HumanaNatura

Two-Minute Salad Meal

September 29, 2013

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In the time is takes to be super-sized at your local fast-food restaurant (or to read this post), you can enjoy a delicious and optimally healthy meal, if you understand how to quickly make healthy salad meals the HumanaNatura way and following HumanaNatura’s OurPlate eating guidelines. All it really takes is some familiarity with the approach, a bit a planning ahead, and your creativity and appetite!

This delicious salad meal came together in under two minutes and is as satisfying as it is healthy. It starts with a base of arugula, adds a handful each of pre-packaged shredded cabbage and carrots, a few grape tomatoes, and a protein via some large pre-cooked shrimp that were marinating in the fridge in a mix of bruschetta sauce and the last of a mango-pineapple salsa we had at hand. It’s all topped with a light drizzle of a ginger-sesame vinaigrette dressing. Lots of flavors in every bite and as easy to eat as it was to make.

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals via OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s easy-to-use optimal eating guide. Experience how this science-based and 100% natural approach to our daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Then perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of HumanaNatura’s comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, you can explore your many opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier modern life between meals – via HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness. Check out an overview of our health programs at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…create new life and health!

Progressive Life At The Equinox

September 21, 2013

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Greetings from HumanaNatura at the equinox! In the natural year, we are now halfway between the extremes of light and darkness of the summer and winter solstices. Everywhere on earth, there is equal day and night, and a heightened balance or natural centering that touches many aspects of life.

In the HumanaNatura natural health system, we encourage practitioners to use the twice-yearly opportunity of natural balance and moderation that is each equinox for the crucial practice of reviewing and updating our Natural Life Plan – making changes as needed, and renewing and revitalizing our commitment to progressive natural life and health for the months ahead.

If you have not yet created a Natural Life Plan to guide your use and expression of the third HumanaNatura technique, Natural Living, our links will take you to our planning worksheets and seven-step planning process. Together, these resources will help you begin more intentionally health-centered and naturally progressive life in the days and weeks ahead.

Our newest member newsletter was released today as well, which is published eight times yearly in harmony with the natural year, providing updates on HumanaNatura’s resources, programs, and worldwide health campaigns. To receive future HumanaNatura newsletters or learn more about our global practitioner-advocate network, go to Join HumanaNatura.

However you mark this equinox, we wish you natural balance and new health!

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Permaculture & Human Health

August 21, 2013

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By Mark Lundegren

Many of us within HumanaNatura are strong advocates of permaculture and the placing of greater emphasis on ecological sustainability in our lives and global society.

After all, in many areas of modern life – from the foods we eat to the cars we drive and the houses we live in – we have not achieved ecologically sustainable practices. Overall, our general mode of life today threatens the planet (and us) with long-term environmental degradation. Given this, the ideals and growing science of permaculture have great appeal.

Unfortunately, not all practices that occur or are advocated in the name of permaculture today are true to its essential goal of environmental sustainability, which can be thought of alternatively as ensuring ecological health. At the same time, and as I will highlight, other permaculture practices that do foster ecological sustainability can be shown to be less than optimal from the standpoint of promoting human health.

In fact, when we broadly survey current permaculture practices, we can see these two shortcomings quite frequently, at least in part reflecting permaculture’s early and still developing nature as a field of applied science. Importantly, however, these common permaculture shortfalls appear readily correctable – via new effort to achieve deeper understanding and improved application of the inter-related science that spans ecological and human health considerations.

At the same time, these less than optimal “permaculture” practices are revealing. They circularly reflect and perpetuate ecological and human health misunderstanding in our time. They lead to misdirected efforts and resources. And they ultimately weaken or slow the essential modern advancement that is permaculture’s basic proposal of fully sustainable human living arrangements.

For these reasons, I would like to take up and encourage new exploration of contemporary permaculture principles and practices from a natural health perspective, one that spans both ecological and human health research. In the discussion that follows, I will begin by first illustrating important ecological and human health gaps or misconceptions that are now fairly widespread in self-identified permaculture practices.

But more importantly, I will then show how these gaps can be promptly closed through a more holistic and careful use of available human and ecological health science. This critical change can help aspiring and practicing permaculturalists achieve a larger and more accurate sense of our long-evolved human condition, as well as an improved understanding on how our environmental and species health needs can be concurrently and synergistically pursued.

