Get Your Body Beach-Ready with Noni

Summer is in the air, and hopefully you’ve all got a beach vacation somewhere on the horizon! But are you stressing about getting your skin and body beach-ready in time? Well, that’s one less thing to worry about. Hawaiian Organic Noni is here to help you look your best and drop years off your body.

Sound too good to be true? Keep reading!

Skin

Noni is packed full of all the compounds your body needs to repair and regenerate healthy, youthful skin. For best results, we recommend both applying Noni Lavender Lotion to affected areas, and eating Noni Fruit Leather daily to get to the underlying problem causing the symptom.

Saggy Skin

Saggy skin can be a major insecurity when you’re wearing a swimsuit, adding the illusion of extra pounds and extra years. Using noni both topically and internally addresses the various causes of loose skin, including sun damage, buildup of dead skin, dry skin, and poor nutrition.

We go over how noni addresses all these symptoms in a past blog post — click here to check it out!

Stretch Marks & Scars

Stretch marks can be an especially persistent skin concern, and one which is not likely to make you feel very confident sunning yourself out on the beach! Luckily, those beneficial compounds in noni can help fill in the scar and replace it with a new finish.

Click here to find out how it works!

Age Spots & Skin Discoloration

Age spots are an indicator that you might have spent too much unprotected time out in the sun earlier in your life. They definitely age you, and they can be very difficult to clear up — without noni’s help, that is! Click here to learn how noni turns back the clock on your age spots!

Using noni regularly before and after sun exposure can even put you at a lower risk for further skin discoloration and complications due to overexposure. It may even reduce your risk of cancer. Click here to learn more about how noni helps you fight off those harmful rays.

NOTE: Noni is NOT a substitute for sunscreen, and you should always wear sunscreen and/or cover up and/or seek shade when out in the sun!

Waistline

There’s still time to slim down a little bit before pulling on that swimsuit. Noni is not a weight loss supplement, but it does have some properties that might be able to help you shed the pounds naturally. Also, as a raw food Noni Fruit Leather might satisfy your hunger while feeding the cells fo the body. The end result is your desire for more food diminishes.

Learn the three things you can do to get your waistline beach-ready in the original article.

If you want to learn more about how noni supports a pain-free active lifestyle, click here!

Noni can help you get your body all ready for the beach, both in terms of your skin and your waistline. Plus that little energy kick will ensure you have lots of fuel in the tank to have lots of fun at the beach!

Has noni helped you transform your body? Let us know in the comments!

How Noni Fruit Supports a Thriving Immune System

When I look back at my overall health before I started eating noni fruit every day, and then compare it to my health today, one benefit that really sticks out is the effect it’s had on my immune system. And I’m not alone! Many people report that after taking noni for a few weeks, they “just don’t get sick anymore.”

If you’ve been sideswiped by one too many colds this year, if you suffer from persistent allergies, or if you eat a diet that promotes inflammation in the body (a diet high in grains, sugars, and processed foods), consider giving noni a try!

First, What’s Noni?

Noni is a tree, also known as Morinda Citrifolia, that produces a very unusual fruit, packed full of beneficial enzymes, vitamins, minerals, phenols, and other micronutrients the body needs for optimum health. Over 165 compounds in the pulp of noni are believed to have benefits for the human body. As raw food, noni pulp feeds the cells of the body promoting overall good health.

One of these benefits is its impact on inflammation and the immune response.

How Your Immune System Works

First, a fact that you might not be aware of: the vast majority of your immune system is in your gut. That’s because most of the harmful bacteria, viruses, and other microbes come to us along with our food. Some of these bad guys are killed by the harsh environment of the stomach, and still more are repelled and killed in the intestines, with the help of beneficial bacteria that coexist happily.

But occasionally, a harmful microbe makes it through your semi-permeable intestinal lining and into your bloodstream — where only nutrients are supposed to go. At that time, it’s your immune system’s job to hunt down, isolate, and neutralize the microbe, then memorize it’s description so similar microbes can be killed more quickly in the future.

Learn how the food you eat affects your immunity.

