Eating From Your Own Garden Promotes Wellness

Home-Grown Peppers and Tomatoes Keep You Healthy

Eating food that you grow yourself promotes your health and well-being

One of the best ways to promote health is to eat fresh from your own garden. Eating your own garden produce not only keeps you well physically, it also grounds you and promotes emotional health. Whether you live in the country or the city, there is nothing quite like the smell of fresh tomatoes, peppers and chives ready to be picked. And one day when Google invents wearable noses that convey scents online, we will have the bonus of being able to share the special aromas of fresh chives, dill, tomatoes, basil and sage with each other.

Growing Your Urban Garden on a Condo Balcony

Waking up to the dawn of the city surrounded by lovely flowers is a good way to start the day

A balcony garden is a feat, a fight to survive against the car fumes wafting up from the urban thoroughfare below. The glorious petunias in various shades of pinks and purples welcome you each dawn, a separation from the waking city beyond. For optimal results, nurture your balcony garden with high-grade potting soil, water it when the sun is down, and if you have southern exposure water it more than once a day.

Starting an Indoor Garden in the Autumn

Adapting outdoor garden techniques to an indoor garden takes skill

 Every summer as we get into August, thoughts start again about how to preserve this unique beauty that is an urban balcony garden. Will it be possible to continue my flowers indoors? Will vegetables grow inside a home? Should I get something that resembles a small greenhouse? Will my cat be safe nibbling at the leaves, and will my produce be safe if my cat does what cats do?

According to Pikes Peak Area Garden Help, the best way to create an indoor garden is the following:

• choose plants that can live on little light
• choose plants that will survive dry conditions
• grow herbs such as sage, basil, marjoram, oregano, and thyme (in sunny areas)
• cut most plants regularly
• give plants ample drainage, lots of water, and lots of light
• vegetables need a minimum of 6 hours of sun each day to thrive
• tomatoes, peppers and eggplants can all grow in potting soil, which is lighter than garden soil or topsoil and won't become too compact
• lettuce can grow indoors all year round, from seed
• some house plants act as air purifiers, like English ivy or spider plants

We would love to hear about your field gardens, balcony gardens, urban gardens or deck gardens. Send us your pictures and we will share them on our next post!

The Benefits of Juicing

Juicing greens provide an enormous source of vitamins that our bodies need for good health

The Benefits of Juicing Start With Nutrition

Are you getting all of the nutrients you need to be healthy? With juicing you can benefit from the vitamins and minerals found in a huge amount of vegetables just in a single glass of juice. You can avoid getting sick, feel less fatigued or worn out, and learn how to control your weight without compromising your nutrition.

Our green juice consisted mainly of kale& lettuce

Our family decided to start juicing vegetables and fruits this January to strengthen our immune systems and feel healthier. This morning we each drank two full glasses of this freshly juiced green juice, containing:

• English cucumber (with the peel left on)
• raw broccoli
• romaine lettuce
• collard greens
• kale
• carrot
• organic celery

Our main inspiration to start juicing was Joe Cross, an Australian juicer who promoted the benefits of green juice diets to cure illnesses and obesity in two movies, "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead" and "Hungry for Change". After watching these inspiring movies, we decided that starting the day with green juice was something that we wanted to try. According to juicing literature, necessary amounts of vitamin B6, beta-carotene, folic acid, selenium, vitamin E and chromium provided by Green Juice can be difficult to obtain in our regular diets. 

We were also interested in juicing the fruits and vegetables higher in vitamin C so we could continue fighting off colds for the rest of the winter. So we threw in a peeled orange, a peeled lemon, and a cut pear into our "green juice" concoction.

Juicing Pulp Provides More Dishes for More Meals

Sometimes the leftover pulp after making the juice can provide more delicious prepared dishes. By pouring a large bowlful of pulp into a soup pot, adding some tomatoes, fresh garlic, chopped onions, dill, basil, and some lima beans - and letting this vegetable stew simmer all day, another meal has suddenly been produced.

With the remaining two bowls of pulp, a great idea would be to make a vegetable loaf, sweetened with honey and cooked with some of the soy flours or rice flours still kicking around in the cupboards. This loaf can be part of a nutritious snack or lunch in the upcoming week. It's an all-natural, pure, and chemically-free way to reuse vitamin- and mineral-rich foods.

The Dangers of Visceral Fat

Is belly fat the same as visceral fat?

Is It Belly Fat or Visceral Fat?

The dangers of visceral fat are becoming known, but what isn't always known is how to tell the difference between regular fat and visceral fat. Subcutaneous fat, which is stored between the muscles and the skin, is regular fat. That's the fat that we can grab a hold of, say around the stomach or thighs. Here is a good comparison between the two fats:

"In comparison to visceral cells, subcutaneous cells are greater in number. But the visceral cells are actually larger in size per cell. And they get to be so big that they atrophy themselves—at which point they constantly, 24/7, produce cytokines. Cytokines are a hormone with known inflammatory properties. "They promote atherosclerosis, tumor growth, aging, oxidation, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease."

