Pterostilbene: Big Promise for an Amazing Antioxidant

A recent study into the effects of an extract found in blueberries provided good news this month about a certain type of cancer. The research showed promise in the treatment of bladder cancer, demonstrating the compound’s anti-cancer activity in the cells. 

Previous research into this powerful fruit has already demonstrated potential in cancer treatment and prevention. Research has shown that blueberries inhibited the growth of Triple Negative Breast Cancer, a particularly aggressive and hard to treat form of breast tumor, and other research shows compounds in wild blueberries may be effective inhibitors of both the initiation and promotion stages of cancer. This latest research was conducted by a professor from National Cheng Kung University in southern Taiwan, and it indicated that a substance extracted from blueberries can induce the death of bladder cancer cells and may be effective for chemotherapy-resistant bladder cancer. 

What’s also interesting about this study is the extract Professor Wang Ying-jan used: it’s pterostilbene. The word may sound familiar – it’s a compound found most commonly in blueberries, and it’s becoming more and more important in the world of nutrition research.  Its unique health benefits once again show the blueberry – particularly the wild blueberries with its potency of concentrated compounds – has more secrets under its deep blue skin.

Pterostilbene: A Promising Compound 

Pterostilbene is an antioxidant found specifically in blueberries and red-skinned grapes. It is similar to resveratrol, the popular compound present in wine and known for its anti-aging properties, but it’s not as well known – yet. (And, despite its presence in grapes, it isn’t found in wine.) It’s one of many “stilbenes” a type of organic compound that is makes up food’s chemistry.

According to Professor Wang who conducted the bladder cancer study, pterostilbene also has antioxidant and antiseptic features that exhibit anticancer activity, and it has the potential to lower blood fat levels. We already know the powerful effect antioxidants have on the body. They help our bodies protect against disease and age-related health risks by decreasing inflammation and fighting free radicals that cause diseases of aging.  Research is in the beginning stages for this exciting new antioxidant compound but it is thought to have a preventative effect on cancer and cognitive decline, effectively slowing cellular aging. It also shows promise for type 2 diabetes by slowing sugar surges and regulating the secretion of insulin. (You can find this study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.) And, early studies indicate a benefit in preventing high cholesterol and heart disease.

Blueberries & Pterostilbene

The best news about this compound is its accessible delivery system. Pterostilbene is most commonly known for its presence in blueberries, in particular the more potent wild blueberry, and also in grapes and peanuts.  It is marketed as a supplement; however, the most dependable way to get the benefits of nutritional compounds remains to eat it in its natural form in food.

If you are intrigued by the unique benefits of pterostilbene, your best approach is to increase your intake of wild blueberries: they are a leader in antioxidants, and the smaller berry with its high skin-to-pulp ratio (where the antioxidants are found) has the highest antioxidant capacity compared to 20 of the most common fruits. At least ½ cup every day provides an exciting, delicious way to boost your health in a promising variety of important ways.


Read more about Pterostilbene’s Healthy Potential at USDA.

Waking Life: Why Mindfulness is the New Healthy

Feel like you’ve lost your head when it comes to diet and nutrition? You might be eating mindlessly, and it could be having a major effect on your health.

It’s unfortunate, but not surprising, that something as simple as eating can be so complicated. We begin a relationship with food several times a day—we must. We eat to stay alive and energetic, we eat to feel happy, to ease boredom, or for no reason at all. We battle cravings at the same time we create celebratory food traditions.

But the biggest food irony lies in the fact that food is also the cornerstone of our health. Good nutrition is essential for disease prevention and longevity. How do we reconcile food’s health functions
when raising a fork is so fraught with implications?

The answer to these food woes might be found in mindful eating – it’s a concept in health and well being that’s trending upward, and just in time. Eating mindlessly, characterized by binging, starving, craving, stuffing ourselves, grabbing whatever and eating it obliviously, touches us all. Besides shaking us from our unconsciousness when it comes to food, mindful eating promises to deliver major benefits in weight control, disease management and emotional well-being. If you feel like your relationship with food is acrimonious, mindful eating may help you mediate, and deliver big changes in your diet and nutrition in the process.

Power Over Food

It may be today’s “It” thing in non-diet dieting, but mindful eating has been practiced by Buddhist Monks for generations. Now, it’s being adopted by workers on the Google campus during their lunch hour. It is touted on talk shows and is the subject of many books. So what is mindful eating? Simply put, it is an approach to eating in which we pay close attention to our food, noticing its wonderful aspects and tuning into what we are putting in our bodies.

