Häagen-Dazs New Japanese Mochi Ice Cream

The ice cream comes topped with a light-absorbing black sesame sauce.

Underneath all that sauce is a mochi-enhanced ice cream with white sesame paste mixed in, and also crunchy walnut chunks.

Video: How Does Cooking Affect Nutrients in Veggies?

Vegetables are chock-full of essential vitamins and minerals, but how should you eat them to get the most nutritious bang for your buck? Raw? Sauteed? Frozen?

You might want to eat those fresh green beans right away, for one — flash-frozen green beans kept for months have up to three times more vitamin C than week-old beans kept in the fridge.

And did you know that oil-based dressing and avocados can help you absorb more nutrients from that kale salad.

Watch video at You Tube (4:31 minutes) . . . . .

Eastern Mediterranean-style Quinoa Vegetarian Salad

Ingredients

1 pound beets
2 cups red quinoa
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
3 garlic cloves, mashed
1/2 teaspoon salt
Pinch of red pepper flakes
1/3 cup chopped fresh Italian parsley
1/4 cup chopped fresh mint
3 stems green onion, chopped
2 ounces arugula
1/2 pomegranate, seeds removed and reserved
1/4 cup chopped Marcona almonds

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil. Pierce the beets in a few places with a fork. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until tender and easily pierced with a knife. Remove the beets from the oven and allow to cool for 20 minutes. Use paper towels to peel off the skins or your hands will be pink for days. Cut into cubes and set aside.
3. Meanwhile, bring 4 cups salted water to a boil.
4. Add the quinoa. Lower the heat, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes, until the quinoa is dry and fluffy. Let cool.
5. In a salad bowl, whisk together the oil, lemon juice, garlic, salt, and red pepper flakes. Add the beets, quinoa, parsley, mint, scallions, and arugula and toss well to combine.
6. Divide the salad among serving plates. Top with pomegranate seeds and almonds before serving.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Source: True Food

Aging and Personality: Not the Man You Used to be

Olivia Goldhill wrote . . . . .

You’re a completely different person at 14 and 77, the longest-running personality study ever has found.

Look at a photo of yourself as a teenager and, mistaken fashion choices aside, it’s likely you see traces of the same person with the same personality quirks as you are today. But whether or not you truly are the same person over a lifetime—and what that notion of personhood even means—is the subject of ongoing philosophical and psychology debate.

The longest personality study of all time, published in Psychology and Aging and recently highlighted by the British Psychological Society, suggests that over the course of a lifetime, just as your physical appearance changes and your cells are constantly replaced, your personality is also transformed beyond recognition.

The study begins with data from a 1950 survey of 1,208 14-year-olds in Scotland. Teachers were asked to use six questionnaires to rate the teenagers on six personality traits: self-confidence, perseverance, stability of moods, conscientiousness, originality, and desire to learn. Together, the results from these questionnaires were amalgamated into a rating for one trait, which was defined as “dependability.” More than six decades later, researchers tracked down 635 of the participants, and 174 agreed to repeat testing.

This time, aged 77 years old, the participants rated themselves on the six personality traits, and also nominated a close friend or relative to do the same. Overall, there was not much overlap from the questionnaires taken 63 years earlier. “Correlations suggested no significant stability of any of the 6 characteristics or their underlying factor, dependability, over the 63-year interval,” wrote the researchers. “We hypothesized that we would find evidence of personality stability over an even longer period of 63 years, but our correlations did not support this hypothesis,” they later added.

The findings were a surprise to researchers because previous personality studies, over shorter periods of time, seemed to show consistency. Studies over several decades, focusing on participants from childhood to middle age, or from middle age to older age, showed stable personality traits. But the most recent study, covering the longest period, suggests that personality stability is disrupted over time. “The longer the interval between two assessments of personality, the weaker the relationship between the two tends to be,” the researchers write. “Our results suggest that, when the interval is increased to as much as 63 years, there is hardly any relationship at all.”

Perhaps those who had impulsive character flaws as a teenager would be grateful that certain personality traits might even out later in life. But it’s disconcerting to think that your entire personality is transformed.

“Personality refers to an individual’s characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms—hidden or not—behind those patterns,” note the authors, quoting psychology professor David Funder’s definition.

If your patterns of thought, emotions, and behavior so drastically alter over the decades, can you truly be considered the same person in old age as you were as a teenager? This question ties in with broader theories about the nature of the self. For example, there is growing neuroscience research that supports the ancient Buddhist belief that our notion of a stable “self” is nothing more than an illusion.

Perhaps this won’t surprise you if you’ve had the experience of running into a very old friend from school, and found a completely different person from the child you remembered. This research suggests that, as the decades go by, your own younger self could be similarly unrecognizable.

Source: Quartz

More Exercise, Fewer Pounds: Cut Your Heart Failure Risk

Getting regular exercise and staying slim can lower the risk for an especially hard-to-treat type of heart failure, new research shows.

This specific type of disease is called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). Ejection fraction is the amount of blood that’s pumped out of the heart. In many people with heart failure, the heart is so weak that it doesn’t pump enough blood out of the heart to meet the body’s demands.

In HFpEF, the heart muscle becomes stiff and doesn’t fill up with enough blood. This causes fluid to build up in the lungs and the body, the researchers explained in a news release from the American College of Cardiology.

“We consistently found an association between physical activity, BMI [body mass index] and overall heart failure risk,” said study senior author Dr. Jarett Berry. BMI is a measurement of body fat based on height and weight.

“This was not unexpected,” Berry said, “however, the impact of these lifestyle factors on heart failure subtypes was quite different.”

Berry, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, is an associate professor in the department of internal medicine and clinical sciences, and director of cardiac rehabilitation.

HFpEF accounts for up to 50 percent of heart failure cases. Treatment for the condition often doesn’t work well, which increases the importance of prevention strategies, the study authors said.

For the report, Berry and his colleagues reviewed information from three previous studies that included more than 51,000 people. The researchers excluded anyone who had heart disease when the studies began.

The investigators looked for information on how much exercise the participants got, as well as their weight. In addition, the researchers reviewed participants’ medical records to see if people had been admitted to the hospital for heart failure over the several years of the study.

The study authors found that traditional risk factors for heart failure — such as high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking and obesity — were less common among those who were more active. People who exercised more tended to be white, male and have higher levels of education and income, the findings showed.

Meanwhile, people who carried more excess weight were younger, less active and were more likely to have risk factors for heart disease, according to the report.

Overall, the researchers identified almost 3,200 cases of heart failure. Almost 40 percent were HFpEF. Nearly 29 percent were heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF), which is associated with weak heart muscle that doesn’t pump properly. And just under 32 percent were unclassified.

The study doesn’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship, but low levels of physical activity were associated with a 6 percent lower risk of heart failure than no physical activity. Those who got the recommended amounts of exercise had an 11 percent lower risk of heart failure.

In people who got more than the recommended amounts of exercise, the risk of HFpEF was reduced by 19 percent.

In addition, the incidence of HFpEF was significantly higher among those with excess weight, the findings showed.

According to the study’s first author, Dr. Ambarish Pandey, “These data suggest the importance of modifying lifestyle patterns to help prevent HFpEF in the general population.” Pandey is a cardiology fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

The study was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Source: HealthDay

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