Gypsy Picnic
My earned ACF Medals
The first few times winning ACF medals was a amazing experience, I encourage everyone who is in the culinary world to compete. I have learned so much from competitions and try to improve each time I compete. It is nice to win a gold medal but I have to say winning gold isn't everything. It is what you get out of it that's important. If you don't learn from your wins or mistakes then whats the point of competing? I have entered in over 20 events. Didn't win all gold, mostly silvers. But I did have fun and when I did win a gold I was pretty excited. I will be out there again trying my best and if I don't win no big lose, I am just happy to be there and experience the excitement. Hope to see you there and good luck if you decide to compete in a culinary event.
Fajitas at El Paso Cafe
If your the are in the need of good Mexican food and margaritas, please try El Paso Cafe. You will not go wrong. I found El Paso Cafe by accident while getting lost around Arlington, Virginia. I felt like I walked across the border into Mexico. I love it it there and I know once you visit you will too, check out for yourself and let me know what you think.
Berry Austin
Another day in Austin and I am in need of more Ice Cream! Today I went to Berry Austin, They have self serve ice cream and sorbet. Just pour it yourself and add the topping of your choice and have the cashier weight it and your on your way to a delious and cool dessert. Just thinking about it makes me want to go back right now to get more. It was a fun place to visit. Check out when you get here in Texas! Located on 5523 Balcones Drive, Austin, TX, 78731
NYT
Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss
By ADAM BRYANT
Mountain View, Calif.
IN early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen.
Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app.
They wanted to build better bosses.
So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints.
Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.
Now, brace yourself. Because the directives might seem so forehead-slappingly obvious — so, well, duh — it’s hard to believe that it took the mighty Google so long to figure them out:
“Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.”
“Help your employees with career development.”
“Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.”
The list goes on, reading like a whiteboard gag from an episode of “The Office.”
“My first reaction was, that’s it?” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” which is Google speak for human resources.
But then, Mr. Bock and his team began ranking those eight directives by importance. And this is where Project Oxygen gets interesting.
For much of its 13-year history, particularly the early years, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place.
But Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.
“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”
Project Oxygen doesn’t fit neatly into the usual Google story line of hits (like its search engine) and misses (like the start last year of Buzz, its stab at social networking). Management is much squishier to analyze, after all, and the topic often feels a bit like golf. You can find thousands of tips and rules for how to become a better golfer, and just as many for how to become a better manager. Most of them seem to make perfect sense.
Problems start when you try to keep all those rules in your head at the same time — thus the golf cliché, “paralysis by analysis.” In management, as in golf, the greats make it all look effortless, which only adds to the sense of mystery and frustration for those who struggle to get better.
That caveat aside, Project Oxygen is noteworthy for a few reasons, according to academics and experts in this field.
H.R. has long run on gut instincts more than hard data. But a growing number of companies are trying to apply a data-driven approach to the unpredictable world of human interactions.
“Google is really at the leading edge of that,” says Todd Safferstone, managing director of the Corporate Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board, who has a good perch to see what H.R. executives at more than 1,000 big companies are up to.
Project Oxygen is also unusual, Mr. Safferstone says, because it is based on Google’s own data, which means that it will feel more valid to those Google employees who like to scoff at conventional wisdom.
Many companies, he explained, adopt generic management models that tell people the roughly 20 things they should do as managers, without ranking those traits by importance. Those models often suffer “a lot of organ rejection” in companies, he added, because they are not presented with any evidence that they will make a difference, nor do they prioritize what matters.
“Most companies are better at exhorting you to be a great manager, rather than telling you how to be a great manager,” Mr. Safferstone says.
PROJECT OXYGEN started with some basic assumptions.
People typically leave a company for one of three reasons, or a combination of them. The first is that they don’t feel a connection to the mission of the company, or sense that their work matters. The second is that they don’t really like or respect their co-workers. The third is they have a terrible boss — and this was the biggest variable. Google, where performance reviews are done quarterly, rather than annually, saw huge swings in the ratings that employees gave to their bosses.
Managers also had a much greater impact on employees’ performance and how they felt about their job than any other factor, Google found.
“The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better,” Mr. Bock says. “So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good? And then you start saying: Well, what makes them that good? And how do you do it?”
In Project Oxygen, the statisticians gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. Then they spent time coding the comments in order to look for patterns.