The mindful eating concept is a way of adopting a new attitude about whatever you eat that includes slowing down and controlling how much. According to one system of mindful eating, the practice allows us to “recapture power over food” that we let go with when we “allow other people, events and emotions to control how you eat, how much you eat, how fast you eat and how you use food in your life.” If that sounds familiar, you are probably the perfect candidate to put mindful eating principles to work in your life. But eating mindfully does not require that you eat well – that’s only a by-product of tuning in. You can mindfully eat a chocolate cake as easily as you can a salad, and you can still reap the benefits.

According to the The Center for Mindful Eating the “Principles of Mindful Eating” include being aware of the nurturing aspects of food preparation, using all of your senses,  and being aware of satiety cues. Making these changes in the way we eat and approach food is what leads to potentially life-changing results. Dr. Susan Albers, author and psychologist at Cleveland Clinic Family Health Center says in “The Surprising Benefits of Mindful Eating” that mindful eating has been found to help with deep emotionally issues surrounding food, reduce chronic eating issues like binge eating and anorexia, and improve the symptoms of Type 2 diabetes.

The Pleasure of Masticating

Adopting a mindful eating lifestyle might begin by holding a single blueberry, for example. According to mindful eating principles, you might spend up to 20 minutes looking, feeling, tasting and chewing this piece of fruit. Time consuming? Sure. But the payoff is that by being aware, we can tune into sensations of enjoyment and pleasure.

In addition, practicing awareness can help us start training to move past our desire to eat fast and stuff ourselves with food. Because eating fast means eating more, we start to eat less. And, because eating mindfully allows us to tune into what we eat and how we feel when we eat, we may naturally decide we want to enjoy other, healthier foods.

Wake Up Your Eating Life

Ready to wake up your diet?  Start with some simple awareness questions when you eat, such as, “How hungry am I on a scale of 1 to 10” and even “Am I sitting?” (You can download the full awareness checklist from Eatingminfully.com.) Other strategies for putting mindful eating into practice, according to the recent New York Times piece, Mindful Eating as Food for Thought, include, unsurprisingly, unplugging the media that tends to accompany our eating in favor of focusing on our food, and using rituals like candles and flowers as part of our meals.

Here’s more tips to shift you into focus:

7 Mindful Eating Tips is a downloadable tip sheet from Dr. Susan Albers. Dr. Albers is also behind eatingmindfully.com, which has information and resources about mindful eating.

The Center for Mindful Eating provides a wealth of educational resources for practitioners as well as the layperson, including training and workshops.

Are YOU a Mindless Eater? Brain Wansick, author of the book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think hosts the Mindless Eating website, a hub of engaging videos, anecdotes about the way we approach food, free stuff and tools for teaching mindful eating.

Will New Walmart Food Labels Improve Health?

Walmart announced this week that it will introduce new labeling on select foods in its stores. The labels, which will begin to appear this spring, will alert customers about those foods that have been vetted for health. Foods that meet the health criteria will be labeled with a bright green front-of-package seal with the words “Great For You” on Great Value and Marketside items, as well as fresh and packaged fruits and vegetables. Learn more about Walmart’s new food labeling.

In a press release, the company stated that the new labeling aimed to help make purchasing decisions easier for moms, and that it would serve as a step toward achieving a population of healthier kids and lower rates of obesity. The move got the thumbs up from First Lady Michelle Obama, who was also quoted in the release. The company also announced that it would be reformulating thousands of packaged food items by the year 2015 in an effort to reduce sodium and added sugars in their Great Value brand. Both the labeling and the repackaging is part of the company’s healthy food initiative.

To meet the Walmart standards of a “Great for You” food, it must contain certain healthy components and be limited in fat, sugar and sodium. Proteins, fruits and vegetables (bagged and canned – there was no mention of frozen)  and whole grain foods get the seal, as do dairy, beans, and eggs. Approximately a fifth of the store’s foods will have the label.

Will the new labeling efforts lead to better health? According to Food Politics author Marion Nestle, it may prove to be more nutritional clutter in an already untidy landscape. Nestle told the New York Times
that while she approves of the strict guidelines for the labels, she fears they may only promote sales, not health.

