Monday Morsels: Healthy Aging Support #4
It’s #mondaymorsels day, a brief post about a food you’ll want to add to your grocery list. This food, as always, will be related to the main topic of the month! This month, we’re talking Aging Like a Champ.
Click on the image to get the full exploration of today’s find!
Let’s add a food to your grocery list in order to support you with our main topic - Aging Like a Champ!
PURCHASING SPROUTED GRAINS.
Choose sprouted grains and grain products.
I’ll tell you three reasons why, if you’re consuming grains, you’ll want to swap them out for the sprouted version. *If you are currently following a paleo approach, this is one of the reasons you might be feeling so good! Taking these foods out for a time can be a gentle way to support a return to vitality at the gut level.
FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR DIGESTION
Whole grains come with a few protective measures in place to help ensure the survival of the grains. Think about it - the grains are the seeds for the next generation of that plant. Mother Nature always favours the young + the continuation of the species!
One of the compounds found in whole grains are enzyme inhibitors. When you eat whole grains, you are now simultaneously shutting down your body’s ability to digest, slowly but surely. Ay. Were you hoping to make good use of that digestive fire? Think you can fare ok with a reduce ability to break foods down into nutrients?
Now activate (or sprout, or soak, or ferment) said grains, and you unlock the nutrients within, while turning off those enzyme inhibitors. This helps preserve your digestive fire, while also supplying you with more of the good things found in whole grains.
FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR GUTS
At the centre of those typical things we associate with aging — remember, what is common is not necessarily normal — it is that low grade chronic inflammation dragon. Ground zero for inflammation? THE GUT.
Consuming raw grains as they come to us - especially whole grains - is really hard on your intestinal tract. Not only do they shut down your digestion, they also contain other compounds like lectins. Why is this so important? Lectins have been shown to contribute to widening the junctions between the cells of your intestinal tract - read Leaky Gut.
In the soaking / sprouting / fermenting action, you’ll be reducing the lectin content, thereby reducing the negative impact on your gut lining. A robust gut lining is crucial to maintaining health + vitality, protecting your immune system and liver from extra work!
FOR THE LOVE OF STRESS RESISTANCE
Whole grains are a well known source of some amazing vitamins + minerals. But when we’re eating them raw and in whole food form, those enzyme inhibitors prevent us from accessing the nutrients found within. Soaking / sprouting / fermenting these grains? Ay ay ay, a bevy of important trace minerals like Selenium, Manganese and Copper that we need for our day to day immune and hormonal function are now easier to access. Things like those B Vitamins, they nourish to support metabolism, hormone balance, and help us with that stress response when we need it.
True sourdough fits the bill here.
What this looks like at the grocery store, then: when buying any whole grains at the store, consider purchasing sprouted versions. Fermented will work as well - think true sourdough. (True sourdough means traditionally prepared: there will not be yeast listed on the ingredients.)
Eat quinoa loads? Buy the sprouted kind. Been digging the whole wheat pasta? Look for a sourdough version. (Kaslo Sourdough Pasta is a fave.) Do you do lots of baking at home with whole wheat or whole grain flours? Look for Anita’s organic flours, they have quite a few sprouted whole grain flours on tap (gluten and non gluten ones). Purchase a few loaves of bread a week? Consider seeking out a sprouted version. Same goes for tortillas - I’ve found sprouted corn tortillas out there. Most health food stores will have sprouted whole grain products and breads on their shelves and/or in their freezer sections. Look for Silver Hills, Ezekiel, Food for Life, and many others.
You can also learn to sprout your own. I’ll be running a class on this in the new year. Sign up for my newsletter to hear about it.
Bring back the Ancestral wisdom of those who came before you. This is the smarts of our ancestors, and smarts that could do well to help us support robust health.
Aiming to keep well as you age, dear one? Looking to get a leg up, want some help in achieving it?
Get in touch. Let’s meet up to start drawing up your road map to support you in both quantity and quality of life.
Monday Morsels: Healthy Aging Support #3
It’s #mondaymorsels day, a brief post about a food you’ll want to add to your grocery list. This food, as always, will be related to the main topic of the month! This month, we’re talking Healthy Aging support.
Click on the image to get the full exploration of today’s find!
Let’s add a food to your grocery list in order to support you with our main topic - Aging Like a Champ!
FERMENTED FOODS.
Fermented Foods are the bomb.
Unless you have histamine troubles - then it can feel like an actual bomb. We’ll address that at the end of this wee write up.
I’ll tell you three reasons why you want to add in ferments, especially when it comes to supporting you with Aging Well.
FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR GUTS
At the centre of those typical things we associate with aging — remember, what is common is not necessarily normal — it is that low grade chronic inflammation dragon. Ground zero for inflammation? THE GUT.
Consuming fermented foods helps set up the proper pH in your gut lining; they help enhance your own digestive fire so that you can better break your foods down; they also provide some important nutrients to help support a healthy gut lining. They are brilliant allies to your microbiome as well! So many gut loving reasons…
FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR IMMUNE VITALITY
Fermented foods help enhance your immune function too - if over 70% of your immune system lives at the gut level, imagine how much pointed support to the gut via ferments can bring! Fermented foods provide important nutrients to your immune system - they free up minerals from the foods themselves during the fermentation process, and provide extra vitamins like Bs and Cs, crucial for the immune response.
