Gadget: Multi-function Kitchen Cleaning Brush

Fonice Silicone Brush

It can be used as coaster, pot holder, brush for cleaning fruits and vegetables, dishes, pots and pans etc. . . . . .

The price for 1 set of 3 pieces is 599 yen (plus tax) in Japan.

Baked Spring Rolls with Fillo Wrappers

Ingredients

4 dried shiitake mushrooms
5 green onions, sliced thinly
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
1 medium red bell pepper (200 g), sliced thinly
2 cups finely shredded Chinese cabbage (160 g)
1/3 cup canned bamboo shoots (65g), drained, sliced thinly
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 tablespoon sweet chili sauce
1/2 teaspoon fish sauce
1/4 cup loosely packed, finely chopped fresh coriander
1 cup bean sprouts (80 g)
15 sheets fillo pastry

Chili Soy Dipping Sauce

1/4 cup light soy sauce
1/4 cup sweet chili sauce
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon finely chopped
fresh coriander
1 red thai chili, seeded, chopped finely

Method

1. Combine chili soy dipping sauce ingredients in small bowl. Set aside.
2. Place mushrooms in small heatproof bowl and cover with boiling water. Stand 20 minutes or until tender. Drain. Discard stems and slice caps thinly.
3. Preheat oven to 190°C(375°F).
4. Heat large lightly oiled non-stick frying pan. Cook onion, garlic and ginger, stirring, until onion softens.
5. Add mushrooms, bell pepper, cabbage, bamboo shoots and sauces. Cook, stirring, until cabbage just wilts. Remove from heat.
6. Stir in coriander and sprout. Remove and drain away excess liquid. Allow the filling to cool.
7. Cut fillo sheets in half. Spray one piece fillo with cooking-oil spray and fold in half crossways. Spray again with cooking-oil spray. Turn fillo so folded edge is on your right and one short side faces you. Place 1 tablespoon of the vegetable mixture 2 cm from bottom edge of fillo. Fold in sides, roll bottom to top to enclose filling. Repeat with remaining pieces fillo and filling.
8. Place rolls on oiled oven tray. Bake, uncovered, in pre-heated oven about 15 minutes or until rolls are browned lightly. Serve rolls with chili soy dipping sauce.

Makes 30 rolls.

Source: Low-fat Feasts

In Pictures: Foods of Restaurants in Canada

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Coffee May Have Bigger Effect on Your Body Than Thought: Study

Amy Norton wrote . . . . . . .

Coffee has been tied to many health benefits. Now, a small study suggests a daily java habit may affect the body’s metabolism more extensively than thought.

The study, of 47 adults, found that heavy coffee consumption — four to eight cups a day — altered blood levels of more than 100 metabolites. That refers to a broad range of chemicals that change after eating or drinking.

Many of the effects were expected, researchers said, but a few were surprising.

For example, coffee cut levels of certain metabolites related to the endocannabinoid system — the same system affected by marijuana. This reduction is the opposite of what happens when you take pot, the researchers said.

What does it all mean? That’s not clear.

But many studies have found that coffee drinkers typically have lower risks of various diseases than nondrinkers do, explained Marilyn Cornelis, the lead researcher on the new work.

The possible benefits include lower risks of Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and certain cancers.

“But most of those studies are just looking at associations,” said Cornelis, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “They looked at people’s self-reported coffee intake and their risk of disease.”

This study, she explained, tried to “get more at the mechanisms — the biology that might be underlying those associations.”

The findings, published March 15 in the Journal of Internal Medicine, come from a clinical trial that involved 47 Finnish adults. All were habitual coffee drinkers.

Researchers had them abstain from coffee for one month, then drink four cups per day the next month, and eight cups a day the following month. Blood samples were collected at the end of each month.

In general, coffee consumption triggered many expected changes in metabolism, Cornelis said.

But her team also spotted some previously unknown effects. Besides the endocannabinoid changes, there were shifts in certain metabolites related to the steroid system and fatty acid metabolism. The steroid system includes cholesterol and hormones such as testosterone and estrogen.

Whether there are implications for people’s health, however, is unknown.

“We hope that this will be hypothesis-generating,” Cornelis said. Future studies, she explained, could dig into the connection between coffee and endocannabinoid metabolites, for example — to see whether it helps explain why coffee drinkers have lower risks of certain diseases.

The endocannabinoid system helps regulate a range of body functions, Cornelis noted. These include blood pressure, sleep, appetite and calorie-burning. Coffee has been linked to better weight control, and it’s possible, she said, that its effects on endocannabinoids play some role.

