Children Eat More Fruits And Vegetables If They Are Homegrown

Children Eat More Fruits And Vegetables If They Are Homegrown: ScienceDaily
2007.04.19
"'It was a simple, clear finding,' said Debra Haire-Joshu, Ph.D., director of Saint Louis University's Obesity Prevention Center and a study author. 'Whether a food is homegrown makes a difference. Garden produce creates what we call a 'positive food environment."..."When children are involved with growing and cooking food, it improves their diet," Haire-Joshu said. "Students at schools with gardens learn about math and science and they also eat more fruits and vegetables. Kids eat healthier and they know more about eating healthy. It's a winning and low-cost strategy to improve the nutrition of our children at a time when the pediatric obesity is an epidemic problem."

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Natural Purple Pigments In Fruits, Vegetables May Help Prevent Obesity

Natural Purple Pigments In Fruits, Vegetables And Berries, Such As Blueberries, May Help Prevent Obesity - ScienceDaily
2008.02.14
"...natural pigments responsible for the beautiful blue/purple/reddish color of certain fruits and vegetables may help prevent obesity. Their animal study however, reports that eating the whole fruit containing these pigments seems to be less effective than eating an extract of the berry...pigments -- called anthocyanins -- prevent obesity in laboratory mice fed a high-fat diet. Anthocyanins are found in grape skins, blueberries, blackberries, purple corn, and other foods. The mice also had other healthful changes in disease-related substances found in the blood..."

Related stories...

Compounds That Color Fruits And Veggies May Protect Against Colon Cancer

Processes That Give Plants Color Shed Light On Antioxidants

Chemoprevention, Naturally: Findings On Plant-derived Cancer Medicines

Anthocyanin - Wikipedia

Got Anthocyanins?

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Fruit, Vegetable Eaters Have Fewer Strokes

Fruit, Vegetable Eaters Have Fewer Strokes - WebMD
2008.01.09
"...University of Cambridge researchers measured vitamin C levels in more than 20,000 people, who were then followed for roughly a decade. Blood vitamin C levels tend to be much higher in people who eat lots of fruits and vegetables than in people who do not. When the participants were divided into four groups based on vitamin C levels, those with the highest concentrations of the vitamin in their blood were found to have a 42% lower stroke risk than those with the lowest concentrations...The findings do not prove that it is the vitamin C in fruits and vegetables that is protective, the researchers note.And most studies have found that taking vitamin C and other antioxidant vitamin supplements is of no benefit for lowering stroke risk..."We don't know what it is, but the message to the public is clear," he tells WebMD. "Eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. Think about color, and eat a rainbow of plant foods."..."


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Four Health Behaviors Can Add 14 Extra Years Of Life

Four Health Behaviors Can Add 14 Extra Years Of Life - ScienceDaily
Via QualityCounts
2008.01.09
"People who adopt four healthy behaviours -- not smoking; taking exercise; moderate alcohol intake; and eating five servings of fruit and vegetables a day -- live on average an additional fourteen years of life compared with people who adopt none of these behaviours...Kay-Tee Khaw and colleagues from the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council used a health behaviour score that is easy to understand in order to assess the participants in the study (who were from Norfolk, United Kingdom). Between 1993 and 1997, 20,000 men and women between the ages of 45 and 79, none of whom had known cancer or heart or circulatory disease, completed a questionnaire that resulted in a score between 0 and 4...A point was awarded for each of the following: not currently smoking; not being physically inactive (physical inactivity was defined as having a sedentary job and not doing any recreational exercise); a moderate alcohol intake of 1-14 units a week (a unit is half a pint of beer or a glass of wine); and a blood vitamin C level consistent with eating five servings of fruit or vegetables a day. Deaths among the participants were recorded unti l 2006...After factoring in age, the results showed that over an average period of eleven years people with a score of 0 -- i.e. those who did not undertake any of these healthy forms of behaviour -- were four times more likely to have died than those who had scored 4 in the questionnaire."

