10 Anti-Inflammatory & Disease-Fighting Foods

From mbg

by Dr. Josh Axe | September 19, 2015 

10 Anti-Inflammatory & Disease-Fighting Foods

Inflammation gets a bad rap, but it isn’t always bad. As a necessary bodily function for preventing illnesses, treating injuries, and healing wounds, inflammation (at least some degree of it) keeps us strong and healthy.

It’s when the immune system starts overacting and begins attacking healthy body tissue that inflammation can lead to a whole host of problems — from weight gain to autoimmune disease, dementia, and even cancer.

High stress levels, food allergies, smoking, and environmental factors can all increase inflammation, but a poor diet is likely the biggest offender. Luckily, a healthy diet that is free of common digestive triggers can counteract the damage, reduce free-radical damage, flush toxins, and speed healing.

Here are 10 anti-inflammatory foods to include in your diet as often as possible:

1. Leafy green vegetables

Dark, leafy greens like kale, spinach, bok choy, and Swiss chard are rich in flavonoids (powerful, plant-based antioxidants) that restore cellular health, which is essential to stopping inflammation.

In addition, they provide vitamins A, C, and K, which protect your brain against the oxidative stress caused by free-radical damage — the same process that causes aging and disease development.

2. Probiotic foods (sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, yogurt, kefir)

A very large portion of your immune system actually lives within your gut and is run by bacterial organisms — what you can think of as “your gut’s bugs.”

Microbial imbalances (when the bad bacteria outnumber the good) have been associated with heightened inflammation and increased risk of various diseases, but probiotic foods like sauerkraut and kimchi can help rebalance and heal your gut.

Probiotics are also linked to improvements in immune, cognitive, digestive, and endocrine system functions, and taking probiotics can even cheer you up!

3. Bone broth

Bone broth — the rich liquid that results from boiling the bones of organic, grass-fed beef or poultry for hours — comes packed with a number of nutrients, including collagen. Collagen and the amino acids proline and glycine work in unison to heal the lining of an inflamed gut, which quickly stops your immune system from acting on overdrive and attacking the body’s healthy tissues, from the skin to the brain.

Bone broth is also a great natural source of chondroitin sulphates and glucosamine — the same compounds sold as expensive over-the-counter supplements used to limit arthritis and joint pain caused by inflammation.

4. Walnuts

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What are the top 10 economic must-reads that are fun to read, and not academic?

From Quora

There are many responses to this question, but I find James Altucher's the most intriguing.

What are the top 10 economic must-reads that are fun to read, and not academic?

James Altucher, "I've written ten books.I've sold a couple of companies. I make angel investme..."

When I started a business, by definition, I knew nothing about business.

I had just started! I was the worst.

Here's what I knew. This was the 90s. I knew how to make a website. Nobody else knew.

So American Express came to me and said, "Can you build a website?"

That started my business. HBO came to me and said, "Can you build a website?"

Miramax came to me and said, "Can you build a website?"

I'm going to admit to you what I did not know: I did not know the business world values products (scalable) more than services (unscalable).

The reason I did not know this is because services are profitable (You can always fire people when business is slow)

Here's also what I did not know: how to hire people and fire people. Or how to manage people. I didn't know anything.

Business is like "micro-economics". Supply and demand, etc.

Macro-economics is like: what happens if there's a draught and we grow less corn. What happens?

So here's what I don't know now:

I don't know how to really read a "P&L" sheet. Just tell me your revenues and profits and let me ask some questions and I can figure out what's working and what's not.

And here's also what I don't know now: what happens if there is a draught and there's no corn. Because it seems like that has nothing to do with real prices.

The price of oil has nothing to do with the supply and demand for oil right now, for instance.

So anyone who writes a book on "Macro-economics" is lying to you. Because it's a made up science.

And Micro-economics they are lying to you also. Because what you need to know there is how to sell, how to come up with an idea, how to manage, how to build product, and how to be a leader.

You can't learn that from a teacher. You can learn a tiny bit from books.

