of good choices vs. bad choices:

Typical Meal

• Chili con queso/chips
• Chili Rellenos
• Refried Beans
• Mexican rice (with lard)
• Gold Margarita

Better Choice

• Salsa with corn tortillas (steamed)
• Chicken Fajitas–use corn tortillas or 1 flour tortilla (if you can’t resist)
• Lettuce and tomato
• Black beans
• Mexican Rice (if no lard is used)
• Lite Margarita

Chinese

Beyond the contrary belief, Chinese food can be very healthy eating if you know how to order. Of course, just like many other types of food preparations, Chinese food is prepared with many types of oils. Some favorite Chinese dishes are battered and fried. Fried rice, egg rolls and Szechwan dishes with peanuts and almonds are extremely high in fat. The Chinese use steamed white rice and many vegetables in their dishes, so take advantage of these items. Here is an example of a popular meal versus what you should try next time:

Typical Meal

• Egg drop soup
• Egg roll
• Fried rice
• Kung Pao chicken

Better Choice

• Skip the soup–too high in sodium
• Steamed vegetable dumplings
• Steamed rice
• Steamed Shrimp or chicken with ginger sauce on the side
• Steamed vegetables

Italian

Now, this one may be your hardest meal to avoid the fat and high carbohydrates to keep your intake in balance. Your foods to avoid at Italian restaurants are cheese, sausage, high fat ground beef and cream sauces. The famous fettuccine alfredo is loaded with fat. Remember, just ordering pasta with marinara sauce (no protein) is a very high carbohydrate meal–usually 80-100 grams in the meal. If you want to keep your carbohydrate intake low and still get satisfied, order like this:

Typical Meal

• Fettuccine Alfredo
• Garlic Bread
• Salad with heavy oil dressing
• Red Wine

Better Choice

• Shrimp or scallops with angel hair pasta–marinara sauce
• 1 piece of bread (no garlic butter)
• Salad – green and tomatoes w/ red wine & vinegar dressing
• White wine spritzer

As you can see, out of the three types of meals you might choose to eat when dining out, you can still maintain your healthy eating habits and not have to “go off the plan” every time you go out to dinner. Do no let dining out be your excuse to over eat!!! Stay in control of your eating – You only have one body – Take care of it!

It’s not exactly a crystal ball, but doctors have a new way to predict the future health of your knees: Recent research shows that patients who have both osteoarthritis of the knee and bone cysts are likely headed for severe arthritis. But don’t get discouraged, if you’re not there yet, you still have time to change the outcome.

To understand what this means to arthritis sufferers, we approached Patience White, MD, chief public health officer at the National Arthritis Foundation, pediatric rheumatologist and a professor of medicine and pediatrics in the department of medicine at George Washington University; she indicated that bone cysts (abnormal pockets of synovial fluid, which is the liquid that normally lubricates joints) are present in about half of patients with osteoarthritis of the knee, most particularly if it is advanced. She said the relationship between the two is a chicken and egg dilemma; it’s unclear whether people have bone cysts because of their severe arthritis or the bone cysts actually contribute to the severity of the arthritis.

To learn more about this relationship, researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, recruited and examined 109 people with knee osteoarthritis. About half of these people also had bone cysts. The group was then reexamined two years later, and researchers found that:

• Patients whose previous MRI showed both bone cysts and arthritis at the start of the study experienced an average 9.3% loss of cartilage.
• Those who’d had arthritis and bone marrow lesions, (which are less serious abnormalities that may or may not lead to bone cysts), had a 6.3% cartilage loss.
• Individuals with arthritis only, no cysts or bone lesions, experienced only a 2.6% cartilage loss.

With increasing bone abnormalities (i.e., lesions and cysts), the likelihood that a patient would require knee replacement also rose significantly. This research was reported in the March 2010 issue of Arthritis Research & Therapy.

Fight Arthritis Aggressively!

Dr. White told me that there’s more to be learned from a larger osteoarthritis study going on now at the National Institutes of Health. In the meantime, she said there’s not much you can do to treat bone cysts. (They’re removed surgically only in rare cases where they present specific difficulties.) But their presence should be viewed as a call to action. To that end, Dr. White urges anyone with knee osteoarthritis to:

• Stay active as movement is the best medicine, Dr. White said. Physical activities such as swimming, walking, stretching and range-of-motion exercises keep your joints flexible and improve muscle strength, which helps take the strain off joints. If you are not sure about the right exercises for people with arthritis, check with your doctor and go to www.Arthritis.org and look for the AF Life Improvement Series that offers programs and DVDs on how to exercise.
• Shed pounds if you are overweight. The heavier you are, the more damage is done to weight-bearing joints like the knees. Every one pound lost reduces the load on each knee when you stand or walk by four pounds. That’s a big result from just a bit of weight loss!

