THURSDAY, Nov. 18, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Women of reproductive age with disabilities report lower diet quality, food security, and physical activity, according to a study presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2021, held virtually from Nov. 13 to 15.

Jacqueline Litvak, from New York University in New York City, and colleagues used data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2013 to 2018) to examine diet quality, physical activity, and related lifestyle factors among 3,409 women of reproductive age by disability status.

The researchers found that compared with women with no disabilities, women with any self-reported disabilities had lower Healthy Eating Index 2015 scores, were more likely to report low/very low food security, and were less likely to report meeting physical activity recommendations of 150 minutes/week of moderate/vigorous activities. In an analysis by disability type, women with self-reported vision difficulty consumed more fast-food meals in one week versus women with no disabilities.

"Women with disabilities may face specific obstacles in improving their diet due to barriers related to their disabilities, including medical conditions or physical limitations, as well as the availability of food," a coauthor said in a statement. "It is important that health care professionals are aware and knowledgeable of these obstacles and make efforts to help women address and overcome them."

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AHA: Women With Disabilities Have Poorer Diets, Face Food Insecurity - HealthDay

The holiday season can be challenging for those on a special diet. Whether you have to go gluten-free, are watching your sodium or counting carbs, sometimes it can be tough to enjoy a holiday treat.

Registered dietitian Kim Galeaz joined FOX59 Morning News with tips for guests and hosts for navigating holiday gatherings and specialized diets.

The following recipes were featured in this Living Well segment:

Pecan Streusel Filling

Coffee cake

Heat oven to 350F. Grease a 913-inch metal baking pan. In a small bowl, whisk together brown sugar, cinnamon and pecans until thoroughly blended. Set aside. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer with paddle attachment, combine butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla. Mix on medium-high until smooth and creamy. Add half the flour mixture and half the sour cream, mixing until blended. Add remaining flour mixture and sour cream and mix just until blended. Spread one-half batter in greased pan. Sprinkle with one-half the streusel filling. Top with remaining half of batter (spread as close to edges as possible) and sprinkle with remaining half of streusel. Bake 40 45 minutes, or until toothpick comes out clean in center. Cool on wire rack. Enjoy warm or at room temperature. Store leftovers at room temperature in tightly covered container and enjoy within 3 days for best quality. Makes at least 20 servings.

Recipe provided by culinary registered dietitian nutritionist, Kim Galeaz, RDN LD from her baking friend with celiac disease, Laura in Blissfield, Michigan

Drain canned sweet potatoes, reserving the sweet liquid. In a medium bowl, smash/mash drained canned sweet potatoes. Add mashed sweet potato, garbanzo beans, peanut butter, lemon juice, oil and garlic to a food processor. Process/pulse until almost smooth. Add salt, cumin, coriander, harissa spice and Harissa sauce. Process again until smooth. Add reserved liquid to make smoother hummus if desired. Taste and add more lemon, harissa or spices if desired. Serve with favorite vegetables, pita wedges, whole grain naan, whole-grain crackers and gluten-free crackers.

Makes about 3 cups hummus (about 10 servings of 1/3 cup each)

Recipe created by culinary registered dietitian nutritionist Kim Galeaz, RDN LD

Heat oven to 350F. Coat two 1813-inch rimmed baking sheets with oil or cooking spray. Set aside. In a large bowl, whisk together brown sugar and all spices. Add walnuts, pecans, cashews and almonds and toss well. Drizzle vegetable oil over all nuts and stir/toss until thoroughly blended and all nuts are coated with spice mixture. Spread evenly in a single layer in prepared pans. Bake, stirring several times, about 15 to 20 minutes, until nuts are browned but not burned. Cool on wire racks. Enjoy immediately. Store leftovers in an airtight container or zippered plastic bag at room temperature. Enjoy within 4 5 days. Or freeze in zippered freezer bags. Theyll last up to one year in freezer.

Makes about 5 cups (roughly 16 servings of 1/3 cup each).

