8 Best Carbs You Should Be Eating Every Day, Say Dietitians

8 Best Carbs You Should Be Eating Every Day, Say Dietitians

Claremont Colonic Newsletter
Don’t be afraid of carbs.
Many people are still afraid to eat carbohydrates because of what they’ve been told in recent years. Things like the Atkins Diet and the Keto Diet have led people to believe that avoiding carbs is the only way you can lose weight or live a healthy life.

But carbohydrates are crucial for your health and unless you have a specific health complication that says otherwise, should be consumed regularly. It’s important to remember, however, that not all carbs are created equal. To learn more about which carbs are healthiest and which ones you can steer clear of, we talked with a few expert dietitians.

Continue reading to learn more about the best carbs you can eat, and for more healthy eating tips check out 6 Best Eating Habits to Reduce Inflammation as You Age.

1. Sweet potatoes

Sweet potatoes are a healthy carb that can provide plenty of benefits and can be a nutritious addition to your daily diet.

“Eating sweet potatoes regularly is a great addition to a balanced diet when you are trying to make healthy food choices. A plain medium sweet potato has around 103 calories, and four of its 20 grams of carbohydrate per serving come from fiber, a nutrient that keeps you satisfied and aids in proper gastrointestinal health. Its bright orange color indicates a high amount of beta-carotene, which is essential for eye health,” says registered dietitian Carrie Gabriel MS, RDN.

Curious about how to add these orange potatoes to your diet? Gabriel says, “sweet potatoes are also easy to load with other foods like black beans and salsa or ground turkey, spinach, and a little olive oil, or you can slice them up and roast them or throw them in the air fryer with some seasonings for a healthier version of French fries.”

2. Oatmeal

Oats are some of the healthiest carbs you can consume because of their high fiber content.

“Oats are a carbohydrate I consume regularly because they are so versatile. Oatmeal has soluble and insoluble fiber to aid in digestion and has been proven to have anti-diabetes and cholesterol-lowering properties. It is great to cook oats traditionally on the stove. However nowadays, making overnight oats with a variety of fruits and nuts, or baking your oatmeal into squares or muffins in the oven, cutting it into pieces, and serving it with a scoop of Greek yogurt is also a popular way to consume this satisfying complex carbohydrate,” says Gabriel.

3. Quinoa

People often choose quinoa as an alternative to rice, which can provide you with plenty of helpful fiber.

“Quinoa is a source of carbohydrate that is healthy to consume on a regular basis. Not only does it contain fiber, but it is also a source of protein to help you stay full and meet your daily requirement,” says registered dietitian Jinan Banna, PhD, RD.

4. Apples

Fruit is a great way to get your daily servings of carbs in, and their natural sweetness can help curb sugar cravings as well.

“Apples are also rich in soluble fibers with prebiotic benefits. Pectin is one such example, and it provides the necessary nourishment needed to support the production of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) to fuel our gut microbiome. Plant-based sources like beans, legumes, nuts, and seeds are also rich in these soluble fibers,” says registered dietitian Rachel Fine, RDN and owner of To The Pointe Nutrition.

5. Whole grain bread

While many people are afraid to eat bread, there is no reason to fear a whole grain or whole wheat bread because it contains plenty of helpful nutrients.

“Whole grains (like quinoa, brown rice, and whole-wheat bread) contain fiber, vitamins and minerals that help keep you fuller longer. They also provide satiety after a meal or snack so you’re less likely to overeat,” says registered dietitian Janet Coleman, RD with The Consumer Mag.

6. Legumes

Although many people might not think of them as a carb, legumes and beans are a healthy carbohydrate source.

“Legumes such as beans, lentils, chickpeas are starchy but also an excellent source of plant protein and fiber. Many studies have found that including them regularly can help with heart health, blood pressure, decreasing risk for cancer, and weight management,” says registered dietitian Vandana Sheth, RDN, CDCES, FAND.

7. Berries

Adding berries to your daily diet is a delicious way to ensure you’re getting the proper nutrients your body needs on a daily basis.

“Berries are delicious, high in fiber, and rich in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. They are a perfect sweet treat as is or added to a meal,” says Sheth.

8. Vegetables

And lastly, don’t forget about your veggies. These healthy carbs are crucial for your health and should be consumed regularly.

“Vegetables are a great source of vitamins A and K, as well as potassium. They’re also low in calories, which is good news if you’re trying to lose weight,” says Coleman.


Contributor: Samantha Boesch – Eat This, Not That!

Silent Spread of Monkeypox May be a Wakeup Call for the World

Silent Spread of Monkeypox May be a Wakeup Call for the World

Claremont Colonic Newsletter
A monkeypox outbreak continues to grow in countries where the virus isn’t normally found, putting global health officials on high alert.
Now with more than 643 cases of monkeypox in dozens of countries where the virus is not endemic, “the sudden appearance of monkeypox in many countries at the same time suggests there may have been undetected transmission for some time,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday.

The virus has been circulating for decades in some places, including parts of West and Central Africa. In early research posted this week, scientists at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh described how the genetic pattern they’re seeing suggests that “there has been sustained human to human transmission since at least 2017.”

