M Café's Curried Cauliflower Salad

This in one of my two, favorite healthy salads I routinely buy at M Café from the LA Times Food Section. The other is their Kale Salad. Both store well in the fridge for up to five days. They’re both SOooo yummy and healthy for you!

Ingredients

Curried cashews
2 cups (1/2 pound) cashews
1 T maple syrup, preferably grade B
3/4 tsp. curry powder
Pinch salt

Directions
1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the cashews on a baking sheet and roast for 5 minutes.
2. While the cashews are roasting, in a medium bowl, combine the maple syrup, curry powder and salt.
3. Toss the cashews with the spiced maple syrup, then spread again on the baking sheet.
4. Roast the cashews for 15 more minutes, tossing every 5 minutes, until toasted and aromatic. Remove from heat and cool well. This makes more cashews than are needed for the remainder of the recipe; the cashews can be stored at room temperature in an airtight container.

Curried Cauliflower

Ingredients
1/4 cup plus 2 T extra-virgin olive oil
2 T plus 3/4 tsp. curry powder
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. ground cumin
1/4 tsp. ground coriander
Pinch dry mustard
2 T (1/2 ounce) fresh ginger, peeled and julienned
3 heads cauliflower (about 8 cups), trimmed and cut into small florets

Directions
1. Heat the oven to 400 degrees.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the olive oil, curry powder, salt, cumin, coriander, mustard and ginger. Add the cauliflower florets and toss to combine and evenly coat.
3. Spread the florets in a single layer on a baking sheet and roast until golden-brown and aromatic, about 20 minutes, tossing every few minutes for even cooking. Remove from heat and cool completely.

Curried Cauliflower Salad

Ingredients
3 T agave syrup or honey
1 ½ tsp. lemon juice, fresh
1 ½ tsp. extra-virgin olive oil
8 cups (1 3/4 pounds) Curried cauliflower
1 cup (4 ounces) peas, fresh or previously frozen
2 cup (2 1/2 ounces) red bell pepper, diced
¼ cup (1 ounce) dried apricot, diced
½ cup (2 ounces) curried cashews
½ cup (1/4 bunch) chopped fresh cilantro
¾ tsp. salt, or to taste

Directions
1. In a small bowl, whisk together the agave syrup, lemon juice and olive oil to form a finishing syrup. Set aside.
2. In a large bowl, toss together the cauliflower, peas, bell pepper and apricot. Pour over half of the finishing syrup and toss to combine. Stir in the cashews, cilantro and salt. Taste, adding additional finishing syrup if desired and adjusting the seasoning as needed. Cover and refrigerate a couple of hours to give the flavors time to marry before serving. This makes about 8 cups salad.

Nutritional Content: Yields 10 servings. Calories: 179, Fat: 12 g (0 Sat), Protein: 17 g, Carbohydrates: 12g, Fiber: 4g, Sodium: 440mg

Red, White & Blue Angel Food Cake

Top this fast and easy angel food cake with fresh strawberries, raspberries and blueberries for a red, white, and blue(berries that is) low cal/fat free, patriotic Fourth of July dessert. And at ONLY 144 Calories per slice and fat free, no one will feel ever feel guilty about indulging this holiday! (Add a dollop of fat-free whipped topping if desired, as it’s one of my “free foods”.)

Ingredients
1 ½ cups sugar, divided
1 (2-inch) piece vanilla bean, split lengthwise
1 cup sifted cake flour (about 4 ounces)
12 large egg whites
½ tsp. cream of tartar
¼ tsp. salt
1 tsp. lemon juice (preferably fresh)

