Pages

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Finding Your Raw Food Balance

A good friend of mine posted a comment today on her Facebook page. She made tacos with walnuts and her ph level was more acidic. She was wondering if it was the walnuts. It could very well have been because walnuts are very acidic. But they also contain tons of health promoting nutrients. The good and the bad?

Let’s look at spinach, one of the most nutrient rich vegetables out there. It is full of vitamins, minerals and phyto nutrients. Spinach contains nutrients that fight inflammation and cancer. It also is full of anti-oxidants. Calorie for calorie it is said to have more nutrients than any other food. Sounds perfect? Not quite.

Spinach is one of the vegetables that is on the dirty dozen list, meaning one of the top 12 fruits and vegetables that pesticides are most frequently found on. Spinach also has measurable amounts of oxalates. Oxalates can cause problems for people with kidney issues and also interfere with calcium adsorption. It also contains purines which can lead to a build up of uric acid.

So, here we have the good and the bad of spinach. And lately, it seems you can read negative and positive about almost everything we put in our mouths. And I am talking about the healthy stuff.  So what do we do? Stop eating all together? Well, then we are left with air and water and everyone knows about the pollution issues associated with that!

Ok…I was a little tongue in cheek there but I think you can catch my drift. How do we deal with all of the information that bombards us? Moderation. Balance. Eat your spinach but not every day of the week, or at the exclusion of other greens. Mix it up. Go for variety. Eat a lot of different foods so you can get the different benefits from all of them. Cover your bases, so to speak. Oh…and buy organic spinach.

Tagged as: organic, raw food, raw food diet, raw food recipes, vegan, vegan recipes


View the original article here

No comments:

Post a Comment