Not only that, but if you understand that your entire immune response is orchestrated by your liver, then you’ll super love these ferments: they’re an amazing support team to the liver! They assist in detoxification, and help take some of the load off of your liver.
FOR THE LOVE OF STRESS RESISTANCE
Fermented foods help free up some important and harder-to-find nutrients that are beneficial to your adrenals. Vitamins Bs + C help nourish your adrenals deeply. When they get a leg up, they help you build resilience, where you can meet the day to day stressors with a bit more ease. Help nourish these babies deeply with the ferments!
Listen. Fermented Foods is how those who came before us did it - in all corners of this big ole globe. It was how you preserved the harvest; it was how you added flavour to your meals; it was how you extended your food supply through harsh winters; it was how it was done. I do a fuller exploration on how to introduce ferments to your life in this blog write - up; make sure to read up.
Bring back the Ancestral wisdom of those who came before you - work SLOW at including the ferments on a daily basis. Start at 1/4 tsp per day, and increase by a bit every week. When it feels terrible, take a break, drink lots of water, and come back a week later at half that dose.
And listen, if they’re super problematic, you might want to look into possible histamine mediated issues. Yea yea yea, ferments are high in histamines. Guess who can help you with that one… *ahem. It’s my specialty.
Aiming to keep well as you age, dear one? Looking to get a leg up, want some help in achieving it?
Get in touch. Let’s meet up to start drawing up your road map to support you in both quantity and quality of life.
Monday Morsels: Healthy Aging Support #2
It’s #mondaymorsels day, a brief post about a food you’ll want to add to your grocery list. This food, as always, will be related to the main topic of the month! This month, we’re talking Healthy Aging support.
Click on the image to get the full exploration of today’s find!
Let’s add a food to your grocery list in order to support you with our main topic - Healthy Aging!
OLIVE OIL.
Delicious, delicious olive oil. Sure, count in here olives too, if histamines aren’t troublesome for you.
I’ll tell you three reasons why, especially when it comes to supporting you with Aging Well.
FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR BRAIN + NERVES
Due to the rich supply of compounds called polyphenols, olive oil ends up acting like a protector to help preserve the function of your nerve cells + entire brain function. These polyphenols have been shown to help support the retaining of memories + cognitive function, support the emotional piece of brain health, and regulating behaviour.
Bonus here too - olive oil has a positive impact on your microbiome - a crucial player in helping maintain the gut barrier AND the blood/brain barrier. Hooray for the olive oil!
FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR MITOCHONDRIA + GENES
A compound found in olive oil — hydroxytyrosol or HT for those keeping track at home — has been found to enhance the ability to produce more mitochondria. Mitochondria are your energy factories of each and every cell. Olive oil for the energy win!
In a rather small study, olive oil has also been found to suppress those genes that fan the flames of chronic inflammation. Olive oil is a good source of vitamin E, a crucial vitamin needed for the body’s work of gene expression. Vitamin E has been found to have a regulatory effect on the gene expression work in the body. Gene expression gone awry can be one of those contributors to aging. Olive oil for the gene expressing stability win!
FOR THE LOVE OF STRESS RESISTANCE
Omega 3 fatty acids, polyphenols, tyrosol, they are all brilliant compounds that are in olive oil. They all play a role in building your body’s resistance to stress: read, low grade inflammation, the chronic kind. There is a wide array of nutrients found in this delicious fat that help reduce the biomarkers that indicate stress + inflammation. The good fats also provide your body with important fuel to help sustain blood sugars + hormonal levels, key players in reducing the internal stress going on in the body.
Olive oil for the anti-inflammatory win there, my kittens.
Olive oil. Drizzle that stuff on everything - drizzle over soups, in dishes. Make salad dressings with it. Make pesto and put that stuff on everything. Drizzle on a half an avocado and bring on the healthy aging prowess one delicious meal at a time.
Aiming to keep well as you age, dear one? Looking to get a leg up, want some help in achieving it?
Get in touch. Let’s meet up to start drawing up your road map to support you in both quantity and quality of life.
Monday Morsels: Healthy Aging Support #1
It’s #mondaymorsels day, a brief post about a food you’ll want to add to your grocery list. This food, as always, will be related to the main topic of the month! This month, we’re talking Healthy Aging support.
Click on the image to get the full exploration of today’s find!
New month, new topic here at #goodfoodHQ. Let’s dive in to the ways Holistic Nutrition can be of support when it comes to Healthy Aging!
MEAT STOCK + BROTH.
My top food. Every. Dang. Time.
I’ll tell you three reasons why, especially when it comes to supporting you with Aging Well.
BECAUSE ANTI-INFLAMMATORY
Meat stock is a super star at reducing chronic low grade inflammation at the absolute ground zero of it all - THE GUT. Meat Stock especially is wonderful at helping nourish the cells of the intestinal lining on a deep level to help reduce junctions between them. (Read: Leaky Gut). Both meat stock and bone broths provide your body with incredible nutrients needed to quiet and quelch that low grade inflammation dragon in every body part - reducing that incidence of chronic disease.
