Soup Therapy: Detoxify, Lose Weight, and Boost Immunity

Soup Therapy: Detoxify, Lose Weight, and Boost Immunity

By Dr. Maoshing Ni - Posted on Fri, Jan 15, 2010, 5:59 pm PST
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The healing power of soup: something that both scientists and grandmothers can agree on. From helping you lose weight to warming you up from the inside out to boosting your immunity, soup is a winter staple that you shouldn’t be without. Maybe that is one reason that it is celebrated this month with its very own National Soup Month. Here's a closer look at what you can do to benefit from soup's amazing healing powers.

The healing power of soup
An ancient Chinese proverb states that a good doctor uses food first, then resorts to medicine. A healing soup can be your first step in maintaining your health and preventing illness. The therapeutic value of soup comes from the ease with which your body can assimilate the nutrients from the ingredients, which have been broken down by simmering.

Here are some healing soup tips that will preserve your wellness and longevity:
1. Lose weight with soup
Obesity is on the rise throughout the industrialized world, resulting in a startling increase in the rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes. You can count yourself out of the statistics if you eat a bowl of soup at least once a day. Nutritious low-salt soups will nourish you as they flush excess wastes from your body. It has been found that people who eat one serving of soup per day lose more weight than those who eat the same amount of calories, but don’t eat soup. Homemade soup is your best bet, because canned soups tend to be loaded with salt and chemicals. My advice is to use organic vegetables whenever possible. The herbicides and pesticides that can be present in conventional produce can assault the immune system and overload it with toxins.

2. Build your immunity
Your immune system needs a lot of minerals to function properly and the typical Western diet does not always hit the mark. When you slowly simmer foods over low heat, you gently leach out the energetic and therapeutic properties of the foods, preserving the nutritional value of the foods. Keep in mind that boiling can destroy half of the vitamins found in vegetables, so cook soup over a low heat.

Immune-Boosting Soup
Simmer these ingredients for 30 minutes: cabbage, carrots, fresh ginger, onion, oregano, shiitake mushrooms (if dried, they must be soaked first), the seaweed of your choice, and any type of squash in chicken or vegetable stock. Cabbage can increase your body’s ability to fight infection, ginger supports healthy digestion, and seaweed cleanses the body. Shiitake mushrooms contain coumarin, polysaccharides, and sterols, as well as vitamins and minerals that increase your immune function, and the remaining ingredients promote general health and well-being. Eat this soup every other day to build a strong and healthy immune system.

3. Detoxify your body
As a liquid, soup is already helping you flush waste from your body. When you choose detoxifying ingredients, such as the ones featured in the recipe below, you are really treating your body to an internal cleanse. The broth below boasts many benefits: it supports the liver in detoxification, increases circulation, reduces inflammation, and replenishes your body with essential minerals.

Super Detoxifying Broth
Simmer the following for 1–2 hours over a low flame: anise, brussels sprouts, cabbage, Swiss chard, cilantro, collards, dandelion, fennel, garlic, ginger, kale, leeks, shiitake mushrooms, mustard greens, daikon radish, seaweed, turmeric, and watercress. Drink 8 to 12 ounces twice a day. You can keep this broth in your fridge for up to one week; however, it is always best to serve soups when fresh because each day, the therapeutic value decreases.

In addition to using cleansing herbs in soups, you can take cleansing herbs in supplements. For a gentle but powerful cleanse using Chinese herbs, Internal Cleanse increases the ability of the liver to cleanse the body of internal and environmental toxins.

4. Warm up with a hearty soup
You always want to eat for the season. Soups provide something the body craves in cold weather. When you cook foods into a soup, you are adding a lot of what Chinese nutrition would call “warming energy” into the food. Warming foods to feature in your soups include: leeks, onions, turnips, spinach, kale, broccoli, quinoa, yams, squash, garlic, scallions, and parsley. As a spice, turmeric aids with circulation, a great boost against the cold weather.

5. Get well faster
As you mother may have instinctively known, when you are sick, there is no better healing food than soup. The reason for this is that soups and stews don’t require as much energy to digest, freeing your body up to fight the infection.

It would be impossible to talk about soup’s healing abilities without putting the spotlight on homemade chicken noodle soup. Studies have found that chicken noodle soup does seem to relieve the common cold by inhibiting inflammation -- helping to break up congestion and ease the flow of nasal secretions.

