Don’t make this shopping experience a quick one – when you get to the market, take your time, bring a cup of tea or coffee, and scan the aisles taking in the sight and smells of fresh produce. And don’t just stop at one, check a number of them out.

Take it from us, this is a fabulous experience to enjoy time and again from late May through October in many places. Worried about how to keep the produce freshest? Talk to the farmer or stand checkout folks – they’re usually very savvy when it comes to storing and canning produce.

It doesn’t matter if you like to shop for salads, snacking or juicing. Having produce for so many months throughout the year is so deliciously awesome we can hardly contain ourselves – we shop all of them in our immediate area!

Find Your Local Farmers Market

Happy Marketing!

The heart loves foods that help lower blood pressure, raise the good cholesterol (HDL), lower the bad (LDL), as well as those loaded with phytonutrients, omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamins to both repair and protect cells, wipe out free radicals, protect blood vessels, boost immunity and provide fiber to carry the toxins out of the body.

So when it comes to your heart, what foods help it go pitter patter and keep you healthy and strong?

• Salmon – loaded with omega-3 fatty acids, it can slow plaque building in arteries and lower cholesterol.
• Nuts – a leaner alternative to meat proteins, some good choices are almonds and walnuts, both loaded with omega-3s, magnesium and fiber.
• Olive and flax seed oils – both can lower cholesterol (too much of either of these can be overkill so use sparingly).
• Black and red kidney beans – contain B vitamins, niacin, omega-3s, calcium and fiber.
• Oatmeal – lowers cholesterol (and tastes fabulous on a cold winter’s day)!
• Dark chocolate – lowers both cholesterol and blood pressure.
• Berries – blueberries, strawberries, mulberries (and every other berry you can get your hands on) are high in antioxidants, help lower both cholesterol and blood pressure.
• Tomatoes – lycopene antioxidant.
• Popcorn – air popped with no butter or salt makes a great fiber as well as an antioxidant.
• Red wine – catechins and reservatrol (flavonoids) may help raise your good cholesterol.
• A host of other fruits and vegetables that keep your heart functioning up to par – broccoli, squash, papaya, sweet potatoes, spinach, cantaloupe, red bell peppers, asparagus, and oranges. (These are favorites to juice also so your cells get an extra potent dose of these power house foods.)
• Tea – chock-full of catechins and flavanoids.

A good healthy diet, exercise to relieve stress, hobbies to make your spirit happy, and helping out your fellow humans all help to keep your ticker tick-tocking for a long time.

by CathyK

Environmental Health News is as current as it gets with topics of health, local and national environment issues, water and air quality, health conditions like cancer, current law status, the animal kingdom and how our world affects them, news for men/women/children, and a whole lot more!

Do yourself a favor and check it out – and rock on with EHN!

Environmental Health News

There are hundreds of halibut recipes on the internet, many with marinades, but this one stood out as one of the healthier versions. This recipe is an adaptation from allrecipes.com. The longer this is marinaded, the better it is – at least for an hour or two.

The Fixings:

2 medium halibut steaks

1-2 cloves garlic, minced

8-10 Tbls. olive oil

1-2 tsp. basil, tarragon OR dill

1 tsp. himalayan salt

1 tsp. black pepper, medium to course ground

1-2 Tbls. fresh squeezed lemon or lime juice

1 Tbls. dried parsley

In a shallow glass bowl mix all the spices, oil and juice. Blend well, add the steaks, turn them a few times in the marinade, and place in the refrigerator for an hour, turning a couple more times. Grill on a highly heated, oiled grate for 5-7 minutes each side. Steaks are done when they flake easily. (NOTE: Another way to fix this recipe is to place steaks in aluminum foil and add some quartered onion and sliced green pepper. Drizzle a bit more oil over the steaks and vegetables and grill for about 20 minutes until steaks flake.)

Enjoy these halibut steaks – excellent with wild rice and steamed rutabagas.

(adapted from a recipe by Jen Hoy 2010)

I’ve heard of cilantro pastes and pestos to help detox heavy metals from the body, but never a smoothie. Being a lover of juicing and using greens as much as possible in my daily diet, I searched for something other than a pesto that would help remove those energy-draining metals right out of the body. This is what I found.

Always use pure, organic produce for smoothies. The last thing you want to do is use fruits and vegetables that have been sprayed or contain GMOs.

• 3/4 cup cilantro leaves
• 1 tablespoon dulse flakes, E3Live complete nutrition powder, or another powdered ‘green’
• 3/4 cup flat leaf parsley leaves
• 3 stalks celery
• 1/2 cucumber
• ½ lemon or lime, peeled and loosely chopped
• 1 mango, peeled and cubed
• 1 sweet apple like Fuji, Pink Lady or Braeburn, loosely chopped
• Filtered water

Put everything into a blender or Vitamix, mix well, and drink it up! This recipe will serve 2, but you may want to keep it all to yourself!

Excellent information from Good Food World describes how food products get from farm to store to consumer.

According to Gail Nickel-Kailing, the author of “You Get to Decide What to Eat, Right?”, our food supply chain is in reality a number of chains, with each of the meat, dairy, produce and other grocery item groups moving through a different process. The link below takes you to an article which focuses solely on the produce system. Future articles will focus on the other food groups as well as other grocery items.

