Рубрика: ПИТАНИЕ + ПРОДУКТЫ

It’s undeniable. The holidays are on the way! How can you keep yourself healthy during this busy season? One key is to strengthen your digestive fire.

Holiday celebrations almost always include rich foods. While we all know that it’s important to eat well, we can get a little derailed this time of year. Also, if you aren’t digesting properly, then you might not be absorbing the nutrients you need from your food.

Good digestion is absolutely a pillar of good health. To feel your best, you’ll want to make that pillar strong. With that in mind, here are some vital things to know about food and digestion:

• Food is both hormone and nutrition (see my blog post Food: A New Paradigm)
• The process of digestion is how we process information (information has a biochemical substrate)
• What we eat is still outside of the body until we absorb it

Today, let’s focus on absorption. To aid your absorption of nutrients:

• Chew fully
• Take digestive enzymes*
• Supplement with HCL*
• Add probiotics and prebiotics to your diet*
• Enjoy warm water with fresh lemon first thing in the morning
• Add fresh ginger to your meals

* This supplemental suggestion does not constitute medical advice. Please consult with your medical doctor before taking any nutritional supplements. 

With the holidays just around the corner, the last tip of adding ginger to your meals is especially useful. It’s a simple, tasty way to kindle your digestive fire. So, when indulging in the season’s rich fare leaves you feeling sluggish, turn to fresh ginger.

One of our favorite ways to incorporate ginger into our meals this time of year is with this yummy, comforting and warming recipe: Carrot Ginger Soup.

Carrot Ginger Soup
Serves 4 to 5

Ingredients

• 3 Tbsp olive oil (or you may substitute ghee or unsalted butter)
• 1 ½ lbs carrots (6 – 8 large carrots), peeled and thinly sliced
• 2 cups chopped white or yellow onion
• 1 tsp sea salt (or to taste)
• 2 cups vegetable stock
• 2 cups water
• 3 large strips of zest from an orange (organic is best)
• Chopped chives, parsley, dill or fennel for garnish 

Directions

Warm the oil in a soup pot over medium heat, add onions, carrots and sea salt and cook until the onions soften, stirring occasionally (about 10 minutes). Do not let the vegetables brown.

Add the vegetable stock, water, ginger and strips of orange zest. Bring to a simmer, cover and cook until the carrots are soft (about 20 minutes).

Remove the strips of orange zest and discard. Working in small batches, pour the soup into a blender and puree until completely smooth. Only fill the blender bowl a third full with the hot liquid and keep one hand pressing down on the lid of the blender to keep it secure. Add more sea salt to taste.

Ladle into serving bowls and garnish with the chopped chives, parsley, dill or fennel fronds.

We hope you enjoy this as much as we do, and that you’ll join me on December 5th for Being Energy’s next Nutrition + Health class –all about the heart. The class will include some useful tips for navigating through for your emotions during the holidays.

The science is in: Happiness matters!

It turns out that happiness and a strong social network are key components in your health and longevity. As the poet W. H. Auden put it, “We must love one another or die.”

This statement is borne out by research showing that social relationships can both extend your life and improve its quality. Studies prove that social connections—family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, churches and clubs—reduce risk of death by 50 percent. A stunning statistic!

Conversely, loneliness poses a very serious health risk. Comparable to smoking and twice as dangerous as obesity, loneliness can:

• Impair immune function
• Increase inflammation
• Raise blood pressure
• Increase cortisol (the stress hormone)
• Increase depression
• Disrupt sleep

Scientists have found that people are happier and feel safer when they are with other people than when they are alone, and that happiness is contagious.

Conducted over 20 years, the Framingham Heart Study, published in the British Medical Journal, concluded: “People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.”

Interestingly, being happy also influences our health at the level of our genes. Researchers at UCLA studying the human genome learned that people with a deep sense of happiness and sense of purpose in life had lower levels of inflammatory gene expression and stronger immune systems. The opposite was true for the type of happiness that is momentary and based in self-gratification (enjoying an ice cream cone for example).

The head of the research team, Steven Cole, said that one of the things this 10-year study shows “is that doing good and feeling good have very different effects on the human genome, even though they generate similar levels of positive emotion… Apparently, the human genome is much more sensitive to different ways of achieving happiness than are conscious minds.”

True happiness is as much a state of mind as it is an emotional and physical (and genetic!) expression. Experiencing gratitude and looking for the good in life is an important part of it. As the fictional Pollyanna said “… there is something about everything that you can be glad about, if you keep hunting long enough to find it.”

There is even more reason to be glad if you can share your happiness with friends and family.

Happiness, and how your emotions affect your biochemistry, is one of the things we’ll talk about in Being Energy’s next Nutrition + Health class, The Power of the Heart, on December 5th. Join us to gain tools and information to start the New Year filled with happiness, hope and abundance.

Sleeping well is a struggle for some of us throughout the year, but the summer season can really turn up the heat on nighttime tossing and turning. To help, we have some recommendations for what to eat and what not to eat to invite blissful slumber any time of year.

For even more tips and tools, be sure to check out our special Sleep Class for Women series with Aerin Alexander in October.

Let’s focus here on food. Food plays a key role in how well (or not) you sleep. The first thing is to avoid eating a heavy meal too close to bed time—say within three hours of going to bed.  Eating too much late at night puts a strain on your liver, and you might find yourself waking up between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. and having difficulty falling back to sleep.

That said, it is good to include some quality protein in your evening meal, especially if you tend toward low blood sugar. So what other foods can help and hinder sleep?

We’ve found that these seven foods encourage better sleep:

• Banana
• Cherries
• Oatmeal
• Whole grain cereal
• Almond milk or soymilk
• Nuts and seeds
• Lean turkey

A yummy, sleep-promoting evening dessert, for example, would be to blend a banana with some almond milk into a thick and frothy drink; you could even throw in some cherries and/or a date or two for extra sweetness. If it’s an especially hot evening, you might even want to make this with a frozen banana for a satisfying ice-creamlike dessert.

Just as there are foods that promote good sleep, there are also foods that prevent it. These are:

• Alcohol (which can lead to fragmented sleep)
• Nicotine prior to bedtime
• Potatoes
• Tomatoes
• Onions
• Salt

In addition to the foods to eat and to avoid, you might try giving yourself that extra push toward a restful sleep with a cup of warm chamomile tea. Chamomile, valerian, linden and passionflower all act as natural sleep aids.

Speaking of herbs, one of our favorite sleep inducers is lavender essential oil. You can put a few drops of lavender on your pillow or into a warm bath, or put just a drop on your temples. Not only does it smell wonderful, but you just might find that it relaxes and eases you into a peaceful sleep.

Wishing you sweet dreams,
Dr. Miles Reid