How to Grow Healthy Food

To grow healthy food, you literally have to start at rock bottom. No matter what youre growing, from chickpeas to chickens, the truth is that you are what they eat!

Its no secret that all life begins with the soil. Although it may look like dirt to the naked eye, organically rich soil is a living, breathing community of microorganisms. These little denizens of the dirt are born, grow, breed, give birth and die leaving an estate of nutrition-filled remains to the soil. While they live, many of these little critters feed on undesirable elements like harmful bacteria.

Every year, gardeners spend thousands of dollars on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that are little more than a quick fix to gardening problems and create long-term health hazards for everyone, from humans to single-celled organisms in the soil. If you really want to grow healthy food, the first step is to keep your underground colony in good health.

There are two things you need to do to maintain healthy soil. The first is to keep out the chemicals. The second is to add rich organic matter to your soil at regular intervals.
Keep out the chemicals

No matter what amount of chemical you use in your gardening, a drop is a deluge to a microorganism. More to the point, most chemicals dont fade away. They leech into your garden and wait to attach to some growing thing like your plants. One example is a gardener who claims to grow organic apples. He doesnt spray his trees, but he does use a chemical weed & feed application on his lawn, seemingly unaware of the systemic consequences of using chemicals.

Feed your soil

The best way to enrich your soil is to give it regular applications of composted organic matter. Compost can be anything from yard mulch to kitchen vegetable waste. If you dont have the time to maintain a compost bin, an easy way to add organic matter to your yard is through mowing your lawn with a mulching mower. Prepared compost is also available for purchase from nurseries and home garden centers.

Remember the house that Jack built? Its similar in your garden. The roots take from the soil to give to the stems that bear the buds that turn into the fruit. Whether or not the fruit is healthy depends on what was in the soil.

Linda is editor of Gardening Guides

Eating Healthy in a Fast Food World

Rushing to Eat

People's lives have become so busy and rushing around, that we no longer eat the way we should. In some places, there is a McDonald's on every major corner, if not some other fast food restaurant. Watching TV, you see a commercial for some kind of food place almost every time commercials are on, urging you to eat there because it's good and you can get it fast and cheap. With so many distractions and obligations, families have these days, how do you eat healthy in a fast food world? It's not an easy thing to do but is possible with planning and knowing what to look for. This isn't to say fast food can't be consumed occasionally, but it should be less often than people are doing it now. Not to mention that our food is so processed that it takes five minutes to cook and has high carbohydrates among other things that are not digested quickly. This is leading to obesity in the population.

The Truth About Whole Grain

Because food is so processed these days to make it faster to cook, as well as more convenient for the way our lives have become, it is actually not as good for you as it once was. Recently the food administration even changed the food pyramid to coincide with how we eat these days and food is made. They are suggesting more whole grains than ever before, as well as vegetables. This may sound like what has been told to children for years, but even whole grains are deceiving on packaging these days. With all the new diets out there for low carb, no carb, low fat, no fat, etc., foods are coming out that say whole grain but are just as processed as its white counterpart. They are made with enriched wheat. This process takes out all the nutrients and other things that take time to digest for a healthy life. Reading the ingredient is a good way to find the real whole grain product. They are now more expensive than the over processed product because manufacturers could make the enriched version cheaper and faster. To eat healthy you have to read the labels of everything you consume.

Healthy Choices at Fast Food Eateries

The truth is that you really can't eat healthy at any fast food restaurant. They aren't designed for those trying or needing to watch what they put in their mouth. But you can make better decisions. Don't' eat the bread if you can stand not too. It's along the lines of the South Beach Diet but that's where lots of your weight gaining properties are. Don't get anything fried, this includes French fries, onion rings, or even fried chicken. Get a diet pop, tea, or water. Avoid the desert and the salad, both have sugar in them and I don't just mean in the toppings. Watch "Super Size Me" for a real eye opener. The show is on McDonald's but you can bet that all fast food restaurants are basically the same. Limit how often you eat fast food to once per week, if that fast. Get a wrap at Subway instead of a toasted sub. Less bread and just as filling with all the fixings you want. When you get pizza, get vegetables on it so you aren't just eating bread, sauce, cheese, and pepperoni. Remember just how bad fast food is for you, your waistline, and your cholesterol. Even if you are fifteen, you should be thinking about how it will affect you later in life. Starting early will make it easier on your body as you age.

