Category: Superfoods

Superfoods: Are They Worth Your Money?

27/12/2017

If you read my stuff regularly, you probably already know how I feel about superfoods. This blog was originally posted in 2012 but seeing it's been 5 years and my views have changed slightly, I thought it deserved a shakeout and refresh!

WTF are superfoods, anyway?
Superfoods are simply foods that have a higher than average nutrient density, which leaves a wide scope for many different foods. Nowadays the word superfood brings to mind some relatively expensive powders, capsules, purees and juice concentrates.

Sedate brown-green powders and lifeless capsules wouldn’t be very sexy as stand alone items. So these products are cleverly marketed with the usual lethal gamut of “cutting edge” research, heavily photoshopped images of women in bikinis laughing at acai bowls who are conventionally attractive with just the right amount of exotic ethnicity - or male white bodybuilders with fake tans posing as Mayan warriors (hilarious)... and those words that appeal to the health nut in all of us: organic, pure, clean, paleo, concentrated, anti-ageing, antioxidant, and of course free of gluten, sugar, dairy, and all the rest of it.

Unknown Superfoods Smoothie

13/8/2014

Try this delicious tangy and creamy smoothie, starring some amazing, cheaper, and lesser known superfoods!

A yummy anti-inflammatory smoothie with lesser known superfoods Cat's Claw and Schisandra berry. I like to eat it with a spoon, pudding style!

Cat's Claw (Uncaria tomentosa) is immune-enhancing and antioxidant, great if you're recovering from the flu that is going around, or for chronic fatigue.

Schisandra berry (Schisandra chinensis) is a super berry traditionally used in TCM, a fantastic antioxidant and adaptogen, and massive support for the liver to enhance phase I and II detoxification.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup organic blueberries
2 leaves kale
1 tablespoon ABC (almond, brazil nut, cashew) nut butter 2 2 teaspoons raw cacao powder
2 tablespoons organic coconut cream
1 teaspoon powdered Cat's claw
1 teaspoon powdered Schisandra berry
juice of 1 lime
stevia to taste
water to blend

PREPARATION

Blend all ingredients together in a high powered blender under smooth and creamy. Enjoy immediately!

Makes 2 small glasses or 1 large serve.

There are a great many so-called superfoods unknown to many people - they're called medicinal HERBS and they are cheaper and in many cases better than the stuff you buy for $150/kg from the health food shop!! You can buy powdered cat's claw and schisandra berry for $35 - 38/kg from Australherbs, around the same price per kilogram as macadamias.

Schisandra berries

The Karma of Superfoods

11/8/2014

Any die hard yogi, health coach, or budding nutritionist will tell you that your smoothie just isn't complete without acai berries, organic blue spirulina, or hemp seeds. I find that many of these folks are dedicated vegans or heartfelt environmental activists who endeavour to tread more lightly on the earth. But did you know that many far flung "superfoods" carry a heavy environmental and social footprint?

Are those pretty blue and purple powders a necessity for truly holistic wellbeing... or a superfluous extra accessible to a privileged few, at the expense of a vast unseen "other"?

Is your superfood smoothie ethically sound?

What are superfoods?

Let's start with the basics. Superfoods are simply foods that have a higher than average nutrient density, which leaves a wide scope for many different foods. The high demand for such foods by health-conscious consumers has let loose the tsunami of superfood marketing and health food store bombardment we've seen in the last ten years.

As humans we tend to thirst for the most exotic, the most expensive, the most foreign version of many things - that includes superfoods. Think goji berries and spirulina from Tibet and China; quinoa, acai, maca, and chia from South America; coconuts, noni fruit and durian from Southeast Asia; mesquite from Mexico; and chlorella from Japan. That means there's a lot of work and resources involved in getting those superfoods from those Andean mountain tops and high Tibetan plateaux into your blender.

Transportation of food contributes a significant percentage of all carbon emissions produced on our planet, and has impacts as far ranging as destruction of foreign ecosystems and cultures. I've found the highest concentration of superfood lovers to be within my own circles of yoga practitioners, health students, clients, and friends, who are as environmentally conscious as they are health conscious. So why do many of us continue to buy foods that carry such a huge environmental and social impact?

