Women’s Health Magazine has compiled a list of The Best Fitness Foods for Women and I was pleasantly surprised to find goodies like chocolate milk.  Sure, it offers lots of calcium, but isn’t it even more fattening with chocolate added? Sports nutritionist Susan Kleiner, Ph.D, author of High-Performance Nutrition: The Total Eating Plan to Maximum Your Workout , explains that “there’s way more to milk than just calcium. In fact, it’s a damn near perfect food, giving you a lot of valuable energy while keeping your calorie count low. [click to continue…]

If your sweet tooth is sabotaging your diet or daily work-outs, take some advice from Dr. C.W. Randolph,  the author of 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. In his current newsletter, he suggests these snacks when you’re experiencing food cravings;

• Tangerine slices -  Citrus fruits contain a substance called D-Limonene, which has been shown to promote the detoxification of extra estrogen.

•  A low-fat yogurt smoothie with 2 tablespons of flax seed - Flax seeds are part of a food group called lignans that reduce estrogenic activity at a cellular level.

• Carrots & Cukes - Toss slighty steamed carrots with sesame seeds and cucumbers and sprinkle with rice wine vinegar. The tart taste will help eliminate sugar cravings.  Since carrots, cucumbers and seeds are all insoluble fibers, they help decrease your extra estrogen load by binding to the estrogen itself and moving it out of your body through the bowel.

You can subscribe to Dr. Randolph’s free newsletter on his website.

A New York Times editorial published yesterday, “Whose Best Interest?” called upon all pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily participate in an online database of all payments made to doctors for speaking and consulting services. They also stated their support for a Senate bill, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which would establish a mandatory national registry of payments of all kinds to physicians - including gifts, payment for clinical investigations and stock options .

Why is this important to menopausal women? [click to continue…]

Because it’s Menopause Awareness Month, I’ve been receiving a lot of emails about products aimed at helping women ease, or at least cope with, the most disruptive symptoms of menopause - hot flashes, night sweats and insomnia. I haven’t tried them myself, but you might find them helpful.  Here are a few to consider: [click to continue…]

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal offers a list of ten fruits and vegetables that, along with apples and pumpkins, are abundant this time of year and provide numerous health benefits, which are summarized below.  See the entire article, by Pervaiz Shallwani, for a lot more information about each food along with suggestions for cooking: [click to continue…]

I came across a startling fact in this month’s Berkeley Wellness Letter. Apparently, hypertension drugs have replaced hormone therapy as the No. 1 medication for women age 45-64.  Another article, this one in The Mayo Clinic’s Women’s HealthSource, about blood pressure changes in women as they age, stated that womens’ systolic pressure - that’s the top number in a BP reading and the one that’s more closely associated with heart disease risk and stroke in people over age 50- increases by about 5 millimeters of mercury with menopause.  So, is there a correlation between rising blood pressure and declining estrogen levels? [click to continue…]

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: [click to continue…]

Cruciferous vegetables are the centerpiece of Dr. C. W. Randolph’s anti-estrogenic diet that he suggests in his book, 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.

Why? As he explains in his book, these types of vegetables can help decrease the body’s load of unhealthy estrogens and reduce an overall unhealthy condition of estrogen dominance. (For an explanation of estrogen dominance, see my previous blog post just below). Dr. Randolph also states that a “very noticeable benefit” of eating more cruciferous vegetables will be decreased abdominal circumference of the waist. [click to continue…]

We’ve created clever euphemisms to describe it - like muffin top, mid-life bulge, and a thickening waist. But however you want to refer to belly fat, it’s an unfortunate fact of life for most women in mid-life and getting rid of it is, as a friend of mine put it, like chiseling cement. [click to continue…]