12 Recipes to Celebrate Spring Veggies

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, spring has arrived. Depending on where you live, you might be flooded with peas, asparagus, and strawberries, and already looking forward to stone fruits and corn on the cob, or you might be watching the thermometer hover around 50° and longing for something besides radishes to show up at the farmer’s market.

The anticipation that comes along with the first spring produce makes the moment that it finally arrives that much more satisfying – the sight and taste of something young, fresh, and green is exhilarating after months of hardy root vegetables and winter staples.

Here, we’ve highlighted four quintessential spring vegetables – peas, asparagus, fava beans, and ramps – and found recipes that celebrate them from twelve great food bloggers. Some are vegetarian, some are light, some are filling, but all of them will increase the amount of green – and the depth of flavor – that you’ll find on your plate after making them.

PEAS

1) Sweet Baby Pea Salad with Cashews and Bacon from Home is Where The Cookies Are

Tiny, perfect, baby peas, plucked from their pods, have a sweetness that is irresistible on a warm spring day.

Exploring Tumblr: 12 Delicious Food Tumblogs to Whet Your Appetite

Internet giant Yahoo Buys Tumblr in a $1.1 billion deal, there’s no better time to get familiar with this amazing blogging network. As much as Tumblr is massive its content is virtually unknown to many of us. To kick it off, here are 12 food tumblogs that will make your mouth water…

Home Cooking & Recipes

1. Jittery Cook

Jittery Cook is a skimmed down Tumblr version of a blog bearing the same name. Created by Montreal based speech/language pathologist and wannabe grandmother Holly Botner, Jittery Cook promotes healthy eating by sharing home cooking recipes with stunning imagery and step by step directions. Holly likes giving her personal slant and interacts with her readers.

8 Healthy Fast Food Meals: Eating Right at McDonalds, Burger King, and Beyond

With so many tempting high-calorie food options at our disposal, it can be really tough to eat healthy all the time in our modern world. The problem is compounded if you’re short on time or money, or you have a car full of hungry kids. For these reasons, many people end up turning to fast food for fuel, even when they are trying to watch their weight. Fortunately, most fast food establishments are aware of the demand for healthy options and offer some meals that aren’t too heavy in fat or calories. Use the following guide, organized by fast food restaurant, to find healthy and filling meal options for when you’re on the go.

McDonalds

Meal 1: Premium Grilled Chicken Classic Sandwich and Fruit & Walnuts (560 calories)

The 350-calorie Premium Grilled Chicken Classic Sandwich offers 18 g protein, 9 g fat (including 2 g saturated), 42 g carbs, and 820 mg sodium.

8 Foods You Should Never Give Your Kids

Every parent knows that getting kids to eat healthy wholesome foods is an uphill struggle.

Adults understand that healthy, satisfying meals usually comprise of ingredients like plain grilled chicken, fish, salads, vegetables, and fresh fruit for dessert. Kids, when confronted with these foods, find them boring, bland, unappealing, or simply disgusting!

Food battles with kids are terribly frustrating, but it’s important to keep issues like fussy eating and the avoidance of fruit and vegetables in balance. Encouraging healthy eating behavior is essential. In later life your kids will be grateful for your persistent focus on good nutrition.

Many foods seem nourishing and delicious. In reality, they actually have very little nutritional value and contain large quantities of hidden fats and sugars.

But, how can you know for certain which foods to avoid?

To help you to decide, we’ve listed eight of the worst foods that you can feed your children for breakfast, lunches, dinners or snacks.

1. Kids’ Breakfast Cereal

Many breakfast cereals specifically target the kids market. Images on the boxes are colorful and exciting, and the blurb has buzzwords, like delicious, healthy and nutritious.

Mystery Of Hundreds Of Human Skeletons Found Near A Lake In India Solved

1. The Most Common Dream For People To Have Is That Of Teeth Falling Out.

According to this website, Dreams of falling teeth are the most common dreams that Dream Moods receives. The typical dream scenarios include having your teeth crumble in your hands, fall out one by one with just a light tap, grow crooked or start to rot.

Image taken from: www.robertgibb.me

2. Depression Can Cause You To Dream Up To 3-4 Times More Than Normal...

In the 1970s, psychologists noted that people suffering from depression also report more dreams than average. In fact, people who are clinically depressed may dream three or four times as much. The quality of REM dreams (also called “paradoxical sleep”) is different too: more intense emotions, more negative themes, more nightmares, and more unpleasant dreams, in general.(source)

Image source: www.eofdreams.com

3. There Is A Project Called "A Call In The Night" That Will Call You Once A Week After 2 am And Connect You To A Random Person To Discuss Your Dreams.

