Antioxidants fight disease risk

It's pretty basic stuff: Eat the right foods, and odds are you'll live longer and better.

Eat the wrong stuff and, well... just look around you: With 80 million diabetics and pre-diabetics in America, you don't have to look very hard before you find someone who's making some pretty bad dietary choices.

Fortunately, it doesn't take much to get back on track-- and a new study shows how a good diet rich in antioxidants can actually turn your life around inside of a month.

Researchers from the Antidiabetic Food Center at Sweden's Lund University put 44 relatively healthy overweight people between the ages of 50 and 75 onto a four-week diet focused on foods that rank low on the glycemic index.

Those are the foods that don't raise blood sugar quickly-- and, as such, they tend to be the healthy low-carb meals you should be eating anyway.

What's more, the patients in the study were told to eat foods rich in the antioxidants that can beat the inflammation linked to poor health and disease. That means these dieters got to chow down on oily fish, barley, blueberries, almonds, cinnamon, vinegar and even some whole grain bread.

Tasty, to be sure--and as the new study shows, they're also real good for you.

After four weeks, the volunteers managed to lower levels of LDL ("bad") cholesterol by 33 percent, blood lipids by 14 percent and blood pressure by 8 percent. They also reduced levels of a marker for blood clots by 26 percent, as well as levels of a key inflammation marker.

It didn't end there.

The participants also saw measurable improvements in both memory and cognitive function.

Add it all up, and that means a lower risk for diabetes, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, stroke, dementia and more--all in just four weeks. And if that's what a month of back-to-basics eating will do for you, imagine what would happen if you made a lifetime commitment to these healthy foods.

The researchers say their study doesn't show which foods specifically led to the improvements, but quickly add that that's the point: It's not one single "magic" ingredient-- just an overall focus on a wide range of foods that rank low on the glycemic index and high in inflammation-beating antioxidants.

Ready to give it a shot?

I know the holiday season is a tough time to diet--but if you can get cooking on your own low-carb, antioxidant-rich eating plan now, you could be celebrating the start of a new you even before the start of the New Year.