For Smarter Nutrition (02)

BetterNutrition.com
BetterNutrition.com is the online version of the Better Nutrition magazine. The site has tons of healthy recipes for all meals – breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There are also recipes for soups, salads, dairy-free foods, foods for vegetarians, and foods that can boost your immunity system. But more than anything else, there is a huge list of articles that contains tips and recommendations on how to have a healthy eating lifestyle even if you are on a strict diet. There are also posts that talk about having a natural lifestyle not only for you, but also for your family and pets as well.

Organic Foods: What You Need to Know About Eating Organic
This page on HelpGuide.org lays out the benefits and the basic facts about organic food and how to keep it affordable. It tries to help the reader navigate through the confusing complexities organic food labels, benefits and claims. It explains what organic means, which varies from country to country in terms of regulation, but in essence, organic crops must be grown without the use of synthetic pesticides, bioengineered genes (GMOs), or petroleum-based or sewage sludge-based fertilizers. Livestock must have access to the outdoors and be fed organic food, and must not be given antibiotics, growth hormones or any animal by-products. The site covers benefits, organic vs. locally-grown, understanding GMOs, how to bet the best bang for your buck when shopping organic, and much more.

The Natural Human Diet
This article by Dr. Michael Greger MD of NuritionFacts.org talks about how today’s diet might be the cause of chronic diseases many suffer. It explains that historically, the body of man is designed to eat greens, fruit, and seeds like the ape. Man is basically a herbivore, and his body is not designed to metabolize animal proteins and animal fat. The article also explains that early man hardly had cholesterol in his diet, and so his body has evolved to conserve the little cholesterol he would get. Because today’s diets are overflowing with cholesterol, no wonder the body cholesterol-conserving mechanism has become maladaptive, leading to clogged arteries and eventually, heart disease.

WebMD Nutrition and Health Information
WebMD.com has always been a trusted source for medical information, so it makes perfect sense to check out their site on diet and nutrition. The site features articles about foods that can be dangerous, healthy foods for a healthy heart, protecting your bones from osteoporosis, heartburn, diet and lifestyle tips for better sex, assessing your heart disease risk, nutrition for kids, eating right before pregnancy, diabetes weight loss, irritable bowel syndrome and more. The site also features quizzes so you can assess your health. Includes a calorie counter, BMI calculator and heart risk quiz, among other useful Web tools.

The Nitty Gitty on Fiber
This page talks about fiber and says that it's not as simple as the food and bowel supplement manufacturers make it out to be. There are a great many types of fiber, each with different effects in the body. For example, no plant fiber is digested by the small bowel, but reaches the colon unchanged. Keeping it as simple as possible, there are two broad catgories of fiber: soluble and insoluble. All plants have both kinds, but the percentage of each varies. Insoluable fiber does not dissolve in water is is not acted on by colon bacteria, i.e., it is noty metabolized. Wheat and corn are about 90 percent insoluble fiber; oats about 50 percent. Ingesting these fibers are beneficial for bowel regularity and reducing the risk of colon polyps. Soluble fiber does dissolve in water and is often used as a food source by colon bacterial. Two categories of soluble fiber are psyllium and prebiotics. Psyllium contains mucilage, which increases stool bulk and reduces cholesterol. Prebiotics are used as a food source by certain beneficial colon bacterials, which create many health benefits.