Tag: High Temperatures

Great Recipe For Diabetic Cookies

Post author By admin
Post date February 21, 2012
No Comments on Great Recipe For Diabetic Cookies

Diabetic cookies can be a marvelous way to raise the spirits when a person is feeling miserable about the restrictions of living with this serious but manageable condition. Having diabetes is often not much fun and we cannot cheer ourselves up with normal chocolate and sweet treats the way we may have done in the past when we needed a boost.

Most diabetic cookie recipes involve using artificial sweeteners. Just about all of the artificial sweeteners available on the market today have raised some concerns about health risks. Often this is to do with what happens to laboratory rats who are fed on very high quantities of the sweeteners.

Diabetic Cookies Sweeteners

Whether you want to let this worry you is up to you, but it may be a good idea not to indulge in huge amounts of artificial sweeteners. Instead, let your taste buds return to enjoying the natural sweetness of whole foods, as they did before sugar corrupted us to expect a very high level of sweetness.

Diabetic Cookies

When choosing a sweetener, check that it is suitable for baking. Aspartame loses its sweetness at high temperatures so avoid any products that are based on aspartame. Others are fine. The packet will tell you. Depending on your diet plan you may be able to use a blend which may be 50% sugar.

I love this recipe for diabetic peanut butter cookies with its mix of sweet and savory tastes. You can try it with less or more sweetener according to taste.

Peanut Butter Diabetic Cookies

0.5 cup sugar free peanut butter (experiment with creamy or crunchy styles)
1.25 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
0.5 cup margarine
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
equivalent of 0.5 cup sugar

Margarine should be soft (not straight from the refrigerator). Mix all ingredients except for the flour into the margarine, then slowly add the flour. The dough should be crumbly but you can add a splash of water if it is too dry.

Make 1 inch balls of dough and place them on a baking sheet. Press down with the base of a glass to flatten them to about a half inch thickness. Bake in a preheated oven at 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) for 10-15 minutes.

If you have diabetic kids, why not teach them to make these diabetic cookies for themselves? That way they will have a treat that they can prepare themselves and share with others in the family if they choose to. It is going to be important that your diabetic child understands how to prepare the right kind of food to manage his or her condition, so starting to learn to cook is important for both boys and girls. Just be sure that all food consumed, including diabetic cookies, is included in the day’s eating plan.

Related Blogs

Related Blogs on Artificial Sweeteners

Related Blogs on Aspartame

Weight Loss Exercise

Avoiding Dangerous Raw Foods

Post author By admin
Post date April 5, 2011
No Comments on Avoiding Dangerous Raw Foods

Avoiding dangerous raw foods is not difficult if you are careful. A raw foods diet is probably one of the healthiest diets that a person can follow, but like all restrictive diets, it has its dangers. In this article we will consider some of those dangers and how to avoid them.

Avoiding Dangerous Raw Foods

Salmonella And Other Bacterial Diseases

It is unfortunately true that raw food is more likely to carry bacteria such as salmonella, that can cause serious food poisoning. Salmonella is most often found in raw meats, eggs and dairy products. Cooking destroys it, as does pasteurization – a process which involves heating to high temperatures, which is done on most commercially sold dairy products and fruit juices, among other foods.

Avoiding dangerous raw foods and some of these bacteria are more dangerous for unborn infants in the womb than for adults. Therefore, you might want to reconsider following a raw foods diet if you are pregnant or planning a pregnancy.

You can avoid most risk of food poisoning on a raw foods diet by following the raw vegan version which avoids all of these foods. However, that has its own challenges – see the section on vitamin B12 below.

There have been cases of salmonella traced to other raw foods such as lettuce. Thorough washing can help, but in any case, this is a risk that applies to virtually everybody, so don’t let the cooked food fans scare you with this one. There are very few people who eat no raw food at all.

Nutritional Deficiencies and Vitamin B12

It is important to make sure that you are getting the full range of vitamins and minerals on a raw foods diet. You need to consider whether you are getting enough calcium, iron (especially for women of childbearing age), zinc, and omega-3 fatty acids. Although this is not really avoiding dangerous raw foods it is critical that you are not dificient in these essential nutrients as well.

