Video: Healthy Eating & Beverages

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Water is the most important beverage for the human body. Learn more about healthy beverages with tips from a certified nutritionist in this free health video.

Video Transcript

Well, moving along we're going to talk about beverages now. The most important beverage being water. And most of you have heard of the eight by eight recommendation. Eight glasses of eight ounces of water per day. That's pretty much a rough guide. How much water you drink really depends on a lot of things. For example the climate. The temperature outside. Your activity level. Your diet. Those are all things that determine how much water you should be drinking. There's a few opportune times to drink water. One would be in the morning when you get up to cleanse and wake up your digestion, help with your elimination. Another good time would be between meals. Between breakfast and lunch and between lunch and dinner. So when it's getting close to meal time that should be your cue to drink a glass of water. Don't rely on sodas to satisfy your thirst. We want you to cut down on your sugar consumption. So if you're hydrated, you're drinking enough water then maybe you'll be satisfied with just a little something sweet. So that's the deal on water. Other healthy beverages. It's been said if we run out of water probably the next healthy beverage we'd be drinking is wine. Wine of course is a part of the Mediterranean diet. Which is one of the healthiest most scientifically documented diets in the world. But again, moderation. And the official recommendation for wine would be one glass per day for women and two for men. And we don't want to go over that. And usually your taste will tell you how much wine to drink per day. If it doesn't taste very good maybe you should put it down. So wine particularly with food. You want to have the alcohol with the food. And the benefits of course. Wine, in moderation, is an anti inflammatory. Part of the healthy Mediterranean diet. We have seen some studies in people that drink wine in moderation have a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease. And of course very good for the heart. Thins the blood. It's anti-inflammatory. Other healthy beverages, of course high on my list would be tea. Particularly green tea contains all those polyphenols. A kind of antioxidant. We need the antioxidants to scavenge an unstable molecule called free radicals. Kind of soak up free radicals. Free radicals contribute to aging and deterioration. So that's why we need the antioxidants like you find in green tea and of course in fruit juices. I would suggest you dilute your juices. Otherwise you might be getting a little too much sugar there. Soy milk, almond milk. I know some people have allergies to soy in which case you might want to try something like oat milk. When comparing these, I would choose the ones that have the lowest amount of sugar so read the label. And the sports drinks, typical sports drinks like the one they advertise on t.v. all the time. You probably know the one I'm talking about. Those are recommended for electrolytes. Minerals that we lose during perspiration. Heavy perspiration. Problem is with some of those advertised ones they don't have the correct sodium potassium balance. So I would go to the health food store and ask for one of the health food store brands of the sports electrolytes drinks with the proper proportion of sodium and potassium. That's the deal on beverages.

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Healthy Eating & Beverages

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