Why Black Rice is not just a gourmet fad but has health benefits too

You may have noticed when strolling down the aisles of your supermarket that in the “exotic foods” section that among the ordinary everyday types of rice — of which there are already quite a few — you may have noticed something called Black Rice. What you may not know is just how special it is and what a treasure house of nutrients it contains.

In ancient China, nobles commandeered every grain of a variety of black rice known as “Forbidden Rice” for themselves and – as is the way with rulers all over the world — issued an order forbidding the common people from eating it. Well now you can take your revenge and raid the supermarket shelves to treat yourself because new scientific research has discovered that a spoonful of black rice bran contains more health promoting anthocyanin antioxidants than are found in a spoonful of blueberries, plus the rice bran has less sugar, more fibre and an abundance of vitamin E.

In case you think this is a propaganda press release on behalf of the Chinese Department of Agriculture let me assure you this comes from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, USA. Many fruits are known to be rich sources of anthocyanin antioxidants and these phytochemicals show promise for fighting heart disease, cancer, and other diseases but this is the first time that black rice has been shown to have the same properties. . As part of a healthy diet many people have switched to brown rice — which is certainly an improvement on white rice — but it seems that black rice could be even more beneficial.

Brown rice is the most widely produced variety of rice in the world and has a brown colour because only the outer husks, or “chaff”, are taken off the rice grains during milling. When rice is processed more, and the underlying nutrient-dense bran is removed, the result is white rice. If you eat brown, not white, rice you are making a far healthier choice as the bran contains higher levels of gamma-tocotrienol, one of the vitamin E compounds, and gamma-oryzanol antioxidants, which are lipid-soluble antioxidants.

A large body of research has concluded these antioxidants can reduce blood levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol) and potentially lower the risk for heart disease. Indeed scientists at Temple University, Philadelphia have found that a specific natural compound in brown rice can reduce high blood pressure and protect blood vessels and Harvard University research suggests that eating brown rice may prevent type 2 diabetes.

An interesting side effect of their research was the discovery that pigments in black rice bran extracts can produce a variety of different colours, ranging from pink to black. Looking ahead, they think this may provide a healthy, natural alternative to the artificial colourings often added to some food and drink. This could certainly be beneficial as several studies have found an association between such colourings and cancer, behavioural problems in children, and other health concerns.

The Louisiana State researchers focused on testing black rice bran as this has the most potent effects, but I do not believe this to be commercially available anywhere. At least I have not been able to find it, if you do please let me know, so in the meantime it would still make sense to add black rice to your diet.

Black Rice has been promoted as a gourmet treat — which at its retail price it certainly is — and is more commonly used as decoration or for visual effect or mixed with either white or brown rice. However to get the maximum health benefits it would certainly pay you to add a tablespoon of black rice whenever you’re cooking any kind of rice.

Bisphenol A Link to Dental Treatment Problems

The danger of BPA is something I have highlighted previously in other newsletters, particularly in relation to children, and now there appears to be yet another cause for concern relating to dental treatment. BPA was originally produced for use as a synthetic hormone in 1936 and today is most commonly used as the building block of polycarbonate plastic for products such as baby bottles and water bottles, epoxy resins (coatings that line food containers), and white dental sealants. It is also an additive in other types of plastic used to make children’s toys.

To date there is extensive scientific literature reporting adverse effects of BPA at doses lower than the current level considered safe by U.S. EPA, a high rate of leaching of BPA from food and beverage containers, and evidence that the median BPA level in humans is higher than the level that causes adverse effects in lab studies.

Children are Most at Risk:

Growing children are particularly at risk to chemicals in their environment because they face greater exposure per pound of body weight and are physiologically more susceptible to them. Children’s exposures begin at conception, as chemicals, including BPA, cross the placenta in a pregnant woman’s body and can affect the embryo or foetus during critical periods of development.

Now there is even greater cause for concern as, according to researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, bisphenol A (BPA) is also released from some plastic resins used in dentistry. They found that this is detectable in the saliva after used during routine dental treatment and among the many risks associated with BPA are changes in behaviour, urinary tract development, and early onset of puberty. Adults of course are not immune either as prostate problems are also associated with BPA.

This study was carried out in the USA where children often have their teeth sealed with a dental resin containing BPA to prevent cavities, and it is often used for fillings. Although they point out that exposure to dental treatment is much less common than children being exposed to BPA in everyday food containers for example it is still a cause for concern. Indeed, they go further and as a further precaution urge that resins containing BPA should not be used on pregnant women.