She said the effects of coffee were the opposite of what you’d expect with marijuana — which is a famous trigger of the “munchies.”

For now, though, it’s hard to know what to make of the findings, said Angela Lemond, a spokesperson with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. She was not involved with the research.

The study was small, Lemond said, and it set up an artificial situation where people went from no coffee to four cups a day, then jumped to eight daily.

“That’s going from zero caffeine to about 400 milligrams a day, then 800,” Lemond pointed out.

It’s not clear, she said, whether the metabolite changes reflect what happens with people’s typical coffee-drinking habits.

Right now, Lemond noted, U.S. dietary guidelines say that adults can safely consume up to 400 milligrams of caffeine a day — or, roughly, what these study participants downed in month two.

But if you do drink that much coffee, you should not load it with cream and sugar, Lemond stressed.

“You also need to look at your total day,” she said. “People often don’t realize what their caffeine intake is from sources like soda or tea.”

Beyond that, Lemond said, people should think about caffeine’s impact on their anxiety levels or sleep problems.

If you drink coffee in lieu of sleep, she noted, that’s a problem. “So many people are sleep-deprived,” Lemond said. “Even if there is a health benefit from coffee, that sleep deprivation will cancel it out.”

Source: HealthDay

Study Suggests That Cancer Survivors Are More Easily Fatigued

Adults who have undergone successful cancer treatment years or decades previously become fatigued more quickly than their peers who don’t have cancer histories, according to a new study in the journal Cancer from scientists at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The scientists examined data from a long-running study of normal aging, which included periodic treadmill tests of fatigability as well as 400-meter walks to test endurance. They found that, on average, participants with a history of cancer treatment reported more fatigue in the treadmill tests and were slower to complete the endurance walks, compared to participants without a cancer history.

“The main goal of cancer treatment has been survival, but studies like this suggest that we need also to examine the longer-term effects on health and quality of life,” says study senior author Jennifer A. Schrack, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Epidemiology.

Looming concerns over the long-term adverse effects of cancer treatments are largely the result of the short-term successes of those treatments, which have left a growing population of cancer survivors: 16 million in the U.S. as of 2016. But studies suggest that cancer treatments’ lingering impacts are clinically real and often resemble an accelerated aging process, including cognitive impairments, heart disease, secondary cancers, and—most commonly—fatigue.

Fatigue as a general feeling is difficult to measure in an objective way, but Schrack and her colleagues, including lead author Gillian Gresham, a PhD candidate in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Epidemiology at the time of the study, examined it in the specific context of physical exertion.

Their dataset came from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), a project that has enrolled thousands of people in the Baltimore/Washington area since 1958 and generally follows them for life with periodic health checks. Since 2007, these checks have included measures of endurance and “fatigability” during walks and treadmill tests.

“Researchers at the National Cancer Institute suggested that we look at these BLSA data to see if there were differences in otherwise healthy older adult cancer survivors,” Schrack says. “We were surprised by the magnitude of the differences we found.”

The fatigability test for BLSA participants involved a 5-minute treadmill walk, after which they were asked to rate their perceived exertion on a scale of 6 to 20. Ratings over 10 were considered “high perceived fatigability.”

After adjusting for gender- and health-related differences between 334 participants who had a history of cancer and 1,331 who didn’t, the researchers found that a cancer history was associated with a 1.6 times greater risk of high perceived fatigability. The mean ages were 74 years for the 334 people in the cancer history group and 69 years for the 1,331 in the no-cancer history group. By comparison, the team found that being older than 65 years brought a 5.7 times greater risk of high perceived fatigability—implying that the effect of a cancer history was more than a third as large as the effect of aging past 65.

Similarly, a cancer history was associated with 400-meter walk times averaging 14 seconds slower than those for participants with no cancer history—which again was a bit more than a third of the slowing effect (36 seconds) that came from aging past 65. The over-65 participants with a cancer history also deteriorated more steeply in their endurance-walk times from one checkup to the next, compared to those without a cancer history.

“These findings support the idea that a history of cancer is associated with higher fatigability and that this effect worsens with advancing age,” Schrack says.

She and her colleagues aim to follow-up with studies of larger groups of cancer survivors for whom there are more data on cancer type, treatment type, and other important factors. Such studies could distinguish the long-term adverse effects of different cancer treatment regimens, and could even help reveal the biological mechanisms underlying those adverse effects.

“The long-term goal is that doctors and patients will be able to take those specific long-term effects into account when they decide how to treat different cancers,” Schrack says.

Source: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

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