Vital Wellness

Alcohol Abuse In Pregnacy

Although alcohol devastates the body both directly as a toxin and indirectly through nutrient loss, scientists suspect that it may also affect the body’s natural antioxidant defenses. Antioxidants are substances that protect your body’s healthy molecules against damage by unstable molecules called free radicals. Heavy alcohol use not only increases the production of free radicals, but it also depletes stores of antioxidants, like vitamins C and E. That means that while those nasty rogue molecules are increasing exponentially, the natural warriors needed to fight them off are decreasing rapidly. This imbal­ance is called “oxidative stress.” Read the rest of this entry »

Although millions of free radicals bombard your cells on a daily basis, the fact that it takes as long as it does for them to cause

Fruits

damage or disease is a tribute to the natural free radical—fighting systems with which you were born. These systems are fighting free radicals every moment of every day.

Each system is ingeniously designed to produce an antioxidant, a natu­rally occurring chemical that binds to the free radical (or the oxidant, as it is sometimes called) before it reaches the cells. In doing so, the antioxidant helps preserve your body’s healthy molecules. Read the rest of this entry »

Daily Value: 18 milligrams

Good Food Sources: Beef, Cream of Wheat cereal, baked potatoes, soybeans, pumpkin seeds, clams.

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There’s no doubt that many of us can use more iron than we’re getting. Roughly 20 percent of Americans are deficient in this mineral. The group most likely to be coming up short: women in their reproductive years.

Iron, which is absorbed in the intestines, comes in two forms: heme and nonheme. Found in meats, the heme form is well absorbed. Men get about two-thirds of their iron needs met by heme iron; the amount varies for women. Nonheme iron is found in vegetables and isn’t as well absorbed. Read the rest of this entry »

Daily Value: 1,000 milligrams

Calcium Sources

Good Food Sources: Skim milk, nonfat yogurt, cheeses, collard greens, mustard greens, kale, broccoli, canned salmon with bones, sardines with bones, corn tortillas processed with lime, calcium-fortified orange juice

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By now, just about everyone knows that getting enough calcium helps prevent diseases such as osteoporosis. Less well known is just how cal­cium goes about doing this.

When you eat cheese or drink milk, the calcium in these foods is absorbed through your small intestine and into your blood. The amount of calcium in your blood is regulated by a substance called parathyroid hormone. When calcium intake is low, parathyroid hormone signals for bone to be broken down, releasing calcium into the bloodstream. “Diets with adequate calcium intake produce less parathyroid hormone, so that we conserve more calcium and more bone,” says professor of nutrition. Read the rest of this entry »

Daily Value: 300 micrograms

Good Food Sources: Brewer’s yeast, barley, oat bran, soybeans, filberts, walnuts, peanuts, bananas, cauliflower, milk, egg yolks, salmon.

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Your nails are a disaster. They’ve been clipped, filed, and buffed, then I coated with polish. And they still look thin, brittle, and pathetic.

They will never appear in Vogue. But they do happen to be just about the first thing folks notice when you shake hands or pet their dogs. So what are you going to do? Read the rest of this entry »