Eating at Home

The best thing to do is find a way to cook meals most nights of the week. This can take planning and team work. Have at least one non-meat dish every week. It doesn't have to be fish or seafood either. Don't use fast cooking rich to go with your meals. Those are again loaded with carbohydrates, which take your body longer to break down and will make you hungry sooner than you should be. Plan weekly meals so that you can cook casseroles and other easy to reheat dishes early in the week for days you will not have time to cook. Utilize your crock-pot and get a recipe book for it. You can make just about anything in a crock pot these days and have a good meal when you get home. Have salad a few times a week with dinner, but watch how much dressing you put on it. Have desert, but make it Jell-O. Indulge once in a while to though and it won't feel like you are depriving yourself of anything.

D. David Dugan is a supporter of http://health.divinfo.com, a site devoted to promoting good health, and http://retirement.divinfo.com, a site designed to provide people of all ages helpful retirement information.

Keep Your Body Healthy With Natural Healthy Foods

We have all heard our body grumble when it needs to be fed; it growls and screams at us for not looking after it. Hunger pains should not be ignored, they are your body's way of signaling that it is in need of something. If you break your meals into smaller, more frequent meals this will help to quell the hunger pains.

But when your body is being fed junk, it does fill the gap, but the body starts to realize that every heartbeat will get tougher and tougher to achieve if we constantly input unhealthy foods loaded with saturated fats and preservatives into our systems everyday.

Natural health foods are not available to just make you look good; they are there to make you feel good, as well as to be able to achieve that greater feeling of overall well-being. Natural foods are essential for maintaining the proper balance in our bodies.

You do not have to jump straight in the deep end either when looking for health natural foods; there are books designed to help the beginner start to gain a healthier body.

These books will help you make decisions, such as what type of healthy natural food you should be looking at buying, as well as how to achieve and maintain a health body.

The greatest medicine can be the food that we eat. Don't just rely on taking supplements, be sure to eat the most naturally healthy foods as well. Natural health supplements should be an addition to a natural health diet, nit something to take in place of one.

Healthy bodies maintained properly will not only help our immune systems, but it will also improve our overall health. With the various new viruses and other diseases coming up every day it is essential now more than ever to maintain a healthy immune system.

Of course, looking good is fine for some people, but to feel that good inside is sometimes tougher to achieve, especially if you are not eating properly; eating healthy natural foods will improve your insides greatly and will help to maintain that healthy inner body.

It's not a simple case where you do something once each month; this is a program that should stay with you for life. You can't just clear the system out once and then be done with it. You must constantly clean the body if you want to feel the results every day.

Gregg Hall is a business consultant and author for many online and offline businesses and lives in Navarre Florida with his 16 year old son. Get quality health products at http://www.shop4betterhealth.com.

Chocolate - A Health Food?

In this article we're going to discuss the health benefits of chocolate, if indeed there are any at all.

Let's be honest. If you're a normal person you love chocolate. Otherwise the industry itself wouldn't be so profitable. How many of us didn't like to chow down for a snack of Oreo cookies and milk or just a big hot fudge sundae at the local ice cream shop? Of course there is always the nice big piece of seven layer cake with that thick chocolate icing.

The list of things chocolate goes on and on and with that list also goes all the health warnings of how chocolate is bad for you. But is it?

Health warnings and benefits, for the most part, need to be taken with a grain of salt only because it seems that what was bad for you ten years ago suddenly has health benefits we knew nothing about, and things that we were told to eat when we were children all of sudden cause problems we didn't even know existed years ago. So, is chocolate one of those things?

Well, the latest information about chocolate, most recently reported in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, was that chocolate, when added to an already healthy diet, provided antioxidant benefits and actually increased a person's high density lipoprotein (HDL), or what is called "good cholesterol." One of the antioxidant benefits was that it impedes the oxidation of the "bad cholesterol."

What most people don't know is that the study was made on only twenty-three subjects which is nowhere near a large enough sample to draw any conclusions from. Also, when taking a very close look at the article itself, it clearly states that the benefits were small at best. It also went on to say that because the differences in the numbers were so small, it would need to be determined if these differences were significant enough to produce an improvement in health that could be measured.

