Roast Pumpkin, Milk Chocolate and five food habits that age you

Polenta and spinach with toasted sunflower seeds

Food Diary (June 12, 2011)

Breakfast: Missed

Lunch: Polenta and spinach with toasted sunflower seeds

Dinner: noodles, lentils

Baking/sweets: various sweets

Today's Favourite Photo

Source: Wayfaring Chocolate

Roast Pumpkin, Milk Chocolate, Bacon, Nut Butter

Today’s Favourite Blog

Source: Care2

An interesting article on five food habits that age you. “Nutrition, not age, determines the body’s internal chemistry”.

The list of 5 bad habits has the usual suspects such as sugar and carbs. However I found habits 4 and 5 particularly enlightening. Here are the 5 bad habits:

Bad Habit No. 1 — A weakness for fast food. Trans fat is the culprit. Trans fat ages you from the inside out by nibbling away at your telomeres, the caps protecting the ends of your chromosomes.

Bad Habit No. 2 — Giving in to a serious sweet tooth. Excess sugar loiters in the blood and causes trouble by glomming onto protein molecules, an age-accelerating process called glycosylation that causes cellular aging in several ways.

Bad Habit No. 3 — Carbo-loading — even when you’re not training. Refined carbs are simply sugars in disguise. After a meal laden with refined carbohydrates, the body’s blood-sugar levels soar, and the pancreas sprays insulin into the bloodstream to help cells convert the food’s energy (glucose) into fuel. But the body often miscalculates and releases too much insulin because (again) evolution hasn’t kept pace with the modern diet.

Bad Habit No. 4 — Waiting until you’re really hungry before eating. Waiting too long between meals is one of the surest ways to age the body before its time. That’s because hunger pangs can lead to overeating, which may lead to obesity. Don’t wait to eat until you’re ready to chew your arm off; instead, keep a little food in your stomach at all times. Schedule regular snack or meal breaks into your day, and keep a stash of healthy mini-meals available for when you’re on the go.

Bad Habit No. 5 — Eating at your desk — or in the car, or while stressed in any way. Stress hormones  — automatically released by the body under all kinds of stressful circumstances — are antithetical to  digestion in a couple of ways. First, the release of adrenaline and cortisol — “fight-or-flight” chemicals — diverts blood toward your limbs and away from your stomach and intestines, which hinders your intestines’ ability to break down food and absorb nutrients. As a result, digestion grinds to a halt and food ferments, sending unusual metabolites into the bloodstream. Second, stress throws off the gut’s acidity and, therefore, its ability to absorb certain nutrients, such as vitamin B12. By eating when you’re stressed, it’s as if you are damaging your body and locking out the repair crews. And finally, eating while stressed or distracted is also more likely to lead to unconscious eating, meaning you’ll be vulnerable to eating more than you intended or be prone to eating foods you would never have intended to eat under better circumstances.