PALM OIL AND ITS BENEFIT FOR IMMUNE BOOST

What you eat is very important. It is commonly said, ‘you are what you eat’. In other words, what you eat has a way of determining what you will become. An international colleague said: ‘For most of us, we feel a certain twinge of guilt every time we eat a really fatty or greasy piece of food, as we know that the chances are it is increasing our risk of suffering from a heart attack… but it tastes so good.  I agree fat meal taste well, but endeavor to stick to heart friendly diet.
Vegetarian or no vegetarian, most of us consume large quantity of oil per day.  Most of the oil contains large percentage of saturated fatty acid that increases bad cholesterol and reduces good cholesterol in the body which predisposes to heart diseases such as heart attack. While most of the oil will fail heart friendliness test, our old red palm oil ( epo pupa) will scale the test with ease.  Contrary to belief that red oil is not good for the heart, there are a lot of researches that proved beyond reasonable doubt that it prevents cardiovascular diseases.
Palm oil
Palm oil is produced from the fruit of the Elaeis guineensis. It is a vegetable oil, not an animal or dairy product, and therefore does not contain high cholesterol. Palm oil is sometimes  confused with palm kernel oil, but it is different. Palm oil is derived from the fleshy part of the palm fruits, while palm kernel oil is derived from the seed or the kernel. Palm kernel oil and palm oil are two different oils with very distinct fatty acid composition. This explanation may not be necessary for some of us who lived in the villages but the current generation might not have seen a palm fruit before.
Palm oil can be classified as both saturated and non saturated fat.  That saturated fat is bad for the body depends on the type; saturated fat in red oil is palmitic saturated fatty acid which does not increase the body cholesterol level. Red palm oil contains a mixture of saturated fatty acids (51%), monounsaturated fatty acids (38%), polyunsaturated fatty acids (11%) and a whole spectrum of anti-oxidative carotenoids (vitamin A), tocopherols and tocotrienols (vitamin E) as major constituents.
Palm oil is trans-fat free. It does not need to go through the hydrogenation (hardening) process. Trans fatty acid achieved by hardening has been shown to lower the good cholesterol and increase the bad cholesterol. In comparison, most vegetable oils (corn oil, soy oil, cottonseed oil, canola oil, etc) require hydrogenation hardening of oil, hence the high concentration of trans- fatty acid.
Benefits of red oil
•It does not promote the formation of plaques in the arteries. Atherosclerosis is the thickening and hardening of the walls of the arteries. Fatty deposits or plaques are made up of mainly fats and cholesterol. Atherosclerosis results in the narrowing of the lumen of the arteries, thus inhibiting the flow of blood.
•Vitamin E in red oil diet inhibits platelets (blood cells that aid blood clot formation) from sticking together. These high contents of tocotrienols (Vitamin E) are very potent anti-oxidants. If a tissue, such as the heart is starved of oxygen, this condition is termed ischemia. Even short periods of ischemia can cause large amounts of cell damage. If the tissue is reoxygenated, this process is called reperfusion. In many cases, the sudden supply of oxygen to cells that have been deprived of it causes further damage. This damage during reperfusion of a tissue or organ can be reduced by the use of certain antioxidants.
• Palm oil diet either increases the production of a hormone that prevents blood-clotting (prostacyclin) or decreases the formation of a blood-clotting hormone (thromboxane).
•The high vitamin A (carotenoid) content of red oil is 300 times higher than tomatoes for equivalent amounts. Vitamin A aids good vision
Warnings- the bad side of palm oil is pronounced when it is poorly processed and badly cooked. To eradicate these likely bad effect the following precautions should be adhered to:
•Do not adulterate palm oil in an attempt to make more profit. Do not mix with other apparently cheaper oil like ‘ori’ in Yoruba language and avoid adding hot water. All those things added negate the benefits of red oil.
•In cooking with red oil, please stop bleaching it. The bleaching destroys all the good nutrients in the oil and converts good cholesterol to bad cholesterol. If your reason of bleaching is to prevent the oil from ‘sleeping’ use your hot plate or burning stove to wake it the following morning.
•Limit other oil and use red palm oil as the people of old age and enjoyed  healthy life
•Be moderate in consumption.

honey as an immune booster

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Honey beneficiary in warding off heart disease

Individual that is worried about wading of heart diseases should substitute honey for refined sugar a sweetener in their tea, coffee or morning cereals. Expert’s assessment honey found it to be rich in chemical substances that ensure a healthy heart by improving blood circulation, helping to prevent blood clot that could affect important organs of the body such as the brain as well as in reducing blood’s level of bad cholesterol.

