Living Well Issue 18

health is the new wealth. here are some suggestions for building a portfolio of long-term good-health investments.

Word play

Getting your kids to eat more healthy foods may be as simple as polishing up your vocabulary. Researchers at the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab have found that people find foods more tempting and are more satisfied after eating them if they have fancy names. It may be the stuff of restaurant menus but there is proof that adding the word “succulent” to “fish fillet” makes people far more likely to eat seafood. The biggest inroads, however, are made with children. The researchers found that preschoolers were more likely to eat broccoli if they believed they were dinosaurs eating a “dinosaur tree”, or would drink a tomato-based vegetable drink if it were called “Rainforest Smoothie”.

Oh Basil

Looking to up your antioxidant fix? You’d be well advised to include more basil in your diet. Basil is high in phytonutrients, can aid digestion, is linked to good heart health and has natural microbial properties. Even the small amounts called for in everyday recipes are useful but a regular serve of something as basil-dense as pesto will be significantly more beneficial.

Cat control

Keep your cat out of the vege patch if you don’t want to negate the benefits of all that healthy eating. That’s the message from top integrated medicine expert Dr Andrew Weil who says that allowing cats free range poses a real risk of toxoplasmosis. Toxoplasmosis is not uncommon.

Most of us won’t ever know we have it because we are unlikely to develop the symptoms (flu-like muscle aches and swollen lymph glands). But it is of far greater concern to those with impaired immunity or to women who are pregnant.

Short on health

Short legs? Being vertically challenged may mean you have a higher risk of liver disease. New British research from a study involving 3600 women shows that the shorter a woman’s legs, the more likely she is to have liver problems. Adult liver function is affected by environmental exposures early in life. Such exposures may be reflected in leg length and these influences can affect liver development and adult risk of diabetes and coronary heart disease, according to the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Leg length can be an indication of how well nourished you were as a child. The authors say that breast-feeding, high-energy intake at four years and an affluent socio-economic position in childhood are the type of factors associated with longer adult leg length.

Tummy trickers

An apple a day may keep the doctor away but one before your main meal has now been scientifically proven to help you lose weight. A recent American study shows that people who munched on an apple just before lunch ate an average of 187 fewer calories. (The savings included the calories from the apple.)