i treated my girls...

a makeover was in major need...so i took my blogs to the salon. kelly at fabulous k creative couldn't have been a better stylist, i mean design master! especially since the client was so high maintenance! you know designers, we have opinions on everything, especially when we are pregnant and on bed rest :) and the best part about the whole experience, we didn't even need to come home and wash and restyle our hair afterwards...kelly was perfect from the start! i don't think she could have created a blog that was more "me" if she tried!

so that knocks off one item from my to-do-list w/ my business....now onto finishing my website...

*images courtesy vantage photographs/ etsy, fabulous k creative, domino

Terapi Herbal Untuk Sakit Kanker

1. Minum herbal.
Minum herbal 3x1-2 selama 1 bulan nonstop kemudian jeda 1 minggu lanjutkan lagi. Bila ada maag, minum setelah makan dan bila masih minum obat dokter, beri jeda 2 jam.

2. Makanan yg harus dihindari selama terapi.
Beberapa makanan dan minuman yang dianjurkan untuk menghindari atau dikurangi konsumsinya:
1. Tauge
2. Vetsin
3. Tape
4. Es
5. Cabai
6. Kurangi garam
7. Lengkeng
8. Alkohol
9. Nenas
10. Sawi putih
11. Daging merah
12. Rokok
13. Nangka
14. Durian
15. Soft drink
16. Kangkung
17. Ikan asin

3.Makanan yg dianjurkan utk dikonsumsi selama terapi.
Terdapat beberapa bahan makanan yang dianjurkan untuk dikonsumsi secara rutin. Konsumsinya boleh hanya satu jenis bahan saja atau campuran dari beberapa bahan. Jika kita sedang terserang, kanker dianjurkan untuk meminum jus bahan-bahan makanan berikut, lakukan dua kali satu gelas setiap hari.
1. Wortel
2. Lobak
3. Pisang raja
4. Belimbing manis
5. Seledri
6. Brokoli
7. Kubis
8. Apel
9. Bawang putih

Minum juga susu kedelai setengah gelas, lakukan dua kali sehari, atau konsumsi selalu 100 gram tempe setiap hari.
Aneka Sayuran Hijau Pencegah Kanker:
1. Buncis
2. Daun singkong
3. Kacang panjang
4. Daun pepaya

Sumber : (Sumber :http://bima.ipb.ac.id/~anita/kanker_payudara.html)

Belajar Menulis Bahasa Inggris

Sesuai perkataan bu guru Anne Ahira yang mengatakan bahwa menghasilkan uang dari internet bukanlah semudah membalikkan telapak tangan tapi ga sesulit dengan seperti membuat roket, begitu pula dengan belajar Internet Marketing, ada beberapa hal yang mesti kita pelajari tuk menjadi internet marketer yang handal. Mungkin ilmu membuat website, mengelola kode HTML CSS, riset mencari niche market, maupun belajar menulis dengan bahasa Inggris.

Menulis berbahasa Inggris bagi kamu yang belum benar-benar terlatih memang butuh keasabaran, apalagi yang dulu ga suka dengan pelajaran bahasa Inggris, partinya kesel banget dengan yang namanya nulis. Namun kalo kamu ga mencoba menulis maka tentunya kamu ga akan meningkat. Yang bisa mengatasai ketakutan, maupun keterbatasan dalam diri kita adalah kita sendiri, so jangan menyerah bila mengalami keterbatasan dalam berbahasa Inggris.

Sekedar informasi, setelah saya bertapa di Pare, Jawa Timur tuk mendalami pelajaran bahasa Inggris selama 5 bulan, 1 bulan mengambil Speaking dan Pronunciation di Expert dan 4 bulan mengambil Grammar di Smart kini saya makin percaya diri tuk berani menulis bahasa Inggris. Butuh pengorbanan tuk mencapai kemajuan tapi selama tidak menyerah tentunya kesuksesan pasti akan datang.... Amiiin..

monday, monday...

it's offically spring break for my two yr old....and it's raining. off to look and see what martha has to offer in the way of entertainment....maybe we should make bunny cookies.

*images courtesy of eva lindh, beach bungalow 8, table tonic, verdigris vie, fairlight day

Interesting Articles in the AJCN

I just received an RSS alert for the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition's latest articles. This upcoming issue is full of very interesting material:

1. Dr. Neil D. Barnard reviews food consumption patterns in the US from 1909 to 2007 (1). This is something I've written about a number of times. The most notable change is that industrial seed oil use has increased by more than 3-fold in the last 40 years, and even more in the last 100 although he doesn't provide those numbers. Butter and lard use declined sharply. Meat consumption is up, but the increase comes exclusively from poultry because we're eating the same amount of red meat we always have. Grain consumption is down, although it peaked around 1900 so it may not be a fair comparison with today:

In the late 1800s, wheat flours became more popular and available due to the introduction of new [high-gluten] wheat varieties, [low extraction] milling techniques, and transport methods, and during this time new breakfast cereals were introduced by John Harvey Kellogg, CW Post, and the Quaker Oats Company. Thereafter, however, per capita availability of flour and cereal products gradually dropped as increased prosperity, improved mechanization, and transport (eg, refrigerated railway cars) increased competition from other food groups. [Then they partially rebounded in the last 40 years]

2. Dr. S.C. Larsson published a paper showing that in Sweden, multivitamin use is associated with a slightly higher risk of breast cancer (2).

