Spices
Maya
also gave the meat a more distinctive flavor (spice producers have since taken terrible advantage of that).. and "although we've been brainwashed into making sure there's a lot of unhealthy sauces and chemical 'flavorings' tossed into the mix (read the labels of your favorite salad dressings & spice mixes)."
Do what you can, for who you can with what you have and where you are.
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Gman
You're spot on. (and I hope I used that saying correctly)
If I'm looking to buy some garlic powder, the last thing I want in it is
salt, especially common "table" salt, which is nearly devoid of anything
good for us other than a small portion of its sodium content. I also don't
want preservatives, anti-caking agents, MSG or any number of other things I
can't pronounce. All I want is dried & crushed garlic. I should add that I
never use garlic powder for cooking. For that, I peel and then crush or
chop actual garlic bulbs. The powder is only there for non-cooked items
where crushing simply doesn't make sense.
In our house, we use 'sea salt' instead of common table salt. It's not
heavily processed and has much less of an effect on the diabetes. I also
have noticed an odd effect gained by voluntarily reducing my own intake of
sodium in any form. Basically, the less I use, the more I can taste it.
It's not that foods with less taste saltier. It's more like my taste buds
are regaining some lost feeling (waking up?) and the need for more salt
simply isn't there. In a couple of ways, it makes perfect sense to me. For
one, dentists will tell you to gargle with warm salt water to deaden mouth
pain, so apparently salt works well as a gum nerve calmer. Why wouldn't too
much of it also deaden taste buds? The other reason is that food makers
often add extra salt to help mask unnatural flavored additives (chemicals).
When you remove the chemicals, there's no longer any reason to keep the
mask. Again, consider our ancestry. How much salt did they have in their
diets and where did it come from? None of them had a table shaker full of
the stuff. Reducing the amount of salt called for in the majority of home
cooked recipes will actually allow the flavor of the other ingredients to
come through even more and the salt will become more of a participant than a
leading flavor. Personally, I want to be able to actually "taste" each of
the individual ingredients in my creations. After all, that's why I added
them! lol
I tend to go through a decent amount of Mrs. Dash, a non-sodium
flavoring mix, but I definitely prefer making my own mixes using whatever's
available when I'm able. Since I don't prescribe to any particular recipe
for the mixes, it helps keep things from tasting too similar all the time.
In their defense, most single spices only contain what they say they
contain, but you still have to consider how they were make into the form you
end up buying. Spices are primarily herbs, dried, crushed, pulverized into
a powdered form that's easy to measure. If that were the entirety of it,
that would be great. But many spices are heat treated to dry them out. The
moment heat is applied, the extremely beneficial enzimes, amino acids, and
other organics within the herb are killed off, making the spice nothing more
than flavoring with no nutritional value whatsoever. I'm convinced that we
need those extra organics to help our systems remained better 'balanced' and
that it's the loss of these things that lead to folks suffering with so many
of the digestive and regenerative ailments we see within today's society.
If you choose to follow any of these suggestions, the best approach is
to take it slow to help avoid the withdrawl your body is bound to feel
otherwise. Some of the garbage that's in our 'processed' (non)foods is
actually addicting and our bodies have been forced to keep certain walls up
in defense (excessive white blood cells & blood pressure, certain enzimes
and other biological 'guards' to combat the foreign stuff). As you remove
the toxins, the body will need time to adjust the height of these walls to
compensate. If you spread out any changes over enough time, you won't have
any detox symptoms to handle and your energy level will continue to increase
until you're as clean as the fresh stuff you're eating then. However, if
you make too many changes too quickly, you'll actually cause yourself
additional fatigue and physical stress as your body launches a full scale
war with the good stuff you're taking in to give itself time to make those
adjustments.
And again, I might sound like I have all the answers, but I don't. What
I do have is a LOT of reading about these subjects and my own experiences
with testing them over the years. I'm not a doctor, physicist, pharmacist
or dietitian. I'm just a fellow human trying to figure out a healthier,
more enjoyable way to live (the diabetes kick started the quest) who happens
to have an online soapbox and a crowd of onlookers. I fully believe I'm on
to something very important here. :)
How Farm Policy Affects Us All
http://tinyurl.com/5uzf46
Peace,
Gman
"The only dumb questions are the ones we fail to ask"