One teaspoon of salt contains 2325 milligrams of sodium.  So one teaspoon is about all we should be having per day.  It would be a lot easier if we were in complete control of the sodium we consumed and it was not added to our food.  A lot of food might not even taste salty to contain a high amount of sodium.  Most of the salt in the American diet comes from restaurant foods and processed, about 80 percent.  Foods high in sodium are the highly processed foods, canned foods, pickled foods, condiments, dressings, and sauces.

There is research predicting that more than 100,000 Ameican deaths a year could be prevented if Americans reduced their sodium intake.

It could be a matter of understanding the labeling terms, according to an article on the Mayo Clinic’s website, here is some help:

• Sodium-free or salt-free. Each serving in this product contains less than 5 mg of sodium.
• Very low sodium. Each serving contains 35 mg of sodium or less.
• Low sodium. Each serving contains 140 mg of sodium or less.
• Reduced or less sodium. The product contains at least 25 percent less sodium than the regular version.
• Lite or light in sodium. The sodium content has been reduced by at least 50 percent from the regular version.
• Unsalted or no salt added. No salt is added during processing of a food that normally contains salt. However, some foods with these labels may still be high in sodium.

I really love salt.  Even though I don’t eat a lot of processed foods, I do salt my food.  I am probably one of the “average Americans” that consumes sodium on the high end.  The information that I am seeing states that liking foods salty is an acquired taste so one can learn to like food less salty by just reducing the salt slowly.  I think I am going to do that.    What about you, do you eat the “average American” amount?  Is there a way you can reduce your sodium intake?

Because I did not believe her I started looking things up online specifically regarding heartburn.  Before my appointment I looked up my symptoms and basically with that route I had everything from a simple infection to coronary disease.  (Eyes rolling)  So looking at it from the diagnosis to the symptoms I was shocked. 

I don’t eat spicy foods.  Ask any one of my Spicy-Is-My-Middle-Name Yelper Friends, they ALL know I don’t do spicy—not even black pepper—at all.  Also, I had never heard of coughing and shortness of breath as being a symptom of heartburn.  Also, I thought heartburn arrived after you ate and left in a few hours, I didn’t know it could last for a week.

I was almost convinced that it was age.  I was disappointed thinking it might be that chronic kind of heartburn.

So I researched. What did I find?  In general there are two types of heartburn, one you get every once awhile (or often)* or there is GERD (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease).  GERD usually occurs because of an actually physiological situation.  Gastroesophageal reflux occurs when the lower esophageal sphincter (LES) — the muscle connecting the esophagus with the stomach can’t do its job of keeping stomach acids from flowing back up.

*(I’m seeing information saying if you have heartburn once a month is is considered mild, once a week moderate, and every day severe.  So to me if you have it, your body is off balance and needs to be kept in balance to not have it at all!)

But I am just talking about heartburn that is NOT actual GERD.  So what are the causes?

Some foods:  onions, peppermint, chocolate, citrus fruits or juices, tomatoes, fried and fatty foods, alcohol, coffee, sugar, legumes, dairy foods, carbonated beverages,spicy foods, black pepper 

Practices: smoking, eating large meals, eating before exercises, eating before going to bed 

Lifestyle: unhealthy stress

Other things: tight clothes, bending over, obesity

I realized that I was the cause of this.  Totally and completely I take responsibility for the imbalance of acid that was going on in my body.  It was my practices.  Due to my current schedule I always found myself realizing I need to eat and it always ended up right before I worked out.  I would GULP down my coffee in the morning, eat late into the night.  I had just began eating a lot more onions.  Just started eating beans and tomatoes.  I was making my system unbalanced. Well, DUH!  I will also share with you that I was totally stressing myself out over doing my routines.  I wanted to do them perfect so I would stress out over that.  So not the entire idea of Nia.

So needless to say I did not fill my prescription for whatever the doctor prescribed because I can fix this by changing my habits. The video I shared in my last post also helped me realize what was really going on.  It was posted to FB the same week I was learning all of this.  To me that helped a lot.  It reminded me that my body is programmed to be in balance and I—me, my fault, my diet, my habits, my practice, my lifestyle was the thing that was making my body work so hard it could not even manage it. 

Thank you for listening to what I learned.  I would love to listen to what you have to say.  Please comment, let me know.

The video says our bodies have to have the right pH level, which is the acid/alkaline balance.  It explains that the body will keep the balance with several mechanism.  The body must be in balance or we will die.  What it goes on to explain is that the typical American Diet and life style has a tendency to make our bodies work really hard to keep that balance.  We eat too many acid producing foods and beverages and have fast pace lives that cause unhealthy stress.

It points out some of the foods that are acid forming and the ones that are not.  There are also examples of beverages given.  It goes onto explain that what happens to the body when it becomes to acidic is that is uses minerals to put the body back in balance.  The minerals are taken away from the other functions that the body needs them for. The video points out that while the United States has a high consumption of calcium rich foods, we have the worst bone health, because one of the minerals used to balance the body when it becomes to acidic is calcium.  Hmmm?  I wonder if that is why a lot of antacids have calcium in them.

