Dietary supplements

• Magnesium helps reduce muscle spasms/cramps.
• Calcium helps tissue healing.
• Zinc also good when taken with magnesium and calcium.
• Fish oil helps with brain health.
• Coenzyme Q10 is the most important enzyme for health: very potent anti-carcinogen, improves heart health, improves energy when taken B-complex vitamins
• Vitamin D3 (actually a hormone): reduced cancer rate by 30%-68%; improves healing, helps fight virus/bacterial infections when taken in over 2000 RXN.
• Sunlight causes vitamin D2, which gets converted to D3; the conversion requires vernix on the skin to do the conversion.  
• Presenter takes 5000 units daily of vitamin D3 from company called Life Extension from Whole Foods.

Attribution: Ben's notes from the lecture of Dr. Ashkan Jalili, CEO and owner of Santa Monica Wellness Group. 

Losing weight with little effort

Image from dexknows Weddings. 

If you were not born a fidgeter, maintaining and losing weight takes a bit more effort, but it need not be a herculean effort. Here are a few changes you can make that are manageable and don't require superhuman will power (which is not sustainable):

• Exercise. It's easier to exercise than control what you eat. 
• Don't have liquid calories. Those pile up fast with very little work. No more soda and juice. Water with a squeeze of lime, sprig of mint, and slices of cucumber are tasty, too. Or how about tea?
• Slow down on that eating. Savor the flavor and texture. Play a game, try to identify distinct flavors. Give your brain a chance to register that you are full. If you cram food in your face, you'll end up eating more. 
• Be realistic. Don't aim to lose a lot of pounds in a short period of time. You'd want to be able to maintain it, too. 
• Keep track. Being mindful of what you eat and what you weight keeps you accountable. 
• Motivate yourself. Have something tangible in mind, like hanging up that pants next to the refrigerator. 
• Get rid of junk food in your house. You don't need them. 
• Graze all day. Have fruits handy to keep yourself from reaching out for junk. 
• Get support. Doing things alone make things unnecessarily hard. 
• Beware of saboteurs. You know, those people who belittle your effort or try to get you to eat more.  
• Use small plates or vessels. Watch that portion size! That plate you are looking at could have multiple servings. Three ounces of meat is the size of your palm or a deck of cards. A 4-inch pancake is a CD.
• Get plenty of sleep. Sleep deprivation increases the hunger hormone and decreases the hormone that makes you feel full.  

Metabolic rates

Image was borrowed. 

Your "metabolism" (the rate at which you burn calories) has three components:

• Basal metabolic rate (BMR) - energy you need to live. Breathing, pumping blood, maintaining body temperature. It uses up about 50-60% of calories.
• Thermic effect of food (TEF) - energy you use around food. Eating, digesting, and storing. 10-15%
• Activity-related energy expenditure. All the getting around and exercising. Rest of the stuff. 

If you want to lose weight, easiest to fiddle with the third one. Mighty hard to maintain weight loss by fudging the first two, which are determined by various factors, such as genes, gender, body composition, activities, and so on. As you lose weight, your BMR goes down as well. As you eat less, so does the TEF. So it gets harder and harder to lose weight.

Fidgeters have higher BMR, so they tend to be leaner. But fidgeting is genetically determined, so if you weren't born one, it's hard to pick up the "habit" (it's really unconscious movement, so it's not like the fidgeter can choose to start fidgeting).

Picking the best melondramatic fruits

Melons (such as watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew) are delish and stuffed with goodness. Their colors give you a hint of their superpowers. The cantaloupe is brimming with vitamin C and beta-carotene; honeydew has loads of folate; watermelon has super high levels of citrulline, which the body converts to nitric oxide (relaxes your blood vessels and lowers your blood pressure).

Some studies have shown that melons could help with anxiety, stress, panic attacks, as well as stroke and heart disease. And the beta carotene can't be bad for your eyes.

OK, OK, so we love melons. But how do you pick one?

A good melon:

• Is heavy for its size
• Sounds hollow when you tap it (if it has a dull thud, it might be overripe)
  
• Is brightly colored
• Has a yellow spot (the fruit ripened on the vine, not the warehouse)
• Plays well with others, including the ugly fruits
  

More on beans, the magical fruit

Beans are good veggies for athletic folks or pips who just want to maintain their weight. Besides the abundant phytochemicals and antioxidants, they pack the most fiber and protein (half a cup = two ounces of meat and seafood) among our plant friends. All the fiber fills you up, so that should keep you from eyeing the dessert tray.

If you're not that into beans, you can trick yourself by secretly adding them to your salad, salsa, ground-meat type stuff (like spaghetti sauces and sloppy joes). If you puree cooked beans, you can add them to your soups, stews, and sauces.

See our sister blog to learn why the bean is also called the musical fruit. For more high-brow stuff on beans, see also our previous blabber.