Call in the Night is an experimental radio show and telephone network documenting the nighttime experience. Anyone with a phone can participate!
Check out more details here

Image source: www.5feet20.com

4. There Is A Lucid-Dreaming Mask. It Produces Sound & Light Cues Which Are Incorporated Into Your Dream And Help You Become Lucid.
It uses infra-red sensors to detect when you are in REM sleep. It then produces sound and light cues which are incorporated into your dream and help you become lucid.(source)

Image source: www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com

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So You Want To Have A Baby?

Whether you’re considering trying to get pregnant for the first time, or you have been trying to conceive for a while without success, it is a good idea to review some tips that can increase your likelihood of conceiving.  Besides helping you conceive, many of these tips, such as getting the right nutrients and reaching a healthy weight, also help set the stage for a successful pregnancy.

Calcium Supplements May Raise Odds of Heart Death in Women

Study also found combined risk from dietary calcium, pills

Women eating a high-calcium diet and taking calcium supplements adding up to more than 1,400 milligrams a day may be running nearly twice the risk of dying from heart disease, a large Swedish study suggests.

Both men and women take calcium supplements to prevent bone loss. The new findings come on the heels of another recent study that found a similar increased risk of death related to calcium intake among men.

“Many older adults increase dietary intake of calcium or take calcium supplements to prevent bone loss and there had been speculation that increased calcium intake with or without vitamin D could improve cardiovascular health,” said Dr. Gregg Fonarow, an American Heart Association spokesman who wasn’t involved in the study.

However, a number of recent studies have suggested that higher dietary intake or calcium supplementation may not only not improve cardiovascular health — they may be associated with increased risk for cardiovascular events and mortality, said Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at University of California, Los Angeles.

The new report was published in the Feb. 12 online edition of the BMJ.

To see if calcium supplements raised the risk of dying from heart disease, a team led by Dr. Karl Michaelsson, a clinical professor in the department of orthopedic surgical sciences at Uppsala University in Sweden, analyzed data collected on more than 61,000 women enrolled in a study on mammograms.

Over 19 years of follow-up, nearly 12,000 women died — almost 4,000 dying from cardiovascular disease, about 1,900 from heart disease and 1,100 from stroke, the researchers found.

The highest rates of death were seen among women whose calcium intake was higher than 1,400 milligrams a day, the researchers noted. On the other hand, women who took less than 600 milligrams of calcium a day were also at an increased risk of death.

Moreover, women taking 1,400 milligrams of calcium a day and also using a supplement had even a higher risk of dying than women not using supplements, Michaelsson’s group found.

All in all, women getting more than 1,400 milligrams of calcium a day were more than twice as likely to die than women getting 600 to 999 milligrams a day, the researchers said.

The U.S. Office of Dietary Supplements recommends 1,000 to 1,200 milligrams of calcium a day for most adults.

According to the study authors, diets very low or very high in calcium can override normal control by the body, causing changes in blood levels of calcium.

Rather than worry about increasing calcium intake of those getting enough through their diet, emphasis should be placed on people with a low intake of calcium, the authors suggest.

Taylor Wallace, a representative of the supplement industry, faults this study because, he said, it was not specifically meant to address calcium supplements and heart disease.

“We are comparing apples and oranges,” said Wallace, who is senior director for Scientific & Regulatory Affairs at the Council for Responsible Nutrition. He noted that in the new study, the data that researchers used to draw their conclusions looked at diet and cancer, not whether calcium supplements were bad for the heart.

“Still, there is not a single human cause-and-effect study that demonstrates a hazard for calcium either from the diet or supplements and cardiovascular disease,” he said.

Although the new study tied total calcium intake to increased risk of death from heart disease in women, it didn’t establish a cause-and-effect relationship.

Wallace did say it’s important to know how much calcium a person is getting from diet and supplements. “It is important to talk with your doctor to make sure you are getting the right amount for you,” he said.

For his part, heart association spokesman Fonarow said: “While further studies are needed, calcium supplements should be used only after careful consideration of whether the potential benefits in terms of bone health outweigh the potential cardiovascular risks.”

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10 Incorrect Ancient Greek And Roman Theories About The Body

Working with the limited scientific knowledge they had, the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations came up with a number of theories about the human body. While some were correct, most were not. As a matter of fact, some doctors, philosophers, and thinkers got it hilariously wrong.

Food Was Changed Into Blood By The Liver
Originator: Galen

Perhaps the greatest Roman (though, he was of Greek ethnicity) doctor ever, Galen published a vast number of writings on the human body and proposedmany correct theories. One of the incorrect ones that he believed was that food was digested by the stomach and taken to the liver, where it was turned into blood. The biggest reason for many of Galen’s errors was that he’d never dissected a human body; in his time, it was outlawed by the Roman Empire. His theories were widely followed—practically blindly—until the 16th century, when Flemish doctor Andreas Vesalius began to question Galen’s findings.

