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But when sprouted, their antioxidant power doubles (and even quintuples for chickpeas).37 Lentils can be easily sprouted into one of the healthiest possible
Draining and rinsing your tinned beans can remove about half the added salt, but then you’d also be rinsing away some of the nutrition. I recommend purchasing the no-salt-added varieties and cooking with the bean liquid in whatever dish you’re whipping up.
The only legumes I have the patience to cook from scratch are lentils.
Another fantastic snack (can you tell I love snacking?) is roasted chickpeas. Google it. My favorite, not surprisingly, is the buffalo ranch flavor (from the Kid Tested Firefighter Approved blog40), using a silicone baking mat.
One study, for example, found that eating 130 grams a day of cooked pinto beans for two months may drop your cholesterol by nineteen points.
(Food for Life, the same company that makes Ezekiel bread, makes a sprouted yellow corn tortilla usually sold in the frozen section.)
I’ll steam a few leaves and use them as burrito wraps to replace the tortillas. We call them collard-ritos in our house.
black-bean brownies. I don’t have a recipe of my own, but if you poke around online, you’ll find many good ones, including the one Dr. Joel Fuhrman
shared on The Dr. Oz Show, which uses almond butter as the green-light source of fat and dates as the green-light source of sugar.44
Factors that might cause you to swallow extra air include chewing gum, wearing ill-fitting dentures, sucking on boiled sweets, drinking through a straw, eating too fast, talking while you eat, and smoking cigarettes. So, if the fear of lung cancer doesn’t get you to quit smoking, maybe fear of flatulence will.
The indigestible sugars in beans that make it down to your colon may even function as prebiotics to feed your good bacteria and make for a healthier colon.
Of the spices that have been tested, cloves, cinnamon, and garlic seem to be the most gas reducing, followed by turmeric (but only
if uncooked), pepper, and ginger.
The smell appears to come primarily from the digestion of sulfur-rich foods. So to cut down on the stench, experts have recommended cutting back on such foods as meat and eggs.60 (Hydrogen sulfide is called “rotten egg gas” for a reason.) This may be why people who eat meat regularly were found to generate as much as fifteen times the sulfides as those eating plant-based diets.61
There are healthy sulfur-rich foods, such as garlic and cauliflower.
If you’re about to embark on a long trip in a confined space after a big meal of aloo gobi, Pepto-Bismol and generic equivalents can act as a windbreaker by binding ...
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No less an expert than Hippocrates himself was attributed as saying, “Passing gas is necessary to well-being.”64 In a review of degassing drugs and devices, Dr. John Fardy, a chair of gastroenterology, wrote: “Perhaps increased tolerance of flatus would be a better solution, for we tamper with harmless natural phenomena at our peril.”65 And, yes, Dr. Fardy is his real name.
Legume consumption is associated with a slimmer waist and lower blood pressure,
Beans are packed with fibre, folate, and phytates, which may help reduce the risk of stroke, depression, and colon cancer. The phytoestrogens in soya in particular appear to both help prevent breast cancer and improve breast cancer survival.
Berries offer potential protection against cancer (chapters 4 and 11), a boost to the immune system (chapter 5), and a guard for the liver (chapter 8) and brain (chapters 3 and
Colorful foods are often healthier because they contain antioxidant pigments, whether it’s the beta-carotene that makes carrots and sweet potatoes orange, the lycopene antioxidant pigment that makes tomatoes red, or the anthocyanin pigments that make blueberries blue. The colors are the antioxidants. That knowledge alone should revolutionize your stroll down the produce aisle.
(Indeed, red onions have 76 percent more antioxidant capacity than white, with yellow onions in between.
Red cabbage may contain eight times more antioxidants than green cabbage,4 which is why you’ll never find a green cabbage in my house.
Shop for the reddest of strawberries, the blackest of blackberries, the most scarlet tomato, the darkest green broccoli you can find. The colors are the antiaging, anticancer antioxidants.
Consuming sugar in fruit form is not only harmless but actually helpful. Eating berries can blunt the insulin spike from high-glycemic foods like white bread, for example.15 This may be because the fibre in fruit has a gelling effect in your stomach and small intestine that slows the release of sugars16 or because of certain phytonutrients in fruit that appear to block the absorption of sugar through the gut wall and into your bloodstream.17 So eating fructose the way nature intended carries benefits rather than risks.
