Sometimes the hardest part about making changes is simply getting started.

But affecting great change can be accomplished by little adjustments.

Overhauling your lifestyle to improve your health can seem daunting and, quite simply, impossible so most of us won’t even consider the challenge.

However, starting with two simple aspects of your routine can snowball into real results that have substantial impact.

Eating more fruits and vegetables and cutting back on television viewing are two lifestyle changes that can effect dramatic changes in the ability to continue on a path to healthy living.

To determine which changes were most effective, the researchers recruited 204 adults aged 21 to 60, who engaged in all four unhealthy diet- and activity-related behaviors. The participants were divided into four treatment groups, each of which was assigned two lifestyle changes: increasing fruit and vegetable intake and increasing physical activity; decreasing fat consumption and reducing leisure time spent sedentary; decreasing fat intake and increasing physical activity; or increasing fruit and vegetable intake and decreasing sedentary leisure.

The participants engaged in their treatment regimens for three weeks and self-reported their progress by logging their data into a personal digital assistant every day and sending it to a coach who communicated with the participants as needed by telephone or email.

As an apple lover I was really happy to hear that eating one or two apples a day may reduce the risk of heart disease.

Like any fruits there are nutritional benefits to eating them.

However, apples in particular seem to have certain properties which allay the onset of cardio-vascular disease.

“We were pleasantly surprised …” that apples so effectively lowered LDL (bad) cholesterol, says study researcher Bahram H. Arjmandi, PhD, RD, Margaret A. Sitton Professor and Chair, Department of Nutrition, Food and Exercise Sciences at The Florida State University in Tallahassee.

“When we look at the whole composite of human studies and animal studies and in vitro lab studies, when you look at the active components in apples and apple juice, there’s definitely benefit,” says Dianne A. Hyson, PhD, RD, a nutritionist and researcher at the University of California at Davis.

Obesity is a national epidemic, and First Lady Michelle Obama is trying to do something about it with an emphasis on exercise and healthy food like fruits and vegetables. But that apparently is a real problem for Sarah Palin. Here’s her idiotic quote:

Take her anti-obesity thing that she is on. She is on this kick, right. What she is telling us is she cannot trust parents to make decisions for their own children, for their own families in what we should eat. And I know I’m going to be again criticized for bringing this up, but instead of a government thinking that they need to take over and make decisions for us according to some politician or politician’s wife priorities, just leave us alone, get off our back, and allow us as individuals to exercise our own God-given rights to make our own decisions and then our country gets back on the right track.

Palin is a complete buffoon.