Murtaza Razvi, an editor at one of Pakistan's leading English newspapers, was murdered in Karachi yesterday. He was one of many journalists I met on a recent trip who have refused to give up their work despite threats.
Two weeks ago I was in an office in Karachi, Pakistan, with a room full of journalists, including Murtaza Razvi, an editor at Dawn newspaper, discussing challenges facing the country?s vibrant media, including risks to covering Pakistan. Yesterday I was e-mailed that he had been murdered.
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Before I left for Pakistan a few weeks ago on a journalist exchange program sponsored by the East-West Center, I asked colleagues who reported in the country, both Pakistani and American, about their greatest challenge.
Americans complained of the government's game of ?smoke and mirrors,? a disinformation campaign that puts most other government propaganda efforts to?shame. The challenge for Pakistani journalists, on the other hand, was decidedly more severe. ?We have a completely free media in Pakistan, but no protection,? said one journalist based in Islamabad.
How severe? The country leads the world in journalist murders, the latest just yesterday.
Seven of the other eight Pakistani journalists at a meeting with my group proceeded to share stories of threats. It was common, they said, to receive a threat by a phone call from the Taliban for not getting enough quotes from them, from political parties for including the Taliban in a story or not being represented the way they saw fit, and even from Pakistan?s version of the CIA, the ISI.
But this wasn?t something that had them lining up to find a new job. It was just how things work. Most of the time the person on the other end of the line is bluffing, they said. They had gotten used to the fact that Pakistan was the deadliest country for journalists in 2010 and 2011, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. And killings there have been met with near-perfect impunity throughout the years. For some perspective, consider that there have been 19 unsolved murders of journalists since 2002. (see CPJ?s video)
When you put it that way, having to peer through smoke and mirrors to get to the heart of a story doesn't look so bad.
I visited the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting while I was in Pakistan. The ministry has jurisdiction over the rules and regulations relating to information, broadcasting, and the press. Like many Pakistanis we spoke to on this trip, the minister talked at length about how wonderful it was to have an active, independent, vibrant media that had absolutely no restrictions and how that was contributing to democracy in Pakistan.?
However, when we raised the question of safety and reported threats against journalist, Minister of Information Firdous Ashiq Awan (since replaced), without asking for details or pausing to smooth this over, said: ?Those are complete fabrications. It never happened. It?s not happening.?
We brought up the famous case of Syad Saleem Shazad, a prominent journalist who went missing after exposing Al Qaeda infiltration of the military. He had been ?warned? several times by the ISI for covering sensitive topics, according to his family. He was later found dead. The ISI, was implicated, though it denied involvement.
The minister dismissed the scenario of Shazad's murder as unproven. She did clarify that, "we condemn that sort of action." But she stuck with her statement that there were no threats or real dangers for journalists who were not "over smart." A former local journalist who now works in the ministry agreed with her.
At this point, Issam Ahmed, the Monitor?s Islamabad correspondent, who had been invited to the round table by the minister, shared a story about a time he had been reporting on a sensitive topic in northern Pakistan, when he was summoned into a car by agents to go meet with the ISI bureau chief. The car sped off at breakneck speed to the headquarters, where the chief warned him to ?not report critically.? So, Issam, said, it wasn't a death threat, but intimidation happens.
Pro-reason bloggers are doing a better job than scientists at challenging alternative medicine. Long may it continue
ALTERNATIVE medicine has never enjoyed such popularity and respect. Therapies once dubbed "pseudoscience" or "quackery" are now typically referred to as "alternative", "complementary" or "holistic". Practices that used to circulate on the fringes are now accepted as mainstream.
The rise of alternative medicine poses a problem for defenders of science. Many see the fightback as a lost cause. I don't. I believe that the factors that allow quackery to prosper can and are being harnessed for a counter-revolution in defence of science.
In the past, those exploring alternative lifestyles joined groups of like-minded people and subscribed to countercultural magazines. They now participate in online communities and surf the internet, where they encounter alternative websites by the dozen, but also come across mainstream scientific viewpoints.
