The Latin name for this greenish-purple vegetable is Cynara scolymus. Sometimes called French or Globe artichoke, it’s the flower of the plant that is sold in grocery stores. But don’t confuse it with the Jerusalem artichoke, which is really a tuber that grows in North America.

One medium artichoke supplies 20 percent of the vitamin C you need for the day. With only 60 calories, it’s also a good source of potassium and magnesium, both important for a healthy heart. And like most fruits and vegetables, it’s packed with disease-fighting antioxidants that nutritionists rave about.

3 ways artichokes keep you healthy

Steps up digestion.

As it turns out, the ancient Romans were onto something when it comes to artichokes and digestion. An ingredient in artichoke leaves helps your liver form bile – something necessary for good digestion. If your liver doesn’t produce enough bile, your food doesn’t get broken down properly, and you end up with stomach pains and indigestion.

If you feel sick to your stomach, overly full, and have abdominal pain after eating a normal-sized meal, you may suffer from dyspepsia – a fancy name for poor digestion.

Several scientific studies showed dramatic improvements in people with dyspepsia after being treated with artichoke extracts. You can also get help for your indigestion the way the ancient Romans did – by eating a delicious artichoke with your dinner.

Chokes out heart disease.

Bile from your liver does more than help you digest food. It also helps break down cholesterol from the fat you eat. But a liver that doesn’t produce enough bile lets too much cholesterol get by – kind of like the I Love Lucy episode where the chocolate assembly line starts moving too fast for her to keep up. People with liver problems can have high cholesterol even if they eat a low-fat diet.

That’s where artichokes come in. Because they can help you make more bile, you might be able to lower your cholesterol by eating them. A study in Germany showed that taking artichoke extract for six weeks caused LDL cholesterol, the bad kind, to fall by more than 22 percent. As a bonus, artichokes might also be able to block some new cholesterol from forming in your liver.

Lowers blood sugar.

Your liver is busier than you might think. In addition to breaking down fatty foods, it also stores extra glucose (sugar) in the form of glycogen and turns it back into glucose whenever it gets a phone call from your blood saying that supplies are too low. This is a great system in a perfectly working body. But some people have faulty phone lines, and their livers work day and night cranking out glucose their blood doesn’t need. This overproduction of glucose can lead to diabetes and other health problems.

In animal studies, researchers found that substances in artichokes kept livers from making too much glucose. More studies need to be done, but scientists think artichokes might someday be useful to people with noninsulin-dependent diabetes. In the future, people might use plants, like artichokes, to keep their blood sugar production in check.

Pantry pointers

Choose artichokes with even, green color. Don’t buy any that look wilted, dried out, or moldy. Heavy, small heads are best.

Small artichokes are good for appetizers, and larger ones can be used for stuffing with a variety of fillings and served as an entree.

Be sure to trim about an inch off the top with a sharp knife. And then trim about one-quarter inch from the tips of the leaves since this part is inedible and rough on your hands.

Artichokes can be steamed in a steamer basket or boiled in water. They should be tender and ready to eat in about 30 minutes. If you’re in a hurry, you can microwave them more quickly. First, rinse them with water to add some moisture. Then wrap each one in microwaveable plastic wrap. For four artichokes, microwave on high for 10 to 15 minutes or until the meaty part at the base of the artichoke is tender.

You can serve these veggies hot or cold. Some people serve a dipping sauce with artichokes. It would be a shame to ruin a lowfat food with a rich sauce, so try a low-calorie, yogurt-based dip.

If you’ve never eaten an artichoke, you might be a little confused about what part is edible. The outer leaves are hard and a little bitter, but at the bottom of the leaf, where they pull away from the stem, there is a soft, velvety hunk of “meat” that you can eat by gently pulling the leaf through your teeth. After you’ve nibbled all the leaves this way, you’re left with the best part of the artichoke – the heart. This is a soft, nutty-flavored center that can be eaten whole. Just scrape off the soft fuzz with a spoon before you dig in.

But whenever I hear one of these reports, I wonder whether it actually ends up doing more harm than good. Most fail to mention the health risks of excessive alcohol consumption, which will do a body far more damage than moderate consumption will do it good. And they leave the impression that health benefits apply to men and women alike. Not so.

Most of the research regarding alcohol’s effects in raising good cholesterol, or HDL, levels looks at men and post-menopausal women. Very little, if any, evidence suggests that alcohol consumption in younger women is beneficial. Even worse, other studies associate younger women’s alcohol consumption with increased disease risk.

Up to 4 percent of breast cancers can be attributed to alcohol. According to a recent study in the British Journal of Cancer, every drink increases a woman’s chances of developing breast cancer. In a recent summary of 63 published studies, 65 percent of the studies found an association between alcohol consumption and increased breast cancer risk.

