This is a great tasting warm salad for getting more nutritious pumpkin and pumpkin seeds into your diet. It’s full of superfoods, very healthy and quite filling as well.
If pumpkin is not in season, butternut squash should be and makes a good alternative with a delicious taste and a similar nutritional profile.
You can make this warm salad recipe with either pumpkin or butternut squash with the same directions ahead.
Avocados are an amazing superfood with a rich flavor and an impressive list of health benefits. Here’s why avocado is healthy and some seriously good reasons to get more of them into your diet.
There is a wide variety of nutritional elements in avocado to support better health and these nutrients are in a highly usable and absorbable form for your body but to their high fatty acid content. Some experts have even described avocado as nature’s most perfect food.
Avocados are rich in the prime antioxidants vitamin C and vitamin E, they contain good levels of most of the B vitamins are full of the often difficult to obtain vitamin K that helps build strong bones and maintain a healthy cardiovascular system.
The buttery green pulp of the fruit is also a good source of minerals like potassium, magnesium, phosphorous, manganese, copper and zinc. Continue Reading…
Parsley is a green superfood so rich in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other nutrients that eating it is like using a multivitamin supplement – only one that actually works.
The nutrition in this herb is much more easily assimilated than in engineered multivitamins and many people who start using it regularly in their diet with attest to the many health benefits of parsley.
Parsley is a good source of provitamin A beta-carotene, with one cup containing around 100% of the standard RDA (though you’d really want to get more than that for vitamin A’s beneficial effects on your immune system, for healthy skin and vision, protection from infection and much more).
It is very high in vitamin C, containing far more than most well known sources like oranges and other citrus fruit (though these are admittedly much easier to eat in large quantities). Vitamin C from natural sources like parsley is a potent antioxidant that protects the cells in our bodies from dangerous free radical damage.
Papaya is an excellent source of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, phytonutrients and digestive enzymes.
Here are 5 ways papaya fruit benefits your health. All great reasons to eat more of this amazing energy food.
Digestive enzymes in papaya, particularly papayas that are still a bit green, contain protein digesting enzymes like papain. When eaten with or soon after a meal containing meat or another high protein food, these enzymes help to break down the protein into its individual amino acids.
Here is a healthy and crunchy pumpkin seed pesto recipe that is full of antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids and other nutrition. Use it wherever you’d use normal pesto for a strong and rich taste that is really good for you.
This recipe adds extra flavor and crunch to salads and steamed veggies and it goes really well with brown rice, sardines, organic chicken, pumpkin and tomato dishes.
You’ll need a good food processor like this to make it, but you’re really missing out on a lot of great food if you don’t have one of these anyway.
This is a very simple and really healthy soup for the cold winter months and it’s good to have something much better for you than pumpkin pie to make with pumpkins.
Pumpkin and coconut go really well together, while the curry paste and bell pepper add a tasty kick to the soup. There’s a lot of health nutrients in this recipe and with all the good fiber it’s surprisingly filling as well.
You’ll need a good blender to make up this soup recipe. If you don’t have one I can highly recommend this powerful one I have in my kitchen.
Here is a rich and tangy pumpkin and garlic soup recipe full of health nutrients to warm you up over winter and keep away colds and flu bugs.
You’ll need a good blender like this to make this healthy pumpkin soup recipe but with all the options they give you this is something every kitchen should have.
Here’s a recipe for a great tasting yet healthy pumpkin and mushroom risotto using BPA-free canned pumpkin and shiitake mushrooms.
Alternatively, fresh steamed pumpkin is great in this risotto recipe if it’s in season. Butternut squash also makes a fine replacement.
For the mushrooms you can also use other stronger tasting varieties such as portobellos, but shiitake mushrooms are best if you can find them.
Here is an very tasty chicken and pumpkin salad recipe I came up with to get more healthy pumpkin into my diet. It makes a simple and tasty lunch or dinner and is really good for your health and energy too.
When fresh pumpkin is not in season, butternut squash makes a fine replacement. If you don’t have pumpkin seeds you can use cashews, which also taste great in this, but pumpkin seeds are particularly good for health nutrients and worth getting.
Lycopene is a potent antioxidant that gives foods like tomatoes, goji berries, watermelon, red bell pepper and guava their red color.
Tomatoes, and in particular processed tomato products like tomato sauce, tomato soup and ketchup, are by far the biggest sources of lycopene in the American diet.
There has been a lot of interest in the strong protective properties and potential health benefits of lycopene in recent years. Consequently, it is one of the most studied and researched of all the antioxidant carotenoids.
Here’s how getting more lycopene into your diet can help protect your body against many life-threatening diseases, like cancer and cardiovascular disease and even slow down the visible signs of aging.
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.