The web has proved to be a crucial mobilising instrument for pro-science activists. When the British Chiropractic Association sued writer Simon Singh for libel, his supporters used Twitter and Facebook to keep abreast of the case. A community of pro-science activists and bloggers has also sprung up. Their actions are not merely intellectual. Singh's supporters flooded the British Chiropractic Association with complaints about individual chiropractors, all of which required investigation.
As British activist and physician Ben Goldacre wrote in 2009: "A ragged band of bloggers from all walks of life has, to my mind, done a better job of subjecting an entire industry's claims to meaningful, public, scientific scrutiny than the media, the industry itself, and even its own regulator. It's strange this task has fallen to them, but I'm glad someone is doing it, and they do it very, very well indeed."
In other words, the defence of science is increasingly being undertaken by members of the public. Such defence was once conducted primarily by scholars; today the battle is often fought at an individual level via cut-and-thrust debate in blog postings.
This social phenomenon of "angry nerds" and "guerrilla bloggers", dedicated to defending evidence-based medicine and challenging quackery, is important. Rather than relying on scientists to defend the boundaries of science, we are seeing a much more socially embedded struggle - a popular enlightenment project.
Can such a project work? Reasserting goals of progress through reason and evidence is one thing, but whether it has any effect remains an open question. How easy is it to persuade people through factual corrections?
The answer seems to depend a great deal on the individual. For example, AIDS deniers are generally impervious to corrective evidence. They are impossible to argue with, and indeed it may even be counterproductive to do so. According to recent research, providing people who are ideologically committed to a particular view with incongruent information can backfire by causing them to dig their heels in and support their original argument even more strongly.
This problem is a general one. A substantial body of psychological research suggests that humans tend to seek out and evaluate information that reinforces their existing views. The digital revolution has exacerbated the problem because, as journalist Farhad Manjoo writes, you can now "watch, listen to and read what you want, whenever you want; seek out and discuss, in exhaustive and insular detail, the kind of news that pleases you; and indulge your political, social or scientific theories... among people who feel exactly the same way".
I believe such pessimism goes too far, though. The boundary between mainstream and alternative knowledge may have become more permeable, but the world has yet to enter what political scientist Michael Barkun of Syracuse University in New York calls "complete epistemological pluralism". The fact that quacks and AIDS deniers keep trying to get the imprimatur of science for their discredited ideas, by trying to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals, for example, speaks to the continued public prestige and power of science.
Furthermore, their support base is far from fixed in stone. Some people are so committed to unorthodox views that they cannot be moved, but they are the exception. People motivated to explore the "cultic milieu" - that fluid countercultural space in which alternative therapies and conspiracy theories flourish - are open to changing their minds.
In his seminal work on the cultic milieu, sociologist Colin Campbell of York University, UK, stresses that it is not a space where firm opinions are held, but rather a "society of seekers" - people who "do not necessarily cease seeking when a revealed truth is offered to them".
This creates the space for pro-science activists to compete for attention. When they do so, the internet becomes a tougher place for people to sequestrate themselves in a comfortable cocoon of the like-minded.
This is good news for the enlightenment project. People may be biased in favour of interpretations that align with their prejudices but this does not mean that they just believe what they like. Faced with information of sufficient quantity or clarity, people do change their minds.
So the challenge for the pro-science movement is to keep an active and credible online presence. The web is an anarchic space where defence of science ranges from ridicule and banter to serious discussion about findings along with links to scientific articles and reports. It looks, in other words, like the space that used to be the preserve of the cultic milieu - but with greater informational depth. The weapons of science and reason are still very much in contention.
Nicoli Nattrass is director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her new book is The AIDS Conspiracy: Science fights back (Columbia University Press)
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The unveiling of Tizen left many mobile open-source aficionados wondering when the OS would reach its all-important 1.0 status. The answer is now: the coalition between Intel, Panasonic, Samsung and a raft of carriers has posted the first non-beta release in both source code and software development kit forms. The finished versions of either carry new features to reward developers for the wait: SDK users get a new browser-based simulator and a faster emulator, while those scouring the source code will find new point-of-interest and route searching features in location-aware apps as well as WiFi Direct and more HTML5 support. About the only wait left is for an actual Tizen phone to ship.
