LiveLongAgeWell

The H1N1 (swine) flu pandemic is dangerous, yes, but also fascinating as a study of how different countries are responding and how theories change quickly. Here in Brazil, where it is winter and prime flu season, the massive city São Paulo has pretty much closed down all schools for the next two weeks, affecting over 6 million students. And just a few weeks ago, public health officials were theorizing that obesity alone appeared to be a major risk factor for developing a serious case, or of dying of the influenza.

Many of the people with H1N1 in ICUs seem to be obese, and the United States—with the epidemic of obesity affecting, amazingly, about 34 percent of the population—has had a much higher death rate than Japan, for example, with less than 2% of the population obese.

Now, the U.S. Center for Disease Control has decided that obesity, on its own, doesn’t seem to be a risk factor. Still it’s worth remembering that fat cells, especially those deep in the abdomen, secrete substances that cause a chronic state of low-level of inflammation in the body, and as a result, obesity depresses your immune system making you more susceptible to most any infection, or even cancer.

So if you are living in the summer now but have worries about flu in the upcoming seasons, you would do well to get yourself in shape and try to lose as much fat as possible to keep your immune system functioning well. If you smoke, have a plan to quit before the fall. Besides that, you can markedly cut your risk of flu by three simple measures: keeping at least a meter (3 feet) away from anyone sick, washing your hands multiple times during the day (especially after you touch surfaces in public areas), and avoid touching your nose, eyes, or mouth, because that’s how you infect yourself.

Know that these influenza viruses, fortunately, don’t penetrate through your skin, and if you remember to always wash your hands well before touching your face, you are much less likely to become infected.

OK, now another way to keep healthy and fit—eat your “greens”…Here is Part II, How to eat greens! (last week was background information):

•    When you try greens and don’t love the taste right away, consider that kale, the king of the greens, contains about 10 times more of that fantastic anti-oxidant lutein as does broccoli. The high fiber content in greens will help you control your weight, your cholesterol, as well as your blood sugar. If you have a family history or particular concerns with breast, ovarian, or colon cancer, you should eat some greens every day. If you smoke, daily greens might give you some protection from the carcinogens in cigarettes. So these truly are superstar vegetables, and you can develop a taste for them.

•    Kale is probably the healthiest of the bunch, but collards are excellent as well, and the flavor tends to be a bit smoother. The plants harvested during cooler weather may taste better, and look for smaller leaves. Spinach is a green, and a good way to start, but you should venture forth and experiment with the more potent ones. You might slowly add bits of raw kale into your daily salad, or add finely-cut collards to soup. Kale comes in different colors and varieties. Mustard greens have somewhat of a spicy, racy taste. Over a few months try them all and see which you like the best.

•    When preparing, cut out any tough stems, and to make life easy, try frozen greens or find bags of pre-washed, cut greens. You can lightly sauté them in olive oil, and try adding lemon, pine nuts, and some red pepper flakes. Look at the DDD appendix for more hints on finding recipes. One note for those on blood thinning medication: the high vitamin K content in greens could interfere with your medication, but rather than avoiding greens, research suggests greens might help protect you from the bone-thinning effects of those medications, so discuss with your physician.

In honor of our mothers, let’s consider some advice many of them have given—perhaps your own mother said “eat your carrots…you’ll see better at night”—now let’s just update that with the latest information. It’s a nice coincidence because a few days before Mother’s Day, the journal Ophthalmology came out with a report on the best (nutritional) advice to prevent macular degeneration, the progressive loss of function in the retina of the eye and the most common cause of adult visual loss. (Click on this link for a “macular degeneration simulator”.)

One reason macular degeneration is so worrisome is that it’s so common: 10% of people over 65 are affected, and that rises to 30% for people over 75. Your risk is higher if you have a history of smoking, and with a close relative with macular degeneration, your lifetime risk rises to 50%. So it’s good to know there is something you can do to help diminish this threat as we get older besides a carrot-a-day…

Here’s what the analysis of the diets of over 4000 people in the Age-Related Eye Disease Study suggested to keep your vision good as you get older:

1. Eat a low-glycemic index diet. The glycemic index is a rating of how foods spike your blood sugar once they are absorbed, and the less the spike, the better. Slow absorbing foods are best. Particularly bad are white bread, starchy foods such as potatoes, and sugary pastries. Best are whole-grain breads, nuts, proteins, and vegetables.

2. Try to get a wide range of antioxidants from fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, and perhaps eggs. Especially good are green leafy vegetables, spinach, kale, broccoli, and when you buy lettuce, stick to the dark green romaine style rather than the wimpy pale “head lettuce” or “American lettuce”. Other good sources of the vision-beneficial antioxidants are eggs, beans (especially black), and again, nuts and whole grains.

3. Try to get lots of vitamin C from citrus fruits.

4. Omega-3 fatty acids are great for your eyes (as well as your brain), and you can best get those from fatty fish, such as salmon.

So go ahead and eat a carrot-a-day, it’s great advice, but if you are really concerned about keeping your vision intact as you get older, and particularly if you have a positive family history, there are plenty of other dietary measures you can take. Don’t wait…add to your shopping list: oranges, broccoli, spinach, whole-grain bread, romaine lettuce, nuts, and salmon!