It’s tempting to dismiss these health risks by pointing to more obvious ones, like excess weight and inactivity. In fact, 54.3 percent of women age 20 to 39 are obese or overweight. But if you’re one of them and you’re trying to lose weight and increase fitness, drinking alcohol will hardly help you achieve your goals.

Add that much-ballyhooed glass of red wine a day without making any other changes in your diet or exercise, and you’ll gain nearly 15 pounds per year. In four years, you’ll be 60 pounds heavier, which won’t do much to help your heart.

Counting calories from alcohol can be doubly difficult. Not only are these calories less satisfying than those from food, these days they’re likely to come in super-sized martini glasses the size of swimming pools. Alcohol sabotages your diet in other ways as well. Lowered inhibitions can lead to overeating, while even one drink can dampen your metabolism for up to 24 hours.

Bottom line: Be honest with yourself. Don’t use health claims about spirits as an excuse to justify excessive drinking which endangers your life, liver, looks and limbs. Keep in mind that plenty of other, better ways to improve heart health are out there. Start by getting and staying fit. Exercise at least five times each week. And eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, whose antioxidants may reduce the risk of heart disease by reducing the oxidation of cholesterol in your arteries.

Most of all, remember that less is more. And get all the facts before you go looking for your health at the bottom of a glass of booze.

Jennifer Grossman is the director of the Dole Nutrition Institute. – NU

Health products are traditionally just one step in the process of improving one’s health. Typically if someone orders a weight loss product, they are also focusing on exercising and nutrition to improve their health. If someone orders a health product to stop smoking, they are probably also focusing on nutrition, weight and exercise. The health products are part of the process of looking at your life and improving your health on many different levels. A small home business for health products means that you are contributing to the process of looking at choosing a healthier lifestyle.

Another advantage to being a health products distributor is the potential to make a great deal of supplemental income. The majority of health related products that you will distribute are consumable. This means that after the person finished taking all of the health supplements, they will need another bottle. More than likely, they will order replacement products from you and this will enable you to build a large repeat customer base for your new home business. There are many different consumable health related products that you can select from for your home business as a distributor. This further increases your chances of success because you are not restricted to a just a handful of products that you hope that someone will select when they visit your internet store.

Many people become successful as a distributor it is because they lucked out on a product that is seasonal or a new trend or fad. However, the problem arises when the season is over or the trend is no longer popular. The product is no longer needed by the general public and the distributor is left wondering why their new home business is suddenly going down hill and not succeeding. It is not until it is often too late to salvage the business that they realize their product was seasonal or a new trend. The advantage to health related products is that they are needed year round. They are not seasonal. It is never just a trend or a fad to be healthy. Because of this, you know that your investment of time, advertising and purchasing products will never be wasted. Consumers will always need health products.

There are many different methods to market health related products. This is a tremendous advantage to anyone that is a distributor for this niche of the market. The more methods that you can use to distribute your products the higher your success rate will be for your home business. Some products can only be marketed a few ways and this limits the potential customer base to purchase the products or services that are being offered. It makes it much harder to have a successful home business while you don’t have this worry as a health products distributor.

You are forced to leave your normal easy lifestyle to adopt one which most definitely better suited for you, but which is also too much hassle in this and age of convenience foods.

The world might be changing its outlook on these things and finding them lacking in anything resembling nutrition, but they are the staple of you life and you have gotten used to them to such an extent that weaning you off these foods is somewhat along the lines of weaning someone off smoking twenty packs of cigarettes a day.

You have to be dragged down kicking and screaming to the nearest organic health food store by those people who profess to love and care for you, when in reality if they cared even one iota for you, they would leave you alone in your singular little rut of eating overcooked TV dinners, greasy fat-filled hamburgers and fries, and sugar laden drinks and desserts. That’s of course assuming they care about you.

But since your family and friends are heartless monsters who enjoy seeing you suffer being in the best of health, you unfortunately have no choice but to go along with their whims and fancies of the moment. And in this case, the moment seems to be stretching out into an eternity of having to eat healthy organically grown and produced foods and this in turn necessitates your having to go on a frequent basis down to your local (or nearest) organic health food store.

Of course if you really tried hard you might be able to get back to your unhealthy lifestyle of one pot of coffee in the morning and another two or three pots as the day progresses. Unfortunately though fate does not seem to be on your side and you find that even when you try to break free of the imposed health food diet, you can’t.

Why? Because now you’re used to it and all the grease in those greasy hamburgers is enough to turn you green ? literally. This is unfortunately your lot in life now and you find yourself frequenting the organic health food store more and more often as your taste buds decide to rejoin the living, and your palate finds enjoyment once again in your meals.