While chicken soup may not cure a cold outright, it does help alleviate some of the symptoms and can help as a preventative measure. Many of my patient’s keep the herbal formula Cold & Flu in their medicine cabinets so its there to support recovery when a cold strikes.

In Chinese medicine, you would traditionally be given a tonic soup specifically tailored to your needs, and for that level of personal care, it is a good idea to consult a health practitioner knowledgeable in Chinese nutrition.

I hope you have gotten a taste of the healing power of soup! I invite you to visit often and share your own personal health and longevity tips with me.

May you live long, live strong, and live happy!

—Dr. Mao


This blog is meant to educate, but it should not be used as a substitute for personal medical advice. The reader should consult his or her physician or clinician for specific information concerning specific medical conditions. While all reasonable efforts have been made to ensure that all information presented is accurate, as research and development in the medical field is ongoing, it is possible that new findings may supersede some data presented

RISIKO OBESITY/kegemukan

Source: CDC/NCHS, Health, United States, 2006

Q: What is the mortality rate associated with obesity?

A: Most studies show an increase in mortality rates associated with obesity. Individuals who are obese have a 10- to 50-percent increased risk of death from all causes, compared with healthy weight individuals (BMI 18.5 to 24.9). Most of the increased risk is due to cardiovascular causes.[1] Obesity is associated with about 112,000 excess deaths per year in the U.S. population relative to healthy weight individuals.[9]
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Complex Weight-Loss Plans Erode Dieters'

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Complex Weight-Loss Plans Erode Dieters'


TUESDAY, Jan. 19 (HealthDay News) -- The more complex a person's diet plan, the sooner the person will abandon it, a new study finds.


The finding came from a study of 390 German women who were using one of two diet plans. The simpler plan provided shopping lists for dieters and a meal plan they were to follow. The more complex plan assigned point values to every food and instructed participants to eat only a certain number of points each day.


The women completed questionnaires over an eight-week span.


"For people on a more complex diet that involves keeping track of quantities and items eaten, their subjective impression of the difficulty of the diet can lead them to give up on it," Peter Todd, a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, said in a university news release.


The effect endured even after the researchers accounted for the influence of significant social-cognitive factors such as self-efficacy -- people's belief that they're capable of achieving a goal, such as adhering to a diet regimen to lose weight.


"Even if you think you can succeed, thinking that the diet is too cognitively complex can undermine your efforts," the study's co-author, Jutta Mata, a psychology professor at Stanford University, explained in the news release.


The study was published online in Appetite.


Mata suggested that people considering going on a diet should look at a number of diet plans and consider how many rules a plan has and how many things a dieter needs to keep in mind while using the plan.


"If they decide to go with a more complex diet, which could be more attractive, for instance, if it allows more flexibility, they should evaluate how difficult they find doing the calculations and monitoring their consumption," she said. "If they find it very difficult, the likelihood that they will prematurely give up the diet is higher, and they should try to find a different plan."


More information


The U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases has suggestions for selecting a weight-loss program.

Menonton TV mungkin memendekkan Usia Anda

TV Watching May Shorten Your Life
Too much sitting raises your risk of dying from heart disease, researchers say By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter


MONDAY, Jan. 11 (HealthDay News) -- Every hour spent watching TV each day may increase your risk of an early death from cardiovascular disease by as much as 18 percent, Australian researchers say.

What's on the television is not the problem; it's the time spent sitting while watching.

"This research provides another clear link between too much sitting and death from disease," said lead researcher David Dunstan, head of the Physical Activity Laboratory at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Victoria.

"The findings have serious implications for Americans and Australians when you consider that aside from sleeping, watching television is the behavior that occupies activity of four hours viewing a day," he added.

The good news is research has shown that moving the muscles frequently throughout the day is one of the most effective ways of managing weight and protecting against disease, Dunstan added.

"We tend to underestimate the value of incidental, non-sweaty activity throughout the day when we are either not sleeping or exercising -- the more you move, the greater the benefits for health," he noted.

Dunstan pointed out that while obesity can add to these problems, even normal-weight people can have increases in blood sugar and cholesterol if they sit too much.

The report was released online Jan. 11 in advance of publication in an upcoming print issue of Circulation.

For the study, Dunstan's team collected data on the lifestyles of 8,800 healthy men and women aged 25 years and older. In addition to lifestyle habits, the researchers tested participants' cholesterol and blood sugar levels. Over more than six years of follow-up, 284 people died. Among these deaths, 87 were due to cardiovascular disease and 125 from cancer.

