The Importance of Drinking Water

About 2/3 of your body is made up of water. Therefore, it is important for you to maintain certain water level inside your body.

How important is water to you?

• Water helps to improve your metabolism. Therefore, for those of you who want to lose weight, water is critical. Increased of metabolism helps you to get rid of extra fat.
• Water helps in flushing out the toxins inside your body. You will feel tired if too much toxins accumulate in your body.
• Relieve your headache. Since 90% of your brain consists of water, you will get headache if you are dehydrated.
• Improve your skin texture and you will look more radiant.
• Helps regulate the temperature inside your body.
• Helps to prevent constipation.
• Water helps to lubricate your joint and bone, so that you won't get sprains or cramps.
  

In order to keep our bodies functioning at an optimum level drinking water for health is vitally important. If you are not getting enough water, your body will react by pulling it from other places, including your blood. Your smaller vessels need to work harder to pump through your system. This can have serious implications in hypertension, high cholesterol, and heart disease. Some research studies also suggested that dehydration can led to headaches, arthritis, and heartburn.

Find out more tips on how to drink enough water and its health benefits here: health benefits of drinking water. You will find that your overall health and appearance is improved.

Villi - The gateway of nutrients to your body

Have you ever wander how our body absorbed the nutrients to our cells? When we take the food, say a plate of pasta, the food gets chewed to smaller pieces and passed down to our stomach where it break down to watery form. The next step is it gets down to our intestine. Inside the small intestines, there are small finger like protrusions lining along the wall of intestines. This little tiny villi can only be seen under an electron microscopy. The function of villi is to absorb the nutrients to our body.

Through years, the villi get damaged and break off. The causes of this damaged are:

• Stress
• Medications e.g antibiotic
  
• Toxins like smoking, food coloring and preservative, alcohol, air pollution etc.
• Poor diet
• Irregular sleeping time

The consequence of damaged villi is our body has difficulty to abosrb nutrients. And this is devastating because whatever you eat, the nutrients cannot be absorbed fully and you start to feel you need more food. As a result, you start to spend more money on food or vitamins or nutrition supplements. This is a complete waste of money no matter how much money you spent on supplements or food because your body is not absorbing it.

The following pictures show the difference between healthy villi (left) and damaged villi (right). The damaged villi gets brittle and flat. The efficiency to abosorb nutrients to our body has reduced tremendously.


The symptoms we get from damaged villi would be:

• fatigue
• weak immune system (fall sick easily)
• lack of concentration or ernergy
• food allergies

According to a study made by Cambridge University, the surface area of a male adult's villi is approximately a surface area of two soccer fields. Astonishingly, the surface area of damaged villi is around the area of one tennis court. Let's do an analogy here, if we pour the amount of liquid to fill up two soccer fields and we take the same amount of liquid to pour into one tennis court, certainly, one tennis court cannot hold the liquid of two soccer field and we have to "throw away" the excess liquid. Just imagine, how much nutrients we have wasted from damaged villi?

To take care of our health, we need cellular nutrition which would help to repair and rebuild the villi so that we can get the maximum benefits from the nutrients absorbed by our cell.

Stress vs Nutrition

Do you know how the stress can affect your body? When you are under stress, you need extra nutrients like vitamins and minerals. To make it easier to understand, just imagine when you are driving a car, and suddenly you brake sharply. What would happen to your car? It consume more fuel, and you need to supply more fuel to your car. Not only the fuel, you need to change brake , tyres, cooling liquid etc if you constantly speeding or driving your car with sudden brake. This is similar when you under stress, your body needs more nutrients, your heart, muscle are exhausting and more free radicals will produce. To find out what free radicals do to ouy body, please refer to my previous article Health No 1 Enemy - Oxidation. Anti-oxidant is the solution to nuetralize the free radicals.

The sad fact is normally when people under stress and busy, they tend to make poor food choice like fast food, or even skipping meals. This is damaging to the body. Just imagine a car with excessive acceleration and brake without supplying extra fuel, sooner or later, the car will be sent to garage. If the car is our body, we will experience the breakdown of body systems, it could be just a flu, cold to cancer or heart problem dependant on the level of seriousness.

Stress is unavoidable in the modern world, but the diet and nourishment has to be incorporated so that we can cope with the stress in a more effective way.

Why is Protein Important?