Enter Noni

Noni fruit has a number of benefits for your immune system, due to the large number of anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial, and nutritious compounds found in the raw pulp of the fruit.

Remember: You can only get access to these beneficial compounds if you eat the noni pulp raw. That means either as fresh unfermented fruit, or as Noni Fruit Leather (a raw, organic product that keeps all the nutrients intact while increasing shelf-life). Noni juice is not raw — it’s fermented and pasteurized, and usually diluted and sweetened as well.

Gut Biota

Noni helps ensure the populations of bad bacteria taking up residence in your gut don’t get out of hand. The fruit contains damnacanthal and scopoletin, two compounds which have been shown to repel microbial parasites, including infectious bacterias like E. coli and Salmonella.

It also provides lots of support for the good bacteria in your gut, due to the high dietary fiber content.

Relieve Inflammation

Chronic inflammation is essentially an immune system that never gets a chance to turn off. When that happens, the immune system becomes fatigued, and therefore less able to do its job. This can lead to more frequent illness, development or worsening of allergies, and even autoimmune disease.

Noni’s high levels of scopoletin reduce inflammation in the body. Scopoletin is also anti-hypertensive, an antihistamine, and a painkiller.

Has noni helped your immune system become stronger and more resilient? Let us know in the comments!

An Intro to Vermicomposting

Waste is a tricky part of the sustainability puzzle, but it’s one we need to get a handle on as we continue to deplete our planet of finite resources. We all know we’re supposed to recycle metal, glass, paper, plastic, and cardboard. But what about kitchen scraps?

Many people don’t worry about that kind of waste. After all, it’s a “renewable” resource, right? It breaks down quickly and safely in the landfill, right? There’s no harm in throwing it out or tossing it down the garbage disposal, right?

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. But there’s a fun, sustainable way you can do your part: vermicomposting. Vermicomposting is composting using worms, which makes the process faster, creates rich compost, and gives you a really fun family project!

Why Kitchen & Yard Scraps Matter

Our nation’s problem of throwing out food scraps dislocates nutrients from the places they’re needed most: farms, gardens, and wilderness land.

When nutrients are instead concentrated in landfills, they release huge amounts of methane gas, a major agent of climate change. Click here to learn more about this phenomenon. Plus, we lose the chance to put those nutrients to work growing plants, animals, and people!

So...Vermicomposting?

If you’re worried about composting at home, you’re in good company. People are afraid to compost for a variety of reasons, including:

• Perceived difficulty to set up
• Fear of bad smells, microbes, and pests
• Long time to create compost

Vermicomposting eliminates many of these concerns. Worms are incredibly efficient at breaking down organic waste into nutrients, so they do it quickly and with very little smell. Worms are also very forgiving, and there are easy ways to get started.

We do lots of vermicomposting on our organic noni farm, collecting worms in the Worm Hotel and feeding them our kitchen and farm scraps. They reward us by helping us keep our soil incredibly fertile. We believe they’re a big part of the reason our noni trees produce fruit year-round.

Learn more about the amazing benefits of Vermicomposting here.

How Do I Get Started?

I’d recommend starting with this very complete resource provided by the Canadian government —click here — which provides all the information you need for happy, healthy, productive worms. They cover everything from feed and moisture preferences to light sensitivity to composting timelines.

If you’re looking for an easy system you can buy and set up, check out this option from Nature’s Footprint. Ask around at your local farmer’s market for worms, which may be better suited to the unique environmental challenges where you live. If you strike out, buying worms online should be fine.

Once your bins are all set up, it’s time to start feeding! Worms love most fruits, vegetables and coffee grounds, but they have a few favorites (pumpkin, leftover corn cobs, melon rinds) and a few foods they just tolerate (citrus, onions, garlic). Make sure to keep bones, meat, dairy, salty foods, oils, and anything inorganic out!

One key to success with your worms is making sure to include some gritty foods, like coffee grounds. Worms don’t have teeth, so this grit actually helps worms fully digest their food. Also, you will find that worms love to lay eggs (for new worms) in coffee grounds.

Before you know it, you’ll be using up your kitchen scraps while also creating awesome fertilizer for your garden!

