Here’s another health tip from my good friend Ray Collins:
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Dear Peter Allan,
Common foods that help you breathe more easily
A report in the medical journal Allergy in June 2008 came up with a very pleasing suggestion…. that eating delicious, hearty Mediterranean food could relieve asthma symptoms.
The study was carried out by a team at the University of Porto in Portugal. They looked closely at the diet of 174 asthmatics. They found that those who
ate large quantities of Mediterranean foods had fewer attacks and flare-ups.
So what’s a Mediterranean diet?
Well, this is generally presumed to be a diet high in fish, fruit, vegetables and nuts and low in saturated fats.
This is the principle diet in Crete, for example. An estimated 80% of the children there eat fresh fruit at least twice a day. And over two-thirds of them eat fresh vegetables, twice a day.
On that island, very few children have asthma or hay fever.
The main fruits recommended by the report’s authors include oranges, apples, tomatoes and grapes.
The study also found that asthmatics who eat nuts at least three times a week are less likely to wheeze. As well as vitamin E, nuts also contain a lot of magnesium, which helps boost your lung power.
The report concludes: “High adherence to a Mediterranean diet reduced by 78 per cent the risk of uncontrolled asthma.”
That’s a fairly ringing endorsement.
But there was something else in the report that interested me…
What NEVER to eat if you’re asthmatic or allergic
The study found that children who ate lots of margarine DOUBLED their chances of asthma and allergic rhinitis (which causes hay fever-like symptoms).
This backs up an Australian study from 2001. Those researchers also concluded that a diet high in polyunsaturated fats – found in many margarines – can double a child’s chances of having asthma.
In 2001, Dr Warren Lenney, a spokesperson for the British Thoracic Society (BTS), said:
“It would be sensible for parents to lessen their children’s intake of margarine and foods regularly fried in polyunsaturated oil as part of a diet rich in fruit and vegetables.”
I think this advice goes for adults too!
As always, more research needs to be done to establish links and causes.
But whatever they discover in the coming years, I’d advise that you give margarine a wide berth. It’s a synthetic food high in trans fatty acids. A substance that many critics claim that it can triple your risk of coronary heart disease.
In 2006, Professor Marion Nestle, a respected professor of Nutrition at New
York University wrote:
“All margarines are basically the same, mixtures of soybean oil and food
additives. Everything else is theater and greasepaint.”
Michael Pollan, the author of In Defense of Food (Allen Lane, 2008) puts it even more bluntly:
“The beauty of a processed food like margarine is that it can be endlessly
reengineered to overcome even the most embarrassing about-face in nutritional thinking – including the real winner that its main ingredient might cause heart attacks and cancer.”
So perhaps it’s best avoided, then!
Yours as ever,
Ray Collins
The Good Life Letter
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