I asked my niece Sarah Jane Schulze, age 6, recently what her favorite food is.
“Sweet or healthy?” she asked me carefully, wanting to clarify my question.
Most people have that kind of attitude about food.
Maybe you are beyond the point where you specify brown or white ice cream or you ask for a second helping of Oreo cookies and put on a big pout when they are all gone. At least, if you are reading this blog, I am hoping for your sake that this is the case.
As we grow up, hopefully we learn to have a broader view of the world of food that includes appreciating the world of vegetables other than carrots.
Kale is high in vitamin K, which helps build healthy bones, and the antioxidants vitamin A and vitamin C. It’s one of the healthiest foods on the planet.
My friend Kathy Martin likes to roast kale in the oven. She spreads the chopped up leaves on a cookie sheet, drizzles them with a healthy oil and sprinkles Celtic sea salt on top. Cook them at 350 until the leaves are crisp. If you don’t eat all the roasted kale at dinner, you can save it for a snack the following day.
Eating kale lowers your risk for five kinds of cancer – prostate cancer, breast cancer, colon, ovary and bladder cancer thanks to nutrients called glucoinolates, which help the body’s detoxication processes. Researchers can identify about 45 different kinds of flavonoids in kale, which means it is anti-inflammatory and a great anti-oxidant.
As I mentioned in a post earlier this morning, I personally like to juice kale. I know people who drink kale juice straight, but in my mind, it is worth mixing with apple juice, which is also great for your liver and gallbladder.
Most big problems, like cancer, could have been solved when they were small problems simply by adopting healthy habits like juicing kale.
