We all have tried super-fast diet plants, crazy workout routines, or expensive plastic surgeries that have either failed us or worked only for a very short period of time. The truth is that the only permanent solutions to losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight are eating a healthy diet and regular exercise.
Superfoods that are packed with valuable nutrients, vitamins, antioxidants and minerals can help to improve your health and boost your metabolism.You can take small steps to clean up your diet and feel happier and healthier in life.
Superfoods are often the most healthful fruits and vegetables and herbs and they are almost always grown organically to avoid containing chemicals, herbicides, pesticides, or carcinogens and being organically grown means that farmers would hopefully care about the quality of the soil, and avoid the use of insecticides and artificial fertilizers or growth-stimulating toxins and chemicals. These days most people know that you can find organic food in your local health foods stores, many supermarkets and green-markets, even local farm co-ops.
Superfoods are indeed a healthier option to keep your body at its optimum, but there is more to superfoods that may be people are aware of. How you select and prepare them for consumption is just as important. First, when you get your produce home, you can wash them and get them ready to eat. If you want to eat them in the next few days, then avoid washing them until you are ready to eat them. That is how you can keep them as fresh as possible. If you have to eat non-organic produce then wash them thoroughly and then leave then to soak for at least 10 minutes and then wash them one last time before eating (although even then there will be some residue chemicals, herbicides, pesticides, or carcinogens). When selecting produce at your local store, make sure you get fruits that are ripe. Unfortunately, this is getting more and more difficult by the day. Fruits are picked about 4-5 days before they are ripe for transportation purposes, which makes it ridiculous since in the last few days, fruits gain most of their nutrients. But our fast life often does not allow us to have access to local farmers’ produce that are ripe and delicious. Produce is transported across U.S. for profit taking and local farmers are often harmed as a result of this process.
Another aspect of Superfoods is that they should be consumed raw and in their entirety, including skin. Raw foods (fruits, vegetables and herbs) have maximum amount of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals and as soon as you start to increase their temperature they begin to rotten, at slower or faster pace. The more you cook, the higher the temperature, the faster these product lose their nutritional value and the first thing they lose is their vitamins. An apple or an orange lose about 40% of their vitamins in the first 15 minutes they are sitting (cut) on a plate. That is why an apple (with skin removed or cut in half) shows signs of discoloration. Eat your fruits and vegetables as raw as possible. Your liver will love you for it and your skin will gain a glow in as little as 30 days (as long as you stop junk food intake as well).
If you can’t eat everything raw, avoid overcooking as much as possible. May be even you want to try, slowly, reducing the amount of cooking you are normally accustomed to. For instance, if you normally cook broccoli for 20 minutes, reduce to 10 minutes. Then once you get use to that, reduce it to only a few minutes (if you have to cook it). I prefer broccoli completely raw, although I understand if everyone cannot do that right off the bat. Just consider that cooking your produce (or any food in general) even for brief amounts of time destroys many of the nutrients that are valuable to your body and your health since these nutrients are affected very drastically by increased temperature. Even worse for your health is burned foods. That barbequed green pepper that is blackened on the charcoal is a carcinogen for your body. It is not healthy at all. Cooking food to the point of browning or charring or blackening is unhealthy because you have put the organic compounds through changes of structure that damages it drastically, hence causing carcinogens which you should avoid by all means. Barbequed meet is even worse, as if that was possible and is one of the worse imagined process of food production and a major health threat. Imagine, fat dripping from your meet into the gas grill or the charcoal and flame burned which causes formation of aromatic hydrocarbons from the polycyclic conversion (known as PAH) and this is a known and concerning carcinogen, derived from the amino acids and proteins exposed to very high temperature. Even browned or blackened vegetables or bread crusts possess a huge amount of carcinogens and must be avoided if at all possible.
The practice of cooking food at high temperature on an open flame, or in a pot/pan, or zapped in the microwave are all dangerous to human health. Eating habits need to change and this itself is a huge problem. People believe since they have always consumed hot dogs or hamburgers in a barbeque party, then how bad can it be? Well, it is a carcinogen that is deadly and can cause cancer. Whether once gets cancer or one’s body is today or tomorrow susceptible to getting cancer is a different matter and hard to judge or predict. But the real question should be, do you want to take chance or do you prefer to avoid carcinogen intake and reduce dramatically the potential of getting cancer?