Pass the Butter Please...

"Pass The Butter ... Please".

This is interesting . .. . I found it on The Alive Academy Facebook Page and wanted to pass it along.

Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back.

It was a white substance with no food appeal so they added the yellow colouring and sold it to people to use in place of butter. How do you like it? They have come out with some clever new flavourings....

DO YOU KNOW.. The difference between margarine and butter?

Read on to the end...gets very interesting!

Both have the same amount of calories.
Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams; compared to 5 grams for margarine.

Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study.


Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods.
Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few and only because they are added!

Butter tastes much better than margarine and it can enhance the flavours of other foods.

Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less than 100 years .

And now, for Margarine..

Very High in Trans fatty acids.

Triples risk of coronary heart disease ...

Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol)

Increases the risk of cancers up to five times..

Lowers quality of breast milk

Decreases immune response.

Decreases insulin response.

And here's the most disturbing fact... HERE IS THE PART THAT IS VERY INTERESTING!

Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC... and shares 27 ingredients with PAINT.

These facts alone were enough to have me avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is hydrogenated (this means hydrogen is added, changing the molecular structure of the substance).

Open a tub of margarine and leave it open in your garage or shaded area. Within a couple of days you will notice a couple of things:

* no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something)

* it does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value ; nothing will grow on it. Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not a find a home to grow.

Why? Because it is nearly plastic . Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?

Pass the BUTTER PLEASE"

Sugary Drinks Linked to Heart Disease

My clients will tell you I am constantly harping on them about drinking enough water.  The other thing they hear me talk about is to eliminate sugary drinks from their diet entirely.  


Recently, The New York Times had an article that talked about a recent study that linked sugary drinks to heart disease.  Some really interesting things came out of this study... most of which lines right up with my "no soda" initiative!


Here are just a few tidbits from the article:

Researchers analyzed data from a prospective study of 42,883 male health professionals, ages 40 to 75. The men responded to diet questionnaires every four years, and more than 18,000 of them provided blood samples.

Over 22 years, 3,683 of the men had heart attacks. Even after controlling for factors like smoking, exercise and family history, the scientists found that men who drank the sweetened beverages most often were 20 percent more likely to have had a heart attack than those who drank the least.

They calculated that one serving daily of a sugar-sweetened beverage was linked to a 19 percent increase in the relative risk of cardiovascular disease. The study was published online in the journal Circulation last week.

Sugar-sweetened drinks were linked with adverse changes in levels of HDL, triglycerides and C-reactive protein. Dr. Frank B. Hu, senior author of the analysis and a professor of medicine at Harvard, said that a study a little over two years ago found similar results in women.

Is diet soda a good alternative? No, said Dr. Hu.

“Some studies have found a relationship between diet soda and metabolic disease,” he said.

Give up the sugar!!

~Noah

7 Workout Mistakes

While we all try to get into the gym regularly, if you're not changing things up, getting your nutrition on track, and not taking care in other areas of your life, it's just not going to give you the results you're looking for.

Simple things like not skipping meals, not skipping the basics, getting enough rest... these can make all the difference! 

I'm often asked about cardio - how much is enough?  The reality is that 20 minutes 3 times a week is sufficient for most people.  Unless you are training for longer distance running or some other very specific event that is all that is needed.  If you balance strength training with those 20 minutes, however, you are going to get an overall fitness level much higher than if you did one or the other alone.

Yahoo! Health has a great article about the 7 Workout Mistakes to Avoid - they have some information about cardio and the other things I talk about above.  Read it and see whether you're sabotaging your own workout goals.

~Noah