Gone Fishin' Eat Fat, Lose Weight Sure, a good diet and lots of exercise will help you lose weight. But add a pinch of fish oil, and your efforts will see even better results. Fish oil is very high in good fats called omega-3 fatty acids, and some Australian researchers have just discovered that getting a daily dose of fish oil can help you get rid of extra weight. For this study, researchers worked with 68 people, all overweight or obese, for three months. The participants were split into four groups, none of which had to alter their normal diets: - Daily fish oil plus moderate exercise three times a week
- Daily fish oil, no exercise
- Daily sunflower oil, plus moderate exercise three times a week
- Daily sunflower oil, no exercise
The fish oil plus exercise group lost the most weight -- an average of 4.5 pounds over the three-month trial period -- without changing their regular diets at all. None of the other groups lost any weight, not even the other exercise group (the one that got sunflower oil). The researchers believe that the fatty acids in fish oil actually step up your body's fat-burning abilities, making your work outs more effective, which helps you melt the pounds away. Curry vs. Colon Cancer Curcumin, the key compound found in turmeric (a key ingredient in curry) has been tested quite a bit over the past several years for its unique cancer-fighting abilities. And now colon cancer prevention can be added to its very impressive résumé. In the latest study, researchers found that a combo pill of curcumin and quercetin (an antioxidant found in onions) could substantially reduce precancerous colon polyps -- both in size and number. In fact, the results showed that after six months of supplementation, the participants' average polyp count decreased by 60 percent and the size of the polyps that were present went down 51 percent. The supplements the participants took contained 480 mg of curcumin and 20 mg of quercetin, taken three times a day. You'd have to eat an awful lot of turmeric to get that amount of curcumin in your diet. As for the quercetin (which is also found in apples), you can easily get that amount from food alone. Bark Beats Prostate Cancer The latest natural source for fighting prostate cancer comes from the white birch tree...more specifically, from its bark. Researchers extracted a compound called betulonic acid from the bark of white birch trees. And the preliminary test results indicate that betulonic acid may keep human prostate cancer cells from reproducing and spreading. Even better, the compound encourages those cells to die. Isolated human prostate cancer cells that were just left alone grew 88 percent more than cells exposed to the compound...and normal cells weren't affected at all. After their success in the lab, the researchers tried the compound in mice with human prostate cancer cells. The scientists let the cancer cells go wild for 12 days, then gave half of the mice daily betulonic acid injections for 17 days. And while the tumors kept growing in all of the mice, growth was impeded by 92 percent in the betulonic acid group.
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