Visceral Fat is Linked to a High-Fat Diet

Science suggests that visceral fat is linked to a high-fat diet. According to Dr. David Haslam of the National Obesity Forum, "'Visceral fat may seem to be an inert lump of lard, but it's actually highly active and constantly pumping poisons into the bloodstream.' Visceral fat is known to cause inflammation in the colon and the artery walls, and is a major cause of heart disease, diabetes and some types of cancer. Research even suggests that visceral fat affects mood by increasing production of the stress hormone, cortisol, and reducing levels of feel-good endorphins. So, along with killing you, visceral fat, it seems, can make you feel low."

Sounds scary, doesn't it?  So how can we keep our visceral fat low? By eating low-fat foods and doing regular, moderate exercise at least 30 minutes per day. Other things to be aware of are:

• portion size
• more fruits and vegetables
• more whole grains
• more lean protein
• less refined-grain pasta and breads

A few years ago I noticed that during my yearly medical checkup it became routine for my doctor to measure my waist with a seamstress tape. I wondered why she was always picking the part of my waist that stuck out the most. It turned out that to properly measure visceral fat, or the dangerous fats stored around the liver, you have to measure one inch above the belly button. I was surprised at where my measurement was in relation to the 35 inches considered normal for women.

So I've started taking regular exercise of between 30-60 minutes per day very seriously. If you are concerned with your level of visceral fat, it's not too difficult to do something to reduce it.

Fresh Home-grown Basil Tops Home-made Wheatless Pizza

Home-grown basil grows beside tomatoes and petunias in thriving urban garden

Home-grown herbs and vegetables in your balcony garden

My fresh basil plant grew indoors for awhile, until I could tell it was time to put it outside. So I created a combined herb and vegetable garden in one of my long balcony planters this year, planting basil beside a tomato plant, and even planting a hanging petunia plant beside them for color. Everything grew together comfortably and each species seemed to thrive without killing off any of the other. A truly model ethos for an  urban garden!

Home-made gluten-free pizza with fresh red pepper, cheese, and fresh herbs

Home-made gluten-free pizza made with brown rice flour

Home-made gluten-free pizza, made without wheat, is made with about 2 cups of a combination of brown rice flour, potato flour, and sorghum flour; then 1 package of yeast, 1 tsp of sea salt, and 1 tsp of xantham gum - and that's pretty much it. You just add 2 eggs (or 2 egg-replacements, as I did), 1 1/2 cup warm water, 2 tbsp olive oil to the yeast, stir, and then mix it all together with the different flours and other dry products. Mix it well. Roll the dough into 2 balls, cover and let stand in a warm place for 1/2 hour to let it rise. 

Afterwards, flatten each into greased pizza pans, and cook just the pizza dough for 5 to 7 minutes. Then bring it out of the oven, spread tomato spread for pizza on the dough, cut red peppers, cheese, fresh sage and basil, and put on top. Bake the pizza for another 20 minutes. Makes two 12-inch pizzas.

Education About Food & Nutrition Increases Wellness

Many people I see in underground fast food malls at lunch in the financial center of Toronto are eating sushi, chicken salads with grains, or healthy full-course dinners with a salad. I noticed this as early as the 80s (except for the sushi) while enjoying my favorite hamburgers and cheese danishes at lunch each day. But over the decades, I became better educated about food. Other boomer friends seemed to know that 'we are what we eat', intrinsically, but I did not. I never ate healthy, and I rarely cooked.

I simply chose unhealthy food once I was on my own because it tasted so good - and it was cheap. For many years it didn't seem to register with me that what I ate had an effect on everything else in my life and how I felt about it.

Later, it wasn't Jamie Kennedy or any other celebrity who finally got me on the track to healthy eating. It was an allergy clinic! After years of suffering from allergies as a teen, my son was treated at The Allergy Clinic in 2006 when they looked at his diet rather than give him allergy injections. Our family went through intense nutritional counselling as a result and I now don't touch bread or wheat. My recommended diet now consists of 4-day rotations of chicken, shellfish, meat or legume, fish. With these 4 dinners go the following grains & vegetables: brown rice, buckwheat, sweet potato, quinoa. Then all kinds of vegetables and fruits are added like spinach, collard greens, romaine lettuce, lemons, apples, pears, bananas, blueberries, carrots, parsnips, etc. My son's allergies were corrected after 2 years on this diet.

I realized that there are a lot of resources about nutrition out there. Some of the ones I rely on are:

• http://www.drweil.com/
• http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/
• http://www.moosewoodcooks.com/cookbook-store/