Recipe created by culinary registered dietitian nutritionist Kim Galeaz RDN, LD

Combine cranberries, canned cranberry sauce, onions and celery leaves in food processor bowl. Process until combined. Add Worcestershire sauce, mustard, horseradish, ketchup, lemon juice, garlic powder and salt and process until just combined. Taste and adjust horseradish, lemon juice, mustard, garlic powder and salt as desired. Serve immediately with cooked chilled shrimp. Refrigerate leftover cranberry sauce in a tightly covered container and enjoy within 4 to 5 days.

Makes about 3 cups sauce.

Recipe created by culinary registered dietitian nutritionist Kim Galeaz, RDN LD

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How to handle the holidays when youre on a special diet - Fox 59

Excerpted from Eat Like a Human: Nourishing Foods and Ancient Ways of Cooking to Revolutionize Your Health by Bill Schindler. 2021 by Bill Schindler. Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown, and Company. All rights reserved.

It was the opportunity of a lifetime. I was starring in National Geographics The Great Human Race, a television series in which I was tasked with finding food and shelter using only the tools available during particular time periods of our evolution as humans. In Tanzania, I replicated a 2.5-million-year-old Oldowan toolkit to scavenge meat from a carcass on the savanna as fast as I could before the lions returned. In Mongolia, I used bone and stone tools to hunt rabbit, and in the Republic of Georgia, I replicated a 40,000-year-old spear point to take down a wild boar with an atlatl. I felt hunger; I felt fear; I felt fierce joy and relief when I successfully hunted or found wild food that sustained me.

Little, Brown, and Company

But now, here I was in Alaska, ostensibly in a bitter winter some 15,000 years ago, when ancestors were attempting to cross what was then the Bering Land Bridge from Asia to North America. After two days of barely surviving with no food on the Arctic tundra, where ripping winds drove snow across endless miles of ice-glittered scrub, my co-star and I had walked south far enough for the snow to change to an icy rain, andbefore us was a pond with a beaver lodge. We desperately needed protein and fat to keep going, and I scouted the pond edge to find a place to set a primitive snare to trap a beaver. Once I found it, I knew my choices were stark: Go into the freezing pond buck naked and then put my dry clothing back on; go into the pond fully clothed and come out in sopping deerskin clothes, risking hypothermia at best, death at worst; or finally, not go into the pond at all and spend another night sleepless and starving.

God, I was cold! My hands were freezing up as I frantically worked to prepare as much of the trap as I could before stripping down and wading in to set the critical anchorthree atlatl darts I would stab into the bottom of the pond to form a kind of tripod, and to which I would attach the snares anchor line. Behind me the mountains loomed like gray giants of mist, fog, and rock, the sky a leaden menace threatening more snow any minute.

You might think that at this point, all I was worried about was successfully setting the trap and getting my freezing butt out of the water and back to a warm fire. Youd be wrong. What was freaking me out was not the cold, the hunger, or even the way my steaming breath was coming in gasps and my limbs shook uncontrollably. It was the fact that I was about to get naked in front of an entire production crew, two cameras, and a drone. Lets be honest: This was a television show. If I failed to find food, the crew wasnt going to let me die out here. But my commitment to this project was to take it as close to the edge as possibleto truly begin to grasp the challenges that our ancestors faced and overcameand that meant stripping and walking into a freezing pond in front of all these people (and knowing that this scene would be aired before millions of viewers). And I have never felt comfortable taking even my shirt off in public. Ever.

If you watch this episode, youll see that I look strong, athletic, ripped. But it wasnt always this wayfar from it. And the fear I was feeling at this moment drew deep from what had been, for so much of my life, my unhealthy relationship with food. Its a story I suspect some of you can relate to in one form or another.

As a chubby, awkward kid growing up in the U.S., I was picked on for my size. I didnt feel like food was something that nourished me. Food was something that scared me. It was something that made me fat. It was something that made other kids make fun of me. Then I became a wrestler in high school, eventually making the varsity team at one of the countrys top Division 1 college programs. And I traded one unhealthy relationship with food for another. Food became something that prevented me from making my competitive weight. I binged and purged and fought with foodrepeatedly and regularly losing and regaining more than 20 pounds a week! And after college and wrestling, the weight piled on with a vengeance, and I became an overweight adult. With that came health issues like irritable bowel syndrome, metabolic syndrome, even joint pain.

