Healthy Eating

This easy baked frittata (a flat Italian omelet), featuring the synergistic combination of broccoli and tomatoes, is perfect for spring brunches and simple suppers. Even if you are cooking for just one or two, it is worth making because leftovers are delicious reheated in the microwave-enjoy them for a ready-made, protein-rich breakfast the following day. A mixture of whole eggs and egg whites helps keep the saturated fat in check. It can be disheartening to discard the extra egg yolks. To eliminate waste, use liquid egg whites, available the refrigerated egg case in supermarkets.

More than 2 billion people around the world are now overweight or obese, according to a new University of Washington study in The Lancet. Since 1980, the global proportion of women who are overweight or obese has gone from 30% to 38%; men have gone from 29% to 40%, overtaking women in percentage overweight or obese.

If youre over 65 or approaching that age and still watching your weight, new findings suggest you may be worrying about the wrong thing. Its true that the obesity epidemic has exacted a serious toll on Americas health. But for older adults, maintaining muscle mass to ward off frailty-a condition called sarcopenia-is more important both to the length and quality of life than counting pounds. The popular Body Mass Index (BMI-see box), a calculation that combines weight and height, turns out not to be a very good predictor of health for older adults-for whom the rules about overweight may simply be different than for younger people.

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a new artificial sweetener, advantame. A derivative of another artificial sweetener, aspartame, advantame is a free-flowing, water soluble, white crystalline powder that is stable even at higher temperatures, and can be used as a tabletop sweetener as well as in cooking applications, according to the FDA.

Health-conscious takeout customers are going crazy for chia seeds, quinoa, almond milk and kale, according to the online ordering site GrubHub.

The proposed new Nutrition Facts labels are more helpful, more accurately reflect serving sizes and better alert consumers to less-healthy foods-at least in the 10-second span the average grocery shopper spends looking at labels.

Sitting down to a home-cooked meal with the whole family is increasingly a thing of the past, according to a report from the trend-watching Hartman Group.

Milk, long touted for helping children and young adults build strong bones, may also help keep the joints connecting those bones working right as you get older. A new study of more than 2,000 patients with knee osteoarthritis reports that greater milk consumption, primarily fat-free or low-fat milk, was associated with reduced progression of the condition. The apparent benefit was seen only in women, however.

Fresh peach season provides a fuzzy-skinned, sweet and juicy invitation to enjoy the nutritional goodness of these favorite fruits. Peaches are low in calories and glycemic index, a good source of vitamins, phytonutrients and fiber, and may even help fight cancer.

If you think only of your heartbeat when you hear the term pulse, you may need to broaden your vocabulary-although this less-familiar dietary meaning of pulse also relates to a healthy heart. Pulses (from the Latin puls meaning thick soup) are the edible seeds of plants in the legume family. They include beans, lentils, chickpeas and dried peas.