It’s no surprise the labeling effort has met with groans from those who study food and nutrition. Labels have been long abused by food companies that advertise healthiness on packages that contain foods that meet no such criteria. Such misleading marketing has jaded both experts and consumers, not to mention prompted legal action. Walmart’s “Great For You” seal may drive home the health factor for some truly healthy products, but whether the label will lead to change in our eating habits and our health remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the principles of healthy shopping at the grocery store remain the same:

  • Shop the perimeter of the store: that’s where healthier, whole foods hang out.
  • Read Nutrition Facts labels, not front-of-package claims.
  • Know the Good Guys from the Bad Guys.
  • Look for foods with the fewest ingredients.
  • Choose more foods that have no labels at all (like fresh fruits and vegetables or their equally nutrient-rich frozen counterparts).
  • Augment your grocery store shopping with local and farmers markets foods whenever possible.

Get label savvy. Learn the latest in Food Labeling & Nutrition from the FDA.

Your ORAC Questions Answered

Part 2 of Wild About Health’s Made Simple Series 

More than any other topic, ORAC measurements have grabbed the attention of our readers over the last few months. Why the interest in ORAC? As part of our Made Simple Series, we are revisiting this nutritional buzzword to see what makes it worth knowing about by answering your ORAC questions as simply as possible.

What’s in this post:

  1. ORAC Basics
  2. Why High ORAC Scores = Health Benefits
  3. Four Steps to Using ORAC to Better Your Health



1. ORAC Basics 

What: ORAC is the nutritional measurement developed and used to evaluate the antioxidant benefit of food. The acronyms stands for or Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, which refers to how much radical oxygen a food can absorb – that is, its effect on combating damaging free radicals.

Why: The ORAC scale offers the general public a tool that can be used to choose the most powerful foods for health and disease prevention. It also allows for easy comparison of foods to see which food is best when it comes to antioxidant power.

The Buzz: ORAC isn’t a marketing ploy. It was developed by USDA researchers at Tufts University as a way to for consumers to understand antioxidant capacity of foods more clearly. It replaces vague terms like “high in antioxidants” or “superfood” as a reliable way to ensure that foods making antioxidant claims are telling it like it is.

2. Why High ORAC Scores = Health Benefits

What: ORAC is important because measuring antioxidant benefits helps us eat foods that prevent disease and help us live longer.

Why: Dietary antioxidants protect the body against unstable oxygen molecules by neutralizing free radicals. Free radicals are associated with:

  • cancer
  • heart disease
  • brain health & Alzheimer’s disease
  • inflammation –  the chief offender when it comes to the effects of aging and disease

The Buzz: The effect of antioxidants on our health and wellness cannot be overemphasized. Research in the field of antioxidants continues, and according to Susan Davis, MS, RD, Nutrition Advisor to the Wild Blueberry Association it is “incredibly consequential for members of our community and the public at large.”

3. Four Steps to Using ORAC to Better Your Health 

Step 1: Know the scale: ORAC rated foods range from 82 to nearly 14,000 in ORAC value, and the higher the better. Find a list on the United States Department of Agriculture or by checking OracValues.com.

Step 2: Know the ORAC score of common or favorite foods, fruits, vegetables and juices.  For example, about 23 grapes rates 739 on the ORAC scale; while about 70 blueberries comes in at 2,400.
Step 3: Understand serving size:  While chocolate comes in at 13,120 ORAC, it’s for 100 grams of unsweetened cacao – an unrealistically high amount to be contained in a sweetened bar.
Step 4: Use the scores to make better decisions about the food you eat. Make ORAC scores part making grocery lists, planning meals, and eating snacks.
What Foods Have High ORAC Scores?  Read ORAC: What’s this New Nutritional Buzzword to find out what foods are big winners in ORAC measurement.

Your Health – Made Simple. No more nutritional mumbo jumbo! Got a nutritional knot you want unraveled? Let us know!

What Does It Mean to Eat “Well”?

Part #1 of Wild About Health’s Made Simple Series

Health and nutrition can be confusing. We are bombarded with marketing messages, inundated with confusing food labels, and assailed with scientific research and multi-syllabic names for compounds and nutrients. 

The Wild About Health Made Simple Series explains health and nutrition as simply as possible. The easier it is to understand, the easier it is to have a longer, healthier life.

Nutrition: Good vs. Bad

Q: Are you eating well?