Once they had some working theories, they figured out a system for interviewing managers to gather more data, and to look for evidence that supported their notions. The final step was to code and synthesize all those results — more than 400 pages of interview notes — and then they spent much of last year rolling out the results to employees and incorporating them into various training programs.
The process of reading and coding all the information was time-consuming. This was one area where computers couldn’t help, says Michelle Donovan, a manager of people analytics who was involved in the study.
“People say there’s software that can help you do that,” she says. “It’s been our experience that you just have to get in there and read it.”
GIVEN the familiar feel of the list of eight qualities, the project might have seemed like an exercise in reinventing the wheel. But Google generally prefers, for better or worse, to build its own wheels.
“We want to understand what works at Google rather than what worked in any other organization,” says Prasad Setty, Google’s vice president for people analytics and compensation.
Once Google had its list, the company started teaching it in training programs, as well as in coaching and performance review sessions with individual employees. It paid off quickly.
“We were able to have a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers,” Mr. Bock says.
He tells the story of one manager whose employees seemed to despise him. He was driving them too hard. They found him bossy, arrogant, political, secretive. They wanted to quit his team.
“He’s brilliant, but he did everything wrong when it came to leading a team,” Mr. Bock recalls.
Because of that heavy hand, this manager was denied a promotion he wanted, and was told that his style was the reason. But Google gave him one-on-one coaching — the company has coaches on staff, rather than hiring from the outside. Six months later, team members were grudgingly acknowledging in surveys that the manager had improved.
“And a year later, it’s actually quite a bit better,” Mr. Bock says. “It’s still not great. He’s nowhere near one of our best managers, but he’s not our worst anymore. And he got promoted.”
Mark Klenk, an engineering manager whom Google made available for an interview, said the Project Oxygen findings, and the subsequent training, helped him understand the importance of giving clear and direct feedback to the people he supervises.
“There are cases with some personalities where they are not necessarily realizing they need a course correction,” Mr. Klenk says. “So it’s just about being really clear about saying, ‘O.K., I understand what you are doing here, but let’s talk about the results, and this is the goal.’ ”
“I’m doing that a lot more,” he says, adding that the people he manages seem to like it. “I’ve gotten direct feedback where they’ve thanked me for being clear.”
GOOGLE executives say they aren’t crunching all this data to develop some algorithm of successful management. The point, they say, is to provide the data and to make people aware of it, so that managers can understand what works and, just as important, what doesn’t.
The traps can show up in areas like hiring. Managers often want to hire people who seem just like them. So Google compiles elaborate dossiers on candidates from the interview process, and hiring decisions are made by a group. “We do everything to minimize the authority and power of the manager in making a hiring decision,” Mr. Bock explains.
A person with an opening on her team, for instance, may have short-term needs that aren’t aligned with the company’s long-term interests. “The metaphor is, if you need an administrative assistant, you’re going to be really picky the first week, and at six months, you’re going to take anyone you can get,” Mr. Bock says.
Google also tries to point out predictable traps in performance reviews, which are often done with input from a group. The company has compiled a list of “cognitive biases” for employees to keep handy during these discussions. For example, somebody may have just had a bad experience with the person being reviewed, and that one experience inevitably trumps recollections of all the good work that person has done in recent months. There’s also the “halo/horns” effect, in which a single personality trait skews someone’s perception of a colleague’s performance.
Google even points out these kinds of biases in its cafeteria line. The company stacks smaller plates next to bigger ones at the front of the line, and it tells people that research shows that diners generally eat everything on their plate, even if they are full halfway through the meal. By using the smaller plate, Google says, they could drop 10 to 15 pounds in a year.
“The thing that moves or nudges Googlers is facts; they like information,” says Ms. Donovan, who was involved in the management effectiveness study and the effort to encourage healthier eating. “They don’t like being told what to do. They’re just, ‘Give me the facts and I’m smart, I’ll decide.’ ”
The true test of Google’s new management model, of course, is whether it will help its business performance of the long haul. Just a few hours after Mr. Bock was interviewed for this article in mid-January, Google surprised the world by announcing that Larry Page, one of its co-founders, was taking over as C.E.O. from Eric E. Schmidt.
Though Mr. Schmidt explained the move on Twitter by writing, “Day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed,” the company made clear that the point was to speed up decision-making and to simplify management.
