15 Healthiest Foods to Stock in Your Kitchen Year-Round
June 16, 2014
Story at-a-glance
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One key aspect of eating healthy is eating
non-adulterated foods—foods that are as close to their
natural state as possible. If you do that, then
basically everything you eat is a "superfood"
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15 food items are included. Keep these on hand so that
you always have healthy key ingredients to choose from
for cooking and snacking
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Overall, fresh herbs and sprouted seeds, especially
sunflower seeds, have the potential to dramatically
boost your overall nutrition
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Top protein choices include organic, pastured meats,
eggs, and organic whey protein
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Healthy fat items include raw dairy products, butter,
macadamia nuts, avocado, coconut oil, and canned Alaskan
salmon
By Dr. Mercola
If optimal health is your goal, there's no getting around your
diet. Your physical health is a direct reflection of what you put
into your body, and how you live your life in general.
Pre-packaged processed foods may be convenient, but cooking from
scratch using fresh unprocessed ingredients is a must if you want to
improve your health.
Remember that one of the keys to staying healthy is avoiding
processed foods as much as possible. This means someone, you, your
spouse, or someone else, needs to spend regular time in the kitchen.
Once you're eating non-adulterated foods—foods that are
as close to their natural state as possible—then basically
everything you eat is a "superfood." You need nutrients—all of
them—and nutrients are found in abundance in fresh, raw foods.
Still, lists of specific items can be helpful to steer you in the
right direction. So to help you get started, the following 15 foods
are items I recommend you keep on hand so that you always have
healthy key ingredients to choose from for cooking and snacking.
1. Sunflower and Other Sprouted Seeds
One of the easiest and most efficient ways to optimize your
nutrition is to add
sprouted seeds to your vegetable juice and/or salad. While
you can sprout a wide variety of seeds, my favorite is sunflower
seeds.
Sprouted, the protein, vitamin, and mineral content of
sunflower seeds soar, and will typically provide you
with 30 times the nutrient content of organic
vegetables! Sprouts in general also contain valuable enzymes—up
to 100 times more enzymes than raw fruits and vegetables—that
allow your body to absorb and use the nutrients of other
foods you eat.
Sprouts are the ultimate locally-grown food, and can easily
be grown in your own kitchen, even if you're tight on space. And
since they're very inexpensive, cost is no excuse for avoiding
them. I started sprouting seeds in ball jars nearly 15 years
ago. Now I grow them in them in trays using soil instead. It's
far easier and produces far more nutritious and abundant food.
You can view the page I created for
directions for growing seeds into harvestable sprouts. We
have kits to grow spouts in our store. Sprouts-as-medicine.com1
is another good source for things relating to sprouts: their
health benefits, recipes, and how to grow your own.
The British Verticalveg.org2
is another. The latter gives helpful growing tips for each month
of the year. One of the benefits of sprouts is that you can grow
them year-round, even when it's cold and dark. The article "6
Easy Steps to Sprout Heaven"3
teaches you how to grow your own sprouts, from start to finish.
2. Organic Pastured Eggs
Proteins are essential to the building, maintenance, and
repair of your body tissues, including your skin, internal
organs, and muscles. Proteins are also major components of your
immune system and hormones.
While proteins are found in many types of food, only foods
from animal sources, such as meat and eggs, contain "complete
proteins," meaning they contain all of the essential amino
acids. Eggs also contain lutein and zeaxanthin for eye health,
choline for your brain, nervous and cardiovascular systems, and
naturally occurring
B12.
Eggs are powerhouses of healthy nutrition, provided they're
harvested from
organically raised, free-range, pastured chickens. The
nutritional differences between true free-ranging chicken eggs
and commercially farmed eggs are a result of the different diets
eaten by the two groups of chickens.
You can tell the eggs are free range or pastured by the color
of the egg yolk. Foraged hens produce eggs with bright orange
yolks. Dull, pale yellow yolks are a sure sign you're getting
eggs from caged hens that are not allowed to forage for their
natural diet. Your best source for fresh eggs is a local farmer
that allows his hens to forage freely outdoors.
To find free-range pasture farmers, ask your local health
food store or refer to EatWild.com4
or LocalHarvest.com.5
Cornucopia.org also offers a helpful organic egg scorecard6
that rates egg manufacturers based on 22 criteria that are
important for organic consumers.