Last Sunday I thoroughly enjoyed a dinner of the national dish of Brazil, feijoada (fehz-waada), so I was happy to see that this week the New York Times featured black beans (the principal component of feijoada), as the topic for its Recipes for Health series.

You probably know that legumes—which includes black beans as well as the color spectrum of others such as navy, red, pinto, and white—are healthy, but my guess is you don’t know how great they really are, and that the black variety is the healthiest of the lot. Some of the benefits of black beans:

1.    They are full of fiber, which naturally lowers your cholesterol absorption and production. High fiber diets have been linked with lower heart attack and stroke risk.
2.    Beans are also loaded with the best type of carbohydrates, the complex type, which are slowly absorbed and provide your body with long-lasting energy without the spikes in blood sugar seen with many carbs.  Beans are especially good for those with sugar control issues, and recently, blood sugar spikes have been implicated in long-term memory decline.
3.    Surprisingly, beans and particularly black beans are full of the same antioxidants, anthocyanins, that are found in grapes. Recent research has shown the darker the bean, the higher the antioxidant content. Black beans actually contain about the same anthocyanin content, weight-for-weight, as grapes and cranberries.
4.    They are low in calories and almost completely fat-free.
5.    Especially for a fruit/vegetable, they are full of protein…one cup provides about a third of your daily protein needs.
6.    Beans have high iron content, and are full of the wonderful trace element molybdenum, as well as heart-healthy folate (a B vitamin) and magnesium.
7.    Black beans likely have anti-cancer properties.
8.    They store well for long periods of time, and are cheap.

The downsides to beans are that they take some time to prepare and cook…the healthiest way is to cook them yourself rather than using canned beans (interestingly, in Brazil, you cannot even find or buy canned beans), and beans tend to cause gas (despite that they are considered beneficial for most people’s gastrointestinal tracts). Pre-soaking the raw hard beans in water for at least six hours makes them easier to cook and also decreases the gas problem. Then simmering beans can take an hour or two, but if cooked in a pressure cooker, it goes down to 30 minutes.

The Times mini-series details several black bean recipes, including basic simmered beans, black bean soup with spinach, and a healthy alternative to traditional fat-filled refried beans.

Real Brazilian feijoada is another matter entirely, and what’s in it depends on the region you live. The one I had last week had black beans mixed with various types of pork and sausages, potatoes, cabbage, squash, and collard greens. Here is one recipe from foodbuzz if you want to experiment. You can even find feijoada made only with chicken, or without meat, although those would not be considered true feijoadas by most (carnivorous) Brazilians.

But if you don’t want to spend the time making feijoada, try at least basic black beans from scratch. It will be worth the effort in taste and nutrition, and the more you can divorce yourself from canned food, the better! (But if you really don’t have the time or inclination to make from scratch, canned low-sodium black beans are an OK substitute.)

All in all, I would wager that black beans are the least expensive super-food we have, and these days, that is something to consider.

Based on last week’s survey results, rather than every week sending out two email updates to subscribers, I will send out one to two weekly based on the content. And as always,  three fresh posts will magically appear on the LLAW website itself every week.

I am trying to drink at least two cups of coffee these days. It helps wake me up and gives me a boost in the afternoon. Plus I enjoy it as a health drink—it’s full of antioxidants. Still, I find many people still carry (unnecessary) guilt about drinking coffee, so as new research about health and coffee comes forward, I will present it in this LLAW blog, be it positive or negative. The news, though, has been overwhelmingly favorable.

Here’s another report—this from the latest Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease—that should make coffee drinkers feel good, and if you don’t drink, you might consider it because this research is more confirmation that coffee seems to help keep your brain functioning well.

How does coffee help the brain? We don’t know but here are three theories: coffee decreases the risk of developing diabetes, which has been associated with dementia. Second, Alzheimer’s disease is marked by a build-up of “amyloid” plaques—basically sticky brain “junk” that blocks function—and caffeine apparently decreases the formation of these plaques. Finally, coffee’s antioxidant effect might be brain protective.

This Scandinavian study—part of the Finnish Cardiovascular Risk Factors, Aging and Dementia (CAIDE) Study—followed 1,400 men and women for more than 21 years, a very long time as research goes, and the result was that those who drank three to five cups per day were 65% less likely to develop dementia than those who didn’t drink coffee or drank less than two cups. The researchers tried to ensure that this difference between coffee drinkers and non-drinkers wasn’t the result of some other factor, for example, that the coffee drinker group had lower blood pressure or cholesterol than the non-drinking group.

Still, since this wasn’t a prospective clinical trial, the researchers can’t be certain that they looked at all factors involved. So there could be something else besides coffee that improved brain function. As a hypothetical example, maybe the coffee drinkers were a more sociable group, and they got out and mixed with more people and that’s what preserved their brains, not the coffee.

But this CAIDE study is one of several that have suggested drinking coffee is a very good way to preserve brain function, and for me, I’m sticking to my two or three cups of caffeinated coffee per day.