Superfood Recipes: Super Foods Healthy Recipes Book

By Gloria Richardson

Superfood Recipes: Super Foods Healthy Recipes Book The Superfood Recipes book covers the two of the Superfoods diet plan with loads of recipes. Each recipe features at least one superfood and many feature more than one. You can enjoy weeks of meals without repeating a single recipe. Superfoods are highly nutritious packed with essential nutrients such as vitamin A, C, and E. There are other anti oxidants as well found in these foods. Anti oxidants is nature's way of strengthening the immune system. If the immune system is good and strong, it will be able to fight of infections easier.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Healthy Lifestyles
• Release date: May 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781632872333

Book preview

Superfood Recipes

Super Foods Healthy Recipes Book

Gloria Richardson and Julie Lewis

Copyright © 2013 Gloria Richardson and Julie Lewis

All rights reserved.

Introduction

What exactly are superfoods? Superfoods are natural whole foods that are grown in nature. These foods include tomatoes, sweet potatoes, spinach, kale, quinoa, blueberries, oranges, kiwi, salmon, turkey, walnuts, beans, oats, chocolate, pumpkin, and more. These foods are packed with nutrition. If you would eat from these foods daily, you would probably not need to take a vitamin and mineral supplement because you would be receiving all the nutrients your body needs in order to be healthy.

Superfoods are easily found wherever you shop for groceries because it is not a food you have to find a specialty store to purchase. You can find it at every grocery store on every farmer's market corner, and grown in abundance all over the land. Superfoods are actually one of the best foods for the entire family. You can mash most of the foods for a baby and feed it to great grandma and all in between. The whole family will benefit from cooking and serving the recipes from this book.

So what's the big deal about the nutrients found within the superfoods? The nutrients are some of the most powerful nutrients nature has to offer. The nutrients, mainly anti-oxidants, are powerful substances that work with the body's immune system. If the immune system is strong enough it can fight off some pretty bad health issues like cancer, arthritis, diabetes, heart disease and more. The anti-oxidants come in the form of vitamin A (beta carotene), vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, flavonoid, CoQ10, ligands , polyphenols, lycopene, and lutein. While you can take these nutrients in a supplement, it is way better to get them from the foods you eat. The body better assimilates the nutrients straight from the foods you eat.

If you have a goal to change your lifestyle to a healthier one then going on the superfoods diet is the best way to go. A change in lifestyle is vital if you have not been eating right or if you have other unhealthy habits. If you want to prolong your life and have a healthy future then it is your choice to make. You can safely go on this diet right now. However, it would be wise to check with your health care provider first just to make sure.

Generally, if a person is diagnosed with conditions like high cholesterol or high blood pressure the first line of action is to diet and exercise. The doctor will ask what you are eating and will recommend a change in diet to more healthy foods rather than any junk foods you may have been consuming. Normally when diagnosed with such conditions you will have around six to eight weeks to correct your issues through lifestyle changes. That just goes to show you how fast eating the right foods can change your health for the better.

The first thing you will want to do when making such a lifestyle change is to break all the bad habits you have including an addiction to junk foods. Junk food has no redeeming value and causes you health issues, if not now, it certainly may later. Weight gain is another big issue caused from a junk food diet. Go off the junk foods and you will give your body a chance to be a lot healthier. The superfood diet may reverse the damage started by the junk foods.

To wean off the junk foods give yourself about three weeks. Take it slow so you can break the addiction and not be bothered with big cravings. Replace one junk food at a time with a healthy superfood snack. This is easy to do because this book contains recipes for appetizers, snacks, and desserts. Do this every three to five days until you have completely weaned from the junk. By the third week, you either should have no more cravings or should be able to manage the cravings for the junk foods. Realize that it takes the body about three weeks to break a bad habit and be patient with yourself.

Once you are off the junk food you need to make sure you drink plenty of water throughout the day. A rule of thumb for the amount of water in ounces you need is to take your weight in pounds and divide in half. That number is the number of ounces you need to drink a day. If you weigh 100 pounds, you would divide that in half and it would be 50 pounds. That is the number of ounces of water you need to drink a day. Add about 10 to 12 ounces to that if you exercise.

Speaking of exercise, whether you need to lose weight or not, it is very beneficial to your health. The body needs physical activity to be at optimum healthy. Exercise helps to raise the metabolism, which should already be raised on the superfoods diet. If you need to lose weight or have been diagnosed with high cholesterol or high blood pressure, then it is vital that you exercise. The amount of physical activity does not have to be a lot to make a difference. You only need to exercise three times a week for half an hour at a time to do the body good. Doing something as simple as walking helps, but you can vary the exercises. Try bicycling, swimming, aerobics, dancing, jogging or running, weight lifting, or any sort of class like yoga or Pilates.

Your health care provider can help you to determine the right program you need for your health, how much exercise, and how much food, etc. Ask them about the superfoods diet and show them this book.

You will enjoy the recipes within the pages, as there is a big variety of all sorts of the superfoods from breakfast to main dishes to desserts and snacks and side dishes. You can improvise the recipes to feed more or less or add to them of your favorite foods and flavors. To your health!

Section 1: Superfoods

Before we say anything else about superfoods and the recipes that you’ll find in this book, it’s important to mention that superfoods isn’t a term which nutritionists or dieticians use. In fact, there isn’t any single, universally accepted definition of the term, although it is used to market all manner of food products and nutritional supplements. That doesn’t mean, however, that some foods aren’t, for lack of a better term, super in terms of their nutritional value and health benefits.

Perhaps the most useful definition of superfoods is this: a food which is rich in essential nutrients, phytochemicals and other beneficial compounds, but that is also healthy in the broadest sense. These are fairly low calorie foods which contain no additives or artificial ingredients.

The best superfoods are also some of the easiest to find at your local market. Foods like pumpkin and other winter squashes, wild salmon, beans and lentils, spinach and other dark leafy greens, blueberries, kiwi fruit, oats, sweet potatoes and even chocolate (dark chocolate, not milk chocolate). Common though these foods may be, they all meet the superfoods criteria and are highly nutritious, healthy foods which deserve a prominent place in anyone’s diet.

We’ll go into the nutritional benefits of these superfoods in a little more detail in the individual chapters which follow. From vitamins and to phytonutrients which may play a