Breakfast should set you up for the day. Sadly few people eat healthy breakfast foods. Instead they eat something that is quick, easy and usually unhealthy. This is not the best way to start your day.
Most people have cereal and milk for breakfast. If you look at the ingredients on most cereal packs, you may as well be eating cardboard. Except cardboard probably wouldn’t do you any harm, even if it is lacking in nutrition.
What’s wrong with most cereals? Mostly they have been so processed away from the original grain or source, they lack any nutrition that was once there. They contain all the unhealthy tricks that suppliers of packaged (and so cheap) foods have to entice you with flavour- sugar or artificial sweetener, fat (often hydrolised) and salt.
To add insult to injury, milk is added to the cereal. Milk is a very unhealthy food. For a start it is a food for babies, and baby cows at that. Yes, milk is high in calcium, but not in a form that you can digest. So you are fooled into thinking you are getting all your daily calcium requirements, when in fact you aren’t getting any.
Secondly, the processing that milk undergoes makes it actively harmful. The homogenisation and pasteurising may be marketed as making the milk healthier, but this is a myth. Any form of processing takes the original away from what the body knows how to digest, creating digestive problems at the very least.
Energetically, milk is very harmful. The grief the cows suffer at the taking of their babies at birth, will affect the milk whether you believe it will or not. This is absolutely the worst thing anyone can do to any mother. And maybe this grief is one of the worst ones – the separation of mother and child especially at birth.
So what other alternative are there to quick and healthy breakfast foods?
Green smoothies!
A green smoothie is one based on maximum nutrition with maximum taste. It’s quick, easy, creative and you can get children involved.
The basics of a green smoothie are
- any green leafy vegetable such as kale, spinach, silver beet, warrigal, chenopodium, etc
- any fruit you enjoy plus a banana
- water or coconut water
The green leafy vegetables are high in practically everything you need especially kale, such as minerals (both macro and trace), vitamins, omega 3, protein, antioxidants and more. However, their taste is not to everyone’s (or anyone’s!) as they are bitter.
The addition of the fruit, in about equal proportions, rectifies this problem, giving the taste of the fruit but the colour of the leaves. The addition of the banana ensures it looks appetisingly creamy, otherwise it can look like pond scum, as someone descriptively told me!
You need a good blender for the kale, but an average one will work for the softer leaves. Apart from the kale, you need to rotate the greens so the oxalic acid levels don’t harm you. Using only one at a time and rotating them will ensure this.
Easy, quick and healthy breakfast foods are just the beginning. Discover more information on healthy eating for optimal weight here.