In this essential discussion for anyone interested in human and ecological health issues, I will sample modern eating practices, in and out of present-day self-described permaculture efforts, and explore their underlying relationship to modern food production methods. This approach will allow me to demonstrate how a re-naturalized, more optimal, and fully sustainable model for both modern human eating and modern food production can be achieved via a new and broader synthesis of contemporary health, ecological, and evolutionary science.

Before continuing, however, let me underscore that this companion and complementary exploration of ecological and human health science has implications far beyond the topics of nutrition and food production. In principle, the approach can be applied productively to many other domains of modern life and endeavor – in essence, wherever human and ecological health goals may or must be pursued in tandem.

Continue reading “Permaculture & Human Health”

Making Cross-Quarter Progress

August 7, 2013

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Greetings from HumanaNatura at the cross-quarter! In the natural year, we are now halfway between the extremes of light and darkness of the past solstice and the more naturally balanced time of the coming equinox .

Right now is a great time to make extra progress on your Natural Life Plan, so that you have adequate action and learning to consider for plan renewal when the equinox arrives, in another six weeks or eighth of the year.

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Summer Berry Salad Meal

July 17, 2013

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Summer is in full swing in much of the world right now. In addition to longer and warmer days, this also means that fresh summer berries are now waiting to bring natural sweetness and interest to our daily meals. When creating healthy salad meals the HumanaNatura way and following HumanaNatura’s OurPlate eating guidelines, summer berries find a natural home and can be used at any meal – morning, midday, or night.

Today’s example HumanaNatura meal is a delicious and hearty morning salad that features an omelet filled with diced red onion, cut broccoli florets, and shrimp seasoned with garlic and curry. As the omelet cooks on almost high heat until just slightly crispy on the outside, fresh organic arugula is used as a salad base and then combined with a mix featuring diced cucumber, quartered grape tomatoes, a generous handful of fresh blueberries, and a scattering of anise seeds. When the omelet is done, it’s paired with the veggies and seasoned simply with parsley and black pepper (though adding a few pine nuts to the mix seems like a good idea in hindsight). In any case and whatever berries you use, a great way to start the day and make use of local, naturally fresh mid-summer foods!

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Type 2 Diabetes Prevention

July 10, 2013

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By Craig Elding

Did you know there are two types of diabetes?

Medical researchers have conveniently named them diabetes types 1 & 2. Type 1 diabetes is largely a result of genetics and cannot be avoided. Type 2 diabetes is a result of diet and lifestyle and is avoidable¹.

Despite this, type 2 diabetes makes up almost 90% of all diabetes cases and is on the rise in much of the world². This article will explain what type 2 diabetes is, how it occurs, and exactly how it can be avoided.

Type 2 diabetes & insulin

After a meal or snack that includes carbohydrates – such as sugary foods, starches and refined grains that quickly convert to sugar, or fruit or whole grains that convert to sugar more slowly – sugar enters the blood stream at a relatively fast or slow pace, causing blood sugar levels to rise.

As blood sugar levels increase, the body naturally produces a hormone called insulin, which tells cells in muscles and the liver to absorb and store excess sugar in the form of glycogen or fat. The effect of this is to reduce the amount of sugar in the blood, a key source of physiological energy, and thus to help normalize energy levels.

Continue reading “Type 2 Diabetes Prevention”

Introducing: Greek-Style Yoga

July 1, 2013

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With the current craze for Greek-style yogurt, we figured sooner or later people would search for Greek-style yoga. But regardless of how you arrived here – whether by accident, out of curiosity, or some other route – we don’t want to waste this funny play on words and learning opportunity.

After all, there actually is such a thing as Greek-style yoga, though few of us realize this at first. But it’s there right in front of us, even as most of us don’t make the connection – though maybe more of us will once folks read and share this post.

The yoga of the Greeks? You’ve probably heard of it already. It’s called calisthenics, a word created from the Greek roots kalos, which means beautiful, and sthenos, meaning strength.

Though calisthenics is a modern word and fitness practice, it has its roots firmly in the athletics of ancient Greece, making it a rough contemporary of other forms of yoga. And like traditional yoga, when calisthenics is practiced regularly and attentively, it does indeed help to make us stronger and more beautiful, on the outside and on the inside too.

Because of the many health and fitness benefits of calisthenics, HumanaNatura encourages its regular practice as part of our Personal Health Program. The image above is a photo-sized copy of our calisthenics workout poster. The poster summarizes HumanaNatura’s multilevel calisthenics exercises and is available free for personal and non-profit use, along with our step-by-step calisthenics guide, at guide and poster download.

