Menopause - The Blog » Nutrition

Eat This For That: 100 Best Foods for Women

Wendy — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:00:42 +0000

I found a terrific list of 100 healthful foods that every woman should include in her diet. Compiled by Alissa Miller on her blog at Nursing Degree.Net , she has grouped them into nine categories and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by some of the foods on her list:

Overall health: Flax seed tops this list
Skin Health - Includes foods with high concentrations of vitamins E and A and anti-inflammatory properties such as avocados, hazelnuts, olives and spinach
Cardiovascular System - Onions, grapes and raspberries were a surprise to me!
Cholesterol- Oatmeal, almonds and garlic are among 10 foods in this category
Bone Health - Sesame seeds, beans and eggs are some of the foods that are rich in potassium, magnesium, calcium and other nutrients essential for bone health.
Weight loss - Dried papayas, watermelon and fruit smoothies are excellent foods that will fill you up and add some sweetness – not calories – to your diet
Nuts, Beans and Grains - Foods such as lentils, quinoa and barley provide lots of protein and a great substitute for red meat.
Antioxidants - Cherries, artichokes, blueberries are on this list of foods that are high in antioxidants, which can help reverse the damaging effects of oxygen on our bodies’ cells.
Super Foods - Acai and Goji berries top this list of 11 foods that are incredibly packed with important nutrients. Can you guess what else is on this list?
Healthy Snacks - Pretzels, pistachios and graham crackers are recommended here for low-cal in-between meal snacks.
Healthy Desserts - An oxymoron? Not according to Alissa who explains, “dark chocolate with at least 60% cocoa can reduce blood pressure and is full of antioxidants.”

10 Foods with High Amounts of Phytoestrogens

Wendy — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:00:51 +0000

If you are experiencing menopausal symptoms typically associated with estrogen deficiency, such as hot flashes, mood swings, and food cravings, you may want to try increasing the amount of plant-based hormones – or phytoestrogens - in your diet. Phytoestrogens are chemicals that are found in plants that may act like the estrogen produced naturally in the body. Consider adding these foods to your weekly visit to the farmers market or grocery store.

Soy milk, tofu, edamame beans
Fermented soy foods such as miso and soy
Flaxseeds and sesame seeds
Wholegrains – such as oat bran, whole wheat and oatmeal
Peppers
Red grape juice and cranberries
Cranberries or red grape juice
Green beans, chickpeas, kidney beans
Broccoli
Celery

There are several herbs and plant roots, including dong quai, black cohosh, ginseng and red clover, that have also been reported as effective in menopause, but you should have the advice of an herbalist or naturopathic doctor before you add this to your diet.

These Foods & Beverages Will Pack On The Pounds Over Time

Wendy — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:50:04 +0000

Managing your weight requires constant vigilance. The average person gains one pound a year, which is hardly noticeable from one year to the next. But if you let it go, those pounds add up slowly and before you know it, you’re 10-20 pounds over your ideal weight. Current dietary guidlines urge people to “eat less and exercise more” to lose extra pounds, which sounds sensible. But recently, a team of researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, investigating ways to curb the obesity epidemic in this country, took a closer look at this diet mantra to see if this conventional wisdom is really good advice for preventing long-term weight gain. What they concluded was that “eat less of this and more of that” would be more like it.

In evaluating three large studies that tracked 120,000 men and women for up to 20 years, they discovered that a few foods in particular “absolutely” contributed to weight gain, while others did not. “It’s not just eat less of everything. It’s eat more of the foods that help you feel full and less of other things,” explained Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, associate professor in the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the research. So, what are the five foods that were most strongly associated with weight gain?

Starches, namely potatoes and potato products — chips were the biggest culprit. People who increased their intake of these products gained weight
Meats – processed and unprocessed came in second
Refined grains and sweets- bagels and white bread act just like sweets suggesting that sugars and carbohydrates have the same relationship with weight gain if they’re refined

The researchers also found that sweetened drinks were most strongly associated with weight gain followed by 100% fruit juice. Dairy drinks – low fat or whole milk, didn’t impact weight gain either way.

Now the good news. Several foods were associated with less weight gain when their consumption was actually increased. Dr. Mozaffarian said this suggests that when you increase your portions of these more healthful foods, you will likely decrease your intake of calories elsewhere:

Fruits and Vegetables
Nuts
Yogurt
Whole grains

To prevent long-term weight gain, “we have to pay more attention to the quality of our diet not just the quantity of what we’re eating and drinking,” sad Dr. Mozaffarian, who discussed the study’s findings in a video posted online here.