PLoS Study link


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Studies show how fruits and veggies reduce cancer

Studies show how fruits and veggies reduce cancer - Yahoo! News
2007.12.07
"Just three servings a month of raw broccoli or cabbage can reduce the risk of bladder cancer by as much as 40 percent...These foods are rich in compounds called isothiocyanates, which are known to lower cancer risk..."Cooking can reduce 60 to 90 percent of ITCs, (isothiocyanates)," Dr. Li Tang...A second team of researchers from Roswell Park tested broccoli sprouts in rats.They used rats engineered to develop bladder cancer and fed some of them a freeze-dried extract of broccoli sprouts. The more they ate, the less likely they were to develop bladder cancer, said Dr. Yuesheng Zhang"...In a third study, a team at The Ohio State University fed black raspberries to patients with Barrett's esophagus, a condition that can lead to esophageal cancer...Ohio State's Laura Kresty and colleagues fed 1.1 ounces (32 grams) of freeze-dried black raspberries to women with Barrett's esophagus and 1.6 ounces (45 grams) to men every day for six months...They measured urine levels of levels of two compounds -- 8-isoprostane and GSTpi -- that indicate whether cancer-causing processes are going on in the body...Kresty said 58 percent of patients had marked declines of 8-isoprostane levels, suggesting less damage, and 37 percent had higher levels of GSTpi, which can help interfere with cancer causing damage and which is usually low in patients with Barrett's."


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Fresh Fruits And Vegetables Retain Antioxidants Long After Purchase

Fresh Fruits And Vegetables Retain Antioxidants Long After Purchase - ScienceDaily
2007.10.06
"...Belgian scientists report that fruits and vegetables do not lose any antioxidant content in the days after purchase, even as tell-tale signs of spoilage appear. In some cases, antioxidant levels actually rise...in the days following purchase, fruits and vegetables do not lose any phenolic compounds, ascorbic acid or flavonols -- a trio of chemical classes associated with antioxidant content. "Better, in some cases, an increase on the antioxidant capacity was observed in the days following their purchase, accompanied by an increase in phenolic compounds,"..."

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Organic fruit and vegetables may be better for you than conventionally grown crops

Organic food 'better' for heart BBC 7/5/07 "A ten-year study comparing organic tomatoes with standard produce found almost double the level of flavonoids - a type of antioxidant.
Flavonoids have been shown to reduce high blood pressure, lowering the risk of heart disease and stroke...Dr Alyson Mitchell, a food chemist at the University of California, and colleagues measured the amount of two flavonoids - quercetin and kaempferol - in dried tomato samples that had been collected as part of a long-term study on agricultural methods...on average they were 79% and 97% higher respectively in the organic tomatoes than in the conventionally grown fruit...New Scientist magazine reported that the different levels of flavonoids in tomatoes are probably due to the absence of fertilisers in organic farming. Flavonoids are produced as a defence mechanism that can be triggered by nutrient deficiency, such as a lack of nitrogen in the soil. The inorganic nitrogen in conventional fertiliser is easily available to plants and so, the researchers suggests, the lower levels of flavonoids are probably caused by over-fertilisation."

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Western diet ups breast cancer risk for Asians

Western diet risk to Asian women BBC News 7/10/07 "Asian women who eat a Western-style diet high in meat, white bread, milk and puddings may be at higher risk of breast cancer...A study of 1,500 Chinese women showed those who ate a "meat-sweet" diet were twice as likely to develop the disease as those on a vegetable-based diet...Those with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of over 25 were found to be most at risk..."

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Vegetables reduce cancer risk

Study adds data that vegetables reduce cancer risk Reuters/Yahoo!News 3/15/07 "A large study of 500,000 American retirees has found that just one extra serving of fruit or vegetables a day may reduce the risk of developing head and neck cancer...Cancer experts now believe that up to two-thirds of all cancers come from lifestyle factors such as smoking, diet and lack of exercise...Tobacco and alcohol use increase the risk of head and neck cancers, which affect the mouth, nose, sinuses and throat...eating six servings of fruit and vegetables per day per 1,000 calories cut the risk of head and neck cancer by 29 percent compared to eating one and a half servings..."Increasing consumption by just one serving of fruit or vegetables per 1,000 calories per day was associated with a 6 percent reduction in head and neck cancer risk, said Neal Freedman...A second study of food consumption in more than 183,000 residents of California and Hawaii found that a diet high in flavonols might help reduce pancreatic cancer risk, especially in smokers...Flavonols are common in plant-based foods but are found in highest concentrations in onions, apples, berries, kale and broccoli. The study found that people who ate the largest amounts of flavonols had a 23 percent reduced risk of developing pancreatic cancer compared to those who ate the least."