One ‘prescription’ that could help treat emotional and physical pain – with no side-effects

Music is not only the food of love and the healer of the soul but now it seems from new research that it could benefit the treatment of depression and the management of physical pain.

Glasgow Caledonian University researchers are using an innovative combination of music psychology and leading-edge audio engineering by looking in more detail than ever before at how music conveys emotion. I suspect that many of us — as with so much of expensively funded research — know this already as it is almost instinctive to turn to music to enhance or change our mood.

What is new is that they are suggesting that the use of music to help regulate a person’s mood could lead to promoting the development of music-based therapies to tackle conditions like depressive illnesses and help alleviate symptoms of with physical pain.

They explain that the impact of a piece of music goes so much further than thinking that a fast tempo can lift a mood and a slow one can bring it down. Music expresses emotion as a result of many factors including the tone, structure and other technical characteristics of a piece. Lyrics can have a big impact too. But so can purely subjective factors: where or when you first heard it, whether you associate it with happy or sad events and so on. This project is the first step towards taking all of these considerations – and the way they interact with each other – on board according to Dr Don Knox, project leader.

Their method of assessing and analysing the impact of music is to ask each volunteer to listen to pieces of previously unheard contemporary popular music and assign each one a position on a graph. One axis measures the type of feeling (positivity or negativity) that the piece communicates; the other measures the intensity or activity level of the music. The research team then assess the audio characteristics that the pieces falling into each part of the graph have in common. They then look at parameters such as rhythm patterns, melodic range, musical intervals, length of phrases, musical pitch and so on.

According to Dr Knox music falling into a positive category might have a regular rhythm, bright timbre and a fairly steady pitch contour over time. If tempo and loudness increase, for instance, this would place the piece in a more ‘exuberant’ or ‘excited’ region of the graph. You might like to try this at home for yourself dear reader and see what results you come up with.

It is envisaged that your doctor could soon be putting music on a prescription that is tailored to suit the your individual needs – though quite how they’re going to train doctors to do this so they don’t end up giving you gangsta rap when a bit of Vivaldi might do the trick I am not entirely sure.

However, I certainly welcome the promotion of music as therapy and so let me be the first to offer you a “prescription” to help lift your mood. If you follow this link it will take you to a recording of a male acappella group from Corsica singing in the most spine tingling and inspiring way that I will be astounded if you don’t feel better after listening to it. They have the rather bizarre name of Barbara Furtuna (though if John Wayne could be called Marion I suppose anything is possible) and all you have to do is to press control and click to follow this link – Listen to them: here.

Why almost half of us are on prescription drugs and another ‘benefit‘ for statins

As it is often said that what America does today Britain will do tomorrow I worry when the latest statistics show that nearly half of all Americans now use prescription drugs on a regular basis and that one in five children are being regularly given prescription drugs. If you are over 50 then it is even more worrying as nine out of ten adults in the age group are on drugs. What concerns me more however is the fact that nearly a third use two or more drugs, and more than one in ten use five or more prescription drugs regularly.

That last statistic shows what can happen when you treat a condition on a symptom by symptom basis with the original need overlaying the subsequent responses and side-effects to each consequent drug. For example, if you need anti-migraine medication but it gives you severe stomach upsets then the second drug will help with that but unfortunately it may also have side-effects of its own for which you could easily be given yet a further drug.

The most commonly-used drugs were:

• Statin drugs for older people
• Asthma drugs for children
• Antidepressants for middle-aged people
• Amphetamine stimulants for children

Statins:
I have said my piece, probably all too often, on the widespread use of statins for what appears to be little perceived benefits and some serious side-effects but — as often happens when a drug is under attack — a perceived benefit has come to light. It appears that regular statin use is associated with a reduced risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis. It reminds me of that other great drug HRT that always comes up with a new use for a specific condition when negative press appears linking it to a serious drawback for health.

I have no problem with people being given drugs that they need and will cure or alleviate their condition, but unfortunately this is just not always the case. Many of the drugs people take actually cause the very things they claim to prevent: osteoporosis drugs are linked to hip fractures, cancer drugs can cause cancer and antidepressants bizarrely enough have suicidal thoughts listed as a side-effect.

Now that the pharmaceutical industry is global, we are just as much at the mercy of the drug companies without any direct influence on them. We know that the drug companies have falsified research, distorted facts in studies and deliberately suppressed negative information about new drugs. You can’t blame your doctor, as they often as much in the dark as we are, but what you can do is get yourself the very best health insurance — by which I mean taking the very best pro active care of yourself through diet, exercise and stress management together with the all-important enthusiastic positive approach to life which will enhance your chances of an active and healthy life.