Many experts say that the study was over-hyped because of possible ties to manufacturers in the chocolate industry itself. And while no wrong doing was ever proven, the suspicions still grew. Defenders of the cocoa bean itself argued that it is commonly known that many substances we don't normally associate with good health have antioxidant benefits, such as tea, so why not chocolate?

What the study didn't mention was all the things that chocolate has that are certainly not good for you. For example, chocolate as a high level of stearic acid, which is a saturated fat. Saturated fats are directly related to high cholesterol levels and increased risk of coronary artery disease and coronary death. Chocolate supporters say that stearic acid is not like other saturated fats. Yet, a study of 80,000 women over the age of 14 who all ate large amounts of chocolate, showed that these women had a much greater chance of heart disease.

No doubt the battle over how healthy or not healthy chocolate is for a person will go on. And while it does, we will continue to eat our Oreo cookies and seven layer chocolate cakes. Isn't life wonderful?

Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to Chocolates

Five "Health Foods" That May Be Making You Sick!

There are many of us who are dieting and trying to live a healthy lifestyle. We exercise and go out of our way to eat the best foods we can. Most of us already know that trans-fats, white sugar and white flour are not the best health choices, especially if we want to keep our weight down.

Unfortunately some of the very foods that we think are healthy are ones that can cause a lot of trouble for our bodies, and even make us ill. Below is a list of some surprisingly unhealthy ?health foods.?


Artificial Sweeteners
Many people who are dieting, whether it is low calorie or low carb diets, will opt for beverages with artificial sweeteners instead of sugar. Admittedly sugar is certainly a troublemaker and should be avoided, but artificial sweeteners are actually worse for you and could even be dangerous to your health.

All the artificial sweeteners are bad, but one of the worst sweeteners for us is NutraSweet (Equal, aspartame). There are over 92 different health related side effects associated with aspartame consumption, including brain tumors, birth defects, diabetes, emotional disorders and epilepsy/seizures. There are more adverse reactions to NutraSweet reported to the FDA than all other foods and additives combined.

A much better alternative to chemically derived sweeteners is stevia, which comes from a plant. It has been used for centuries with no know side effects. It can be purchased in most health food stores in the United States.


Sports Drinks
Although marketers would have us believe that sports drinks are what the body needs when exercising heavily, the truth is that sports drinks are filled with sugar (sucrose, glucose, and fructose) and salt (potassium and sodium) as well as artificial flavorings and colorings. Add a little salt to Cool-Aid and you have about the same thing. You would be much better off drinking spring water or diluted freshly squeezed juices while exercising.


Most Energy and Sports Bars
Most sports and bars are also filled with things that are not the best for our bodies, and are little better than candy bars. Many of them contain sugar or artificial sweeteners, chemicals, preservatives, and synthetic nutrients. Check the ingredients before you buy an energy bar. Try to find one that is made with whole foods, such as oats and flax seeds, fruits, and natural sweeteners.


Soy Products
This is one of the most surprising ones of all, after all soy has been used for countless generations in Asia. But the way we now use soy is very different than the way the Asians have traditionally used it. The ancient Asians knew that the soybean was hard to digest, so they had extensive fermenting processes that broke down most of the indigestible components, making it much healthier to eat. Examples of this would be products like soy sauce, tempeh, and miso. These were used in small amounts as condiments and flavorings, not as a meat replacement.

But the way we use soy as a meat alternative (texturized vegetable protein or TVP) can be very unhealthy, since soy contains large amounts of toxins or anti-nutrients. Some of the problems the anti-nutrients in soybeans cause are conditions of the pancreas, cancer and thyroid problems. Soybeans also can block the body?s absorption of essential minerals.


Granola (and Other Unprepared Grains)
For the last 30-40 years granola has been synonymous with heath food. But eating unprepared grains, or grains that have not been soaked, fermented or sprouted, has only come about in the last 50-100 years. People who lived before our time understood that unprepared grains could cause dietary distress.

There are anti-nutrients in grains (like there are in soybeans), such as phytic acid and enzyme inhibitors, that make them harder to digest. These antinutrients can cause serious problems like Crohn's disease, colitis, and even mental disorders. Our failure to prepare our grains properly is one of the reasons that celactic disease is so prevalent now.