The participants were grouped into three TV-watching categories: those who watched less than two hours a day; those who watched two to four hours a day; and those who watched more than four hours a day.

The researchers found that every hour of daily TV watching increased the risk of dying from any cause by 11 percent. For cardiovascular diseases the increased risk was 18 percent, and for cancer it was 9 percent. Compared with those who watched less than two hours per day, those who watched TV for more than four hours each day had an 80 percent increased risk of dying early from cardiovascular disease and a 46 percent increased risk of dying from any cause.

The association between TV watching and death remained even when the researchers took into account risk factors for cardiovascular disease such as smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, unhealthy diet, excessive weight and exercise.

Although the study was done in Australia, the findings are applicable to Americans, Dunstan said. Average daily television watching is about three hours in Australia and the United Kingdom, and up to eight hours in the United States, where many people are either overweight or obese, he noted.

"What we are now starting to understand is that the risks associated with sedentary behavior are not necessarily offset by doing more exercise," Dunstan said.

"In other words, irrespective of how much exercise you do, if you sit watching television for four hours on a daily basis you still have a substantially increased risk of early death from all causes and a much greater risk of cardiovascular disease," he said.

Experts agreed that to stay healthy you need to keep on the move.

Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that "regular exercise has been consistently demonstrated to result in improved cardiovascular health and lower risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes and premature death."

He added that "reducing time spent inactive may be of benefit in reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and should be considered as part of a comprehensive approach to improve cardiovascular health."

David Bassett Jr., a professor of health and exercise science at the University of Tennessee, said that "when one looks at time trends in physical activity over the past century, it is clear that people are doing more structured, purposeful exercise than before."

However, what has changed is that people are doing less walking, household chores and manual labor than in the past, he said. "We are also spending more time in sedentary activities like television watching, computer use and desk jobs," Bassett explained.

"This study adds to a growing body of evidence that the amount of time spent in sedentary activity, as distinct from the amount of time spent in purposeful exercise, can affect your health," he said.

More information

Diabetes Rates May Double Worldwide by 2030

Semakin ramai mengidapi penyakit kencing manis...

Diabetes Rates May Double Worldwide by 2030

WebMD Health NewsApril 26, 2004 -- The number of people with diabetes will double worldwide by 2030, according to new estimates from researchers at the World Health Organization (WHO) and several European universities.

Although the U.S. is expected to experience a far more rapid increase in diabetes rates, the study suggests the greatest relative increases will be in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and India.

That's because researchers say deaths due to infectious diseases as well as maternal and infant deaths in developing countries are expected to continue to drop in the next 30 years. Meanwhile, as diabetes rates climb in these areas, deaths due to related diseases, such as heart disease, will increase and account for a larger proportion of deaths in developing countries.

According to the study, published in the May issue of Diabetes Care, the top 10 countries with the highest number of estimated diabetes cases for 2000 and 2030 are as follows:




2000
2030

Rank
Country
People with diabetes (millions)
Country
People with diabetes (millions)

1
India
31.7
India
79.4

2
China
20.8
China
42.3

3
U.S.
17.7
U.S.
30.3

4
Indonesia
8.4
Indonesia
21.3

5
Japan
6.8
Pakistan
13.9

6
Pakistan
5.2
Brazil
11.3

7
Russian Federation
4.6
Bangladesh
11.1

8
Brazil
4.6
Japan
8.9

9
Italy
4.3
Philippines
7.8

10
Bangladesh
3.2
Egypt
6.7





Diabetes Epidemic Growing Ahead of Schedule
The study shows that the three countries with the most people with diabetes are expected to remain India, China, and the U.S. But researchers predict an even higher increase than the CDC predicted in 2001.

The CDC study projected that the number of Americans diagnosed with diabetes would reach 29 million by 2050, but this study estimates there will be more than 30 million Americans with diabetes as early as 2030. Researchers say the new estimate is based on the fact that up to 50% of people with diabetes do not know they have the disease, and their projection is based on people with both diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes.

Researchers say it's unlikely that their projections overestimate the future of the diabetes epidemic because they are based on the prevalence of obesity remaining stable. But obesity rates have been rising substantially in recent years. Obesity is the leading modifiable risk factor for diabetes.

"Even if the prevalence of obesity remains stable until 2030, which seems unlikely, it is anticipated that the number of people with diabetes will more than double as a consequence of population aging and urbanization," write researcher Sarah Wild, PhD, of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and colleagues.

