Eat only 60% full for long life and health

Studies as well as anecdotal accounts have shown that eating less leads to a longer life and a healthier life. So don't eat till you fell "full" but stop about 40% before that. Of course one cannot try to split hair and attempt to eat exactly 60% from full. Approximate will do. Read the rest below:

1. What is wrong with eating too full
2. Mice experiment
3. Overworking body
4. Side Effects of eating
5. Good Eating Habits

What's wrong with eating too full?

Don't overeat and don't encourage your family members and friends to overeat - unless you wish to shorten their healthy living and perhaps die younger!

An interesting article about eating too full....
In Today's Dr Lee Newsletter Issue:
"What's wrong with eating too full?"

"The more you eat, the sooner you die. The lesser you eat, the longer you live." This is what Dr Lee always says in his health talk. He also mentions, "Eating too full causes all sort of health problems such as hypertension, diabetes, stroke, etc."

Why eating too full is so harmful to your health? What can you do about it?

Mice experiment

To see how eating habit affects life span, a professor from University of Texas did an experiment on mice.

For the first group of 100 mice, he let them eat without any restriction, just like a buffet meal. The second group was fed only 60% full. And the third group was given food without restriction too. But this time, he reduced protein content to half. After 2.5 years, guess how many mice were still alive out of 100?

* First group (eat without restriction) - only 13 mice was alive. Opsss...
* Second group (eat 60% full) - 97 mice was still alive. Only 3 mice died.
* Third group (eat without restriction with protein cut half) - 50 mice still alive.

What can we learn from these results?

Firstly, eating too full is really harmful to your body. Secondly, eat 60% full if you want to live longer and healthier. Thirdly, taking too much protein is harmful to your body too. We don't need so much protein after all.

Overworking body

Imagine having a small family car. Instead of using it for short travel between home and office, you use it for long distance travel between different cities every day. Instead of using it 1 hour a day, you use it for 10 hours a day. Instead of driving at 70 km/h, you always speed up to 170 km/h, hitting engine's red line.

Can you estimate your car life span? Do you expect having various problems with your car after a short time?

Driving your car at high speed for a long time is like always eating too full. You force your body to always work at its red line.

Do you know digestion is the most demanding work for your body? Think about the organs involved such as your mouth, stomach, liver, pancreas, duodenum and intestine. Think about the length of digestive tract from your mouth to intestine.

Eating too full zaps up much of your body energy for digestion. Otherwise, this energy may be used for other purpose such as enhancing your immune system.

Do you realize you become very tired easily after a big meal? That is the sign of your body working hard to digest all the food you take in.

If you eat an extra bowl of noodle, your pancreas has to produce extra insulin hormone to process the extra carbohydrates you take.

Your liver, stomach and intestine also have to produce extra enzymes to digest and process specific nutrients from that bowl of noodle.

Therefore the more you eat, the harder your body has to work to process it. Of course, we must eat to survive. But we don't have to eat that much!

If you drive your car slowly and handle it gently, you can use it for a long time. But if you always floor the accelerator and drive like a rally driver, you know the consequence on your car life span.

Side effect of eating

Your car engine burns fuel to move your car and bring you to anywhere you like to go. As a result, the engine produces exhaust smoke which is toxic. It must be dispersed out from your car. Similarly, your body cell burns nutrient for energy to survive. In the process, it produces free radicals. Since free radical is toxic to your body, it has to be neutralized and expelled.

"Just metabolizing food especially fatty and carbohydrate-rich fare causes the body to produce free radicals, which attack cells and can promote the development of chronic conditions including heart disease, diabetes and cancer," says Ronald L. Prior, Ph.D.

Of course, your body can control free radicals in small quantity. But the more you eat, the more free radicals your body produces. Without adequate control, these free radicals easily attack your body cells and eventually cause all sort of diseases.

Good eating habit

After knowing the harmful effect of eating too full, what's your choice? Do you want to live longer, just like the second group mice in the experiment? Or do you want to risk ending your life earlier, just like the first group mice? If you wish to live longer, here are some tips you can follow:

1.. Always eat until 70% full. Do not exceed 80% full. You may want to stop eating when you feel slightly full.

2. Avoid having buffet style meal which makes it harder to control how much you eat. Instead, prepare the food you want to eat in a plate. After finishing it, don't add anymore food.

3. Leaving the dining table earlier may prevent you from picking some extra food to eat.

4. It is always a good idea to prepare lesser food in the first place. Some people are afraid of having not enough food for everyone. Actually, lesser food is beneficial for everyone..In a restaurant, order in small amount first. You can always add in some extra order if necessary. But if you can get by with the original smaller order, that's great.

Remember this: You have higher chance of overeating if you serve more food on the table. You have better chance of not overeating if you serve less food
5. Avoid stuffing your fridge with ice cream, chocolate or other dessert. You cannot eat what you do not have.

6. When someone prepares a big plate of food for you, look at it first. Ask yourself, "Do I want to stuff it all into my stomach?"