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Place ¾ cup sugar in a small bowl. Scrape seeds from vanilla bean, and add seeds to sugar; discard bean. Work the vanilla seeds into sugar with fingers until well combined.
2. Lightly spoon flour into a dry measuring cup; level with a knife. Combine flour and sugar mixture, stirring with a whisk to combine.
3. Beat egg whites with a mixer at high speed until foamy. Add cream of tartar and salt; beat until soft peaks form. Add remaining ¾ cup sugar, 2 tablespoons at a time, beating until stiff peaks form. Beat in juice. Sift flour mixture over egg white mixture, ¼ cup at a time; fold in after each addition.
4. Spoon the batter into an ungreased 10-inch tube pan, spreading evenly. Break air pockets by cutting through batter with a knife. Bake at 325 degrees for 50 minutes or until cake springs back when lightly touched. Invert pan; cool completely. Loosen cake from sides of pan using a narrow metal spatula. Invert cake onto plate.
Nutritional Content: Yields 12 servings, Calories: 144, Fat: 0.1g (sat 0.0g,mono 0.0g,poly 0.0g), Protein: 4.3g, Carbohydrate: 31.7g, Sodium: 105mg

What We Can Do to Use Less Oil & Get Fit Too.

We all agree that we all need to do a better job conserving our planet’s limited resources, but where do you begin when it comes to making your workout green without busting your budget? Here are 3 simple solutions that will easily help you get green into your workout routine without much effort at all. These eco-friendly frugal changes are easy switches that will save you time and lots of money too!
1. Join a neighborhood gym that’s within walking distance to where you work and/or live. You’ll be supporting the local economy, saving car gas, car emissions, and costly parking fees. Plus, you’ll burn more Calories walking to and from the gym.
2. If the weather is fine, walk outside—it’s free. Did you know that out of all motorized pieces of fitness equipment, treadmills use the most energy? Try holding up to 2 pound dumbbells, which will help tone and sculpt your shoulders while increasing your Calorie burn by approx. 33%. According to www.treehugger.com, a treadmill uses around 1500 watts every hour or the equivalent of 15 of those old-fashioned light bulbs. And, over 1 hour, treadmills use the same amount of power to light up your Christmas tree for 12 hours. Treadmills also pump out about 4 pounds of CO2 per hour.
3. Use organic cotton and/or bamboo, or reclaimed fabric towels. Lots of discount retailers sell eco-friendly towels, such as organic cotton, bamboo, or organic cotton-bamboo blend. For example Bed, Bath, and Beyond, www.BedBathandBeyond.com, a nationwide retail store, sells them for reasonable prices. They routinely offer 20% coupon specials, which make the towels even more affordable. And, bamboo towels are extremely soft, luxuriant, and surprisingly absorbent.

Gut Bacteria May Help You Lose Weight

I am a big proponent of taking probiotics, naturally such as eating low fat yogurt oral supplements, that you can buy at www.LindaLaRue.com.

Reprint by Amber Dance from LA Times Health Section, June 21, 2010

Don't go searching for a bacteria shake just yet — scientists are still investigating which bacteria do what in humans. Something in your gut could be making you fat — and it isn't just last night's pizza. The vast, diverse community of microbes inhabiting the intestines, scientists are finding, can influence metabolism and weight. Between 10 trillion and 100 trillion microbes, mainly bacteria, dwell in a person's colon and small intestine. They function together almost like another of the body's organs, influencing, among other things, how many calories we extract from our food and whether we make or burn fat. Researchers have discovered significant links between gut bacteria and weight and metabolism in mice — and are starting to find similar associations in people.

The story in humans is far from certain, though, and scientists say it's too soon to concoct microbe-filled "stay-slim" beverages — a fact that has not prevented some companies from promoting their bacteria-laden products as helpful for weight loss.

Bacteria that draw the maximum calories from our food would have been useful to our hunter-gatherer ancestors but are less beneficial for modern people eating an American fast-food diet. In addition to our ready access to high-calorie eats, the bacteria we carry around have changed, says Andrew Gewirtz, an immunologist at Emory University in Atlanta, through antibiotic use, improved hygiene and cleanliness in the food supply. This, he believes, could be one environmental cause for obesity and related conditions such as diabetes.