Read more about Bill Schindlers research: Did Processed Food Make Us Human?

All the while, I was constantlyto the point of obsessiontrying to figure out what to eat. Over decades of research that encompassed experimental archaeology and studies of ancient technologies, and took me from fieldwork with Indigenous and traditional peoples around the world to the professional kitchens of global Michelin star chefs, I sought to answer that question: What should I eat? And I began to find the answers only when I realized that, all along, thats not the only question I should have been asking.

While some people may be asking What should I eat?, the equallyif not moreimportant question that must accompany this is How should I eat? Most people will take the latter question quite literally, as in What time should I eat? or How much should I eat? or Should I eat slowly? But in the context of my latest book, Eat Like a Human, I ask readers to expand their thinking about this word beyond those literal questions. Instead, I ask them to consider how as a concept that is directly connected to what our ancestral dietary past can teach all of us about our relationship to food today.

A modern human predicament is that today people can eat to obesity and still be malnourished. This reality has everything to do with the ways many of us as individuals, as well as our cultures and food systems, have strayed from the fundamental dietary imperative of our ancestors: how to eat the safest, most nutrient-dense, bioavailable foods possible. Hewing to that imperative is literally what made us human. To begin to understand it, we have to shift some perspectives and go back in time.

Of course, Im not suggesting that we all learn how to hunt with an atlatl and butcher our catch with a handcrafted obsidian blade. (Although, trust me, its fun and rewarding to try these technologies!) We humans may be essentially biologically the samewith the same nutritional needsas we were 300,000 years ago, but we are living in the 21st century. Our expectations about how food should taste, smell, and lookand even the way we present it and gather to consume itare often entirely different. Our ability to incorporate ancestral and traditional food technologies into our lives requires planning and time. Some of us have a lot more of the latter than others.

The author re-creates an ancient bone tool using a stone burin. Luke Cormack/Courtesy of Bill Schindler

Nor would I expect you, for instance, to trash everything in your pantry, dump out your refrigerator, and upend your life to make a radical change (in fact, I recommend against it). For some of you, even a small foray into the how of food may be sufficient. But if youre reading this, I suspect that food and your relationship to it is a subject into which youve already put a lot of time and thought. And its likely you have genuine concerns for how our diet impacts the world around us, perhaps even goals for sustainability, ethics, and economics in the way that we feed ourselves. For all those reasons, I believe the diet of our future should absorb the lessons of our past and blend them with modern culinary arts and foodways to create a food system and philosophy that can meet our contemporary cultural expectations while creating foods that are deeply nourishing and sustainable.

On the Alaskan tundra, freezing in a beaver pond in a desperate attempt to find a calorie-rich, nutrient-dense meal, all of these realities were slamming into memy childhood as a chubby kid burdened by a self-destructive relationship with food; my lifework of understanding primitive technologies and ancestral foodways so that I could better feed myself and my family; my yearning to know more about how our ancestors created the technologies to overcome so many physical deficiencies and beat the survival odds.

The snare I was settingusing cordage Id made from natural plant fibers and waterproofed with tallowwas a technology tens of thousands of years old. I stabbed a series of sticks into the mud near the bank to funnel the beaver toward the snare, whose loop was suspended in the water. My drenched hands and feet were already freezing, but after stripping off my deerskin clothes, it took me a bone-chilling five minutes or so waist-deep in the water to set the traps anchors and properly adjust the snare. Once done, I flailed out of the water, still naked in front of all those cameras. I frantically reached for the clothes that Id left hanging on a bush. My whole body was shaking, and as I stumbled back to the camp where my co-star, Cat, had been tending the fire that wed built hours earlier with a bow-drill, my muscles were shutting down and my legs wobbled like Jell-O. But I knew, just as our ancestors did, that the trap would do its work as we stayed warm through the night by the fire.

