Will Eating Carrots Really Help Improve Your Eyesight?

Even if you have kids who don't like carrots, they are often tempted by the sight of whole baby carrots which are delicious steamed or boiled. There are many reasons why carrots are good for health, and one of these is that they really can help improve the health of our eyes. They can help delay age-related macular degeneration and yes, they really do help with night vision, along with other foods containing vitamins A, E and anthocyanins which make carrots and berries black.

The best types of carrots for health and vision are the purple, almost black ones and the red ones, both of which we have here in Pakistan. They look very appealing when seen on stalls freshly scrubbed and set against slices of pure white fresh coconut. They are a real feast for the eyes.

The problem with carrots as with most fruit and vegetables is that the nutrients which they contain lie just below the skin (in the case of carrots) or in the skin. To clean carrots so that they retain this layer of goodness you should gently scrub them with a slightly abrasive sponge or with a vegetable brush; this way you keep those beneficial substances.

The red carrots also contain lycopene and to get the best of this you have to expose it to heat, so carrots are best served hot rather than raw, especially as the body can't absorb all the beta-carotene contained in a raw carrot. It is best to juice them or cook them to make the most of this. Lycopene is found in watermelons and tomatoes too and other red fruit, it has been called the natural Viagra and is believed to help men with erectile dysfunctions.

The purple or black carrots get their colour from anthocyanins as do blueberries, blackberries and bilberries, for example, and all these fruit and vegetables have potent antioxidant properties, as well as helping to improve eye health. Antioxidants scour the body fighting the free-radicals which can cause healthy cells to turn cancerous, so we need to eat food which has this powerful property. The phytonutrients contained in carrots are extremely beneficial to us, as they can help reduce the risks of heart disease and cancer as well as to help with vision and of course the beta-carotene contained in the orange and red carrots (and the purple ones) helps to protect the skin from sun damage, and although you can get the maximum protection from drinking 8 fluid ounces of carrot juice a day, eating boiled or steamed carrots also provides this protection.

Carrot juice can help soothe the pain of a burn or scald too, so it has immediate as well as long-term effects. You can also use grated carrot as a face pack, simply grate the carrots and apply to your face and leave this on for half an hour before rinsing it off with warm water. Your skin will feel better and less tired. It's a very good remedy for dry skin but works with any tired complexion.

In Rome the carrot was considered an aphrodisiac, and given the constituents of the purple and red ones, this makes sense, as the wild carrot eaten then was probably the purple one. The orange one which is so popular today was produced from mutant carrots by the Dutch, whose national colour is orange, symbolizing their royal House of Orange.

It has been found that carrots can help cleanse the liver due to their chlorine content, can ease the withdrawal symptoms associated with alcohol, improve the health of HIV sufferers, help lower blood sugar and cholesterol levels, and fight infections by boosting the immune system. They can also help with anemia as well as improving eyesight.

Adding carrots to your diet whether in the form of juice, or raw in salads or cooked will help improve your overall health, as well as your eyesight.

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Posted in: Carrots,Eating,Eyesight,Improve,Really

Is Green Tea Really Good for Our Bodies?

Man has been drinking tea for centuries, and even in the western world, where drinking tea came much later, it has still been consumed for hundreds of years. Until now however the health benefits of tea were not the reason why they were consumed. It was just a "pick-me-up" drink, and after the advent of coffee, the number of tea drinkers have gone down.

This is because it is the caffeine in the tea that perks us up, and coffee has much more caffeine in it than does tea. But it is not the caffeine that is good for our bodies. In fact too much caffeine has been associated with the hardening of arteries that are a cause for cardiovascular problems. Tea is good because it has lesser caffeine, just enough for us, while at the same time giving us a huge amount of antioxidants.

All of us who are conscious of our health know about antioxidants. We all know how as a by product of digestion, a number of free radicals keep floating around our body, and how if allowed to remain, they can cause cancer. We also know how it is the antioxidants that we eat that nutralize these free radicals.

The more processed food we eat, the more free radicals in our body, so the more antioxidants we need. Many of us take vitamin c which is a known antioxidant to help here. Some of us even take gingko extract which is a much more powerful antioxidant than is vitamin C.

Tea has more antioxidants than does even gingko. In fact green tea is preferred because it has more antioxidant properties than black tea, and has two times the amount of antioxidants as does gingko. The problem is that drinking green tea is a cultivated taste. There are a number of places in the world where green tea is taken as part of the daily morning and evening ritual, but if you haven't been brought up to it, it does not taste very nice.

Of course you can add sugar and other stuff to sweeten it a little, but then you'll just be loading up on excess calories for nothing. The best option then is to take green tea supplements.

Green tea supplements are a very good idea because they are available both lose and as a capsule. So for those who don't like the taste, they can go for the capsules and all you have to do is swallow a couple of them. And because they are nothing but tea leaves, they are even more powerful than drinking the brew because you are taking in the leaves itself in its powdered form.

You can get a lot more information if you check out green tea tablets.

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Posted in: Bodies,Green,Really