3. Soy protein and isoflavones, which have been proposed to do everything from increase bone mineral density to fight cancer, are slowly falling out of favor. Dr. Z.M. Liu and colleagues show that soy protein and/or isoflavone supplementation has no effect on insulin sensitivity or glucose tolerance in a 6 month trial (3). This follows a recent trial showing that isoflavones have no effect on bone mineral density.

4. Dr. Ines Birlouez-Aragon and colleagues showed that high-heat cooked (fried and sauteed) foods increase risk factors for diabetes and cardiovascular disease (insulin resistance, cholesterol, triglycerides), compared to low-heat cooked foods (steamed, stewed) in a one-month trial (4). The high-heat diet also reduced serum levels of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins C and E.

5. Dr. Katharina Nimptsch and colleagues showed that higher menaquinone (vitamin K2) intake is associated with a lower cancer incidence and lower cancer mortality in Europeans (5). Most of their K2 came from cheese.

6. And finally, Dr. Zhaoping Li and colleagues showed that cooking meat with an herb and spice blend reduced the levels of oxidized fat during cooking, and reduced serum and urinary markers of lipid oxidation in people eating the meat (6).

life is good.

doctor's apt went good, kiddo is staying put- check

pretty, warm weather- check

i get to go to tay's easter egg hunt- check

avett brothers playing on itunes puts an instant smile on my face- check

life is good- double check ;)

* images courtesy of brunch at saks, simply seductive, chocolate therapie

New Review of Controlled Trials Replacing Saturated fat with Industrial Seed Oils

Readers Stanley and JBG just informed me of a new review paper by Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian and colleagues. Dr. Mozaffarian is one of the Harvard epidemiologists responsible for the Nurse's Health study. The authors claim that overall, the controlled trials show that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat from industrial seed oils, but not carbohydrate or monounsaturated fat (as in olive oil), slightly reduces the risk of having a heart attack:

These findings provide evidence that consuming PUFA in place of SFA reduces CHD events in RCTs. This suggests that rather than trying to lower PUFA consumption, a shift toward greater population PUFA consumption in place of SFA would significantly reduce rates of CHD.

Looking at the studies they included in their analysis (and at those they excluded), it looks like they did a nice job cherry picking. For example:

• They included the Finnish Mental Hospital trial, which is a terrible trial for a number of reasons. It wasn't randomized, properly controlled, or blinded*. Thus, it doesn't fit the authors' stated inclusion criteria, but they included it in their analysis anyway**. Besides, the magnitude of the result has never been replicated by better trials-- not even close.
• They included two trials that changed more than just the proportion of SFA to PUFA. For example, the Oslo Diet-heart trial replaced animal fat with seed oils, but also increased fruit, nut, vegetable and fish intake, while reducing trans fat margarine intake. The STARS trial increased both omega-6 and omega-3, reduced processed food intake, and increased fruit and vegetable intake. These obviously aren't controlled trials isolating the issue of dietary fat substitution. If you subtract the four inappropriate trials from their analysis, which is half the studies they analyzed, the significant result disappears. Those four just happened to show the largest reduction in heart attack mortality...
• They excluded the Rose et al. corn oil trial and the Sydney Diet-heart trial. Both found a large increase in total mortality from replacing animal fat with seed oils, and the Rose trial found a large increase in heart attack deaths (the Sydney trial reported total mortality but not CHD deaths).

The authors claim, based on their analysis, that replacing 5% of calories as saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat would reduce the risk of having a heart attack by 10%. Take a minute to think about the implications of that statement. For the average American, that means cutting saturated fat nearly in half to 6% of energy, which is a challenge if you want to eat a normal diet. It also means nearly doubling PUFA intake, which will come mostly from seed oils if you follow the authors' advice.

So basically, even if the authors' conclusion were correct, you overhaul your whole diet and replace natural foods with industrial foods, and...? You reduce your 10-year risk of having a heart attack from 10 percent to 9 percent. Without affecting your overall risk of dying. The paper states that the interventions didn't affect overall mortality.


* Not even single blinded.  Autopsies were not conducted in a blinded manner. Physicians knew which hospital the cadavers came from, because autopsies were done on-site. There is some confusion about this point because the second paper states that physicians interpreted the autopsy reports in a blinded manner. But that doesn't make it blinded, since the autopsies weren't blinded. The patients were also not blinded, though this is hard to accomplish with a study like this.

