How to Stay Young and Beautiful

If you hate tomatoes...if you like drinking wine...if you've ever been told to drink extra amounts of water...if you like eating berries...if you don't like eating greens like spinach...if you have tried a detox programme...I'm sure you'll get a whole lot from watching this documentary by BBC Health Care, as many of your questions would be answered scientifically.

[Discovery Health Care] How To Stay Young and Beautiful

Here's a summary of the important discoveries:

#1 - Eating tomatoes can help your skin stay younger for longer.

• One of the main cause of aging is free radical attack in our body.
• Tomatoes contain a phytochemical known as lycopene (colour pigments which make tomatoes red), which acts as a natural antioxidant to prevent wrinkles and skin damage from sunlight.
• The group of people in this experiment, as a whole, experienced 30% less damage to their skin when exposed to the same amount of UV light.

#2 - Red wine from high altitude grapes and made traditionally are better for your heart.

• Polyphenols (pigments which give the red colour in the skin of grapes) make our blood flow more easily, make blood vessel more flexible, and help prevent fatty deposits from building up, thus reducing the risk of heart disease.
• The French, despite their high-fat diet, have one of the lowest incidents of heart diseases in the world. This is also known as the "French paradox".
• Red wine made in the traditional way, where the grape skin and seed are soaked longer in the wine, allows the maximum amount of polyphenols to be absorbed into the wine, thus giving better health benefits.
• Grapes grown in higher altitudes are also known to have higher amount of polyphenols in them.
• Some grape varieties like cabernet sauvignon and tannat grapes have naturally higher levels of polyphenols.

#3 - Eating food when you drink red wine can help your heart and help your liver.

• Drinking wine with an empty stomach causes a person to get drunk more easily.
• Drinking wine with an empty stomach allows the alcohol to reach our intestines faster in huge amount, being absorbed into our bloodstream far too quickly, and reach our brain within just a few minutes.
• When drinking wine together with food, as the food and wine enters our stomach, the pyloric valve clamps shut holding the food in our stomach to be broken down, same for the alcohol. The gradual release of food by the pyloric valve allows alcohol to reach our intestines in smaller amount, and reaching our bloodstream slowly, giving our liver plenty of time to neutralize it.

#4 - You don't need to drink extra litres of water on top of your normal diet.

• A suitable allowance for water for adults is 2.5 litres daily.
• Most of the amount of water that we need daily can already be obtained from our normal diet.
• Drinking extra amount of water on top of those obtained from our normal diet doesn't change the condition of our skin.

#5 - Can berries improve memory?

• Experiment has shown that for some people berries do improve their memory, but not all of them experience the same. Overall not being significant.

#6 - To help protect your eyesight, you should eat spinach once a week.

• Spinach contains lutein (a yellow compound giving spinach its colour) which is used by our body to build a jelly-like solution in our eye to protect the retina and prevent macular degeneration.
• Macular degeneration, a kind of blindness in the eye normally related to aging, is caused by damage of the retine due to sunlight.
• Experiment has shown that eating spinach has helped the group of people achieve 19% increase in levels of macular pigment.

#7 - A detox regime won't improve your body's natural detox processes.

• Experiment has shown that there's no difference in the level of detox processes in the body between those on a detox diet and those on a normal diet.

This is truly an education for all of us. I hope this helps quell some of the arguments on these topics, where most people are still relying on "hearsay" for information.