Fall in love with food again

Recharging your food is about eating more fresh food and less packaged, calorie-dense junk food. It’s about falling in love with food again, discovering the amazing variety of different tastes available. It’s about changing gears once in a while and enjoying Slow Food. It also involves mood foods: nutrition tips to help make you more alert when you need to be, and types of foods to help you chill out and relax.

Cath’s Super Foods for Energy: Tea

When you’re busy and feel overloaded, nothing picks you as quickly as a quick cup of tea. Now there’s new research to prove that tea out-guns coffee when it comes to lifting your mental performance and overcoming fatigue throughout the day.

Your grandmother would have told you what I’m about to say - there’s something about tea that refreshes and helps you relax and revive!

Honestly whenever I feel a little ‘worn out’ or in need of a break, I love a cup of good old-fashioned tea. English Breakfast with a shot of milk is the favourite brew but I’m also partial to a delicate Ceylon and most things herbal like lemon and ginger or anything with a little peppermint.

Read the entire article by Catherine Saxelby

Drink up and recharge

Energy is our currency to alertness and better performance, but what exactly is energy? Energy is defined as the body’s ability to perform work. Human energy is measured as Kilojoules (or kilocalories) and may be scientifically defined as the ability to raise the temperature of one liter of water by 1OC. Another way to think of energy is the ability to “do”.

The human body is a mass of living cells suspended in a medium of water. Each of these cells requires energy to carry out (or do) their designated roles within the body. For example, the heart cells job is to beat and push oxygen to needy organs and the brain cells main job is to transmit impulses while awake and importantly while sleeping.

Read the entire article by Tom Buckley

4 easy ways to cut down on caffeine

Overdoing the caffeine? Living from coffee to coffee? Can’t get going in the morning without your java fix? Sipping a cappuccino or short black is a common way for busy people to recharge your batteries or even wake up. But what do you do when it gets to be too much?

Like you, I too enjoy a coffee out – that aroma and adrenalin hit is just wonderful. Plus it’s a great way to catch up with friends or colleagues. Especially when you’re pressed for time.

Read the entire article by Catherine Saxelby

Real men eat right

Health statistics reveal that women complain of ill-health and are in hospital more often than men, yet men’s health is definitely poorer than women’s. Consider these male-female differences:

•    Men suffer more from heart disease, lung disease, high blood pressure and bowel cancer than women.
•    Men have higher rates of suicide and self-injury than women.
•    Men die on average six years earlier than women - life expectancy for men is 75, while for women it is 81 years.
•    Men consult doctors less, take less responsibility for their health and are much less likely to be prescribed antidepressants than women.

Read the entire article by Catherine Saxelby

Energy - a misunderstood and over-hyped word

Do you want more energy?  Want to bounce out of bed in the morning? Need to power through your Inbox? That’s what all frantic overworked people want, isn’t it? Energy and lots of it! Yet that’s not what is meant by the word ‘energy’ when it’s listed on a food pack.

As a nutritionist, I hate the word ‘energy’. These days it’s everywhere on energy drinks, energy bars, B vitamin pills and even breakfast cereals that claim ‘carbs for energy’ as if there was something magical about their cereal.

Read the entire article by Catherine Saxelby

THE new food mantra - nutrient rich eating

Want to get more bang for your buck at the supermarket? Would you like to know that every calorie is working to get you healthy? Then why not try THE new food mantra ‘nutrient-rich eating’?

During the last decade, food marketers have busied themselves removing many nutritional nasties from our food. These ‘better-for-you’ foods are labeled ‘less fat’, ‘salt-reduced’, ‘low-sugar’ and ‘additive-free’, and are promoted as being healthier so you can get into shape.

Read the entire article by Matt O’Neil

Steering clear of sugar

With many of the latest health reports now focusing on carbohydrates and fats, it sometimes seems that sugar has been forgotten. So does sugar actually deserve the bad rap it has gotten in previous years? Natureco naturopath Samantha Warner said while sugar in itself is neither good nor bad, the issue is quality and quantity. “Sugar in the modern world has become evil purely due to its high availability and excess in processed foods,” she said. Most processed food does not contain many minerals and vitamins, which help the body to use the energy from sugar. “We must use our stored nutrients to help us digest and assimilate the sugars we are eating, leading to chronic deficiencies particularly magnesium, chromium, zinc and B vitamins,” Ms Warner said.

Read the entire article by Maya Anderson

Heal and recharge your body with herbs and green food

Natural medicinal herbs to heal the human body and mind have been around for several centuries and prevalent in almost all cultures of the world. But the advent of modern medicine has precluded their use resulting in severing our ancient association with nature’s herbal health choices.

The modern medical approach is not health centered, rather it has an illness based approach and offers little recourse for a reaching optimum health. Herbal medicine on the other hand, treats the human body in a holistic way. It does not focus on illness alone; it looks to the total well-being of the human body and to prevent diseases from attacking it.

Read the entire article by William Brister

Recharge your body with a natural detox

When you are thinking about a body detox plan, there is a good chance that you are suffering from all the signs of having too many toxins your system; you are lethargic, tired all the time, and probably fighting depression on top of it. When you are looking for ways towards a full body detox, you’ll find that you are often told to eat better, but what does that mean? The fact is, there are many foods that you can eat that will have an excellent whole body detox effect on you, so make sure that you stock up the next time that you are at the grocery store!

Read the entire article by John Khu