The study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (6/23/11)

Consuming Small Bites at a Slower Pace Can Promote Weight Loss

Wendy — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 01:28:26 +0000

If you’re struggling to shed pounds and haven’t had success with any diet, maybe you should change the way you eat. Consider the findings of a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition: It showed that big bites and fast chewing makes you consume significantly more calories than if you take small bites and chew more. Presumably, when you taste food for a longer period of time, it satisfies your hunger sooner and you eat less. So the lesson here is to cut your food into smaller pieces, chew more (one physician told me to chew food 20 times!) and take the time to enjoy your meal.

A Leading Nutritional Expert’s Tips for Losing Your Belly and Finding Your Waist

Wendy — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 04:10:39 +0000

Marilyn Glenville PhD, is a leading expert in nutritional health for women. The advice she offers in her 2006 book, “Mastering Cortisol: Stop Your Body’s Stress Hormone From Making You Fat Around the Middle,” explains in plain language how our eating habits are making us listless and fat around the middle – two common complaints of menopausal women. In a previous blogpost, I highlighted a section of her book that focused on vitamins, minerals and herbs that can help women eliminate “that bulge.” Here, I provide a top-line summary of her tips for what and how to eat in order to lose excess weight and belly fat in particular. Her detailed explanations will help you understand the importance of her advice, so if you’re complaining of weight gain and belly fat, I highly recommend that you read this book:

Stop Dieting and don’t count calories. A severe restriction of food is a biologically unnatural state
Eat little and often. Eat three main meals, but make them smaller than you would normally. Eat a mid-morning and a mid-afternoon snack. No starchy carbos after 6pm. Because your blood sugar is stable, your energy levels will also be stable and there will be no more roller coaster highs and lows.
Don’t skip breakfast - If you miss the first meal of the day, your body starts to attack the muscles, breaking them down for fuel. Set aside 10 to 15 minutes each morning. It’s essential.
Eliminate all sugar and refined carbohydrates from your life. Carbohydrataes are starches and sugars. Fast releasing carbs (e.g. cakes, cookies, instant oatmeal, white rice, potatoes and bananas) cause a rapid rise in blood sugar. Consume instead slow release carbohydrates such as whole wheat, brown rice, beans, vegetables and fruits.
Add protein to each meal. As soon as you combine a protein to a carbohydrate, you change it into a slow-release carb, which is a good thing.
Eat essential fats. The real culprits of weight gain are sugar and refined carbs in foods and drinks – not fat. Stay away from bad, saturated fats (meat and dairy products) and consume unsaturated fats (found in nuts, seeds and oily fish) instead.
Don’t eat on the run. In order the control the cortisol that is putting the weight around your middle, you need to keep your blood sugar in balance. Have a seat, chew well and enjoy the food.
Watch what you drink. Caffeinated drinks, alcohol, soft drinks and fruit juices can specifically cause fat to be deposited around your middle. Dr. Glenville’s diet plan suggests staying away from liquid carbs for at least a month to give your liver a rest.
Change the way in which you think about food. The word “diet” has temporary connotations. If you’re really serious about changing your body shape, make healthy, enjoyable eating a habit. Aim to eat well 80 percent of the time to get rid of that fat around the middle and give yourself 20 percent leeway.

The Grapefruit Is a Power Food, But Maybe Not if You’re on HRT

Wendy — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 03:18:42 +0000

While most of this country is experiencing freezing temperatures, southern California looks like one big citrus grove. I picked these grapefruits in Palm Springs this weekend and they turned out to be my favorite kind, pink, which according to Power Foods: 150 Delicious Recipes with the 38 Healthiest Ingredients offers about 35 times more vitamin A than their yellow counterparts. Just one grapefruit covers your daily requirement of vitamin C and includes a range of phytonutrients, specifically carotenoid pigments. Pink grapefruits in particular have a high ORAC value - meaning it ranks high on the government’s list of anti-oxidant containing foods – right up there with oranges, broccoli florets, cherries and kidney beans. So with all these health attributes, why do so many people avoid eating grapefruits?

There was a 2007 study that found a connection between grapefruit eating and breast cancer. This was later refuted by the findings of the Nurses Health Study, which found no such link after monitoring more than 77,000 women for 18 years. In fact, according to the current issue of Nutrition Action Healthletter, the study participants who ate an average of at least a quarter of a grapefruit a day had a 22 precent lower risk of breast cancer. Yet another study, which tracked nearly 115,000 European women for 10 years also found no overall link between grapefruit and breast cancer.