"The human and economic costs of this epidemic are enormous," write the researchers. "A concerted global initiative is required to address the diabetes epidemic."

Obesity, Inactivity Keeping Heart Health Stats Down

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Obesity, Inactivity Keeping Heart Health Stats Down

HealthDay Reporter – Thu Dec 17,2009 11:49 pm ET

THURSDAY, Dec. 17 (HealthDay News) -- While physicians and surgeons are getting better at treating heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems, too many Americans are ignoring the basic rules for preventing them, according to new statistics from the American Heart Association.

Topping the list: too little exercise, too much weight.

In fact, 59 percent of adults surveyed last year reported no activity vigorous enough to prompt sweating and a significant increase in breathing or heart rate, according to the update. The findings are published online Dec. 17 in the journal Circulation.
"The things people need to focus on are our weight and our waist," said Dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, chair of the heart association's statistics committee. "Those are driving a lot of other risk factors, such as cholesterol and diabetes."
Tackling inactivity and overweight will be key to turning heart health statistics around said Lloyd-Jones, who is also chairman of the department of preventive medicine and staff cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

The American diet also demands more attention, he said. "There is just too much availability of very calorie-dense food," he said. "We're not doing anything to burn off those extra pounds."

Data from 2003-2006 shows that 11.3 percent of children and teenagers were at or
above the 97th percentile in body mass index for their age. That's ominous, because oerweight teens have a 70 percent chance of becoming overweight adults, the report notes.

Preventive measures should be emphasized for younger people, Lloyd-Jones said. "We need to be thinking about this as a life-long problem, not just when you turn 50," he said.

Cholesterol control is ignored by many who would benefit from it most, according to the Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics 2010 update. Fewer than half the Americans with symptomatic heart disease are receiving treatment to lower their blood levels of fats, and only a third of people getting treatment are achieving the target levels of LDL cholesterol, the "bad kind" that clogs arteries.

"Everything is coming together in the worst way -- obesity, inactivity, smoking," said Dr. Clyde W. Yancy, heart association president and medical director of the Baylor Heart and Vascular Institute in Dallas. "In our younger group, instead of seeing improvement, it is getting worse."

One relatively bright spot is better control of high blood pressure, a major cardiovascular risk factor, Lloyd-Jones said. "In the last few years, we have taken a bump up, and that gives us reason to hope, especially in prevention of heart failure," he said.

Other findings:
• Death rates from cardiovascular disease declined about 30 percent between 1996 and 2006, as treatments improved.
• In 2006, 7.2 million in-hospital cardiovascular procedures were performed, a 33 percent increase over the 1996 level.
• The cost of treating cardiovascular disease is expected to rise 5.8 percent in 2010, to $503.2 billion, a figure that lends real urgency to prevention efforts, Lloyd-Jones said.

"So we are spending half a trillion dollars on cardiovascular disease," Yancy said. "And we recognize that, as in our younger population the incidence of sedentary life style, obesity and smoking are going up, that expenditure will continue to rise."

By 2020, the association hopes for a 20 percent improvement in the cardiovascular health of all Americans and a 20 percent reduction in deaths from cardiovascular diseases and stroke.

More information
Cardiovascular risk factors are listed by the American Heart Association.

Looking Younger Than Your Age May Mean Longer Life

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Looking Younger Than Your Age May Mean Longer Life

By HealthDay - Mon Dec 14, 2:03 PM PST
- MONDAY, Dec. 14 (HealthDay News) -- People who look younger than their age tend to live longer than those who look older than their years, a new study suggests.

The finding came from research that involved 1,826 Danish twins, aged 70 and older, who were given physical and cognitive tests and then had their faces photographed. Three groups of volunteers looked at the photos and indicated the age they perceived the participants to be. Twins were assessed individually, and on different days.

The researchers, from the University of Southern Denmark, then tracked the twins for seven years and found that perceived age was significantly associated with survival, even after adjustments were made for actual age, sex and the environment in which each pair of twins was raised. The bigger the difference in perceived age, the more likely it was that the older-looking twin died first, they noted.

The researchers also found an association between perceived age and physical and mental functioning.
Common genetic factors that influence both survival and perceived age may help explain the findings, the study authors explained.

"Perceived age -- which is widely used by clinicians as a general indication of a patient's health -- is a robust biomarker of aging that predicts survival among those aged 70 and older and correlates with important functional and molecular aging phenotypes," Kaare Christensen and colleagues wrote in their report, which was published Dec. 13 in the online edition of the BMJ.

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