A 100-gigbit highway for sciencePublic release date: 30-Apr-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Linda Vu lvu@lbl.gov 510-495-2402 DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Researchers take a 'test drive' on ANI testbed
Climate researchers are producing some of the fastest growing datasets in science. Five years ago, the amount of information generated for the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report was 35 terabytesequivalent to the amount of text in 35 million books, occupying a bookshelf 248 miles (399 km) long. By 2014, when the next IPCC report is published, experts predict that 2 petabytes of data will have been generated for itthat's a 580 percent increase in data production.
Because thousands of researchers around the world contribute to the generation and analysis of this data, a reliable, high-speed network is needed to transport the torrent of information. Fortunately, the Department of Energy's (DOE) ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) has laid the foundation for such a networknot just for climate research, but for all data-intensive science.
"There is a data revolution occurring in science," says Greg Bell, acting director of ESnet, which is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Over the last decade, the amount of scientific data transferred over our network has increased at a rate of about 72 percent per year, and we see that trend potentially accelerating."
In an effort to spur U.S. scientific competitiveness, as well as accelerate development and widespread deployment of 100-gigabit technology, the Advanced Networking Initiative (ANI) was created with $62 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and implemented by ESnet. ANI was established to build a 100 Gbps national prototype network and a wide-area network testbed.
To cost-effectively deploy ANI, ESnet partnered with Internet2a consortium that provides high-performance network connections to universities across Americawhich also received a stimulus grant from the Department of Commerce's Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program.
Researchers Take a "Test Drive" on ANI
So far more than 25 groups have taken advantage of ESnet's wide-area testbed, which is open to researchers from government agencies and private industry to test new, potentially disruptive technologies without interfering with production science network traffic. The testbed currently connects three unclassified DOE supercomputing facilities: the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Oakland, Calif., the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in Argonne, Ill., and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
"No other networking organization has a 100-gigabit network testbed that is available to researchers in this way," says Brian Tierney, who heads ESnet's Advanced Networking Technologies Group. "Our 100G testbed has been about 80 percent booked since it became available in January, which just goes to show that there are a lot of researchers hungry for a resource like this."
Climate 100
To ensure that researchers will use future 100-gigabit effectively, another ARRA-funded project called Climate 100 brought together middleware and network engineers to develop tools and techniques for moving unprecedentedly massive amounts of climate data.
"Increasing network bandwidth is an important step toward tackling ever-growing scientific datasets, but it is not sufficient by itself; next-generation high-bandwidth networks need to be evaluated carefully from the applications perspective as well," says Mehmet Balman of Berkeley Lab's Scientific Data Management group, a member of the Climate 100 collaboration.
According to Balman, climate simulation data consists of a mix of relatively small and large files with irregular file size distribution in each dataset. This requires advanced middleware tools to move data efficiently on long-distance high-bandwidth networks.
"The ANI testbed essentially allowed us to 'test drive' on a 100-gigabit network to determine what kind of middleware tools we needed to build to transport climate data," says Balman. "Once the development was done, we used the testbed to optimize and tune."
At the 2011 Supercomputing Conference in Seattle, Wash., the Climate 100 team used their tool and the ANI testbed to transport 35 terabytes of climate data from NERSC's data storage to compute nodes at ALCF and OLCF.
"It took us approximately 30 minutes to move 35 terabytes of climate data over a wide-area 100 Gbps network. This is a great accomplishment," says Balman. "On a 10 Gbps network, it would have taken five hours to move this much data across the country."
Space Exploration
In 2024, the most powerful radio telescope ever constructed will go online. Comprising 3,000 satellite dishes spread over 250 acres, this instrument will generate more data in a single day than the entire Internet carries today. Optical fibers will connect each of these 15-meter-wide (50 ft.) satellite dishes to a central high performance computing system, which will combine all of the signals to create a detailed "big picture."
"Given the immense sensor payload, optical fiber interconnects are critical both at the central site and from remote stations to a single correlation facility," says William Ivancic, a senior research engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center. "Future radio astronomy networks need to incorporate next generation network technologies like 100 Gbps long-range Ethernet links, or better, into their designs."
