What is macrobiotic food?

What is healthy food and how to make good changes in food?!

What macrobiotics is and is not?!

Many of the prejudices and misinformation about macrobiotics.

• Is that eastern teachings?
• Is it a religion?
• Am I going to eat if the principles of macrobiotics be deprived of some essential nutrients my body?
• Will I eat only rice and seaweed?
• Whether healthy food is very complicated and demanding to implement, with many rigid rules?

For macrobiotics can say that is closest to the traditional diet. Traditionally – whether Mediterranean, Irish, Polish, Jewish, Indian – because it respects the basic principle of traditional food: a man is inextricably linked with their environment, their surroundings and be with her to live in harmony. Or, as says Evelyn Kushi, macrobiotics is not required to change religion, way of thinking or your life, it only requires that you eat according to your environment.
Macrobiotics required to live in natural harmony with the environment, aware that we are part of it. Macrobiotics is also a perception that the food supply: the understanding that everything we eat becomes part of us and influence what we become.

Healthy cooking, healthy food and healthy technique is good only if you cook with joy and freedom of research. Macrobiotic cooking to connect you with your intuition, that voice in us, who knows what we need, as and when stored. Society and mass culture teach us, in fact, many rules that we, although we are not aware of that, blind respect. Healthy cooking should lead us in connection precisely with our intuition, which are known to our real needs. This inner voice and should be our teacher, our guide.

Foods are the right heart healthy cooking. Cooking begins purchasing, acquiring food. Freshness and quality ingredients are as important as a recipe or cooking technique. Just the grocery shopping should be full of joy. Remember how you when you were a kid going with my mom to the market, or with his grandmother to pick fruit from which the grandmother make a fragrant pie, remember the joy with which acquiring the foods that make you save a meal for someone you love …

Fundamentals

The point is to choose the cooking simple, natural ingredients and that they are making a healthy, balanced meals. The key to a healthy diet is variety. The variety of basic foods: whole grains, legumes and legume products as well as all fruits and vegetables from land and sea, seeds, nuts. Different techniques of cooking, all of blanching to grilling, baking and frying and different cutting techniques should be combined in the cooking.

An important feature of a healthy cooking is definitely alignment with the age in which the cook, with air conditioning, and living conditions of all this is not a strict rule, but something that we naturally think common sense dictates. In winter this this and this, in summer and spring to it and it … It is of use and knowledge of local foods and recipes.

Diet should be based on the preparation of whole grain: 50 to 60 percent whole grains, 30 percent of fresh vegetables, soups, and 5 percent sea vegetables, 10 to 15 percent of pulses and their products. All other foods are taken only as a supplement to a small percentage (fruits, nuts, seeds, fish).
Macrobiotics draws attention to chew food well and getting used to eat only then when you feel hungry.

How to start

These tips are for everyone who wants to cook healthy: and those who do not have much time, and those who are not adept at cooking, and …

Grocery shopping

As when choosing a garment or a little thing: do not then rejoice in thinking about how it will fit with this and that, what you it’s good, what stands out … So it is with food. Carefully selected ingredients, freely and with pleasure. Always keep in mind that these foods feed themselves and their families. Feed themselves. Enter them into your body. So your body does not deserve the best?
Touch, smell, good to look at food. Enjoy the design as we prepare healthier: those who do not have much time, and those who are not adept at cooking, and …

Brown rice, barley, oats, corn, pasta from whole-wheat flour, flour, beans, chickpeas, peas, various beans, tofu, quality oil, pickled vegetables, spices, good salt, miso paste … You can read the label and check the composition of each product. Just read and avoid all foods that contain preservatives and contents of which your name is hard to read (chemicals, etc.).
Unrefined sea salt – this is just so easy to dry and contains all natural ingredients, which are essential to our body. Choose the non chemically treated.

Soy sauce is a product of natural fermentation of soybeans. Popular brands of mass-produced artificially are fermented, artificially colored, sweetened to … and are difficult to digest and no way are not healthy. Natural fermentation with the strain to break down to the simplest components, providing the very delicious and suitable for welding.

Any questions you have, do not hesitate to ask your retailer in health food stores.

If you choose to incorporate into your diet products from certified organic farming can be sure you are not getting into your body pesticides, fungicides …

What is good is always kept in the house

To start supplying the brown rice grain sakratkim, whole barley, millet and oats – it should always have in the house, and various dried beans – lentils, chick peas, adzuki beans, black beans, then a good quality soy sauce, extra virgin olive oil, cold pressed sesame and corn oil, sea salt and good spices (basil, chili peppers, rosemary), rice or barley miso, vinegar and balsamic vinegar. If you have these basic supplies you can walk into the kitchen at any time and to prepare simple and healthy dish.
Utensils and tools

The kitchen is truly alchemical workshop, place of transformation. The warmth and love with which food is prepared as the main ingredient of each dish. What every kitchen makes productive place the organization and order.

If you just decided to turn a new page and start a healthier cooking suggest that you first thoroughly wash your entire kitchen. This will contribute to an atmosphere of self-respect and respect for food that you prepare. Secondly, it is best to work in a clean, well maintained, comfortable environment.
Good organize supplies.
Dishwasher – stainless steel, stone ware, cast iron or porcelain coated cast iron, a good knife for cutting vegetables, the most important tool, knife, large wooden boards, brush vegetables, colander, strainer, bowls, pressure cooker.

And then – start

Master the few basic techniques and recipes. Let your dishes are simple and delicious. When this good master, let the light imagination and intuition to guide you. Relax and create.
A balanced meal: whole grains, around which we build the rest of the meal, soup or stew of beans, warm stews and light, fresh prepared vegetables.

Keep always in mind that the main part of the meal should consist of cereals and vegetable carbohydrates, rather than the protein from beans and fish or nuts. Proteins enter and view limited to entering only one type of protein a day. For example, do not eat a dish made of pulses and food containing nuts, the same meal. Or, also, do not prepare the soup of beans if one of the dishes of the meal of fish. And do not forget that natural food, natural health foods have their own wonderful flavor that only should be encouraged. So do not deluge food sauces, condiments, sauces.

(This article was prepared based on the introduction to the book Cooking the Whole Foods Way, Kristine Pirelli)