Changing Habits:
We Tell Ourselves It’s Hard
Actually, though, it can be easy, maybe even not that much of a change. So many of the best things to help our goals toward healthy eating are easy to use regularly, we just have to learn the best ways to use them.
Lots of foods can help change our health in very real ways. Many are easy ways to get vitamins and nutrients to make us feel better.
As Black people – Women – we KNOW that foods can be very good for us all. Even more versatile, though, are the herbs and spices we cook with. The fact that we can incorporate them with great flexibility in all types of foods and in multiple meals everyday makes herbs and spices winning ingredients.
The key to making healthy food flavorful is to season it well. Enter herbs and spices. Learning how to use them as substitutes for salt and other potentially health damaging ingredients takes a bit of finesse, but can be fun and tasty. Better still, the meals we can make are improved- more fresh tasting- and many herbs and spices can also help with weight maintenance and loss goals.
Our First New Habit
GARLIC. Yes, technically not an herb or a spice. That’s truth. But even though it is botanically a vegetable, it is almost never used like one. More commonly, we use it like an herb or spice.
I chose to begin with garlic because it is a real agent of good health and super easy to incorporate into so many great dishes. Using lots of garlic, slicing or crushing it- in my favorite dishes I like to do both, and letting it sit afterwards for 10-15 minutes before cooking with it are tips that can allow for use in its most optimal state for healthy returns.
Garlic has many effects on health. It aids in lowering cholesterol, heightens immune response and can protect bones, just to name a few benefits.
Here, garlic gets our premiere feature in our Release The Pressure (RTP) series because of its strong effect on Blood Pressure, especially when used with healthy foods and as a substitute for salt, soy sauce, other sodium based seasonings that negatively affect our blood pressure.
Finding ways to include garlic in our meals, even nearly every meal, is stunted only by our lack of imagination, or need for ease or difficulty in cooking. We can use garlic in quick meals on busy days. Also it’s a star of slow cooking in soups and sauces. In its healthiest and most effective form- raw- it can be whipped into dressings, placed directly on salads, even blended in beverages.
For any of us, especially Black Women trying to reduce our over representation as hypertensive patients, creative cooking with garlic is extremely helpful. That, plus the diversity of use garlic provides, makes it easy for versatile cooks, like many Black Women are, to include garlic in Italian, Asian, Mexican, Indian, of course Soul Food, and so many more variations of culinary delights.
Yes, garlic is a winning first clear choice to spotlight for our Release The Pressure (RTP) campaign to fight Hypertension in Black Women and begin Changing Habits.