First off, I realized recently I’ve been pronouncing this incorrectly for years. I won’t even tell you how I was mangling it, but instead, here’s the correct pronunciation: keen – wa

Quinoa is a seed about the size of a millet, produced from a plant related to spinach and Swiss chard. Chenopodium or “Goosefoot” comes from the Andes mountains region of South America.

It has some interesting history. The Incas used to mix quinoa with fat and roll it into a ball. The Incan armies used them for food, calling the mixture “war balls.”

Information On Healthy Food Quinoa

Now days quinoa is available as a grain, flour, pasta and cereal. It’s nutritional quality is compared to that of dried whole milk by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Bottom line, quinoa has more protein in it than any other grain known. Some varieties of quinoa have more than 20% protein. In comparison, hard red winter wheat contains about 12.6%, and red wheats have the highest proteins of the different kinds of wheat.

More Health Food Info on Quinoa

Even better, the protein in quinoa is complete, containing all the essentail amino acids. It’s also rich in iron, potassium and riboflavin, plus B6, niacin and thiamin. Since it’s high in protein, that makes it an especially good food for vegetarians.

More filling than rice and wheat, quinoa is a good food to help manage your weight.

Quinoa Is An Easy Health Food

Compared to some other grains, quinoa cooks up fairly quickly. It only takes about fifteen minutes to cook the whole grain. It’s excellent in hot casseroles, pilafs, soups, stews and stir-fries. Quinoa also works well in salads.

Try some quinoa as an easy way to put a high-protein grain in your diet!

To get a better idea of what a drupelet is, think of a raspberry. Each tiny section of a single raspberry fruit is a drupelet.

Inside Out Easy Health Food

Figs are turned inside out from the likes of raspberries, with their drupelets on the inside, and each of these tiny bubbles of fruit inside the fig has a seed in the center.

These inside out goodies have been grown since ancient times. These days, Turkey and Greece are the leading producers of figs in the world. The United States comes in third place with figs grown in California, Texas, Utah, Oregon and Washington. Most of the figs harvested are grown in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Health Food Information

Why should you eat figs? FIBER! Lots of fiber! Per serving, figs are higher in fiber than any other fresh or dried fruit. They’re also rich in potassium, calcium, magnesium and iron, and a good source of polyphenols, plant-based chemicals that help fight disease.

Because of all that fiber, figs are great to promote regularity. The type of fiber in figs may also reduce the risk of developing adult-onset diabetes.

The polyphenols in dried figs may offer a protective effect against heart disease and cancer.

Figs For Easy Healthy Food

So there’s an easy way to get some health food – eat figs! They taste good, don’t need any preparation before eating them, provide fiber and other nutrients, and help protect your body against disease.

Figs are a fantastic easy health food!

Turns out some folks at Texas A&M discovered that purees of dried plum, or dried plum mixed with apple, may be used as food preservative ingredients in ready-to-eat meat products, like roast beef.

The idea was to find something natural to substitute for the synthetic antioxidants like butylhydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylhydroxytoluene (BHT) presently used to slow down the oxidative deterioration of food.

The researchers, led by Professor Jimmy Keeton from Texas A&M, prepared the beef roasts by adding a brine containing no plum ingredient (control), dried plum juice (2.5 or 5 per cent), fresh plum juice concentrate (2.5 or 5 per cent), or spray dried plum powder (2.5 or 5 per cent). The roasts were then cooked, vacuum-packed and refrigerated for 10 weeks.

Keeton and co-workers report that all the plum ingredients exerted an antioxidant effect, with the best results coming from the 2.5 per cent dried plum juice and fresh plum juice concentrates Additionally, it seems the added plum ingredients only made a minimal difference on scores of tenderness, taste, colour and appearance..

Well, how about that? Maybe one of these days in our local grocery stores we’ll be able to buy naturally grown beef preserved naturally with plum good products.

Meat Science, Volume 80, Issue 4, December 2008, Pages 997-1004