Anorexia: Risk and Warning Signs

Anorexia: Risk and Warning Signs
People of almost any age and either gender may develop an eating disorder. However some groups of people are more at risk than others.

• Females clearly are the most susceptible. In fact, approximately 90 to 95 percent of all people with anorexia or bulimia are women.

• Adolescent are at particular risk. Estimates indicates that as many as one of every 100 teenage girls in the United States will develop anorexia.

• Athletes such as dancers and gymnasts, who must control their weight, are susceptible.

• Eating disorders are being increasingly identified in males, as well as in adults and even in children as young as eight, nine and ten years old.

Eating disorders produce warning signs. If you or someone you knows shows any combination of these symptoms, be concerned.

People with anorexia may:

• Eat tiny portions, refuse to eat, and deny they are hungry.

• Show abnormal weight loss – a much as 15 percent or more of body weight or a large weight loss in a short time.

• Act hyperactive, depressed, moody or insecure

• Have an intense fear of being fat

• See themselves as fat, wanting to lose more weight, even when they are very thin

• Exercise excessively and compulsively

• Suffer from constipation or irregular menstrual periods

• Develop fine, downy hair on their arms and face

• Complain of nausea or bloating after eating normal amounts of food

• Binge-eat, then purge, perhaps by vomiting or using laxatives or diuretics

Anorexia: Risk and Warning Signs

Coffea Canephora

Coffea Canephora
Coffea canephora, which produces the popular robusta beans, is the second most important variety of the coffee plant.

Like its arabica cousin, C. canephora can grow tall; if left to its own device, it can attain a majestic thirty feet in height.

But like the Arabica plant, it is kept to about eight feet in height to allow for harvesting.

In other ways, too, the robusta plant resembles the arabica plant.

C. canephora doesn’t deliver a crop until three to five years after it is planted, after which the fruits take almost a year to mature. And the plant can continue to bear cherries for twenty to thirty years.

Like C. arabica and C. canephora appreciates sixty inches of rain per year. However, this plant likes it considerably hotter than its arabica cousin, and also tolerates higher humidity.

Grown mainly in West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia and parts of South America, robusta plants do best in equatorial conditions with temperatures ranging from the mid- seventies to the mid eighties, and altitudes ranging from sea level to 3,000 feet.

They also differ in that they are both more resistant to disease and higher yielding than robusta plants. The typical robusta tree yields as much as two to three pounds of beans per year – about twice the amount produced by an arabica plant.

Moreover, at 2 percent caffeine by weight, the caffeine content of robusta coffee is higher than that of arabica.

Robusta beans are considered inferior to arabica because they are far less flavorful, with a distinct bitterness.

This is why robusta beans are less expensive than arabica beans and are often used in lower grade commercial coffee blends, as well as in the processing of many instant coffees, both flavored and unflavored.
Coffea Canephora

The Beneficial Effects of Chocolate

The Beneficial Effects of Chocolate
In its New World beginning, chocolate was favored as a food that relieved the effects of fatigue.

The emperor Montezuma, for example, could drink up to fifty goblets of xocoatl per day, which may seem enormous, but was probably the amount he needed for support in the day’s tasks (he kept a harem of six hundred concubines).

This anecdote is the source of the many beliefs in the aphrodisiac virtues of chocolate, virtues, incidentally, that remain to be proven.

Over the course of history, chocolate has been regarded as not only a food pleasant to the taste, but also as a remedy for different ailments, especially angina and circulatory problems.

This positive associations of chocolate and health lasted until the end of the nineteenth century; it was only with the industrialization of chocolate production and the manufacture of the sugar filled candies containing very little cacao (and fewer polyphenols) that chocolate began to be perceived as a substance harmful to health.

Up until now, researchers have studied mostly the potential impact of chocolate on cardiovascular disease in populations that consume large quantities of cacao.

Cacao’s beneficial effect on the cardiovascular system may be related to its antioxidant activity.

The ingestion of moderate quantities of cacao causes the blood’s antioxidant capacity to rise, thus diminishing the oxidant of proteins responsible for the formation of atheromatous plaques (plaques that protrude into blood vessels and black blood flow).

However, that this effect disappears when chocolate is eaten together with the milk, because of a dramatic change in polyphenols absorption.

Another effect of chocolate that certainly contributes to its beneficial for the cardiovascular system is the reduction of harmful blood platelet activity which reduces the risk of clot formation.

The similarity of the phytochemicals content in cacao and that of other foods suspected of playing a role in cancer prevention allows us to imagine that cacao may also exhibit anti-cancer properties.
The Beneficial Effects of Chocolate