Healthy Foods And Cacao: Part Two
By: Marilyn Reid
As was discussed in Healthy Foods and Cacao: Part One, our bodies need raw materials to fight off the side effects of living. Our bodies are, literally, under attack, either by the normal processes of living (oxygen) or the other things we encounter on a daily basis that leave our bodies open to attack (H1N1). What we feed our bodies will either help in the fight or tear it down further. There are other minerals and nutrients our bodies need to do that work effectively.
It is the sweet potato, not the carrot, that will have the greatest impact on your vision. Sweet potatoes outpower carrots. One carrot contains 203% of the daily recommended vitamin a, but a sweet potato weighs in with 262.2% of the daily recommended dose. Sweet potatoes also contain vitamin C and B6 are known to help the body fight off inflammation.
Tomatoes contain vitamin C and vitamin A, but they also contain potassium (8% of the RDA). Tomatoes real punch comes from lycopene, which is present when tomatoes are cooked. Lycopene made headlines because of its impact on prostate cancer, but research has indicated that it may also be beneficial in warding of stomach, colon, breast, and lung cancers. Regardless, tomatoes are incredibly high in antioxidants and should be part of everyone’s diet.
Mom was right about eating your broccoli. As with all the superfoods so far reviewed, broccoli is high in antioxidant vitamins, like A and C, but it is also high in fiber, folic acid and even calcium. Broccoli contains 178 milligrams in one cup. (Milk has 300 in one cup, but also the fat that goes with it and no fiber.) A diet high in good fiber has been shown to ward off rectal and colon cancers.
Dense in antioxidants, cacao nibs are packed with a whole host of nutrients, making it a great choice for brain health. As discussed in the article Organic Cacao, the Department of Metabolism and Nutrition, in Madrid, Spain, reported that cacaos the glucose retardation index of cocoa . . . were similar to other natural commercial insoluble fibres. In other words, the good fiber in cacao helped keep glucose levels down. The chromium in cacao nips is known to reduce ones cravings for sugary foods (http://healthyfoodrawdiet.com/cacao/cacao-nibs). It has also been shown to reduce the platelet levels in the bloodstream, inhibiting the formation of clogged arteries and reducing the risk of cardiovascular problems. While cacao nibs do contain fat, it is important to remember that our bodies need fat to process nutrients.
Salmon is more evidence that not all fats are created equally. The fat in salmon is essential for our bodies, but more so our brains. The omega 3 fatty acids in salmon have no equal. It must be noted that for salmons benefits to be maximized, it is critical that one consumes wild catch salmon, as farm raised salmon omega 3 are significantly lower. It is believed that farm-raised salmon does not enjoy the normal diet as salmon out in the wild and does therefore not contain the same benefits. The quality of the meat suffers and the salmon can in fact suffer from more infections and must therefore be treated with antibiotics, leading to a whole host of other issues.
You are what you eat. If you fuel your body with superfoods that are rich in nutrients and good fats, your body will be better able to ward off infection and perform the way in which it was intended. Salmon, cacao nibs, tomatoes, broccoli, sweet potatoes are some of the best foods for fueling our body to fight off expected invaders, like free radicals that lead to oxidization, and unexpected invaders, like cancer cells.
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Healthy Foods And Cacao: Part One
By: Marilyn Reid
What makes a food a healthy food? What properties does it have to make it a nutritional super food? We age because our bodies break down and wear out. Why? From the moment we draw our first breath, we begin the, usually, slow process of dying. Every breath gets us a step closer. The unfair part is that the process of aging is initiated with breath. Oxygen, so vital for our living, brings us daily closer to death. Think of the aging process as rusting. That is why antioxidants are so essential. They help the body deal with the process of rusting and thereby help stave off aging and help the body function optimally.
Green tea is quite a powerhouse. In the last couple of years, dentists have been recommending green tea because it has been shown to kill the bacteria causing plaque. As we know, dental plaque is, indeed, related to cardiovascular plaque and those with oral issues often also have heart issues. Further, studies have shown that green tea is beneficial in treating mouth and throat infections, which might explain its connection to a decrease in esophageal cancers. Green tea has been linked in several studies with a reduction of cancer proclivities, probably because of its high levels of antioxidants.
Usually, when we think of cacao, we think of hot cocoa. Cacao, even cacao tea http://healthyfoodrawdiet.com/cacao/cacao-tea), however, has often been recommended as a substitute for other, more harmful drinks. While cacao does contain some caffeine, it tends to be less acidic than coffee or black tea and therefore tolerated more easily. Furthermore, cacao, especially unprocessed and unsugared, has loads of other health benefits. Containing such properties as Phenylethylamine, it is able to induce both a sense of calmness and alertness. Cacaos levels of flavonoids are unsurpassed by most foods and contain other minerals like magnesium and chromium provide the body with nutrients that will stave off sugar cravings.
