Wisdom from The Action Wisdom In Action

If You Want to Age Gracefully, Don't Eat This

From the Huffington Post.

"Barring an accident, your lifestyle has everything to do with your longevity.

It's already been established that diet can override genetic predispositions for disease, so don't fall into the trap of believing your health and longevity is somehow inescapably tied to what's polluting your gene pool."

...

"This results from two primary conditions: too much sugar and processed foods, combined with insufficient exercise.

Interestingly, controlling these two factors will likely eliminate more than 90 percent of the following medical conditions:

• High blood pressure
• Obesity
• Diabetes
• High cholesterol

Of all the molecules capable of inflicting damage to your body, probably the most damaging are sugar molecules. Fructose in particular is an extremely potent pro-inflammatory agent that accelerates aging."

...

"Fructose adversely affects your body in a number of ways, but one of the mechanisms that causes significant damage is glycation, a process by which the sugar bonds with proteins and forms so-called advanced glycation end products, or AGEs. It's a fitting acronym because--along with oxidation--it's one of the major molecular mechanisms whereby damage accrues in your body, which leads to disease, aging and eventually death.

When sugar glycates, it creates inflammation, which activates your immune system in a defensive maneuver. Macrophages are scavenger cells that are part of your immune defense, and as such they have special receptors for AGEs, aptly called RAGEs (think: raging inflammation). These RAGEs bind to the AGEs and get rid of them.

Unfortunately, this process can leave its fair share of battle scars."

...

"As a standard recommendation, I strongly recommend keeping your TOTAL fructose consumption below 25 grams per day."

...

"This includes keeping track of your fructose intake from whole fruits. For a helpful chart showing the fructose content of many common fruits, please see this link*. I recommend this lower level simply because if you consume processed foods or sweet beverages at all, you're virtually guaranteed to consume "hidden" sources of fructose."

...

"Fresh fruit is nearly always preferred to fruit juices as the processing destroys many of the nutrients in the fruit and many commercial fruit juices are also highly adulterated or deceptively labeled.

Additionally it is important to understand that most commercial fruit juices should be avoided as fruit juice typically has large amounts of methanol, which is wood alcohol, and a metabolic poison. Often the methanol is bound to pectin and when you consume fresh fruits the methanol passes through your body and causes you no harm. However, after the fruit is processed into juice and put into containers, the methanol gradually dissociates from the pectin and dissolves in the juice.

The longer the fruit juice is in the container, or the more heat it is exposed to, the more methanol that is released into the juice."

*I substituted another link to the same information, because the author wanted people to register on his website for his information, which would've opened you up to junk mail and spam. Since the same information was available elsewhere, I used it.

The original article (link at top) contains other useful anti-aging info, but I chose to limit the excepts to fructose.

Posted by Cute at 7:09 PM

Labels: financial (non-tax), food purchases, health