In this week’s news: Flavonoids found to be fab for women’s health; yoga may be your excuse to skip aerobics; and could you undo your holiday weight gain just by breathing?
Fabulous flavonoids
Feeling guilty about all that holiday dark chocolate you’ve been devouring? A new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition may help you feel a bit better. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who followed more than 13,800 women through a 15-year period, concluded that middle-aged women who eat a diet rich in flavonoids – found in dark chocolate, red wine, citrus fruits, berries, lentils, green and white teas, onions, apples and parsley – were more likely to age more healthily, both physically and mentally.
2015: Your year of yoga?
If you have resolved to exercise in the coming year but dread the idea of aerobics, cycling or walking, you may be happy to hear that yoga may be just as good for your heart. Researchers at Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, Netherlands, measured the benefits of yoga compared with exercise and with no physical activity and found that yoga not only reduced stress and increased flexibility and fitness levels, but also lowered the risk of cardiovascular disease, much like more-strenuous forms of exercise. What’s more, compared with no exercise, yoga lowered BMI, blood pressure and cholesterol levels. In fact, study participants who did yoga were about 6 pounds lighter, on average, than those who didn’t exercise at all.
An excellent reason to exhale
Breathe deep. Guess what – you’re losing weight. A new study exploring where the fat goes when we shed pounds shows that most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide. The rest of it is excreted as water in urine, feces, sweat, breath, tears or other bodily fluids. “Our calculations show that the lungs are the primary excretory organ for fat,” the study’s authors write in the BMJ. “Losing weight requires unlocking the carbon stored in fat cells, thus reinforcing that often heard refrain of ‘eat less, move more.'” Lovely to think that losing those holiday pounds could be as easy as exhaling.
Amy Reiter also contributes to FN Dish.
from Healthy Eats – Food Network Healthy Living Blog http://ift.tt/1wNWx9p
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