If you’ve been listening to the radio recently, you must have heard the advertisements proclaiming that coffee can be really healthy for you as it has a lot of antioxidants. While it’s true that antioxidants can be good for you, by binding with a lot of the oxidising materials that can cause cancer in humans, the truth about the adage that coffee is good to you is far harder to establish. In this article, we’ll look at some of the science done around the world to try and determine just whether or not coffee is good for you and, if it is, how you can try to avoid some of the less benevolent effects of coffee.

We’d like to point out however, that not all coffee is created equal and some types of coffee might have more antioxidants than others, which may have practically no antioxidants. Unfortunately, there are just too many variables that determine the antioxidant content in the coffee – for instance, do green coffee beans have the most antioxidants or are there more (or less) antioxidants once the coffee beans have been roasted? What about instant coffee or coffee powders? Does the process of making instant coffee mean that most of the antioxidants have been destroyed? Read the rest of this entry »

With just a few simple cooking techniques at home, you and your family can enjoy better health. Here are some tips that we’ve gathered on how to cook more healthily at home:

Reduce the amount of salt you use in your cooking. Most of the time we get used to a certain quantity of salt but, in fact, if you cut the amount of salt in your diet by a half, you might not even notice the difference. Reducing your salt intake is essential in keeping your blood pressure and health within a healthy range, and prevents you from getting a whole host of kidney problems. If you find the taste change unacceptable, you can always substitute salt with any natural herbs to make up for the taste change, and even get the health benefits from some of these healthy herbs. Read the rest of this entry »

For most Malaysians, rice is an essential part of almost every meal during the day and no meal is complete without a plate of fluffy white rice. Many parents like to tell their children to make sure they finish their rice because it’s good for them, but what if we told you that white rice isn’t necessarily as good as some people think it is? In fact, white rice actually got off to a bad start – the technology to profitably make white rice has only been available since the 19th century and it was found that those who ate white rice were susceptible to a disease known as beriberi, which is caused by a deficiency in vitamin B1, because the process of converting the raw rice grains into white rice was removing this essential vitamin from the rice. Because there was a lot of lobbying to the governments, manufacturers started adding back the vitamin B1 to the rice to prevent beriberi from spreading, but they were never obliged to replace some of the other essential nutrients lost in the process of preparing white rice.

Enter brown rice, which has started seeing more attention from the health conscious although there still remains a stigma against brown rice which is seen more as “poor man’s food”. Until the technology was around to process white rice, brown rice was actually what people ate for most of human history, although we are now much more accustomed to eating white rice. Brown rice is basically Read the rest of this entry »

This controvery actually seems to flare up every 10 years or so, and we’re not sure if it has ever been satisfactorily resolved. As granite countertops become more common in the kitchen, some people are concerned that the use of granite means exposing their homes with radon, a colourless, odourless and radioactive gas that is present in almost all granite in the world. Radon is actually one of the most poisonous substances on Earth; although very little amounts of it are produced every year, relatively speaking, radon is actually cited as the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States, just behind smoking. Concerns about radon exposure because of granite countertops at home are therefore quite understandable.

How is radon actually produced in the Earth? Well, the Earth has had small quantities of uranium since the formation of the planet and because uranium takes a very long time to decay (4.5 billion years before half of the uranium decays to other elements), there will be uranium in the Earth for a good time yet. Uranium decays to form other elements such as radon which is therefore present in almost all the rocks in the Earth but particularly granite. If this granite is then mined and then used for kitchen countertops, you will then have a small amount of radon constantly being released into your home. Read the rest of this entry »

Gaining weight is so easy nowadays in Malaysia with a wide abundance of tasty and fattening foods and a more sedentary lifestyle thanks to our office jobs. As a result of this, Malaysians nowadays resort to a variety of different diets, pills and even surgery in order to lose weight and feel more confident about themselves. Although these drastic methods do very frequently work, they can come at a very high cost to your health (as well as to your wallet) and, really, we think that the natural ways work the best in losing weight sustainably, but they will require personal effort and will take time.

In theory, the strategy towards sustainable weight loss is quite simple: as long as you expend more calories than you consume and store, you should be on track to losing weight. Of course, that’s easier said than done – our evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers means that the human body has had to evolve dealing with extended periods of food deprivation by learning to store as many calories as possible in the form of fat. Read the rest of this entry »

Margarine is very commonly advertised as a healthier alternative to butter. After all, butter is mostly saturated fat and we know that too much saturated fat is very bad for the health, right? In fact, we’ve collected a few facts about margarine that might make you want to think twice about whether or not you should be eating that much margarine and also to dispel some of the myths we’ve seen thrown about the place.

٠ We got a chain e-mail that says that margarine was originally created as a cheap way to fatten turkeys for eating. However, according to this site that commonly evaluates chain e-mails and tests whether they are true or not, margarine was actually invented as a cheap substitute for butter and not used specifically to fatten turkeys. The site goes on to mention a few other facts about margarine. Read the rest of this entry »

With the haze that’s enveloping many parts of the country; we shouldn’t be surprised to see rising incidences of asthma and other lung related problems. For my part, I have very sensitive sinuses and it is admittedly quite unpleasant to write articles for these blogs when I need to pause every few seconds to wipe my running nose or to sniff. Fortunately, there are simple natural remedies that can alleviate some of these sinus problems (I’m researching this as much for myself as for you readers), so let me share some tips that have worked for me: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure there are many cancer prevention techniques and suggestions being thrown around every day and, indeed, I wouldn’t have been motivated to write this article if I hadn’t had relatives who were recently diagnosed with cancer. The trouble with diseases like cancer are that prevention measures are something that really need to be done throughout your entire life because you never know when cancer will strike. All you know is that your chances of getting cancer will rise or fall depending on your lifestyle choices.

With that in mind, here are some tips that I can suggest: Read the rest of this entry »