Google clearly hopes to recapture some of the nimbleness and innovative spirit of its early years. But will Project Oxygen help a grown-up Google get its start-up mojo back?
D. Scott DeRue, a management professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, applauds Google for its data-driven method for management. That said, he noted that while Google’s approach might be unusual, its findings nevertheless echoed what other research had shown to be effective at other companies. And that, in itself, is a useful exercise.
“Although people are always looking for the next new thing in leadership,” he said, “Google’s data suggest that not much has changed in terms of what makes for an effective leader.” Whether Google’s eight rules will still apply as the company evolves is anyone’s guess. They certainly aren’t chiseled in stone. Mr. Bock’s group is continuing to test them for effectiveness, watching for results from all the training the company is doing to reinforce the behaviors.
For now, Mr. Bock says he is particularly struck by the simplicity of the rules, and the fact that applying them doesn’t require a personality transplant for a manager.
“You don’t actually need to change who the person is,” he says. “What it means is, if I’m a manager and I want to get better, and I want more out of my people and I want them to be happier, two of the most important things I can do is just make sure I have some time for them and to be consistent. And that’s more important than doing the rest of the stuff.”
By ADAM BRYANT
Mountain View, Calif.
IN early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen.
Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app.
They wanted to build better bosses.
So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints.
Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.
Now, brace yourself. Because the directives might seem so forehead-slappingly obvious — so, well, duh — it’s hard to believe that it took the mighty Google so long to figure them out:
“Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.”
“Help your employees with career development.”
“Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.”
The list goes on, reading like a whiteboard gag from an episode of “The Office.”
“My first reaction was, that’s it?” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” which is Google speak for human resources.
But then, Mr. Bock and his team began ranking those eight directives by importance. And this is where Project Oxygen gets interesting.
For much of its 13-year history, particularly the early years, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place.
But Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.
“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”
Project Oxygen doesn’t fit neatly into the usual Google story line of hits (like its search engine) and misses (like the start last year of Buzz, its stab at social networking). Management is much squishier to analyze, after all, and the topic often feels a bit like golf. You can find thousands of tips and rules for how to become a better golfer, and just as many for how to become a better manager. Most of them seem to make perfect sense.
Problems start when you try to keep all those rules in your head at the same time — thus the golf cliché, “paralysis by analysis.” In management, as in golf, the greats make it all look effortless, which only adds to the sense of mystery and frustration for those who struggle to get better.
That caveat aside, Project Oxygen is noteworthy for a few reasons, according to academics and experts in this field.
H.R. has long run on gut instincts more than hard data. But a growing number of companies are trying to apply a data-driven approach to the unpredictable world of human interactions.
“Google is really at the leading edge of that,” says Todd Safferstone, managing director of the Corporate Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board, who has a good perch to see what H.R. executives at more than 1,000 big companies are up to.
Project Oxygen is also unusual, Mr. Safferstone says, because it is based on Google’s own data, which means that it will feel more valid to those Google employees who like to scoff at conventional wisdom.
Many companies, he explained, adopt generic management models that tell people the roughly 20 things they should do as managers, without ranking those traits by importance. Those models often suffer “a lot of organ rejection” in companies, he added, because they are not presented with any evidence that they will make a difference, nor do they prioritize what matters.
“Most companies are better at exhorting you to be a great manager, rather than telling you how to be a great manager,” Mr. Safferstone says.
PROJECT OXYGEN started with some basic assumptions.
People typically leave a company for one of three reasons, or a combination of them. The first is that they don’t feel a connection to the mission of the company, or sense that their work matters. The second is that they don’t really like or respect their co-workers. The third is they have a terrible boss — and this was the biggest variable. Google, where performance reviews are done quarterly, rather than annually, saw huge swings in the ratings that employees gave to their bosses.
Managers also had a much greater impact on employees’ performance and how they felt about their job than any other factor, Google found.
“The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better,” Mr. Bock says. “So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good? And then you start saying: Well, what makes them that good? And how do you do it?”
In Project Oxygen, the statisticians gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. Then they spent time coding the comments in order to look for patterns.
Once they had some working theories, they figured out a system for interviewing managers to gather more data, and to look for evidence that supported their notions. The final step was to code and synthesize all those results — more than 400 pages of interview notes — and then they spent much of last year rolling out the results to employees and incorporating them into various training programs.
