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Vegetarian Body Building: The Myths

May 17, 2008 by Lucy · Leave a Comment 

Do you need to eat meat in order to succeed in body building? Vegetarians are not the typical thin and gaunt images that you see portrayed in the mass media. Rather with complete understanding about nutrition, you can create a diet filled with healthy essentials that could help support your vegetarian body building. Read more

Fibre Facts Worth Knowing

May 1, 2008 by Lucy · 3 Comments 

If you’ve been looking for a way towards a high octane diet, you may find fibre to be exactly what you need. Even though research has shown fibre to be powerful, many people aren’t taking this nutrient seriously at all.

To help you fuel your health with fibre, here are some facts that may help you.

  1. Fibre fights diseases. A diet high in fibre can help to prevent colon cancer and heart disease. High fibre helps the body to eliminate cholesterol by binding it in the digestive tract. For thousands of years, fibre has been used to stop constipation.
  2. Fibre can actually help with over eating. All high fibre foods will take longer to chew and digest, making you feel satisfied longer.
  3. Most popular foods don’t have enough fibre. If you like the more popular foods, you probably need to increase your intake of fibre.
  4. Grains offer the most fibre. Dietary fibre is actually plant matter that we cannot digest. The best sources are whole grains and concentrated grain
    products.
  5. Kids need fibre as well. Children that are older than 2 years of age should consume a daily intake of fibre. Kids are most receptive to fibre found in
    fruits, vegetables, and even fortified breakfast cereals.
  6. More fibre needs more water. In order to keep fibre moving through your digestive tract, you’ll need to consume a lot of water. With your diet of
    fibre, you’ll need eight or more glasses of water every day.
  7. Fibre cannot be cooked out. When you cook your fruits and vegetables, don’t worry about cooking the fibre out, as it stays. The fibre found in
    fruits and vegetables aren’t just in the skin or in the peel.
  8. You can get enough fibre. If you eat more than 50 grams of fibre in a day, you can get diarrhoea and bloating, which can interfere with your body’s
    absorption of other key minerals.
  9. Getting the right amount of fibre in your diet doesn’t have to be hard. Even though you may think so, getting the amount of fibre you need isn’t very
    hard to do. All you have to do is eat the right foods and you’ll be well on your way to a fibre rich lifestyle.
  10. Nuts also contain fibre, and a high fibre diet is thought to help prevent heart disease as well as diabetes. Yeast has a nutty, cheesy, and creamy flavour that makes it an excellent cheese substitute and is often used by vegetarians as a substitute for parmesan cheese. Nutritional yeast comes in the form of flakes or powder, and can be sprinkled on to almost anything, from popcorn, bread, and vegetables, to pizzas, pastas, and casseroles.
  11. Bran and whole grains are other good sources of fibre. Although bran can cause rumbling and intestinal gas and even some mild cramping, so it should be eaten in small amounts at first. The amount can be increased as the body gets used to it.
  12. Beans - in particular garbanzo beans added to salad will increase its fibre value. Though beans do create gas for some people, there are products available that will generally take care of this problem i.e. Trio Flora or similar.

Insoluble fibres include whole wheat, wheat and corn bran, flax seed and vegetables such as celery, green beans and potato skins.

The purpose of insoluble fibre is to assist in slowing down the absorption of sugar into the blood stream. This can help people who suffer with diabetes by regulating the sugar levels and preventing spikes of sugar overload. Insoluble forms of fibre (also known as roughage) work like a broom to sweep the intestine clean of debris. Research has shown that high fibre diets decrease the risk of colon diseases, including Crohn’s, Colitis and even cancer.

Soluble fibre is found in various amounts in legumes (peas, soybeans, and other beans) oats, rye, chia, and barley, some fruits and fruit juices (particularly prune, plum and berry juice). Certain vegetables such as broccoli and carrots as well as root vegetables such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, and onions (skins of these vegetables are sources of insoluble fiber) and lastly - psyllium seed husk, which is a mucilage soluble fibre.

Soluble fibres may also be beneficial for alleviating symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome and abdominal discomfort, such as diarrhoea and/or constipation.

As one of the key ingredients to healthy eating, fibre is something you don’t want to skip. If you aren’t getting enough fibre in your diet - you should do something about it now rather than later.

You can find guidelines for fibre intake at: The American Dietetic Association (ADA) and The British Nutrition Foundation

Healthy Vegetarian Diet Article

February 15, 2008 by James Richardson · Leave a Comment 

When looking at a vegetarian resource center your whole intention is to find an informative info at your finger tips to help with your new lifestyle change. Info like nutritional facts will be so beneficial. Try to find a resource center that is non-profit, that way it should dedicated to your education, not to someone’s pocket.

Vegetarian resource groups are open to exchanging ideas from topics like peer pressure and coming up with new snacks to eat. Use your group as a place to help with the challenges of your non-vegan friends. Plaining put, its the basic facts for the new vegetarian.

Standards for vegetarian are not the same, this society of vegetarians has many groups and sub groups with-in them. The strictest vegetarian is the vegan hands down with out even wearing a silk shirt because silk worms may have been caused harm in the process. Even the food labels do not know the different types.