What do you do if economics is BS and you are answering a question about "What are the 10 best Economics books?"

I don't want to lie to you. I'm going to give you the 10 best books that inspired me to make more money. 

That's, pure and simple, what I hear when I hear the world "economics". 

These books won't make you more money. But they will inspire you and point you in the right directions for making money.

I'm not going to give you books I read in college. Those are all BS books.

For me, if I am honest, reading these books has caused me to have more money in my bank account.

A) Zero to One by Peter Thiel. Changed my mind about the nature of competition, monopolies and the role of employees. Also check out my podcast with him.

B) Abundance by Peter Diamandis. If someone ever "dooms and glooms" you, this is the book to read. The rest of the people are trying to scare you.

C) The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. Not because he teaches you how to be "powerful". That word means nothing. It's just...he's smart. Read him.

D) Mindset by Carol Dweck.  Are you fixed, or growth. When and why?

E) The End of Jobs by Taylor Pearson. A book about our current world situation is just a photograph. One moment from now it will change. One moment ago it was different.

This book by Taylor is about this moment. And it's important to read. (Or check out my podcast with him)

F) Tomorrowland by Steven Kotler

Might as well know what trends are happening and the state of where they are now.

G) Are You Fully Charged? This book will make you a better person, leader, businessman. At least...it did for me. Plus I have a man-crush on Tom Rath.

H) Sapiens by Blah Blah Blah. I hate always looking up his name. My wife and I always just call him, "Israeli guy".

This book is the most important economics book ever. If there were such a thing as economics. Who cares. Read it. The 80,000 year overview of where we've been and where we are going.

At the very least you will be smart at cocktail parties after you read this book.

I like reading books where I feel like my IQ is going up while I am reading it.

I) The Rational Optimist. Again an anti-doom and gloom book by the astonishing Matt Ridley. This is another one of those books where your IQ is higher after you read it.

J) History of the World is Six Glasses. My kid had to read this for school. And then I read it.

It's great to take a well-trodden topic (history) and re-formulate it in terms of what we drank and how the answer to that question is totally what changed history.

Practicing having a mindset like that, where you turn the common into the fantastic, is what makes one a good economist.

Again, I can list a lot more. I don't want to limit myself to ten. I have  book club where I list many more but you don't need it.

[Oh, I'm editing this post. One more CRITICAL ONE: "Antifragile" by Nassim Taleb. But with a caveat. As you read it, try to determine how it personally can change your life as opposed to reading it as an economics book.]

Do this:
- start with these ten.
- don't listen to anyone who uses the word "economics" (after this post of course)
- make a lot of money using what you learned in these ten books.

The 21-year-old building India's largest hotel network

From BBC


The 21-year-old building India's largest hotel network

How Ritesh Agarwal built India's biggest chain of branded hotels before his 21st birthday

By Kinjal Pandya-Wagh
Business reporter, BBC News

One night, 18-year-old Ritesh Agarwal was locked out of his apartment in Delhi. It was an unfortunate minor incident that was to change his life.

Forced to check into a hotel he found himself in a situation he had already experienced several times while travelling in India.

"The receptionist was sleeping," he says.

"Sockets did not work in the room, mattresses were torn apart, the bathroom was leaking, and at the end they wouldn't let me pay by card."

"I felt if this was my problem, this had to be a problem for many travellers. Why can't India have a good standard of hotel rooms at a reasonable price?"

Four years later, at the age of 21, Mr Agarwal is now the founder and chief executive of Oyo Rooms - a network of 2,200 hotels operating in 100 cities across India - with monthly revenues of $3.5m (£2.3m) and 1,500 employees.

The firm works with unbranded hotels to improve their facilities and train staff, rebrands them with its own name, and from then on takes a percentage of the hotel's revenues.

The owner of the hotel benefits from a higher occupancy rate, thanks to Oyo's branding.

And as part of the business, Mr Agarwal has also developed an app, which guests can use to book rooms, get directions to the hotel, and once they have arrived, to use the hotels amenities, for example to order room service.

