Monday, July 14, 2014

To Peel, or not to Peel… 'Tis the Question.

So I changed my diet, about a month ago, for health reasons and have finally started seeing some changes on the scale… 10 pounds worth of change to be exact. Woo-hoo! Finally! To say I'm big-boned would be an understatement. Most people think I'm in the 150-160 pound range on any given day, but a month ago when I began to change my eating habits I was weighing in at 196 on a good day.
Now that I'm comfortably on the road to a healthier lifestyle I've got to admit that fresh fruits and vegetables have played a big part in losing weight. It also helps that my mom is my diet buddy and we have so many of our meals together. Needless to say, she keeps me in line. Getting back to the point, I've been reading up on the effectiveness of vitamins when taken through food, rather than pills and supplements, and a consistent theme among the internet "experts" and nutritionists in my town seems to be that ingesting fruit together with its peel can and will bring more "absorbable" (that's my own word there) vitamins into the body. This article is about just that and I'd like to encourage you to take the time to read it and then do your own research for a healthier you.
As a Latina woman i've always used certain fruit peels for certain recipes, but i've got to admit that the banana peel really threw me off. I can't stand the smell or taste of bananas, much less the peel. But I do eat them in front of my kids occasionally, just so they know that mommy won't chicken out on vitamins. The same way I make my husband eat broccoli in front of them as well… but that's a whole different story better left for a different day. When my recipes include fruit peels or zesting it's usually in the citrus family, although occasionally I do use apple or mango peels for recipes where my kids won't notice.
When I was about 8 years old there was this kid at my church who ate the watermelon rind clear down to the very skin of it. We thought it was weird but mom said he was a good example of taking advantage of every vitamin that fruit had to offer. I guess watermelon kid was onto something. I can only hope that someday my kids will also have a watermelon kid to learn from, or even be that watermelon kid… if our crops don't keep getting pumped with steroids and pesticides.
What are your thoughts on taking full advantage of plant vitamins?


Much love.


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