Blueberries, like green tea, are loaded with antioxidant vitamins. Blueberries, cousins to cranberries and bilberries, have been shown to promote urinary tract health. Interestingly, the tartness associated with wild blueberries is one of the reasons blueberries are so potent. That tartness leads to helping the body in becoming more alkaline (and less acidic). Acidity, we know, makes our system work harder. Our body has to strip magnesium and calcium from our bones to reduce the bodys acidity and make it more alkaline. Over time, a high level of acid in the body will affect the kidneys that are under load from the acidity and are working overtime to neutralize it. Blueberries, on the other hand, help restore and maintain a good level of alkalinity.
It has been suggested by numerous studies that cancer itself may be the body’s reaction to being under the load of inflammation over time. Any time we force our bodies to work overtime and we do not give our bodies the raw materials it needs to deal with that level of stress, we invite a whole host of other issues. Superfoods, like cacao, green tea, and blueberries are generally high in antioxidants and help the body fight inflammation, while providing it with the nutrients it needs to function optimally.
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Jameth Sheridan Discusses Superfoods Cacao and Raw Chocolate
Jameth Sheridan Interviewed by Kevin Gianni
To read the rest of this transcript as well as access Rawkathon experts just like Jameth Sheridan please click here! Kevin Gianni is an internationally recognized health advocate, author & film consultant. He has helped thousands of people take control of their own health naturally. For more information visit raw food diets and holistic nutrition.
View all articles by Kevin Gianni This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s Rawkathon, which can be found at http://www.Rawkathon.com. In this excerpt, Jameth Sheridan shares on superfoods including cacao and raw chocolate.
Rawkathon with Jameth Sheridan. Jameth Sheridan is the co-author of Uncooking with Jameth and Kim and the co-founder of the superfoods company HealthForce Nutritionals.
Kevin: Let’s move into, there’s a bunch of superfoods and a bunch of stuff I want to talk about. When we were in the car on the way over here, we started talking about chocolate.
Jameth: Yes.
Kevin: And cacao. And so, I want to kind of, I just want to get your scope on it. What’s the deal, what’s your experience with it?
Jameth: Sure.
Kevin: Maybe that can instruct some people.
Jameth: Sure. As far as for flavoring of things, chocolate has replaced carob over the years on the raw foods community. The whole idea is that raw, cacao is what raw chocolate is really called, and the whole idea is because it’s raw, it’s healthy. Just like I talked about earlier, there are two categories of food, raw and cooked. So chocolate, that has negative effects on people, that actually kills a lot of animals, all of a sudden because it’s raw, now it’s good for you. I wouldn’t call it a half truth, it’s maybe like a quarter truth or a fifth truth..
If you have a regular chocolate bar, it’s got pasteurized milk, it’s got hydrogenated oil, it’s got white sugar, it’s got artificial flavorings. None of it is organic. It’s got pesticide residues. It’s absolute crap. I would consider that poisonous for the body. In addition, it’s got caffeine and theobromine from the chocolate. And the chocolate’s probably been heated up to a temperature that’s not raw for sure.
You then can move into, let’s say, a whole food vegan chocolate bar where you have organic cocoa butter, organic cacao, sweetened with some sort of organic, more whole food natural sugar and no flavorings whatsoever. That is much healthier than a regular chocolate bar.
When you move into a raw chocolate-type product, you’ve got cacao and cacao butter, almost always of which are organic. The sweetener, instead of let’s say a refined sugar or a less refined sugar, in the vegan chocolate bar, is now something like agave nectar, or yacon, or lucuma, which are whole food sweeteners. Vastly healthier. And, if there’s vanilla in it, it’s actually vanilla bean. If there’s coconut in there, it’s not coconut flavoring or coconut flakes, it’s actual coconut. So, the raw chocolate bar is much more whole foods. It’s much more blood sugar balanced. Everything in there is, for the most part, a healthy ingredient.
But, you still have a cacao in there. And, cacao still has, it’s either caffeine or theobromine or both in there, they’re almost exactly the same chemicals. And, caffeine is not good for you. Whether it’s in the form of yerba matte or cacao. Caffeine artificially increases your heart rate. It can give you heart palpitations, it artificially increases your respiration. If you take enough of it, you actually can die. You can induce death if you take enough of it because your heart won’t be able to beat that fast. And, I’ve seen it mess a lot of people’s health up. If you take cacao before bed, you cannot sleep, period, because it’s going to keep you awake. It’s similar, we also talked about it in the car, people take No-Doze, they take caffeine to keep themselves up, like a whole food version of that. I consider cacao a whole food medicinal, recreational drug. And I don’t think any evidence suggests anything otherwise than that, it’s just it has this cache it has this thing that because it’s raw we can have it in any quantity and just pound it in and I’ve seen people really mess up their health and their lives by following that advice and I think it’s actually reckless.
Kevin: And you had mentioned in terms of antioxidants, I mean it’s good compared to some things.
Jameth: It’s up there, it’s one of the higher whole food type antioxidants. But when you compare it to lots of herbs like sage or oregano or rosemary or even if you start to get into herbal extracts or some fruit and vegetable extracts like resveratrol from grapes has about 40 times more antioxidants than cacao in it. Cacao is an OK antioxidant but if you are looking to take cacao to increase you antioxidant levels it’s a bad way to do it because cacao increases your metabolism, in an artificial way, it makes your heart beat faster and creates, actually, adrenaline in your body. It actually uses up more antioxidants than it provides you.
