It’s Time to get the Roughage Treatment
Saturday, January 5th, 2008
How to get more fiber into your diet easily.
Start your day off with a high-fiber cereal. Look for cerals with at least five grams of fiber per serving and top your bowl with berries, ground flaxseed and walnuts for even more fiber added. With eight grams of fiber per cup, raspberries are a sweet cereal addition no matter what time of day it is.
Here are other ways to incorporate fiber additions to any meal:
• When making meat loaf or a juicy burger for the grill, use oatmeal instead of bread crumbs to boost the total fiber count even more.
• Next time you are serving up a potato beside your steak, don’t leave the skin behind. Potato skins, throughly washed, are a way to get even more fiber. Keep in mind that sweet potatoes usually have a couple more grams than the typical white variety.
• Cup for cup, wild rice has four thimes more fiber than processed white rice does.
• Keep a bag or two of frozen vegetables on hand to add fiber to stir-frys, pasta sauces, and fajitas. Frozen fruits impart sweet creaminess to your post-workout smoothies. And also do keep in mind that produce is flash frozen on site right after being picked, which preserves most of its vitamins and minerals.
• A vegetable salad is already packed with fiber, but to add to it, mix in some fiber-rich items such as sunflower seeds, dried cranberries, avacados and mandarin oranges.
• When you are tossing up a salad, add in some dark leafy greens like kale, and spinach for the nutritional boring iceberg lettuce and you will add an extra gram of fiber and a whole bunch of disease-fighting chemicals to the mix.
• Take your time when you grocery show and read the food labels carefully to find high fiber choices. Some food manufacturers are doing their best to make it easy for use to reach our fiber requirements.
• When it comes to bread, crackers, waffles, and other grain products make sure they are 100% whole grain. Doing this will give you a couple of extra graims. If you see “enriched flour” or “wheat flour” as the first ingredient you know you have a product made with mostly white flour.
• Instead of snacking on rice cakes, granola bars, or anything of the sort, try making some homemade trail mix and taking it along. All the nuts anf fruits you add to the mix will give you more than enough fiber in a day.
• Beans and lentils are nature’s perfect foods. Loaded with vitamins and minerals, and fiber too. Even canned beans are a high-fiber food that can easily be tossed into pretty much any dish.
• Give your scrambled eggs some nutritious value by mixing in chopped onion, broccoli, red bell pepper and green onion.
• All-natural nut butters such as almond and hemp butter add a couple grams of fiber to your toast, along with a healthy dose of heart-friendly fats and vitamins like E.
• Supplemts are another great addition to your daily fiber intake. They come in powder-form, pill-form, cracker or cookie-form and even chewable flavored “candy-like”-form. And they taste rather groovy too. (Source: Food for Thought 2007)
**Do you think you are overweight, or could lose a few extra pounds? Over at Encouraging Health, Brick ONeil has some good news and some interesting facts that may help. Read the whole story here.**
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Earthly Eating Recipe:
Carrot and Almond Coleslaw
Serves: 4
1 lb. carrots, shredded
1/4 cup olive oil
2 tbs. fresh lemon juice
2 tbs. orange marmalade
1 tbs. prepared horseradish
1/2 cup sliced almonds
Salt and Pepper, to taste
1. In a large bowl, whisk together the lemon juice, orange marmalade and horseradish.
2. While shicking slowly ass the olive oil, to emulsify the mixture. Add the carrots and the sliced almonds, season to taste.
Happy Eating!
