Everybody raves about the healthfulness of the Mediterranean diet, and as a fully 50% Italian girl, I can tell you it’s great. But you know what makes it even better? — making it vegan and high-raw.
The typical diet is high in fresh produce, mostly greens and tomatoes, olive oil, wine, and fish. Edge it up a notch by:
- Keeping the produce there—and adding more of it, eating most of your veggies and all your fruits raw
- Eating more olives than olive oil (even the best oils are still highly refined: extracted oil is
to healthful high-oil foods (olives, nuts, seeds, avocado) what extracted sugar is to healthful high-sugar foods (fresh and dried fruits, and the sweeter veggies such as carrots). You want your oil and your sweetness to come, most of the time at least, in a whole package with fiber, vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. - Enjoying your wine if you aren’t prone to overdoing (organic wine with no added sulfates is the best, and all wine is considered raw), although you can get the same phytonutrient (reversatrol) in red grapes and juice made from it. (Juice grapes yourself and then cut the juice half with water — it’s really sweet. The result is heavenly.)
- skipping the fish (with its mercury, PCB, and DDT contamination) and adding sea vegetables (kelp, dulse, nori) to your salads, or by making veggie-sushi. If you feel that you’re not getting sufficient Omega-3 fatty acids without fish or fish oil capsules, there are some great vegan EFA supplements, derived from algae. The one I take is Deva Omega-3 DHA.
And if you’d like an easy and totally addictive Mediterranean salad recipe, stay tuned for my next post…Buon gusto!
Victoria Moran is a certified life coaching offering holistic and spiritual-life coaching; for more info, check out www.victoriamoran.com/coaching. Her books that have to do with health and nutrition include: The Love-Powered Diet: Eating for Freedom, Health, and Joy; Fat, Broke & Lonely No More: Your Guide to Overcoming Overeating, Overspending, and Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places; and Fit from Within: 101 Simple Secrets to Change Your Body & Your Life, Starting Today and Lasting Forever.
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