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Healthy Eating
Eating Healthy is a foreign concept in todays world. However, if we
want to live long and healthy lives, we need to go against the flow and
learn more about good nutrition. Here you will find healthy and delicious
recipes as well as articles and tips that promote healthy eating.
Note: Healthy Eating is updated monthly
Featured Healthy Recipe
Roasted Pepper Soup
3 red bell peppers, washed and deseeded
1 yellow bell pepper
1
medium onion, finely diced
1 garlic clove, crushed
3 cups of
vegetable stock
1 tablespoon plain all-purpose flour
Salt and black
pepper to taste
Diced red and yellow bell pepper pieces to
garnish
Plain yogurt or cr?e fraiche to garnish
Preheat the grill. Wash and cut the peppers in half and remove
stalks, core and seeds. Arrange the peppers in a non stick baking
tray (skin side up) and place under the hot grill. Grill for
approximately 8 to 10 minutes or until skins begin to char.
Transfer the peppers to a plastic or zip lock bag, seal and leave to
cool. Once cool (about 15 minutes) peel skins and discard.
Roughly chop the remaining pepper flesh and set aside.
Place the onion, crushed garlic and 2/3 of the vegetable stock in a
pan. Cook over medium heat for about 5 minutes or until stock begins
to reduce. Sprinkle the flour into the pan and stir to reduce
lumping. Add the chopped peppers and bring to a boil. Cover,
reduce heat to low and simmer for 5 minutes.
Let soup cool slightly and the transfer to a food processor or
blender. Blend until smooth. Transfer soup back to pan and
reheat gently, season with salt and pepper to taste.
Serve in warm bowls and sprinkle a few chopped peppers and a little
yogurt in the center of each bowl if desired.
Featured Article
The Delightful Health Benefits of
Chocolate
By: stephfoster
Some call it a food group. It just means that much and tastes that
good.
While it's not the healthiest food in some ways there are many health
benefits to eating chocolate too.
Dark chocolate is of course the best, as it has the most cocoa and
therefore the flavonoids, which provide the benefits. The flavonoids have
antioxidant properties, which have the potential to help prevent cancer,
heart disease, and stroke.
Natural cocoa powders are the best, and when you're shopping for
chocolate you can get the best benefit from chocolates with the highest
cocoa content. In addition, milk chocolate has more fat and calories due
to the milk content than darker chocolates do.
The benefits aren't extreme and unfortunately not worth overindulging
in chocolate. They do give a delightful bonus to one of life's little
pleasures. The occasional dark chocolate is about as good for you as the
occasional glass of red wine, which also contains flavonoids.
A new potential benefit has been discovered by Children's Hospital
& Research Center Oakland. They've found that chocolate can help with
diarrhea by limiting the production of fluids. The flavonoids appear to
bind to a protein called CFTR, and then inhibit them. This discovery is
promising for its potential to be developed as a cheap treatment with few
or no side effects. Only time will tell on that possibility, of
course.
Some worry about the stearic acid found in chocolate. Stearic acid is a
saturated fat, but some say it's a neutral so far as risk to the heart
while others say it has been shown to be a problem. As with many health
topics it can be very hard to decide what to believe.
You can call chocolate addictive but it isn't really, or at least
there's no evidence that it is. It's just a delight to eat. It contains a
variety of chemicals that can improve your mood but in very small
quantities.
The absolute best way to indulge in chocolate is to use cocoa powder in
recipes that have other healthy ingredients. You can substitute cocoa
powder for baking chocolate in some recipes to decrease the fat content.
To make many baked goods even better for you, use just egg whites rather
than the entire egg and replace butter and oil with unsweetened
applesauce.
To finish this article off, I'd like to include a favorite recipe for
chocolate meringue. There's a lot of sugar in this recipe, so it's not
100% healthy but they're quite decadent without a lot of calories.
2 egg whites
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3
tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate
chips
Preheat oven to 250 degrees. Beat the egg whites in a large bowl at
high speed until peaks start to foam. Slowly add sugar as you continue to
beat. Keeping beating until stiff peaks form.
Mix in vanilla and cocoa powder while beating at a lower speed. Mix
chocolate chips in by hand.
Cover a baking sheet in foil or parchment paper. Drop spoonfuls of
meringue about an inch apart.
Bake for one hour. Turn off oven and leave meringues in the cooling
oven for at least two more hours to allow the meringues to completely dry.
Store in an airtight container.
Stephanie Foster runs http://www.gimmechocolate.com and is maybe just a little
obsessed with chocolate. Visit her site to find more chocolaterecipes.
Healthy Eating | 