We’re told by our doctors, by our leaders, and by countless talking heads to eat well and maintain our health; we’re urged to “get healthy” in order to maintain our weight, our heart, our brain, and our longevity. It sounds simple, and in some ways, it is. But how do we accomplish it?

Here, we dump the science and the complex guidelines and strategies, and break down good nutrition in simple terms so you can start today moving the needle toward healthy.

Eating Well: 5 Simple Steps

1. Fruits & Vegetables, Every Day

A healthy diet emphasizes fruits and vegetables. Need a visual? Use the MyPlate guidelines. The new “plate” version of the old pyramid presents the general guideline of how much of each food group we should be eating.

You can eat seasonal food, organic food, or local food – if it’s available and affordable, then that’s great. You can eat across the rainbow and make an effort to get important phytochemicals that provide some fruits’ deep color. But the most important principle is this: fill you plate to half with fruits and vegetables every time you eat.

2.  Know the Basics

Keeping nutrition simple means knowing about a few hot button healthy eating issues. Good nutrition emphasizes dietary fiber and cuts salt, saturated and trans fats, and added sugar. Unless you are dealing with specific dietary needs, as a general rule, you can maintain a healthier diet by doing the following:

  • Reducing sodium
  • Getting more fiber
  • Drinking more water
  • Reducing saturated fat

3. Shrink Your Portions

In order to maintain a healthy diet, many Americans must cut calories. Our health is often associated with our weight. Being overweight contributes to diabetes and heart disease and can shorten our life, and it’s as simple as that.

According to the Lempert Report, portion size is linked to plate size. (Surprisingly, it is also linked to plate color!) If you love numbers, counting calories might help. (Realizing that a bowl or chips and french onion dip will take up at least half your day’s calories helps their importance sink in.) But the easiest thing you can do is shrink your meal. Get a smaller plate, cut portions in half to eat later, or get rid of family-style eating. Whatever you do, aim to get the most nutrition you can from the calories you eat, and eat only the calories you need.

4. Cook For Yourself

Why cook for yourself? It’s simple: You’ll know what’s in your food. You’ll eat more whole, unprocessed ingredients. You’ll be better able to control your sodium, sugar, and fat. It’s more economical. It’s tastier. And, cooking your own meals is almost always lighter. Start cooking: it’s one of the best things you can do for your health.

Is your goal to eat better? Get these four simple principles under you belt. You can start understanding the benefits or pterostilebene and the best superfoods for optimum disease prevention later – it will come naturally. For now, start simple, and change the way you eat and how much. Then, if someone asks if you have a healthy diet, the answer will be simple: Yes.

More on the Web

  • What is a healthy diet? Get a simple definition at Choosemyplate.gov.
  • Give your diet some digital help. This article has 5 Apps for Eating Better that will help you find fruits and veggies, locate local, seasonal foods, and give you a fun way to track of your servings.
  • Break it down. Fruits & Veggies More Matters takes the confusion out of healthy eating and provides nuts and bolts advice about calories, food groups, and what you should know.

Oatmeal Homage: Bowl or Bar, It’s Healthy, Hearty Winter Fare

More oatmeal is eaten in January than in any other time of the year. As this month comes to a close, it’s the perfect time to squeeze in a little healthy celebration of National Oatmeal Month. That’s right: January is officially the month when this heart healthy food gets its due. Warm, healthy, filling and the perfect foil for an array of favorite tastes, this versatile food is as good in a bowl as it is a in a bar.

Oatmeal is the broad term for ground, steel-cut, crushed or rolled oats, and it is known for its many health advantages, including being a source for omega-3s, manganese and soluble fiber. It plays a serious role in lowering cholesterol, and reducing blood pressure, especially as an alternative to less healthy breakfast bowls. Other benefits, of course, include that stick-to-your-ribs feeling that helps you feel full until lunch, and it provides a necessary warmth on a cold winter morning.

But as National Oatmeal Month helps illustrate, oatmeal is not just for breakfast. This popular food is also a windfall for cookies, bars, and breads, adding nutrition and texture to all it comes in contact with. It gives new meaning to “oatmeal bar” by enhancing beer, it thickens soups and chili, and it even has less edible uses, including facial scrubs and shampoo.