The process of reading and coding all the information was time-consuming. This was one area where computers couldn’t help, says Michelle Donovan, a manager of people analytics who was involved in the study.
“People say there’s software that can help you do that,” she says. “It’s been our experience that you just have to get in there and read it.”
GIVEN the familiar feel of the list of eight qualities, the project might have seemed like an exercise in reinventing the wheel. But Google generally prefers, for better or worse, to build its own wheels.
“We want to understand what works at Google rather than what worked in any other organization,” says Prasad Setty, Google’s vice president for people analytics and compensation.
Once Google had its list, the company started teaching it in training programs, as well as in coaching and performance review sessions with individual employees. It paid off quickly.
“We were able to have a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers,” Mr. Bock says.
He tells the story of one manager whose employees seemed to despise him. He was driving them too hard. They found him bossy, arrogant, political, secretive. They wanted to quit his team.
“He’s brilliant, but he did everything wrong when it came to leading a team,” Mr. Bock recalls.
Because of that heavy hand, this manager was denied a promotion he wanted, and was told that his style was the reason. But Google gave him one-on-one coaching — the company has coaches on staff, rather than hiring from the outside. Six months later, team members were grudgingly acknowledging in surveys that the manager had improved.
“And a year later, it’s actually quite a bit better,” Mr. Bock says. “It’s still not great. He’s nowhere near one of our best managers, but he’s not our worst anymore. And he got promoted.”
Mark Klenk, an engineering manager whom Google made available for an interview, said the Project Oxygen findings, and the subsequent training, helped him understand the importance of giving clear and direct feedback to the people he supervises.
“There are cases with some personalities where they are not necessarily realizing they need a course correction,” Mr. Klenk says. “So it’s just about being really clear about saying, ‘O.K., I understand what you are doing here, but let’s talk about the results, and this is the goal.’ ”
“I’m doing that a lot more,” he says, adding that the people he manages seem to like it. “I’ve gotten direct feedback where they’ve thanked me for being clear.”
GOOGLE executives say they aren’t crunching all this data to develop some algorithm of successful management. The point, they say, is to provide the data and to make people aware of it, so that managers can understand what works and, just as important, what doesn’t.
The traps can show up in areas like hiring. Managers often want to hire people who seem just like them. So Google compiles elaborate dossiers on candidates from the interview process, and hiring decisions are made by a group. “We do everything to minimize the authority and power of the manager in making a hiring decision,” Mr. Bock explains.
A person with an opening on her team, for instance, may have short-term needs that aren’t aligned with the company’s long-term interests. “The metaphor is, if you need an administrative assistant, you’re going to be really picky the first week, and at six months, you’re going to take anyone you can get,” Mr. Bock says.
Google also tries to point out predictable traps in performance reviews, which are often done with input from a group. The company has compiled a list of “cognitive biases” for employees to keep handy during these discussions. For example, somebody may have just had a bad experience with the person being reviewed, and that one experience inevitably trumps recollections of all the good work that person has done in recent months. There’s also the “halo/horns” effect, in which a single personality trait skews someone’s perception of a colleague’s performance.
Google even points out these kinds of biases in its cafeteria line. The company stacks smaller plates next to bigger ones at the front of the line, and it tells people that research shows that diners generally eat everything on their plate, even if they are full halfway through the meal. By using the smaller plate, Google says, they could drop 10 to 15 pounds in a year.
“The thing that moves or nudges Googlers is facts; they like information,” says Ms. Donovan, who was involved in the management effectiveness study and the effort to encourage healthier eating. “They don’t like being told what to do. They’re just, ‘Give me the facts and I’m smart, I’ll decide.’ ”
The true test of Google’s new management model, of course, is whether it will help its business performance of the long haul. Just a few hours after Mr. Bock was interviewed for this article in mid-January, Google surprised the world by announcing that Larry Page, one of its co-founders, was taking over as C.E.O. from Eric E. Schmidt.
Though Mr. Schmidt explained the move on Twitter by writing, “Day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed,” the company made clear that the point was to speed up decision-making and to simplify management.
Google clearly hopes to recapture some of the nimbleness and innovative spirit of its early years. But will Project Oxygen help a grown-up Google get its start-up mojo back?