On the whole, our gut bacteria are beneficial, says Ruth Ley, a microbial ecologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. They prevent disease-causing bacteria from taking hold in our body simply by filling up all the available space. And they help us digest foods, such as some starches, that we cannot break down ourselves, producing vitamins and energy sources we can use. "You might just generally be sicklier without them," Ley says.

Babies are born bacteria-free but start to pick up bacteria during and after birth. Infants mostly collect bacteria from their mothers and others around them; in a sense, the gut community is inherited from family members. If the gut-obesity theory proved correct, that would suggest obesity risk could be passed along with them.

"If a person has changes in their gut bacteria — and that could be due to anything, to diet, to antibiotic use — if that person has kids, then they can transfer those gut bacteria and maybe transfer the problem," Gewirtz says. Because people pick up different bacteria from their environments, people have different gut communities. For example, in a study published in the journal Nature in April, scientists reported that some Japanese people could digest compounds in nori, the seaweed in sushi, because they hosted the right bacteria for the job.

Every person carries at least 160 different kinds of gut bacteria, scientists estimated in another Nature study published in March. Most fall into two divisions, or phyla: the bacteroidetes and the firmicutes. Both of these groups are found in soil and water as well as in animals. Some cause disease, but many in the intestine are beneficial. The firmicutes, in particular, are good at digesting our food. The more firmicutes in a person's intestines, the more calories they can collect from a meal.

Obesity studies. This is where the obesity link comes in. In 2005, Ley and colleagues at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where she worked at the time, studied the gut bacteria found in mice, hoping to use them as a model to study obesity. They compared normal, lean mice with ones that were genetically obese because they had a mutation in the hormone leptin, which normally controls appetite and metabolism.

As in people, the main intestinal inhabitants of mice were bacteroidetes and firmicutes. But the researchers discovered that obese and lean mice had different proportions of each. In particular, fat mice tended to have more firmicutes, and fewer bacteroidetes, in their guts than lean mice.

In another study, Ley and colleagues worked with sterile mice that have no gut bacteria. These mice eat a lot, but don't get fat, presumably because they don't have the bacteria to extract the full complement of calories from their food. But when the scientists transferred the bacteria from fat mice to bacteria-free mice, the recipient mice gained weight. This result, reported in a 2006 Nature paper, directly suggests there's something about the bacterial community in the obese mice that contributes to weight gain.

What about human beings? Ley and co-workers examined the proportion of firmicutes and bacteroidetes in 12 people, in a study they also reported in Nature in 2006. They examined bacteria samples from obese people as they followed a yearlong diet program. Before the diet, the subjects had more firmicutes and fewer bacteroidetes than healthy-weight people. As the year progressed and the dieting continued, the bacteroidetes numbers went up, and the firmicutes numbers went down.

In addition to squeezing every last available calorie out of the food we eat, bacteria can also influence metabolism by signaling the body to store fat or burn less of it, and slow down food moving through the intestine so there is more time to collect calories. The exact nature of the bacterial signals that influence metabolism is unclear, but in a March article published in the journal Science, Gewirtz and his colleagues reported that bacteria can cause inflammation that alters appetite and weight.

Normally, the immune system and gut bacteria maintain a kind of peace, Gewirtz says. But the mutant mice in this experiment were not normal: They lacked a protein needed to keep bacteria in the intestine where they belong, and out of the bloodstream. In these mice, gut bacteria leak out of the intestines and cause inflammation as the immune system responds to the intruders.

That inflammation, the scientists found, altered the body's sensitivity to insulin, a hormone that normally suppresses appetite and regulates blood sugar and fat storage. With the insulin system out of whack, the brain doesn't receive the crucial "I'm full! Put the fork down!" signal it needs to stop us chowing down.

This, in turn, led to a sort of "pre-diabetes" condition in the mice — and by the time they were 20 weeks old, they weighed approximately 5 grams more than normal animals. Gewirtz's team took the bacteria from the fattened mice and transplanted them into sterile, non-mutant mice. These mice then gained weight. Again, it seemed like just having the wrong bacteria can pack on the pounds.

