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Recipes

Feeding the Troops: Bulk Meals on a Budget

In recent months, grocery prices in Australia have been growing faster than wages and inflation. Even wine prices have remained more stable, for the most part. With that in mind, more and more families are looking for ways to purchase food on a budget and hunt out affordable, family-friendly recipes.

Whether you want to feed more people for less, or you’re looking for bulk meal options for freezing and meal prep, some of these recipe ideas below may be worth your attention.

Beef and Potato Casserole

Feed the family a dish that costs under $5 per serve – a casserole containing beef, potatoes, and frozen vegetables. The beauty of this easy recipe is that you can throw nearly anything in it that you need to use up fast in your fridge.

Silverbeet, onion, carrot, mushrooms, and zucchini can all make excellent, flavourful food additions. This dish can feed an entire family and may even have enough leftover for lunches, as well.

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Categories
Diets Health

The Wholefoods Diet

Wholefoods are plant foods which have not been processed or refined (or as little as possible) prior to eating – think fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. The term wholefoods tends to refer to a more plant-based diet with animal products, oils and salt being excluded.

Wholefoods are grown from seed without chemicals, sprays or insecticides and are as close to their natural form as possible, providing us with a natural alternative to the many ‘convenience’ food products now being offered in supermarkets.

Recent research shows that getting optimal nutrition from our food (and thereby optimal health) we should be eating wholefoods as our ancestors did about 100 years ago as these retain fibre, phytochemicals and nutrients that are often lost with highly processed and packaged foods. Examples of phytochemicals include anthocyanins which give blueberries their deep colour or red coloured lycopene found in tomatoes. Wholefoods are as nature intended them to be – no added fats, sugars or salt and with all the fibre our body needs. Fibre aids our digestion and helps us to feel full faster. Eating wholefoods also help to fight heart disease and diabetes.

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Categories
Beauty Sustainability

How Green Is Your Beauty?

The Zero Waste movement has gained much momentum with many people switching to sustainable and eco friendly practices. So what IS Zero Waste? It’s where we reduce what we need, reuse as much as we can, send little to be recycled and compost what we cannot with the aim to send nothing to landfill. Going Zero Waste will help reduce the environmental threat to our planet plus save us money in the long term. But have you ever thought about the impact your beauty products are having on the earth? If you love to pamper your skin why not pamper the planet at the same time by taking a little bit of time to choose beauty products that will help your skin and save our planet! Here’s how:

1. Look for organic certification from the world’s leading organic certification bodies who have a global organic and natural cosmetics standard otherwise known as COSMO – a product may claim its organic or natural so look for products certified by BDHI (Germany), Cosmebio (France), Ecocert (France, ICEA (Italy), Soil Association (UK) and ACO (Australia) to be certain. (Check out Zk’in Skin Care range which is COSMO Certified)

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Categories
Health Diets

Do You Need to do FODMAPs?

What is the low FODMAPs diet and should you be on it? Firstly it’s important to know what FODMAPs is and what it means – Fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. So you can see why it’s commonly referred to as FODMAPs!

The FODMAP concept was first hypothesised in the Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics Journal in 2005 with the low FODMAP diet being developed at Monash University in Melbourne.

Put simply the Low FODMAP diet targets natural carbohydrates (sugars) in foods that don’t break down easily, causing fermentation in the gastrointestinal system. Fermentation is the chemical breakdown of a substance by bacteria, yeasts, or other microorganisms. This fermentation in the gut creates unpleasant symptoms such as smelly gas, bloating, and abdominal pain. So where are the FODMAPs hiding in our food?

Oligosaccharides are found in certain plants such as artichokes, burdock, chicory, leeks, onions, and asparagus.

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