There are raw foods that can supply these nutrients and you will need to ensure that they are included in your diet. Having a wide variety of nuts and seeds will help to ensure that you get enough minerals, for example. Ground flax seeds can provide essential fatty acids.

The need for vitamin B12 is something that anybody following a raw vegan diet needs to be aware of. It is not an issue for those on a diet that includes raw meat or dairy products.

B12 is an important nutrient: without it, we will eventually suffer brain damage as well as other serious health problems. The human body does produce B12 but not in a way that allows us to use our own. For example, it is found in breast milk and other human secretions. But unless we happen to be consuming quantities of these, we need to get B12 from another source, and there is no vegetable source.

This means either consuming animal products or taking a supplement. Animal products are not vegan, and supplements are not raw. So B12 can be an issue for people who want to follow a 100% raw vegan diet.

However, the body does store B12. So some people, who have eaten plenty of animal products up to now and are not considering being vegan for more than a year or two, hope that they may have enough B12 to see them through. If you decide to take this risk, you should at least be tested for B12 levels before you start a vegan raw foods diet, and then annually.

This is my recommendation for a cheap and easy book to learn the essentials of the Raw Food Diet. Whether you want to start today doing Raw completely or if you just want to test out the Raw Food waters this book is a must. This specific easy to use Raw Food diet will help you lose weight, look younger, and have great energy. Learn more about Raw Food here now.

So when thinking about Avoiding dangerous raw foods there are really tow things to think about Bacteria, or the preseence of bad bacteria and vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

Weight Loss Exercise

Is A Raw Food Bar Really Raw?

Post author By admin
Post date April 1, 2011
No Comments on Is A Raw Food Bar Really Raw?

There are plenty of companies offering some type of raw food bar that you can buy. You can either order on the internet or find them at your local health food store.

However, you might wonder whether they are really raw. How could raw foods last so long and be a commercial proposition?

How Raw is Your Raw Food Bar?

In many cases, if you look at the fine print on a raw food bar or on the company websites, you will see that in fact very few, if any, of these vegan snack bars are truly raw. Most of them use some of the following ingredients:

Californian almonds which are pasteurized by law

Cocoa (chocolate powder) from roasted cacao beans, not raw

Pasteurized lemon juice or other pasteurized fruit juices

Cashew nuts which are heated to high temperatures to extract from the shell

It is possible to find cashew nuts that have been shelled in other ways, without using heat, but it is a more expensive process. Many manufacturers therefore choose regular cashews even when they are making what they consider to be a raw food bar.

Pasteurized is not Raw Food

Pasteurization is a process that heats food to high temperatures, close to boiling point, to kill bacteria and preserve the food. Food that has been pasteurized is not raw.

Some even contain roasted peanuts or regular peanut butter made from roasted ingredients. In fact, if you read the label, you will often find that a raw food bar only contains 50% to 60% raw ingredients. That is not what most people following a raw food diet would want to eat.

However, you can quite easily make a nut-based raw food bar yourself. Take 4 cups of raw nuts* and 8 fresh medjool dates, plus one teaspoon of fresh squeezed lemon juice. Chop or grind 1 cup of the nuts in a food processor, add half the pitted dates and process again, then another 1 cup nuts, then the rest of the dates. Keep processing after every time you add something. Add another 1 cup of nuts, then lemon juice, and finally the last cup of nuts.

When the mixture is done, you can add dehydrated fruits whole if you want. To have a chocolate flavor, mix in raw cacao powder plus a little agave nectar or other raw sweetener. Then form into bar shapes and refrigerate.

Raw nuts include: most filberts/hazelnuts, cashews from specialist raw food suppliers, most walnuts, brazil nuts in shells, most almonds from outside the USA

Raw is In The Eye Of The Consumer

In most countries, there is no law that says that a product marked ‘raw’ must be 100% raw, live food, never treated at temperatures above 118 degrees F. The word ‘raw’ is often used to mean something that still needs some cooking, like a bread mix, or nuts that have not been roasted for taste, etc. The ingredients of a bread mix would not really be raw.

Therefore, unfortunately virtually anything could be labeled a ‘raw food bar’. It probably has some raw ingredients and does not contain raw sugar, so it may be healthier than a sugary snack. There may also be some that are truly 100% raw – check labels. In most cases, if you want a truly raw food bar you will need to make your own.