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Posts Tagged ‘Plant-based nutrition’

Green Recipes for Health and Weight Loss Success

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Convenient Ideas for Endless Great Eating With Whole Foods

Whole foods are so tasty that, if you are not into cooking, you can still have excellent not-meals with little kitchen time. For example, after work, one of my favorite quick dinners is green lentils with vegetables on a whole grain tortilla.

The lentils cook from their dry form in about 40 minutes. I mix them with freshly steamed or leftover brown rice or some frozen organic corn. Then spoon onto the whole grain tortilla with some chopped leafy greens, salsa, and/or spices. Steamed fresh vegetables round out a super simple but yummy and filling start to an energetic evening.

Sometimes, though, I want a more elaborate taste experience. Just as important, I find chopping and mixing colorful whole foods to

Working with beautiful whole foods is fun and relaxing

be relaxing and fun. If you never liked cooking before, you may change your mind when you go the whole foods route.

Want cooking ideas? An unbeatable site for thousands of whole foods recipes is fatfreevegan.com. This super blog is friendly, fun, and overflowing with enough recipes to keep you happily hanging around your kitchen for years.

This site features food photos that will make you hungry if you aren’t already. The advanced search function helps you find a recipe to use up ingredients that are filling your garden or refrigerator. The home page has an extensive, convenient list of five star recipes.

Cooking ideas are conveniently grouped into categories either by ingredients (such as beans (more…)

Tags: getting healthy, Janice Stanger, lose weight, Plant-based nutrition, weight loss, whole foods
Posted in Recipes | 1 Comment »

Whole Foods Fuel Your Own Olympic Performance

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

Why Athletics, Nutrition, and Health Hang Together with a Plant-Based Diet

The current parade of Olympic athletes can make those of us with ordinary abilities a bit ambivalent. On the one hand, we admire the limits to which people can push the human body. Finely honed and trained athletes set the standard for physical achievement.

However, you can also feel discouraged. After all, an Olympic gold medal can feel life a project for another lifetime.

Snowboarding Is physically demanding

Be encouraged instead. You can achieve your physical potential. Land in first place with vigorous longevity and superb health. Your key is a whole foods, plant-based diet and regular exercise. Don’t try too much at first in the way of training. Make sure your doctor agrees with the exercise plan you have in mind, especially if you are overweight, out of shape, or have a chronic disease. If you persist, you will be amazed at your achievements.

Here’s a small sample of inspiring, 100% plant-based champs.

Carl Lewis won 10 Olympic medals in track and field – nine of them gold! His best year as an athlete was the year he stopped eating animal foods.
Edwin Moses, another Olympic gold medal champ, won the 400-meter hurdle competition for eight years in a row.
Brendan Brazier is an ultra marathon and triathlon winner.
Dr. Ruth Heidrich won more than 900 first place running and triathlon ribbons after she gained the (more…)

Tags: athletes, Brendan Brazier, Carl Lewis, Edwin Moses, getting healthy, Janice Stanger, nutrition facts, Olympics, Pat Neshek, phytochemicals, Plant-based nutrition, Ruth Heidrich, whole foods
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Health Care Costs Continue Relentless Climb -You Pay

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

A Whole Foods Diet is the Best and Quickest Answer To Our National Black Hole for Money

Did you ever wonder why pharmacies are so conveniently found in supermarkets? You may take this so much for granted that even the question sounds strange. Here’s the connection.

The highest profit margin items in the supermarket are animal foods and manufactured foods. This is why industry pushes these

Put whole foods in your cart for health and savings

products with heavy advertising, coupons, and funds to develop ever more offerings. How often do you see an ad for fresh, unprocessed carrots or potatoes, or for dried beans or bulk brown rice? Industry makes few profits off these whole foods.

The animal protein, oils, and chemicals in animal and manufactured foods then contribute to chronic inflammation throughout your body. This ongoing inflammatory process underlies most chronic illnesses, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, migraines, sinusitis, allergies, depression, and more.

So high-profit-margin drugs and over-the-counter remedies are a natural complement to the bulk of the foods that line aisle after aisle in the supermarket. You can find whole food choices, though, in the produce section and scattered throughout the store. Look closely and you will see whole wheat bread made without animal products or hydrogenated oils, whole grain cereals and oatmeal, dried and canned beans, salsas, dairy-free milks, corn tortillas, and many other tasty options.