You’re the Top

For all its uses, oatmeal’s Oscar-worthy role might be as the perfect foundation for a daily serving of fruit. It shines when combined with healthy berries – wild blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, apples and bananas all work well, but favorite toppings are a matter of personal taste. Some favorites include raisins, nuts of all varieties (try walnuts for additional serving of good fat), butter, brown sugar, milk, syrup, currants, cinnamon, cranberries, pumpkin puree, shredded coconut, citrus zest, and fresh ginger. Some oatmeal lovers have even been known to splurge with M&M’s, cream, and bacon!

A “Smothering” Boon

Top health professionals agree about the mysterious benefit of combining foods. It’s called synergy – it’s nature’s way of increasing our health benefits naturally. Food synergy occurs when components within the same food, or components between different foods, work together in a way that is more powerful than their effects would be separately. Evidence suggests that the components in the foods we consume interact with each other to give our bodies extra disease protection and a higher level of health.  It may be why can’t yet seem to achieve similar health benefits from supplements – they are missing out on food combinations that provide healthy synergy.

Oatmeal provides the basis for perfect synergistic meal. According to Superfood doc Steven Pratt, there is synergy between wild blueberries and almost every other food, making smothering a bowl of oatmeal with beneficial berries a nutritionally smart move. Find more synergistic combinations for health and taste, such as berries and walnuts, an ideal oatmeal topping.

The Perfect Bowl

While instant oatmeal can be a preferred method for some, once you start making oatmeal from “scratch”, you’ll wonder why you ever to opted for instant. Simply use equal parts oats and liquid (milk or water) in a pot and stir for about five minutes until the desired consistency is achieved. For one portion, start with 2/3 cup of oatmeal and 3/4 cup of whole milk, then decide what texture you like best. Opinions on making the perfect bowl do differ – here’s Ehow.com’s recipe for perfect bowl. Or, try this Quintessential Blueberry Oatmeal from NYTimes.com. (That purple hue means nutrition!)

Oatmeal Recipes to Try This Month (and Next!)

Wild Blueberry Research You Should Know About

New Diet, Cancer & Bowel Health Studies You Shouldn’t Ignore

According to Dr. David B. Agus, author of The End of Illness, we are on the cusp of a health revolution.

Through biomedical engineering, understanding our DNA, and mapping the proteins in our blood, we’ll know 1) our predisposition for a variety of illnesses 2) our nutritional deficiencies, and 3) our nutritional prescription for preventing those diseases. According to Agus, this revolution will endow us with the data we desperately need to optimize our individual health.

If we’re lucky, such personalized medicine will be available in our lifetime. But until we all have access to our biological profile, along with the sound medical advice to parse the data and allow us to individualize our nutrition, we must opt for the best health and nutrition advice we have – the kind known to work best for a broad population.

We know that improving the way we eat can be the best preventative medicine. Real foods deliver nutritional benefits the most efficient, safest way: without shortcuts. While we wait for science to help deliver the perfect, tailored preventative diet, eating real food to get the nutrition we need, and staying up-to-date about new technologies that can improve our health is our best strategy.

Part of that strategy includes absorbing health research that applies to you. Not sure what does? You probably already know a lot about your personal health. You may know if you have a genetic predisposition to certain illnesses. You know if you are experiencing health challenges. You also know that you are committed to prevention that will lengthen your life.

That knowledge is the first powerful step toward creating your own personal health profile and eating a diet that prevents and battles illness.

Health News That Might Just Be Crucial to Your Health

What recent research impacts your personal health? The following list includes some valuable new research about health, and their common denominator is wild blueberries. Their anti-inflammatory phytonutrients and powerfully concentrated nutrients make wild blueberries an ideal Rx for general prevention, as well as for body weight issues, maintaining heart health, bowel and digestive problems, and a particularly rare form of breast cancer.

Body Weight & Heart Health. Torching belly fat is not just a matter of looking good– there’s much more at stake than fitting into your skinny jeans. Belly fat is an indicator that you may be at risk of heart disease and type-2 diabetes. Belly fat boosts inflammation and hardens arteries. And, If your waist size is more than half your height, you’re at higher risk for developing diabetes. Phytonutrients, which are responsible for the dark pigment in fruits like blueberries, are uniquely helpful in lowering the risk of heart disease and type-2 diabetes. Wild blueberries in the diet also correlate to lower cholesterol and improved glucose control, and offer concentrated nutrition for few calories (just 42 belly-flattening calories in ½ cup).