Tough journey

Despite such rapid growth, he says the early days were "extremely difficult".

"No one would believe that this could be a technology business in the future," he says.

But some people did believe in him. A similar idea - which eventually evolved into Oyo Rooms - won him a coveted Thiel Fellowship - a programme sponsored by PayPal co-creator and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel - which pays for 20 teenagers each year to stop studying and try to set up a business instead.

He used the funding from the fellowship to start the business.

Read more from BBC >>

Check Out Life Spans Around The World — And Likely Years Of Ill Health

From wnyc.org

Lancet study: "You're never going to have a disease-free population. Maybe part of it is that medical services can prolong unhealthy lives." 

Check Out Life Spans Around The World — And Likely Years Of Ill Health

Sep 5, 2015 · by Susan Brink

From NPR

It's one of those good news/bad news stories. A study in the medical journal The Lancet found that people around the world — in countries rich, poor and in the middle — are living longer. But here's the rub. You can't count on living those extra years in good health.

In the first of what will be an annual look at health along with life span around the world called the Global Burden of Disease Study, researchers found that between 1990 and 2013, life expectancy rose by 6.2 years. The average life span at birth across the globe is now 71.5 years, though rates vary tremendously by region. People live the longest, according to the Lancet study, in Andorra, in southwestern Europe, or an average of 83.9 years. People die the youngest, an average of 48.3 years, in Lesotho, in Africa.

But regardless of socioeconomics, geography or total number of years lived, the study shows what appears to be a universal part of the human condition: people live an average of one-eighth of their lives in a disabled or unhealthy state.

"What's interesting is that wherever you go around the world, about seven-eighths of life expectancy is healthy," says Peter Byass, professor of global health at Umea University in Sweden. "I'm not sure we totally understand why."

"We probably can't do a lot about decreasing this part of life that's not healthy," he adds. "That pretty much appears to be a part of being human."

Healthy life — the measure researchers used, called HALE, or healthy life expectancy years — ranged from a high of 73.4 years in Japan to a low, again in Lesotho, of 42 years.

Not much is known about when those years of ill health occur. "A lot of the unhealthy stuff is around end of life," says Byass.

Spending more money on health care doesn't seem to reduce the proportion of life spent in ill health. The study was based on regional data and showed that in high-income North America, men live an average of 76.64 years, but only 66.17 of those years are healthy; women live an average of 81.62 years, but experience good health in only 68.85 of those years. The United States, which spends more on health care than any other country, is part of that high-income region. "This is seen even in places where there's a high investment in health care," says Byass, who wrote a commentary accompanying the Lancet study. "You're never going to have a disease-free population. Maybe part of it is that medical services can prolong unhealthy lives."

Read more from wnyc.org >>

8 Surprising Facts About Fruits And Veggies Infographic

From ahealthblog.com

8 Surprising Facts About Fruits And Veggies Infographic


Researchers have shown that the phytochemical sulforaphane in broccoli selectively targets and kills cancer cells and leaves healthy prostate cells untouched. Sulforaphane is found in fairly high levels in broccoli as well as other cruciferous vegetables.

The study results are a significant breakthrough for the potential usage of sulforaphane in broccoli for the prevention as well as treatment of cancer, and clinical trials are in progress.

Sulforaphane in broccoli is an inhibitor of HDAC (histone deacetylase) enzymes. HDACs are a family of enzymes which, amongst other things, influence access to DNA and are involved in whether specific genes, such as tumor suppressing genes, are expressed or not. A number of the mechanisms which help prevent abnormal cell growth are avoided in cancer cells. HDAC inhibitors assist in “switching on” the silenced genes and repair normal cellular function.

It’s important to show that sulforaphane in broccoli is safe if it’s to be used for the prevention of cancer prevention or cancer therapies. Just because a nutrient or phytochemical comes from food doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safe consumed in large quantities. But this appears to be a phytochemical which selectively kills cancer cells, and this is important in cancer therapies.

Read more from ahealthblog.com >>