The last minute or so is where they explain how diet soda causes weight gain. 

In my next post I will share with you how this video came to me at the perfect time.  In the meantime leave a comment telling me what you think of this video.  I learned a lot from it.  Did you learn anything?  Did you find it interesting?

If you would like, check out the food target he mentions in the video. 

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE cherries.  How about you?  My husband came home recently (can you tell he does the grocery shopping?  Awesome, huh?) with a 3 pound container of cherries.  Oh my!  I love cherries.  I think they are beautiful.

I had a difficult time photographing them though because they kept disappearing.  Okay, I admit, they disappeared into my mouth.  YUM!

I was curious about cherries so I went looking around and I found out that tart cherries help relieve gout pain.  They have compounds that help with the inflammation, the vitamin C and potassium help with lowering the uric acid levels. 

Each place I looked had slightly different numbers on a cup of cherries, so here is what I ended up with

• Calories:  Between 75 and 100
• Fat:  Between 0 and 1.5 grams
• Cholesterol: 0 mg
• Carbohydrates: Between 18.73 and 23.2 grams
• Fiber: Between 2 and 3 grams
• Sugars: Between 15 and 18.6 grams
• Protein: Between 1.24 and 1.5 grams

I would think it depends on the sweetness.  The sweeter they are the higher the calories, carbs, and sugar.  These numbers are based on raw cherries, not ones cooked into a pie or a cobbler.  While I LOVE cherries, I do not like them cooked or dried.  Do you?

Some places list cherries on the same list as blueberries and cranberries, you know, the “Superfruits”, but some do not.  I guess we will see as more research is done.

How do you feel about cherries?

I have come to realize that I do not care for mushy tomatoes. I like them firm, maybe even on the just-before-ripe side. Also, I like them raw not cooked. So I was watching the tomatoes my Wonder-Hubby planted very carefully. Now, you also may know that I don’t know the first thing about gardening and ripe or not so I rely on my hubby to tell me. He is a fantastic gardener when he has time. He can make on-the-brink-of-death plants come back to life. I was watching the one tomato that was yellow very closely. But obviously not close enough. One afternoon while I was doing Nia in my living room I glanced outside and I noticed the tomato looked odd. I went to investigate, something had tasted our tomato. I was very sad.

I was wondering if taking it and cutting off the “tasted” portion was too gross. I hadn’t examined it to see how much damage had been done. I posted my sadness (either on FaceBook or Twitter) and other people said that they would eat it as long as you were able to cut off all the evidence of “tasting”. Once I assessed the damage and I concluded that whatever tasted it just peeled and poked a little so I cut the fruit in half making sure there was nothing on the half I was planning on eating. Then I cut it up and shared it with my hubby. It was sweet. I was surprised.

I looked online to see if I could find some information about them to post, but there are a lot more than I realized and now I am not sure which ones we have. They kind of look like Limmony or Lemon Boy but I am not sure because they are much smaller. What do they look like to you? Do you know tomatoes? Whatever they are, they are very tasty. They are somewhat sweet and really taste more like fruit to me.

We wanted to grow Zebras but couldn’t find them. Which is somewhat good because now we have tried a new (to us) tomato. So many people grow tomatoes. Do you? What kind?

1 can kidney beans
1 can garbanzo beans
1 large red pepper – chopped (big or small, you decide)
½ large sweet onion – cut small square sizes
¼ to ½ bun cilantro – cut ½ inch size
½ to 1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoon granulated garlic
1 teaspoon fine ground black pepper
1 ½ teaspoon of balsamic vinegar
3 teaspoon of extra virgin olive oil

Drain the beans, mix everything together.  Like most salads it is better when the flavors have mixed so wait an hour or so, then eat.  Yum!

I adjusted the recipe to have MORE bell pepper (can you tell which ingredient I love, love, love?), I used a little more salt because I bought these really low sodium beans.  I mean compared to the other two brands I looked at these had about one third of the sodium.  I like that idea, but I also know that if it doesn’t have a good enough flavor for me I won’t eat it, so I actually put in 1 teaspoon plus two sprinkles.  I didn’t have granulated garlic so I used garlic powder and I probably put in more than 2 teaspoons.  I cannot tolerate pepper, but I loved her salad and she said she put in a lot of pepper so I sprinkled pepper in.  I also used 2 teaspoons of balsamic vinegar.

I am sure this is an easy thing for people to make, but I have NEVER, EVER, EVER liked a bean salad before so this recipe just thrilled me.  Ya see, I REALLY don’t like cilantro either, but I think the kidney beans and the cilantro work to “cancel” each other out.  Ha!  I don’t know, but I like this salad.   I hope you do too.

Since I am on a quest to learn to eat (and like) beans, do you have a recipe that you would like to share to help me out?