In that research, genetic sequences showed that the first monkeypox cases in 2022 appear to have descended from an outbreak that resulted in cases in Singapore, Israel, Nigeria and the United Kingdom from 2017 to 2019.

Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the research, said it suggests that “this outbreak has been going on for a long time, locally,” as in where the virus is endemic. And it means the world has failed to protect those in resource-limited areas where it has been endemic and to control it at its source before it spread globally, he added.

“It’s really a tale of two outbreaks,” Worobey said. “We need to actually turn our attention to where it’s been spreading … and start caring about that population just as much as we care about what’s going on in all these other countries around the world.”

If research continues to show that the virus has spread more among humans than previously thought — more distant from an animal source, that is — Worobey said one “really good question” is, why wouldn’t the world think monkeypox can be endemic in places beyond West and Central Africa?

‘We don’t even know how long this has been spreading’

Epidemiologist Anne Rimoin has been studying monkeypox for about two decades and has long warned that its spread in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo could have broader global health implications.

“If monkeypox were to become established in a wildlife reservoir outside Africa, the public health setback would be difficult to reverse,” Rimoin, now a professor of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, warned in a 2010 article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The latest monkeypox outbreak is proving difficult to predict in part because we haven’t been able to fully trace its origins. “We don’t even know how long this has been spreading,” Rimoin said. “This could have been spreading silently for a while.

“It’s like we’ve now decided to watch a new series, but we don’t know exactly which episode we’ve landed on. I mean, are we on episode two, or are we on episode four, or are we on episode 10? And how many episodes are in this series? We don’t know.”

Previous human cases of monkeypox weren’t thought to be too far removed from some initial exposure to an infected animal — typically rodents. Once the virus is circulating among these animals, it can continue jumping back into humans who might come into contact with infected squirrels or guinea pigs, for example.

If we continue to see sustained person-to-person transmission in this outbreak, even at low levels, that brings the possibility of a spillover back into animals in nonendemic countries from “an existential threat to a distinct possibility,” Rimoin told CNN. Such a spillover could then allow the virus to remain in an environment, jumping between animals and humans over time.

“Canon has been, monkeypox will burn itself out” after a short chain of human transmission, Rimoin said. However, although our knowledge of the virus goes back decades, it’s now spreading among new places and populations. For epidemiologists, that means keeping an open mind.

“We know a fair amount about this virus, but we don’t know everything about this virus,” she said. “We’re going to have to study this very carefully.”

Too early to tell

WHO officials say the global public health risk is moderate.

“The public health risk could become high if this virus exploits the opportunity to establish itself as a human pathogen and spreads to groups at higher risk of severe disease such as young children and immunosuppressed persons,” according to a WHO risk assessment issued Sunday, which added that “immediate action from countries is required to control further spread among groups at risk, prevent spread to the general population and avert the establishment of monkeypox as a clinical condition and public health problem in currently non-endemic countries.”

In a news briefing last week, an official with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that it’s “too early to tell” whether the virus could become endemic in the United States but that experts remain “hopeful” that won’t happen.

“I think we’re in the very early days of our investigations,” said Dr. Jennifer McQuiston, deputy director of the CDC’s Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology.

McQuiston pointed out that the virus didn’t become endemic after the last monkeypox outbreak in the United States, in 2003, when pet prairie dogs led to dozens of infected people across multiple states.

“We’re hopeful we’ll be able to similarly contain this,” McQuiston said.

The European CDC appeared to agree with McQuiston in its own assessment last week, saying there’s no evidence that the virus established itself in US wildlife after authorities conducted “an aggressive campaign for exposed animals during the 2003 outbreak.”

According to the European agency, “The probability of this spill-over event is very low.”

Still, it wouldn’t be the first virus to take up residence in a US animal population, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Before 1999, West Nile virus was unheard-of in the US. Now, it’s the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the country.

“It got seeded into mosquito populations and … bird populations and was able to establish itself,” Adalja said.

Still, he agrees that this is far from an inevitability with monkeypox because “2003 was a good opportunity for it to happen” — and it didn’t.

Worobey says there are too many unknowns to figure out where this monkeypox outbreak is headed. “What we’re finding out here, in real time, is that we know very little about what’s going on,” he said, “and I think it’s too early to be giving blanket reassurances.”

A different landscape

It’s not just murky beginnings and silent spread that make this monkeypox outbreak hard to predict.

“It’s just a very different epidemiological landscape,” Rimoin added.

“What we know about monkeypox comes largely from studies in very remote rural communities in Central Africa, where the transmission dynamics are bound to be very different,” she said, especially compared with “high-resource settings in Europe or the US.”

And although a full-fledged pandemic isn’t yet a concern, that doesn’t mean certain groups aren’t at risk, a WHO official said Monday.

“At the moment, we are not concerned of a global pandemic,” said Rosamund Lewis, technical lead for monkeypox at the WHO Health Emergencies Programme.