3. Butter
Good old-fashioned butter, when made from grass-fed cows, is
a rich in a substance called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). CLA
is not only known to help fight cancer and diabetes, it may even
help you to lose weight, which cannot be said for its trans-fat
substitutes.
Butter is a rich source of easily absorbed vitamin A (needed
for a wide range of functions, from maintaining good vision to
keeping the endocrine system in top shape) and all the other
fat-soluble vitamins (D, E, and K2), which are often lacking in
the modern industrial diet. Butter is rich in important trace
minerals, including manganese, chromium, zinc, copper, and
selenium (a powerful antioxidant).
As mentioned above, RealMilk.com7
can help you locate a source of raw butter. If you want to try
your hand at making it yourself, check out Positron.org.8
They have an excellent web page with step-by-step instructions9
for making your own butter from scratch, using raw, grass-fed
milk.
4. Fermented Vegetables
Your gastrointestinal tract (GI) houses some 100 trillion
bacteria. These bacteria actually outnumber your cells 10 to 1.
When your GI tract is not working well, a wide range of health
problems can appear, including allergies and autoimmune
diseases. If you suffer from any major illness, it's imperative
to "heal and seal" your gut in order to fully recuperate.
Balancing the menagerie of
microorganisms that occupy your GI tract is a key part of
maintaining a robust immune system.
To maintain a healthy gut,
fermented foods are a necessity. Just one quarter to one
half cup of fermented food, eaten with one to three meals per
day, can have a dramatically beneficial impact on your health.
Yogurt and kefir are two examples, but there are many others.
Ideally, you'll want to include a variety of cultured and
fermented foods in your diet, as each provides different
beneficial bacteria. And, as with kefir and yogurt, you can
easily and inexpensively
ferment your own vegetables.
While you can do wild fermentation, which is allowing
whatever is on the vegetable to just naturally take hold and
culture the food, this method is very time consuming.
Inoculating the food using a starter culture speeds up the
fermentation process. My research team has also created a
starter culture loaded with powerful probiotic strains to help
produce high levels of vitamin K2, which many people are
deficient in.
5. Avocado
Avocados, which are actually classified as a fruit, are low
in fructose and rich in healthy monounsaturated fat (which is
easily burned for energy), and research has confirmed the
avocado's ability to benefit vascular function and heart health.
Personally, I eat a whole avocado virtually every day, which I
usually put in my salad. This increases my healthy fat and
calorie intake without raising my protein or carbohydrate intake
by much.
It is also very high in potassium (more than twice the amount
found in a banana) and will help balance your vitally important
potassium to sodium ratio. Avocados also provide close to 20
essential health-boosting nutrients, including fiber, vitamin E,
B-vitamins, and folic acid. Besides eating them raw, you can use
avocado as fat substitute in recipes calling for butter or other
oils. Another boon of avocados—they're one of the safest fruits
you can buy conventionally-grown, so you don't need to spend
more for organic ones. Their thick skin protects the inner fruit
from pesticides.
6. Macadamia Nuts and Pecans
Mounting research suggests that
nuts may actually help you live longer, and help you lose
weight. This isn't so surprising considering the fact that tree
nuts are high in healthy fats that, contrary to popular belief,
your body needs for optimal function. Most nuts'
nutritional makeup closely resemble what I consider to be an
ideal ratio of the basic building blocks—fat making up the
greatest amount of your daily calories, followed by a moderate
amount of high-quality protein and a low amount of non-vegetable
carbs.
My favorite nuts are macadamia and pecans, as they provide
the highest amount of healthy fat while being on the lower end
in terms of carbs and protein. The main fatty acid in macadamia
nuts is the monounsaturated fat oleic acid (about 60 percent).
This is about the level found in olives, which are well known
for their health benefits.
7. Organic Coconut Oil
Besides being excellent for your thyroid and your metabolism,
coconut oil is rich in lauric acid, which converts in your body
to monolaurin, a monoglyceride capable of destroying
lipid-coated viruses such as HIV and herpes, influenza, measles,
gram-negative bacteria, and protozoa such as Giardia lamblia.
Its medium chain fatty acids (MCTs) also impart a number of
health benefits, including raising your body's metabolism and
fighting off pathogens. Additionally, a very exciting and recent
discovery is that coconut oil may serve as a natural treatment
for
Alzheimer's disease, as MCTs are also a primary source of
ketone bodies, which act as an alternate source of brain fuel
that can help prevent the brain atrophy associated with
dementia.