Gail provides a wonderful visual, general in nature, of the steps involved in getting your produce from the farmer’s field to the grocery store. Within this process she describes how little the consumer is involved. Every step and all food items are predetermined by farmer, the government, food manufacturers and the retailers themselves.

For some enlightened reading, to to Good Food World and see for yourself:

You Get to Decide What to Eat, Right?

You intuitively know that raw foods are good for you. You may be a bit overwhelmed with all the raw food information out there. Your body is craving more real, organic, whole food every day. But where do you start? With a good raw food cookbook? Nope.

While many of the raw food authors have good intentions, their books contain recipes with large amounts of nuts, dates and bananas, which can cause an imbalance in blood sugar levels, as well as add on unwanted pounds. There are a couple exceptions to this rule; those that are teaching proper food combining and slow introduction to the raw food lifestyle use these foods in moderation only.

Make things simple for yourself – just start eating more fruits and vegetables,  or have a fruit smoothie as long as the foods are fresh and there aren’t any added ‘natural flavorings’ or sugary syrups. Often these contain chemicals and colorings and you won’t get the benefit as you might with an all-fruit or fruit/vegetable smoothie.

Your next step might to make your in-between snacks raw.  This can be something as simple as an apple, or vegetable sticks like celery, carrots, peppers, jicama, rolled up lettuce leaves with hummus, a small handful of raw nuts, and so on.

After a couple weeks of snacking with real food, considering making one of your daily meals raw. Again, make it simple. Start with a nice salad at lunch. Or make one of your side dishes raw. You can take it even slower if you haven’t eaten a lot of fruits and vegetables over the years. Don’t eat the food in it’s raw form, lightly steam or saute it. The idea when starting out is to keep the food as close to its natural form as possible, so you benefit from the enzymes and energy in the live food. When we cook the holy heck out of a food we destroy many of its healing properties.

Try a week or two of eating your snacks raw. When you’re comfortable with that, try adding in a raw side dish to one of your meals. Maybe after a few weeks you can try an entire meal raw.

As overwhelming and difficult as raw food eating may sound, it really isn’t. The key is to move into the raw lifestyle at a pace you’re comfortable with. Many people find the more they eat raw, the less they want processed or overcooked foods – they simply feel better and actually crave live foods.

If you start out with an all-green juice or smoothie (which is NOT recommended in the beginning), the chances you’ll be turned off by raw food is pretty high. As nutritious as the greens are, you need to wean onto them and add them in slowly. Over time, you may find you want the bulk of their raw foods green. Then again, you may not.

There are varying degrees of  raw food eating. Some folks love, and are comfortable with, eating 100% raw. Others like a combination of cooked and raw, and some do well with either of those combinations with some animal protein.

There are no fast and hard rules when it comes to eating raw. Do what feels right for you and your body, it will always let you know what it needs. And if you decide to try out a raw food book, there are plenty of them out there with recipes to satisfy your palate. 

The biggest culprits? The top 10 contaminated lipsticks came from Maybelline and L’Oreal, as did 2 from Cover Girl, 2 from NARS and 1 Stargazer. (This is not a complete list – there are many more.)

There seems to be argument as to how much lead is okay to have in lipstick (that’s easily absorbed through your skin and into your body), but the answer SHOULD be no lead at all. It’s already been determined that there are NO safe levels of lead in the body, so why should there be acceptable levels in our cosmetics and personal products? Lead builds up in the body over time, so each time you apply a new coat of lipstick, you’re dumping chemicals into it. And you spread the lead around when you kiss your partner. Yuck!

The FDA has stated on its own website, “It is not scientifically valid to equate the risk to consumers presented by lead levels in candy, a product intended for ingestion, with that associated with lead levels in lipstick, a product intended for topical use and ingested in much smaller quantities than candy.”

I guess they don’t understand that the skin absorbs everything, including lead, sending it into the bloodstream and liver, so in fact, the risk is exactly the same.

Does this mean you have to go without colorfully shaded lips? Not at all. From The Daily Green, here are 11 safe alternatives to keep your lips colorful with no lead added.

The Daily Green Safe Lipstick List

by CathyK

That said, I read another blog the other day titled “A Green Revolution at Our Nation’s Malls,”  by Starre Vartan discussing the use of empty mall spaces as community space, sports centers or even green farms.

This got me thinking how wonderful it would be if we as a community became enlightened enough to actually network together and rent space to sell home grown food, crafts, gluten-free baked goods, or even services – all coming from a place of mindfulness!

As I follow trends of where things are moving in the future – I must say that many have discouraged me – except where community is involved. When communities come together we all come together – it’s known as the ripple effect.  And in this case, it’s a very positive thing, one that I give a big thumb’s up to!

Photo Credit to Starre Vartan's article on Green Revolution in the Malls

To read Starre’s entire article, go to:

A Green Revolution at Our Nation’s Malls

By CathyK

At Oaktree Wellness Center we’re always looking for environmental- and green-friendly sites, and we just landed on this one today:

myearth360.com

Says it all doesn’t it? A portion of all their sales goes to the National Environmental Education Foundation. Found in the site are reusable glass products, bpa-free baby bottles, eco-art/body products/books/fitness/clothing/gifts/pet products/candles and loads more.

Many eco-friendly businesses and their products are listed here as well as green campaigns for schools.

The goodness of green……..

by CathyK