Year: 2019

July 26, 2019 at 04:00PM by CWC As a health and food writer, I interview dietitians, nutritionists, and doctors virtually every day, picking their brains on what’s healthy and what isn’t. Regardless of the eating plan or food trend of the moment, there’s one piece of advice they repeat over and over again: “Buy products where you recognize everything on the ingredients list.” It sounds simple enough: If a food is branded as healthy but has an ingredients list 20 lines deep, full of terms that I’ve never heard of, I’m going to put it back on the shelf. But a lot of the products I gravitate towards—alternative milks, dairy-free ice-creams, gluten-free pastas—often have a very simple label, except for one ingredient that leaves me scratching my head: gums. Whether it’s xanthan gum, guar gum, or locust bean gum, they’re ingredients I see popping up again and again, often on an otherwise very easy to understand ingredients list. ad_intervals[‘410812_div-gpt-ad-8891272-3’] = setInterval(function () { if (ads_ready) { clearTimeout(ad_intervals[‘410812_div-gpt-ad-8891272-3’]); googletag.cmd.push(function(){googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8891272-3’);}); } }, 100); “Different gums are used for different things,” registered dietitian Kim Morton, RD, tells me. “Most are binding and thickening agents that help products, like sauces or alternative milks, get thicker.” Morton adds that while some gums may cause digestive problems in some people, all of them are widely considered safe and approved by the Food and Drug Administration. To gain a bit more knowledge about the most popular gums used in healthy foods and drinks, I had Morton walk

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July 26, 2019 at 12:50PM by CWC I have a friend who eats lemon slices whole—as in, rind and all. I tease her relentlessly for it, but she might actually get the last laugh when it comes to whole-fruit consumption. According to a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, the amount of beneficial bacteria you ingest when deciding how to eat an apple increases significantly when you don’t stop short of the core and seeds. Researchers at the Graz University of Technology in Austria analyzed the bacteria content in both organic and store-bought apples and came back with some unexpected (at least, to me?) findings. For starters, both types of apples contained approximately the same amount of bacteria content; however, organic apples had more diverse and more beneficial microbes as compared to store-bought varieties. Perhaps more intriguing is the team’s finding that in both apple types, the bulk of the good bacteria were found in an apple’s seeds. This means that if you skip them, you miss out on some major digestive help. In fact, researchers concluded that tossing an apple core reduces the amount of microbes consumed from more than 100 million to a measly 10 million. ad_intervals[‘411184_div-gpt-ad-8891272-3’] = setInterval(function () { if (ads_ready) { clearTimeout(ad_intervals[‘411184_div-gpt-ad-8891272-3’]); googletag.cmd.push(function(){googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8891272-3’);}); } }, 100); And while most modern-day humans can benefit from a little bacteria boost, there are certain signs that you in particular want to emulate Johnny Appleseed. Microbiome health affects everything from immunity to weight to depression (and

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