Honey is a sweet food made by bees using nectar from flowers. The variety produced by honey bees is the one most commonly referred to and is the type of honey collected by beekeepers and consumed by humans. Honey produced by other bees and insects has distinctly different properties. Honey bees form nectar into honey by a process of regurgitation, and store it as a primary food source in wax honeycombs inside the beehive.

It is composed of sugars like glucose and fructose and minerals like magnesium, potassium, calcium, sodium, chlorine, sulphur, iron and phosphate. It contains vitamins B1, B2, C, B6, B5 and B3 all of which change according to the qualities of the nectar and pollen. Besides these, honey also contains copper, iodine and zinc existing in small quantities. Several kinds of hormones are also present in it

Honey has a long history of human consumption, and is used in various food and beverages as a sweetener and flavouring. it has a role in religion and symbolism, flavours of honey vary base on the nectar source, and various types and grades of honey are available.

Historically, honey has been used by humans to treat a variety of ailment.  it contains is cheap, making it potentially useful for treating wounds and earthquake-sticker and war-ton areas where running water is scarce and often contaminated. It is being used to treat burn, wounds, effective in the treatment of stomach ulcers

Preliminary studies in the 2004 edition of journal of medicinal food on honey suggested that eating honey can reduce blood level of some markers that are linked to an increased risk of heart disease.

For many years, blood levels of cholesterol and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol have been used, and more recently homocysteine and C-reactive protein (CRP) have been added to the list of heart disease risk factors. People with high homocysteine level have higher rates of heart disease, cancer, and some other conditions, but antioxidants, vitamin E, and some medications such as statin drugs can lower CRP levels.

Antioxidants present in honey come from a variety of sources, and include vitamin C, monophenolics, flavonoid and polyphenolics. Now experts review of studies on antioxidant properties of honey and their ability to protect cardiovascular diseases such as heart problem indicated that honey’s antioxidant levels rivals those levels found in tomatoes and sweet honey corns although honey by itself may not serve as a major source of dietary antioxidants, it demonstrates the potential for honey to play a role in providing antioxidants in a highly palatable form.

For instance one of these studies involved seven small trials with between five and nine participants. In each trial blood was examined before and after drinking solutions containing honey, glucose and artificial honey (approximately half glucose and half fructose). The solution used in each trial contained between 1 and 3 ounces of honey, glucose, or glucose and fructose. Healthy people experience an immediate slight decrease in total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglyceride levels after drinking the honey solution but not after glucose and artificial honey solutions

This trend persistence in healthy people drinking the honey solution for 15 days, after which HDL cholesterol levels rose and homocysteine levels dropped. The effect of taking the honey solution every day for 15 days was even more pronounced in people with high cholesterol: total cholesterol drop 8 per cent, LDL cholesterol levels dropped by 11 per cent,and CRP levels dropped by 57 per cent.

Interestingly, they indicated that “due to honey pleasing taste, it may be more readily consumed by individuals reluctant to ingest plant-derived antioxidants. Certainly compare to refined sugars such as sucrose and fructose which has no antioxidant values, honey can be a flavorful, supplementary source of antioxidant because of its unique positive effect on risk factors for heart disease.”

Furthermore, substances that belong to a class of chemical substances called polyphenols that are found in honey have been reported as promising pharmaceutical drugs in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. For instance, epidemiological studies reported that quercetin, an antioxidant flavonol that is present in honey, is associated with reduced risk of coronal heart disease and stroke.

The researchers in the review of health benefits of honey for the heart in 2010 African journal of traditional, complementary and alternative medicine in their conclusion wrote: ”This review has clearly demonstrated that certain honey polyphenols have a promising pharmacological role in preventing cardiovascular diseases. After generating more in-depth and exhaustive information of these compounds jointly in vitro and in vivo studies, clinical trials should initiated to further validate these compounds in medical applications. ”

So individuals avoiding honey because they think its consumption can cause obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease, must have a rethink. Indeed, honey contains sucrose, glucose and fructose but fortunately, the substances in honey are healthy.