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Super Foods – Salba
We’ve mentioned it a few times on the site, and now we’d like to talk a little more about this burgeoning Canadian food/product called Salba.
First off, its origins: Salba comes from the salvia family of plants, which also gives us the herbs sage and mint. Its seeds are removed from the sprouts. Technically, Salba comes from the same family that produced the famous chia pet, but it’s made up of two distinct varieties of the plant (called Sahi Alba 911 and 912), and according to the makers, these varieties are the ones that have been found to have far higher natural levels of omega-3.
WHAT SALBA DOES FOR US
The great thing about Salba? It’s a whole food. It’s not a breakfast cereal with omega-3 injected into it, or a supplement with some kind of complicated green-tea infusion — Salba is an actual seed, grown, cultivated, and consumed as-is. And it’s loaded with great stuff, much like the Quinoa we’ve talked about elsewhere.
The one difference between Salba and Quinoa is that ‘Salba’ is a trademark — an actual product put out by a Canadian company, consisting of those two registered varieties of the Salvia Hispanica L seed. It’s technically possible to buy chia seeds on the market, of course, but according to the company, not all varieties have the same nutritional value.
THE ONLY FOOD WITH A MEDICAL PATENT
It also happens that Salba is the only food that holds an actual medical patent. Here’s some technical-speak from the site itself:
Salba® is the only food that holds a medical patent (60-274.256). The patent pertains to Salba’s ability to manage the effects of blood sugar regulation and the dietary approaches to such management. It is focused on methods of improving associated metabolic abnormalities, specifically with Salba®, and methods of use in these seeds in lowering blood pressure, blood glucose and post-prandial glycemia
AN EASY WAY TO GET SOME FIBER
One of the best benefits of Salba is fiber — you can get a great amount of it with even a little portion. It’s also loaded with protein, antioxidants, fatty acids, and iron. In short: it’s a good food.
INCORPORATING IT INTO YOUR DIET
There are a few easy ways to get the benefits of Salba without any serious hassle. One thing I wouldn’t recommend is relying too much (if at all) on any Salba bars, since many of them contain Glucose-Fructose, added salt, and sunflower seed oil. Sure, you’re getting Salba, but eating stuff like that allows you to fall into the breakfast-cereal trap: where food containing loads of stuff that is not healthy gets marketed as ‘heart-smart’ or whatever the latest cereal-shelf trend might be. Don’t bother.
Instead, just go with standard Salba, which you can get in its normal seed form or pre-ground. Since it’s completely flavorless, you can add it to a ton of things and not worry about it affecting the overall taste.
SOME REAL RECIPE IDEAS
1) Try it in your salads — throw a couple teaspoons of the seed into literally any salad you’re making, and you’ve just added a ton of great nutrients. It’s extremely easy, and you can do it practically without thinking.
2) Bake with it — with a similar philosophy to the salad, just throw a bit of ground Salba into your next batch of bread, muffins, or even a cake. As long as you don’t go out of control with the quantity, you’ll be getting an incredibly healthful addition and won’t even taste it — meaning you just turned normal muffins into extremely beneficial ones.
3) Drink it — Seems strange, but works perfectly, too: add some ground Salba to any shake, smoothie, or other drink concoction you can whip up. If you’re a coffee drinker, you can likely get away with adding a bit of ground Salba to your coffee, especially if you’re a fan of cappuccinos or other milk-centered drinks, since they can easily handle some basic additions.
WHERE DOES ALL THIS FIT INTO EATING CLEAN, WHOLE FOODS?
We’ve covered the basics of Salba here, but there’s one thing we want to talk about a little more. The Salba people promote their product as a ‘whole food’, but we’ve just described how it’s used very much like a supplement.
We obviously talk about clean & whole foods a lot on the site, and when a ground-up powder makes that same claim, it automatically invites comparison with nature’s other whole foods — especially fruits and vegetables.
Do tomatoes or zucchini have a big marketing board behind them? Not exactly. We pay market prices for those foods, partially because any farmer is free to grow a tomato, a pumpkin, or a pear when and how they want. A whole food is a whole food, not a product.
So how, exactly is Salba a product, then, but also a whole food?
THE KEY: SALBA IS A WHOLE FOOD THAT ACTS LIKE A SUPPLEMENT
Think of Salba like chewing on basil or sage throughout the day, only avoiding the strong taste associated with those herbs (basil is wonderful, but just eating leaves of it all day — not so much). Plus, it comes in seed form, and can be ground up and added to all sorts of things without averse effects.
It’s one of the best ways to get a certified amount of natural ‘supplements’ (iron, fiber, omega-3, magnesium) into your diet without using chemical ones, buying pre-infused products, or having a mental breakdown every time you go shopping. Basically, you’re doing the supplementing yourself — in the morning in your oatmeal, or in a salad.
IT’S HARD TO ALWAYS GET EVERYTHING OUR BODIES NEED
No matter how many whole foods we might be eating at a time, we’re never going to get everything our body fully needs. Eating a balanced diet, not eating to excess, and eating clean are great ways to get most of it, but the up-and-down nature of our daily meals means that some weeks we might not consume all the vegetables that have those great antioxidants that work so well, or get the appropriate fiber or magnesium that’s fully necessary.
To combat that, some people turn to supplements. Nothing wrong with a multivitamin, say, but using artificial, chemical supplements to, well — supplement what you should be getting naturally isn’t the best idea. If you’re going to eat clean, whole foods, skip the jars of protein powder, fiber infusions, and omega-3-added granola bars, and try Salba instead.
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