Mining For Mineral Facts

So you’ve heard that organic food is more nutritious than conventionally grown food. You’ve also heard that it tastes better. But you still have your doubts. Today ProNature aims to dispel them to a certain extent by giving you a small sample of data to ponder about over the weekend.

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In a survey conducted among 175 people, 117 preferred the taste of organic food. Clearly in that sample space, organic food came out the winner as far as taste is concerned!

In a study conducted by Rutgers University, USA, the mineral content of organic and non-organic food was compared and the results are here for you to see. You can see how significantly more nutritious organic food really is.

Percentage of Dry Weight			Quantities per 100 Grams Dry Weight				Trace Elements. Parts per million Dry matter
Vegetable:	Mineral Ash	Phosphorus	Calcium	Magnesium	Potassium	Sodium	Boron	Manganese	Iron	Copper	Cobalt
Snap Beans   Organic    Non-organic	10.45 4.04	0.36 0.22	40.5 15.5	60 14.8	99.7 29.1	8.6 0.9	73 10	60 2	227 10	69 3	0.26 0
Cabbage   Organic    Non-organic	10.38 6.12	0.38 0.18	60 17.5	43.6 13.6	148.3 33.7	20.4 0.8	42 7	13 2	94 20	48 0.4	0.15 0
Lettuce   Organic    Non-organic	24.48 7.01	0.43 0.22	71 16	49.3 13.1	176.5 53.7	12.2 0	37 6	169 1	516 9	60 3	0.19 0
Tomatoes   Organic    Non-organic	14.2 6.07	0.35 0.16	23 4.5	59.2 4.5	148.3 58.8	6.5 0	36 3	68 1	1938 1	53 0	0.63 0
Spinach   Organic    Non-organic	28.56 12.38	0.52 0.27	96 47.5	203.9 46.9	237 84.6	69.5 0	88 12	117 1	1584 49	32 0.3	0.25 0.2

It would be a favour to our bodies, which are already under the onslaught of urban living conditions and pollution, to pamper them with nutritious organic food. Clearly demonstrated above, though in a small sample, is the superiority of organic food and how it is perfect for our health. We hope that this mining exercise on mineral facts has helped to make you a little more curious about organic food than before. Have a great weekend!

Enabling Healthier Choices For You

In our earlier posts and our story, we have shared with you the thoughts that went into starting ProNature and one of those thoughts was to make organic food easily available to the domestic consumers so that it can be adopted as the food of choice. We hope that through our updates we have been able to generate awareness about how organic food is better for your health, for the environment and for the society. And it remains our constant endeavour to reach you better on your neighbourhoods so as to allow your shopping to remain as convenient as ever while you make healthier choices for your family. 

Organic food is gradually opening up and becoming available more and more easily in India today. Most neighbourhood supermarkets stock organic food these days following rising levels of consumer awareness. This is equally a product of the efforts of certain conscientious individuals who have taken it upon themselves to make organic products accessible to the masses, be it food or otherwise. 

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As regards ProNature, we are available in the following cities and stores to facilitate your shopping convenience:

Bangalore:

• Reliance Fresh
• Food Bazaar
• Smart retail
• Safal fresh
• Namdhari’s
• TOTAL Mall
• Mother Earth
• Fresh @
• SPAR
• Spencer’s Hypers
• MK Retail
• Nilgiri’s
• Many other stand-alone supermarkets

Hyderabad:

• Reliance Fresh
• Food Bazaar
• SPAR
• Other stand-alone supermarkets

Chennai:

• Fresh @
• Many Stand-alone supermarkets

We are also available in Pondicherry and Coimbatore. We close this post with the hope that we all soon see that day when availability and accessibility of organic food will no more be a hurdle in the way of a healthier lifestyle for all. Amen!

Notes From The Spice Route

Remember reading about the middle ages? About India’s peak of glory and after? The things that made many an explorer take to the seas in search of ways to get to India? Remember the Silk Route and the rice trade? And of course the Spice Route!

It has been since those times that India has figured prominently on the map of the world when it comes to spices. India seems to have taken the saying ‘Variety is the spice of life’ and turned it on its head by offering the world such a variety of spices to savour. Not just that, Indians take it one step further by grinding a few spices together to create Masalas – an explosive combination that can bring any recipe to life!

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At the very basic level, most India recipes have two or three spices as the key component, things that go into the recipe before anything else does. It is when mustard seeds splutter in oil or Cumin Seeds turn brown that one starts to add other ingredients. Many curry-based preparations also need powdered forms of spices like coriander powder and cumin powder. There is of course turmeric powder with its antiseptic properties that goes into almost all recipes uniformly!

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Then there are recipes that need spices like Cinnamon Bark, Anise Flower, Curry Leaves to give them flavour and aroma that will leave any connoisseurs heady with delight. Be it the everyday Pulavs, the delicious Biryanis or the Mughal or Awadhi cuisines by themselves, these spices are what makes them a gourmet’s delight.

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And there are Masalas that bring the combined strength of a few spices to recipes and give each recipe a signature flavour. It could be the Garam Masala or Goda Masala used primarily upwards of the Deccan Plateau and it could be the Rasam Powder or Sambar Powder used primarily in the South, but without these Masalas certain recipes are incomplete.

