becoming a health nut

I’m beginning to exhibit symptoms of becoming a health nut – well, sort of.
I haven’t exactly fallen off the fat, lazy wagon enough to put in a couple hours a day at the gym or dedicated an entire room of my house to the exercise equipment I’ve picked up at yard sales.
I haven’t yielded my comfortable chair at the computer or my couch potato stance in front of the television set.
My refrigerator is not overflowing with vitamin tablets, lecithin and leathery strips of dried fruit or healthy portions of kelp.
But – give me some credit – I have begun to collect information. I am researching the topic. So even if I don’t get fit, I will have lots of information to share with everyone else who wants to live long and prosper.
Here are this week’s finds:
• The Holy Grail of healthy eating these days is Whole Grains. Sprinkle them over your salads, look for them in your cereal and substitute them into your breakfast muffin. 100% whole grain bread contains many more vitamins and minerals than its white counterpart and contributes to decreased heart disease, cancers, diabetes according to a research done by the National Institutes of Health and the Harvard School of Public Health.
I hear and obey. I whipped up some mighty fine tasting muffins with a bunch of raisin bran cereal, added flax meal and oatmeal, apples and applesauce. Everyone loved them, including me. I think I had about five for breakfast that day. And then just to make sure I got my quota of whole grains for the day, I had a couple more for my mid-morning break and one or two before I trundled off to bed.
• Support the dairy industry and it will bless you with an increased ability to lose weight. In a study done by Michael Zemel, a professor of nutrition, those who dieted and ate three servings of lo-fat yogurt each day lost 22 percent more weight in all the right places. Participants lost an average of 14 pounds over 12 weeks.
Yogurt. Ahhh, right. Excuse me, they did say three times a day, didn’t they? I cringe at the thought. I prefer to sink my teeth into my food, thank you.
Would a glass or two of low-fat milk to wash down my whole grain muffins be okay? Other than that I just plain have to add nuts and cereal to the yogurt or I won’t eat it.
• Eating healthy it isn’t all whole grains and yogurt though. Keeping healthy can also involve indulging in your favorite dark chocolate. A research study from the University of L’Aquila in Italy says that eating a serving of very dark chocolate can lower your blood pressure and increase your body’s ability to metabolize sugar. Plus, dark chocolate contains the tryptophan used in the body’s production of the neurotransmitter serotonin, a necessary chemical for decreasing anxiety and depression.
I wish I had known that before I made the muffins. I had some dark chocolate chips stuck back in a corner of “do not eat”, I could have dumped them into the muffin batter and created the perfect, heart healthy food and not suffered a moment of anxiety afterwards that possibly I had eaten too many.