Let us know if you have any questions about vermicomposting! We’d be delighted to share our decades of experience with you.

Easy Ways You Can Do Your Part For Sustainability

Earth Day is tomorrow, and to celebrate we’ve been sharing lots of information about sustainability and organic farming on the blog this month. Today we turn it back around to you. What can you do to preserve and protect our beautiful, bountiful, endangered planet?

Here are just a few ideas:

Eat More Plants

There are countless reasons why all of us should be eating less meat, particularly less meat raised in our modern industrial agricultural system. First of all, those animals are mightily abused, kept in cramped quarters, fed substandard feed, and weaned inhumanely early.

In addition, new research from the journal PNAS shows that a huge worldwide dietary shift to a vegetarian or vegan diet would save millions of lives by 2050. Doing so would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60-70%, as well as save up to $1 trillion annually in terms of healthcare and lost productivity.

If you’re interested in reducing your meat consumption, check out our tips to incorporate more plants into your diet.

Grow a Plant or Two

One of the most fun ways to increase your consumption of fruits and vegetables is to grow them yourself. It’s possible to start gardening no matter how little space you have. Even apartment-dwellers can grow potted plants on balconies or windowsills.

Start small with a few herbs, then expand to a couple of your favorite fruits and veggies. For even your most small-scale efforts, make sure to adhere to organic principles and focus on improving the quality of your soil. That will ensure the most nutritious fruits and vegetables for you and your family.Click here for some tips to get your organic garden started!

Get Composting

As we mentioned, soil fertility is key to producing maximally-nutritious food. That’s why we prioritize composting and other methods of returning nutrients to the soil so heavily on our farm. You can read more about the importance of soil fertility here.

Getting started with composting yourself isn’t hard, but it takes some preparation and willingness to change your habits. As with any project, start small with just one small compost bin. You might even want to try vermicomposting (composting with worms) if you want to generate compost more quickly! The key to making good potent compost is oxygen. Turning your compost every other day injects oxygen and promotes good bacterium to make the best compost.

Add Sustainability to Your Social Feeds

Be honest — how much time do you spend each day on social media? For most of us, it’s a lot more than we’re totally comfortable with! One way you can make that time more productive is by being intentional about who you follow on social media.

If you fill your news feeds with organizations, thought leaders, and brands who post about sustainability, organics, and natural health, you’re likely to make more of those healthy, green choices in your day-to-day life. We recommend the Cornucopia Institute in particular, but there are lots of other great sites like Rodale’s Organic Life and Mother Earth News. Of course, you can also follow us!

Learn about the last thing you can do in our original article!

What are you doing this Earth Day to make your lifestyle more sustainable? Let us know in the comments!

Foraging for Noni

Are you lucky enough to live in or visit a place where noni trees (Morinda citrifolia) grow happily? This resilient, hardy tree can grow throughout the tropics, including Southeast Asia, Micronesia, the Caribbean Islands, Madagascar, and the Pacific Islands, including of course Hawaii!

Part of the reason it’s spread so far is because thousands of years ago, Polynesian settlers brought live plants with them wherever they colonized. Now the range of Morinda citrifolia  is huge — lucky for those of us who love the amazing benefits it has for the human body. Some of us love the taste too, though it definitely needs to be acquired!

You won’t find noni in your local supermarket, because it has no shelf life whatsoever. Once the fruit is picked and ripened, it begins to ferment very quickly. Not only does this fermentation produce a very unpleasant taste, but it also destroys at least 50% of the beneficial compounds in the fruit! Fermentation of noni fruit creates alcohol that destroys enzymes and changes or degrades the many beneficial compounds found in the raw pulp. Fermenting noni creates a wine.

If you want fresh noni, you’ll have to forage for it!

Why You Need Ripe, Raw Noni

Ripe, raw, fresh noni fruit is one of nature’s ultimate foods for healing the body. It’s effective against a wide variety of ailments, including chronic pain & inflammation, depression, and even the broad scope of conditions associated with metabolic syndrome.