Coconut oil is easy on your digestive system and does not
produce an insulin spike in your bloodstream, so for a quick
energy boost, you could simply eat a spoonful of coconut oil, or
add it to your food. Make sure you choose an organic coconut oil
that is unrefined, unbleached, made without heat processing or
chemicals, and does not contain genetically engineered
ingredients. As an added boon,
coconut oil has countless other uses besides cooking and
eating; from topical beauty applications to first aid
treatments, to general household cleaning.
8. Fresh Herbs
Herbs are not only great in meals for spice and added flavor
but are key to the nutritional density in the foods you eat. As
just one example, plain black pepper actually increases the
bioavailability of just about all other foods -- herbs and other
compounds! Herbs can protect you against diseases, clear toxins
from your body, and provide you with vitamins and minerals.
Every time you flavor your meals with herbs or spices you are
literally "upgrading" your food without adding a single calorie.
As a general rule, you really can't go wrong when using herbs
and spices, and I recommend allowing your taste buds to dictate
your choices when cooking. That said, herbs and spices also have
a variety of medicinal properties, which you can read more about
in my previous article on the nutritional and medicinal role of
herbs and spices.
Turmeric is one example of a spice with potent and
scientifically proven medicinal benefits—against cancer no less.
9. Raw Garlic
Raw
garlic is a food that should be on your menu daily. It
boosts your body's natural abilities to protect you from
hypertension and osteoporosis, and research is mounting that it
decreases your risk for various forms of cancer. It is a potent
antimicrobial as well, working as a natural antibiotic,
antifungal, antiviral, and antiparasitic agent. Garlic must be
fresh to give you optimal health benefits, though. The fresh
clove must be crushed or chopped in order to stimulate the
release of an enzyme called alliinase, which in turn catalyzes
the formation of allicin.
Research10
has revealed that as allicin digests in your body, it produces
sulfenic acid, a compound that reacts with dangerous free
radicals faster than any other known compound. To activate
garlic's medicinal properties, compress a fresh clove with a
spoon prior to swallowing it, or put it through your juicer to
add to your vegetable juice. A single medium size clove or two
is usually sufficient, and is well-tolerated by most people. The
active ingredient, allicin, is destroyed within one hour of
smashing the garlic, so garlic pills are virtually worthless.
You also won't reap all the health benefits garlic has to offer
if you use jarred, powdered, or dried versions.
Fermented black garlic is another option that will provide
the active ingredients in a more usable form.
10. Homemade Broth
Homemade bone broth is excellent for speeding healing and
recuperation from illness, as it helps "heal and seal" your gut,
the importance of which was discussed earlier. It contains
healthy fat, of course, but also important minerals like
calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, silicon, sulfur, and trace
minerals, as well as the broken down material from cartilage and
tendons—including chondroitin sulphates and glucosamine.
Making your own bone broth is extremely cost effective, as
you can make use of leftover carcass bones that would otherwise
be thrown away. One important caveat when making broth, whether
you're using chicken or beef, is to make sure they're from
organically-raised, pastured or grass-fed animals. (For detailed
instructions on how to make your own broth, please refer to my
previous article: "Bone
Broth—One of Your Most Healing Diet Staples.")
11. Himalayan Salt
Salt is essential for life, and your body needs it for
optimal function. But it's important to realize that there are
major differences between the refined and highly processed salt
found in processed foods and regular table salt, and unrefined
natural salt, like sea salt or Himalayan salt. The former will
promote damaging health effects, while the latter is important
to many biological processes, including:
Being a major component of your blood plasma, lymphatic
fluid, extracellular fluid, and even amniotic fluid |
Carrying nutrients into and out of your cells, and
helping maintain your acid-base balance |
Increasing the glial cells in your brain, which are
responsible for creative thinking and long-term
planning. Both sodium and chloride are also necessary
for the firing of neurons |
Maintain and help regulate blood pressure |
Helping your brain communicate with your muscles, so
that you can move on demand via sodium-potassium ion
exchange |
Supporting the function of your adrenal glands, which
produce dozens of vital hormones |
Natural unprocessed
salt, such as Himalayan salt, contains about 85 percent
sodium chloride and 15 percent naturally-occurring trace
minerals—about 84 of them in all, including silicon, phosphorus,
and vanadium. On hot days, or after exercising and sweating
profusely, you can make a wholesome sports drink to replenish
lost electrolytes and minerals by mixing a pinch of Himalayan
salt and a dash of fresh lemon juice in a glass of water.