D. Scott DeRue, a management professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, applauds Google for its data-driven method for management. That said, he noted that while Google’s approach might be unusual, its findings nevertheless echoed what other research had shown to be effective at other companies. And that, in itself, is a useful exercise.
“Although people are always looking for the next new thing in leadership,” he said, “Google’s data suggest that not much has changed in terms of what makes for an effective leader.” Whether Google’s eight rules will still apply as the company evolves is anyone’s guess. They certainly aren’t chiseled in stone. Mr. Bock’s group is continuing to test them for effectiveness, watching for results from all the training the company is doing to reinforce the behaviors.
For now, Mr. Bock says he is particularly struck by the simplicity of the rules, and the fact that applying them doesn’t require a personality transplant for a manager.
“You don’t actually need to change who the person is,” he says. “What it means is, if I’m a manager and I want to get better, and I want more out of my people and I want them to be happier, two of the most important things I can do is just make sure I have some time for them and to be consistent. And that’s more important than doing the rest of the stuff.”
Amy's Ice Cream
This week I Flew back to back in Austin, Texas because I just can't stay away. One of the places I often visit is Amy's Ice Cream and because of the beautiful weather here I need something to cool me down a bit. Today the weather is sunny and super warm, not a cloud in the ski makes for a perfect day to eat ice cream from Amy's. I ordered the killer queen. It has chocolate ice cream with chocolate pebble puffs and peanut butter chunks. It sure hit the spot!
Here is the link if you like to check it out http://www.amysicecreams.com/2.0/#/home/
Here is the link if you like to check it out http://www.amysicecreams.com/2.0/#/home/
Student Skills
Our team got a gold in the student skills category. Here is our gold medal four course meal
My 6 platted desserts
Team Pentagon!
Pastry Live competition
Here I am in my live competition, I had hour and half to make a dessert for four people.I end up winning a Gold Medal. My dessert (from bottom to the top) chocolate brownie, vanilla custard, chocolate board, white chocolate mouse, chocolate board. What you don't see I added a berry compote, with a blueberry sorbet.
Coca-Cola’s Secret Recipe Finally Revealed
The secret recipe of Coke has been hidden and locked down for 125 years. But apparently, not anymore. This American Life says they've found the ingredients that make up the delicious bubbly cola and have revealed it to our delight.
The story starts with John Pemberton, a Civil War veteran who's credited with inventing Coca-Cola. His original recipe was written down in a recipe book of various ointments and medicines that was passed down from generation to generation.
The recipe:
Fluid extract of Coca: 3 drams USP
Citric acid: 3 oz
Caffeine: 1 oz
Sugar: 30 (unclear quantity)
Water: 2.5 gal
Lime juice: 2 pints, 1 quart
Vanilla: 1 oz
Caramel: 1.5 oz or more for colorThe secret 7X flavor (use 2 oz of flavor to 5 gals syrup):
Alcohol: 8 oz
Orange oil: 20 drops
Lemon oil: 30 drops
Nutmeg oil: 10 drops
Coriander: 5 drops
Neroli: 10 drops
Cinnamon: 10 drops
Coke has become infamous in guarding their secret recipe with tales of the recipe being under 24 hour surveillance, Coca-Cola executives only knowing half the formula or that the two people who know the recipe can never fly together. It's added to the allure of Coke, for sure, but there's also some truth to the that. When Asa Candler, an early Coke President, bought the original formula from Pemberton in 1887, he was so paranoid about people stealing the recipe that he ordered that the recipe could never be written down again. He also removed all labels from the ingredient bottles and went through company mail to see if anyone was snitching.
Truth be told though, it's impossible to fully replicate Coke's recipe because there's one ingredient only Coca-Cola can get: fluid extract of coca (which is coca leaves stripped of cocaine). Only one factory can process those leaves and only Coca-Cola has a special deal with the DEA that allows them to use it. So even if the secret is out, we're still missing the Coke in our Cola. [This American life via Time]
Truth be told though, it's impossible to fully replicate Coke's recipe because there's one ingredient only Coca-Cola can get: fluid extract of coca (which is coca leaves stripped of cocaine). Only one factory can process those leaves and only Coca-Cola has a special deal with the DEA that allows them to use it. So even if the secret is out, we're still missing the Coke in our Cola. [This American life via Time]
Foods for a Healthy Heart
Oatmeal
Start your day with a steaming bowl of oats, which are full of omega-3 fatty acids, folate, and potassium. This fiber-rich superfood can lower levels of LDL (or bad) cholesterol and help keep arteries clear.