If your answer is no, just put aside some food to another empty plate first. After finishing your food, look back at the extra food on that new plate. Say to yourself, "Phew! Luckily I didn't stuff that portion into my stomach."

7. When you get too hungry before your meal time, just take some fruit instead of heavy meal. The tendency to overeat is very high for modern people. Do you know most monks only eat twice a day?

They wake up at 4am, meditate and say their prayer. Later they have their simple breakfast at 7am. Before 12pm, they have their lunch. That's all for them. They eat no more after that. No tea break. No dinner. No supper. They still look strong and energetic.

Of course, we don't have to eat like them. But it reminds us we can eat less and stay healthy. So remember to eat only 70% full if you want to stay healthy.

Strategy to reduce salt consumption and blood pressure

The doctor has taken me off the status of pre-hypertension. However, I still need to control salt intake to control the blood pressure.

I am a widower plus am too lazy to cook myself. I take my normal meal once a day in a restaurant where I do not have control over how much salt be in my daily meal, normally in the mid-morning. I then take only fruits in the afternoon and sometimes soy milk for the protein. Both fruits and soy bean milk has no or very negligible salt. That is how I reduce my salt consumption

Papaya, the wonder and cost effective fruit

I have long been a regular consumer of the papaya fruit. When I attended a talk organized for premium account holder of OCBC Bank (Oversea Chinese Banking Corporation Bank) by Dr. Lim Hua An, he started off with the exact quotation you see in this blog Header -"Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food". He divided his talk into 3 parts, Nutrition, Colon Cleansing and the third part I couldn't remember.

My confidence in him increased when to my question as to which is more important, he answered "nutrition". He said if you get your nutrition correct, the rest will automatically follow.

He also said one of he best fruit to eat is the humble papaya:



He confirmed what I had believed all along, that papaya contains lots of carotene and vitamin C. To me, on per weight basis, it is also one of the cheapest fruit I can buy and thus the most cost effective. I hope to edit this post later to write more about the virtues of the lowly papaya fruit. At the moment, I am in a hurry to use this post to demonstrate the use of an image to sign your post. I will post the link to the instructions later.

Benefits of whole grains

What is whole grain

A grain consists of three parts – bran, germ and endosperm, and when they are all present, they are considered as full grain. Often grains are refined by grinding and polishing to appeal to less knowledgeable people. Some people do not like whole grain because they don't look beautifully white and may feel "grainy" when they chew on them. I love whole meal bread not only because I believe they are more healthy, but I like to chew on them, and they don't kind of stick to the gum when I eat them compared with white bread. Many healthful and nutritious ingredients are removed by the grinding and polishing process and become nutritionally deficient. Some have said that they have observed bugs dying when trying to sustain themselves on refined grains in silos.

Benefits of whole grains

Whole grains have more dietary fiber, protein (especially the amino acid lysine which cannot be synthesized by our body and is a building block for proteins plus it plays a crucial role in the production of various enzymes, hormones, and disease-fighting antibodies), dietary minerals like selenium, magnesium, phoosphorus and manganese. Whole grains also contains vitamins like vitamin B6, vitamin E and niacine. Most of the antioxidants and vitamins are found in the germ and the bran of a grain which are removed by refining.

Many believe whole grains help to maintain a healthy heart. The most important benefit of whole grain compared to refined grain is the dietary fiber which is deficient in refined grain. Dietary fiber helps reduce the incidence of digestive system diseases, some forms of cancer, gum disease, coronary heart disease. It is also believed to help reduce the chances of one getting diabetes because carbohydrates from whole grains are digested and retard the entrance of sugar into the bloodstream. And of course it helps one have more frequent and easier bowel movements which is important to have a healthy colon and probably reduces the chances of developing piles because one do not need to strain hard to defaecate.

All about Poultry

Found this interesting Article Poultry Talk. It is one of the many good articles of the Wellness Letter which relies on the expertise of the School of Public Health and other researchers at University of California, Berkeley, as well as other top scientists from around the world. If you don't have time to surf over there, here is a brief summary of what is in that article:

Eating white meat (chicken or turkey) is better than eating red meat as poultry has less fat and fewer calories, especially if the skin is removed. However, the healthiest diets are still diets rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains (and include some fish) and lower in animal products of all kinds.

What’s the difference between farm-raised and organic chicken? Well, organic chicken are raised on 100% organic feed and no antibiotic is used, plus the welfare of the chicken have to be promoted (a rather vague provision). However, slaughtering methods are the same no matter how the chicken was raised, and that’s where most contamination with Salmonella and Campylobacter, two potentially deadly strains of bacteria found in raw chicken, occurs.

The free-range label means the birds have access to an outdoor pen, via portals on the poultry house. They may never go outdoors, and you shouldn’t picture them roaming free in a big yard. “Pastured” chickens, sometimes sold in high-end markets, are also raised in cages, but the cages sit on grass and are moved from time to time. There is no evidence that chickens labeled “free-range” or “pastured” taste better, are more nutritious, or get more humane treatment than other birds.