Bowel Health. If bowel health is a concern for you, you are among thousands of suffers. As Western diets proliferate throughout the globe, the numbers appear to grow. A new report published in Nutrition
about the nutrition and bowel health connection provides some promising news for those suffering with a common bowel disorder, Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Recent research shows broccoli or blueberries (both were studied in this research performed on mice) may decrease bacteria strains, reduce e. coli, and improve intestinal damage. Colon inflammation tended to be lower for both broccoli and blueberry-fed mice, and tended toward being even lower for those fed blueberries.

This comes on the heels of research into blueberry and gut health that shows that wild blueberries may support intestinal balance and may be helpful in increasing beneficial bacteria (particularly in studies of blueberry powder).

Triple-Negative Breast Cancer. We reported this groundbreaking City of Hope study in a recent post,  which explains the promising conclusions that blueberries may slow down the growth of, or stop, triple-negative breast cancer tumors. Triple-negative breast cancer is one of the most aggressive types of breast cancer. It doesn’t respond to traditional cancer treatment, and there are few effective drugs available to combat it. Such a discovery would have a major impact on those with this devastating disease, and those at risk for it.

But there’s no need to wait to start a disease-fighting regimen: there is overwhelming agreement in the scientific community that efforts to lower the risk of breast cancer should involve eating blueberries, along with a variety of fruits and vegetables. Initial studies credit, again, phytochemicals, found in uniquely high concentrations in wild blueberries, for evidence that they might suppress the proliferation and migration of these cancer cells in humanly-consumable doses. In a world of quick-fix supplements and bottled nutritional tinctures, that a preventative for this deadly form of cancer is widely available seems nothing short of a miracle.

A Bit About Wild

While some research focusing on the power of blueberries utilizes the high-bush berry, many target the wild blueberry, or low-bush blueberry, for their nutritional research. Rightly so. It is important to understand that the smaller wild blueberry (wild blueberries will always include the “wild” moniker) has advantages that the cultivated, or high-bush blueberry doesn’t. If you are interested in amplified nutrition (not to mention amped-up taste), choosing the smaller, nutritionally-concentrated wild is essential.

Wild blueberries have a long health history. They are an indigenous fruit grown wild in barrens of Maine and parts of Canada for hundreds of years, and their natural resistance nurtured by rugged soil and challenging weather has made them an enormously powerful fruit with naturally intense nutritional benefits. There is simply no reason not to choose wild—wild blueberries have an increased concentration of these beneficial phytonutrients, and that means you are consuming more health benefits per serving. Opting for berries other than wild is a nutritionally senseless compromise.

An Ounce of Prevention: Today’s Pound of Cure

While scientists continue to conduct research into cures for challenging illness, they often come up with more mysteries. As many nutrition researchers indict environment, Western diets, and genetics, cures remain elusive. It is prevention that will lengthen our life. Fortunately, prevention is achievable by taking advantage of the readily available foods that surround us, both in their fresh, and equally beneficial frozen states.

Until we can take targeted preventative measures based on our personal health profile, health and nutrition gained through real foods offer their own innate, naturally powerful benefits. Eating wild blueberries as part of a broad color spectrum of fruits and vegetables, may be one of the best preventative tactics we have available to us.

Fruit Flash Mob! Create Some Colorful Chaos

What is a flash mob for fruit? It’s an inspiring hat’s off to edible color!

The credit for this creative way to promote the health benefits of servings, in their rainbow of colors, goes to the kids at an elementary school in Norfolk, Virginia. We love that this raucous crowd includes a giant “hollah!” for blue fruit (and a dancing blueberry at 2:20). Great job, mob!

Ready to do your own fruit flash mob?

Consider the surprise of grocery store shoppers (try the chips and snacks aisle for a little nutritional irony) or fast food restaurants when you and your mobbers go all in to flaunt the wonders of fruit. We’re not suggesting anarchy…but a flash mob for fruit might be just the reminder we need that getting our servings of high nutrition, high antioxidant content, and a deep, bright, variety of color is crucial to health and disease prevention. As Norfolk Elementary would say, Whoo Whoo Blueberries! Whoo Whoo Apples!

How to Organize a Fruit Flash Mob:

1) Know your purpose.
Your mob should make a point and be fun, too. Touting fruit and veggie servings? Find a way to make your position clear in a way that is satirical and entertaining.