** They refer to it as "cluster randomized", which I feel is a misuse of that term.  The investigators definitely didn't randomize the individual patients: whichever hospital a person was being treated in, that's the food he/she ate. There were only two hospitals, so "cluster randomization" in this case would just refer to deciding which hospital got the intervention first. I don't think this counts as cluster randomization.  An example of cluster randomization would be if you had 10 hospitals, and you randomized which hospital received which treatment first.  It's analogous to individual randomization but on a group scale.

brown and white= the perfect combo....

i kind of feel that way about my husband and i...

happy b'day dear! i love you...

{i promise to one day make up the two birthday's, 30 & 33, you have had to celebrate while your wife's on bed rest. }

*images courtesy of city sage, love that too, canadian house and home, meyer davis studio, house and home, le love

Manfaat Pohon Jarak

Wednesday, 16. January 2008, 06:01:29

obat tradisional, kesehatan
neee juga...tak tambahi kalo jarak pagar tuh bisa untuk mengobati luka gores/berdarah akibat jatuh, terkena cangkul ketika kerja bakti ato kesandung batu...bagi orang2 desa seperti saya, yang tidak mampu beli Betadine, langsung saja metik daun jarak lalu ujung batangnya akan keluar getah...lha getah itu yang dioleskan di luka, tunggu beberapa saat agar getah mengering baru kemudian bisa dipake beraktifitas lagi seperti mandi, maen bola, bersepeda, kerja bakti....etc....

wisss pokoke jarak tuh tanaman paling bermanfaat di kampungku...meskipun gak diteliti secara valid di laboratorium oleh para insinyur.... ada yang mo nambahi silahkan...


Di zaman penjajahan Jepang, orang dipaksa menanam jarak pagar untuk diambil minyaknya sebagai bahan bakar kapal dan pelumas senjata. Secara tradisional, masyarakat Jawa sebetulnya biasa memanfaatkan daun serta minyak buah jarak untuk mengatasi berbagai gangguan kesehatan, yakni diare, penurun panas, gatal, dan borok kronis.

Kasmin (32 tahun) dan Wandi (29), ingat betul, semasa kecil di Jepara, ibunya selalu memborehkan remasan daun jarak pagar di sekitar pusar mereka saat tubuhnya panas tinggi. Menurut kedua juru masak sebuah rumah makan di bilangan Menteng, Jakarta Pusat ini, malam hari diobati dengan daun jarak, paginya suhu tubuh mereka sudah kembali normal.

David (33), sinse yang berpraktik di bilangan Daan Mongot, Jakarat Barat, mengaku semasa kanak-kanak, ibunya sering meletakkan daun jarak pagar yang telah diolesi minyak kelapa dan dipanaskan di atas api ke perutnya. Resep itu terbukti ampuh untuk menanggulangi diare yang menyerangnya.

Bahan Bakar
Jatropha curcas alias jarak pagar sudah dikenal luas oleh masyarakat pedesaan. Tumbuhan bernama Cina, Ma feng shu ini, biasa ditanam sebagai pagar rumah, di kebun, atau di makam. Di Sumatera, tanaman ini bernama Nawaih nawas, jarak kosta di Sulawesi, Lulu nau (Nusa Tenggara), dan Muun mav (Maluku).
Menurut cerita banyak orang, pada zaman penjajahan Jepang, rakyat dipaksa menanam pohon jarak. Minyaknya diambil untuk digunakan sebagai bahan bakar kapal dan pelumas senjata.

Oleh banyak petani tanaman hias di Jakarta, tanaman berfamili Euphorbiaceae ini dijadikan bahan kawinan dengan pohon lain. Contohnya dengan pohon batavia dan beringin putih.
Masyarakat Tangerang yang diwawancarai SENIOR mengaku memanfaatkan tanaman ini sebagai obat tradisional sakit perut. Kadin UKM melaporkan, jarak pagar terbukti meningkatkan produktivitas ayam petelur serta mengindikasikan adanya manfaat yang lebih hebat daripada Viagra, yang harus diimpor dengan harga mahal.

Manfaat untuk Bayi
Akibat buang air, berat badan bayi akan mudah menyusut. Dokter biasanya akan mengobservasi mengapa bayi jatuh sakit, apakah mungkin akibat makanan atau minuman yang dikonsumsi sang ibu, cuaca dingin, atau sebab lain. Secara empiris, balita yang sakit mencret dapat disembuhkan dengan daun jarak pagar.
Caranya, petiklah tiga lembar daun jarak, terutama yang masih hijau dan segar. Olesi daun jarak itu dengan minyak kelapa secara merata di bagian atasnya. Setelah itu, panggang di atas kompor selama beberapa detik hingga tampak layu.

