Healthy Recipes for You

Try These Delicious and Nutritious Recipes

Are you looking for a recipe that tastes great and is good for you? The team at A Healing Within has put together a list of recipes that you're sure to enjoy. Call us today at (818) 659-2072 if you have any questions about healthy eating.

Raw Creamy Broccoli Soup

Ingredients:

• 3 cups raw broccoli florets
  
• 1 cup raw broccoli
  
• 1/2 cup raw cashews
• 1/2 cup celery
•  1 1/2 cups water
• 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• 1/4 cup chopped yellow onion
•  1 clove garlic
• 1 teaspoon dried dill.
• 1 tablespoon fresh parsley
• 1 teaspoon fresh thyme
• 1/2 sliced avocado
• 1 tablespoon fresh chopped chives
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt if you eat salt or use Dulse or celery salt to taste.
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Preparation:

• Place all of the ingredients in a blender and blend for 30 to 40 seconds or until smooth. Add more water if needed and spice it up to taste. Some fresh dill is great.

Garnish:

• A few broccoli florets, dill, or any spice you prefer

Why Fruit Is the Answer to Better Health

Our digestive systems and overall bodies are most similar to apes. That makes us, like apes, a frugivore! And a frugivore’s GI tract is designed for fruit!

The strongest ape is the gorilla, which eats a 90 percent fruit diet, yet is one of the strongest animals walking this earth. However, if you want to get specific, scientists have estimated over the years that we share 99 percent of our DNA with another ape, the chimpanzee. In fact, humans are so similar to chimps, that the asymmetry of a chimpanzee’s brain and its hand preference (left or right) is parallel to ours. Is there another wild animal that can be left-handed? Other animals don’t even have hands—they have paws!

A chimp's diet is 50 percent fruit, supplemented with greens, nuts, seeds, bark, blossoms, and insects. Very rarely will an ape hunt other mammals and eat their flesh, and when they do, it’s usually for dominance reasons.

If you gave an orange to your dog, it would think it’s a ball. Can you picture a lion trying to open a mango? What would a rabbit do with a watermelon? Certain animals are meant to eat certain foods, and it just so happens that you and apes are meant to pick, peel, scrape out seeds, and perfectly chew and digest fruit.

Yes, I know what some of you are thinking. “What about the sugar?” I had a client the other night tell me that her co-workers were aggressively informing her that she shouldn’t be eating that much watermelon, and it was just pure water and sugar. This is pure ignorance brought about by programming from the “establishment.” If it were true, I would have chronic illnesses, and more importantly, so would the primates.

I’m here to tell you — fructose is a natural, simple sugar. It’s a monosaccharide that is metabolized easier than any other food we could put in our mouths. Complex carbs (starches, such as bread, potatoes, pastas, and flours) are long chains of carbon that leave behind “sugar leftovers” because the body can’t metabolize these structures properly. This brings forth fungus, belly fat, and can cause your sugar levels to spike. So it’s not how much sugar is in a food — it’s what kind of sugar is in a food!

When I teach children, I refer to the fructose in fruit as “sunlight sugar.” It’s magical and incomparable to table sugar or the refined sugar put in cookies and candy. It’s the best kind of simple carbon you can get. And remember, you need carbon and oxygen to create vital energy. What other foods are better? Grains? Beans? Pastas? Breads? Flesh? Dairy? You know what these foods have in common? They all can’t be consumed in their natural state! You have to soak them, or boil them, or pasteurize them, or cook them, or add ingredients. These denatured foods can manifest into poor health as they cause immune responses in the body. Why would the human body react that way toward these foods? Because they’re recognized as foreign. It’s like breaking into a department store and the alarm is going off! Intruder! Intruder! Intruder!

Fruit is special. Think about how many flavors there are. Is there another food on this planet that has the variety of tastes that fruit does? Is there another food that even tastes good in its natural state at all? Even the “establishment” knows this; that’s why they use fruit flavors for your fake, destructive, artificial foods, like candy, gum, and ice cream. The same person who criticized my client for eating too much watermelon probably sucks on watermelon-flavored candy, drinks cherry soda, or feeds their kids orange-flavored popsicles.

And if that’s not enough reason, isn’t fruit one of the only natural foods that you don’t have to refrigerate (nuts and seeds too)? They take a long time to start decomposing, don’t they? The only fruits I put in the fridge are berries (grapes included) because they tend to ripen fast. But my apples, oranges, melons, mangoes, pears, pineapples, and peppers all stay in a big old basket I bought. You can’t leave kale or spinach unbagged in a basket, can you? You can’t leave flesh or dairy out on the counter, can you? No! They all oxidize and then go bad.

As you start to incorporate more fruit into your daily diet, you may get slight stomach aches, rumbling, or acidity. In fact, I had a client just the other day say that her stomach was rumbling real loud at her job from eating too much fruit. She was discouraged and embarrassed. The first reaction is the blame the fruit! So I asked what she ate the day before. Turns out it was junk! The reason for the tummy noise was because fruit is astringent, meaning it’s a cleaner. So, it’s cleaning up your gut and mixing with the “junk” that is already leftover in your tummy. So let’s not blame the fruit for doing it’s job. If you ate a high-fruit diet, you wouldn’t get the stomachaches, rumbling, or acidity because you would be clean. Remember, this food stuff is all chemistry! Fruit is always the answer to the human body, and I’ll tell you why:

Why Fruit?

1. Juicy fruits such as grapes, berries, and melons move lymph.
2. Fruit gives natural energy with no spikes and crashes like “sweets.”
3. The fructose in fruit needs no insulin. It diffuses through the cells.
4. A piece of fruit digests in about an hour.
5. Fruit is full of vitamins and minerals.
6. Fruit is full of fiber.
7. Fruits are on the alkaline side of chemistry.
8. Fruit helps the nervous system, giving you clarity and focus.
9. There are so many kinds, with so many flavors.
10. Most nuts and seeds come from fruits, which makes it a complete food group.
11. Fruit is astringent and cleans and sweeps out toxins and wastes.
12. Fruits don’t need to be denatured, so you can eat them raw. This makes fruit real fast food.

― Excerpt from the book, "Diet, De-Stress, Detox" by Dr. Kevin Reese.