Scientists have plenty of data that gut bacteria affect weight in mice, but their understanding of the effects in humans remains hazy. For example, not all human studies have shown that firmicutes go hand-in-hand with obesity in people, cautions Margaret Zupancic, a microbial genomicist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

In part, that is because it's much more difficult to study people in a carefully controlled way. People, after all, are out and about in the world and have a variety of food and exercise regimes, unlike genetically similar mice living in identical cages eating identical mouse chow.

Another fact hampering scientific study is that intestinal bacteria are difficult to grow in a laboratory setting. Thus, scientists must study the entire community from stool samples and try their best to figure out from those which bacteria serve specific functions. To get a better handle on the human situation, Zupancic and others are now working with people in a variety of settings, collecting stool samples to further analyze the human gut community and how it interacts with our genetics and lifestyles.

If certain bacterial communities do cause obesity in people, replacing the bad bacteria with the good ones seems like a possible route to weight loss. The idea is not wholly unprecedented. Doctors occasionally treat debilitating diarrhea with a transplant of bacteria from healthy stool, for example. And there is certainly evidence that products called probiotics (see the sidebar) may improve health via a spoonful or swig of bacteria-laden foods. Even simply changing your diet might sway the bacterial community in a different direction, Ley says.

Next steps. Gewirtz says that someday it might be possible to swap obesity-linked bacteria for skinny-jean microbes. But scientists caution that a nice bacterial cocktail is not the next big weight-loss drink. For one thing, they don't yet know what bacteria to use if they were to try and concoct such a drink. It is difficult to sort out the relationships between all the factors that lead to obesity, including diet, exercise, genetics — and now, possibly, bacterial inhabitants.

And then, for a bacterial-replacement therapy to really work, doctors would first need a way to get rid of less desirable bacteria already in residence in someone's gastrointestinal tract. The right combination of antibiotics might do the job, Gewirtz says, but there are no well-defined methods for creating such a treatment.

Some companies, meanwhile, already are claiming that the right probiotics can slim you down. This month, researchers from the Japanese company Snow Brand Milk Products reported that people who drank a probiotic milk drink for 12 weeks lost weight. For their study, published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, they offered the probiotic drink or a bacteria-free concoction to 87 people. The subjects were slightly heavy, with an average BMI (body mass index) of 24.2. (A BMI of 25 and above is considered to be overweight.)

Over the course of the study, people drinking the probiotic lost an average of 1.5% of their BMI and, on average, 1.4% of their body weight. That's about 2 pounds for a 150-pound person.

The Ultimate Workout for Summer Abs: Awesome Abs without The Crunches

Looking for the ultimate workout to sculpt summer abs? Start now on these crunch-free moves designed to tone your midriff and you'll be flaunting a flat belly in no time
By Amanda Vogel Best Health Magazine, May 2010

The fastest way to a flatter stomach isn’t doing hundreds of crunches. Rather, the key is to train a deep abdominal muscle that wraps around your midsection called the transversus abdominis (TA). Think of it as a sort of internal Spanx shapewear, smoothing your belly from the inside out. Your TA acts as a natural girdle, and it needs proper training to make your lower abs in particular look and feel flatter and sleeker. “However you train your ab muscles is how they develop,” explains Linda LaRue, creator of the Crunchless Abs DVD series and a celebrity trainer in Los Angeles. LaRue says that doing standard crunches incorrectly can cause you to build your ab muscles outward. The trick to a flatter belly is “pulling your abs up and in as you work them from all angles.”

Before you get started
To get the most from these exercises (and your workout in general), follow these simple pointers from LaRue: 

• Check your posture. Whether standing, lying or sitting, align your ears with shoulders and hips. Next, pull shoulders down and slightly lift breastbone. Feel for equal muscle balance between your front and back.

