Giving a Nutritional Upgrade to Your Products:
Ingredients
Koff’s “It” List for Energy, Digestive Wellness
and Heart Health
By Ashley Koff, R.D.
“You are what you eat,” and for a grow- ing number of Americans this means choosing food ingredients identified
to promote optimal health. Americans are
seeking out products with organic ingredients, learning cooking or “assembly” techniques via ever-growing media outlets that
tout health benefits and looking into “food as
medicine” ingredients with long-standing histories of traditional healing properties like
bitter melon, cinnamon, maitake mushrooms
and fermented foods.
Price tags matter, but interestingly, even
when stated as a factor or even deterrent, according to a recent NPR-Thomson Reuters
Health poll of 3,000 adults nationwide, the
majority still convey a preference for organics.
Yes, they want to support their local farmers,
but personal health concerns drive their preference for organics, conveyed as concerns
about toxins and their role in increased risk
for disease. So as consumer demand increases
for foods that help prevent illness and even
heal, how can companies provide ingredients
and food products that satisfy this desire?
Here are some “it” ingredients that offer
nutritional upgrades, including promoting
quality energy, digestive wellness and heart
health. But let’s not forget the old medical
saying, “the hipbone’s connected to the
thighbone…,” and note that what’s good for
the heart is good for the skin is good for the
immune system and so on. So these ingredients are ones to look at as those that help promote optimal health through great taste and
variety.
Energy
While everyone clamors for more energy,
it’s the quality of energy that really matters.
More energy, more often than not, isn’t better energy. This is because pushing the body
to overdeliver may provide energy in the short
term but will cause problems in the long
run—think crash and burn. So ingredients
that provide quality energy work with the
body to enable it to function optimally; helping one avoid the spiked high and plummeting low of an energy surge in favor of
achieving a sustained energy level from an
eating occasion. Every single ingredient identified below helps provide optimal energy and
offers an exceptional nutrition upgrade over
other ingredients often consumed.
Raw Cacao. Kick caffeine with theobromine! Raw cacao offers a stimulant fix for
those in need, but rather than getting it all
from caffeine,
cacao provides
theobromine for
a boost and then
magnesium to
mellow it out
for a more
sustained energy. Take care
with raw cacao, as it needs to be attentively
harvested and processed to provide a clean
product. Some companies bringing raw cacao
to the retail marketplace are Navitas as well as
Big Tree Farms—which offers everything
from peeled raw whole cacao beans and nibs
to cacao butter and a new line of chocolate