And when we’re talking Healthy Aging - why, we are not beating around the bush: we’re focusing on reducing the incidence and/or progression of those chronic diseases often associated with aging. What’s the common denominator with those diagnoses we have come to associate with our elders? You know, things like dementia, cancer, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, diabetes, etc. At the root of them all is the one thing: CHRONIC INFLAMMATION. Meat stock + bone broth can help address that central piece, in order to support vitality.
FOR THE LOVE OF DIGESTION
Meat Stock + Bone Broth are both gigantic helpers in revving up your body’s own ability to digest. If you understand that disordered digestion is at the root of that chronic low grade inflammation, then anything you can do via diet to help support improved digestion will go a long way.
Double that with the fact that as we age, our ability to digest starts to wane (about age 40). Add in there too for those of us who were ever on birth control along the way, the long term side effects of that have a dampening effect on our digestion. Meat Stock + Bone Broth to the digestive fire rescue!
FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR CONNECTIVE TISSUE
If you understand that the nutrients found in stocks + broths are incredibly rich in things like proteoglycans, and nutrients rich in connective tissues like cartilage, collagen, bone marrow, ligaments and such, this nutrient dense food is one of those Traditional Foods that really knocks it outta the park when it comes to supporting your body’s living framework. Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body - it literally holds you all together! Stocks + broths offer a rich array to support all your bones, joints, ligaments, fascia, tendons + connective tissue so you don’t fall apart.
So soup it up, butter cup.
How to know which one is best for you, Meat Stock or Bone Broth?
Read up on this blog post here.
Bonus too, you’ll find a recipe and a video how-to on making the good stuff at that same link. Want to get the recipe? Sign up for my newsletter and you’ll get this, along with a few other recipes to get you started on supporting you well through the ages ahead.
Aiming to keep well as you age, dear one? Looking to get a leg up, want some help in achieving it?
Get in touch. Let’s meet up to start drawing up your road map to support you in both quantity and quality of life.
Monday Morsels: Stress Support #5
It’s #mondaymorsels day, a brief post about a food you’ll want to add to your grocery list. This food, as always, will be related to the main topic of the month! This month, we’re talking stress support.
Click on the image to get the full exploration of today’s find!
This month, we are zeroing in on the food ways to help you through #stress. Let's add one last nourishing item to your grocery list.
DARK LEAFY GREENS.
Dark Leafy Greens! All of them.
I’ll tell you three reasons why, especially when it comes to supporting you through stress.
BECAUSE MAGNESIUM
When the stress response is turned on, you utilize magnesium as one of the nutrients to get through a perceived crisis (whether real or imagined). Magnesium is indeed needed to slow down the release of your stress hormones, furthermore acting as a guardian at the blood/brain barrier to prevent the hormones from entering the brain. (See study here)
Your greens with the highest amount of magnesium? Think spinach + swiss chard.
BECAUSE MINERALS
Minerals are a crucial component you need to get from your daily diet - as they help reduce what is contributing to your body’s stress load internally - think chronic low grade inflammation. Adding in mineral rich foods like dark leafies will provide your body with anti-cancer properties, with nutrients needed to lessen inflammation in the body; they’ll support hormonal balance; are super nourishing to your brain; nourishing to the liver + adrenals, two of your major organs that feel stress keenly.
Minerals found in good amounts in your greens: manganese, calcium, magnesium, iron, copper, potassium, and on and on. Nourish with the dark leafies!
BECAUSE ANTIOXIDANTS
Dark leafy greens deliver to your system those all important antioxidants - code for vitamins that help beat oxidation. What is oxidation? It’s the end result of that low grade inflammation in the body. The more that Inflammation Dragon comes ‘round your place, the more he stokes those fires. Those fires? They’re the oxidation. What does it take to put the fire out? ANTIOXIDANTS!
Important antioxidants like all B vitamins, vitamin A in plant form, vitamins C and K1 (plant form) are all excellent helpers in putting the fire out of that inflammation dragon. As Dr. Terry Wahls puts it, think Green-BACK and eat your greens!
Look! The rainbow!
Think the obvious dark green leafies like kale, arugula, spinach, chard; but look off the beaten path for things like dandelion greens, endives, collards, beet greens, lettuce. Start using seaweed and nettle! Heck, even green fresh herbs fit the bill here! So parsley, dill, cilantro, mint, and on and on. And listen - make a cup of tea with something green. A great way to get some of these benefits into your bodacious bod.
BEST PURCHASING TIPS: it’s a question of good / better / best when it comes to purchasing greens. Where you can, opt for organic versions in order to reduce what may be contributing to hormonal imbalances. These imbalances only fuel that slow internal inflammation that contributes to your body’s overall stress load. Refer to the Dirty Dozen / Clean Fifteen to help you figure this piece out. (Spoiler alert: dark leafy greens are one of those foods that, when possible, you may want to purchase organic or biodynamic.)
Struggle with stress, dear one? Get in touch. Let’s meet up to start drawing up your road map to help you better be able to meet life’s stressors.