The antioxidant carotenoid alpha-carotene is found primarily in orange vegetables like carrots, pumpkins and many leafy greens.
While often found alongside the more well known beta-carotene, new research is showing alpha-carotene to be an even more powerful antioxidant for cancer prevention and protecting your cardiovascular system.
I like my soups quick, simple and tasty, with as many superfoods as I can pack into them. This carrot and parsley soup really fits the bill.
Both parsley and carrot are excellent skin foods. But with the addition of garlic, turmeric and coconut oil, this soup is a really nutritious food for healthy skin.
Carrot soup is a great way to get your beta-carotene and other health nutrients. The way I like to make it is really quick and simple and has other very healthy ingredients like celery and turmeric.
This carrot and celery soup uses a blender and makes a delicious, easy and warming lunch or dinner coming into winter.
The ingredients below serves two but you can double as needed for more people.
Here are 4 very healthy carrot juice recipes to detoxify your body while improving your skin, enhancing your immunity and boosting your energy levels.
Each are quick to make, use just a few ingredients and, enjoyed regularly, they can make a really difference to your overall health and well-being. I hope you like them.
Making carrot juice is easy but there are a few important points to keep in mind for the best results. Let’s take a quick look at them.
To start you’ll need a good juicer. They are various types of juicing machines available and carrots, being one of the more solid vegetables, will be easier to juice with a well-built machine.
It doesn’t have to cost a great deal, but the cheapest are usually the cheapest for a reason and over the longer term it pays to get a juicer of decent quality. Many people start with a centrifugal juicer as these are usually less expensive.
However, if you enjoy the health benefits of juicing enough to do it regularly, a good masticating/auger type juicer becomes a wise investment.
Forget about synthetic multivitamins, carrots are nature’s big orange nutrition boosters. Full of beneficial vitamins, minerals and other nutrients, carrots eaten regularly can really improve your health and energy levels. Here’s why.
In the vitamin stakes, carrots are of course an extremely rich source of beta-carotene (it’s even named after them) for Vitamin A, with testing usually showing over 16,000 IU’s per cup of carrot.
Beta-carotene is the best known of the carotenoids and a powerful antioxidant for disease prevention and general good health. A good intake of beta-carotene in your diet may also help protect your face from sun damage that leads to skin aging.
Carotenoids are a family of phytonutrient pigments that occur naturally in many fruits and vegetables, particularly ones with colors like orange and yellow and in dark green leafy vegetables (where the green chlorophyll takes dominance).
Whilst there are hundreds of carotenoids, only a few are known to be significant in the American diet. Alongside beta-carotene, which is the most commonly occurring, there is also alpha-carotene, gamma-carotene, beta-cryptoxanthin, lycopene, lutein and zeaxanthin.
Here is a spicy butternut squash soup with curry to warm you up over the colder months. It’s based on combining a traditional Thai recipe for yellow curry with the richness of coconut milk and butternut squash for a great tasting soup full of nutrition.
This is what you’ll need to make it up for yourself.
This butternut soup recipe combines antioxidant rich squash with extremely healthy broccoli and its anti-cancer compounds.
It also has bell pepper for its high vitamin C, coconut oil and coconut milk for their important medium chain fatty acids and turmeric and garlic for even more powerful antioxidants.
It would be hard to make up a butternut squash soup that tastes as great as this does while still being so incredibly good for your health.
There is quite a bit of broccoli in this soup, but you’ll find it blends in really well with the other ingredients. Even if you don’t usually like it by itself, this is a great way to get one of the healthiest vegetables out there into your diet.
There is a method for cooking butternut squash that retains the most vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other nutrition when you eat them.
This way of preparing butternut squash is also quicker and simpler than any other I’ve tried. Personally, I think it tastes the best too. Here’s how to do it.
Choose butternut squash that are relatively heavy for their size and have a bright and consistent color to the skin.
Butternut squash is one of the most nutritious and healthiest vegetables you can eat, with a rich array of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.
It not only tastes great, it is also low in calories, yet surprisingly filling due to its high levels of dietary fiber for weight loss and digestive health.
Many people would do well to replace fattening potato products with the far healthier and nutritionally superior butternut squash. Here’s why.
Butternut squash is loaded with antioxidant carotenoids to protect your body’s cells from free-radical damage that can lead to cancer and skin aging.
Healthy green smoothies made with fruits like avocado, banana and kiwi are a great way to get a lot of nutrition into your diet. They are also a simple way to use greens like spinach or kale when you don’t feel like eating a salad.
In fact, the way greens are blended up in smoothies makes their nutrients much more accessible, while at the same time masking their taste and making them easy to drink for children.
Using avocado in this smoothie recipe adds a wonderful creamy flavor as well as all of it’s valuable health benefits. Mixed with the many minerals, vitamins and antioxidants in spinach, along with the vitamin C of kiwi and all the nutrition in banana, this makes for a powerful yet great tasting green smoothie.
Try some of the optional ingredients like ground flaxseed, papaya, pineapple or pumpkin seeds for an even more nutritious avocado smoothie. Here’s how to make it. Continue Reading…