The pulp of raw noni fruit contains at least 165 beneficial compounds, including vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, digestive enzymes, and many others. Curious about what makes the biggest impact? Click here to learn about the top four most beneficial compounds in raw noni fruit!

Notice how we keep specifying “raw” noni? That’s because the vast majority of noni products on the market today are fermented and pasteurized noni juice. Both of those processes destroy at least 50% of the beneficial compounds found in the raw pulp, resulting in a 14x drop in potency.

If you want to access all the benefits noni has to offer, you’ll need to either find a noni tree to pick your own or try our Noni Fruit Leather. Our slow dehydration process allows us to use unfermentedorganic noni pulp and we keep the heat low enough to preserve the beneficial enzymes and antioxidants. Our dehydrator never rises above 115 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to pasteurization, which is more like 150-185 degrees! For this reason, our Noni Fruit Leather is classified as a raw food.

We’re passionate about bringing the power of noni to as many people as possible, as we have seen its ability to change lives time and time again.

The Noni Tree Explained

Morinda Citrifolia is a tree in the coffee family. There’s a misconception out there that noni is a shrub, but in reality it grows up to about 9 meters, or even taller. The leaves are shiny, dark green, and deeply veined with light green. The name “citrifolia” comes from the leaves’ similarity to citrus leaves.

The fruit is what makes the noni tree unusual. Noni is a syncarp, also known as a multiple fruit. That means it’s made up of the fruits of several flowers, which fuse together. Other examples of syncarps are pineapples and jackfruits.

While most fruits start as a flower which then develops into a fruit, noni develops a small fruit first, which looks kind of like a little green pinecone. Then small, white flowers form and come out all over the fruit.

You can learn more about how noni grows and is pollinated by clicking here!

From there, the green fruit keeps growing. As it matures, it starts to turn yellowish white, usually starting at one end. Eventually the fruit changes completely in color to white, at which time it’s ready to pick.

How to Pick Noni for Maximum Freshness

Once you’ve found a noni tree, it’s important to be patient and only take fruits which have turned completely yellow-ish white. If there is even just a hint of green at one end, the fruit is not ready. The fruits along one branch will not mature all at once, so keep looking for fruits with no green at all.

If you pick a green fruit, it will quickly turn black and spoil! White, mature fruits will continue to ripen on the counter. They’re ready to eat when they’re soft like a ripe tomato. Don’t push it too far, or the fruit will start to ferment, destroying the beneficial compounds in the pulp.

Why Can’t I Pick Up Noni Off the Ground?

Searching for ripe noni on the tree can be a pain — but we recommend only picking mature hard fruit from the tree. We do not recommend eating noni fruits off the ground as they are usually fermented and can have bugs inside. Also since fallen fruits are likely to be partially fermented, they will taste bad and have less nutritional benefit.

Animals love to eat fallen noni fruits — they know what’s good for them! The wild roosters on our farm love to forage for newly fallen fruits that have not fermented.

Learn what you can do with your foraged noni in the original article.

What If I Don’t Live Near Noni?

If you don’t happen to live in an area where noni fruit is abundant, and don’t have plans to travel to such a place anytime soon, you can still get your fix of raw, organic noni! But you won’t be able to find the fresh fruits in a grocery store, or have whole fruits shipped to your home.

But you can get Noni Fruit Leather, no matter where in the world you live!

As I explained above, Hawaiian Organic Noni uses only raw, organic noni pulp. We never bring the temperature above 115 degrees because that would kill off many of the antioxidants and beneficial enzymes in the raw fruit.

It’s as close as you can get to picking fresh noni straight from the tree. But we hope you’ll come visit us on our farm sometime, so you can try noni as it was intended to be enjoyed!

Did you try foraging for noni? Tell us about your experience in the comments!

Give Your Body an All-Natural Spring Cleaning

Spring’s in full swing at last! Say goodbye to winter’s aches and pains, dry skin, and gloomy moods, and welcome sunshine, chirping birds, and the start of the growing season!

Of course, spring also comes with its own set of challenges: allergies, the dreaded spring flu or cold, and sore muscles from trying to work off that winter weight! It’s a season for renewal and change — don’t let your body hold you back from your best self this year.

