Here is a scrumptious and healthy alkaline rich beet and orange salad with refreshing lemon zest and your choice of protein and toppings.

Try silky light tofu, or organic cottage cheese, crumbled feta, or plain. To top it off try fresh thyme or rosemary. I happen to have a blood orange I threw into the mix, so get creative and treat yourself to this healthy root vegetable and citrus salad.

Below is the recipe and an example menu to pair this nutritious side dish with.

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Going to a body and nutrition expert with my husband is one of the best things we’ve done for ourselves. What was the key take away? Warning! Turn Alkaline!

Turn Alkaline? Are we magicians? Well according to biochemists we are! You can change your body chemistry with what you eat!

Chemicals have seeped into foods, air, and water, which in turn lower our system’s ability to control the chemistry of our body fluids, increasing illness and chronic disease.

The sad fact is that most food consumption in the wealthiest nations has shifted from nutritious raw foods to low nutritional value processed foods and we need to shift it back. Now that our total biological terrain is at risk, we urgently need to do some clean up by shifting our body chemistry back to the raw, organic foods it was designed to function on as we’ve evolved.

Below I’ve listed out a quick list of the good foods (alkaline) to treat your body to often…

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Can you imagine anything worse than being somewhere in public and realizing your breath is loaded with a smell so pungent that it’s offending everyone in a one mile radius from you?

It may be fair to say that garlic tops the list there.

Yikes. I’ve nightmares about this and think having a constant supply of a combination of mouthwash and chewing gum in my bag would be a great idea, but the fact remains that licking some grrr-lick can work nothing short of wonders for you, despite its grrrr factor.

Plus with a reputation for preventing everything from the common cold to aging, garlic is as much known for its versatility as for its effectiveness.

Hey, it can even be effective as a repellent - and not just for mosquitoes.

The word garlic comes from  garleac, meaning “spear leek” in Old English. It is reported to be native to Central Asia, and dates back over 6000 years.

But it was the Egyptians historically that took garlic to the next level. They worshipped it and placed clay garlic bulb models  in the tomb of none else than Tutankhamen. Can you believe, they even used it as currency? Who would’ve thought that money could stink so bad?

Egyptian folklore holds that garlic repelled vampires and ghosts, protected against the “Evil Eye”, and warded off nymphs said to terrorize pregnant women and engaged maidens. Garlic was also considered an aphrodisiac in Egypt. Nature decided to enshrine this super-substance in stink.

Researchers have known that the distinct aroma, flavor and healing properties of garlic come from an organic compound in garlic called allicin, which is also a powerful antioxidant or something that stop the damaging effects of radicals that can accelerate certain diseases.

Like a lot of other herbal medicines though, garlic was not subjected to a vigorous scientific study until earlier this year.

In a Science News report,Queen’s University Chemistry professor Derek Pratt, who led a study on how garlic does it said “We didn’t understand how garlic could contain such an efficient antioxidant, since it didn’t have a substantial amount of the types of compounds usually responsible for high antioxidant activity in plants, such as the flavanoids found in green tea or grapes.”

The  team experimented with synthetically-produced allicin, they found that an acid produced when allicin decomposes rapidly reacts with radicals, more than the allicin itself, explaining its effects better.

According to Dr. Pratt, who is Canada Research Chair in Free Radical Chemistry, no one has ever seen compounds, natural or synthetic, react this quickly as antioxidants.

“The reaction between the sulfenic acid and radicals is as fast as it can get, limited only by the time it takes for the two molecules to come into contact,” he told Science News.

That’s all for the science part. From the personal angle, I wonder why Nature wraps extremely good things in extremely bad packages. Maybe the rock band, The Verve, got it right when they sang that life is a bittersweet symphony. And sometimes it’s easier to appreciate the sweet, when you’ve had a taste of the bitter.

Garlic has long been known for its health benefits. The study’s authors write:

Garlic has been used for centuries for culinary purposes, and its health benefits have been known since at least 1500 B.C. when ancient Chinese and Indians used it as a blood-thinning agent. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, used garlic to treat cervical cancer. In China, garlic was shown to reduce the risk of esophageal and stomach cancers by 70%. Garlic is also effective against breast and prostate cancers due to the presence of S-allyl mercaptocysteine. Documented scientific investigations on garlic were initiated by Louis Pasteur who first reported its antibacterial and antifungal properties. Albert Schweitzer used this concept and treated dysentery in Africa with garlic.  Subsequent studies found efficacy of garlic as a cardioprotectant.

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 Grains and beans are a truly remarkable way to add protein to a meat and dairy free diet. Quinoa (pictured in a field above) has nine grams of protein. Tempeh is a vegan food that has 41 grams of protein in a cup. Sometimes it is made from cultured organic soybeans, water, organic barley, organic brown rice, and organic millet, like this lightlife tempeh. Here are more grain facts:

• Quinoa (shown growing in the image above) has 9 grams of protein
• Bulgur, cooked into cup has 6
• Brown rice, cooked into a cup has 5

Sunflower seeds make great additions to salads. 1/4 cup of sunflower seeds (pictured below) has six grams of protein.

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Many researchers and cancer specialists believe that up to 60% of those deaths can be prevented if Americans adopt healthier lifestyles.

According to Rachael Stolzenberg-Solomon, a researcher at the National Cancer Institute,

“The easiest and least expensive way to reduce your risk for cancer is just by eating a healthy diet.”

Here is an overview of ten important cancer fighting foods to include in your diet on a regular basis:

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Wellness Formula is a blend of healing ingredients,

The immune system is our guardian angel if you will, it heals us with unconditional love, responds quickly to outside influences, and protects the body in microscopic, unconsciously controlled ways. When illness attacks hit, there is a way to consciously address these problems to support your natural healing system. The answer is Wellness Formula. It works very well when allergies or colds strike, and when we encounter extreme conditions and need a boost.

A key benefit of the daily wellness vitamins are increased and sustained antioxidant defense.

The maker Source Naturals provides a nice overview on how to befriend your immune system with this formula and explains the benefits of the blend:

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Winter gardening often takes two forms: planting crops for winter harvest and planting crops to overwinter for early spring harvest. Now that September is almost half-way over, winter gardeners need to get busy! It is time to plant arugula, cabbage, corn salad, legumes, lettuce, mustard greens, and radish seeds; however, corn salad, lettuce, and mustard greens enjoy a little covering or cloching to extend the harvest. It is also possible to transplant broccoli, cauliflower, and collards for winter and spring harvests. For other areas of the garden, cover cropping in the fall will prevent erosion and boost nitrogen content.

My favorite crop to grow in the winter is garlic, which can be planted at the end of this month and into October. Garlic is amazing, as it slowly grows through the wintertime. In addition, there are some plants that are only harvested in the winter, such as Jerusalem artichokes. These high-potassium roots are native to the United States, and they make a great winter treat roasted with olive oil and garlic. It is fun to dig Jerusalem artichokes out of the snow covered earth and be thankful for their winter bounty.