Tempelkan daun jarak tersebut di perut bayi, tentunya setelah daun terasa hangat. Tiga lembar daun itu sebaiknya ditaruh melebar, sehingga bisa menutupi seluruh bagian perut bayi.
Sinse David mengingatkan, jangan lupa untuk membedong atau membalut perut bayi memakai kain. Setelah beberapa menit, lebih baik lagi jika bayi sudah terbangun dari tidur pulas, bukalah bedong tersebut. Biasanya daun jarak tadi sudah mengering, dan bisa dibuang.

Antipiretik
Jarak pagar merupakan tumbuhan yang berasal dari kawasan tropis dan subtropis, dan tumbuh subur di kawasan Amerika Selatan, Amerika Utara, Afrika, dan di Asia. Tinggi pohon ini berkisar 4-5 meter dengan ranting yang mengandung banyak cairan getah.

Lebar daunnya kira-kira 15 cm. Bunganya kecil berwarna kuning kehijauan dan tumbuh berkelompok. Buahnya berbentuk bujur telur, licin, dan akan berganti warna, dari hijau ke kuning. Bila kering menjadi berwarna hitam. Bila telah masak, akan merekah dan mengeluarkan biji berwarna hitam.
Dijelaskan Dr. A. Setiawan Wirian, salah seorang pendiri Himpunan Pengobat Tradisional dan Akupuntur se-Indonesia (HIPTRI), jarak pagar berkhasiat sebagai pencahar dan toksik lektin. Tanaman yang dikembangbiakkan dengan biji dan stek batang ini mempunyai rasa pahit, astrigent, sejuk, beracun.

Masih kata Dr. Wirian, jarak pagar juga mampu melancarkan darah (stagnant blood dispelling), menghilangkan bengkak (antiswelling), menghentikan perdarahan (hemostatik), serta menghilangkan gatal (antipruritik). Tanaman ini mengandung n-l-triakontanol, alpha-amirin, kampesterol, stigmast-5-ene-3 beta, 7 alpha-diol, stigmasterol, beta-sitosterol, iso-viteksin, viteksin, 7-keto-beta sitosterol, dan HCN.

Di India, menurut pakar pohon jarak pagar dari Institut Teknologi Bandung, Dr. Ir. Robert Manurung, minyak jarak telah diadopsi sebagai minyak bakar mesin kereta api. Saat ini India menanam pohon jarak pagar di sepanjang bantaran rel kereta api sepanjang 24.000 km!
Selama ini, petani Indonesia hanya memanfaatkan pohon jarak pagar sebagai tumbuhan pagar atau pembatas sawah karena dianggap tidak ekonomis. Daun dan buahnya pun cuma digunakan untuk pakan ternak.

Untunglah, setelah ditemukan cara mengekstrak buah jarak menjadi minyak, tanaman memiliki nilai ekonomi tinggi. Bahkan, jika dibandingkan dengan komoditas lain, potensi tanaman ini sangat tinggi. Dari satu hektar bisa dihasilkan 40 ton biji dengan harga jual Rp 2.000 per kilogram.
Seperti diuraikan Rektor ITB, Prof. Dr. Djoko Santoso, dan Rektor Institut Pertanian Bogor, Prof. Dr. Ansori Mattjik, seusai melihat peralatan pengolah biji jarak menjadi BBM dan unjuk kerja generator pembangkit listrik berbahan bakar minyak jarak di Kampus ITB, Bandung, pertengahan tahun lalu, pohon jarak bisa menjadi primadona di dunia pertanian. Sebab, berdasarkan hasil penelitian di ITB bekerja sama dengan Mitsubishi Research Institute, minyak jarak memiliki kemampuan setara solar, sehingga bisa dijadikan BBM alternatif untuk masyarakat



Sumber: GHS
Wartawan: TOK

spring

the weather was perfect on saturday....sunny and warm. i am hoping that it stays that way so i can start enjoying the back porch a lot more often. being able to go and swing and watch taylor play and warren cook out is a great way to spend a day.

*images courtesy of harsh rule, house and home, elements of style, lonny, house of turquoise, brabourne farm

2010 Trail Series

Let's get this party started!!

Kiss winter goodbye, spring has sprung and even monkey pants has come out of hibernation.

Saturday March 27th we will start our 2010 series of trail runs around the London area.

Some things will remain the same, like having a laugh at other peoples expense, and poking fun at Carl for being so uptight on leaving on time, but one thing has changed.

The 'Black Ball' is what you want to get this time.

Each week all runners who show up at the designated trail will be asked to pull a ball from the orange pail white ones go back in and the black one is a keeper you get to hold on till the end of the season.

This will be critical to who wins the coveted trail running jacket. (guaranteed to make you pee your pants)

March 27th will be Meadowlilliy Trails, off Commisioners Road one block east of Highbury Ave.

Google map link when you click the title block above picture.

