Eat seven-a-day fruits and vegetables and you can keep yourself healthy and away from time-consuming and expensive visits to your doctor. Research has shown that keeping a healthy, well-balanced diet and eating at least 5-7 fruits and vegetables a day can significantly reduce your health problems, including heart attack, stroke, cancer and other chronic diseases.

As the most important part, your daily diet with fruits and vegetables, will give you many other health benefits. It’ll help you to reduce unwanted fat and calories consumption. It will increase your vitamin and fiber intake and support your efforts to maintain your normal, healthy weight. Start eating fresh organic fruits and vegetables and buy them at the farmer’s market. If you don’t have this chance, you can substitute fresh produce with frozen. Don’t think that frozen fruits and vegetables are not good as fresh. Some of them are even better and keep more vitamins because they are frozen as soon after picking from the fields or gardens. Dried fruits are good option, too.

Keeping a healthy, green diet doesn’t mean that you have to give up eating your favorote foods. It’s all about your mindset. To understand what you are going to eat and drink, to decide on variety of the right foods and set up the right portions daily shouldn’t be a difficult task, but only your desire to achieve your goal to prevent sicknesses and  keeping yourself healthy. Make a plan and stick to it.

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Powerful veggies

The beetroot is really a universal panacea. The French call it lovingly as Bonbon de Nature (Nature’s Candy). The Russians use for the beet a word “svekla,” sounding like a pretty woman’s name. In my previous post, Kitchen Pharmacy: Beets Are Your Buddies, I described many benefits the beets can provide us.
Today I write again about this superfood for people who still don’t want to accept it.
My grandmother (herbalist and healer) introduced me to this veggie when I was two years old. At this age she started giving me in the mornings one teaspoon of freshly squeezed beet juice mixed with carrot juice. I still love organic beets. I mix them with the apples, baby carrots, celery and ginger and create fresh and tasteful homemade juices, salads, appetizers, soups, including the famous Russian borscht.
Discover the best kept secret of red beets; the ancient doctors’ findings, and what scientific studies and research, conducted around the world conclude. Now it’s your time to learn how to make delicious, healthy meals not only with the beetroot, but with other powerful veggies and fruits. It’ll help you to prevent many diseases or to heal naturally.

 I met different people who grew up here, in the U.S.A. They never tried the beetroot, but they are very confident about hating this vegetable. How you can hate something if you even did not try it? Good question. What an “iron” logic I have to say! I don’t know what these veggies did to deserve such a hatred? So I asked Kami McBride, herbalist and founder of the Living Awareness Institute in California (www.livingawareness.com) to share with the readers her experience and knowledge about this powerhouse veggie. Kami has taught herbal medicine since 1988. She has helped thousands of people to learn how to use herbs in their daily lives, and understand that whole foods and herbal medicine are an important aspect of everyone’s preventive health care plan. (more…)

Beets: Your Buddies!

 by Svetlana Konnikova

Red beets have been known as powerful food and medicine for many centuries. Ancient physicians knew them for healing intestinal complaints, anemia, fever, nettle rash and many other ills. Our great-grandmothers, grandmothers knew about health benefits of beets too. Our mothers know about it today.

Modern science has confirmed what the ancients knew–that beets, preferably organic, contain a number of biogenetic acids which increase peristalsis of the intestines, betain, which helps break down protein, and also helps form choline, which improves liver vitality.

Do you want to keep your yourself and your family healthy and prevent illnesses? Make these amazing fresh juices which will purify your blood and detoxify your body better than any heavily advertised “Detox” pills. Use only organic fruits and vegetables.

• Blood Purifier Juice

1 medium size raw beet

1 cup baby carrots

Make at least three times a week 1/2 glass fresh beet juice mixed with 1/2 glass of fresh carrot juice and drink it before breakfast.

• Rejuvenation Juice

1 medium size beet

1/2 cup baby carrots

1 leaf kale

1 leaf collard

1 celery stick

several stems parsley leaves

a small piece ginger root

1 Granny Smith apple

Run all ingredients through a juicer, and voila! You made a delicious fresh juice. Enjoy! Do it during one month and you’ll see how step by step you’ll loose weight and fat will disappear around your waist. Your skin will glow. You will look refreshed, so don’t be afraid to look in a mirror.

There is another benefit for people suffering hypertension. BBC News reported, a  British study found that drinking at least one glass of fresh beet juice may lower your blood pressure within one to four hours after drinking it. The fundings  about this natural treatment were published online in the journal Hypertension.

Beetroot is a universal panacea. It has a very pretty French name, “Bonbon de Nature,” which means “Nature’s Candy” in English. 

• Bonbon de Nature (pure beetroot juice)

Two-three medium size beets (washed, skin removed, cut on cubes)

Four-five green beetroot leaves (washed and cut)

Run the beets and the leaves through a juicer. In 10 minutes you have a delicious  homemade the beetroot juice. Drinking fresh, homemade beetroot juice or consuming other 4-5 vitamin-rich vegetables a day might be a simple way to maintain a healthy cardiovascular system.

• Our family recipe, Red Wheels Salad.

This absolutely fabulous and nutritious salad is so easy to make. You can include it in your lunch or dinner menu. Eating three to five ounces of cooked beets before breakfast, helps with constipation, liver diseases and indigestion.

• Cook two medium organic red beets (skin on) in two cups water until soft. Cool, peel and grate them. In a bowl, combine the beets with two cloves crushed garlic, two tablespoons chopped walnuts and a pinch of sea salt. Add two tablespoons organic nonfat sour cream, vegetable mayonnaise or olive oil. Mix the salad and enjoy! You can use raw beets instead of cooked. It is even healthier.

I spoke with many people about beets and they told me that they don’t like beets . Unfortunately they were never introduced in a proper way to this amazing vegetable. All they remember is a glass jar  with cooked beets which their Mom bought in a grocery store and used as a garnish or an addition to soups. These mass-produced beets are not real beets, but processed ‘dead’ vegetables. If you will try fresh, organic beets, you’ll have a great, new and healthy experience.

• Run them through the juicer and make fresh juice.
• Steam them, let cool and use as a side dish together with other vegetables
• Make a Cool Red Salad. Grind 2 raw beets, add 1 tablespoon olive oil, squeeze a half of lemon. Mix all ingredients and eat. 

It is proven by many European doctors for centuries that the best kept secret of red beets is their ability to prevent and treat tumors, in addition to diuretic, laxative, anti-inflammatory and pain reducing benefits. Thus, get to know these wonderful vegetables, test the benefits they can provide. Beets are our buddies, don’t ignore them!

Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

You can find more healthy recipes in the book, Mama’s Home Remedies, ISBN:978-0-9791758-2-4

If you wish to use copyrighted material or articles from this blog for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’ or  republish it, please credit as follows: by Svetlana Konnikova, MA, AN

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.