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Tomatoes
July’s Tomato Haul (Photo credit: statelyenglishmanor)
A new study has found that eating lots of tomatoes can help prevent strokes. Tomatoes are also high in lycopene and anti oxidents which are thought to have anti cancer properties. They also contain quercetin which has anti cancer, anti microbial and anti iflammatory properties. Tomatoes are also one of the foods where cooking increases these benefits.
Like many fruits and vegetables today, are they really as beneficial as they should be. Tomatoes are a seasonal, sun ripened summer fruit. Unless you grow your own or buy organic outdoor grown tomatoes they may be lacking in these vital nutrients. When they are artificially grown under cover and then picked before they are ripe, how much of the nutrients that should be in a tomato have actually developed.
That is the same with many of our fruit and vegetables today. Back to tomatoes and have you noticed how most shop bought tomatoes all taste the same and all have tough skins – some genetic engineering to make it easier for them to be carted around and handled.
One final thought on the study that tomatoes help prevent strokes. Why is it then that in countries where tomatoes are a large part of the diet people still get strokes.
As always there are always more questions than answers when it comes to diet and nutrition.
Food Health Info Under Threat
Image via Wikipedia
I want to pass on this important request for support in fighting censorship about health matters that affect you. I want any readers in the European Union to support the efforts of the Alliance for Natural Health. This is a critical free speech and freedom of access to information issue concerning your health and what you can find out about food and how it affects your health. If you care about freedom of speech, and if you feel that it should be legal and reasonable for companies to be able to publish plausible basic information about health please take action and support this campaign to stop the EU commissars once again interfering where it is not needed. They have already stopped us accessing certain herbs that had been used for centuries for health and nutritional benefits and now they want to restrict how you can describe the benefits of healthy foods.
CLICK ON THE ALLIANCE FOR NATIONAL HEALTH:
DEFEND FREE SPEECH IN FOOD HEALTH INFORMATION
In the 10 years of our history campaigning on natural health issues in Europe, never before have a few minutes of your time had the potential to cause such a dramatic effect on our ability to use natural foods and ingredients to manage our own health!
We’re asking you simply to write to your relevant MEPs. Yes, many of you won’t know who they are, but links on the campaign pages we’ve produced will enable you to find them quickly.
Find out how and why this matter is important via our campaign pages, which are currently available English French and German
If we do nothing, we will be plunged into a world where the vast majority of statements that point to beneficial effects of foods and natural health products will have to be removed. In this more or less health claims-free environment, people will find it much more difficult to choose healthy foods, and companies with huge advertising budgets will do better simply because they can give their products more exposure.
None of us want a situation where misleading claims, or claims with no supporting evidence, are allowed. What we want is a fair environment, which reflects the fact that evidence for claims about the health benefits of foods and food ingredients isn’t back and white. Neither can such evidence rely exclusively on the same kind of clinical trials used for pharmaceutical drugs.
We’ve launched the campaign today, as you’ll see below. Now, we’re just asking that European citizens use their democratic right and write to their MEPs, regardless of political party. This is quite simply a numbers game, so it’s important to write to all MEPs that are in your regional constituency. Getting the European Parliament to block a piece of European legislation is not easy, and in fact it’s only happened once before: when approval of the meat glue thrombin was stopped.
But if we don’t try, it will be us who will have to tell future generations that we sat back and let the ban happen.
Why all this weird suppression of information?
Isn’t freedom of speech a basic tenet of the EU?
Most of you will not be shocked to learn that it all comes down to money for the big boys. In other words big corporations are the drivers
The real motivation behind the EU’s so-called ‘consumer protection’ laws is to create a harmonised EU-wide regime that only benefits the biggest players – in this case Big Food, and even Big Pharma. The latter is increasingly getting in on the act.
A reminder that Big Food acts as the prime mover is the fact that its biggest trade association, FoodDrinkEurope, has been an ardent supporter of the regime from the outset. We have consistently opposed this position. Strangely, however, while some of the other trade associations were also long-time opponents of the health claims list, now that we’re at the eleventh hour, they have decided not to support a veto.
And at the end of the day, it’s not necessary
Every EU “Member State”* already has its own legal mechanisms to stop false, dubious or unsubstantiated advertising. But this EU law preventing virtually any health claim about any food or food supplement will make them redundant.
* Incidentally, do you remember when Euriopean “”Member States were still known as “European countries”. We are not sure when the UK and other “member states” ceased to be independant countries, but apparently this has now ocurred in the People’s Undemocratic Republic of Europe. Anyway, we digress.
European citizens – please write to your MEP urgently
Click on Campaign Pages and Find Out How To Write To Or Email Your MEP’s.
Please don’t leave it to others to do that which you can’t be bothered to do if you care about your right to take the supplements of your choice, and your right to be given information about foods and the health benefits of foods freely and how you want to be informed.
Don’t sit on the fence this time. Stand up for your rights against the unelected busy bodies trying to control your life. Thank you.
Nutrition Before Pills
In my book ‘The Nutrition Diet and Recipe Book’ which you can get FREE from www.obooko.com (under Health and Self Improvement) I wrote about how the body can react if it does not get the food it needs. Basically your body needs nutrients to survive and they come from the food we eat. This means that when your body needs topping up with vitamins and minerals and other nutrients it tells you. It sends out hunger signals. You then eat and the body is satisfied. That is assuming you have eaten nutrient rich foods that the body needs. If you eat processed/junk food devoid of nutrients as your main form of eating your body will not get those important nutrients it is asking for. It then sends out more signals (hunger pangs) so you eat more food. If your food is junk you finish up getting fat!!
Now new research has gone further and found that if the body does not get the nutrients it needs cells start to eat themselves, and not only in the body but in the brain as well. Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York discovered this and found that the body responds to hunger by producing fatty acids which send more hunger signals to the brain to increase the need to eat. So as well as making us fat, lack of nutrients can also contribute to damaging brain cells!
So what use is this information to us. Basically it should be another tool to encourage us all to eat a healthy nutrient rich diet as I keep drumming on about. If you give the body what it needs in the food we eat these urges to eat more and more will not occur and will help with weight control amongst other things.
As I said, I would use the information to encourage healthy eating, but not the scientists. They are going further with their science and are looking at how they can stop this ‘cannibalistic’ effect medically. Probably so a drug company can then produce another wonder pill at great expense.
Surely it is easier, cheaper and healthier to get people to eat a healthy diet. Then you can’t sell a ‘healthy diet’ and make money, so devise a pill instead. It will disrupt the body’s processes as with the pills on the market to stop us absorbing fat and lose weight(?).
Some hope. You take the pill and still eat the wrong foods that brought about the need for the pill in the first place and the pill usually has side effects. Also in the case of fat, your body needs fat so why should you block it. I will talk about fat in a future blog.
As I said why block the fat? It would be better to spend the money on educating people with nutrition advice that they can follow – and eat a diet based on nutritious foods like my Nutrition Diet.