So before you rush off to the doctor for a prescription, ask yourself first whether you really need that drug or whether it is something that you can handle with the use of time and some sensible home treatment. In the winter most people get colds, some get flu, and many others are not affected at all so let’s try and make this the winter where your body is so healthy those infections just cannot take hold.

One way to do this is to increase the amount of “super foods” such as chlorella, spirulina and wheat grass in your diet and although I have to confess that none of these have a great taste I have found that adding chlorella and spirulina to a fruit or vegetable juice drink (though turning it an unattractive shade of green) does mean you get the benefit without the taste.

Wheat grass is now making a comeback as years ago (certainly here in Brighton) there were several wheatgrass juice bars with trays of the green stuff growing live and ready to be juiced. Happily — as again it is not top of the pops for taste — you can now buy it in supplement form from Natural Greens as capsules and you will also be helping the charity YES TO LIFE, which helps support people with cancer in the UK in accessing Complementary & Alternative Medicine as they are giving a percentage of the company’s profits to them.

One ‘prescription’ that could help treat emotional and physical pain – with no side-effects
Music is not only the food of love and the healer of the soul but now it seems from new research that it could benefit the treatment of depression and the management of physical pain.

More Good Reasons To Drink Cranberry Juice

Cranberry juice is a staple in most women’s store cupboard either as a preventive, or treatment, for cystitis but it now seems it has even wider applications as new research shows it has promise in blocking Staph Infections. These are very common and caused by a Staphylococcus (or staph) infection that often begins with a small cut, which then gets infected with bacteria.

Normally around a quarter of the population carry staph in the nose, mouth, genitals, and anal area but the prime area is usually the foot — especially if you go barefoot as it is very easy to pick up bacteria from the floor. Strains of S. aureus can cause a range of staph infections from minor skin rashes to serious bloodstream infections and one particular strain, known as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, (MRSA), is a growing problem in hospitals, nursing homes, and other institutions because it doesn’t respond to most antibiotics. As we have recently seen, because of the overuse of antibiotics, our bodies have developed resistance to them which renders them relatively ineffective.

So the good news is that researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts have recently carried out a small clinical study that appears to show that a cranberry juice cocktail blocked a strain of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) from beginning the process of infection.

Terri Camesano, professor of chemical engineering at WPI, has done previous work with cranberry juice studying its effects on E. coli and urinary tract infections, but they included Staphylococcus aureus in this latest study because it is a very serious health threat. Although it is in its early stages, the results of the study are surprising.

Their analysis showed that subjects who had recently consumed cranberry juice cocktail significantly reduced the ability of E. coli and S. aureus to form and that Staphylococcus aureus showed the most significant results in this study.

These results do appear to create more questions than answers, according to lead researcher Camesano, but it seems to me that taking out some natural health insurance in the form of a daily glass of cranberry juice couldn’t hurt.

Natural Remedies for Sciatica

Each year, many people are forced to miss out on activities they enjoy because of sciatica-related pain. The sciatic nerve runs from the lower back all the way down the legs, and the pain associated with sciatica can be severe. Sciatica can be caused by many issues including herniated discs, bone spurs, poor posture, obesity, weak muscles, and major trauma. The symptoms of sciatica include weakness, pain, and numbness anywhere along the sciatic nerve. These symptoms can be incapacitating and most people will do anything they can to relieve their symptoms.

When walking it is important to always maintain proper posture. Walk upright with your head held upward. One way of teaching yourself the proper posture when walking is to get you back against a wall so that your head heels and your buttocks touch the wall and walk outwards maintaining that exact posture. When you sit it is good to remember to keep your thighs parallel with the floor and sit in an upward position and slouch back slightly. Sleeping is always one of the key ways to maintain a day free from lower back pain caused by sciatica. If you wake up pain free you are more likely to have a pain free day. The best way to sleep at night is by sleeping in fetal position with a pillow in between your knees.

Treatment for sciatica is directed towards maximizing mobility and your independence. The nerve problem should be classified and treated the right way. Some people with this need no treatment, and heal spontaneously. If there was no evidence of nerve degeneration, no history of trauma, sudden onset of the pain, no difficulty moving, then conservative treatments are the most effective.

Eating is very important, you want to make sure to maintain a healthy weight by eating properly. If you are over weight it puts more pressure on your back causing more pain than you would normally experience if you were at a healthy average weight. Being overweight means making your body carry around the extra burden of those gained pounds by eating unhealthy.

Legions that press on the nerve will have to be surgically removed. This may relieve your symptoms. In cases with lacerations to the nerves, even with sciatica treatment, recovery may be limited, or not possible. Injections are usually given to ease the swelling and irritation around the nerve. Over the counter medicines are given to relieve your nerve pain.