2) Get a mob.
Large mobs can be assembled on social media sites like flashmob.com, but smaller mobs can be found with a bunch of willing friends. Large spaces usually require large numbers – a New York City street needs at least 50 – but smaller venues work fine with 10 or more.

3) Choreograph a dance, or write or adapt a song.
Mobs must be original and lively, and that can be accomplished best by dancing or singing. Other types of creative mobs include freeze mobs, mime mobs of Guinness Record mobs.

4) Prepare.
Provide clear instructions to your mob to ensure accuracy and timing, and then rehearse. Mobs do best when participants join gradually – start with a leader and let the others join in 1-3 at a time, until everyone is participating.

5) Check for safety.
Safety or legal restrictions are a must for flash mobs. Check your location first to make sure you are not blocking others from their activity or obstructing exits. Flash mobs should surprise and delight, not hinder.

6) Remember to blend.
The key to a successful flash mob is pretending that nothing happened. Be sure everyone blends straight-faced into the crowd when it’s over, and save the post-mortem for later.

7) Remember the video.
You’ll want to upload it to YouTube.com, post it on your blog and twitter account, or keep it for posterity and inspiration to others.

Think you can outdo Norfolk Elementary’s Fruit Flash Mob? Organize your own and send the results to editor@wildblueberries.com. We’ll post the video on Wild About Health and let our readers be the judge!

Is Tom Brady Hurting Your Health?

Why Confusing Life with Football Could Be Killing Your Wellness Efforts
Superbowl Cupcakes by pinguino, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  pinguino We live in a culture that is devoted to sports – we love the excitement and the competition, we feel satisfied by its clear wins and finite season, and we invest ourselves fully in our affection for our team. Looking forward to kick-off is healthy.Trouble is, we can often attack other goals – like disease prevention and good health – as if they are just another showdown on the field. But not everything is like football, including our personal health and wellness, and thinking that it is can set us up for failure.

Are you treating your health like a Patriots playoff game? It’s time for an interception. You can still wear you lucky socks when Tom Brady’s on the field, but throwing around that sports analogy doesn’t always makes sense.

Is Your Personal Health & Wellness Like Football?

Why It Is 

You’re running offense and defense.
You’re getting aggressive when it comes to nutrition—you’ve armed your kitchen with frozen fruits, you’ve shopped the perimeter of your grocery store, and you’re playing AC/DC’s Thunderstruck – you’re ready. But if your defensive line is benched, you’re in big trouble. The snack table at work, the vending machine you pass midday, and the late-night food commercials during Top Chef all require a strong defensive line to keep you in the game. Being a nutritional Neon Deion is the only way to stay alive in the scrimmage for good health.

You’re as good as your last touchdown.
Go ahead and spike the ball when you cross the finish line—it’s those little glories that make the game worth playing. But it’s only the first quarter, and there’s and lot of maneuvering to go. A fumble, a bad pass or a difficult sack, and all that kiss-blowing and moonwalking in the end zone is ancient history. It’s the same with your health and nutrition efforts. You had kale salad for dinner? Nice work. But breakfast is around the corner and your choices – eggs Benedict or oatmeal with ½ cup of wild blueberries – start all over again, and that salad is just last season’s highlight reel.

You can get slowed by injury. 
Bronco receiver Erik Decker’s knee injury may keep him off the field this weekend, providing a potential windfall for the New England Patriots. The health game is riddled with similar hiccups.  Times of stress can sabotage efforts at good nutrition; the holidays, with its cookie swaps and parties, can act like injuries and bench your best nutrition intentions; even actual injuries like illness or hospitalization can put nutrition and exercise on the back burner. Life is a nutritional gridiron, and as everyone who’s headed for the car a little too early knows, one quarter is never the same as the last.

Why it Isn’t

You can’t depend on your superstar quarterback. 
Football can seem like a battle of the quarterbacks. When Tebow and Brady face off, it’s nearly a two-man game: it’s all about the two helmeted suns surrounded by their luminous satellites. But in the battle for good nutrition, you are your own quarterback. And your own offensive line, your own runner, and your own field-goal kicker. You can’t rely on your star to get you through the season, and your latest hair style makes nary a difference to your heart, your brain, or your cells.

