Eating Right With Spices and Drinks

Diet food can be found in unexpected places. For example, look around the drink and spice aisles at your local grocery store. Ingredients here can teach you how to eat healthy if you're looking for ways to support your healthy weight loss aspirations. Green tea and cinnamon are two foods that fight fat and improve overall health in different ways but together provide exponential health benefits. Let's look at cinnamon first.

Dr. Richard Anderson (PhD) is a USDA scientist whose research on cinnamon has been published. He and his colleagues conducted one study that aimed to determine the effects of cinnamon in daily diet plans. Subjects consumed a total of 500mg of extract per day by taking 2 capsules in the morning and 2 more in the evening. We are more familiar with cinnamon powder, of which 10g or 1.5Tbsp is equivalent to 500mg of extract. 12 weeks of this regimen produced great results: reductions in body fat and increases in lean body mass.

A completely different kind of benefit of adding cinnamon to healthy diets was seen in the conclusion of another research study. This one ended with participants, who came into the study lean and healthy, experiencing improvements in insulin sensitivity and blood glucose regulation. For a person who is already eating right and not necessarily trying to achieve fat loss, more efficient insulin sensitivity lowers their risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

All the promising information about the good nutrition of cinnamon is out there, but there is one snag holding people back from the benefits. 10 grams is a lot of cinnamon to work into 3 healthy meals a day. Planning would be strenuous and you would have to have a knack for creativity when it comes to cooking. Coming up with weekly menus would be like creating your own fad diets.

Another drawback to working cinnamon in to healthy meals is explained by Dr. Anderson: "When consuming high amounts of polyphenols in the diet the salivary glands produce a protein that binds and minimizes their effects." Polyphenols are the chemicals that most likely give cinnamon powder its diet food power, so greater consumption backfires. Cinnamon in capsule form is an easy and effective solution to this problem.

A capsule is also the best way to take advantage of healthy eating with green tea. Green tea is another ingredient that, when added to healthy diets in large amounts, produces surprising but gratifying outcomes. Unfortunately, drinking 3-4 cups of green tea every single day is as grueling a mission as eating 1.5Tbsp of cinnamon.

Around 3 or 4 cups of brewed green tea is the amount that has been figured to produce healthy weight loss effects. To understand how this diet food works, we first turn to Drs. Kimberly Grove (PhD) and Joshua Lambert (PhD), who are from the Department of Food Science at Pennsylvania State University. In their work, they reviewed a compilation of research studies that focused on green tea as a treatment for obesity. They state that 1 cup of brewed green tea contains between 240 and 320mg of catechins. 30-50% of the catechins are the type that probably burn more calories: epigallocatechin gallate, or, more commonly, EGCG.

A popular research study by Dulloo et al. tested the effect of 270mg of EGCG in daily eating plans. This amount was consumed by participants through 2 capsules of extract 3 times a day and can be found in 3-4 cups of green tea. Over half of the subjects ended up experiencing, on average, an additional 78.3 calories burned over 24 hours, which is really impressive since the same number can be achieved by running at a high speed on a treadmill for a few minutes. The actual number of extra calories burned ranged from 63.5 to 200.

Now, you might be looking at that 3-4 number and thinking you would enjoy drinking a few bottles of the sugary tea you pick up from the gas station every day. In fact, fad diets like this might be an easy way for you to get good nutrition. However, the tea drinks that come in cans and bottles lose a significant portion of EGCG during manufacturing and storage, so this is not the route you want to take. Additionally, other types of teas contain smaller amounts of catechins. Green tea alone boasts the highest numbers of catechins, and particularly EGCG. So, healthy weight loss benefits are there at your disposal but you must be strict with your tea selection in order to use it as a diet food.

The fat-fighting ingredients in green tea, like those in cinnamon, are most effective and easily incorporated into diet plans in the form of a capsule. Instead of sprinkling a tablespoon of cinnamon on your healthy meals and washing it down with 3 cups of green tea, add a supplement to your healthy eating and exercise plans. Metabolism, by Prograde, uses a team approach by soliciting the efforts of cinnamon, green tea, and other fat-fighting ingredients in their supplement that gives your healthy weight loss a boost.

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