Len Mistretta | Ten nutrition mistakes even really healthy people make

Even when you try your best to eat well, it’s difficult to know everything about nutrition. I often talk with clients who believe they are making good choices and don’t realize that little oversights stand in their way of optimal health.
Here’s a list of 10 common but easy-to-repair nutrition mistakes.

You add whole flaxseeds to your breakfast

Flaxseeds are filled with omega-3 fats, fiber and lignans (antioxidants), which all benefit heart health. But whole flaxseeds may pass through the intestines undigested, which means you’ll miss out on the health benefits inside the seed. Buy ground flax seeds instead, or put them in a coffee or spice grinder.

You blend a nutritious smoothie, but it’s a calorie bomb

It’s easy to toss a combination of superfoods into a blender. Blueberries, cashew butter, chia, kale, bananas and coconut milk sound like a dreamy breakfast elixir, but these concoctions can quickly become calorie bombs. Keep smoothies in the 300-calorie range by serving smaller portions (about 8-12 ounces), using more vegetables than fruit, and by going easy on the high-calorie nuts and seeds.

You take your supplements with coffee

Caffeine from coffee can hinder your body’s ability to absorb some of the vitamins and minerals in your supplements, including calcium, iron, B-vitamins and vitamin D. And it’s not just coffee — beverages such as tea and cola contain caffeine, too. Enjoy your coffee about an hour before taking your supplements, and swallow pills with water instead.

You use regular canned beans for your meatless meals

Beans are an amazing source of fiber and protein, but canned varieties may have close to 1,000 mg of sodium per cup — that’s two-thirds of what you need in an entire day. Look for cans that say “no salt added” or “low sodium.” If you can’t find them, drain and rinse your canned beans, which will eliminate about 40 percent of the sodium.

To cut back on sugar, you cut out fruit

The top source of sugar in the American diet is sweetened beverages, not fruit. Sugary soft drinks have no beneficial nutrients, while fruit has fiber, vitamins and protective antioxidants. Plus, we don’t tend to overeat fruit, but do tend to drink too much soda. Consider how much easier it is to down a 20-ounce soda, as opposed to eating six bananas at one time. Both pack 16 teaspoons of sugar. Choose fruit and skip the soda.

You skip the dressing on salad

Vegetables contain fat-soluble vitamins A, E and K, and a host of antioxidants that require fat to be absorbed. If you skip the oil and vinegar, you miss out on key nutrients from the salad. Serve your greens with oil-based dressing, nuts, seeds or avocado to dramatically boost your body’s ability to soak up the veggies’ beneficial nutrients.

You trust claims like ‘low-fat’ and ‘sugar-free’

For many years, we’ve relied on label claims that tell us what our food doesn’t contain — fat, sugar, gluten. It’s more important to look at what the food does contain. Ultra-processed foods may be fat-free or sugar-free, but also loaded with preservatives or refined ingredients. Read ingredient lists and choose foods that are as close to nature as possible.

You drink almond milk for calcium but don’t shake the carton first

Milk alternatives made from soy, almonds, cashews, rice, etc. are often fortified with calcium and vitamin D. But the added nutrients don’t stay in the liquid very well and tend to sink to the bottom of the container. If you drink without shaking first, you can’t reap the benefits of the added vitamins and minerals. Shake well before serving.

You miss out on probiotics by buying the wrong type of yogurt

Yogurt is fermented milk, and fermented foods contain probiotics. So logic would dictate that all yogurts are probiotic-rich, but unfortunately that’s not the case. If yogurt has been heated or pasteurized, probiotics are destroyed and may not be added back. Look for the words “live active cultures,” or check ingredient lists for names of specific probiotics (lactobacillus acidophilus, L bulgaricus, etc.) to ensure you’re getting these beneficial bacteria, which aid digestion and support the immune system.

You refuel with sports drinks

Sports drinks are meant to replace fluid and electrolytes that are lost when you sweat excessively, and are suitable after endurance sports like a soccer game or marathon. But the extra sugar and salt in sports drinks are not needed for casual exercise with minimal perspiration. After a stroll, hydrating with water is the best choice. READ MORE.....