In Mongolia, the author hunts rabbits using a bow and arrow he made using stone and bone tools. Griffin Kenemer/Courtesy of Bill Schindler

The next morning, while I was still recovering from the chill, Cat walked to the pond, now brittle and glistening with a covering of ice. Beneath it, a beaver hung suspended, caught and drowned in the snare. Cat broke the ice and dragged the beaver to the ponds bank. Using a simple stone blade, she skinned and butchered the prize. Later, we cooked the fat-rich tail and nutrient-dense heart and organs over the fire. It was a deeply rejuvenating mealphysically, spiritually, and mentally. I realized that I was proud not only of successfully acquiring this unparalleled food source in a desperate situation, but of facing and overcoming that deep-seated discomfort in my body image driven by a destructive and misinformed relationship with food.

What I was learning was how to begin asking the right questions, the ones we all are constantly compelledthrough daily necessity and ancestral driveto ask ourselves: not simply what should we eat, but how can we make our food as safe and nourishing as possible?

This excerpt has been edited slightly for style and length.

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The Diet of the Future Is a Menu That Draws From the Ancient Past - SAPIENS

November is World Vegan Month. It's meant to educate people about what it means to have a vegan diet, and the reasons why. A local dietitian said a vegan diet can be good for you as long as it's done right.

People who are vegan don't just avoid meat; they avoid anything that comes from an animal, including dairy, eggs, and honey. Many are vegan because they want to save animals or our environment. Data shows between two and six percent of Americans are vegan.

There's a misconception that a vegan diet isn't healthy because its missing key nutrients, but a local dietitian said that's not necessarily the case.

Fox 4 Evening News Anchor Patrick Nolan has been vegan for more than a decade.

"I do it mainly for health. Health of my body, mental health, health of the planet. I haven't heard any animals say it's hurting their health," he said.

"I think a vegan diet is great," Registered Dietitian Betsy Opyt said.

She said one reason why, is people with vegan diets are eating more fruits and vegetables.

"Those are the ones that have the abundance of vitamins and minerals and phytochemicals and bioflavonoids. Those really protect your body and your cells. They boost your immune system," Opyt said.

She said plant-based foods are hydrating and nourishing, and rich in minerals.

"It's anti-inflammatory. Keeping our bodies low in inflammation just keeps us so much healthier," she said.

But Opyt said it's important to do a vegan diet right,

"I always say a vegan diet should not come from a box, and it shouldn't say 'vegetarian' or 'vegan' on the outside, and it's all processed foods on the inside. Really, a vegetarian or vegan diet should be primarily plant-based whole foods," she said.

She said she uses things like nutritional yeast and sea greens like algae and seaweed to make up for the amino acids and B-12 vitamins you miss when you don't eat animal protein.

"And then things like quinoa and hemp seeds, where they have all 18 amino acids. Those are those building blocks that we need to make sure we have that complete protein," Opyt said.

She recommends people who have vegan diets go for regular lab testing to make sure they're getting all the nutrients needed.

"Whenever I go for a checkup and do the tests and blood pressure and all that, I'm always told that they're very good. I have one healthcare provider who tells me I'll never have a heart attack," Patrick Nolan said.

He said a vegan diet makes him feel good physically and mentally.

Opyt said it's best not to eat black and white; as our bodies change, we may require different kinds of diets and proteins. She also said in our country, we tend to think "What's the meat?" when making meals, instead of "What's the veggie?" She recommends planning meals around the vegetables, to make sure they're balanced and healthy.

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Your Healthy Family: 'World Vegan Month' and the benefits of a vegan diet - Fox 4

via Shaquille O'Neal on Instagram

Shaquille O'Neal says the last time he had abs, he was playing for the Miami Heat in 2006.

O'Neal said his newly sculpted torso is thanks to a strict high-protein, low-carb diet.

For 6 months, he only ate small portions of fruits, vegetables, protein shakes, fish, and chicken, he said.

Shaquille O'Neal says he has his Miami body back.