Protein is a form of energy in our body. It helps to build strong muscle, forms an important building blocks for our body (cells, blood, skin, hair etc.), and it is essential for body immune system and creating enzymes. Protein is composed of Amino Acids, most of which body can produce by iteself, but 10 essential amino acids cannot be made by our body, and must be consumed in the form of food.

Another benefit of protein is it helps to lose weight. For every extra KG of muscle, it helps to burn an extra 100 calories a day approximately. This is essential for those people who want to lose weight in a healthy way. By gaining extra muscle will help to reduce the excess body fat and shape up.

Good sources of protein include poultry, fish, whey protein, beans etc. Better choice of protein is plant protein like whey protein and soy protein. To compute specific daily protein intake, you will need the ideal body weight.

Woman's ideal body weight:
US measure: 100 pounds for 60 inches in height+ 5 pounds for each additional inch over 60 inches.
Metric: 45 kilograms for 150 centimeters in height+ 0.85 kilograms for each additional centimeter in height

Men's ideal body weight:
US measure: 106 pounds for 60 inches in height+ 6 pounds for each additional inch over 60 inches.
Metric: 48 kilograms for 150 centimeters in height+ 1 kilogram for each additional centimeter in height.

Men and women protein intake range based on ideal body weight:
Minimum Daily Protein Requirement: W.H.O. recommends 0.45 grams of protein per kilogram of ideal body weight per day.
Maximum Daily Protein Requirement: US RDA recommends 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of ideal body weight per day. The UK Department of Health and Social Security is approximately the same.

Reference source: http://www.indoorclimbing.com/Protein_Requirement.html

Health No.1 Enemy - Oxidation

What is oxidation? We cut an apple, left it on a table, after a while, it turns brown. This is an oxidation process.

Do you know that oxidation process also happen in our body? We are exposed to pollution, stress, poor nutrition, UV etc. everyday. Little did we know that these can lead to oxidation process in our cell. When we subjected to outside factors like radiation, stress etc., our body is contantly producing toxin and burning by using oxygen which is similar to an apple turns brown. As such it produces free radicals which could damage our cell membrance. When our cells are damaged and are not being repaired properly, it could lead to cancer, diseases, illness and ageing.

How do we protect our cells from free radicals? We need anti-oxidants, example of anti-oxidants are Vitamins E, C, A which can be found in vegetables and fruits. It helps to fight against the free radicals to protect our cells, healthy cells can help to maintain body functions and keep us healthy. There are numerous research studies show that anti-oxidants may slow or potentially prevent process of cancer. Visit http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/antioxidantsprevention for more information and trials on anti-oxidants vs cancer.

Health and Nutrition - Benefits of Minerals

Calcium: helps to build bones and teeth. You will find it in milk, yogurt, cheese, soy milk.

Iron: Helps the red blood cells transport oxygen to every parts of our body. Can be found in red meats, poultry, shellfish, beans etc.

Magnesium: Maintain strong bones, muscle and nerve function. Source of foods: whole grains, nuts. green vegetables.

Potassium: Maintain nerve system. Can be found in banana, green leafy vegetables, legumes.

Zinc: vital for growth, immune system, sexual development. Foods: red meats, seafoods, whole grains.

Health and Nutrition - Benefits of Vitamins

Vitamin A: Promote good vision, strenghtens immune system. Mostly can be found in dark colored orange or green vegetables, orange fruits e.g cantaloupe, peaches, mangos etc., other good sources are milk, liver, eggs.

Vitamin C: Helps to form collagen, absorb iron and calcium. Essential for healthy teeth, bone and skin. Great source from red berries, kiwi, orange, red and green bell peppers etc.

Vitamin D: Strengthens bone system. You can get it while your skin expose to the sunlight. Food source: egg yolk, fish oils, milk.

Vitamin E: Helps to protect cells from damage, build red blood cells. Can be found in various foods such as green leafy vegetables, nuts, vegetables oils, whole grains etc.

Vitamins B: Consist of B1(Thiamin), B2 (Riboflavin), B3 (Niacin), B6, B9 (Folate), B12. In general, vitamins B help to convert food to energy, build red blood cells, and essential for brain and nerve function. B9 (Folate) is also needed to make DNA. Good source of foods: Fish, meats, poultry, eggs, legume, cereals, whole grain food, potatoes, banana etc.