In anticipation of these future networks, Ivancic and his colleagues are utilizing a popular high-speed transfer protocol, called Saratoga, to effectively carry data over 100-gigabit long-range Ethernet links. But because it was cost-prohibitive to upgrade their local network with 100-gigabit hardware, the team could not determine how their software would perform in a real-world scenariothat is, until they got access to the ANI testbed.
"Quite frankly, we would not be doing these speed tests without the ANI testbed," says David Stewart, an engineer at Verizon Federal Systems and Ivancic's colleague. "We are currently in the development and debugging phase, and have several implementations of our code. With the ANI testbed, we were able to optimize and scale our basic PERL implementation to far higher speeds than our NASA testbed."
End-to-End Delivery
Meanwhile, Dantong Yu, who leads the Computer Science Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, used the ANI testbed to design an ultra-high-speed, end-to-end file transfer protocol tool to move science data at 100 gigabits per second across a national network.
"A network like ANI may be able to move data at 100 Gbps, but at each end of that connection there is a host server that either uploads or downloads data from the network," says Yu. "While the host servers may be capable of feeding data into the network and downloading it at 100 Gbps, the current software running on these systems is a bottleneck."
According to Yu, the bottlenecks are primarily caused by the number of times the current software forces the computer to make copies of the data before uploading it to the network.
"Initially I was testing this protocol at a very local lab level. In this scenario transfers happen in a split-second, which is far from reality," says Yu. "ANI allowed me to see how long it really takes to move data across the country, from East-to West Coast, with my software, which in turn helped me optimize the code."
The Next Steps
Within the next few months, the official ANI project will be coming to an end, but the community will continue to benefit for decades to come from its investments. The 100-gigabit prototype network will be converted into ESnet's fifth-generation production infrastructure, one that will be scale to 44 times its current. ESnet will also seek new sources of funding for the 100-gigabit testbed to ensure that it will be available to network researchers on a sustained basis.
"Since its inception, ESnet has delivered the advanced capabilities required by DOE science. Many of these capabilities are cost-prohibitive, or simply unavailable, on the commercial market," says Bell. "Because our network is optimized for the needs of DOE science, we're always looking for efficient ways to manage our large science flows. ESnet's new 100-Gigabit network will allow us to do that more flexibly and morecost-effectively than ever."
###
About ESnet
ESnet provides the high-bandwidth, reliable connections that link scientists at national laboratories, universities and other research institutions, enabling them to work together on some of the world's most important scientific challenges including energy, climate science, and the origins of the universe. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, and managed and operated by the ESnet team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), ESnet provides scientists with access to unique DOE research facilities and computing resources, as well as to scientific collaborators including research and education networks around the world.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
A 100-gigbit highway for sciencePublic release date: 30-Apr-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Linda Vu lvu@lbl.gov 510-495-2402 DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Researchers take a 'test drive' on ANI testbed
Climate researchers are producing some of the fastest growing datasets in science. Five years ago, the amount of information generated for the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report was 35 terabytesequivalent to the amount of text in 35 million books, occupying a bookshelf 248 miles (399 km) long. By 2014, when the next IPCC report is published, experts predict that 2 petabytes of data will have been generated for itthat's a 580 percent increase in data production.
Because thousands of researchers around the world contribute to the generation and analysis of this data, a reliable, high-speed network is needed to transport the torrent of information. Fortunately, the Department of Energy's (DOE) ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) has laid the foundation for such a networknot just for climate research, but for all data-intensive science.
"There is a data revolution occurring in science," says Greg Bell, acting director of ESnet, which is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Over the last decade, the amount of scientific data transferred over our network has increased at a rate of about 72 percent per year, and we see that trend potentially accelerating."
In an effort to spur U.S. scientific competitiveness, as well as accelerate development and widespread deployment of 100-gigabit technology, the Advanced Networking Initiative (ANI) was created with $62 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and implemented by ESnet. ANI was established to build a 100 Gbps national prototype network and a wide-area network testbed.