• Contract your pelvic floor. To help activate the TA, do a soft “Kegel” during each move by gently pulling your pelvic floor muscles—the ones you use to hold back urine when you need the bathroom—upward. (Bonus: Kegels help prevent or lessen incontinence.)

What you'll need
• Equipment: A mat or bath towel, a hand towel and a one- to two-kilogram (three- to five-pound) dumbbell (optional).

• Warm-up: March in place or walk briskly for about three minutes.

• Repetitions: Begin with two sets of each exercise, working up to three sets as your abs get stronger. Perform each for the suggested reps or time (or less if you can’t hold good form). You should be able to do two sets of three moves in about six minutes (about eight to 10 minutes including warm-up). 

• How often: Do this routine three times a week. For a well-rounded program, add cardio and weights, and stretch after every workout.

1. Standing cross core
Works: deep abs, sides of abs, back, thighs and butt, as well as shoulders when done with dumbbell

A. Hold a dumbbell in your right hand, arm slightly bent and held straight out to your right side. (This exercise can also be done without the dumbbell.) Place left hand on left hip and stand with feet hip width apart, shoulders relaxed, abs tight and pelvic floor pulled upward. Do a squat (as if you are about to sit into a low chair) and at the same time cross your right arm diagonally across your body until your right hand is in front of your left knee. 

B. (Shown) As you return to standing, raise your right arm back across your body until you are reaching your right arm to your right side and up, with hand just above ear level and elbow slightly bent. With right arm still extended to your right side, also twist your torso right, looking slightly upward and to the right. Keep your feet flat on floor and pointing straight ahead. 

C. Return to starting position; repeat. Do 10 reps; switch sides.

2. Crouching Tiger
Works: deep abs, inner thighs and arms

A. Get onto your hands and knees with your knees aligned under hips and hands in line with your shoulders. Place a small rolled-up towel between your knees; squeeze the towel to hold it in place. Curl your toes under. 

B. (Shown) Maintaining a long spine, draw your abs up and in, and pull up your pelvic floor. Avoid holding your breath. With elbows slightly bent and still squeezing the towel between your knees, lift your knees about two inches off the floor.

C. Hold for 15 to 20 seconds. Return your knees to the floor. Repeat.

3. Core Clock
Works: deep abs and back

A. Lie face up with legs bent, feet on floor but heels lifted, and arms stretching to ceiling. Hold each end of a hand towel, pulling it taut. 

B. Slowly rotate your torso so that both knees point toward your right side (with toes still on floor) as your extended arms reach just slightly toward your left side. Then move knees to left, with arms slightly right. Alternate 10 times total, then follow the instructions below if you feel strong enough (otherwise, repeat this move for another 10 reps). 

C. (Shown) Continue same sequence as above but with feet off the floor, legs bent to 90 degrees and knees over hips. Alternate sides 10 times total. If you feel as if you’re falling toward the side, you are twisting too much; lessen your range of motion.

Skinny Margarita: Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Most margarita recipes use highly caloric, sugary orange flavored liquors, such as curocao, triple sec or grand marnier that will bust your diet. Here's a great recipe that is 0g carbs and only 112 calories versus a regular margarita, which has 740 calories!

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup fresh limejuice
• ½ cup club soda
• 2 packets Splenda
• 1 shot patron silver
• lime wedge
• ½ tsp orange extract

Mix together the orange extract, Splenda packets, and club soda. Put crushed ice into a shaker and pour this liquid over the ice. Add in 1 shot tequila, lemon and limejuice. Shake thoroughly, then pour into a glass. Calories: 112 per serving. Carbohydrates: 0g.

Nutrition Tip: Healthy Plate Portions

When assembling your dinner plate, try this visual: 1/2 your plate should be veggies, 1/4 should be whole grain, and 1/4 should be protein. And, a healthy plate size is 9 inches--not 12!

For more yummy & healthy nutrition tips & recipes, join my FREE Make Healthy A Lifestyle emag@http://www.LindaLaRue.com/members!