Posts Tagged ‘raw’
Healthy Salad Dressings Made Easy
With warmer weather looming on the horizon in Northern America, many women and men start to simplify and streamline their diets. Gone are the heavy chili dinners and beef stews that fill our bellies in the dead of winter. Enter the salad: cool, fresh, crisp bursts of flavor – but not necessarily a significant caloric savings over a meat and potatoes dinner. The culprit: creamy, oil based dressings. The solution: for most, it’s to take their dressing on the side.
Traditional commerically prepared salad dressings are an easy way to turn a healthy salad into a calorie-dense, fat-laden disaster. Bottled dressings can have anywhere from 8 to 20 grams of fat per serving.
The key to making delicious healthy dressings at home is to reduce the oils and other fats, and bump up the ingredients that add texture and flavor.
Oil also serves to soften and balance the acids so that they’re more pleasing to the pallate.
When thinking of healthier dressings, most people eschew creamy dressings in favor of lighter vinaigrettes. But classic vinaigrettes often use a 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 ratio of fat to acid (for example: olive oil and red wine vinegar). Such a ratio can yield at least 10 grams of fat per tablespoon! And who uses just one tablespoon?
When choosing oils for your dressing, think carefully about flavors. Extra-virgin olive oil is almost always an excellent healthful and flavorful choice. But so are nut oils such as almond, macadamia and hazelnut. Each contributes complex yet subtle flavors that can complement a salad. Olive and nut oils also are rich in healthy monounsaturated fats.
You can reduce the amount of oil, however, in any dressing by approximately 40 percent if the other ingredients that balance the dressing are not too acidic.
A common complaint when reducing the oil content of a dressing recipe is that one often misses the thick texture that oil adds to your recipes. Try adding Dijon mustard as an emulsifier to make up for the reduced oil. Like oil, mustard is thick enough to bind the other ingredients and adds a tangy flavor.
In creamy dressings, the emulsifier often is sour cream or mayonnaise (and sometimes oil, too). Providing a healthy option for these ingredients is an easy fix.
Nonfat yogurt, reduced-fat sour cream, and reduced-fat mayonnaise all make good substitutes. They each have good flavor and produce dressings that hold together and coat vegetables quite well.
Or try buttermilk. Buttermilk is always either nonfat or reduced-fat. Its thick texture and mild, tangy flavor makes it a useful ingredient.
With a little bit of ingenuity and creativity, it is possible to make healthy salad dressings without sacrificing good nutrition by cutting calories, fat and chemicals.
The author is an expert on plastic surgery and has done lots of research on Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle and Homemade Supplement Secrets.
Going Raw
Going on a raw food diet
There are many different types of diets that vegetarians choose to indulge in due to either the effects that the diet will have on their health or for other reasons. One particularly different type of diet, i.e., the raw food diet. In this article, we’ll work towards giving you a basic explanation of what the raw food diet is and the helpful effects that it can have on your own personal health.
Why go raw?
There are numerous benefits of going on a raw food diet. Amongst them include aid losing weight. Raw food diets tend to have less calories than other diets. Those on the raw food diet often find that it helps them to get much closer to their ideal weight level. Ironically, people who undergo the raw food diet often say they have much higher levels of energy than they have had in the past. Eating raw food pushes the body into burning excess calories via energy expenditure instead of storing it as fat. If you are looking at seriously burning fat, try Wai Lana Yoga’s “Fat Burner” juice, which will speed up your metabolism and give you the jump start you need. One of the main reasons health expertsuse to explain the reason theraw food diet works is the fact that animal foods are be harder to break down by the body, and some of the energy stored in meats and other types of refined foods can only be stored as fat. Furthermore meat uses more energy digesting your food. Whereas, raw foods are easily broken down into energy.
Going raw? Avoid this
It is very important to remember if you are on a raw food diet, you ought to avoid eating any amount of cooked food. Cooked food requires more digestive acid to be used than raw food, and if you eat cooked food no matter how little or how much, your stomach will become acidic which will make it hard to take the raw foods. To avoid temptation of eating cooked food, fill up with a variety of raw foods. Fruit and vegetable juices, such as the 40+ tasty favorite juices of Wai Lana. The most nutricious foods make you full quickly, and these juices are so nutrient packed, they’ll leave you full and satisfied.
The importance of supplements
If you’re on a solely raw-food diet, it’s a good idea to take supplements certain nutrients in order to help them to achieve a more perfect balance of health. B-12 is a good vitamin to take, as it is tough to get from raw fruits and vegetables. Other recommended supplements include copper and zinc, since plants and fruits tend to have lower levels of these. Wai Lana has natural supplements which you can take and (rest~be) assured that it is good for you. It’s also important to ensure that you eat a good quantity of nuts and seeds, as they are a significant source of the protein that your body needs to aid new tissues and to rebuild old ones.
Best things about a raw food diet
People who are on a raw food diet tend to have a voracious appetite. Eat as much as you like. That’s right, you can eat all you want! Raw foods are so low in calories, you don’t need to be concerned about your food intake. The raw food diet can be hard to stick to, but once you have adjusted to it, it will benefit your health greatly.