A Warm Welcome to February my Friends!
I sincerely hope your heart is filled with love and joy this season.
If you didn’t already know… February is a month dedicated to all things HEART in the world of health.
Know someone who would appreciate a little love?
❤️💙💛❤️💙💛❤️💙💛
Heart Disease accounts for nearly 1-in-3 deaths in the United States.
This February is national heart month, so in celebration and reminder we’re going to focus on heart health for our story today.
Do you know about some of the predominant risk factors for heart disease ??
Hypertension
Diabetes
Obesity
High Cholesterol
Alcohol Consumption
Smoking
Stress
Poor Sleep
Poor Diet
And most of these details as I’m sure you can tell are definitely able to be improved with diet and lifestyle. We can eat an anti-inflammatory diet, we can reduce and eliminate our intake of unnecessary junk foods and added sugars, fried foods, dedicate ourselves to rest and relaxation, make sure we get a good amount of exercise and stay away from unnecessary smoking and alcohol consumption.
Let’s eat a lot more plants - high in fiber, vitamins and nutrients.
Let’s avoid highly refined grains and ultra-processed foods like sweets and snacks, sugar, four, etc. and soda, sweetened beverages, and others to maintain healthy blood sugar regulation inside our amazingly beautiful bodies. Maintaining balanced blood sugars and low inflammatory diet can help reduce the impacts of cholesterol and arterial damage.
Let’s use lots of herbs & spices to creatively craft our foods with lots of flavor for our foods instead of throwing on all kinds of sugar, fat and salt like the food industry does to get us to like their foods.
Let’s learn to work with our emotions, reduce our stress levels, and let go of our control of things completely out of our control in order to learn to love our lives a bit more lavishly. Reducing stress and anxiety as well as improving our deep breathing can help us reduce our blood pressure, improve our overall health between our heart, gut, brain, and body! :)
Okay okay okay, so now with all that I want to get right to our heart healthy recipe this week!
Full of fiber, nitric oxide to promote optimal blood flow and healthy circulation…
Brussels Sprouts - made famous from Brussels, Belgium, these little “baby cabbages” as some people all them are part of the same family as Kale, Cauliflower, Broccoli, Kohlrabi, Collard Greens and Cabbage too of course.
Vitamin C
Vitamin K
Commonly paired with Balsamic Vinegar, Black Pepper, Parmesan, Nutritional Yeast
Beets and Beet Greens - beautifully dark burgundy red, purple, and even gold, beets have a long history as health foods too; used in healing digestion since the Middle Ages and is well known for supporting circulation, improving exercise endurance and reducing blood pressure. Beet roots are beholden by a beautiful compound called betanin - which gives it that bold purple color, which is one of the very first natural food colorants (especially as the secret ingredient in RED velvet CAKE!)
You can find white beets, red beets, orange, yellow, and scarlet too. Beets can be great for pickling, brining, added to soups and stews, sauces and definitely desserts. Slice a boiled beet on top of a fresh salad with walnuts for a great colorful crunchy pair. Cook halved pears with halved beets in a crock pot overnight and you’ll have come beautifully colored pears just like a fancy gastronomist!
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Here’s this week’s recipe below! Let me know what you think when you try this scrumptious dish! :)
Prepare it for a party and you’ll be delighted by how easily people go back for more (and more)!
❤️💙💛❤️💙💛❤️
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