Today's walk through Mother Earth's Medicine Cabinet will lead us down the Heart Health & Healing section. There are several different natural ways to lower your blood pressure, such as adding or eliminating certain foods in your diet. Before we move on to the goodies in store that can help you with lowering your blood pressure, I'd like to explain exactly what high blood pressure is.
Milk. It was the beverage of choice growing up as a child in our house. Never skim, sometimes raw, and with any meal of the day. In fact, cow milk is the beverage of choice in most American households.
Wheat berries are the true whole wheat. They are the complete grain that contains the bran, germ and endosperm. They can be grown into wheat grass, ground into flour or used as side dishes and in salads. They are rich in nutrients, making wheat berries a superfood that benefits the entire body. Wheat berries have several varieties; the Hard Red Spring and Hard Red Winter have a brown tint and are high in protein.
The temperatures are on the rise, flowers are in bloom and farmer’s markets are stocked full of this season’s finest. If you look, you will find asparagus most dominantly known in its green variety, but also available in white and purple, stocked on the shelves. This nutrient dense vegetable is only available in the produce aisle of your local supermarket from February to June, with its peak harvest in April, when the price for these gems may come down a bit.
Why all the hype about asparagus?
Wild rice is not actually rice at all, but the seed from a grass of semi-aquatic species found from southern Canada to the eastern United States along the Atlantic coastal marshes. It was the staple food for the Ojibwa and Chippewa people who gathered it by canoe and fire parched the seeds.
Green beans aren’t exactly the “coolest” vegetable of the hour, but there’s more to this crispy legume than meets the eye.
Also referred to as “snap beans” or “string beans,” green beans have been gracing dinner plates for centuries. Though we don’t usually give green beans as much attention as say, kale or sprouts, they are actually incredibly high in nutrients and even have some “superfood” qualities.
Minerals are an essential part of our diet. Did you know that minerals cannot be made by the body? That’s right, they have to be ingested. Today’s walk through Mother Earth’s Medicine Cabinet will take us down the long road of minerals we need, and what foods we can get them from.
Trace minerals, also known as trace elements or micro-minerals, are minerals we only require in very low doses, whereas our body requires more of the major minerals. Minerals basically serve three functions for our body.
With the days warming up and summer around the corner, our dreams of dinner fare turn towards salads. Yet, we can only eat so many lettuce-based salads as we yearn for something exotic, tasty and fun.
Green papaya salad makes a wonderful meal for a warm evening meal. When we talk about papayas, we often visualize a gorgeous orange-fleshed fruit that is very sweet, silky and tropical tasting. Green papayas are not a different species of papaya; they are just an immature papaya. And green papayas pack a wallop of nutrients.
Cassava, manioc, yuca, manihot, tapioca…maybe you’ve seen this long, dense tuber in the [exotic] produce section of your local market. The staple starch goes by the scientific name Manihot esculenta, but its common name differs depending on the region. Native to South America, Africa and parts of Asia, cassava has been a staple carbohydrate in the diets of those living in such sun-drenched, tropical regions. In the U.S., we most commonly find cassava or manioc in the form of tapioca balls, which are made from the pulp of the starchy tuber.
Amaranth is a seed that has been part of the Aztec diet for more than 8000 years, when the Aztecs would collect the seeds in the wild. They also used the seeds to make flour for baked images of their gods during festivals and for tributary payments. The plant began to be cultivated in Mexico approximately 4000 B.C.E. and continues to be a native Peruvian crop.