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Healthy Indian Recipes: Doi Maach (Bengali Fish Curry)

5/28/2012

Another recipe by Anuja and Hetal (of ShowMeTheCurry.com) from our book "The Healthy Indian Diet"!

Doi Maach is a popular Bengali fish curry made with unmistakable and aromatic mustard oil. Rohu fish is used to get the authentic flavor but can be substituted with red snapper, halibut, cod, haddock or swordfish.

Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 25 minutes
Serves: 2-3

Ingredients:
Rohu fish – ½ lb (substitutes: red snapper, halibut, cod, haddock, swordfish)
Turmeric powder – ¼ tsp + ¼ tsp
Salt – ¼ tsp + ¼ tsp or to taste
Onion – ½ medium, blended
Mustard oil – 3 tbsp
Cardamom – 4

Click Read More (below) to get the rest of this delicious recipe.

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Review: "Healing Spices"

5/22/2012

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Over the last 2 months, I read Dr. Bharat Aggarwal's best-selling book "Healing Spices" and learned quite a bit.

(You may have read my interview with Dr. Aggarwal, a biochemistry professor at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who became famous for his research on turmeric/curcumin.)

He uses a broad definition of spices. For example, almonds and coconuts are covered in addition to seeds and grounded dried plants that we all call "spices."

What I really like is the clear and concise voice he and his co-author Ms. Deborah Yost use, and how they cite research studies for health claims associated with each spice (and food) in the book.

Some information (such as the anti-inflammatory properties of turmeric, which we have covered at HealthyIndianDiet.com before) you will already know. But I'm sure you will learn many new things. Among the little nuggets of knowledge I gained were:

1. Thymoquinone, an antioxidant unique to black cumin (not the same as cumin), appears to fight prostate and pancreatic cancer cells in a laboratory. Link to the study.

2. Research published in prominent journals like Diabetes Care demonstrate that having cinnamon in your meal daily can help people who have diabetes control their blood sugar levels better. Link to the study.

3. Coconut oil, though full of saturated fats, is made mostly of medium chain fatty acids. A Brazilian study on women showed that regularly consuming coconut oil helped them lose some abdominal body fat (which is the worst kind for chronic disease). Link to the study.

4. People with ischemic coronary heart disease who drank pomegranate juice for a year improved the blood flow to their heart in a study done at UC-San Francisco. Link to the study.

There's more to learn in "Healing Spices" (and many recipes incorporating spices, too), and while I'm skeptical of studies done in labs or on animals, there are several studies Dr. Aggarwal's book highlights which have been done on people that show many spices, herbs, and fruits have a positive effect on people's health.

So if you're interested in learning more about how what we eat affects our well-being, you must read this book! If you have read "Healing Spices" before, let us know how you liked it by leaving a comment or shooting us an email.

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Something in Turmeric could reverse Alzheimer's dementia

5/8/2012

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Last weekend I gave a talk titled "PET Imaging of Alzheimer's Dementia." (To the left is a picture of a patient who did not develop Alzheimer's compared with another patient who did, as detected by a special PET agent developed at UCLA.)

After my talk, I became curious and reviewed the literature on whether curcumin (the bioactive component of turmeric, used in day-to-day cooking and Ayurvedic medicine for centuries) could protect against this horrible disease where the sufferer is robbed of memory, feelings and personality. This is a disease where the suffering is just as horrible for the people taking care of the patient. And while there's one FDA-approved medication (Aricept) that seems to slow down progression by about 9 months, there is none that reverse the disease.

So I was excited to read the research on on mice models of Alzheimer's, which tell of curcumin actually reversing one of two likely causes. The current consensus is that the two causes of Alzheimer's dementia are (1) increased production and accumulation of a protein named Amyloid-beta 42 around brain cells, and (2) accumulation of another protein named tau tangles inside brain cells, both of which evoke an inflammatory response leading to the eventual death of these brain cells.

Gary Cole, Ph.D., a UCLA researcher, has shown in vitro experiments (such as in petri dishes in the lab) and in mice that curcumin has 3 major effects that appear to fight the Amyloid cause of Alzheimer's: it (a) breaks down Amyloid-beta so that it doesn't accumulate, (b) prevents the protein from forming, and (c) helps reduce how much cholesterol is available in the brain.

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Know a restaurant that offers brown rice?

5/1/2012

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I dined with my family at an Indo-Chinese restaurant this weekend, and yet again no brown rice on the menu. Of the last 5 Indian restaurants I've eaten at this past half-year, 4 offered white rice only. (Read why brown rice is better.)

This experience has led me to highlight a restaurant in Houston that puts brown rice on the menu: Masala Wok. For each curry dish there are two options for the same price: (1) white rice plus naan, or (2) brown rice with no naan. The easy way to think about this is (1) more food, or (2) less food. Fair enough. (Read on!)

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Healthy Indian Recipes: Doi Maach (Bengali Fish Curry)

Review: "Healing Spices"

Something in Turmeric could reverse Alzheimer's dementia

Know a restaurant that offers brown rice?

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