However, “we are concerned that individuals may acquire this infection through high-risk exposure if they don’t have the information, they need to protect themselves,” she said. “And we are concerned that, because the global population is not immune to orthopoxviruses since the end of smallpox eradication, that the virus may attempt to exploit a niche and spread more easily between people.”

Health authorities have warned that, although anyone can get the virus, members of the LGBTQ community appear to have a higher risk of exposure at the moment.

“What we’re seeing now began as a small cluster of cases, and then the investigation rapidly led to discovery of infections in a group of men who have sex with men … and so we don’t yet know what the source of the actual outbreak is,” Lewis said Tuesday.

“What’s most important now is not to stigmatize,” she said.

A number of other lingering questions could also change our understanding of how well the virus spreads from person to person. For example, it’s unclear how much spread there is when people have minimal symptoms or what effect mutations may have on the virus. On those points, Adalja said, there’s no reason to be concerned yet.

For one, the fact that doctors are seeing a number of cases with lesions in the groin area — versus more common areas such as the face, hands and feet — suggests to him that close contact with symptomatic people with skin lesions is more likely driving the spread, Adalja said.

And although it’s important to run down any viral mutations we see with monkeypox, this virus mutates relatively slowly because its genome is made of double-stranded DNA, which is more stable than, say, the single-stranded RNA of coronaviruses.

The pace of those mutations seems to have sped up somewhat, Worobey said of the early Edinburgh research. However, the global outbreak probably has far more to do with the virus gaining access to new circles where it’s easy to transmit and not “the relatively small number of mutations that have accumulated since 2017,” he added.

When it comes to whether the virus is currently changing in significant ways, “we don’t have the answer to this. We don’t really know,” Lewis said last week.

“We don’t yet have evidence that there’s mutation in the virus itself. We are beginning to collect that information,” she said. “We will be convening our groups of virologists and other experts who will discuss this very question based on the sequence of the genome of some of the cases that are being detected.”

Meanwhile, health officials around the world continue to track cases and the contacts of those cases to better understand how the virus is spreading — and how to stop it.

“Right now,” Rimoin said, “we have to do everything we can to stop community transmission.”


Contributor: Jacqueline Howard and Michael Nedelman, CNN

5 Ways to Ensure You Don’t Die in Your Sleep

5 Ways to Ensure You Don't Die in Your Sleep

Claremont Colonic Newsletter
Here’s what to watch for.
Film fans everywhere were shocked by the recent death of actor Ray Liotta, who reportedly died in his sleep on May 26 at the age of 67. This comes a few months after comedian Bob Saget, 65, died from a head injury while he was sleeping. While passing away during sleep seems peaceful and preferable to many, when it happens to people in their 60s (relatively young these days), it can seem scary. Although we don’t know Liotta’s cause of death, experts say 90% of sudden, unexpected deaths at night are caused by cardiac arrest. Here’s how to avoid that, if at all possible.

1. Be Vigilant About Medications

People who have heart and lung disease and who take medication that affects the brain (including sedatives, antidepressants or pain medicine) have the greatest risk of dying in their sleep, Dr. Sumeet Chugh, medical director of Cedars-Sinai’s Heart Rhythm Center, told the Wall Street Journal recently. He advised people in that group talk to their doctors about reducing risk. “Talk to your physicians again and say, ‘Listen, do I need this extra sedative? Maybe I can try to manage with one instead of two.'” Even if that doesn’t apply to you, being aware of potential interactions between medications, not to mention alcohol and other substances, is increasingly important as you get older.

2. Be Aware of Sleep Apnea Symptoms

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) causes people to stop breathing for periods during sleep as soft tissues collapse into the airway. The body wakes up slightly so breathing can resume, repeating the process several times a night. If it sounds exhausting, your body agrees: Sleep apnea can raise the risk of heart disease and sudden cardiac arrest. The condition is treatable, but experts say 80 to 90 percent of people with sleep apnea are undiagnosed. The prime symptom: Snoring. If you do it chronically, consult your doctor.

3. Don’t Ignore Chest Pain

Chest pain isn’t like a headache or hangover—trying to “sleep it off” could be a fatal mistake. Experts say that if you experience even mild discomfort, pressure, tightness or squeezing in the chest area; pain in the neck, jaw, back or shoulders; shortness of breath; or lightheadedness, it could be a sign of a heart attack. Call 911 immediately.

4. Be Vigilant About Heart Health

Regular physical exams will keep you up-to-date on your heart health. Many heart problems or signs of heart disease can be identified with a routine EKG. Year round, practicing heart-healthy habits—eating a healthy diet, getting regular exercise, avoiding tobacco, and drinking alcohol only in moderation—can go a long way.

5. Get Enough Quality Sleep

Sleep isn’t a health risk—far from. Not getting enough quality sleep on a regular basis has been linked with a variety of health problems, from obesity and diabetes to dementia and heart disease. Last month, scientists said they’ve determined the ideal amount of sleep for people in middle and old age: Seven hours a night. Getting six hours or less has been associated with cardiovascular disease.


Contributor: Michael Martin – Eat This, Not That!