The fun part of exercising—eating!

Eating before and after exercise matters because it affects the quality and results of your efforts.

Before exercising
Make sure that you have enough energy to sustain the intensity of your workout. Eat a substantial meal (300-500) with a 2:1 ratio of complex carbs and protein. Candies and soda are nonsense carbs, so think whole grains. 

If it's been a while since you last ate, snack up on bananas, cereal, or something that's easy to digest (that is, not loaded with fat or fiber). It's a snack, OK, so 100-200 calories would do. Do I need to tell you that a wheel of aged cheddar is a bad idea?

While exercising
If you are going for long sessions, say, a 40-mile bike ride, you need to keep on snacking to keep yourself from bonking out. At a brisk pace, one can burn about 500-700 calories an hour (but the actual number of calories that you burn depends on a variety of factors, like your weight, muscle mass, intensity, and so on). 

It doesn't matter if you are not in the mood to chow. Remember the rule: Eat before your hungry, drink before you are thirsty. By the time you feel the pangs, it's too late. You're already approaching Bonksville.

After exercising
Help your muscles recover from the beating. Within 20 minutes of your exercise, eat a mix of protein and carbs, such as a fruit smoothie,  milk, or yogurt with fruits. Ricotta cheese is particularly promising. A study published in the Journal of Nutrition found that it eased workout-related muscle soreness. The cheese contains a type of amino acid essential for repairing exercise-worn muscles.

Don't pig out (like sucking in 40 ounces of smoothie) just because you burned some calories that day. Be consistent with your caloric intake, otherwise you'd be gaining some pudge along with muscle mass.

And don't forget to rest or do low intensity stuff for a couple of days after a really punishing workout. For dealing with muscle soreness, see the previous blog.

Fish farms

Aqauculture or fish farming can be bad for the environment. Shrimp farms in Asia result in the destruction of mangrove forests, which provide hospitable environments for young fish and prevent coastal erosion. Salmon farming pollutes the ocean with fish poop (Yes, I said poop! Does this make the blog edgy? No?! P**p!!!), excess feed, antibiotics, and other contaminants. It's so bad that the Environmental Defense Fund goes tsk, tsk.

In addition, fish farming could be bad for you. Some studies have found that farmed salmon (particularly from Europe) have higher level of PCBs and other industrial pollutants. Other farmed fishies are probably loaded with anitibiotics, pesticides, and chemicals that promote growth and control disease. (On the plus side, you might save on prescription drug costs. Yay, I guess.) Some farmed fish outside of the US have banned substances, and the FDA barely checks the quality.

It's not all bad, though. If done responsibly, aquaculture can relieve pressure from overfishing, and it does require less energy than raising land animals (the moo'ing kind).

You can sometimes determine the origin of your supermarket fish by looking at the country of origin labeling (COOL). But there's no oversight. For some weird reason, restaurants and fish markets are not required to tell you anything.

Here are some clues that the fish is farmed:

• The packaging brags: "Ocean-raised." Pffft, that's just double-speak for "farmed."
• "Atlantic salmon," farmed. How do I know that? Easy, we killed off the wild population already.
  
• Salmon sold from November to March. It's off-season. Sure, the salmon could be wild, but it's frozen.
  
• Most smoked salmon. But canned Alaskan sockeye (also called pink, red, and blueback) is probably wild.
• Most shrimp, mollusk, catfish, tilapia and trout.
  

Go fish

We all know about how we're supposed to eat 4-6 ounces of fish two to three times a week, but what kind of fish? In addition to the pesky mercury thing, PCBs, red tide, and other contaminants, there's that collapsing fish population issue.

In general, fishies lower on the food chain (like herring, mackerel, and sardines) are fine. I myself am rather partial to the Chocolate Fish from New Zealand, but local fishmongers don't sell them. Pity.

If you are buying canned fish, look for logos bearing the Marine Stewardship Council logo, which certifies that the fish was caught using sustainable pole-and-line methods.

Anyway, if you want fancier fish, check out these three great resources:

• Environment Defense Fund Seafood Selector tells you which fish is bad for the environment and you. Well-organized info.
  
• Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch shows you which ones you should avoid and provides alternatives.
• Blue Ocean Institute Seafood Guide is not stingy with details and tells you exactly why the fish is good or bad for you. It comes with scores and color coding. Great site for nerdier fish lovers.

Bean, bean, the magical fruit

A University of Toronto study showed that beans and nuts, which have low glycemic index, might be better than a whole-grain diet in controlling blood sugar. Extra bonus: a low-glycemic diet significantly boosted HDL (aka, the "good cholesterol") levels.

The low-glycemic diet in the study included beans, peas, lentils, pasta, quickly boiled rice and certain breads, like pumpernickel and rye, as well as oatmeal and oat bran cereals.

For meatier reading, see the New York Times article and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Both require you to login, but the NY Times is free.