As supermarkets get larger and the dizzying menu of manufactured foods grows, it’s little surprise that health care costs reached a (more…)

Tags: getting healthy, health care costs, Janice Stanger, making a difference now, pharmacy, Plant-based nutrition, supermarket, weight loss, whole foods
Posted in Plant-based nutrition | 2 Comments »

Do-It-Yourself Vegetable Oil

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

It’s Easy…As Long as You Own a Factory

Did you ever try to make your own cooking oil at home? Say, for example, you wanted corn oil. Take a few kernels of corn and try pressing them in a mortar and pestle, or squeezing them with a binder clip, or even stepping on them. What do you get? A big mess – smashed corn and a clean-up job. But you won’t find any corn oil in your experiment.

Would you rather eat whole corn right off a healthy plant in the field, or...

The oil in your kernel is tightly bound with all the fiber in the whole corn, not to mention the protein, complex carbs, and other nutrients that make corn so yummy and filling. All these components are required for the kernel to do the job nature intended, which is to grow a baby corn plant. So the oil needs to hang in there pretty tight as part of nature’s complete plan for the next corn generation.

Here is the short version of how factories “refine” most oils from whole seeds – corn, soy, nuts, palm, and others. (Olive oil may require a less complex process.)

Step 1. Extraction. The “crude oil” is separated from the rest of the seed through use of a very strong press or solvents. In fact, even if some oil is obtained through mechanical pressure, solvents may be used to extract more. Hexane, a toxic, explosive chemical made from petroleum and also found is gasoline, is often used as the solvent.

Step 2. Degumming. “Impurities,” which are other natural plant components suspended in the crude oil, are separated by mixing water with warm oil and spinning the resulting mixture in a centrifugal separator revolving at high speeds.

Step 3. Neutralizing. Acids in the oil are now neutralized with caustic soda, which converts the fatty acids into an insoluble soap. Some factories may need to further wash and dry the oil to remove the rest of the soap after some settles out. The oil still is a bit yellow, though, and has smell most people would not like.

Step 4. Bleaching. The oil is bleached to make it the colorless liquid that consumers expect.

Step 5. Deodorizing. The factory uses various methods to get rid of remaining smells in the oil.

Would you rather eat the oil extracted with a chemical solvent, then bleached and deodorized?

The oil must be kept away from air so it does not immediately oxidize, becoming rancid and (more…)

Tags: getting healthy, Janice Stanger, lose weight, manufactured food, nutrition facts, Plant-based nutrition, vegetable oil, whole foods
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Commitment Is the Engine of Weight Loss

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Easy Tips to Strengthen Your Commitment to a Whole Foods Diet

A whole foods diet is the vehicle that will deliver permanent, hunger-free weight loss. Commitment is the engine that makes this vehicle move. Knowledge of the weight and health benefits of unprocessed plant foods will make you comfortable with this top-of-the line diet. But facts alone are static and are not likely to get you to your goals.

Commitment is a drive that you consciously build. At first, this can require much effort. Later, commitment becomes more of a habit and worldview, reinforcing itself every time you make a positive choice.

Willpower is different, and necessarily short term. When you rely on willpower, you force yourself to do something you really don’t want to do. For example, if you don’t like your job, it takes enormous willpower to show up every day. Taking the unwanted, even

Commitment makes choosing whole foods this easy and fun

dreaded, action becomes harder each time you do it.

In contrast, commitment becomes easier over time. Eventually your choices are as effortless as floating in a refreshing pool on a hot summer day.

Commitment will keep you consistently on track to take actions you desire, but which may be drowned out by other choices if you don’t stay focused. Consider moving toward a whole foods diet as one example. You actually want to eat healthy food and learn to build your taste for crunchy vegetables, sweet fruits, and whole grain breads. To get there, you need to break old habits, overcome lazy inertia, and retrain your appetite. So commitment moves you from longing to success.

Many strategies enhance the dedication that real commitment requires. One of the most effective methods is to focus on a cause outside your own self-centered concerns. The power of caring is enormous. If weight loss is your goal and a whole foods diet is your method, choose the cause that has the most emotional impact to keep you on track. You can focus on slowing climate change through a sustainable diet, ending animal suffering, or feeding hungry people with grain otherwise destined to become animal feed.