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/living/health-and-medicine/article139852758.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/living/health-and-medicine/article139852758.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/living/health-and-medicine/article139852758.html#storylink=cpy

Len Mistretta | Seven Tips For Running Your Business From Anywhere

Every morning, Noel Chandler wakes up at 5 a.m. to the sounds of the jungle. He sneaks out of bed, tiptoes past his kids' room as they sleep and meditates for 20 minutes. Then he tosses his surfboard in his Land Cruiser and drives down the road for his morning surf.

“Sitting [meditation] and surfing; it’s the best way to start the day," he says. He then heads back home to help his wife get the kids ready for school and dives into his work day. "It wasn’t always like this,” Chandler adds, "The year before we moved here was one of the darkest and most unhealthy 12 months of my life.”

In fact, his lifestyle was quite different than it is these days.

Taking Ownership

Chandler, a client of mine, is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and CEO and co-founder of Mosio, a healthcare research software company. Four years ago, the stress of building a company began taking its toll on his health and happiness, leading him to 70-plus hour work weeks of worry. “I was running a software company that improves the healthcare industry, yet I was incredibly unhealthy, overweight, depressed, and far from the best version of myself. It didn’t make sense,” says Chandler.

Something had to change, so in deciding what they wanted out of life, the couple and their two children moved to Costa Rica. The re-focus on priorities not only changed him personally, but it encouraged him to create something beneficial for everyone on his team. “It started with me, but ended up having a huge impact on the type of company I wanted to lead,” he adds. “I knew Mosio could be a successful place where work complemented life’s truly important currencies: health, happiness and time.”

Focusing On Lifestyle And Output

Since then, Chandler has lost 30 pounds, meditates and surfs almost every day. He and his business partner, Jay Sachdev, have created a culture focused on lifestyle flexibility and output rather than hours clocked. In July 2015, the company began working just four days a week. “This took our mission as a healthcare company to a new level. Our 'Health, Happiness and Hobbies' mantra enables us to hire easily and keep a dedicated team.”

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His advice for entrepreneurs looking to make the shift is as follows:

1. Take a personal inventory of your time, health and happiness. Look at what is most important to you and fulfill those needs. “You need to take care of yourself first or you’re not going to be able to help anyone else,” Chandler says. “Sacrificing the most important things in life now with the hopes you’ll get them after you’ve achieved certain milestones is a fool’s bet. Something always comes up,” he adds.

2. Create a business support network. Through advisors, mentors, coaches, or fellow entrepreneurs, surround yourself with support. “Choose people other than your significant other or business partners. You need people you can be real with — in a business sense — to help you tackle challenges.”

3. Hire great cultural fits. Find people prepared to work within an infrastructure of self-sufficiency and professionalism. “This is easier said than done,” Chandler says, “But those who are a good fit and value the format, step up. Those who aren’t find their way out,” he adds.

4. Trust the process. Create great systems and personal .   Read More......

Len Mistretta | How can we make pharmaceutical drugs less toxic to the environment?

The past few years have seen the advent of a new eco-scare: The unsettling afterlife of pharmaceuticals. Drug residues excreted by humans and livestock linger in our waterways, often for months, before decomposing. The effects of these residues are hard to isolate and poorly understood, but scientists have discovered hints of trouble. Some have found alarming numbers of intersex fish —that is, fish whose testes contain egg cells—in rivers laced with estrogens and estrogen-like compounds (from pharmaceuticals and other chemicals). Others have observed that anti-depressants like Prozac may disrupt frog maturation and hobble minnows.

As the Associated Press reported in a widely read 2008 investigation, even our drinking water contains traces of many drugs. The quantities are infinitesimal, and there is no evidence of harm to human health. But we don't know how chronic exposure to even the lowest concentrations of these compounds, in unpredictable mixtures, might affect us—precise testing of the long-term consequences is essentially impossible. Based on the precautionary principle, not to mention the intrinsic ickiness of drug-tainted water, vigilance is surely warranted. We have eco-friendly laundry detergent and nail polish remover, so why not develop greener drugs?