The less-than-super truth

Bolivian farmers harvesting quinoa.

Superfoods aren't always sustainably harvested. Take quinoa, once a Bolivian farmer's food, now in the pantry of every first class health conscious westerner, and at a price. Due to to western demand tripling prices of quinoa on the global market since 2006, poor Bolivians can no longer afford their staple grain.

As an extra kick in the guts, the quinoa-growing region of Bolivia is now suffering from health issues such as malnutrition, partly because quinoa growers who export their crop now purchase cheaper, refined grains to eat from the store.

Well-intentioned health and ethics-led consumers are unwittingly driving poverty in Bolivia. If you buy quinoa sourced from South America instead of Australian-grown quinoa, you are one of these consumers. So please check the packets before you buy!

Similarly, "wildcrafted" superfoods such as maca can be damaging to local populations despite the relatively high prices paid to locals for foraging rights. The same way our desire for chocolate, bananas, coffee and sugar has decimated local cultures and ecosystems in previous centuries.

Do we really need these extra nutrient packed "superfoods" in our smoothies and diets, despite the fact that in many cases, we are hurting other humans and impinging on their basic human rights?

Food and karma

How far has your food travelled to get to you?

The way food (including "superfoods") is grown or raised, processed, transported, traded and prepared has powerful effects on soil, plants, animals, ecosystems and the health of the planet, as well as on farmers, consumers, economies, and society as a whole.

If you're a student of yoga, you may be familiar with the term karma. The theory of karma is one of cause and effect. However, causes do not simply lead to a predictable set of knock on effects. Karma works in subtle ways, with causes combining in multitudinous complexities to create experience.

When you eat something, you eat everything that happened to make that food come into existence. You say “yes” to the hands and systems that allowed that food to come to you. You affirm a certain version of the world. If you choose bananas from a South American plantation located on destroyed rainforest land, using pesticides and shipped long distances using oil-fuelled ships, you ever so slightly reinforce this state of affairs. You make it part of your reality and experience. You say yes to that world.

If you instead purchase bananas from a local organic farm, you say yes to a different set of conditions. You strengthen community ties, and in a miniscule way weaken the hold of impersonal food corporations. You say yes to a world that treats soil, air and water with respect.

Do you rely on a food production system that restores nature and cultivates human consciousness? Or one that throws nature out of balance, relies on animal and human suffering, is grown and processed by strangers, and employs monoculture and genetic modification? And since we're talking about superfoods, one that places a higher price on the most exotic, the most antioxidant dense, and the most sexy-sounding and marketable, despite the costs?

Still feel like you need your superfood smoothies? You need not pay ten times the price for possibly a tenth of the antioxidants - seeing as the more exotic superfoods are shipped from so far away and stored for - in some cases - years, many of these foods are no longer fresh and therefore have experienced loss of antioxidant activity and superfood-ism anyway!

There are many locally grown, comparatively cheaper superfoods with an unusually high nutrient density that you could pop into your morning smoothie instead, to give you a bounce and a clear conscience. Kale, parsley, turmeric, ginger, and dandelion greens can all be grown in your own backyard easily, and in the case of dandelion, can be found growing along your fenceline!

Grounded spices such as nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, turmeric and mustard contain the highest ORAC count of pretty much any foodstuff you can get, far exceeding noni juice or acai berries. Some of my other favourite superfoods are locally grown avocados, blueberries, hemp seeds, and locally caught fish.

And if you must have quinoa, acai or maca, and you're concerned about sustainability and social justice, do your research. If you're buying organic chocolate, make sure it's at least "fair trade." Check where it is grown and how it is harvested. We eat the energy we want to become, so choose wisely.

Does the food you eat resonate with who you are, and who you wish to be?

Buy local, check labels. Your purse and your body will be happier for it.

5 life lessons I learnt from being bed-ridden

8/5/2014

I went to bed on Tuesday night feeling nauseous and with a belly ache, and woke up feeling like I’d been hit by a truck. Every muscle in my body ached, and moving was a joke – I felt about 200 years old!