Fatty Liver: It's not Just for Grown-ups Anymore

The epidemic of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one of my favorite topics on this blog, due to the liver's role as the body's metabolic "grand central station", as Dr. Philip Wood puts it. The liver plays a critical part in the regulation of sugar, insulin, and lipid levels in the blood. Many of the routine blood tests administered in the doctor's office (blood glucose, cholesterol, etc.) partially reflect liver function.

NAFLD is an excessive accumulation of fat in the liver that impairs its function and can lead to severe liver inflammation (NASH), and in a small percentage of people, liver cancer. An estimated 20-30% of people in industrial nations suffer from NAFLD, a shockingly high prevalence (1).

I previously posted on dietary factors I believe are involved in NAFLD. In rodents, feeding a large amount of sugar or industrial seed oils (corn oil, etc.) promotes NAFLD, whereas fats such as butter and coconut oil do not (2). In human infants, enteric feeding with industrial seed oils causes severe liver damage, whereas the same amount of fat from fish oil doesn't, and can even reverse the damage done by seed oils (3). [2013 update: obesity is probably the main contributor to NAFLD.  Obesity is associated with ectopic fat deposition in a number of organs, including the liver]

So basically, I think excessive sugar and industrial oils could be involved NAFLD, and if you look at diet trends in the US over the last 40 years, they're consistent with the idea.

I recently came across a study that examined the diet of Canadian children with NAFLD (6). The children had a high sugar intake, a typical (i.e., high) omega-6 intake, and a low omega-3 intake. The authors claimed that the children also had a high saturated fat intake, but at 10.5% of calories, they were almost eating to the American Heart Association's "Step I" diet recommendations**! Total fat intake was also low.

High sugar consumption was associated with a larger waist circumference, insulin resistance, lower adiponectin and elevated markers of inflammation. High omega-6 intake was associated with markers of inflammation. Low omega-3 intake was associated with insulin resistance and elevated liver enzymes. Saturated fat intake presumably had no relation to any of these markers, since they didn't mention it in the text.

These children with NAFLD, who were all insulin resistant and mostly obese, had diets high in omega-6, high in sugar, and low in omega-3. This is consistent with the idea that these three factors, which have all been moving in the wrong direction in the last 40 years, contribute to NAFLD.


* Fatty liver was assessed by liver enzymes, admittedly not a perfect test. However, elevated liver enzymes do correlate fairly well with NAFLD.

** Steps I and II were replaced by new diet advice in 2000. The AHA now recommends keeping saturated fat below 7% of calories.  However, the new recommendations focus mostly on eating real food rather than avoiding saturated fat and cholesterol.

Web-scale Content Based Image Retrieval

Do you remember the concept of Computer Blindness? It is about people intuitively expecting from computer vision algorithms results unreachable by the state-of-the-art methods. Believe or not, recently I fell for that trick too.

I was looking throw Navneet Dalal's slides on Histograms of Oriented Gradients. They contained a lot of frames captured from the movies as examples. There was the following one among them:

It seemed familiar to me. I endeavoured to remember the movie, but I failed.¹ So I decided to check out some web-sites that offered the inverse image retrieval.

Sure, first I turned to St. Google. The similar image service disappointed me since it was not able to find the similar image of what I want. Actually, it has some indexed base (not very large), and one can find the similar images only within that base. If one somehow find the image from the base (e.g. using a text query), (s)he is shown a button that allows similar image retrieval.

There are different web-sites for this purpose. TinEye positions itself as a reverse image search engine. However, it failed to find anything. It honestly admitted that nothing similar was found. GazoPa found something, but that was different from what I had expected, though the found images were similar in saturation. It was strange because usually such methods work on greyscale images to be robust to the colour levels shifts.

Then I decided to check if the situation is common, and tried a different image, which I found on my desktop:²

I wanted to find the name of its author and the title³. The result was almost the same. TinEye found nothing, GazoPa found a lot of pictures of different girls.

Why is the web-scale CBIR not possible to date? Because there are simply a lot of images in the web, and it is intractable to perform search in such a large index. The common workflow implies feature extraction and further feature matching. From each image hundreds of features could be extracted. Each feature is a high-dimension vector (e.g. 128D). Suppose we have N images in the index. If we extract 100 features from each (which is fairly the lower bound), to handle the given picture we should match 100 * 100 * N features in 128D space. It is really hard to do it instantly even if N is small. In 128D, indexing structures like kd-trees do not improve performance over exhaustive search, because branch and bound method is unable to reduce the search space in practice (approximate methods partly solve the problem). For example, it took 13 hours to match 150,000 photos on 496 processor cores for the Building Rome in a Day project. This also tells us that there are 150K photos of Rome in the web, so try to imagine the whole number of pictures!

But there is a certain hope for success in the web-scale CBIR. First, when we deal with billions of photos (and trillions of features) kd-trees are likely to give sublinear performance. Second, one could use the web context of an image to seed out come obviously wrong matches.

