Tag Archives: Micronutrients: Carotenoids

Why eat the beets, cabbage, red colors

Summary:  This post nails the need for increased variety of vegetables for chronic disease prevention and management and addresses quantities.  It includes a delicious, phytonutrient rich, and quick recipe for eating the beets, cabbage, red colors; this subcategory of vegetables can be a hard sale to your family but you’ll learn in this post why you want to include such.  It is especially timely given the fall seasonal foods now available and your requests for more vegetable recipes.

This recipe is PALEO, SCD, GAPS, AIP, and NIGHTSHADE friendly fare, but not FODMAP friendly unless within your unique re-intro tolerance limits.  Cabbage, beets and onions are fructans, one food compound eliminated on FODMAP unless you’ve reintroduced these vegetables and you know your tolerance quantities.  Keep in mind that FODMAP loads are cumulative, and this recipe contains three fructan foods which bumps up it’s fructan total load.  One family’s tip for integrating cabbage back into their low FODMAP   lifestyle is detailed immediately below the recipe, and perhaps this preparation technique can work for you too.

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Meet the FATS & Best Salad Dressing Oil, Part1

SUMMARY: The focus of this post is to better your understanding of vegetable oils and unsaturated fats.  Raw vegetable salads are chock-full of important vitamins and nutrients, but the latest science says you won’t get much benefit without eating them along with both the right type & amount of fat. In fact, essentially no or very low absorption of carotenoids was observed when salads with fat-free salad dressing were consumed (see this study or this study, Table 3.) 

In this post learn: the preferred fat/oil for best carotenoid absorption (spoiler alert: that would be unadulterated, organic, and cold pressed EVOO brands which are listed in the  UC Davis pdf report here — scroll down to the lightbulb for more details), that you can actually ditch dressing and instead add half an avocado, or you can add cooked eggs to an incredibly small amount of dressing to even further boost carotenoid absorption. Make certain you consider the sections entitled What inhibits Carotenoid Absorption for possible impact due to your particular health status, and the tips for Decoding Labels.

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