After a rough 2020, in which 28 people close to O'Neal including Kobe Bryant and his sister Ayesha Harrison-Jex passed away, the 49-year-old NBA Hall-of-Famer told Men's Journal he lost any drive to exercise and eat healthy.

Jumping back into the gym, and starting a new high-protein, low-carb diet, helped him to regain a sense of control, he said. By June, O'Neal said he was feeling better than ever and he was even able to see his abs again for the first time in 15 years.

"I've been doing this for six months and just eating fruit, protein shakes, salads, fish, chicken, and asparagus or other vegetables," O'Neal told Men's Journal.

"Very small portions and eating that every day has helped me lose 25-30 pounds. I started to see stuff that I haven't seen in 20 to 30 years like a six-pack. And I haven't had one of those since I was on the 2006 Miami Heat."

O'Neal added that he also followed a workout routine that emphasizes cardio with a lot of jogging and some strength training mixed in.

Brian Bahr/Getty Images

Eating high amounts of protein and reducing carbs can be an effective weight-loss method when paired with exercise and a caloric deficit, which O'Neal alluded to with his smaller portions.

An active person should consume 0.5 to one gram of protein per pound of their body weight to lose weight and build muscle, sports dietitian Nancy Clark told Insider's Gabby Landsverk. O'Neal who is listed at 7-foot-1 and said he weighed 375 pounds during an episode of "Inside the NBA" in May would be recommended to eat 187 to 375 grams of protein a day to lose weight.

While protein shakes aren't a silver bullet for muscle gains, they can be a very effective tool for cutting weight while preserving muscle mass, Kristi Veltkamp, a registered dietitian with Spectrum Health, previously told Insider. Replacing a 500- to 700-calorie meal with a 200-calorie shake may help people achieve the calorie deficit to aid weight loss.

Read the original article on Insider

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Shaquille O'Neal says he has abs for the first time in 15 years, thanks to 6 months on a low-carb, high-protein diet and smaller portions - Yahoo News

According to new research, a certain type of dietary fiber known as resistant starch may have an impact on lupus disease activity by affecting ones gut microbiome the naturally occurring community of bacteria and other microscopic organisms within the gastrointestinal tract. Resistant starch is a type of fiber that resists digestion in the small intestine and ferments in the large intestine, acting as a prebiotic, meaning it feeds the good kind of bacteria there. Some of these good gut bacteria, in turn, have been linked to immune system benefits and reduced disease activity in lupus and lupus-related antiphospholipid syndrome (APS, a condition that can cause blood clots and other health problems).

In the latest study, researchers looked at people with lupus and lupus-related APS and analyzed how much resistant starch they ate per day as well as their gut bacteria makeup. Although none of the study participants consumed a diet considered high in resistant starch (more than 15 grams per day), even moderate resistant starch consumption (2.5 to 15 grams daily) was associated with larger quantities of the good bacteria Bifidobacterium, which has known immune system benefits. Additionally, people with APS who ate moderate amounts of resistant starch had smaller amounts of bad bacteria that have been linked to the disease.

Dietary sources of resistant starch include:

While much remains unknown about the connection between diet and lupus, eating a nutritious, well-balanced and varied diet is recommended. Learn more about diet and nutrition with lupus.

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New Findings on the Role of Diet and Gut Bacteria in People with Lupus - Lupus Foundation of America

Lifestyle

18 Nov, 2021 10:20 PM3 minutes to read

The study has shown diets higher in fibre can lead to stronger immune response to vaccines. Photo / 123rf

A high fibre diet can improve an individual's immune response to the first dose of a vaccine, a recently published New Zealand study has shown.

The Malaghan Institute of Medical Research has been investigating immune responses to the influenza vaccine, with findings published in Frontier in Immunology earlier this week.

Researchers recorded the diet and microbiome samples of participants prior to a first vaccination, and then analysed the antibodies in their blood following the vaccine dose.

Malaghan Institute immunologist Dr Alissa Cait, who was on the research team, said the goal had been to detect any specific bacteria that could predict immune response to the vaccine.