9Lambs Grew From Trees
Originator: Megasthenes

Megasthenes was a Greek explorer who returned from a trip he took to India and wrote a book about his travels. He referred to cotton plants that he saw as “trees on which grew wool,” which led to the misconception that lambs grew on trees. From that incorrect assumption, a number of other ancient thinkers, including Theophrastus and Pliny the Elder, mentioned “wool-bearing trees” in their writings, perpetuating the myth. As late as the 18th or 19th centuries, this was still a commonly believed theory, with books published on the subject and a number of expeditions undertaken in search of the mythical plant.

8Light Came From The Eye
Originator: Plato

Plato, one of the greatest Greek philosophers, contributed greatly to medical knowledge—erroneously in a number of cases. Perhaps his worst error was the idea that “a stream of light or fire” emanated from the eye, rebounded off of an object, and combined with sunlight, allowing it to be seen by the eye. An object’s color was said to be “flame particles” that were let off its body. This was a commonly held notion until the 11th century, when Persian scientist Ibn al-Haytham developed his theory that the eye was merely an optical instrument in his writing The Book of Optics.

7Veins Carried Blood, Arteries Carried Air
Originator: Praxagoras

An ancient Greek physician whose writings have been lost to humanity, Praxagoras is perhaps best known for being the first to realize that veins and arteries are different. However, he believed that air traveled through the arteries (probably due to the fact that blood tends to leave the arteries upon death and accumulates in the veins). Praxagoras explained away bleeding by saying the arteries attracted blood from the neighboring tissue when exposed to air. This theory was widely believed for hundreds of years.

6Sleep Occurs When Blood Flows Away From The Surface
Originator: Alcmaeon

Another ancient Greek philosopher and doctor, Alcmaeon of Croton was the holder of a number of medical firsts, including the idea that the brain was the seat of understanding, rather than the heart. He also theorized that sensory organs are attached to the brain. However, he wasn’t always correct. He believed that sleep came to humans when their blood flowed from the surface of their bodies to the blood vessels farther in. Alcmaeon also believed that death occurred if all of the blood went deep into the body.

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5The Brain Was Just A Cooling Device
Originator: Aristotle

Aristotle believed the heart was the center of knowledge and the source of the sensations in the human body, rather than the brain, and he had an interesting theory about the brain. He felt that the brain was merely a cooling organ for the heart and an area for “spirit” to pool. Even though earlier Greeks, including Alcmaeon and Plato, had put forth a neuro-centric model of the human body, Aristotle ridiculed them for their “fallacious” views. In addition, he also thought women’s brains were smaller than men’s, another of his errors that persisted for a number of years.

4Hemorrhoids Could Be Cured In Weird Ways
Originator: Pliny The Elder

Pliny the Elder was one of the greatest Roman authors and publishedNaturalis Historia, one of the earliest examples of an encyclopedia. Apparently, hemorrhoids were quite the problem for the ancient Romans, because there were a number of cures. Using an onion as a suppository was supposed to help, and eating garlic with wine but vomiting it back up was said to be beneficial to hemorrhoid sufferers as well. Using a fresh root of rosemary and rubbing it on the anus was also very effective (it also helped if you had a prolapsed rectum). Perhaps the strangest cure was a cream made from the lard of a pig and the rust of a chariot’s wheels.

3Light Traveled Through The Ether
Originator: Aristotle

While Aristotle influenced civilization for thousands of years, it doesn’t give him a pass on some of his wilder theories. Chief among them was his idea that the entire universe was filled with an unknown substance called “the ether.” Aristotle proposed the theory because he believed light would be unable to move through an empty universe. Like many of his ideas, this one persisted, and the best and brightest of the scientific community failed to contradict it. It was widely believed until 1910, when Albert Einstein proved light didn’t need the ether with his theory of special relativity.

2The Testicles Determined A Person’s Voice
Originator: Aristotle

Aristotle certainly had his fair share of incorrect theories. Not the least of these was that the testicles were a key factor in determining a person’s vocal pitch. Aristotle’s reasoning was that a boy’s voice tended to deepen during puberty, when his testicles dropped (a lot of this theory was dependent on his observations in animals as well). In addition, he noticed that men who were castrated before puberty maintained their “ladylike” voice, as well as a number of other traits. Obviously, we now know the larynx and the mucus membrane within it control the voice’s pitch.

1The Womb Roamed Around A Woman’s Body
Originator: Hippocrates

Recognized as the father of Western medicine, Hippocrates had a number of incorrect theories, most notably his theory of humorism, which stated that the human body was made up of four elements that caused illnesses when out of balance. However, his craziest theory was the idea of a “wandering womb.” Hippocrates believed that a woman’s body craved warmth and moisture, so they needed to get laid often. If not, their womb would get bored and start to migrate around their body. In addition, an excess of “male activities,” could also cause the womb to wander. Depending on where it finally attached itself, various disorders could result, including hysteria. This was still a widely held theory until the Middle Ages.

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