Continue reading “Introducing: Greek-Style Yoga”

Personal Or Progressive?

June 23, 2013

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By Mark Lundegren

Health – we all know we need it and most of us take at least some steps to ensure it. But often, our health efforts are less than effective or ideal.

And in truth, our health efforts are never optimal and can always improve, since health is an open-ended natural phenomenon that exists without obvious limits. This is true in principle, and it is in true in our individual lives and groups.

As my title suggests, I’d like to talk about an alternative way of thinking about natural health promotion, one that seeks to bridge or combine approaches that are overly personalized or excessively focused on the science of progressivity.

If you are familiar with the HumanaNatura natural health system, the idea of excessive progressivity might seem like a strange idea, since our overriding focus is on intentionally re-naturalized and progressive modern living. But just as our health pursuits can be too personalized and not make use of scientific principles, they can be inadequately personalized too or not sufficiently grounded in our personalities and the enduring power of our personal motivations.

In both cases, by being excessively consumed with either personalization or progressivity, we can miss important opportunities to advance our health and quality of life. We can fail to achieve what I will call, and explain next, health actualization – a higher category of health advancement based on attentive choices that span purely personal and purely progressive considerations.

Understanding Progressivity

Let me start this important and potentially life and health-liberating discussion with a definition, and then turn to a simple model you can use to think more concretely – and more personally – about progressive life and health for yourself and others you influence.

As you may know, when HumanaNatura talks about progressivity or progressive living, we mean simply – and not so simply – an informed and sustained practice of seeking greater levels of health and well-being in our lives, groups and communities, or in our global society more generally. Key themes in describing the process of progressive Natural Living are that it is continuous, lifelong, compounding or pro-cyclical, and revolutionary.

Continue reading “Personal Or Progressive?”

Progressive Life At The Solstice

June 21, 2013

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Greetings from HumanaNatura at the solstice! In the natural year, we are now at the extreme points in the ever-changing light of our earth. Today is the longest day and summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, and winter solstice and the longest night in the south.

In the HumanaNatura tradition, we encourage taking time at this and every solstice to celebrate progress on our Natural Life Plan and mark this natural milestone in the year with family and friends.

If you have not yet created a Natural Life Plan to guide your use and expression of the third HumanaNatura technique, Natural Living, these links will take you to our planning worksheets and seven-step planning process. Together, these resources will help you to begin using this crucial HumanaNatura technique to achieve more intentionally health-centered and naturally progressive life before the next solstice arrives.

Our newest member newsletter was released today as well, which is published eight times yearly in harmony with the natural year, providing updates on HumanaNatura’s resources, programs, and worldwide natural health campaigns. To receive future HumanaNatura newsletters or learn more about our global practitioner-advocate network, go to Join HumanaNatura.

Tell your friends about HumanaNatura…promote new life and health!

Spicy Veracruz Style Salad Meal

June 12, 2013

OurPlate Score: 10/10 Follow & Network on Facebook

This decidedly festive salad meal shows how regional cuisines can be re-purposed to make interesting and extra-healthy meals the HumanaNatura way and following HumanaNatura’s OurPlate natural eating guidelines. In this case, we use a simple white fish prepared Veracruz-style to make a spicy and satisfying salad-meal that is as good for you as it is great-tasting.

Today’s meal starts with white fish fillets marinated refrigerated for a few hours in a Veracuz sauce, which you can buy in many supermarkets or make yourself – either from scratch or beginning with a prepared diced tomato sauce. Once marinated, the fish fillets are separated from the sauce and pan-sautéed on medium-high heat with olive oil for a few minutes on each side. The marinade is then added to the pan and simmered with the fish on medium-low heat for a few minutes more.

As the fish cooks, a salad base and veggie mix is prepared, this time with lightly torn arugula, thin-sliced red onion, diced cucumber, halved grape tomatoes, and some pitted and julienne cut medjool dates we had at hand. When the fish is ready, it’s all combined, garnished simply with black pepper, lemon and parsley, and served promptly, making for a welcome day or evening meal that is at once hot, cool, sweet, and delicious!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals via OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s optimal natural eating guide and meal rating tool. And then experience firsthand how this science-based and 100% natural approach to our daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of our comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, you can explore your other opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – via HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness. Check out an overview of our health programs at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…forster new life and health!

Modern Natural Life & Health