In the long run, we need to develop more descriptive image representation and learn how to combine the textual content with the content. Also, using the user interest prior could be useful. The engine may start the search from the most popular photos and ignore the least popular ones. Thus, the task could be formulated as a sequential test, where the predictor should be able to say if the found match is good enough, or it should continue search.

UPD (Apr 7, 2010). Here is a rather broad list of visual image search engines.

¹ The first thought was about Roman Polanski's "The Pianist", which is surely wrong. If you recognize the movie please let me know!

² I've seen the picture in the Hermitage Museum and downloaded it after returning from St. Petersburg, because the girl had reminded me my friend Sveta.

³ It is actually Franz von Lenbach's Portrait of Marion Lenbach, his daughter.

beauties.....

these interiors are so pretty...

i love the clock, i would skip around the room if i had two of those beautiful x stools sitting in my LR, that designer doggie bed makes me think twice about the gigantic ll bean bed barron sleeps on, that bedroom seems so peaceful- i like the unexpected lighting, and that bathroom, man, i love it all.....

*images courtesy of love that too, wisteria, tricia joyce, aubrey road, decor pad

Awet Muda Berkat Sirsak
Kamis, 18 Maret 2010 | 09:09 WIB

JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com — Sirsak punya banyak manfaat. Di dalamnya terdapat zat-zat yang mampu menangkal asam urat, hipertensi, osteoporosis, dan bisa membuat awet muda. Manfaat lainnya, meningkatkan daya tahan tubuh, menyembuhkan wasir, dan memperlancar pencernaan makanan.

Untuk hidup sehat, kita dianjurkan mengonsumsi 2-4 porsi buah dan 3-5 porsi sayuran per hari. Buah dan sayur merupakan sumber vitamin, mineral, dan serat pangan yang sangat baik. Selain itu, sirsak juga merupakan sumber senyawa fitokimia yang belakangan ini sangat dirasakan manfaatnya bagi kesehatan.

Kita perlu bersyukur karena wilayah kita dilimpahi berbagai macam buah tropis. Buah-buahan tersebut sarat komponen gizi dan nongizi yang sangat dibutuhkan untuk mengoptimalkan kesehatan tubuh.

Salah satu jenis buah tropis yang sangat populer karena aromanya yang tajam serta rasanya yang manis keasaman adalah sirsak. Buah ini sangat mudah dijumpai, mulai dari pasar buah tradisional hingga supermarket. Di restoran dan hotel, buah sirsak umumnya disajikan dalam bentuk jus dingin.

Rasanya yang manis keasaman itu memberikan sensasi tersendiri bagi para penggemarnya. Bagi yang senang sarapan dengan roti, buah sirsak juga sering ditambahkan dalam bentuk selai. Apa pun bentuk olahannya, cita rasa sirsak tetap melekat kuat pada produk sehingga sangat mudah dikenali.

Buah mendunia
Sirsak (Anona muricata Linn) merupakan kerabat dekat srikaya (Anona squamosa Linn). Tanaman sirsak berasal dari daerah tropis Amerika, yaitu sekitar Peru, Meksiko, dan Argentina. Di tempat asalnya, sirsak merupakan buah penting dan bergengsi.

Buah ini merupakan salah satu pohon buah yang pertama kali diintroduksi ke dunia lama setelah Colombus menemukan Benua Amerika. Segera setelah itu, orang-orang Spanyol membawa sirsak ke Filipina dan terbukti tanaman ini dapat tumbuh di sebagian besar negara tropis, termasuk di Indonesia. Tanaman ini tumbuh baik di seluruh Indonesia, dari dataran rendah hingga ketinggian 1.000 meter di atas permukaan laut.

Kata sirsak berasal dari bahasa Belanda, yaitu zuurzak. Kata zuur berarti asam, zak berarti kantong. Jadi, secara harfiah diartikan sebagai kantong yang rasanya asam. Di Malaysia, sirsak disebut durian belanda (Dutch durian).

Sebutan lain untuk sirsak adalah corossol/cachiman epincux (Perancis), saucrapfel (Jerman), guanabana/zapote agrio (Spanyol), thu-rian-rhaek (Thailand), seetha (Tamil), guayabano (Filipina), ciguofan lizhi (Cina), togebanreishi (Jepang), dan seremania (Fiji). Dalam bahasa Inggris, buah sirsak dikenal dengan istilah soursop karena rasanya yang manis keasaman.

Di Indonesia, tanaman sirsak disebut juga sebagai nangka belanda atau nangka seberang. Tanaman tersebut dapat beradaptasi dan tumbuh baik di semua wilayah. Namun, tanaman sirsak belum diusahakan secara besar-besaran, umumnya ditanam secara terbatas di halaman atau pekarangan rumah.

