Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Fifteen Great Foods

I went to the website, veganpeace, which is not a raw site, but they have a lot of nutritional information on vegetables, grains, nuts and seeds. They have graphs which break down the vitamins and minerals in a particular food, Kale for example. It will tell you that one cup of Kale has 134% of the daily amount of vitamin C we supposedly need, (I’m not being sarcastic) 206% of vitamin A, 684% of vitamin K, 26% of manganese, and so on, and so forth. And with all that, you can also click on specific vitamins and minerals, and it will tell you which foods have the most of these nutrients.
So, I thought, maybe it would make sense to go through all of the vitamins and minerals and see if I can come up with, let’s say, ten foods which would satisfy our daily needs. Not that I would limit myself to eating these ten foods, but to get an idea of which foods I should, perhaps, concentrate my diet around.

Now, everything changes all of the time, and which foods are good for a raw-living foods person changes like I change my underwear: for example, pickled foods, mushrooms, honey, dried fruits, and anything dehydrated, has gone from bad to good, to good to bad. So, I want to say, without doing a major study, and surely not thinking of every possible nutritional pro or con, and admittedly, having worked on this for about an hour; I have come up with fifteen foods which, pretty much, presumably, cover our nutritional needs.
They are, in no particular order:

1) Spirulina
2) Passion Fruit
3) Almonds
4) Sunflower Seeds
5) Shitaki Mushrooms
6) Oranges
7) Kale
8) Bananas
9) Cacao
10) Raw Tahini (ground sesame seeds)
11) Flax Seeds

12) Avocado
13) Goji Berries
14) Acei
15) Hemp Protein

This list seems, to me, to be helpful. Of course, there is a lot of play within these food varieties. For example, any dark leafy green will give you all the vitamin K you could ever want. But, I thought, given everything I know about food nutrition now, these foods represented the best of their nutritional relatives.

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