The more methods you use to foster commitment, the sooner and more completely you will succeed. Visualization is a readily (more…)

Tags: getting healthy, global warming, greenhouse gases, Janice Stanger, lose weight, perfect body, Plant-based nutrition, process of change, visualization, weight loss, whole foods
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Justice and Sustainability on Martin Luther King Day

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

Dr. King’s Great Words Bolster Commitment to Healthy Eating for All

Great leaders inspire great effort. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a profound and moving orator. His speeches inspired millions to rise above their own limited concerns and work for the greater good, for justice, liberty, and equality.

If you are seeking change for the better in your own life, think about Dr. King’s words, “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

Another inspiring Dr. King quote is “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

The most fundamental justice is to ensure that all have the basic necessities. As long as some are not adequately fed, those who care must be committed to end this injustice.

Nourishing food for hungry people...or wasted as animal feed?

In October 2009, the United Nations estimated over a billion people were undernourished, with the number not having enough to eat rising every year. At least five million children a year die from the effects of too little food. The desperately poor cannot afford food when its price increases by an amount that would be insignificant to wealthier people.

You may be wishing you ate a healthier diet, but have not quite gotten around to consistently basing your meals on whole plant foods. Paradoxically, the best way to build commitment to your own well-being is to look to ethical concerns and purpose outside yourself.

When you eat animal foods, such as meat, milk, and eggs, there are two to sixteen pounds of plant foods hidden in every pound of the animal food. Most of the nutrients in these plants, including protein, vitamins, minerals, and calories, are lost when the plant is eaten. Animals use these nutrients for their own metabolism and survival. The meat is a pale remnant of the whole plant food the animal ate. All the phytochemicals – beneficial plant nutrients (more…)

Tags: environmental degradation, getting healthy, Janice Stanger, making a difference now, Martin Luther King Day, Plant-based nutrition, undernourished people, water shortages, whole foods
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Healthy People 2010: The Decade that Wasn’t

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Let’s Reach Our Goals, Not Lower Them

Imagine you are on a team that is not winning nearly as many games as you’d like to. So you set some goals that will get you to first place if you achieve them. But your team has no game plan and just practices at random. When the big game comes, your score has actually deteriorated.

What do you do now? Revisit how to achieve your goals? Set up a realistic plan? Imagine that instead of continuing to pursue your dreams, you decide to simply pick less able teams to play against so your problems won’t be so obvious.

Few would want to play on such a lackluster team. This strategy of diminishing goals does seem to appeal to the nation’s health navigators, though.

Every ten years, the federal government sets health goals for the upcoming decade. From 2000 through 2010 though, the country did not fare very well in getting to optimum health. In fact, only about one in five of the goals for Healthy People 2010 appears to have been met.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for the Healthy People program that started in the 1970s, will likely set lower goals for 2020 than it did for 2010. This is the official response to the nation’s poor performance in achieving the targets set for 2010.

Our children rely on us to point the way to lifelong health and vigor

As a country, we ended up going downhill on critical goals. Most importantly, obesity increased from about a quarter of all adults in 2000 to 34 percent in 2010. Obesity is the result of poor food choices, and there is no coordinated effort to educate people on the power of whole foods.

Our children are relying on us to shoot for optimum health. Let’s aim high and make a plan to get there. Plant-based nutrition is a major part of the solution, and would address virtually all goals to reduce chronic illness and risk factors. With such a straightforward way to get to the top, why settle for anything less? In the meantime, why wait for the government to wake up. You can move forward and improve your health, and your family’s, today. Your next meal is the starting point for your own Healthy People program.

Intrigued? Now you can use our Whole Foods Blog Finder to target informative, fun postings on plant-based nutrition. Quick information at no cost!

Blog by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, a nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.

Tags: family, getting healthy, Healthy People 2010, Janice Stanger, making a difference now, obesity, Plant-based nutrition, whole foods
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A Whole Foods New Year’s Tradition that Tastes Great

Friday, January 1st, 2010

Black-eyed Peas and Greens Are Fun and Healthy

The Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas and greens on New Year’s Day is now widespread. Prosperity and luck throughout the year are the promised benefits. The peas (actually a kind of bean) symbolize coins, while the greens stand for dollars.

Eating this combo at New Year’s started about the time the Civil War was ending. Union soldiers spared the humble black-eyed peas as they confiscated or destroyed other crops in the South.

Black-eyed peas are the stars on New Year's

Had the troops understood the outstanding health benefits of black-eyed peas they might have targeted this food as well. This legume shares the same health benefits as other beans, filling you up and satisfying your appetite. The beans are a nutritional powerhouse, rich in minerals, complex carbohydrates, fiber, vitamins, protein, and phytochemicals.