A handful of chemists are trying to do just that—drawing lessons from a few drugs that are green by chance while hunting for new strategies to shrink pharmaceuticals' environmental footprints. Enthusiasts such as Buzz Cue Jr. (a retired Pfizer scientist who now consults for the industry) and Klaus Kummerer (a German chemistry professor) publish papers and give talks at conferences, touting a new approach to pharmaceuticals that takes the post-toilet phase into account. While companies have done a good deal to reduce the environmental impact of drug manufacturing—cutting waste and using more innocuous solvents, for instance—they've done little to make the drugs themselves more eco-friendly.

Developing "benign-by-design" drugs poses a series of vexing challenges. In general, the qualities that make drugs effective and stable—bioactivity and resistance to degradation—are the same ones that cause them to persist disturbingly after they've done their job. And presumably even hard-core eco-martyrs (the ones who keep the thermostat at 60 all winter and renounce air travel) would hesitate to sacrifice medical efficacy for the sake of aquatic wildlife. What's more, the molecular structures of pharmaceuticals are, in the words of Carnegie Mellon chemist Terry Collins, "exquisitely specific." Typically, you can't just tack on a feature like greenness to a drug without affecting its entire design, including important medical properties. 

Yet there are some drugs that just happen to work well but with minimal environmental impact. The pancreatic cancer treatment glufosfamide is impressively biodegradable, as is valproic acid, an epilepsy medication. "Biologics," which include insulin and vaccines, consist of natural (as opposed to synthesized) compounds, so they break down easily in the environment. One of the greener drugs turns out to be that little blue pill: The human body fully converts Viagra into significantly less potent metabolites. * (Well more than half of the antibiotic amoxicillin, by contrast, passes through the patient unchanged.) Such drugs offer tantalizing clues that scientists may be able to apply to future formulas.

While trying to learn from these accidentally green drugs, scientists are also seeking novel ways to keep minnows off Prozac. Cue and others dream of a "magic switch" that would allow a drug to remain stable until its release into the environment, at which point—presto!—it would become biodegradable. One way to do this is to make drugs "photodegradable" with light-sensitive molecular triggers, which would cause the drug to decompose in the waste treatment plant. Another possibility is to design an inherently less stable drug, and affix it to a temporary stabilizer that would break off only after arriving inside the body. This research, however, is in the conceptual stages, far from reaching your local Rite-Aid.

Efforts to reduce drug dosages—a complementary tactic—have made more headway. Take, for instance, a treatment in development for osteomyelitis, a type of bone infection. Rather than inundate your entire body with antibiotics, the medication uses a special molecule to ferry the antibiotics directly to the infection site. Similarly, several new cancer therapies can target malignant cells with greater precision than ever before. And researchers continue to enhance "bioavailability"—the proportion of the drug's active ingredients that actually reach the patient's relevant tissues. All of these approaches permit lower doses without compromising effectiveness. This means fewer side effects for the patient—and for the planet. (A caveat: In some of these cases, though doses are lower, the drug is more potent, which could cancel out the environmental gains.)

Today, companies have little incentive to make greener drugs unless doing so coincides with other profit-enhancing benefits, like reduced side effects. Designing drugs is painstaking and expensive, and adding another criterion makes it that much harder. In Europe, however, policies are starting to apply pressure: In 2006, the EU issued guidelines that pharmaceutical companies must follow to assess the environmental risk of new drugs. And since 2005, a government-sponsored Swedish database has included information about the biodegradability, bioaccumulation, and toxicity of drugs, so that doctors and patients can weigh eco-friendliness along with other factors. The United States has also taken notice of the problem. Approximately every five years, the Environmental Protection Agency compiles a list of "contaminant candidates" for possible regulation. The most recent list, completed in 2009, for the first time singled out pharmaceuticals—nearly a dozen of them. This doesn't necessarily mean the EPA will regulate the drugs, but it's a signal to pharma companies that the issue is on the government's radar.

Until greener drugs hit the pharmacy shelves, we can take modest steps on our own to mitigate damage by keeping the offending substances out of our medicine cabinets in the first place. Many drugs are godsends, of course, but there's plenty of evidence that Americans probably take more than we need. Patients expect to leave the doctor's office with a prescription, and doctors oblige, dangerously over-prescribing antibiotics. The practice of doling out Zoloft and other psychoactive drugs in lieu of talk therapy has already sparked a backlash. If we could scale back gratuitous and harmful drug use, we would all be better off—and so might the minnows.