It’s become such a stressful hassle to fly; most people wouldn’t have a hard time believing that doing so could cause heart problems.  But this particular warning has nothing to do with the stresses of late flights and airport security or even the likelihood that you’ll get exposed to illness from a fellow flier.  A recent study from the Harvard School of Public Health found that some people may unexpectedly experience cardiac arrhythmia, (extra heartbeats,) while flying.

The study brought together 39 men and women (average age was 63), one-third of whom had been diagnosed with heart disease. Over the two-day study period, they each spent two five-hour sessions in a hypobaric chamber, one session simulated atmospheric conditions at sea level, while the other session created the air pressure conditions you would experience in the cabin of a jetliner flying at 20,000 to 40,000 feet. The participants’ heart rates were monitored during both tests. Those without heart disease were unaffected.  But among those with heart disease, six people experienced arrhythmias. Interestingly, though, none were aware of the extra beats.

Calling these findings “statistically significant,” the study’s lead author, Eileen McNeely, PhD, an instructor in the department of environmental and occupational medicine and epidemiology research at the Harvard School of Public Health, told me that researchers are now trying to determine the extent to which the results are “clinically significant.” “It’s obvious that there are some physiological changes associated with flying,” she said, “but we’re not sure about the magnitude of the risk.” She explained that sustained arrhythmia brings an increased risk for stroke or cardiac arrest. In the study, the extra beats were not sustained.  ”But we don’t know if this is always the case,” she said.

Dr. McNeely pointed out that the available data document very few in-flight medical emergencies, so the overall risk that this will happen is quite low. And it’s worth noting that there’s no research available that follows the health of air travelers after they’ve landed, so we don’t know whether passengers have medical issues later that are connected to arrythmias that occurred in the air. Dr. McNeely thinks that it is important to learn more about physiological changes people experience while flying to ascertain whether there are specific dangers that warrant taking precautions, or even, at least for particularly vulnerable people, not flying.

In the meantime, she says it makes sense for airline passengers to follow the health advice currently given to people traveling to high-altitude locations in the mountains. To prepare for flying, Dr. McNeely advises that otherwise healthy men over age 45 and women over 55 or who are postmenopausal (categories that put people at greater risk of arrhythmia) should:

• Drink plenty of fluids — Drink lots the day before you fly and during your flight. Dehydration can make you more vulnerable to cardiac problems. Avoid alcohol for the same reason.
• Get plenty of rest. Try to get as much rest in the few days before your flight as you can. In other words, don’t run yourself ragged getting ready with the idea that you’ll get to catch up on sleep once onboard.
• Avoid excess stress — Pack early and leave plenty of time to get to the airport and through security. (Interesting note: Noise can be a central nervous system stressor, noise-canceling headphones in flight can help you stay relaxed.)

The risk of in-flight emergency is higher for people with heart disease or who have a lung condition that inhibits oxygen uptake (such as emphysema). For these people, Dr. McNeely advises doing all of the above, plus:

• Avoid long walks through the airport. Take the in-airport shuttle so you don’t wear yourself out before your flight.
• Ask your cardiologist whether you should bring supplemental oxygen or a portable oxygen concentrator on board.
• Under a doctor’s supervision, consider regular supplementationwith L-carnitine and Co-enzyme Q-10. Both of these can limit the ill-effects of decreased oxygen delivery to the heart.

Source(s):

Eileen McNeely, PhD, instructor, Harvard School of Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Medicine and Epidemiology Research, Boston.

Reprinted with the permission of:
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Want to give yourself a better chance of avoiding Alzheimer’s disease? Get your eyes checked. New research reveals that treating vision problems can actually reduce the risk for certain types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.

Seeds for this study were planted with information from the Aging, Demographics, and Memory Study, when University of Michigan researchers observed that people with dementia tended to have had fewer eye procedures prior to their diagnoses than those without dementia. This led the team to ask two questions:

1. Does poor vision contribute to the development of dementia?
2. Does treating visual disorders reduce the likelihood of developing dementia?

Can You See Dementia in Your Future?

Using data from Medicare and the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study, the Michigan researchers followed 625 elderly Americans- none of whom had dementia at the outset- for an average of 10 years. Based on a scale that ranked vision from excellent (one) to totally blind (six), they found that the risk for dementia increased by an average of 52% with each step up the scale. Mary A.M. Rogers, PhD, a clinical epidemiologist and the study’s lead author said that the study results suggest the problems with declining vision preceded the dementia. She said that this is the first epidemiologic study, to her knowledge, that points to treatment of vision problems as being protective against the development of late-life dementia.

