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49% Of Americans Eat This Unhealthy Food Every Day...

7/5/2015

I saw this headline in my email inbox the other day, and thought, hmmm.... High-fructose corn syrup? Nope, that's got to be more than 49%. Hydrogenated oils? Processed foods? Milk? Bacon? :-)

Actually, the truth is more surprising than that, because it's a food that many people think of as "healthy." And it's not an ingredient at all. In fact, it can make a whole meal, and is probably the most common lunch staple in America.

What is it, and why is it so unhealthy? Read on and find out....

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The Truth About "Free Range" Eggs

6/21/2015

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You've probably heard the hype about "free range" poultry, and how both the meat and the eggs are better for you than conventionally cage-raised. But are they really?

What does "free range" even mean, anyway? Are the chickens gallivanting about in a glorious pasture full of grass and tasty bugs, or are they just "free" to roam a fenced-in concrete slab?

That is in the question, indeed, and in today's post, I will address this, and the multitude of often confusing labels you see on store-bought eggs, to help you understand the difference in the quality of the eggs, as well as the quality of life their feathered progenitors enjoy.

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Does Your Body Recognize Your Breakfast?

6/14/2015

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Example of a TRULY healthy breakfast...

Let's face it: if a caveman sat down to breakfast with you, he probably wouldn't recognize a thing on your table.

He actually wouldn't see frosted flakes, bagels, Cheerios, or English muffins as food at all.

Unfortunately, neither does your body!

Biologically, humans just don't evolve all that quickly. In fact, while it may be the 21st century, your body still craves the same foods that your ancestors ate for thousands of years. Some nutritionists call these important foods "primal nutrition."

Primal nutrition is considered by many to be the basis for good health, as it contains the proper mix of fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that our ancestors got from the whole, natural foods that they ate regularly.

But just how bad is the typical "healthy" American breakfast anyway, and how can you make healthier choices without being bored out of your mind?

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8 Foods You Shouldn't Buy Organic

5/31/2015

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We've all heard how much healthier organic foods are for you, but we also know that buying only organic foods can get pricey pretty quickly. If you want to make your food dollars work efficiently for you, and get the most bang for your buck, so to speak, while still taking care of your health, there are a few strategies you can use to eat healthy without going broke.

We've shared some tips for saving money on organic food in previous posts, so I won't cover those again here today, but be sure to check those out as well. (Of course, the best way of all is to grow your own food! But we'll save that for another day.)

One great way to make sure you're eating healthy is to choose whole, unprocessed foods. Processed foods command a premium, as we have previously mentioned. You're paying a lot for someone else to process and package your food for you - and in the process, you're also losing nutritional value. Whole, natural, unprocessed foods are cheaper by the pound than any seemingly "cheap" processed items you can buy - and better for you, to boot. Want to save money on food - and eat healthier? Buy the fresh, unprocessed ingredients, and make it yourself!

But another thing to be aware of is that some foods are more important to buy organic than others. You can strategically save money and still buy and eat healthy foods, if you know which non-organically raised foods to avoid, and which ones are okay to eat. That way, you can put the "organic" portion of your food dollars towards foods that really shouldn't be eaten any other way.

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How Healthy Are You - Really?

5/25/2015

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I've noticed something interesting about our weekly email updates that we send out to our subscribers. Whenever we send one that focuses on something like improving relationships, or financial balance, fewer people open the update than when we send one that directly addresses a specific physical health topic like healthy eating, or fighting disease.

From a marketing standpoint, you might say that in that case, it would be better not to focus on those topics. But this defeats the purpose of our main premise of holistic living - that is, that everything is connected!

While most people may think that being healthy simply means eating foods that are good for you, and getting enough exercise, in fact, we feel that True health goes much deeper than that.

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7 Anti-Aging Foods You Should Eat Daily To Stay Young

5/3/2015

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We're all getting older. It's just a fact of life. But depending on your lifestyle choices, you can seem (and feel) a lot younger than your years! By living a healthy, balanced lifestyle, you can not only live longer, but get more living out of the years you have left.

How you treat your body, including what toxins you expose it to, what activities you participate in, how much sleep you treat it to, and most importantly - what foods you feed it - can really impact both the quality and length of your life.

This week, I wanted to discuss 7 common foods that are packed with some of the most powerful anti-aging nutrients available to help you maintain a healthy body and mind long into your senior years.

And I'm not talking about expensive, impossible-to find "superfoods" from some exotic Amazon forest here. In fact, you may be surprised to see some of the foods on this list.... (Hint: You probably have most of them in your kitchen right now!)

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6 Cooking Oils You Should Never Use

3/29/2015

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I've talked about healthy fats a lot here before, and sometimes unhealthy ones as well, but quite a bit of confusion still surrounds the subject.

Today, I thought I'd share an article that may help clarify some questions many people have around this subject: why is it that some oils and fats commonly used in cooking are actually harmful to your body, while others are healthy?

Read on to find out which 6 cooking oils you should never eat...

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3 Reasons to Plant Heirloom Seeds This Spring

3/15/2015

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If you're anything like me, you love an uplifting, feel-good story about taking back control of our food supply - and this one comes just in time for spring planting! Whether you're a fan of Forks Over Knives, Food, Inc., or Fresh, you need to check out the new documentary, Open Sesame: The Story Of Seeds. This may be one of the most important food documentaries out there, as it tells a story that affects each and every one of us, no matter what your dietary beliefs, preferences, or choices are.

Everything starts with a seed. As it says in the movie, "without seeds, nothing else would exist." Whether you're a vegan, vegetarian, or omnivore like me, you and your food exist because of seeds. Everything you eat comes from a seed - even animals, which are fed on plants that come from seeds.

Yet you may be shocked to learn that 90% of the vegetable seed varieties in existence 100 years ago are now extinct! (I shared a helpful visual of this a couple of years ago on our sustainable gardening blog.)

The loss of seed diversity may seem like a shame, but how does it really affect you? In truth, it's actually a grave danger to our survival as a species (see #1 below).

The good news is, there IS something you can do about it: Plant heirloom or open-pollinated seeds!

Here Are 3 Reasons Why You Should Grow Heirloom Seeds This Year:

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The Surprising Truth About Calories & Weight Loss

3/1/2015

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Hot on the heels of last week's "shocking" announcement about cholesterol comes another long-overdue gem of health insight - this time from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

A recent article in the Journal announced that it is possible to get fatter without eating more, and conversely, that it is also possible to lose weight without eating less. (And no, this is not factoring in exercise.)

This flies in the face of approximately 100 years of mainstream advice on obesity and weight gain, which has only considered amount of calories consumed versus calories burned. In truth, like most things about health, the reality is much more complex than that!

In fact, weight gain (and loss) has a lot more to do with the type of calories consumed, and their effect on blood sugar, than you may have guessed. So how does this work? Let me explain....

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It's Official: Government To Declare Cholesterol Okay

2/22/2015

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The timing seems a bit fishy, coming right on the heels of our recent post about eggs.... Is the government reading our blog and stealing my ideas?? LOL! But yes indeed, apparently the U.S. government is revising dietary guidelines to say that eating cholesterol is actually okay, according to last week's article in the Washington Post.

This comes after 40+ years of cholesterol being the beloved villain of the media, doctors, and government warnings, but apparently, according to the co-chair of the task force arranged by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association in 2013 to look at dietary cholesterol studies, “Looking back at the literature, we just couldn’t see the kind of science that would support dietary restrictions."

Really??

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