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Have you ever thought of eating seaweed as a
healthy nutritious food? Probably not. Grocery
store isles are not exactly brimming with shelves
stocked with seaweed. Quite the contrary, you would
be lucky to find any seaweed product there. So it
would be no wonder if this item were missing from
your kitchen cupboard at home, and how many recipes
in your cookbook are there that calls for seaweed
as an ingredient?
You won't find it in your average menu plan. It
is not something people usually consider when
thinking about food unless they are into sushi,
which is often served with seaweed.
Statistics show that the people
of Japan have better health than people living in
the United States. Seaweed is a staple food of the
island country of Japan and diet is often the
factor determining good health and longevity.
Seaweed has the high-fiber of vegetables, more
protein than meat, and more calcium than milk.
Eating seaweed is not a bad idea at all.
Replacing the fat of fast food burgers with the
fiber of seaweed would go a long way to improving
the way we eat. It could be done using seaweed
extract without the burgers tasting much
different.
A lot of modern food is over-processed and grown in
depleted soil. That is not so if you eat seaweed.
The ocean floor is rich in nutrient material and
seaweed is a concentrated source of minerals.
Supplementing your regular diet with seaweed is a
good way to be sure you are getting the quantity
and variety of trace minerals and vitamins you
need.
There are many types of seaweed. You can find them
in health food stores as well as stores that sell
Asian food. Look for Agar, Dulse, Hijiki, Irish
Moss (which saved thousands of people from
starvation during the potato famine of 19th century
Ireland), Kelp, Kombu, Laver, Nori, Sloke, and
Wakame. Put them together and you have a low
calorie sea-vegetable salad! Seaweed can also be
used in seasonings, soups, teas, and assorted food
recipes.
Seaweed may not be the name we want to call this
food with such value. Sea plants, sea vegetables,
marine flora, or ocean herbs may be more
appropriate titles. Many scientific studies have
been done on the medicinal properties of these
ocean herbs.
Limu Maui is an exotic name, which translated means
brown seaweed. There is a substance in brown
seaweed called fucodian which a Japanese researcher
claims to be similar to mothers’ milk in its effect
on the human immune system.
PubMed is a service of the National Library of
Medicine and the National Institutes of Health and
is a good place to look-up studies on fucodian,
laminarin (also an immune-booster found in brown
seaweed), or anything else. It is available at
either pubmed.gov or pubmed.org on the world wide
web.
If you have no inclination to eat vegetables let
alone sea vegetables, you can still benefit by
getting them in easy to take supplement form as in
tablets, capsules, or liquid extract. In that way
you can also get the smaller algae forms of seaweed
like chlorella or spirulina. You would be getting
plenty of beta-carotene, vitamin C, potassium,
calcium, magnesium, iron, and iodine. Again,
studies on these can be found at PubMed.
Seaweed is a wholesome food that adds variety to
your diet and is good for your health.
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