Even with the minimum vegetarian, you can eat foods that do not cause the death of animals. A more simple meal would be a pasta and sauce; it has been a standard for years. Food from the Middle East would be more of a culinary food because there food is more innovative.

Being a vegetarian is easy; it will not be a pain to do at all. Most of my adult life I was not a vegetarian, I listened to the claim that you need to eat meat for more muscle to grow. Then I hear the statement of cows just eat grass and look at all the meat they supply. Farms growing what we need has kept us hear for thousands of years.

I am going to try not to turn this into a rant, so please bear with me. Health care costs would be far less with vegetarian diet. The reason would be you would be eating far less fat, with that cancer rates would be less. Changes are there would be less obesity people in the world also.

First off you will be able to live without animal protein. Do not cram your self with all the facts at first because it will over well you. Start making the change with food like using more mushrooms in your meals, use things you know. A gradual change into being a vegetarian is the best route to take.

Making this change is going to be easier than you think because you will be eating many of the same foods you eat now. You can live without the meat gurus and you will not fall over. If planned it right it will be a healthier life for yourself for many years to come.

 

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Preparing Great Vegetarian Soup Recipe

January 20, 2008 by Diana Pells · Leave a Comment 

A great vegetarian soup recipe is not just all about preparing your appetite for a healthy vegetarian meal - it should be healthy as well. To help you come up with some of your very own vegetarian soup recipe, here are some tips.

Experiment

With vegetarian soups, there are really no hard-and-fast or clear cut rules on how you should do it. You just have to follow the preliminary basics and then let your imagination rule. This means that you may just have to sauté the usual garlic, onions and your choice of vegetables, add the soup stock or vegetable broth and then add whatever you like including spices. Read more

How to Get a Quick Easy Vegetarian Meal

December 13, 2007 by Diana Pells · Leave a Comment 

Vegetarians live busy lifestyles too and with work and kids, vegetarians need all the help they can get with preparing interesting meals. Contrary to popular belief, preparing a quick easy vegetarian meal may be a convenient task after all. Here are some practical tips for a quick easy vegetarian meal.

Pre Cook Vegetables

Your veggies need not be washed, prepared or cook on the spot. In fact, expert cooks boil twice or thrice as many vegetables in one sitting and then just freeze the extra for use on the third day.

Try to find out which veggies can be pre cooked like quinoa, broccoli and stringed beans. Vegetable soup can also be prepared in this way. Just make sure that you add a little more water when you take it out of the fridge on the second or third day. As an added note, be sure to label your pre cooked veggies and food with the date so that you know which ones should be taken out first and eaten and which ones are nearing expiration. Read more

Getting the Most Out of Your Chili Vegetarian Recipe

December 11, 2007 by Diana Pells · 2 Comments 

One vegetarian favorite is the chili. A true chili vegetarian recipe cook however, knows that there is more to just randomly adding any kind of chili pepper. There are some things that you need to take into consideration with your chili vegetarian recipe.

Know Your Chili

Of course, the amount of chili in your vegetarian recipe will be determined by your capacity to withstand its hotness. The question however is how to find out if there is too much in your chili vegetarian recipe. One basic step is to know your chili peppers. It is a fact for example that bell peppers and pimiento provide no hot taste at all so you can basically add as much as you want in a dish. Habanero and santaka chilies however are among the hottest so you would do well to add moderate amounts in your chili vegetarian recipe. The famous jalapenos are only about moderately hot and are often the favorite ingredients in a chili vegetarian recipe.

Rev Up on Moderately Hot

For those who can’t handle habaneros that are too hot, they can increase chili peppers to the middle or lower range of hotness. It is a fact that a chili vegetarian recipe is packed with full flavor which means that you need less of salt, sugar or other sources of flavor which are not healthy in large amounts.

Another reason why you should increase chili intake is because it contains antioxidants which help clean up your system. They are also natural pain killers that do not dull all of your vital senses.

Handle Chilies Properly

Chilies do not just burn the tongue but the skin as well. Handle chilies only with your bare hands if you only have a small quantity to cut. Handling lots of chilies for a flavorful chili vegetarian recipe can burn your skin. It makes better sense to use cooking gloves with lots of hot chilies. Make sure too that the juice of chili peppers never find its way into your eyes. Chili juice on your eyes can be a very painful experience. You can also keep your skin and hands off chili peppers by grinding them instead.

Manage the Heat

If you can’t handle too much hotness from the chili, you can always remove the chili seeds and the white membrane before cutting and adding to your chili vegetarian recipe. Tomato sauce is also said to be effective in helping lessen the hotness of chili.

If the heat is already burning in your mouth, you should avoid beer and other beverages. While people still popularly use water to kill the fire of a chili recipe, yogurt and milk seem to be more effective.

Mix with Other Tastes

Chilies taste best when mixed with beans, garlic, onions, tofu and tomatoes. Just make sure that you mix your ingredients well so that the chili flavor does not stick in just some parts of the recipe but watch out for burned ingredients. Experts advise though that ingredients shouldn’t be mixed all at once since this could kill the hot taste. Sauté the spices gradually to release the chili oil that holds the secret to its hot taste. Depending on the dish, you can serve a chili dish the next day to give time for flavors and tastes to mix.

 

About the Author: Diana Pells

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