Healthy Eating Habits for the Whole Family

The national child obesity rate is an alarming 19%. With summer coming to a close and the school year starting, teaching your children healthy eating habits can help your children (or teen) maintain a healthy weight and now and to adulthood.

Eat Together

Try to make mealtimes enjoyable and stress free. Meal times are not a time for arguing or discipline. Unpleasant mealtimes could cause children to eat quickly to leave the room as soon as possible. This could lead your child to associate eating with stress. Also, try to have specific eating areas in the home as allowing food throughout the house can lead to unhealthy eating habits.

Did you know? Eating in front of the T.V. can cause you to consume 30% more calories.

Click here for healthy eating tips!

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!

4 Ways to Get a Healthier Gut

Are you struggling with weight loss? Allergies? Upset stomach or digestive issues? You may feel like these symptoms are unrelated or just “part of life,” but that’s your first mistake.

Your second mistake is not paying enough attention to the health of your gut, often the main cause of those annoying daily symptoms.

The Western diet, particularly the high doses of fat and sugar it piles on our plates, has a number of major detrimental effects on the digestive system, specifically your gut and your gut’s bacteria.

You may think it’s gross to talk about your gut, (especially the bacteria in your gut!) but this is a serious subject that Westerners in particular need to discuss more openly. The fact is, you need bacteria in your body, at least 100 trillion in fact, and we’ll show you why.

We’ll also provide you with 4 ways to keep your gut healthy, so you can be proactive against the annoying symptoms of an unhealthy gut!

Why Your Gut Matters

Microbiota, probiotics, prebiotics, lactobacillus...these unfamiliar words can sound like they’re being spouted by a mad scientist. In reality, these are all just fancy names for the good-guy bacteria in your body and the foods that support them. They provide key benefits to improve your quality of your life.

Benefits of Having Enough “Good Bacteria”

• Easier extraction of key nutrients from your food
• Synthesization of vitamins you otherwise could not make
• Help in digestion of proteins
• Reduction of inflammation
• Build-up of a stronger immune system against bad bacteria
• Reduced emotional stress

You need lots of the right kinds of bacteria to get these good benefits. Many researchers believe the good bacteria work by outcompeting bad bacteria in the body which cause problems. The symptoms of deficiency can range from daily annoyance to dangerous health complications:

Effects of Bacteria Deficiency

• Allergies
• Diarrhea
• Inflammation
• Stomach pains and cramps
• Gastrointestinal pains
• Increased risk for parasitic infections
• Struggles with obesity
• Possible insulin resistance
• Irritable Bowel Syndrome
• Increased risk of heart disease

Research suggests that taking care of bacterial strains in your body is a lot harder than, say, taking a Vitamin C supplement. Improving the health of your gut requires committed maintenance, but doing so guarantees a richer life with richer bacteria over time. 

Here are some ideas to help get your gut health back on track!

4 Ways to Maintain Your Gut

High Fiber Fruits and Vegetables.

The easiest way to help the bacteria in your gut is by enjoying a more plant-based diet. Fruits and veggies high in fiber give the bacteria in your digestive tract the tools they need to extract nutrients from the food and build stronger communities, which means a stronger immune system!

It’s especially important to eat your fruits and veggies raw. Learn why this is by clicking here!

Examples of fruits high in fiber include bananas, raspberries, and exotic fruits like guava and noni fruit. Vegetables to increase in your diet include dark leafy greens, carrots, beets, broccoli, and artichokes.

Learn about how Fermented Foods help your gut health here.

Stress Relieving Exercise

Taking care of your gut’s bacteria is not only restricted to your diet. You also need to move your body to keep your gut healthy and allow the bacteria to distribute their benefits to your body!

We aren’t saying you have to join a hard-core pilates class and start running marathons. At-home yoga, a daily walk around the block, and even house cleaning each day can do wonders! If you are looking for a little more exercise, try going for a jog or joining a dance class with friends.

Raw, Organic Noni Fruit Leather

If you’re looking for a simple, daily raw food to add to your diet, which will make a big difference to the health of your gut, try either our Noni Fruit Leather or our Noni Banana Fruit Leather.

Both of these fruit leathers heal your body from the inside out by putting over 165 beneficial compounds to work battling inflammation, nourishing your cells, and yes, improving the health of your digestive tract!

How Noni Helps Your Gut

• Helps reduce chronic & acute pain
• Boosts and regulates immune response
• Anti-parasitic, fights “bad” gut bacteria (including E. coli and Salmonella)
• Reduces inflammation associated with allergies & disease
• Beneficial enzymes support digestion
• Balances blood sugar levels
• Antioxidant defense against free radicals
• High levels of soluble and insoluble fiber
• Natural energy booster encourages you to exercise

If you can commit to these four gut maintenance tips, your whole body will feel better in no time!

How has Noni Fruit Leather improved your quality of life — especially with regards to your digestive system? Let us know in the comments!