Some of the connections between poor vision and dementia symptoms seem obvious, while others are not yet understood; for instance, Dr. Rogers pointed out that people with poor vision may be less likely to participate in the kinds of activities, such as reading, playing board games and engaging in physical activities which can be protective against cognitive decline. She said that other research indicates that vision loss can lead to structural changes in the brain, but notes that more studies are needed to understand why.

See Your Doctor

The truly promising news of this study is the notion that dementia might be preventable.  Dr. Rogers points out that when elderly people received appropriate treatment for their visual difficulties,  such as corneal transplant, cataract removal and lens insertion, and treatment for retinal detachment, lesions and other eye disorders, their probability of developing dementia decreased. Even one visit to an ophthalmologist was associated with a lower risk.

The bad news, however, is that at this point Medicare coverage of vision problems is spotty. While only about 13% of the Medicare population has Alzheimer’s disease, this group accounts for 34% of Medicare spending; and the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is increasing. Dr. Rogers believes it would be very worthwhile to investigate whether expanding vision screenings and treatment to more elderly Americans would in fact save money for Medicare.

In the meantime, add “preventing dementia” to the list of reasons why having your vision checked is a worthwhile endeavor.

Mary A.M. Rogers, PhD, research assistant professor, department of internal medicine, University of Michigan, and research director of the Patient Safety Enhancement Program, University of Michigan Health System, Ann Arbor.

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Somewhere between the rigidity of eating three meals a day with nothing in between and the over-indulgence of mindless snacking is a middle ground called grazing. Now research from the University of Texas at Austin says that grazing is a good thing — in fact, the more frequently people eat, the more likely they are to be healthy.

Using data from the American Time Use Survey, conducted by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the report found that those who spread the amount they eat over more time have a body mass index (BMI) that is 0.2 lower, on average, than those who spend less time eating.  They also have better self-reported health. While the difference in BMI is not huge, for a person of average height it results in a few pounds less weight.

Good Grazing… Bad Grazing

You might think that this study’s findings go against the grain; eating too much is the generally accepted cause of weight gain and many health problems, after all.  But science supports grazing, says David Grotto, RD, LDN, a former spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association and author of 101 Foods That Could Save Your Life. “When there are large gaps of time between meals, the body goes into a self-preservation mode, reserving calories and storing fat,” he explains. “If you eat more frequently, your body ratchets up metabolism and burns calories. Also, when you graze, you’re less apt to overeat at the next meal.” Note the really important part of what Grotto said — eating more frequently…not eating more.

I asked Grotto to share some suggestions on how to keep grazing healthful. First and foremost, he says, it is important to stay aware of what and how often you eat. “Don’t think you can simply graze to your heart’s content,” he says. “Research clearly shows that calories consumed shouldn’t be greater than energy spent if you are to avoid gaining weight.”

The best grazing foods, he says, contain protein, fiber, monounsaturated fats and/or slow-digesting, complex carbohydrates. These will make you feel fuller than other foods, and you’ll be inclined to consume fewer calories. Nuts are a good choice as they contain monounsaturated fats, which take a long time to digest. One study showed that women who ate one to two ounces of nuts a day lost more weight and kept it off longer than women who did not eat nuts. To avoid monotony, mix a variety of nuts (almonds, walnuts and pistachios, for example) with oat cereal, dried fruit and dark chocolate. Keep some handy in a resealable bag and eat a few at a time. Also healthy are snacks like apple slices, cheese and whole-grain crackers, and peanut or almond butter.

It’s important to note that Daily Health News contributing editor Andrew L. Rubman, ND, registered a dissenting opinion on the greatness of grazing: “It isn’t necessary to eat all day to keep the body supplied with a steady stream of healthful nutrients. If you don’t skip breakfast, lunch or dinner, consistently make smart dietary choices, and take the time to chew thoroughly during meals, then you’ll digest your food more completely, have a steady stream of nutrients coming into your body from the gastrointestinal tract, and not feel the need to graze.” However, he added, if you can’t seem to fit in three healthful meals a day, a certain amount of grazing may be a good short-term solution.

Source(s):

David Grotto, RD, LDN, a nutrition counseling consultant and former spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association and author of 101 Optimal Life Foods (Bantam). He is based in Elmhurst, Illinois.

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Reprinted with the permission of:
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