So, stay away from the granola. Oatmeal is an excellent addition to our diets, but use whole rolled oats (not instant) and soak them overnight before boiling them for breakfast. Go to our recipe blog at http://coconut-recipes.blogspot.com for a good recipe for coconut oatmeal.

Good breads to eat are those that have properly prepared grains, including whole grain sourdough and sprouted grain breads. You can usually find these in specialty grocery stores and health food stores.


If you are trying to lose weight and/or eat healthier, remember that just because a company markets a ?healthy? product well or a health food store sells it, it doesn?t mean that it is really healthy for you. Do some research before you grab that sports bar, or better yet, reach for an organic apple, cherries, or some other natural (not processed) food. Your body will thank you and reward you for it.

By Dianne Ronnow, ? 2005 Mohave Publishing. Enzyme-Health.com. Discover how thousands of people are losing weight and getting healthier adding coconut oil to their diets at Coconut-Oil-Diet.com.

Health Food Supplement - Add Flax Seed To Your Diet And Enjoy The Benefits

What is flax seed?

First I will tell you what it can do. Number one, adding flax seed to your diet can fight cancer. It will help to regulate hormones and thus lower the risk of hormone sensitive cancers like prostate and breast cancer. Flax seed is grown in cold climates like Canada and the North Midwestern States. The cold weather allows the seeds to grow rich in omega-3 fatty acid. The omega-3 provides the core nutrients of the flax seed. The seeds are great sources of protein, fiber and lignans but the real health benefits come from the omega-3. A few of the tests that have been done with flax seed show increase in sensory perception. Several studies show that flax seed can be a cholesterol-lowering agent. Flax seed can also provide relief from constipation and can increase the performance of your digestive system.

How do you use it?

Flax seed is a small brown or golden seed that is about the size of two or three sesame seeds. Flax seed does have a harder texture so it needs to be ground up before consumption. Due to its high oil content it grinds easily and can be put on just about any food. Many people sprinkle it over salads or put in yogurt or your morning cereal. There are many great free recipes that are available to cook with flax seed. For the first time user of flax seed there are starter kits available that are priced low and you can usually get 3 pounds of flax seed, a how to book on how to include it into your diet and a flax seed grinder all for about $30. The flax seed has a rich nutty taste to it and if you use 100% certified organic flax seed the nutty taste is rich and can really taste good. It is commonly added to sports drinks and shakes.

Flax seed may be what your body is missing to have a complete healthy diet. The health benefits are endless and is very popular as a weight loss supplement.

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Healthy Breakfast Foods

It is always surrounded by silly excuse of lack of time. And still no one denies that fact that "breakfast" is the most important meal of the day.

Why such a hullabaloo about this early morning meal? Well, for starters, this meal comes after a break of 8 - 10 hours; hence your blood sugar level will be low. Since your body has gone with out food for such a long time, it needs nourishment to kick-start its day. Therefore "breakfast" is considered to be an important and essential meal of the day.

Breakfast benefits both, young and old. It is the key to jump start your muscles and your day. People who eat breakfast (healthy) daily are more likely to

- Consume more vitamins, minerals and less of fat and cholesterol.
- Increased strength and endurance.
- Better concentration and productivity all day long.
- Control over weight
- Low cholesterol = no risk or little risk of heart disease

Children who eat breakfast are likely to have better concentration, problem-solving skills and eye-hand coordination. They will be alert, creative, and less likely to miss days of school.

If you think skipping this meal, will help you lose weight, think again. By passing over this meal, your body will go in the starvation mode and make you crave for snacks especially sweets. Impulsive snacking on unhealthy foods can lead to weight gain. So you motive of losing weight by skipping breakfast stays unachieved.

Try to choose healthy foods from at least two food groups each morning

- Fruits & Vegetables
- Grains
- Dairy
- Proteins

A glass of pure fruit juice, bananas, yoghurt, low-calorie muesli with semi skimmed or skimmed milk, fresh fruit salad with few spoonfuls of low fat yoghurt, fresh and raw veggies mixed with flavoured yoghurt, a slice of toast or plain bread with eggs, boiled or poached are some of the options for breakfast. Kids can enjoy a Smoothie with their favourite fruits; add dash of yoghurt or honey to make it more delicious.

If you look forward to eating different kinds of healthy foods for breakfast, you are less like to skip this meal. If time is your hurdle, think about packing your breakfast or eating on the 'run', its better than skipping it altogether.