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Veggies for Enlarged Prostate Risk

Eating Vegetables May Cut Men's Risk Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia WebMD 2/14/07 "Enlarged prostates appear to be less common among men who eat lots of vegetables, a new study shows...Data came from more than 32,000 male health care workers enrolled in a long-term health study that began in 1986... When the researchers took a closer look at the data, they found that high consumption of vegetables -- but not fruit -- seemed particularly beneficial for BPH...The men who consumed the most vegetables were 11% less likely to have BPH surgery or moderate to high BPH symptoms...In addition, certain antioxidants – beta-carotene, lutein, and vitamin C -- were associated with reduced risk of BPH. But those antioxidants had to come from fruits and vegetables, not supplements...(Sabine Rohrmann, PhD, MPH,)"

Flax lignans might help BPH

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Education no protection against later memory loss

Education Does Not Protect Against Age-related Memory Loss ScienceDaily 1/10/07 "Adults over 70 with higher levels of education forgot words at a greater rate than those with less education...More education is consistently related to better cognitive performance in older adults and in this study, too, individuals with higher levels of education had a higher ability at any given age. However, it was those with the highest education whose performance dropped the most..."Even though we find in this research that those with higher education do better on mental status tests that look for dementia-like symptoms, education does not protect against more normal, age-related declines, like those seen on memory tests," said lead author Dawn Alley of the University of Pennsylvania..."

So how can we slow cognitive decline ?

Research shows these have promise:

Green Tea (don't use milk)

Coffee (3 cups a day)

Dark Chocolate with lots of cocoa (no milk again)

Curcumin and more on Curcumin

Eat lots of green leafy veggies

Take a daily fish oil supplement with lots of DHA and more here

Exercise and more here

A cousin of exercise - keep your weight down

Another cousin of exercise - keep symptoms of metabolic syndrome low (blood pressure, HDL (keep this high), triglycerides, blood sugar)

I suspect research will prove resveratrol will be useful in preventing some cognitive decline, but there isn't much out there yet on this subject.

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How Do You Get Your Kids To Eat Their Veggies?

A Recipe for Coaxing Your Kids to Eat Their Vegetables The Wall Street Journal Online 11/21/06 "Try, try and try again. One of the biggest mistakes parents make when it comes to kids and food is that they give up too soon. But Pennsylvania State University researchers have conducted studies using foods that most kids don't typically eat a lot of, such as vegetables and Asian dishes. They discovered it can take up to 15 exposures to a new food before a child will accept it...kids and animals are naturally neophobic -- meaning they have an instinctive tendency to reject an unknown taste as a way to protect themselves from foods that will make them sick. If parents would keep trying, putting the food on the table and asking kids to just take a bite, most kids will eventually learn to accept a new food, says Dr. Birch...Don't react. Child experts say parents need to stay low key when offering a food. Don't bribe or threaten punishment, and don't celebrate when kids eat their vegetables. Studies show that when kids are cajoled into eating a food or even rewarded or praised for eating it, the child often develops an aversion to it...Use tasty toppings. Use foods like ketchup, cheese sauce and ranch dressing"

This might make sense for most kids... but not for me and my loathing of brussel sprouts. Which brings up the issue of super tasters and having more taste buds than average that bring out the bitter taste in veggies. It could be that no matter how hard you try, or how persistent you are... your child will never enjoy veggies like broccoli all that much.

Gotta love the term "neophobic." That's a wonderful descriptor, but it's new to me... so I'm afraid of it.

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