SWIHA Blog

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Let’s celebrate with a superfood green lemonade smoothie! This refreshing, potassium-rich, plant-based smoothie with banana, pineapple, ginger, and greens only requires 1 blender, 10 ingredients, and 10 minutes of your time! The smoothie produces the most vibrant blue-green color (perfect for the holiday, I know) and tastes sweet like lemonade. It’s a perfect quick meal, snack, afternoon pick-me-up, or if you are just feeling like you want to be transported to summer vacation mode!

Chew your way into a healthy lifestyle this National Nutrition Month! What better way to launch yourself into the spring season than by motivating yourself to have a healthier lifestyle? National Nutrition Month was first celebrated in March of 1973, for only one week. The purpose was to deliver nutrition education to the public while also promoting the profession of dieticians. As interest in Nutrition grew, the week expanded into a month-long celebration in 1980! With this growing awareness of Nutrition, and the importance of making informed food choices and developing healthy eating habits, National Nutrition month can be exactly the call to action you need to get started on your health journey! Every year, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics establishes a theme for National Nutrition Month, this year the theme is “Celebrate a World of Flavors” - meant to embrace global cultures, cuisines, and inclusion.

We all know our body possesses natural defenses against sickness—our immune system, a dynamic and ever-learning mechanism to keep us healthy and fight off infection. However (and especially with the emergence of the novel Corona Virus) you may be looking to boost that ability alongside the other precautionary measures you’re taking. In holistic healing, we believe in addressing the ‘root’ of mind-body-spirit health, so today we’ll be doing exactly that—with three roots that are excellent ways to support your immune health!

Many people are opting to remove dairy from their diet, opening their eyes to the many alternatives and getting creative with ways to recreate traditionally dairy-based items! Janet Lee, a raw food chef and SWIHA Holistic Nutrition instructor, recently shared on a Facebook Live video for #WellnessWednesday two ways to make delicious and nutritious coconut yogurt.

Coconuts have numerous health benefits – they contain fiber, manganese, copper, iron and medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs), supporting your heart and bones, healthy weight loss, as well as having many essential electrolytes to prevent fatigue. When you add probiotics to the mix for gut health, you have a treat that is yummy and supportive of your total wellness.

Full of fiber and packed with nutrition, green smoothies are a staple in any health-conscious diet. Making this delicious drink is as easy as 1, 2, 3!

• 1 cup of fruit
• 2 cups of liquid
• 3 cups of greens

Step One: Choose Your Liquid Base

To ensure even blending, add two cups of liquid to your blender first. Be mindful of the sugar content of liquid bases, and feel free to choose more than one!

By Janet Lee, Guest Blogger

February is a month associated with love, so it’s appropriate that February is National Heart Health month. Due to the Valentine’s holiday, February also brings lots of chocolate or sweet, sugary desserts to show others or ourselves how much we are loved. While it’s perfectly fine to enjoy sweets, it’s also beneficial to realize how much sugar we are putting into our bodies. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the average American consumes between 150 and 170 pounds of refined sugar a year.

Interestingly, less than 100 years ago, the average American consumed roughly four pounds of sugar a year. Needless to say, that our consumption of sugar has skyrocketed. The World Health Organization (WHO) and American Heart Association states that women should consume only 20 grams of sugar a day or 5 teaspoons. For men, it is 36 grams or 9 teaspoons a day. Children are at 12 grams or 3 teaspoons a day. 1 soda = 40 grams of sugar or 10 teaspoons.

Warming Ingredients for Winter Meals

Dee McCaffrey, GUEST BLOGGER

As the colder weather of winter approaches, our bodies naturally crave warm and grounding foods. Using thermogenic spices in our foods is a great way to warm our bodies and our taste buds. Thermogenic spices, such as cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, increase the body’s core temperature and speed up metabolism. Warming spices of the holiday season have many health benefits as well—they increase circulation, support efficient digestion, boost the immune system, regulate our blood sugar levels, help with weight loss, and even ward off cancer and Alzheimers.

Spices also bring the aroma of the holidays into our homes and make recipes taste delicious. Here’s a guide to some of the best warming spices, from cinnamon and nutmeg, to more exotic spices such as star anise and cloves. Discover the healing benefits of these warming spices, and how to use them in winter cooking.

By Melanie Albert, Guest Blogger

“Eat your vegetables,” is a common phrase that most of us probably heard from our parents growing up. Many people, especially children, believe that vegetables are boring, or that they have no taste. That only “health nuts” eat raw or plain steamed vegetables. This is where “finishing vegetables” comes into Whole Food S.O.U.L. Food cooking techniques. Read on for tips and recipes about how to make veggies fun and delicious for the whole family to enjoy!

Add Culinary Interest to Your Veggies

Finishing steamed vegetables with organic oils, toasted spices, fresh herbs, toasted nuts and seeds, and finishing salts adds delicious taste and culinary interest, with beautiful colors, textures and aromas.

Steam carrots, cauliflower or broccoli in a bamboo steamer and then finish them with different combinations of oils, seeds, salt or spices to create exciting, tasty dishes!

By Dee McCaffrey, Guest Blogger

The high stress nature of the holiday season can make staying balanced through the holiday season challenging.

Prevention Magazine online recently reported that 90 percent of Americans experience feelings of stress during the holidays. Whether it’s caused by crowded shopping malls, traveling, or family relations, how we manage stress can affect whether or not we have an enjoyable holiday season or an undesirable holiday.

However, there is a solution! Including some of the holiday's best stress-relieving foods as part of regular meals is a great way to maintain a feeling of calm and balance. Eating high energy and nutritious foods can help potentially stressful situations, because these foods provide us with the energy and stamina to cope.

Which foods are the best for relieving stress? Those that contain high amounts of B-complex vitamins, vitamins C and E, and those that contain minerals like manganese, selenium and zinc. The food items rich in these substances should be included regularly in meals.

On the other hand, eating processed foods and those low in the stress-busting nutrients will deplete energy levels and potentially stressful situations will become stressful and harmful to health.

Here's a list of the some of the most beneficial foods for relieving stress. Many of these are part of the traditional American holiday fare.

By Melanie Albert

Protein, alongwith fats and carbohydrates, is an essential macro nutrient which we must eat everyday with every meal. Protein is a building block of our body and helps to buildthe foundation of our bones, muscles, cartilage, skin and blood.

No Meat for 25 Years

I stopped eating red meat 30 years ago because my body could not digest it. I was a runner and felt like the meat made me sluggish. Then 18 years ago when my Mom was diagnosedwith breast cancer, I learned about antibiotics in poultry and stopped eating chicken and turkey, which I loved at the time.

My family was worried for years that I was not eating enough protein, but while I was studying nutrition, I learned so much about good plant protein, and now I’m honestly not worriedabout eating enough protein. Today, I love educating people about good sources of plant protein, including beans, whole grains and even vegetables.