12. Canned Alaskan Salmon
Rising pollution levels have contaminated most fish to the
point of being potentially hazardous, especially for children
and pregnant women, if eaten too frequently, or in too high
amounts. The key to eating fish these days is to choose fish
that are high in healthy omega-3 fats, and low in hazardous
contaminants.
Wild-caught Alaskan salmon (NOT farmed) fits this
description, and is one of the few types of fish I still
recommend eating.
While fish will certainly stay fresh for a long time if
frozen, another option is to stock up on canned salmon. Just
make sure it's labeled "Alaskan Salmon," as Alaskan salmon is
not allowed to be farmed. Also look for
BPA free canned options like what we have in
our store. Avoid Atlantic salmon, as all salmon labeled
"Atlantic Salmon" currently comes from fish farms. Also, sockeye
salmon cannot be farmed, so if you find sockeye salmon, it's
bound to be wild, and therefore a good choice. Other canned fish
that are in the safer category (having lower contamination risk
and higher nutritional value) are sardines, anchovies, and
pickled herring.
13. Raw Milk from Organic, Grass-Fed Cows
Contrary to popular belief, pasteurized milk is not safer
than raw milk from a
healthy, grass-fed cow raised according to organic standards.
Data shows that even illnesses linked to raw milk are
minimal, and far lower than those from
pasteurized CAFO milk. Grass is a cow's natural food. Corn
and other grains are not. When cows eat grains—which is the
standard fare in confined animal feeding operations
(CAFOs)—their body composition is altered, including the balance
of essential fats. As a result of the animals' diet,
high-quality raw milk has many health benefits that pasteurized
milk lacks. For example, grass-fed raw milk contains:
- Healthy bacteria that are good for your gastrointestinal
tract
- More than 60 digestive enzymes, growth factors, and
immunoglobulins (antibodies)
- Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA)
- Beneficial raw fats, amino acids, and proteins in a
highly bioavailable form, all 100 percent digestible
- Vitamins A, B, C, D, E, and K in highly bioavailable
forms, and a very balanced blend of minerals (calcium,
magnesium, phosphorus, and iron) whose absorption is
enhanced by live lactobacilli
Getting your raw milk from a local organic farm is one of the
best ways to ensure you're getting high-quality milk. You can
locate a raw milk source near you at the Campaign for Real Milk
Web site.11
The Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund12
also provides a state-by-state review of raw milk laws.13
14. Whey Protein
Even if you don't have access to raw milk, you can use a
high-quality, minimally processed
whey protein derived from the milk of organically-raised
grass-fed cows to receive many of the same health benefits. Whey
protein contains beta-glucans and immunoglobulins, which protect
your immune system and support your body's natural
detoxification processes.
Whey protein is often referred to as the gold standard of
protein, and when consumed 30 minutes before and/or after your
workout, it can help increase both fat burning and muscle
building. Amino acids found in high-quality whey protein
activate certain cellular mechanisms, including a mechanism
called mTOR,14
which in turn promotes not only muscle protein synthesis, but
also boosts thyroid, and protects against declining testosterone
levels after exercise.
15. Yogurt and Kefir Made from Organic, Grass-Fed Milk
Cultured dairy products such as yogurt and kefir made from
organic, grass-fed milk are other powerhouses of nutrition
you'll want to keep in stock—and you can easily make them
yourself, using a starter culture. Besides cow's milk, you can
also make them fusing raw goat or sheep's milk. While both kefir
and yogurt are cultured milk products, they contain different
types of beneficial bacteria (probiotics).
Yogurt contains transient beneficial bacteria that keep your
digestive system clean and provide food for the friendly
bacteria that already are present. Kefir actually helps to
colonize your intestinal tract -- a feat that yogurt cannot
match. Additionally, kefir contains several major strains of
friendly bacteria and beneficial yeasts not commonly found in
yogurt. Kefir's active yeast and bacteria may provide more
nutritive value than yogurt by helping digest the foods that you
eat and by keeping the colon environment clean and healthy. It
also contains vitamins, minerals, and essential amino acids that
help your body with its natural healing powers and maintenance
functions.
Copyright 1997- 2014 Dr. Joseph Mercola. All Rights Reserved.
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