While Vitamin C intake is fairly simple to accomplish today with either foods rich in this vitamin or Vitamin C supplements, that hasn’t always been the case. Scurvy was once a real health concern, associated with low levels of Vitamin C in the body. The problem was rampant in areas of the world where fruits and vegetables high in Vitamin C content were rare, or where people couldn’t afford to have those vegetables as part of their daily menu.

Oranges and other citrus fruits are among the more common food sources of Vitamin C. The papaya is probably the fruit with the single highest natural Vitamin C content. A medium papaya provides more than the daily recommended allowance for Vitamin C for any normal, healthy person.

Because most people associate Vitamin C with citrus fruits, you may not realize that there are some other non-citrus sources of Vitamin C. If you simply don’t like oranges or grapefruit, you can still find fruits that are high in Vitamin C to add to your diet. Strawberries and cantaloupe are among those fruits. There are some other foods that are also good sources of Vitamin C, such as peppers.

Vitamin C has also been found to be a natural antioxidant, meaning that it helps the body fight off specific health problems and diseases and may even slow some of the signs of aging. Some people think that Vitamin C will keep you from getting a cold, but the vitamin’s natural aid to the immune system is the only real aid when it comes to colds. Instead of taking Vitamin C after you’re coming down with a cold, the best course is to be sure you have sufficient levels of Vitamin C all the time.

An important fact about Vitamin C is that the body doesn’t store this vitamin as is the case with some vitamins. That means that you need to give your body new sources of Vitamin C daily to be sure the body maintains a sufficient Vitamin C level.

Most professionals seem to agree that getting Vitamin C naturally is best. But if you’re not getting sufficient amounts of this important vitamin, vitamin supplements are a good idea. Manufacturers have met the demand for more options when it comes to vitamins, including Vitamin C. You’ll find tablets, drinks and chewables, all packed with enough Vitamin C to keep your body ready to fight off the infections that naturally come your way.

Avocado and cheese sandwich made with wholemeal bread. Avocados are a good source of vitamin E and C as well as being high in fibre and potassium. They also contain folic acid, an important vitamin for pregnant women. Cheese contains important levels of calcium and wholemeal bread is high in fibre.

Dried banana chips. Dried banana chips are often fried in coconut oil and coated in honey. Bananas contain high levels of vitamin A and C. They are also rich in potassium. You can often find banana chips included in muesli. Great for a carbohydrate boost.

Crackers and cheese. A very popular snack after dinner. Cheese is high in calcium. Crackers also come in wholemeal varieties and these are a good source of extra fibre.

Fruit salad. You can combine any of your favourite fruits in this snack such as kiwi fruit, apples, pear, and nectarines. This snack will help you towards your five a day of fruit and vegetables.

Hummus in pita bread. Hummus is made from dried chickpeas, garlic and sometimes tahini. Hummus contains fibre and iron; tahini is made from sesame seeds and is high in calcium.

Celery is an excellent source of Vitamin C that is essential for promoting a healthy immune system. It also helps alleviate the symptoms of colds. Vitamin C inhibits free radical damage that may trigger inflammatory conditions like asthma and arthritis. This vitamin is also beneficial in promoting a healthy cardiovascular system.

Medical research shows that celery contains active compounds called pthalide that are essential in reducing the blood pressure. Pthalide works by relaxing the muscles of the arteries that regulates the blood pressures which allows the blood vessels to constrict. Healthy blood vessels may help prevent stroke, heart attack, and other heart ailments. The benefits of celery in reducing blood pressure is also attributed to its high contents of potassium, magnesium, and calcium. High consumptions of these minerals have been associated with reduced blood pressure.

A food regimen which contains celery may help prevent cancer because of the anti-cancer properties. This vegetable contains coumarin which essential in the prevention of free radicals from degenerating the cells which is a leading cause of cancer. Coumarins may also enhance the activity of white blood cells, these cells defend the immune system and eliminate harmful cells, including cancer cells. Celery also contain acetylenics that have been shown in some scientific studies to stop the development of tumor cells.

Other health benefits of celery may include the following:

* Diseases of the kidneys (nephritis)
* Diseases of the pancreas
* Diseases of the liver and gallbladder.
* Rheumatism
* Neuritis
* Constipation
* Asthma
* Catarrh
* Pyorrhea
* Diabetes – leaves
* Dropsy – roots
* Brain fatigue
* Acidosis (the condition of depletion of alkaline reserve or bicarbonate content of the body, celery being an alkaline food.
* Anemia, no doubt due to the presence of iron, some protein and Vitamin
* Obesity
* Tuberculosis
* Improvement of teeth, no doubt due to the presence of calcium.
* Calms the nerve and give relief in cases of insomnia.

