one-minute superfood: beets

As I've mentioned, growing up, my parents raised their own grass-fed cattle and always had a garden. With the cattle, especially, my parents always taught me to use all parts of the animal and let nothing go to waste.

Today, my animal just happens to be a beet.

Beets (beet greens in particular) are one of the top five most nutritious and healing foods on the planet.

On the stove, you can see the leaves being sauteed in a little organic butter and cooked in the steam from the water droplets on the freshly-washed leaves. Now, if you cook beet greens, cook them thoroughly and throw away the juice that remains. Beets are high in oxylates. But if the greens are cooked thoroughly and the cooking liquid discarded, it reduces the oxylate level tremendously. Did you know you should never eat high oxylate greens like spinach and beet greens raw?

There is much less oxylate in the red stems so I always cook them with my beet greens, just chop them up into the cooking greens.

In the foreground you see two of the beets that will be going into the oven to roast. I never thought I'd convince my children to eat roasted beets, but I put them in the oven on 350 til they are tender, take them out and peel them easily, chop them up into chunks, stir them up with some soft creamy organic butter, and they are to die for. Now my children beg me to make roasted buttered beets.

Don't feel guilty about the organic butter. You always want to have some form of fat with your nutrient-dense veggies so you can absorb all the fat-soluble vitamins.

In the background, you see chopped raw beet and chopped beet stems with sea-salt-water in glass jars that will go into a cabinet for a couple days or months (however long I can stand waiting) to make my extremely nutritious fermented beet kvass. It's simple to make and sooo good for you. Detoxifying for your body. Not nearly as hard to ferment as other foods. Google "How to Make Beet Kvass" and you'll get a million recipes that are basically the same.You can do this! Cheaper than a $140 bottle of probiotics. Also, when you drink beet kvass you get even more nutrition than you would from eating a fresh beet, without all the sugar--since the sugar ferments away!

Try to get them organic. There's not much of a price difference. If you can only find non-organic, then don't eat the leaves and stems. They are heavily sprayed. Just eat the root bulb of the beet.

For optimum health, you actually should eat a beet every day. But aim for at least 3 beets every week.

Don't believe me? Check these out (and these are just the mainstream opinions):

Dr. Mercola on Beets

World's Healthiest Foods and their thoughts on Beets

Dr. Axe on Beets