Opt for coarse or steel-cut oats over instant varieties—which contain more fiber—and top your bowl off with a banana for another 4 grams of fiber.
Salmon
Super-rich in omega-3 fatty acids, salmon can effectively reduce blood pressure and keep clotting at bay. Aim for two servings per week, which may reduce your risk of dying of a heart attack by up to one-third.
"Salmon contains the carotenoid astaxanthin, which is a very powerful antioxidant," says cardiologist Stephen T. Sinatra, MD, the author of Lower Your Blood Pressure In Eight Weeks. But be sure to choose wild salmon over farm-raised fish, which can be packed with insecticides, pesticides, and heavy metals.
Not a fan of salmon? Other oily fish like mackerel, tuna, herring, and sardines will give your heart the same boost.
Health.com: 20 healthy salmon recipes
Avocado
Add a bit of avocado to a sandwich or spinach salad to up the amount of heart-healthy fats in your diet. Packed with monounsaturated fat, avocados can help lower LDL levels while raising the amount of HDL cholesterol in your body.
"Avocados are awesome," says Dr. Sinatra. "They allow for the absorption of other carotenoids—especially beta-carotene and lycopene—which are essential for heart health."
Health.com: 8 avocado recipes besides guacamole
Olive oilFull of monounsaturated fats, olive oil lowers bad LDL cholesterol and reduces your risk of developing heart disease.
Results from the Seven Countries Study, which looked at cardiovascular disease incidences across the globe, showed that while men in Crete had a predisposition for high cholesterol levels, relatively few died of heart disease because their diet focused on heart-healthy fats found in olive oil. Look for extra-virgin or virgin varieties—they're the least processed—and use them instead of butter when cooking.
NutsWalnuts are full of omega-3 fatty acids and, along with almonds and macadamia nuts, are loaded with mono- and polyunsaturated fat. Plus, nuts increase fiber in the diet, says Dr. Sinatra. "And like olive oil, they are a great source of healthy fat."
Health.com: 8 super nuts
Fotolia
"Blackberries and blueberries are especially great," says Sinatra. "But all berries are great for your vascular health."
Legumes
Fill up on fiber with lentils, chickpeas, and black and kidney beans. They're packed with omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, and soluble fiber.
Spinach
Spinach can help keep your ticker in top shape thanks to its stores of lutein, folate, potassium, and fiber.
But upping your servings of any veggies is sure to give your heart a boost. The Physicians' Health Study examined more than 15,000 men without heart disease for a period of 12 years. Those who ate at least two-and-a-half servings of vegetables each day cut their risk of heart disease by about 25%, compared with those who didn't eat the veggies. Each additional serving reduced risk by another 17%.
Health.com: What can you make with fresh baby spinach?
Flaxseed Full of fiber and omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, a little sprinkling of flaxseed can go a long way for your heart. Top a bowl of oatmeal or whole-grain cereal with a smidgen of ground flaxseed for the ultimate heart-healthy breakfast.
SoySoy may lower cholesterol, and since it is low in saturated fat, it's still a great source of lean protein in a heart-healthy diet.
Health.com: Supplements for cholesterol: What works?
Look for natural sources of soy, like edamame, tempeh, or organic silken tofu. And soy milk is a great addition to a bowl of oatmeal or whole-grain cereal. But watch the amount of salt in your soy: some processed varieties like soy dogs can contain added sodium, which boosts blood pressure.
Source http://shine.yahoo.com
The Naga Viper rates an astonishing 1,359,000 on the Scoville scale
Neither Mexico nor India: The world's hottest chilli comes from a tiny greenhouse in Cumbria
By JAYA NARAIN
Last updated at 8:39 AM on 3rd December 2010
Last updated at 8:39 AM on 3rd December 2010
It is so hot weapons experts plan to use a couple in a spice bomb to incapacitate enemy soldiers on the battlefield.
But the world’s hottest chilli does not hail from India, Thailand or Mexico but from a small greenhouse in Cumbria.
It was created by crossing three of the hottest varieties of chilli pods known to man.
The Naga Viper rates an astonishing 1,359,000 on the Scoville scale, which measures heat by the presence of the chemical compound capsaicin
The result is a record breaking chilli that will make your eyes stream, throat burn, nose run and much, much worse.