In addition to these health benefits, celery contains many active ingredients that has made this vegetable a very important plant when it comes to promoting good health. It contains balanced content of minerals, vitamins, and other necessary nutrients. Celery also contains important concentrations of plant hormones and other essential oils that may regulate the nervous system and promote a sense of relaxation Some studies also claim that the celery is may also promote stimulating and positive effects on the sexual system. Because of the many health benefits of celery, regular consumption of this vegetable is encouraged by many nutritionists and other health experts.

but most of them have a larger price tag than the unhealthy, high-fat foods. There are options. If you shop wisely, you can eat healthier than you ever have before and decrease your grocery bill at the same time. Nutritious eating doesn’t need to be expensive.

Less Junk = More Savings:

In choosing healthy foods, keep in mind that you will automatically be spending less than before due to the absence of junk foods that you may normally purchase such as soft drinks, sugary snacks, and high fat meats.

Less Waste = Less Waiste:

Healthy eating is not just eliminating certain foods from your diet; it is replacing them with healthy foods. And, if weight control is your goal, you will also be reducing your portion sizes, which will mean less money spent on each meal.

Less Meat, More Veggies:

Reducing the amount of meat you eat and replacing it with vegetables is a great way to save money. Fresh vegetables are not nearly as expensive as meat or poultry and your body will thank you for it. Salad is another cheap, healthy food. The pre-packaged salads will cost a bit more than if you purchase the lettuce and other vegetables separately and prepare the salad yourself.

Frugal Fruit:

Fruit can be a somewhat expensive, but if you purchase canned fruits in low-sugar syrup or water, you will pay relatively little in comparison to fresh fruit. Apples and oranges are inexpensive compared to some other fruits and you can often find sales that will further reduce your expenses.

Beans and Rice are Nice:

Legumes and rice are very inexpensive and you can use either or both of these to replace meat several times per week.

Save on Meat:

Canned fish costs considerably less than fresh fish and still contains most of the nutrients. Canned tuna and salmon are very cheap and are very low in fat and calories if you choose the varieties packed in water rather than oil. Chicken is less expensive if you purchase a whole chicken and remove the skin yourself before cooking.

Healthy food does not have to be expensive. You can purchase cheap healthy foods and not only eliminate unhealthy fat and calories, but you can actually save money if you shop wisely.

A light breakfast must necessarily be followed be a substantial meal, while a heavy breakfast must be followed by a light lunch. If both breakfast and lunch are light, then a heavy dinner is needed.

Like all meals, breakfast must be planned to include food nutrients not provided for or inadequately found in the two other meals to complete the essential body requirements for the day.

Too often, skimpy breakfasts are blamed in lack of time. Considering that one-fourth to one-third of the day’s requirements is served at breakfast, the need for planning ahead is doubly justified.

Breakfast mean to break the fast of several hours.

The factors affecting the nature of the breakfast menu will depend upon age, sex, weight, health, and kind of activities of the individual family members. Other factors to consider are the amount of time allotted for its preparation by one or several family members, or by a hired helper and how light, moderate, or heavy other meals are intended to be. Family custom may have to contend with all of these, although strictly speaking, this must not prevail upon the more important factors.

Breakfast should always include a raw fruit because this contains more vitamins and minerals than cooked ones. Fresh ripe fruits have a rich mellow aroma that can stimulate even the most delicate appetite. It should be taken as the first course of the meal for the same reason.

Fresh eggs are good breakfast food because they are rich in complete protein, fat, iron, calcium, phosphorus, vitamins A & B, and niacin. They are also easy to prepare and digest. They can be fried, poached, soft-cooked, hard-cooked, scrambled, or prepared as an omelet.

Rice and other cereals are the main fuel contributors in breakfast. Rice is cooked plain or sautéed in small amount of fat and garlic. Corn broiled and buttered is a practical American way that can be adopted anywhere where corn is available.

Milk is the almost complete food and is welcome at any meal. At breakfast, milk is popular as a beverage or taken with coffee, chocolate, oatmeal, and other cereals. Milk should be bought from sanitary and reliable sources. Fresh milk is safer if pasteurized before serving.

Breakfast breads may be in the form of rolls, buns, loafbread, biscuits, waffles, or hot cakes. Breads can be toasted and served with butter or fruit jam like strawberry. Waffles, hotcakes, and French toast are good for heavy and substantial breakfast. Rolls with butter and jam, jelly, or marmalade are suitable for heavy breakfast, too, especially if taken with a heavy protein dish and chocolate.