Sciatol is a natural supplement. Its formulated to support the health of the sciatic nerve, spine, and spinal cord. This is the best medicine to take to relieve the pain and discomfort caused by sciatica. Sciatol contains six potent ingredients carefully chosen by scientists and expert herbalists. Based on clinical studies, Sciatol is scientifically formulated to relieve sciatic pain and discomfort, reduce inflammation and swelling, relax muscles, prevent muscle spasms, sooth the sciatic nerve, relieve pressure on the sciatic nerve.

Looking to find info on Exercises For Sciatica – What Causes Back Pain?, then visit our site to find the best advice on Certified Rolfing 10 Series- Treating Sciatica and Sleeve for you.

Are Men Too Stressed to Cope with Heart Attack Risk?

You may have seen the news reports this week that because men are working longer hours and taking less exercise they are doubling their risk of a heart attack. If you know anyone in this vulnerable position, you might want to pass on this email to them to reinforce the importance of taking care of your heart in order to stay healthy.

Click here to find out more information about my How To Cope With Stress eBook —-> Cope With Stress

We know that stress plays a major part in whether or not you are going to be more likely to succumb to a whole host of health problems and heart disease is a major killer. Trying to handle a constant level of stress will undermine all your best efforts at staying healthy so I want to offer you some immediate help to identify and deal with your personal vulnerability to stress

Poor health, strained relationships, lack of effectiveness at work or at school are just some of the results of living with stress on a daily basis. Of course we cope, we have become experts at that, but we all have limits and going over them has serious consequences for our physical and mental and emotional health.

One of the problems of coping with stress is that we take that stressed state for granted and it becomes ‘normal’ for us and we don’t see the warning signs. Like all my books, this brand new ebook came from my own, and my clients, issues and in trying to help them I came up with some unique insights and a clear, practical plan to help them move on with their lives. When you are stressed you don’t have time to wade through heavy tomes or search out key information: now you don’t have to because I have done it for you. Here you will find all the easy, accessible information that you need to help you to identify the causes of stress in your life and then get some real, working, solutions.

How will this help men to cope?

In too many ways to list here, but if you are genuinely looking for ideas and solutions, then these are some of the key elements you will benefit from:

• Identifying the emotional and physical symptoms of stress

• Discovering the Chemical Connection to Stress

• Your Personal Vulnerabilities

• Self-assessment questionnaires

• Conventional and alternative treatments compared

• Self-help options

• Top tips to handle stress every day

Are you handling your stress or is it handling you?

Once you have read the book, then you can continue to use those top tips as part of your everyday life. Stress comes from those things that upset us the most and that is usually related to change. I have designed an action plan for both types. Knowing which you are will lead you to solutions to dealing with your stress, and there are questionnaires in the book to help you identify just what stresses you the most.

You are unique, and what stresses you, and how you respond to it is unique too. I have been writing and speaking about handling stress for over ten years and I know how distressing it can be to live with – both for you, and your friends, family and colleagues as they watch you struggle without really knowing how to help.

Let me give you the tools to not only overcome the stress you are currently dealing with, but give you with the means to avoid it in the future. I know it works, and so do those who have read it.

Are you ready?

If you want to know if my approach works, then my instantly down loadable e-book will be with you immediately so you can start to put your positive health plan into action. Visit my website at www.creativecatalyst.co.uk and on the marketplace page you will be able to buy How to Handle Stress — your proven action plan for just $9.97 and as a special bonus you also get my free special report on “ATTITUDE AND ILLNESS” because that is a key factor in having that healthy, stress-free future. Click here to find out more information —-> Cope With Stress

If you will learn to handle your stress, and not let it handle you, then that is a major bonus on the road to reducing your risk of a heart attack.

Weight training for the over 50s

When you mention weights to me, I tend to think of dark and sweaty rooms full of people (well men actually) sweating away to the accompanying noise of clanging barbells. However it seems that I am wrong as I was just sent a new book which has been written by two very respectable looking ladies (one even wears pearls) which offers the complete program to what they describe as staying stronger longer and contains easy exercises to avoid the effects of the ageing process and be fit for life.

Pauline Eborall and Patricia Furber are the authors of ‘Wonderful Ways With Weights’ and were inspired to write it because of their own unsatisfactory experiences as middle-aged women in fitness classes and gyms. For both men and women osteoporosis is a real danger as we get older and weight bearing exercise is one of the best ways to combat it and these exercises focus on building a strong body and happily they also say that you do not have to be fit to start. The exercises are based on their own experience and were roadtested on a group of their friends for over a year aged between 40 to 80. What they found was that if exercise is regular and progressive than strength can be gained and maintain even by those in their 80s and 90s.