The Naga Viper chilli packs an astonishing 1,359,000 on the Scoville scale, which measures heat by the presence of the chemical compound capsaicin.
Experts at Warwick University carried out tests on the chilli and officially declared it the hottest.
It beat competition from the ferocious Bhut Jolokia pod - the previous holder - to take the title of the world’s hottest chilli in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Creator, Gerald Fowler, a full-time chilli farmer for five years, said: ‘When they grow chilli in India or the Caribbean they’re used to the heat and the drought. When they’re grown over here I think they fight back against the harsher climate and produce even more heat.’
Dozens of customers at Mr Fowler’s village pub, the Engine Inn, signed a disclaimer stating they are of sound body and mind before sampling a curry cooked with Naga Viper. Only two managed to finish the whole dish.
He sells the chilli as a tongue-blistering sauce for curries but says he is getting a lot of interest from chilly growers keen to get their hands on the seeds.
Gerald Fowler with his Naga Viper chilli pods, the hottest chilli pods in the world
‘It’s painful to eat,’ said Mr Fowler, 52, who runs the Chilli Pepper Company, in Cark-in-Cartmel, near Grange-Over-Sands. ‘It’s hot enough to strip paint.
‘It numbs your tongue, then burns all the way down. It can last an hour, and you just don’t want to talk to anyone or do anything. But it’s a marvellous endorphin rush. It makes you feel great.’
The most popular chilli – Jalapeno – measures a pitiful 2,500 to 5,000 on the Scoville scale.
Mr Fowler’s Naga Viper is more than 270 times hotter and trumps the previous world record holder, the Bhut Jolokia, at 1,001,304.
The Indian Government has been examining ways of using the very hottest chillis such as the Bhut Jolokia to produce a spice bomb that would completely incapacitate enemy soldiers without killing them.
Earlier this year they created an 81-mm tear-gas like grenade which could be thrown by a soldier.
The mix of spices and phosphorous chokes the enemy’s respiratory tract, leaving targets barely able to breathe for a time.
It also causes severe stinging to the skin as well as streaming eyes, a burning throat and disorientation.
Mr Fowler crossed the Bhut Jolokia, with two other varieties, the Naga Morich and Trinidad Scorpion, and grew the plants in his 8ft by 16ft heated greenhouse.
He said: ‘The chef Heston Blumenthal gave a volunteer our chilli oil and monitored their brain activity on a CAT scan. It showed the part of the brain which registers heat was right next to the part of the brain which makes us feel happy.’
He said: ‘Some people have actually eaten the raw pods, because that’s the sort of macho thing that some people do, and posted it on YouTube. A couple were sick.’
Mr Fowler has sold chilli seeds to the Eden Project in Cornwall, to the Edinburgh Horticultural Society, and to farmers in Afghanistan, as a alternative to growing poppies for opium.
‘I’ve been growing chilli for 10 years, and doing it full-time for five,‘ he said ‘I was a website designer and just got drawn into it when my dad got a chilli plant.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1335043/Worlds-hottest-chilli-grown-tiny-Cumbrian-greenhouse.html#ixzz1CBJqPTms
UPDATE:
Naga Viper
The Chile Pepper Institute has had many inquires about the Naga Viper, the latest claimant to the world's-hottest chile pepper, since yahoo and other wire services have run the story. The Chile Pepper Institute can not confirm that the Naga Viper is the world's hottest. To confirm that the Naga Viper is the world's hottest, a scientific replicated experiment will have to be done. Mr. Gerald Fowler, the developer of the Naga Viper, is a member of the Chile Pepper Institute. The Chile Pepper Institute has contacted him and asked for a seed sample. If Mr. Fowler is willing to submit a seed sample, The Chile Pepper Institute would grow the Naga Viper and the Bhut Jolokia side-by-side in replicated trials at New Mexico State University in 2011. The Chile Pepper Institute will keep our members appraised of the results.
UPDATE - Currently, there are no seeds of this variety available http://www.chilepepperinstitute.org/
Scoville scale: The scale is named after its creator, American chemist Wilbur Scoville. His method, devised in 1912,is known as the Scoville Organoleptic Test. The modern commonplace method for quantitative analysis uses high-performance liquid chromatography, making it possible to directly measure capsaicinoid content. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)