To cost-effectively deploy ANI, ESnet partnered with Internet2a consortium that provides high-performance network connections to universities across Americawhich also received a stimulus grant from the Department of Commerce's Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program.
Researchers Take a "Test Drive" on ANI
So far more than 25 groups have taken advantage of ESnet's wide-area testbed, which is open to researchers from government agencies and private industry to test new, potentially disruptive technologies without interfering with production science network traffic. The testbed currently connects three unclassified DOE supercomputing facilities: the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Oakland, Calif., the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in Argonne, Ill., and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
"No other networking organization has a 100-gigabit network testbed that is available to researchers in this way," says Brian Tierney, who heads ESnet's Advanced Networking Technologies Group. "Our 100G testbed has been about 80 percent booked since it became available in January, which just goes to show that there are a lot of researchers hungry for a resource like this."
Climate 100
To ensure that researchers will use future 100-gigabit effectively, another ARRA-funded project called Climate 100 brought together middleware and network engineers to develop tools and techniques for moving unprecedentedly massive amounts of climate data.
"Increasing network bandwidth is an important step toward tackling ever-growing scientific datasets, but it is not sufficient by itself; next-generation high-bandwidth networks need to be evaluated carefully from the applications perspective as well," says Mehmet Balman of Berkeley Lab's Scientific Data Management group, a member of the Climate 100 collaboration.
According to Balman, climate simulation data consists of a mix of relatively small and large files with irregular file size distribution in each dataset. This requires advanced middleware tools to move data efficiently on long-distance high-bandwidth networks.
"The ANI testbed essentially allowed us to 'test drive' on a 100-gigabit network to determine what kind of middleware tools we needed to build to transport climate data," says Balman. "Once the development was done, we used the testbed to optimize and tune."
At the 2011 Supercomputing Conference in Seattle, Wash., the Climate 100 team used their tool and the ANI testbed to transport 35 terabytes of climate data from NERSC's data storage to compute nodes at ALCF and OLCF.
"It took us approximately 30 minutes to move 35 terabytes of climate data over a wide-area 100 Gbps network. This is a great accomplishment," says Balman. "On a 10 Gbps network, it would have taken five hours to move this much data across the country."
Space Exploration
In 2024, the most powerful radio telescope ever constructed will go online. Comprising 3,000 satellite dishes spread over 250 acres, this instrument will generate more data in a single day than the entire Internet carries today. Optical fibers will connect each of these 15-meter-wide (50 ft.) satellite dishes to a central high performance computing system, which will combine all of the signals to create a detailed "big picture."
"Given the immense sensor payload, optical fiber interconnects are critical both at the central site and from remote stations to a single correlation facility," says William Ivancic, a senior research engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center. "Future radio astronomy networks need to incorporate next generation network technologies like 100 Gbps long-range Ethernet links, or better, into their designs."
In anticipation of these future networks, Ivancic and his colleagues are utilizing a popular high-speed transfer protocol, called Saratoga, to effectively carry data over 100-gigabit long-range Ethernet links. But because it was cost-prohibitive to upgrade their local network with 100-gigabit hardware, the team could not determine how their software would perform in a real-world scenariothat is, until they got access to the ANI testbed.
"Quite frankly, we would not be doing these speed tests without the ANI testbed," says David Stewart, an engineer at Verizon Federal Systems and Ivancic's colleague. "We are currently in the development and debugging phase, and have several implementations of our code. With the ANI testbed, we were able to optimize and scale our basic PERL implementation to far higher speeds than our NASA testbed."
End-to-End Delivery
Meanwhile, Dantong Yu, who leads the Computer Science Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, used the ANI testbed to design an ultra-high-speed, end-to-end file transfer protocol tool to move science data at 100 gigabits per second across a national network.
"A network like ANI may be able to move data at 100 Gbps, but at each end of that connection there is a host server that either uploads or downloads data from the network," says Yu. "While the host servers may be capable of feeding data into the network and downloading it at 100 Gbps, the current software running on these systems is a bottleneck."
