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Blood Sugar Concerns? Choose This
Snack
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If you have trouble with high blood sugar, you might want to make this one of your mainstay snacks: A handful of walnuts.
Walnuts are already in a heart-healthy league of their own because of their cholesterol-improving powers. And now a small new study suggests that
eating walnuts every day may help give blood vessels a much needed tune-up in people with diabetes.
Thy Daily Nut
In the study, people with type 2 diabetes were asked to eat about 2 ounces of walnuts every day. After 8 weeks, endothelial function improved
significantly in the walnut eaters. Why is this good news? Because endothelial cells -- that thin layer of cells that lines the inside of blood vessels -- may
be one of the first places to go bad when people with diabetes start developing vascular disease.
Walnut Wonders
Compared to other nuts, walnuts (attach to the recipe below) have higher amounts of alpha-linolenic acid, which may help protect against plaque
formation in arteries. Walnuts also are a great source of an amino acid called L-arginine, which helps relax blood vessels and control blood pressure.
And surprisingly, the nut eaters in the study didn't suffer any deleterious effects to their weight and waist sizes. Could be all the protein and fiber in
walnuts helped the study participants eat less overall.
Say Hello to Your Toes
Touching your toes used to be a gym-class requirement in elementary school. And it might be worth a try to see if you can still do it.
Why? A new study suggests that your ability to touch your toes as you get older could reveal something important about your heart. In particular,
about the stiffness of the arteries that serve your heart.
When it comes to muscles, flexibility is a good thing. And the same goes for your blood vessels. The more limber and elastic those vessels are, the
better they maintain healthy blood pressure. Now, research suggests there might be a connection between flexible muscles and stretchy blood vessels.
In a study, adults 40 and older who had a harder time touching their toes from a sitting position also tended to have stiffer arteries. Their systolic
blood pressure numbers were also a bit higher than their more limber peers.
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