What about the grapefruit’s reputation for interfering with medications? Grapefruits, along with tangelos and Seville (sour) oranges do interfere – not with the pill itself – but rather, with an enzyme that enables absorption. However, the effectiveness of several medications are actually enhanced by grapefruit juice. To find out which category your prescription medicine might fall under, see this list.

Is hormone supplementation on the list of pills (or patches) that you should avoid mixing with grapefruit juice? I had a tough time getting to the bottom of this issue because it falls in the “it depends” category of answers. So I asked Peter Koshland, a pharmacist and founder of the Koshland Pharm, a custom compounding pharmacy in San Francisco. Here’s his explanation:

Grapefruit juice inhibits drug metabolism at the GI tract, so its effects on estrogen would be most pronounced with oral dosage forms, leading to increased levels of estrogens in the bloodstream. We are recommending that women stay away from oral estrogens in most cases so that would help diminish any potential interactions, however, estrogens are enterohepatically recirculated (the estrogens circulate through the bile duct, through the GI tract and back into the circulation) so even with topical administration, there may be some effect. Of course, I recommend that women have their estrogen levels tested whenever they are on supplementation, and if a patient is having an interaction with grapefruit juice, it would be picked up as higher levels.

So, should women who are on transdermal estrogens avoid grapefruit juice? I guess it’s probably a good idea, but not an absolute.

Here is what Natural Standard has to say about the estrogen-grapefruit interaction. (As stated on its website, Natural Standard was founded by healthcare providers and researchers to provide high-quality, evidence-based information about complementary and alternative therapies).

Estrogen and progestin combination: Grapefruit may increase the bioavailability and side effects associated with estrogen (153; 154; 155). In one randomized crossover trial, grapefruit juice increased the ethinylestradiol C_max significantly to 137% (p=0.0088) and increased the AUC(0-8) to 128% (p=0.0186) (155). Grapefruit juice has demonstrated the ability to alter the metabolic degradation of estrogens and increase the bioavailable amounts of 17beta-estradiol and its metabolite estrone in ovariectomized women (154). The most likely mechanism of action of the flavonoids of grapefruit juice on 17 beta-estradiol metabolism is the inhibition of the CYP450 3A4 enzyme, which catalyzes the reversible hydroxylation of 17 beta-estradiol into estrone and further into estriol (154).

Indulge Your Cravings for Chocolate Guilt Free

Wendy — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 13:00:25 +0000

Valentine’s Day or not, chocolate is most everyone’s favorite treat and lately it has attained the status, along with leafy greens and flax seed, as a health food. A piece of dark chocolate can even help you lose weight, according to David Wolfe, a noted natural foods expert. He says Cacao, the raw bean that is rich in the antioxidant flavanol epicatechin, is actually one of the great weight loss foods because it contains an abundance of minerals, such as magnesium, iron and chromium, that appear to shut off the appetite.

Debra Waterhouse, a registered dietician who 15 years ago wrote Why Women Need Chocolate: Eat What You Crave to Look Good & Feel Great also thinks chocolate should be part of a woman’s diet, but for other reasons. As she explained in her book:

Women do need chocolate as well as other foods high in starch, sugar and fat to stabilize moods, control weight and revitalize well being. Food cravings are Mother Nature’s way of informing us that we need to eat a specific food in order to look and feel great.

Waterhouse conducted a survey with more than 600 respondents to explore food cravings in men and women. She found that 76% of women were more likely to crave chocolate (over crackers, ice cream and candy). She used that information to create a diet plan called the “ON Plan” (Optimal Nutrition for Mind and Body) that was based on these five principles:

Trust your female food cravings
Discover your female pleasure foods
Learn how to eat for maximum satisfaction
Distribute your food to maximize mood
Follow your optimal eating routine.

So even though her book and diet plan are more than a decade old, this might be just the diet plan you’ve been looking for. But don’t get carried away, she warned: “Biological food cravings can be satisfied with surprisingly small amounts of foods. If you trust your food cravings, you can use them to balance your brain chemistry and moods…and you’ll be a happier person.”

So if you receive a box of chocolate today, enjoy it fully and without guilt. Just not the whole box in one sitting.

**For additional reading on Chocolate and Heart Health, see these research studies…

Are These “Best” or “Worst” Foods Part of Your Diet?

Wendy — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:39:32 +0000

The Nutrition Action Health Letter has posted on its website a list of The 10 Worst and Best Foods. Topping the Best list are sweet potatoes (a favorite of mine), which are loaded with carotenoids, vitamin C and potassium. The delicious, sweet Mango, with its abundant supply of vitamins, came in second; and unsweetened yogurt came in third (it contains no sugary preserves).