This regime is gentle and gradual and you never need push yourself beyond your current level of fitness as it is a continuous process. Indeed they even have exercises in their easy to follow illustrated guide that include exercising in water and from a chair. What I particularly liked was that the photographs used show people of the right age doing these exercises which makes it seem much more realistic.

As well as exercises there is also good dietary advice and tips scattered through the book on improving things like arthritis and even suggestions for spicing up food without using salt. If you’d like to get a copy then it is available from Amazon or at www.kintburypublishing.co.uk

Entirely Free – and Effective – Weight Loss Aid

One of the things I have found most aggravating about getting older is how often my mother has been proved right. It was never used as a weight loss aid in our house for as we were on a very low income indeed it was used to fill us up and make us less hungry. What is this magical weight loss ingredient that costs you nothing and has absolutely no side-effects?

Something that I hope you already have plenty of every day in your diet — plain, simple, water. It’s something that’s been around for a long time and suggested as a way of losing weight that you drink a large glass of water before each meal and now scientists have documented that it really is true. There has been a clinical trial of this amazing weight loss-promoting liquid and the results were reported at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Boston.

Previous studies had already shown that middle aged and older people who drank two cups of water immediately before eating a meal consumed between 75 and 90 fewer calories during that meal. In this recent 12 week study, dieters aged between 55 and 75 who drank water before every meal lost about 5 pounds more than those who did not increase their water intake.

You have to love scientists as they are incapable of taking anything at face value and so here we now have the scientific proof from a randomized, controlled clinical trial that drinking water before you eat will make you feel fuller, so you will eat less. Also research from Columbia University School of Public Health and the Harvard School of Public Health had previously found that when overweight teenagers substituted water for sweetened drinks such as squashes and colas they could eliminate an average of 235 excess calories per day.

The trick here of course is to actually get teenagers to switch from their favourite caffeine and sweetener laden soft drinks to plain water but the free report mentioned below might just help.

Free Reports

For a useful free factsheet on weight loss please cut and paste this link into your browser: http://www.naturalhydrationcouncil.org.uk/content/cmsGoAssets/Documents/Stored/30/Water%20and%20Weight%20Management%20factsheet.pdf

And if you want to do more to help children and their water consumption there is also an excellent free downloadable factsheet ‘Hydration for Children – Back to School’ which explains the importance of adequate hydration for children both from a health perspective and from an educational perspective in terms of maximizing cognitive performance in the classroom.

It contains many helpful facts, tips, and information that will be very helpful for anyone wanting to improve the health and alertness of children. You can download it from this website www.naturalhydrationcouncil.org.uk and then click on the link to Hydration for Children – Back to School.

Butter Is Still Better

If there is anything better than butter in a baked potato or on a scone that I haven’t yet come across it, but I know that the margarine industry has spent a lot of time and money in persuading as that it is bad for our health. As I keep on saying (or nagging, if you prefer) there is nothing wrong with butter it’s all about the quantity you are using and if you want a healthy heart then switching to the new range of margarines that have been enriched with omega-3 fatty acids will not make a difference — in fact could make it worse.

A study carried out by Wageningen University in the Netherlands over a three-year period showed that using such margarines did not prevent second heart attacks in older men and women at risk for worsening heart disease. The initial results appeared to show that switching to such margarines did initially reduce cardiac events, but by 30 months the evidence of that benefit had disappeared, said Daan Kromhout, MPH, PhD, the lead researcher. He reported their results at the recent European Society of Cardiology meeting and their findings were simultaneously published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.

These findings have surprised some cardiologists as most of the data on omega-3 fatty acids come from epidemiologic studies and those were positive. Alfred Bove, MD, of Temple University in Philadelphia has likened the situation to hormone therapy, which had been widely recommended to reduce cardiovascular risk in postmenopausal women based on data from epidemiologic studies. Subsequent evidence however showed that HRT can be a major risk factor for heart attacks in women are relying solely on research — in whatever field — is never a good idea.

The margarines used in the trial were supplied by Unilever, and included the well-known “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter,” which I have to confess I have no trouble believing as I can see no resemblance in taste at all. This research should not be used to downplay the role of Omega 3 in the prevention and treatment of not only heart disease but also Type 2 Diabetes and depression, because it is clearly an important element in our diet. However this definitely indicates that margarine is not the vehicle to introduce it to your diet. Better sources include oily fish such as salmon and Flax seeds and walnuts.

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