Just as important, black-eyed peas and greens are easy to cook and there are so many fun variations on the basic dish. Here is the recipe I made for 2010.

Any Day of the Year Black-Eyes Peas and Greens

The ingredients are: (more…)

Tags: black-eyed peas, family, getting healthy, Janice Stanger, lose weight, New Year's tradition, Plant-based nutrition, whole foods
Posted in Recipes | 2 Comments »

My Best Decade Ever: Life with Meaning

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

A Ten-Year Adventure in Plant-Based Eating

I feel younger, healthier, and more vigorous now, when the clock is within striking distance of 2010, then I did back in 1999. In that year, I was more worried about my health and weight than I was about Y2K. Aging felt like it was overpowering me. Even though I was only 47, I was tired of coping with chronic pain and fatigue, weight that had a mind of its own, and ever-tightening clothes.

In 1999 I was meat-free, but still ate eggs and dairy products. I knew the remaining animal foods were at the root of my health issues, but simply did not feel ready to give them up early in that year. Partly habit held me back, partly fear, and partly laziness. What would the “center of the meal” be without some kind of animal foods?

I remember the last time I ate eggs for breakfast. They lay in my stomach all day like a chunk of cement. Finally about 4 in the afternoon I could feel them clearing and moving on to make room for me to breathe. I decided right then to never eat chickens’ reproductive materials again.

Finally, the big breakthrough for my health came at the end of 1999. I collected enough plant-based cookbooks and recipes to know I could make

Me hiking in gorgeous Northern California this summer

satisfying food all day with many delicious alternatives. The last animal food to go for me was ice cream. I discovered soy-based frozen desserts in yummy flavors and never looked back. My prefernce quickly changed to these new frozen desserts, even if they tasted a little different at first.

Within months of going plant-based, I lost 25 pounds and have never regained them! My chronic pain episodes, sinusitis, and ear infections evaporated. Every day I felt more energetic than the last. How unexpected but how welcome.

Ever since 2000, I’ve felt like I’m aging in reverse. My body is detoxifying – this process takes years, not weeks. Toxic chemicals stored in fat are well incorporated and dissolved in the body. If you are still in the throes of an animal-based diet, you have no idea how fantastic it feels to give your body the time it needs to truly heal.

I keep setting new standards for myself in terms of health. This has been a gradual and highly fulfilling process over the last decade. Watching my two daughters also choose a plant-based diet, with vast improvements in their mood and energy, has also been deeply satisfying.

I am physically active every single day now. I’ve deleted virtually all manufactured foods from my diet, including trans fats, bottled oils, chips and any deep fried foods, white bread and bagels, and (more…)

Tags: aging in reverse, family, getting healthy, gratitude, Janice Stanger, lose weight, making a difference now, perfect body, Plant-based nutrition, process of change, reverse chronic disease, weight loss
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Not-too-sweet Cranberry Sauce: Here’s the Secret Ingredient

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Home Made Cranberry Sauce that Will Wow Your Guests

If you grew up eating canned, jellied cranberry sauce, as I did, you have hopefully already discovered how amazing the home made version of this perpetual favorite can be. No holiday gathering would be complete without the deep red and tart richness of this treat.

This cranberry sauce was so good that my friends started eating it before I could get my camera out

Luckily, fresh cranberries are in season. Leave the cans in the store and bring home the ingredients for your own taste treat. While you can discover hundreds of recipes on the Internet, I have put together the following simple recipe that cooks in ten minutes. Even people who usually don’t like cranberry sauce will eat a plate of this.

Recipe for not-too-sweet cranberry sauce:

Ingredients

4 cups of cranberries (this is the amount in a 12 ounce package)

¾ cup water

½ cup sugar (see below) (more…)

Tags: cranberry sauce, family, getting healthy, holiday meals, Janice Stanger, Plant-based nutrition
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Perfect Formula Diet

Posts Tagged ‘Plant-based nutrition’

Green Recipes for Health and Weight Loss Success

Whole Foods Fuel Your Own Olympic Performance

Health Care Costs Continue Relentless Climb -You Pay

Do-It-Yourself Vegetable Oil

Commitment Is the Engine of Weight Loss

Justice and Sustainability on Martin Luther King Day

Healthy People 2010: The Decade that Wasn’t

A Whole Foods New Year’s Tradition that Tastes Great

My Best Decade Ever: Life with Meaning

Not-too-sweet Cranberry Sauce: Here’s the Secret Ingredient

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