A great way to embrace the warmer weather is to do some spring cleaning...for your body! This doesn’t necessarily mean going on a cleanse, but following these tips can help give you a fresh slate to write the story of this year on!

Drink in Some Sunshine

So many cleanses and detox tips focus on what you eat and drink, but it’s extremely important to drink in your sunshine as well! As you know, sunshine provides vitamin D, a key nutrient that you body can produce by itself — just add sunlight!

Sunshine converts cholesterol in your skin into vitamin D, and all you need is 10 or 15 minutes outside each day to absorb all you need. And with the days getting longer, you have less of an excuse to miss your daily dose. Just watch out for sunburn, and click here to learn how to treat sunburn with noni!

Vitamin D is essential for a healthy immune system, healthy bones, and possibly even weight loss. Plus, if you go outside in the morning, you can improve your circadian rhythms and improve alertness during the day.

Hydrate Away

This is the number one easy way to improve your quality of life for the huge numbers of us who are nearly always slightly dehydrated. All you have to do is squeeze in a few extra drinks of water throughout the day.

If you’re really concerned about hydration, consider cutting out diuretics like coffee and alcohol. There are lots of reasons to cut out these substances, not least of which is your ability to hydrate better without them.

Cutting out liquid calories and replacing them with water will not only help you hydrate, but could also help balance out your blood sugar, reduce your weight, and leave room in your diet for much more nutritious food calories!

Eat Nature’s Bounty

So many of us today are worried about reducing calories, not even realizing that the more serious problem is the need to boost nutrition! Our modern food system is adept at producing high-calorie, nutritionless foods. The only way to fight back is to eat more unprocessed, organic foods.

Eating more plants is a great place to start, particularly leaves, fruits, and roots. If you think that just means eating a ton of salads, think again! We wrote out some tips to incorporate more plants into your diet — click here to check it out.

In particular, upping your intake of raw foods like Noni Fruit Leather can be extremely beneficial in terms of nutrition, detoxification, and weight loss.

Learn how to fight off free radicals and up your dietary fiber intake in the original article.

Get Your Skin Beach-Ready

Of course, you can’t neglect your body’s largest organ in this spring cleaning: the skin! Not only does our skin’s health impact how we feel about our looks, it’s also one of the first organs to show signs of trouble when things are out of balance. Allergies, acne, scarring, and aging are all signs that our bodies aren’t getting what they need.

In thinking about the skin, you have to consider both topical treatments and foods you can eat that contain nutrients your skin needs. For example, rather than torturing your skin with harsh chemicals to fight acne, try using Noni Lavender Lotion as we explain here, which soothes, heals, and rebuilds all at once. But also eat Noni Fruit Leather daily to give your skin the building blocks to build new, healthy skin.

If your skin is already damaged by stretch marks, scars, or even skin conditions like eczema or psoriasis, this one-two punch of both topical and internal use of noni can have a dramatic impact. Don’t give up on your skin — it just needs a little help to return even skin tone, tighten up, and regain its youthful glow.

Get Moving

Surely you didn’t think you were going to get through a post about spring cleaning for your body without touching on exercise? Exercise will make all of the above activities feel easier and more natural, and they will in turn make it easier to motivate yourself to get moving!

Exercise helps detoxify your body by getting your blood and other bodily fluids moving and circulating. This helps the good nutrients get used and stored appropriately in the body, and helps toxins and other junk you don’t need to get flushed through.

The good news is, one of the first benefits of taking raw food noni every day is a consistent energy boost. It’s the perfect quick snack before a workout, as it doesn’t fill you up or slosh around in your stomach, but it gives you a really substantial amount of energy! So that’s it — no more excuses!

How does noni fit into your self-care this spring? How are you committing to your best self?

How Noni Turns Back the Clock on Age Spots

For many of us, wrinkles aren’t the only way our skin betrays our age! Age spots and other skin discolorations can be an even more frustrating reminder, and a sign of too much time out in the sun. The good news is, noni can help erase those as well.