You might be surprised at what their editors rank as the Worst Foods. Leading the pack is Marie Callender’s Chicken Pot Pie, which they call “Artery Crust” for its high calorie, saturated fat and sodium content. They didn’t have nice things to say about the Olive Garden’s Tour of Italy Homemade Lasagne either, which they label “Triple Bypass.” And in third place is Campbells Condensed Soup, which they claim gives you half of a days worth of sodium if you consume only one of the 2 1/2 servings contained in one can. You can see both lists in their entirety on the newsletter’s website.

The Nutrition Action Health Letter is a publication of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy organization that focuses on health and nutrition issues. It does not accept advertising so their editors call it like they see it when it comes to issues concerning food labeling, advertising deception, food-safety, and marketing junk food to kids. It’s a great resource for honest information about the food we eat and the manufacturers that produce it. The cover story this month is called “Fat Chance- New Clues to Why We Gain Weight.”

Banish Belly Fat With The Right Kind of Diet & Exercise

Wendy — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 06:11:19 +0000

Among the top complaints about the menopause transition – besides sleep deprivation… and hot flashes… and foggy brain – is weight gain and belly fat (aka “muffin top”). But it seems to be a concern shared by women of all ages, if magazine covers and book sales are any indication. Thirteen of the top 16 best-selling women’s health books on Amazon are about how to lose belly fat including the Flat Belly! Diet series of books which have claimed the top three spots on the list.

Despite my own quest for a slim torso, I haven’t read this book. But I have read and recommend the one that comes in at # 10 on Amazon’s list, The Abs Diet for Women: The Six-Week Plan to Flatten Your Belly and Firm Up Your Body for Life. Like the Flat Belly! series, this book has its own franchise of books, DVDs and handbooks by the author, David Zinczenko, editor in chief of Men’s Health.

What I like about this book is his explanation and guidance for a high-protein diet of six small meals each day (3 main meals with 3 balanced snacks) and a workout program that aims to “burn fat day and night.” This is accomplished, he says, by emphasizing weight and resistance training over cardio exercise, though that is important too for weight maintenance and wellness as we age. He just sees more value and better outcomes from circuit training in the gym over an hour on the treadmill and he includes pictures of core-strengthening and toning exercises that you can do in the gym or at home.

The Abs Diet approach is not unlike the one promoted a decade earlier by Bill Phillips in his excellent book, Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength. An updated edition for women, Body-for-LIFE for Women: A Woman’s Plan for Physical and Mental Transformation, was written by Dr. Pamela Peeke, and published this year.

Finally, another book I recommend is From Belly Fat to Belly Flat: How Your Hormones Are Adding Inches to Your Waist and Subtracting Years from Your Life — the Medically Proven Way to Reset Your Metabolism and Reshape Your Body. It is co-written by Genie James and Dr. C.W. Randolph, a physician who specializes in hormone balancing.

What diet or exercise books have you found to be particularly helpful for fighting menopausal weight gain?

Cranberries Can Prevent, But Not Cure UTIs

Wendy — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:56:31 +0000

The latest issue of Nutrition Action Newsletter hit my doorstep this week and there’s an interesting article, “Rooting for Fruit,” about using our fruit bowls as a medicine chest. Of particular interest to me was the explanation for why cranberries can help prevent urinary tract infections (UTIs) if consumed regularly.

First some background: Menopausal women are at greater risk of developing a UTI due to the changes that occur in the bladder as a result of declining estrogen levels. Half the cases of UTIs are caused by a (P-type E. coli) bacteria, which have little hairy tips called fimbriae. These attach themselves to the bladder so that they multiply and cause an infection.

According to Amy Howell of Rutgers University, the expert source for the Nutrition Action Newsletter article, Cranberries contain proanthocyanidins, which prevent bacteria from sticking to the surfaces of cells on the bladder wall. “So you can avoid infections by stopping the bacteria from sticking to cells in the bladder and instead just wash them out in the urine.” However, she added that “once the bacteria stick to the bladder wall and start multiplying, patients need antibiotics.”

Apparently, you need to drink one to two glasses of a cranberry juice cocktail daily for it to have any preventative effect. Dried cranberries and even cranberry sauce work just as well, Howell explained, but not cranberry pills “since you don’t know how much proanthocyanidin is in them or whether they’re rendered inactive by improper storage or processing.”

You’ll need to choose a brand that contains as much cranberry juice as other juices that it is mixed with.

I have been a subscriber to the Nutrition Action Newsletter for years and highly recommend it. It is published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an independent non-profit consumer health group. They advocate honest food labeling and advertising, safer and more nutritious foods, and they accept no government or industry funding!