I don’t know whether it was food poisoning or that yucky gastro bug going around, but it felt dreadful! However, it lasted a fraction of what it could have, thanks to some herbs, some rest, and even some TV (I know, shocking!).

When I went over the last week step by step, I could see the warning signs and how I’d ignored them. Read on for the five big lessons I learnt from the whole experience that could help you avoid experiencing the same thing I did, starting with lesson number one...

Listen to the warning signs.

Last weekend I was preparing to open my new yoga and clinic space… at the same time my mum was visiting for the first time in a long time, at the same time I was teaching a bunch of classes the same day, on the same day I planned to catch up with several different friends… you get the idea.

I noticed I was losing my keys over and over again. Locking them in the car, finding them in obscure places after hunting for ages, and getting really frustrated in the process. Picture me after teaching my final yoga class of the day, crying and screaming whilst lying under my Dad’s land cruiser for twenty minutes trying to undo the spare key in pitch black, while my mum waited for me to pick her up from the train station! I was stressed out and it was giving me the memory of a guppy.

Stress triggers our brains to release hormones, like cortisol, which affect the memory and cognitive function section of the brain. The over-stimulus caused by these hormones overloads the memory part of the brain, which causes us to forget things. Temporary memory loss can also be caused by multi-tasking, which many of us do to "stay ahead" in our busy lives. I for one am guilty of multi-tasking, thinking I’m being more productive when really I’m just making myself unmindful and stressed out!

When we are carrying on a conversation on the phone as we walk into the house, and planning what to cook for dinner at the same time, we aren’t paying attention to where we are simultaneously putting down our keys. Our brains don't store data well when we’re not paying attention to something in the first place. Brains are designed to do one task at a time. We are not computers and when we try and behave as if we were, our brains refuse to co-operate and forget things.

Exercising daily, eating healthily, getting plenty of sleep and practising mindfulness all help maintain a healthy brain, producing more neurotrophins, essential transmitters to enhance nerve connections within the brain.

Herbs are king.

After a busy four days of fitting out the new space and entertaining my mum, I arrived at my partner’s house late one night, frazzled and exhausted. I ate something and went to bed feeling a bit nauseous but too tired to care. The next day I was in a world of gut pain and couldn't bear the thought of getting up.

Being in no state to self-prescribe herbal remedies, my herbal-wizard boyfriend Andreas took great pleasure in concocting strong and slightly disgusting brews of thyme (anti-microbial and carminative) and peppermint (calming for the gut), and making gel capsules of powdered pau d’arco (antimicrobial, analgesic) and echinacea (immune boosting) for me.

Sure enough, my every-minute stabbing gut pain became less frequent and less intense, and I recovered in record time. The power of herbs never ceases to amaze me. (This further fuelled my desire to study naturopathy in the second half of this year!) I also managed to get some sleep. A lot of sleep…

Rest is golden.

Trying to do too much gets us into trouble by putting our adrenals into overdrive and driving our immune systems into the dirt. Getting sick was the final alarm bell my body was using to tell me to “slow down or we’ll force you to.”

Once I was sick, all I wanted to do was lie in bed. Sleeping during the day is something I rarely do because of a misguided belief that it’s lazy to be in bed when the sun is out. How ridiculous of me to think that!

I was in bed for all of Wednesday – except when some unsuspecting but lovely Jehovah’s Witnesses came knocking and on seeing the state I was in, offered to come in and make me some tea. (With my about-to-hurl sounds they were only at the door for two minutes, which must be some kind of record.)

Listening to my body by staying in bed all day was possibly the best thing I did. I woke up on Thursday feeling refreshed and better than I did before I got sick! I enjoyed some hula hoop yoga in Andreas' sunny backyard, feeling grateful to be alive. Rest truly is a powerful healer. And it gave me a chance to watch a little TV, another thing I’ve avoided for the past 12 or so years…

TV is not (always) evil.