I personally use the Noni Lavender Lotion every day to help prevent sun damage to my skin. One of the first things I noticed when I started using noni topically many years ago was how soft and smooth it keeps the skin. As I’ve aged, I’ve been grateful for what it’s done to slow the aging process and help me heal quickly even as I’ve gotten older.

I recently had an accident on the farm, falling through the old barn roof as we were demolishing the old building. I ended up with a concussion and 10 stitches on my forehead and face. Several times a day, I applied Noni Lavender Lotion to the stitches. When the stitches were removed last week, the doctor commented on how quickly my skin was healing, and how there weren’t any scars forming. I told him it was the noni!

Noni can bring that same healing power to bear on your age spots! Here’s how it works.

Inside Noni: Why Does It Heal the Skin?

Research has identified over 165 beneficial compounds in pulp of Noni, which is why Noni has such a broad base usage. Dr. James Duke lists over 65 traditional uses of Noni on the USDA Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases. Ancient Polynesians used noni topically as well as internally, most likely as part of an anti-aging routine, in addition to healing wounds, sore muscles, and so on.

The compounds of most interest in noni’s ability to fight age spots are anthraquinones, specifically one called damnacanthal. Anthraquinones can help alleviate your most troubling skin conditions and promote overall good health for the cells of the body.

What are Anthraquinones?

Anthraquinones are a type of phenol produced by some plants. Phenols are reactive molecules that help plants do a variety of things, including deter predators, prevent oxidization, and more. Many phenols, including a number of anthraquinones, have shown evidence of being beneficial for human health.

Some of the anthraquinones in noni are antibacterial agents, able to help protect injuries from infection. Others fight enzymes that break down collagen in the body, which may slow down the aging process.

The anthraquinone most of interest to noni researchers is called damnacanthal, which likely helps protect plants from UV damage.

What Makes Damnacanthal Special?

In humans, damnacanthal has been shown to stimulate T cells, which may help fight cancerous and precancerous cells. There is also evidence that damnacanthal prevents and kills parasites!

Many studies have shown noni’s ability to reduce the appearance of age and UV-related skin discoloration. Noni may help regulate production of melanin, the compound which increases skin pigmentation, and protect against further damage.

These studies are covered in detail in an article from Healthy Living Magazine (click here to read the full article) and if you’re interested to learn more, we recommend giving that a read.

Click here to learn about more about the other top beneficial compounds found in noni.

Noni’s Antioxidant Boost

Noni combats the damage of the sun with its high levels of antioxidants. According to the Free Radical Theory of Aging, antioxidants can neutralize the potentially harmful free radicals unleashed by the radiation of the sun.

Noni Fruit Leather scores higher in ORAC units (units used to measure antioxidants) per serving than apples, berries, and even other superfoods like acai. Published research has shown our Noni Fruit Leather has the the highest antioxidant levels per serving size. Learn more about the antioxidant content of noni here.

How to Use Noni to Treat Age Spots

Many anti-aging products advertised today do contain noni, but the dosage is too small to have a noticeable effect. Plus, many products use noni juice, which is less than half as potent as raw noni. Don’t expect to receive great anti-aging or beautifying results for your skin where raw noni pulp is only a minor component!

Even for topical use, you want your noni raw. That’s why our Noni Fruit Leather is made of 100% raworganic noni pulp, and our lotions contain over 90% Noni Fruit Leather. No other noni products are as pure or as effective at stopping aging in its tracks.

So why doesn’t noni juice work? Noni just doesn’t lend itself well to fermentation, pasteurization, and other processing — necessary processes for making noni juice. You can learn the details of why this is by clicking here.

Noni Lavender Lotion: Gentle Topical Treatment for Age Spots & More

Use Noni Lavender Lotion daily to reduce the appearance age spots! Noni is not a miracle, where one or two applications of the lotion turns back the clock on every one of your age spots. But if the Noni Lavender Lotion is applied regularly, new skin is gradually built and the spots will fade away.

Here are two easy skin treatments that will help you gently treat your age spots.

Learn two easy skin treatments to treat your age spots in the original article.

