Health Boosting Weight Busting Veggie Hack

Recipe Notes

Some Things  To Take Note Of:

• Be sure to pull your mushrooms out of the fridge and put them on a window ledge that receives sunlight for a couple hours before cooking. This boosts their vitamin D level from zero (cold fridge temperatures reduce vitamin D to zero) to upwards of 800 - 1,000 according to studies.
• Once you sun the mushrooms and then cook them after sunning whatever amount of Vitamin D increase that occurred in the mushrooms while sunning them "is there" in the mushroom and will not be reduced by placing them in the fridge "AFTER" cooking them.
• Cooking stops the life of veggies so whatever you’ve got after that makes sense that it stays. The only reason mushrooms and things like lettuce change through temp etc is that they are still alive and are reacting to light, cold and heat.
• So essentially you sunbathe them and then cook them to preserve the Vitamin D. Just like you would any other type of food.
• You do not want to sun the mushrooms and then put them back into the cold fridge to be cooked on another day. Placing the fresh sunned mushrooms back into the cold fridge will destroy the Vitamin D and that is NOT what you want in order to get the full immune boosting properties of sunning the mushrooms. Sun them, cook them, and then refrigerate them to be used in other recipes throughout the week.

Why Mushrooms?

• Mushrooms are your inexpensive secret weapon against disease.  Plain old button mushrooms have shown to boost Type A antibodies (the first line of immune defense in your gut) and lower inflammation by 50 percent after just a week of eating a daily serving.  Shiitake mushrooms showed a doubling in Killer T cells (cells that fight diseases) within just 4 weeks in people who started to consume them daily in one study. Mushrooms are one of the most powerful cancer fighting foods you can eat. An Australian study showed that eating just 1/3 of an ounce of mushrooms per day (about 1 button mushroom) is enough to reduce breast cancer risk by 64%. When women in the study included green tea in their daily diets along with mushrooms, their breast cancer chances were lowered to 89%…wow! Even the humble button mushroom powerfully fights against cancer cells… imagine what eating lots of mushrooms can do! Mushrooms help regulate your blood sugar, keep you full, heal your gut and protect against heart disease and stroke.
• Before cooking your mushrooms be sure to pop them on a window ledge. This boosts their disease fighting powers through the roof! Fresh mushrooms go from having very little vitamin D to one of nature’s highest sources of highest vitamin D in only one hour or two when exposed to sunlight. Penn State researchers found that UV light exposure caused button mushrooms to go from zero to 824 percent vitamin D. Other sorts of mushrooms like shiitake went from zero to over 1000! All you need to do is put your mushrooms in the sunlight  in between the hours of 10 am to 3 pm and their levels should skyrocket.

Why Cherry, Grape or Plum Tomatoes?

• Little tomatoes have much more skin than their larger tomato cousins. Phytonutrients in tomatoes are concentrated largely in the skin. A study in Glasgow revealed that choosing cherry tomatoes over larger kinds could give you twice as many health boosting flavonoids. Lycopene is the major disease fighter in tomatoes and this is largely stored in the skin. Lycopene has been shown in several large studies (that tracked tens of thousands of people) that those with lycopene rich diets had significantly less incidence of cancer (many types of cancer but especially prostate cancer). When it comes to skin, Lycopene has show in studies to improve the defense of your skin so it burns less easily in the sun and actually reduces sun damage already done to your skin. Women who had a lycopene rich diet in one study were found to have significantly more pro-collagen in their skin, the very thing that keeps skin firm and less wrinkly.  In a review of seven studies totaling over 100, 000 people overall, researches found that those people who had the highest amounts of lycopene had almost a 20% reduced risk of stroke and significant reductions in heart disease.
• Ditch the fridge for your tomato storage.  Tomatoes will almost double their lycopene amounts if stored in your kitchen at room temperature on your counter. Storing below 10 degrees prevents lycopene enhancement. Also, lycopene is very hard for your body to receive through raw tomatoes. It is stored deep within the cell walls and the way to get it out and available to your body is through heat.  Notice how tomatoes become a brighter red color when you cook them? This is lycopene  becoming more available to you.  Cooking transforms the lycopene molecules from very hard to absorb to easy!

Why Baby Spinach or Kale?

• Dark green leaves like spinach and kale are some of the most powerful disease fighting foods to ever enter your mouth and they only get more potent when you cook them. Another reason to cook your dark greens… spinach is high in oxalates (while kale is not) which can bind with calcium to form crystals and cause kidney stones in some people who are especially sensitive.  Cooking causes the oxalic acid to leach out and dramatically reduces oxalate amounts. Remember this… the darker the green, the more powerful the healing components in your leaves.  For example, kale has 52 times the carotenes, 42 times the vitamin C and 30 times the vitamin K of ice burg lettuce.  Spinach is not far behind. Dark leaves protect your heart, your blood pressure, your immune system, are powerful cancer and diabetes fighters and the list goes on and on. When it comes to getting the most health bang for your buck, choose baby spinach over mature leaves. A recent Swedish study found that baby leaves had significantly more polyphenols. Kale on the other hand is the opposite. To get the ultimate use of kale’s amazing disease fighting powers.. go with mature kale leaves as these get more nutrients as they grown.
• Want to get the most nutrition out of your leaves? Tear or cut them a little when you bring them home from the store then return to bag and store in the fridge before cooking. Being rough with your leaves by cutting or tearing is called wounding them and this increases antioxidant activity in the leaves as they try to heal. Yes, these leaves are still alive in your refrigerator and as they try to heal, their polyphenol levels can jump up 50 percent.

This recipe was "featured" in the Trim Healthy Living EZine~ Edition 17! 

Health Boosting Weight Busting Veggie Hack (FP) is part of the Veggie-Full Ultra Trimming Menu.