Kaya vitamin C
Buah sirsak terdiri dari 67,5 persen daging buah, 20 persen kulit buah, 8,5 persen biji buah, dan 4 persen inti buah. Kandungan zat gizi dan serat pangan buah sirsak per 100 gram bagian yang dapat dimakan dapat dilihat pada tabel.
Setelah air, kandungan zat gizi yang terbanyak dalam sirsak adalah karbohidrat.

Salah satu jenis karbohidrat pada buah sirsak adalah gula pereduksi (glukosa dan fruktosa) dengar kadar 81,9-93,6 persen dari kandungan gula total.

Buah sirsak mengandung sangat sedikit lemak (0,3 g/100 g) sehingga sangat baik untuk kesehatan. Rasa asam pada sirsak berasal dari asam organik nonvolatil, terutama asam malat, asam sitrat, dan asam isositrat.

Vitamin yang paling dominan pada buah sirsak adalah vitamin C, yaitu sekitar 20 mg per 100 gram daging buah. Kebutuhan vitamin C per orang per hari (yaitu 60 mg) telah dapat dipenuhi hanya dengan mengonsumsi 300 gram daging buah sirsak.

Kandungan vitamin C yang cukup tinggi pada sirsak merupakan antioksidan yang sangat baik untuk meningkatkan daya tahan tubuh dan memperlambat proses penuaan (tetap awet muda).

Mineral yang cukup dominan adalah fosfor dan kalsium, masing-masing sebesar 27 dan 14 mg per 100 g. Kedua mineral tersebut penting untuk pembentukan massa tulang sehingga berguna untuk membentuk tulang yang kuat serta menghambat osteoporosis.
Keunggulan sirsak terletak pada kadar sodium (natrium) yang rendah (14 mg per 100 g), tetapi tinggi potasium (kalium), yaitu 278 mg per 100 g. Perbandingan kalium dan natrium yang tinggi sangat menguntungkan dalam rangka pencegahan penyakit hipertensi.

Kaya serat
Selain komponen gizi, buah sirsak juga sangat kaya akan komponen nongizi. Salah satu di antaranya adalah mengandung banyak serat pangan (dietary fiber), yaitu mencapai 3,3 g per 100 g daging buah.

Konsumsi 100 g daging buah dapat memenuhi 13 persen kebutuhan serat pangan sehari. Buah sirsak merupakan buah yang kaya akan senyawa fitokimia sehingga dapat dipastikan bahwa buah tersebut sangat banyak manfaatnya bagi kesehatan.
Beberapa contoh senyawa fitokimia yang terkandung pada buah sirsak adalah: acetaldehyde, amyl-caproate, amyloid, annonain, anomuricine, anomuricinine, anomurine, anonol, atherosperminine, beta-sitosterol, campesterol, cellobiose, citrulline, coclaurine, coreximine, dextrose, galactomannan, geranyl-caproate, muricine, muricinine, muricapentocin, muricoreacin, procyanidin, stepharine, stigmasterol, tannin, xylosyl-cellulose (http://www.herb4myhealth.com).

Senyawa fitokimia tersebut dipastikan memiliki khasiat bagi kesehatan walaupun belum semuanya terbukti secara ilmiah. Berbagai manfaat sirsak untuk terapi, antara lain, pengobatan batu empedu, antisembelit, asam urat, dan meningkatkan selera makan. Selain itu, kandungan seratnya juga berfungsi untuk memperlancar pencernaan, terutama untuk pengobatan sembelit (susah buang air besar).

Sari buah (jus) sirsak di dalam sistem pencernaan akan meningkatkan selera makan. Kegunaan lain dari sari buah ini adalah untuk pengobatan pinggang pegal dan nyeri, penyakit wasir (ambeien), batu empedu, dan lain-lain (Wirakusumah, 2004). @

Prof Dr Made Astawan
Dosen Departemen Teknologi
Pangan dan Gizi IPB

celebrating green...

my way of celebrating st. patrick's day has had many different meanings over the years...in elementary school i celebrated it by seeing how much green i could actually put on my body, in middle school i toned it down to just a pair of earrings, in high school i think i wore pink b/c i was trying to be cool by not wearing green, in college i chugged green beer, and currently i traded in all of that green for a bowl full of guacamole....

happy st. patrick's day...i hope you enjoy the green, whichever way you choose to celebrate it :)

*images courtesy of design sponge, glimpse of style, partierre garden, google image

Book Review: The Primal Blueprint

Mark Sisson has been a central figure in the evolutionary health community since he began his weblog Mark's Daily Apple in 2006. He and his staff have been posting daily on his blog ever since. He has also written several other books, edited the Optimum Health newsletter, competed as a high-level endurance athlete, and served on the International Triathlon Union as the anti-doping chairman, all of which you can read about on his biography page. Mark is a practice-what-you-preach kind of guy, and if physical appearance means anything, he's on to something.