On Wednesday night, being in less pain but still feeling exhausted I desperately wanted a distraction. So I turned to watching a few hours of TV to divert my attention away from the pain.

I normally shun television but I managed to find a few English game shows on ABC and SBS that felt like they weren’t killing brain cells. Plus Masterchef was pretty enthralling!

I now understand why people are drawn to TV – it’s a distraction, and when you’re in (any kind of) pain, distraction isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s still not something I’d want to use as a long term coping mechanism, but it helped. And as I lay there staring at the idiot box, I started to realise that…

Having healthy digestion is a blessing.

In the midst of my crippling gut pain, I thought of all my clients with IBS, IBD, Crohn’s, food intolerances and food allergies, and sent them some serious metta (loving-kindness). I’m extremely fortunate not to have any life-consuming gut issues besides lactose intolerance (which is relatively easy to manage).

Living with that kind of pain day in and day out is hard to imagine, yet it’s something many of my clients and closest friends do every. Single. Day. Having healthy digestion, and having general health, are a blessing, something to be deeply grateful for, rather than take for granted.

Superfood Smoothies

16/11/2012

Love yummy smoothies with extra nutritive value to boot? So do we!

I enjoy using superfoods in smoothies and trust you will too with these recipes. The ones we've used here are some of the more common powdered or pureed ones you'll find in your health food store. Just remember, superfoods come in many forms - some of which are so common, unmarketed and cheap that we seem to have forgotten how nutrient-packed and good for us these foods are!

These are things like avocados, quinoa, green coconuts, buckwheat, homegrown sprouts, figs, green leafy vegetables, lemons, ginger, walnuts, regular ol’ berries, beetroot, papaya, parsley, comfrey, certain mushrooms, teas and herbs.. and many other everyday foods, season permitting. These gorgeous whole “superfoods” are not only easy on the wallet but are remarkable in their cleansing and health-enhancing abilities.

Maca *may* have given ancient amazonian warriors the libido of a sex-starved stallion on viagra, and noni juice *may* have helped traditional south pacific islanders hammer their bamboo rafts across vast seas...

But let’s not forget these guys lived in pristine rainforests or in tropical paradise, didn’t overindulge at Christmas time, and exercised far more than the average westerner. So to say that certain superfoods gave them “the edge” is in my opinion a little bit reductionist. That said I love using acai, cacao and spices in my smoothies as they are just plain yummy - and who knows, you just might tap into your inner native!

So let's get stuck into some delicious slurpies from our last Active & Healthy workshop...

Antioxidant Hero Cacao Nut Milk

1 cup raw almonds, soaked overnight in filtered water
3 cups water
1 frozen banana
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon raw cacao
1 tablespoon raw honey

Place drained nuts and 1 cup of water into a blender. Blend until smooth, then gradually add remaining water. Strain mixture through muslin cloth or a fine strainer, reserving pulp for other recipes such as cookies.

In a blender combine nut milk, antioxidant-rich cacao, honey and banana, process until smooth. Sprinkle with raw cacao nibs and indulge!

Acai Supercharger

2 frozen bananas
2 sachets raw Amazonia acai puree
1 handful frozen berries
1 ½ cups water or freshly squeezed apple juice

Combine all ingredients in a blender and blend well. Serve cold. Acai is a brazilian berry packed with antioxidants and my personal addiction. Just be sure to use the raw puree rather than the stuff that has had sugar and guarana added - instant head spin if you're a sensitive soul like I am!

Anti-Cancer Coconut Mango Lassi

Turmeric is a powerful anti-cancer spice. Combined with hydrating coconut and mango, this delicious superfood smoothie is reminiscent of Indian and Sri Lankan cuisine.

Flesh of 1 mango
coconut water or coconut milk
1 teaspoon turmeric
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
Honey or stevia as needed

Combine all ingredients in a blender and blend well. Serve cold.

Enjoy these superfood smoothies as breakfast, snacks or just because! A green smoothie is of course a superfood smoothie too, but I've posted plenty of other recipes on those!

Mash it up, drink it down, love it all :)

Casey's blog