Noni is a powerful tool to have in your anti-aging arsenal, and it does much more than fading out age spots. For more information on how noni can turn back the clock on aging, click here.

Easy Tips to Incorporate More Plants Into Your Diet

We all know we’re supposed to be eating our fruits and vegetables — especially whole, raw ones — but it often feels like a seriously uphill battle.

America’s industrial food system encourages us to increase our consumption of industrial foods, full of simple carbohydrates, processed fats, and potentially harmful additives. If it seems expensive, difficult, and time-intensive to buy and prepare raw, whole ingredients, it’s by design.

But fighting back against this system is far from impossible. The biggest step is finding areas in your life where you can make the easiest changes for the biggest impact! These easy ways to get more fresh, raw fruits and veggies will help.

1. Swap Your Morning Coffee for Noni Fruit Leather

Start off first thing in the morning by replacing your morning cup of coffee with a simple raw food that gives you a side-effect free energy boost: Noni Fruit Leather. The best news: that energy boost comes along with tons of antioxidants, beneficial enzymes, and 165+ other beneficial compounds.

An energy boost is one of the first positive effects that many people experience when they start taking Noni Fruit Leather every day. Here on the farm, it’s how we all start the day!

2. Drink Your Greens

If you think green smoothies have to be bitter or flavorless, you simply aren’t doing them right! You can fill your smoothies with delicious, nutritious fruit and still pack in plenty of greens to get the vitamins and minerals you’re looking for.

If you want your smoothies to pack an even more nutritious punch, try blending in a piece of Noni Fruit Leather! We recommend starting your smoothie with your liquid, adding the noni and your greens, and then blending all that together until it’s perfectly smooth. Then you can add your fruit (fresh and frozen) and any thickeners you’d like to use, without having to worry about an unexpected chunk of spinach!

3. Sweeten with Fruit Instead of Sugar

Most Americans today are addicted to sugar. Our bodies are biologically designed to crave sweetness, as it’s a sign of ripeness in nature, signalling peak nutrition and freshness. Unfortunately, in our industrial food system, sweetness often means just the opposite.

Our bodies didn’t evolve to cope with the huge amounts of sugar we ingest today, plus we aren’t used to having access to such a concentrated form of sugar. Modern sugars are stripped of fiber, vitamins, and all the other things that balance out the sugar that occurs naturally in fruits, for example.

Whenever possible, skip the added sugar altogether. If you’re making a recipe that really needs some sweetness, try adding fruit juice or preferably whole raw fruit to sweeten instead of sugar.

Read tips 4 - 7 about how to incorporate plants into your diet in the original article.

8. Preserve the Bounty

One thing that stops many people from eating fresh fruits and vegetables is spoilage. Planning exactly when things will be ripe and ready-to-eat is a skill that takes practice, and it’s extremely frustrating to throw out food — especially if you paid the price for organic, local, non-GMO foods!

Even the most basic food preparation methods can help you extend the shelf-life of these perishable foods, without sacrificing nutrition! Freezing and drying are particularly awesome ways to get more life out of your fresh produce.

9. Bring Nutritious Snacks To-Go

Snacks are the area where most of us cheat the most on our nutritional aspirations, but it’s also one of the greatest opportunities to sub in fresh, raw fruits and vegetables! Whole fruits and veggies make great snacks all on their own, but adding a dip rich in proteins and healthy fats will make them stick.

Noni Fruit Leather also makes a great energy-boosting snack!

10. Reduce Decision Fatigue

Did you know that the human brain can only handle a certain number of tough decisions in a day? There’s a well-documented phenomenon called “decision fatigue” that kicks in when we have to control our impulses too many times in one day.

This can be a big problem if you’re trying to change the way you eat. Many of us are able to start the day strong with good choices, but by the end of the day, we cave in and binge on something sweet, salty, or nutritionless. You aren’t weak — you’ve just reached the point of decision fatigue!

Stocking up on healthy foods instead of junk food is one way you can reduce the number of decisions you have to make, and protect you from a temporary lapse of willpower.

What other ways can you think of to increase the number of fresh, whole, raw fruits and vegetables in your diet? Let us know in the comments!