"Interestingly, we found that for participants who were receiving their influenza vaccine for the first time, those who had the best immune responses had a prevalence of fibre-specific bacteria in their gut."

Cait said human bodies needed gut bacteria to digest food, meaning gut microbiome was often a good reflection of a person's diet.

"A large amount of fibre-specific bacteria indicates those participants ate a diet high in fibre," she said.

"These results suggest that those who consume a diet rich in fibre from foods such as fruits, vegetables and grains seem to produce a better immune response to the first dose of a vaccine due to specific colonies of bacteria that are cultivated in their guts."

As part of the study 122 healthy participants between ages 18 - 64 were given the 2016 trivalent influenza vaccine.

They were asked to report on their diets and provide samples of their gut microbiome to show the prevalence of bacteria pre-vaccination.

Following their first dose of the influenza vaccine, researchers analyzed blood samples of participants for antibodies to determine the responsiveness of their immune system.

The study's results have indicated diet is most influential for people receiving their first vaccine.

Cait said it is not the fibre on its own, but the molecules produced when bacteria ferments fibre known as short-chain fatty acids that influence the influence the immune response.

"Our bodies actively transport short chain fatty acids from our gut to our blood system where they circulate around the body," she said.

"Our previous research has shown that these molecules appear to have a balancing effect on our immune system dampening allergic and autoimmune responses while stimulating immune responses towards invasive organisms like viruses or bacteria and vaccines."

Cait is currently part of a team investigating the effect of dietary fibre on the immune response to the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.

Led by Vaccine Alliance Aotearoa New Zealand, the study Ka Mtau, Ka Ora (from knowledge comes wellbeing), will observe the response of at least 300 New Zealanders over a period of 12 months after their second vaccination.

She suggests that increasing dietary fibre could have an added protective benefit for people receiving their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.

"It's the age-old advice, eat a balanced diet and reap a multitude of health benefits. Now we can potentially add improved vaccine protection to this long list."

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High fibre diet can improve immune response to vaccines, study shows - New Zealand Herald

In 1947, two years after the end of World War II, runaway inflation tormented Japanese citizens.

Water charges had risen eight-fold since the end of the war, postal rates had grown by 12 times and the price of white rice had soared 25 times higher.

People who owned no land to grow food sold their clothing and household goods to farmers in exchange for food.

At the end of that year, a takarakuji lottery with the top prize of 1 million yen ($8,770 at the current exchange rate) was introduced for the first time.

People were asked how they would spend it if they won. Here are some of their answers: Ill get smashed on black market sake. I want to provide warm homes to orphans. Ill buy a house and get married.

That year, the salary of Diet members was raised to 5,500 yen per month, sharply up from 3,500 yen. Other perks were also introduced: a monthly allowance of 125 yen for communication expenses and 40 yen per day for miscellaneous accommodation expenses.

Telegraphs were indispensable to political activities back then, and the office buildings for Diet members in Tokyo did not yet exist.

The two types of allowances were later consolidated, entitling Diet members to a payment of 1 million yen per month.

Now, these allowances are coming under review following an outcry over what is dubbed the 1 million yen a day issue.

Those who won their first Lower House seats in the Oct. 31 election, as well as former lawmakers who returned to the chamber after losing in the previous poll, were paid the full monthly allowance for being in office for just one day.

The Diet has dragged its feet on disclosing how members are spending these allowances, but they are funded by taxpayers money.

How can taxpayers be sure their money is not being splurged on nights out at Ginza clubs or handed out to buy votes at election time without their knowledge?

If lawmakers are open and aboveboard and have nothing to hide, the Diet has no reason not to disclose how the allowances were used, together with receipts.

The 1 million yen lottery of 1947 went to a boy from Fukushima Prefecture, who told the media without the slightest hesitation: Im depositing half in a postal savings account, and the rest will be spent on my younger brothers education.

His face graced newspapers with his big, sunny smile.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 19

* * *

Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.

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VOX POPULI: Diet should be as transparent with funds as this 1947 lottery winner | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis - Asahi...