Buckwheat & Quinoa Top Gluten Free Nutrition

by BodyEcology.com

You can still enjoy your favorite dishes even if you’ve given up gluten. For a real treat the kids will love, try whipping up a batch of fluffy buckwheat pancakes for your family this weekend!

Do you suspect that you might be suffering from gluten intolerance?

If you’ve made the decision to go gluten free, there’s something you should be aware of: not all gluten free foods are the same. Worse yet, some of them simply aren’t that good for you.

Many of the new gluten free foods gracing the shelves of your favorite supermarket replace gluten with rice, corn, or potato flours, or even food thickeners such as xanthan and guar gum. These ingredients simply don’t provide enough of the essential nutrients your body needs.¹

Flour products are “gummy” and are not as good for your intestines as the whole grain. The worst-case scenario is that regularly eating flour or heavily processed foods could disturb your healthy inner ecosystem, which is made up of the friendly microflora (good bacteria and yeast) that reside in your intestines and keep you healthy and strong. This in turn could lead to a vitamin and mineral deficiencies and all kinds of unwanted symptoms.

Don’t worry, there’s good news.

A new study has been released supporting what we here at Body Ecology have long known: that buckwheat and quinoa are the most nutrient-rich, gluten free foods you can put into your body.²

Buckwheat and quinoa, along with amaranth and millet are the four gluten free grain-like seeds that are an integral part of the Body Ecology system of health and healing. For more on just why you should be cozying up to these grain-like seeds on a regular basis, read The Risks of Consuming Typical Grains & the Healthy Grains to Choose Instead.

We don’t just recommend these gluten free grain-like seeds solely for people aiming to tackle gluten intolerance. However; if you’re aiming to overcome candida, re-establish healthy grain-loving microflora, stave off protein, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, or even if you simply want to lose weight, then you owe it to yourself to discover some of the amazing dishes you can prepare from these delicious gluten free grain-like seeds.

As a rule of thumb, skip processed foods such as conventional cereals and pasta. For an understanding of just how processed foods made from grains such as oats, barley and wheat can be damaging to your body, take a look at The Four Major Health Risks of Conventional Cereal Grains & The Four Healthy Weight-Optimizing Grains to Choose Instead as well as Is Pasta Good for You? The Ones to Eat and the Ones to Avoid.

Here are some of your best gluten-free options:

Organic Quinoa provides endless mouthwatering dishes you can prepare such as the ever-popular Quinoa and Cilantro Salad with Lemon & Garlic.
Organic Millet can even be used to prepare Millet “Mashed Potatoes” that would be a nutrient-packed replacement for the real thing in your household! The Body Ecology Diet book contains the recipe for Millet Mashed Potatoes and many other mouth-watering millet dishes.
Organic Kasha (Roasted Buckwheat) makes a delicious substitute for oatmeal on a cool morning. Prepare the buckwheat and add cinnamon, ghee and stevia to taste.

Organic Buckwheat Flour - while flour is not highly recommended, especially on the beginning stages of the Body Ecology diet (because it is more difficult to digest than the grain itself), we recognize that kids (and adults too!) sometimes want treats, like pancakes. For special occasions, using flour made from gluten free grain-like seeds is a much better option than flour from gluten-rich grain-like seeds. Buckwheat flour can be used to cook up fantastic buckwheat pancakes that your family will love, as well as buckwheat stuffed peppers for dinnertime.

Preparing Your Gluten Free Grains

All grains, nuts and seeds contain anti-nutrients that make them difficult to digest. This is why Body Ecology recommends soaking them first. Just cover the grains, nuts or seeds in filtered water and let them sit for 8 – 12 hours. Then drain in a fine mesh strainer, rinse and prepare as usual. Now this tip applies for flour too and you can reduce some of the liquids in your recipe to make up for the water that has soaked into the flour.

Pasta – You have a couple of choices for pasta. One is to purchase organic 100% buckwheat soba noodles online or from your health food store. Read the label though because most brands of buckwheat soba noodles contain wheat. This can be good for a treat when you’re in a bind, but if you are in the first stages of healing your inner ecosystem with Body Ecology, recognize that the pasta was made without soaking the flour first (see side bar on preparing grains).

So we’ve found a better option for gluten free pasta that we know you’ll love! Miracle Noodles, a long time staple in Japan, are a great no-cal, no carb, fiber-rich, gluten-free replacement for pasta.

With gluten free foods such as these, you can rest assured that no matter what your reason for avoiding gluten, you can still give your body the nutrients it needs – and your taste buds the flavors they crave!

Sources:

1 Daniells, Stephen. Quinoa and buckwheat top nutrition tables for gluten-free. FoodNavigator.com, February 10, 2010
http://www.foodnavigator.com/content/view/print/277174

2 ibid.

Return to Newsletter Archive

Recommend This Page to a Friend

Print this article

Body Ecology Diet

...recovering your health, rebuilding your immunity.