A Raw Food Day – an entire day with pure raw organic food. Fresh fruits, vegetables, leafy greens, nuts and seeds – and all prepared in flavourful ways .
It’s a luxury for your body, mind, heart and soul.
And, … it’s super easy to prepare and even easier to clean up afterwards – imagine no greasy pots and pans!
I have been amazed, astounded really, by the power of green food!
Lifestyle diseases can be cured by lifestyle changes!
Today is World Diabetes Day – A good time to spread some awareness about an illness that has blown out of proportion, an illness that has sky-rocket!
An illness that kills!
We are now getting gorgeous cherries, the deepest red, sweet, tasty and succulent – beautiful in a salad.
The other day I had quinoa cooked in coconut milk for breakfast, with cherries. It was an idea from one of my favorite blogs, In pursuit of more , and it was so delicious!
Quinoa is a nutritional powerhouse – its protein content is higher than in any other grain , it is also a perfect source of dietary fiber and ion.
To develop more of this good stuff I decided to make a salad – cherries with quinoa!
I made a red quinoa salad tossed in a cherry/garlic dressing, served with walnuts, more cherries and crumbled creamy goat cheese on top – it turned out to be so good that we made it 3 days in a row!
Here’s the recipe:
Cook 2 cups of red quinoa according to package. Put it aside to cool.
For the dressing:
15 fresh cherries, pitted
2 spoons of good balsamic vinegar
6 -8 spoons of olive oil
1 clove of garlic
sea salt
Put all the ingredients in the blender and blend to a smooth dressing consistency.
Add the dressing to the quinoa – stir it and arrange it in a serving dish. On top add 15 pitted cherries chopped coarsely, add coarsely chopped walnuts and sprinkle with some crumbled creamy goat cheese and some fresh basil leaves.
Cherries are known as a true super fruit – cherries are high in pectin, a soluble fiber that helps to prevent heart disease by lowering the “bad” cholesterol. Scientists have identified a group of naturally occurring chemicals abundant in cherries that helps lower blood sugar in people with diabetes, the berries have anti-inflammatory properties that help reduce joint pain and arthritis. They are also high in antioxidants helping to prevent heart disease and cancer, they contain melatonin which helps regulate heart rhythm and improve sleep – they are packed with vitamin A, C and E !! So — mixed with the marvelous quinoa this dish becomes a potent and delicious dish, boosting your health with every bite.
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” Hippocrates, father of medicine, 413 B.C.
Enjoy!
I found this very interesting interview with Professor Dr. Med Bente Klarlund Pedersen in one of the Danish newspapers, Politiken (the Danish Article).
Professor (Dr. Med.) Bente Klarlund Pedersen is the director of Copenhagen Muscle Research Center and her focus is on inflammation and metabolism(CIM)
Her results are very interesting to us looking to improve health and balance our lives. For example, her early research has shown that there is a connection between physical activity and the immune system.
She shows that our muscles are not alone making us capable of moving around, but work similarly to other organs producing hormone-like compounds – important for our overall health. She has shown that muscles work like vital organs setting “turbo-on” conversion of sugar and fat during exercise.
Another really interesting point that Dr. Klarlund has found is that in people who are not physically active, not only do their muscles deteriorate, but lack of exercise also makes them more prone to diabetes, heart disease, dementia, cancer, osteoporosis and depression. She is focusing her research to find out how inactivity can be connected to so many different lifestyle diseases.
Her basis research shows that muscles not only get messages from the nerves, but also communicate through many hormone-like compounds. Thus, muscles work like organs. Some of their research experiments with people paralyzed from the neck and down showed that by stimulating their muscles, they could achieve the same positive effects as if they had been exercising! Their bodies burned sugar and fat and they could even experience “Runner’s high” even though they were paralyzed and not physical active in any way.
In another experiment, they asked a group of people to limit their activities to walk a maximum of 1.500 steps a day – where 10.000 steps would be the norm. The results showed that lots of things happened – for example, they lost 1.2 kg muscle mass. They became insulin resistant which is the stage before diabetes. When they consumed fat, the fat remained longer in the body and built up around the inner organs – in just 2 weeks!!!
Her own 2 sons were part of the study and she explains how they, during the research, became irritable and short-fused. This gave her the idea to the next study she did. She teamed up with Neorospychologists to research how peoples’ focus and ability to concentrate changed when they didn’t get exercise. They are still collecting data but preliminary results show, as they expected, that it is more difficult to concentrate and focus when we do not exercise.
Professor Dr. Bente Klarlund Pedersen recommends a minimum of 1/2 hr of exercise every day. Some of her new research also points out that exercising helps to keep muscles stay younger for longer.
I find her research interesting on so many levels – when it comes to preventing disease, how exercise affects our levels of concentration and our performance. I find it fascinating to read about research on how exercise affects our emotional health and well-being.
Dr. Pedersen is currently researching marathon runners – she says she is fascinated by the extremes – to find the difference in the people who exercise a lot – and the people who do little or no exercise.
It is exciting to see what comes of her research.
Anne Sture Tucker 