I use cacao what I call ceremonially. If I’m going to work out and I’m tired anyway, and I figure you know, I’m not going to work today at all, I will take a little bit of cacao or other things sometimes or green tea or other things with caffeine to just kind of kick myself in the ass and actually go out and do an hour or two workout. But just a little bit. If it’s already late at night and my wife and I want to stay up and watch a movie we’ll have a little bit of cacao. But we use it very, very carefully because its unbalanced power can easily be upset.
Kevin: Yeah.
Interesting. Let’s talk about another staple in the raw food diet which is nama shoyu, even tamari, for those people who find raw tamari, let’s talk about that.
Jameth: Sure. If I can start with that by talking about salt in general.
Kevin: Yeah, good.
Jameth: There’s the idea that some people think you should be on a completely low sodium diet because so much research has shown that low sodium diets lower blood pressure, it lowers your risk for kidney disease, for heart disease and so forth. Now that research is based on regular white table salt which is heated anywhere from 300 to 1200 degrees. It has chemicals added to it, it has inorganic iodine added to it, and inorganic iodine is toxic and can kill you if you have enough of it. Regular table salt is absolutely abysmal for your health and that should never be. Because that is so bad some people have thrown the baby out with the bath-water and say all salt is bad.
When you have no salt in your diet, or for example let’s talk about when you water fast, you have large amounts of water, no salt in the water and you would thing you would be extremely hydrated but when you water fast you’re actually slightly dehydrated. Because when you have too much salt from any source you hold too much water in your body, there’s too much water held in solution in your body you become puffy and retain fluids. If you have too little salt, salt is what allows you to hold on to fluids, you can’t hold on to enough fluids and no matter how much water you drink, in fact the more water you drink when you don’t have enough salt, the more dehydrated you become and the more work your kidneys have to do to maintain the salt you have in your system. So salt balance is essential.
Now you would think that on a natural diet you should be able to get enough salt from salty vegetables like celery or tomatoes and in some cases I think that’s accurate. But for anyone sweating or doing anything athletic or people who genetically have low blood pressure or most people in my experience need to have additional sources of organic sodium. If you look to animals in nature whenever there is a salt-lick around the animals flock to it and start consuming that salt- lick. Even animals in nature, you even find predator and prey near each other at salt-licks licking the salt because the prey is so drawn to that salt that they’ll risk getting eaten by a predator just so they can have that salt. There’s something very valuable about it.
The best form of salt in my opinion by far in any community is miso, because miso used to be considered cooked which was completely wrong because miso starts out cooked but it’s aged for two years. Usually it’s in wooden casks like they used to do in the old days and its treated with probiotics and enzymes and by the time miso comes out every square molecule of that miso has undergone enzymatic and probiotic action and miso actually has a huge life force field around it. It’s anti-cancer, it’s anti-radiation, it’s a tremendous antioxidant, it’s a tremendous healing food and only a small part of it is salt. To me it’s the number one, I actually consider miso a superfood. A hardcore superfood up there with any other superfood and it compares statistically and with research. It’s a live, living salt.
The next salt, the next things you would go to I think would be a shoyu type or tamari soy sauce. Years ago there was a mistake in the raw food community that someone thought or was led to believe that nama shoyu was raw soy sauce and tamari was not. People said tamari is poisonous crap, it’s cooked, and nama shoyu is the way to go. And let me tell you the truth on that, I’ve done a lot of research on this. Tamari is the world’s original soy sauce, made in Japan, back to recorded records. Miso was made, and the liquid that floated to the top of the miso was tamari, that was what was tamari. It was aged. It was fermented in a good way with bacteria and enzymes and no wheat was ever added to this there was no such thing as wheat in Asia. And today tamari is made on its own and fermented on its own.
Nama shoyu is very recent, thousands and thousands of years there was tamari and the ingredients are soy beans, water and salt, enzymes and probiotics that treat this. Nama shoyu is made differently whereas today they add westernized wheat to nama shoyu. The wheat actually when it ferments forms a large amount of alcohol. So it has a less full bodied flavor than tamari and it has a larger alcohol content which isn’t necessarily a problem but there’s less flavor to it and since it has wheat in it people with wheat allergies and people with gluten intolerance which is a big percentage of the population cannot consume it. And tamari, unless someone actually went out of the way to pasteurize, it is not cooked. Tamari is raw, so is nama shoyu. They’re equally as raw, but tamari is made the traditional healthy way, has a stronger better flavor than
nama shoyu and is completely gluten free.
Nama shoyu has destroyed, I mean absolutely reeked havoc, destroyed raw food cuisine for anyone who is wheat sensitive or anyone who has celiac disease which means they can’t have any gluten whatsoever. It’s just eliminated that for them and it’s less healthy for them than tamari. There’s no reason you need to be having wheat in your tamari, in your soy sauce. So to me, tamari, excuse me nama shoyu’s time has come due to an error, someone thinking it was raw and tamari was not and it’s now time for it to go. It has no place in the raw food community, I don’t think whatsoever, because we have superior alternatives and that would be gluten-free tamari.
Source: Kevin Gianni
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