According to Yu, the bottlenecks are primarily caused by the number of times the current software forces the computer to make copies of the data before uploading it to the network.
"Initially I was testing this protocol at a very local lab level. In this scenario transfers happen in a split-second, which is far from reality," says Yu. "ANI allowed me to see how long it really takes to move data across the country, from East-to West Coast, with my software, which in turn helped me optimize the code."
The Next Steps
Within the next few months, the official ANI project will be coming to an end, but the community will continue to benefit for decades to come from its investments. The 100-gigabit prototype network will be converted into ESnet's fifth-generation production infrastructure, one that will be scale to 44 times its current. ESnet will also seek new sources of funding for the 100-gigabit testbed to ensure that it will be available to network researchers on a sustained basis.
"Since its inception, ESnet has delivered the advanced capabilities required by DOE science. Many of these capabilities are cost-prohibitive, or simply unavailable, on the commercial market," says Bell. "Because our network is optimized for the needs of DOE science, we're always looking for efficient ways to manage our large science flows. ESnet's new 100-Gigabit network will allow us to do that more flexibly and morecost-effectively than ever."
###
About ESnet
ESnet provides the high-bandwidth, reliable connections that link scientists at national laboratories, universities and other research institutions, enabling them to work together on some of the world's most important scientific challenges including energy, climate science, and the origins of the universe. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, and managed and operated by the ESnet team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), ESnet provides scientists with access to unique DOE research facilities and computing resources, as well as to scientific collaborators including research and education networks around the world.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Students who study nutrition have been taught to eliminate as much largely milled grains as possible from their diet. The major source of fiber and other nutrients in these grains is in the hull. Is it wise to do this while buying fiber additives or wheat germ in order to restore benefits that you can get from natural whole grain? Not really!
Avoid foods containing corn syrups. Products with this have higher sugar content. There are many foods and condiments that include corn syrup so make sure you take the time to read the ingredient lists on food labels.
Be sure to eat meat. You need quality protein, such as meat, to build stronger muscles. Chicken, pork, or beef ? the choice is yours. They can all help to meet the nutritional needs of your muscles. A daily serving of 10 ounces will see to all your nutritional requirements.
One simple way to improve your general nutrition is to get rid of all the junk food that is in your kitchen and pantry. This includes cookies, chips, candy and soda. Instead, replace them with healthy snacks, such as low-fat microwave popcorn, fresh vegetables, frozen vegetables, canned beans, canned diced tomatoes, whole grain wraps or pita pockets and similar healthy foods.
A very simple way to make sure that you get all of the required vitamins in your diet, is to start drinking juice as a part of your regular routine. Store bought juices may not be the best choice. Begin thinking about making your own juices from vegetables like carrots or beets. Juices can be blended to improve the taste. When you drink fresh juice they have vitamins and minerals that are good for health.
The moment you begin to lose motivation, recall why you even made the effort in the beginning. These reasons will differ from person to person but will help you reach your goals.
Proper nutrition is vital to your good health and fitness. By eating a well-balanced diet, you can feel good and look good as well. Reducing the foods and drinks you consume that contain refined sugar is a good thing to do for yourself. Watch out for sodas and fruit juices. You want to avoid their large amounts of sugar. See how much better your diet is without that sugar. It can also improve your appearance.
Try switching french fries with a baked potato for your kids. Create a face with the potato using low-fat cheese, tomatoes and peas.
In reasonable amounts, fruit or vegetable juices can replace some servings of raw fruits and veggies. Fruit juice gives you a variety of vitamins, and you don?t have to spend any time preparing the produce. Drinking fruit juices can be hard on your teeth. By sipping your juice through a straw, you can prevent tooth decay.
Packaged foods are required to include a nutritional facts section on the label. Learn how to read these facts, and stay away from foods with more than 5% of saturated fat, sodium or cholesterol. If you eat too much of these, it will greatly increase the chances of serious illnesses, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and hypertension.
You don?t need to be a food scientist or a nutrition expert, in order to properly understand the benefits of certain foods and how to get the most nutritional value out of your diet. You only need to read some great tips like what you?ve just learned here and make sure to use them to balance your diet.
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