There’s no coach calling the shots. 
If only Bill Belichick could talk us through the right nutritional moves. While keeping nutritional goals can be supported by community, peers, and sometimes even a fitness trainer or nutritionist, most of our life does not come complete with a coach calling the shots from the sidelines. When you open your refrigerator, no one is yelling into their headphones, guiding your choice to chop up some vegetables instead of grabbing the leftover pizza.  Instead, understanding dietary needs, learning new strategies for getting high antioxidant foods, and cooking with health in mind is completely up to us.

There’s no Superbowl.
Football season is about taking it all the way, and that’s one of the reasons we love it: we are always looking toward the final ticker tape parade. But there’s no clear goal when it comes to health. You might be counting down pounds, or tracking your cholesterol and blood pressure. But most of the time, living a healthy, disease-free life is a continuum with no gold ring, and no Vince Lombardi trophy. But the good news is that there’s no heartbreak about a blocked field goal that tanks the playoff. When the season’s never over, you’re always in the game.

The stands are empty.
Cook a meal four times out of seven this week? Choose a wild blueberry smoothie instead of a monkey bun this morning? These small accomplishments can have a huge cumulative effect – and yet, the stands are quiet, and the foam fingers aren’t waving. What gives? As nice as it would be, no one cheers your small health accomplishments. Good health and nutrition choices are usually private wins that don’t get the fanfare. When you realize no one’s going to slap you on the backside for yards run, then the next time you bite into a fresh salad and take a pass on the processed dessert, you’ve only to showboat a little on your own, and keep on.

There is no next year.
When it comes to living a healthy lifestyle, there is no training season and there is no next time. Your health depends on what you do every day, year in and year out. Want a healthy heart? Make small changes in your diet like curbing salt and saturated fat. Concerned with cancer prevention? Maintain a diet that battles free radicals with foods high in antioxidants. Warding off the symptoms of metabolic syndrome? Eat your servings of fruits and vegetables every day for the advantages they provide to your well-being today and your longevity tomorrow.

The bottom line? No Monday morning quarterbacking – get a game plan for good health and start holding the line. Good health and longevity isn’t just sport, and you can bet it’s going to be a fight to the finish.

Brainy, Skinny & Big on Blue: The Year’s Top 10 Wild About Health Blog Posts

What was your health and nutrition obsession in 2011? For many it was all about food synergy, while others preferred to focus on the harvest. This year’s most popular posts span the food and color spectrum – here’s a look at what you liked most at Wild About Health this year. They may be worth a second read in 2012!

Your Top 10 Posts of 2011 

1. Infatuated with Food in Maine? 
This post features the 10 Best Local Bloggers in the local world of eating from those who cover the Portland culinary scene to avid home cooks who love to share their creations.

2. Food Synergy: Nature’s Meal Plan?
One plus one is more than two. This post focuses on the mysterious world of synergy: food combinations that work together to provide more powerful health benefits.

3. At Blueberry Harvest Time, Picking at Peak Means an Endless Summer
This go-to post from 2010, revisited this year, breaks down the tradition and technology of farming wild blueberries and why this little blue fruit is the pride of Down East Maine and Nova Scotia.

4. You Can Trust Allison Fishman
The author of You Can Trust a Skinny Cook talked exclusively to Wild About Health this year and shared her “skinny” story, her tips, and a delicious recipe.

5. First Spring Look: Maine’s Wild Blueberry Barrens 
This year, it was just like being there. Geoff Leighton shares his photos from an off-season trip to the barrens when things are just starting to happen in the land of wild blueberries.

6. New! Harvest Pics From Down East Maine’s Wild Blueberry Barrens 
2011 was all about the blue: these up-to-the-moment pics show the wild blueberry barrens, the post-harvest processing, even a peek at rake-making.

7. Can You Clean Your Brain? New Research Shows Berries Can Eliminate Brain “Debris” 
New research was a boon for the brain, and berries are big winners when it comes to brain “clutter”.

8. Frozen Fruit Myths…Debunked! These myths about frozen include straight talk about the nutrition and performance of fantastic frozen fruit.

9. Skin Superfoods: Eating Rx for Your Largest Organ
Beautiful skin isn’t just about genetics—it’s about what you put on your plate, and these foods beautify inside and out.

10. ORAC: What is This Nutritional Buzzword?
This post provides the basics of a need-to-know nutritional term created to determine the antioxidant power in foods, an important measurement for health and disease prevention.

Here’s to more healthy and nutritious reading in 2012!