Sweet potatoes are full of vitamin C and fibre. They're also loaded with carotenoids which help fight cancer, protect your heart, and boost your immune system. In addition, one single sweet potato gives you well more than the recommended daily amount of vitamin A and supplies you with copper, vitamin B6, potassium, iron, and manganese (which is good for your bones). With all these benefits, it makes sense to create some tasty dishes using the sweet potato. And so comes one of my favorite recipes: Cinnamon Sweet Potato Fries.
Ingredients
- 4 medium-sized sweet potatoes, washed and scrubbed but not peeled
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- 3 tsp cinnamon
- ¼ tsp salt
Method
- Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
- Slice the sweet potatoes into fries. These should be no larger than ½ inch thick and should be as long as the sweet potatoes themselves. Think standard french fries. Rinse and place these in a large bowl.
- Pour the oil over the sweet potatoes and mix well. Add the cinnamon and toss.
- Arrange the sweet potatoes in a single layer on the baking sheet.
- Bake for 15 minutes and turn over.
- Bake for another 15-20 minutes or until the fries are golden brown.
- Season with salt and serve immediately.
These fries are a favorite in our home. You can peel the sweet potatoes if you like, but since most of the fibre is on the skin or just below it, you want to keep as much as you can to maximize the health benefits of this simple dish. Store any extra sweet potatoes in a cool, dark place, but not in the fridge. They'll last longer in the bottom of your pantry than in the refrigerator.
Blueberries are sweet and delicious, but they're also one of the healthiest berries around. They help aging memories and fend off free radicals to protect people of all ages. They're also packed with fibre, helping to prevent constipation, relieve diarrhea, and protecting against urinary tract infections. Any mother will love that. And children love them. Love them so much that they'll eat them straight out of the fields.
But not everyone has a blueberry patch in their backyard. Some of us have only the frozen blueberries you get at the supermarket. Kids may not like to eat them frozen, but you can do plenty of things to frozen blueberries to make children crave them. So if you have some frozen blueberries lying around, try this simple and sweet blueberry sauce.
Ingredients
- 1½ cups frozen blueberries
- 2 tbsp berry sugar (a little more if you like a sweeter sauce)
- 2 tbsp finely grated lemon peel
Method
Add all ingredients to a small saucepan. Warm on the stove at medium heat, stirring constantly. Do this for 4 minutes or until the sauce begins to boil. When the boiling occurs, immediately remove the sauce from the heat. Continue stirring for 1 minute.
This sauce can be poured over French toast, waffles, or pancakes. You might also want to blend it with vanilla yogurt for a quick snack or even use in in a smoothie. You can refrigerate this sauce for up to 2 weeks or freeze it for up to 2 months, so make a large batch and use it whenever you can.
We like to use it as a dip for fruit such as pears and apples. My boys like to dip whole bananas in the sauce and freeze them, making blueberry-dipped banana popsicles. It's a healthy addition to any dish.
We've heard it for years. Heavy backpacks are damaging our kids' spines. Pediatricians and chiropractors have been saying this for years. But if you need true evidence, you need only look back to a study done in 2010. American scientists scanned eight children using an MRI. Each child was scanned several times, first with an empty backpack, then bearing loads of nine, eighteen, and twenty-six pounds in the backpack. Backpacks were worn using both shoulder straps during every scan.
There were some interesting results that more than reinforced the idea that we're loading up our children past what's healthy. As the weight increased, the spinal discs responsible for absorbing shock slowly became squashed and were unable to do their job. In addition, the lower spine became more likely to curve to one side in an effort to accommodate the increased weight. Not to mention the fact that the children were in more pain with the heavier loads.
Of the eight children scanned, four of them showed the beginnings of significant curvature of the spine when wearing the eighteen-pound backpack. With this in mind, you should never load your child's backpack with more than ten to fifteen percent of his or her body weight. This is, of course, dependent on the age of the child, but don't stray from these figures too much.
So before you send your kids off to school tomorrow, grab their packs and throw them on the scale. Are they too heavy? If so, take steps to reduce the impact of a heavy backpack on your child's health.
3D movies are all the rage. From Alice in Wonderland to The Avengers, moviegoers get to see many newer movies using the magic of 3D. Put on a pair of glasses and you're good to go. But 3D is doing more than simply entertaining the masses. Thanks to the power of 3D movies, many people are discovering that they have permanent vision problems, and sometimes these are problems that could have been corrected in childhood if they had been detected early enough.
If your children see a flat image or two of one character instead of the 3D effect when watching a 3D movie, your child may have what's called binocular vision disorder. This disorder, which affects up to 10% of the population, is really a blanket term to cover a problem with the way the two eyes work together. For example, if the muscles in one eye are stronger than the other, the brain may actually "shut off" the weaker eye. This can be corrected, but in most cases intervention must happen before the age of seven.
Many other conditions are just as easy to treat. Muscles that are too weak to properly turn one eye toward the toher can be strengthened by playing special video games designed for this purpose. Surgery is an option of last resort, but it really can save the vision of many children, including my older son who almost went blind when he was three years old. The trick is knowing there's a problem in the first place.
If your child complains about not being able to really see the 3D effects on any movie (when wearing the 3D glasses), take him or her for an eye exam immediately. If you've never taken your child for an eye exam, start now and repeat annually. A basic vision checkup can catch many problems, and some of these are easy to fix.