In 2009, Mark published his long-awaited book The Primal Blueprint. He self-published the book, which has advantages and disadvantages. The big advantage is that you aren't subject to the sometimes onerous demands of publishers, who attempt to maximize sales at Barnes and Noble. The front cover sports a simple picture of Mark, rather than a sunbaked swimsuit model, and the back cover offers no ridiculous claims of instant beauty and fat loss.

The drawback of self-publishing is it's more difficult to break into a wider market. That's why Mark has asked me to publish my review of his book today. He's trying to push it up in the Amazon.com rankings so that it gets a broader exposure. If you've been thinking about buying Mark's book, now is a good time to do it. If you order it from Amazon.com on March 17th, Mark is offering to sweeten the deal with some freebies on his site Mark's Daily Apple. Full disclosure: I'm not getting anything out of this, I'm simply mentioning it because I was reviewing Mark's book anyway and I thought some readers might enjoy it.

The Primal Blueprint is not a weight loss or diet book, it's a lifestyle program with an evolutionary slant. Mark uses the example of historical and contemporary hunter-gatherers as a model, and attempts to apply those lessons to life in the 21st century. He does it in a way that's empowering accessible to nearly everyone. To illustrate his points, he uses the example of an archetypal hunter-gatherer called Grok, and his 21st century mirror image, the Korg family.

The diet section will be familiar to anyone who has read about "paleolithic"-type diets. He advocates eating meats including organs, seafood, eggs, nuts, abundant vegetables, and fruit. He also suggests avoiding grains, legumes, dairy (although he's not very militant about this one), processed food in general, and reducing carbohydrate to less than 150 grams per day. I like his diet suggestions because they focus on real food. Mark is not a drill sergeant. He tries to create a plan that will be sustainable in the long run, by staying positive and allowing for cheats.

We part ways on the issue of carbohydrate. He suggests that eating more than 150 grams of carbohydrate per day leads to fat gain and disease, whereas I feel that position is untenable in light of what we know of non-industrial cultures (including some relatively high-carbohydrate hunter-gatherers). Although carbohydrate restriction (or at least wheat and sugar restriction) does have its place in treating obesity and metabolic dysfunction in modern populations, ultimately I don't think it's necessary for the prevention of those same problems, and it can even be counterproductive in some cases. Mark does acknowledge that refined carbohydrates are the main culprits.

The book's diet section also recommends nutritional supplements, including a multivitamin/mineral, antioxidant supplement, probiotics, protein powder and fish oil. I'm not a big proponent of supplementation. I'm also a bit of a hypocrite because I do take small doses of fish oil (when I haven't had seafood recently), and vitamin D in wintertime. But I can't get behind protein powders and antioxidant supplements.

Mark's suggestions for exercise, sun exposure, sleep and stress management make good sense to me. In a nutshell: do all three, but keep the exercise varied and don't overdo it. As a former high-level endurance athlete, he has a lot of credibility here. He puts everything in a format that's practical, accessible and empowering.

I think The Primal Blueprint is a useful book for a person who wants to maintain or improve her health. Although we disagree on the issue of carbohydrate, the diet and lifestyle advice is solid and will definitely be a vast improvement over what the average person is doing. The Primal Blueprint is not an academic book, nor does it attempt to be. It doesn't contain many references (although it does contain some), and it won't satisfy someone looking for an in-depth discussion of the scientific literature. However, it's perfect for someone who's getting started and needs guidance, or who simply wants a more comprehensive source than reading blog snippets. It would make a great gift for that family member or friend who's been asking how you stay in such good shape.

personal touches

lately warren has been on my case about adding some personal touches to the house....and by personal touches he means family pictures. he thinks the house feels too much like a 'show house'...believe me, my house is far from a show house but it does have tablescapes in the main areas and to a 33 yr old man, that means a show house. we do have family pictures scattered around the house, but they are mostly in our bedroom. i have a gallery wall of black and white pictures of taylor that were taken when she was one. i guess, i have kind of moved away from tons of pictures on every table...am i at fault? my personal touches are items that have meaning like an antique bowl that was my great grandmother's or a great find that i discovered while out thrifting one day (men don't get these things, especially warren). last night taylor asked if this antique fan worked and warren replied "no, your mother likes to put old things around the house that don't work for some odd reason". am i a victim to wanting an over-decorated house? does this mean i lack personal touches? please advise....i want the house to have pretty tablescapes but i also need to please my husband b/c after all, it's his house too!

*images courtesy of jean randazzo, domicileid, unknown, verdigris vie, david jimenez, belle masion, domino, vogue living, shelter

when i picture perfection....

it comes in a subway tiled wall, a soft cream viking, and beautiful porcelain numbers that line my kitchen cabinets drawers.....

*images courtesy of jill sharp and country living

no words...

just pretty pictures.

*images courtesy of chocolate therapie, country style magazine, trisha brink design, beautiful paper