Surely there must be some level of fructose consumption that’s harmful even when served in Mother Nature’s green-light form, right? Apparently not. Seventeen people were asked to eat twenty servings of fruit per day for months. Despite the extraordinarily high fructose content of this fruit-based diet—the sugar equivalent of about eight cans of fizzy drinks a day—the investigators reported beneficial outcomes with no overall adverse effects for body weight, blood pressure,20 insulin, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels.
Goji berries, however, have the highest concentrations of melatonin.35 Gojis have the third-highest antioxidant capacity of any common dried fruit—five times more than raisins and second only to dried pomegranate seeds and barberries (a fruit commonly found in Middle Eastern markets and spice shops).
Gojis also have a specific antioxidant pigment that makes sweetcorn yellow—zeaxanthin. When eaten, zeaxanthin is shuttled into your retinas (the back of your eyes) and appears to protect against macular degeneration, a leading cause of vision loss.
zeaxanthin content in yolks, but goji berries have about fifty
Anthocyanin pigments are responsible for many of the intense blue, black, purple, and red colors of berries and other fruits and vegetables.
Bilberries gained notoriety during World War II when it was said that pilots in the British Royal Air Force “were eating bilberry jam to improve their night vision.”
bilberries but thanks to a top-secret new invention: radar.
Unfortunately, these anthocyanin pigments take a hit when berries are processed into jam. As much as 97 percent of anthocyanins are lost when strawberries are turned into strawberry
Freeze-drying, however, appears to be remarkably nut...
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Evidently, nearly all wild “aggregate” berries (meaning berries that look like clusters of little balls, like blackberries, raspberries, and mulberries) in North America are edible,45 but please be sure you make an ironclad identification before foraging.
Think baked apples, poached pears, and grilled pineapple.
If you like drinking your fruit, blending is better than juicing to preserve nutrition. Juicing removes
When you merely drink the juice, you lose out on the fibre and all the nutrition that was attached to
Harvard University researchers found that greater juice consumption was associated with higher diabetes risk. So, by choosing yellow-light sources of fruit, like juice or jam, you may not only be missing out on nutrients but actively working against your health.
the charts,7 but taste-wise, my personal favorite is Honeycrisp—or any pick-your-own variety I can find locally. If you’ve never tried an apple you picked right off a tree, you don’t know what you’re missing. Failing that, farmers’ markets can offer good deals on great produce. My family buys apples by the half bushel.
Barhi dates, for example, are wet and sticky, but when frozen, they acquire the taste and chew of caramel. Seriously. Paired with my Honeycrisp, it’s like eating a butterscotch-flavored caramel apple.
Medjool dates in Middle Eastern grocery stores and many natural foods markets,
(although Black Sphinx dates from Phoenix come close!).
Olives and extra-virgin olive oil are yellow-light foods. Olive consumption should be minimized because they’re soaked in brine—a dozen large olives could take up nearly half your recommended sodium limit for an entire day. Olive oil is sodium-free, but most of its nutrition has been removed. You can think of extra-virgin olive oil a little like fruit juice: It has nutrients, but the calories you get are relatively empty compared to those from the whole fruit. (Olives are, after all, fruits.)
Cooking without oil is surprisingly easy. To keep foods from sticking, you can sauté in wine, sherry, stock, vinegar, or just plain water. For baking, I’ve successfully used green-light ingredients such as mashed bananas or avocado, soaked prunes, and even tinned pumpkin to substitute for oil to provide a similar moistness.
Berries contain the most antioxidants, whereas melons wallow down around iceberg lettuce levels.
I bought an inexpensive dehydrator from eBay, and I’m so glad I did.
Sulfur-containing preservatives, such as sulfur dioxide in dried fruit and sulfites in wine, can form hydrogen sulfide in your gut—this is the rotten egg gas implicated in the development of the inflammatory bowel disease ulcerative colitis.
The sulfur naturally contained in cruciferous vegetables does not appear to elevate colitis risk,19 so feel free to add kale crisps to your healthy snacking menu.
Adding citrus zest to your meals not only adds color, flavor, aroma, and a bit of culinary flair but also nutrition. Citrus zest lives up to its name in terms of enlivening dishes, and it may do the same to
