Check out this week’s post by Keshia Shepherd as she reviews Joel Salatin’s book, Folks, This Ain’t Normal. If you haven’t heard of Joel Salatin, the self-proclaimed Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer, you’ll want to check this out!
Food truly is one of the foundations of health. Our bodies are awesome at restoring health if given the building blocks to heal. I have been in a series where we have been delving into much of the negative things in our food supply, but I also want to share great foods for our health. The more we push out the negative and add in the positive, the stronger we can become.
Superfoods are powerful foods for our overall health, providing raw materials to maintain a healthy immune system. One of these superfoods is Maca Root.
This is the third post in my series “What is in Your Food?” You can check out about xanthum gum and guar gum if you missed the first two posts.
In this post, I will share about carrageenan which is another thickening agent and stabilizer used commonly in processed foods. It is often used as a substitute for fat in non- and low-fat foods, stabilizer in dairy replacements products, and a vegan alternative to gelatin. It can also be found in canned pet food, cosmetics, and toothpaste.
Recently I have been sharing about some potentially negative foods in our diet, guar gum and xanthum gum. In this post, I am going to share about goji berries which is considered a superfood.
So what is a superfood? A superfood is defined as a food that contains a high level of essential nutrients and additional compounds that may benefit your health. An additional component is they are low in calories. Some may feel this is important, but I am more about the nutrients. You can check out this post about counting calories if you would like to learn more. Anyway, think of superfoods as nutrient dense and calorie sparse.
This is the second post in the series “What is in Your Food?”, and is about guar gum. Guar gum is another food additive in many processed foods. In foods and beverages, it is used as a thickening, stabilizing, suspending, and binding agent. In manufacturing, it is used as a binding agent and thickening agent for lotions and creams.
If you read the labels on processed foods, you know there are many ingredients listed; you may not have any idea what it is, why it is in there, and are there health concerns or risks with these ingredients?
Xanthum gum is one of these common ingredients found in processed foods. It has been around since the early 1960’s; it was discovered by a research team of the United States Department of Agriculture led by Allene Rosalind Jeanes.
If you are looking to make some positive changes in your diet, a great place to start is reducing the pesticides you consume. These pesticides may induce adverse health effects on us including cancer, and effects on the reproduction, immune, or nervous system. Now most of us don’t drink a bottle of pesticides, but we do consume many of these substances if we purchase predominantly commercially grown produce.
Every once in a while I read a book that deeply affects me or some part of my life. Today I want to share one of these books. It is called People Over Profit: Break the System. Live with Purpose. Be More Successful. By Dale Partridge. I highly encourage you to read this book!
There has been much information about the importance of consuming fermented foods in the news lately, but you may be wondering where do I start? A great place to start is fermented drinks; they are tasty, can be sweet or sour, and provide beneficial bacteria and yeast to your system. Yes, we need beneficial bacteria and yeast to keep the pathogenic ones under control. Now for this post I am not talking about wine or beer even though they are fermented! One of the easier fermented drinks to make at home is water kefir.