According to all the information I have seen in my fact finding mission for this post:  beans help lower “bad cholesterol” by helping it out of the body.  Beans have an excellent amount of fiber (really excellent amount fiber).  Beans have a lot of protein.  The ratio of fat to proteis is awesome.  These are some of the reasons I think I need to learn like beans. 

Let’s look at two examples the kidney bean and the garbanzo bean (also known as chickpeas)

Kidney beans – 1 cup has

Calories: 225
Protein: 15.3g
Carbohydrate: 40.4g
Total Fat: 0.88g
Fiber: 11.3g
Iron: 5.2 mg
Magnesium: 80 my
Folate:  229 mcg*

Garbanzo beans (canned), 1 cup has

Calories: 286
Protein: 11.8g
Carbohydrate: 54.3g
Total Fat: 2.7g
Fiber: 10.5g
Folate: 160 mcg
Vitamin B6: 1.13 mg
Vitamin C: 9 mg
Zinc: 2.54 mg*

My next post (Saturday) I will share a Bean Salad recipe.  Come back and check it out!

*Source:  Truthstar Health website

Some additional info at: WHFoods Kidney  and  WHFoods Garbanzo

Chocolate, I am ok with.  I am not a chocoholic and I can live without it.  And some chocolate is DEFINITELY better than others. 

I was talking with my friend about chocolate covered bacon and I was saying how disgusting I thought the thought of it was.  So, being an evil person disguised as a great person (ha, ha!) she bought me a piece.  She was walking down the street and was overwhelmed by the smell of bacon and realized it was coming from a candy shop.  So she bought me one. 

She gave it to me and I just couldn’t eat it.  Just the THOUGHT of it grossed me out.  I put it away and forgot about it.  When I remembered it, my stomach did a cramping like flip-flop.  Ewwww.  Just the thought of it grosses me out.  What a horrendously unhealthy combination. 

No, yes, however you say that, I am NOT the epitome of healthy eating, but I try to avoid the things I feel are the really glaringly obvious unhealthy stuff.  So my tummy was NOT wanting to try it. 

As I was taking it out of the bag to take picture I noticed a piece broken off.  I tasted it.  It really doesn’t taste like anything but salty chocolate.  After I took the pictures I ate the small piece and let hubby have the other one.    This chocolate happens to be one of the ones I think it better than others.  But I couldn’t really taste the bacon as bacon. 

To me, if I am going to eat bacon and have those calories and fat I want to eat the bacon and taste the bacon and enjoy the bacon.  Eating it covered in chocolate is a waste to me . . . but that is just me.  Everyone eats how they want and this is not how I choose to eat.  So chocolate covered bacon will not be one of the foods I have as a treat. 

What about you?  Have you tried it?  Do you like it?  What chocolate covered salty food (or?) have you tried as a treat?

Typically when I think of salad I think of a GREEN salad, a salad with lettuce.  Salad, however can be made up of a variety of things.  I am in the habit of saying “salad” for green salad and vegetables then saying “pasta salad”, “fruit salad”, “potato salad”, etc. for other salads.  We have a salad every night when we eat at home.  If we dinner at home 25 nights out of the month 20 of them will be with salad. 

But sometimes I don’t have lettuce.  So I do on occasion just make a veggie salad.  Basically the same things I would put in a green salad but without the green of the lettuce.  Here in this picture, there are cucumbers, red and green bell peppers, onions, and it looks like a little feta cheese.  Maybe it could be considered a Greek Salad.  I didn’t think to put olives in it.  But it was good anyway. 

Do you eat salad?  What kind?  What is your favorite?  What do you like to put in your Green Salad?

My husband doesn’t mind leftovers.  That makes him really easy to cook for.  But at the same time I don’t want him to have to eat the EXACT same thing a few nights in a row.  So one thing I do to allow me to cook once but not leave us eating the EXACT same thing for a few days is I cook chicken in foil packets.  Yup, just like those aluminum foil ladies on TV showed us. 

This also enables me to get one more servings out our a “two serving” bag of chicken.  (From Costco the boneless, skinless Foster Farm Chicken Breasts are packaged in twos—-hmmmmm . . . . ? . . . )  I separate the chicken onto foil pieces then I just put whatever seasonings, spices, fruit, sauces, veggies I want in each package.  I have to label them because my husband is not a fan of teriyaki and I am.  Plus he likes spicy hot and I don’t. 

So then I cook them up and we have chicken for a few days.  Even though it is chicken it is not that same flavor chicken every night.  Then each night I can cook up different veggies, and either rice or pasta.  Or we might throw the chicken in or on a tortilla, or maybe even on some bread.  Either way it makes making dinner that night much easier and faster.  I love it.

Come join me for a Nia class in San Jose and see why I like to do it every day.  And here, share with me your thoughts on cooking every day or leftovers?  Do you like leftovers?  Do you cook every day?