Nutrition Quarterly Fall 2022

CINNAMON FUNCTIONAL FOODS • Cinnamon may have beneficial effects on neurodegenerative diseases. • Cinnamon may improve some key risk factors for heart disease, including cholesterol, triglycerides and blood pressure. • Cinnamon contains large amounts of highly potent polyphenol antioxidants. Source: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/10-proven- benefits-of-cinnamon morning. After about a week I felt such an incredible change in my energy levels andhappiness, there was no question about reverting back to my normal eating habits. I was a twenty-two year old who felt as vibrant and young as ever. I felt the way I likely should have felt. My biggest change was by far the hardest thing to convince myself to do – exercise. I was never really an active person (other than working in a restaurant and running from table to table), so going for a jog was never really on my list of things to do on any given day. Once again, I assumed that I would need to be some kind of superhero to get out of bed an hour earlier and go to the gym. I’ll be honest, at first, it I should have. I decided to cut it back to the weekends and began feeling better during the week. My next big change was my eating habits. For the majority of my life, the list of ingredients and nutrition panels were just extra text on the box. So I started learning about what the ingredients I was putting into my body actually meant to my well-being. I stopped eating ingredients that I couldn’t pronounce and began eating things that were natural, not processed. I learned that I was sensitive to gluten and dairy, and quit eating them altogether. I thought that I would need some super-human strength to change my diet, but I started feeling fantastic when I woke up in the was, but then I began to feel my attitude change and a shift in how healthy I felt. I became excited to get up and get on the treadmill, because it woke me up even better than a cup of coffee ever did. After learning how to treat myself better and breaking some bad habits, I now understand what getting older and aging really means – absolutely nothing. Age is much more conceptual and less concrete than I ever realized. How you feel when you wake up is all about how you treat yourself and has nothing to do with what year you were born in. Age is just a number that only has meaning if you assign meaning to it. Stop acting your age, and start acting how you feel. Nutrition Quarterly · Series 3 – Volume 4 12