ProNature has tried to incorporate as much of this culinary legacy into its portfolio as possible by trying to offer a range of Organic Spices in various categories. At present, the portfolio includes:

Seed Spices:

• Cumin (Jeera)
• Coriander Whole (Khada Dhaniya)
• Fenugreek (Methi)
• Mustard Seeds (Rai)
• Fennel Seeds (Saunf)
• Sesame (Rai, White, Natural)

Powder Spices:

• Black Pepper Powder
• Cinnamon Powder
• Coriander Powder
• Cumin Powder
• Red Chilli Powder
• Turmeric Powder

Miscellaneous Spices:

• Black Pepper (Whole)
• Cardamom
• Cinnamon Bark
• Clove
• Tamarind  

Masalas:

• Rasam Powder
• Sambar Powder

Make your recipes come to life with organic spices and rest assured that your daily culinary experience would be only about taste, not toxins. We leave you with that thought as we sign off from the Spice Route.

Is Your Favourite Food On The List?

It is the age of globalization that we live in. Where earlier we could enjoy only food varieties native to our land, today we can sample food from so many other continents and climates! It is fascinating how our taste buds have found a whole new world for themselves. 

It does bode us well, though, to be more aware as new worlds open up to us. Here are the top food items whose samples were found to have the most pesticide content among all. Maybe it’s the way they assimilate what they absorb, maybe their skins are thinner, but for some reason, these foods retain higher percentages of chemicals from pesticides when compared to others.

Food Item	Percentage of Samples Found To Contain Pesticides
Celery	94.5
Pears	94.4
Peaches	93.7
Apples	91
Cherries	91
Strawberries	90
Imported Grapes	86
Spinach	83.4
Potatoes	79.3
Bell Peppers	68
Red Raspberries	59

If your favourite food is on the list above, ProNature suggests switching to an organic variety of it so that you can enjoy the flavour without worrying about high pesticide content.

Taste the world in a healthy way. Go organic today!

Images Credits: http://www.fishpondinfo.com, http://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk, http://www.ireallylikefood.com, http://www.honeybell.com, http://www.bestfruitnow.com, http://www.statesymbolsusa.org, http://ayeshahaq.wordpress.com, http://www.averagebetty.com, http://home.howstuffworks.com, http://garciasfamouspizza.com, http://www.twincityfrozenfoods.com

Protecting Our Children From Chemical Exposure

Chemicals are all around us. They are being used ubiquitously in our convenience-filled lives today. Is it any surprise then that exposure to these chemicals begins in the womb itself today because of the intrusive farming methods that we have used all these years!

The cord blood that we trust will keep supplying nutrients and oxygen to the developing child, today also supplies many potentially harmful chemicals to the child. Even once the child is born, various persistent organic pollutants (POPs) which are present in pesticides and attach themselves to fatty tissues in humans, reach the child through the mother’s milk.

Pesticides also contain various persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that rather than being flushed out of our bodies, attach themselves to fatty tissues in humans and accumulate. Those fatty tissues are a source of nutrients for mother's milk, so as a mother's body calls on its reserves of fat for lactation, the pollutants go along for the ride, invading mother's milk, and in turn, the baby.

All this exposure to pesticides puts an entire generation ahead of us at serious health risk and switching to an organic diet significantly reduces this pre-natal and neonatal exposure to harmful chemicals. We know that the most rapid development in an infant is in the neonatal stages and exposure to hazardous substances during critical periods of infant development can disrupt the signals of normal development and lead to health problems later in life.

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So how do we protect our children and coming generations from this exposure to chemicals? While policies need to be devised around all sorts of chemical exposure in our daily lives, as individuals the least we can do is switch to organic food and organic products. It could be clothing and our cleaning products, our gardening, how we handle pests in the home, but we need to look for more natural and effective ways of doing things. Every such change, no matter how small, will increase the odds for a healthy life for our children. 

ProNature helps you do that by trying to make organic food accessible easily for adapting into your lifestyle. And we hope to make a significant contribution to healthier lives and happier people in our own way.

Zen And The Art Of Machine Maintenance

A majority of us own some sort of a vehicle or another and we all know that vehicles need repair and maintenance. And for that reason, every once in a while, we tend to give our vehicles away for a servicing, to be overhauled and for the wear-and-tear to be compensated for.

There are other machines in the house that need such repair and maintenance, like various electrical and electronic items. And then there is the most important machine in the house – our body. 

The human body, in all its complexity, is no different from a machine that undergoes wear-and-tear with time and all the activities that it has to perform. There are organs and muscles whose tissue needs repair. The joints in the body need to be lubricated in their own way. As a function, the incoming food needs to be digested, absorbed and the remnants excreted. And enzymes are required for this process. Blood and antibodies need to be replenished (RBCs and WBCs). There are so many functions that this single body performs that it naturally needs its own form of reinforcement, replenishment and repair on a regular basis. And the one component of our diet that is necessary for all these functions to be performed efficiently is Protein.

Protein also is a source of energy for the body. Some of the sources of proteins that we can incorporate in our diet are:

Protein content per 100 gms of quantity

Food stuff	Protein gms	Food stuff	Protein gms
Bajra	11.6	Rice	7.5
Wheat flour	12.1	Wheat germ	29.2
Bengal gram whole	17.1	Green gram dhal	24.5
Lentil	25.1	Soyabean	43.2
Groundnut	25.3	Almond	20.8
Fenugreek seeds	26.2	Fish	21.8
Beef muscle	22.6	Egg hen	13.3
Chicken	25.9	Liver goat	20.0
Mutton muscle	18.5	Milk buffalo's	4.3
Milk cow's	3.2	Cheese	24.1

* Source: Indian council of medical research 1989.

To add to all the benefits that protein consumption has, consuming organic proteins is a toxic-free way of experiencing the replenishing power of proteins and for that reason, ProNature brings you the following important sources of protein in the organic form in its portfolio:

• Tur Dal                        
• Channa Dal                 
• Kala Channa               
• Kabuli Channa             
• Moong Green - Split and Whole
• Moong Yellow                        
• Rajma                         
• Black Urad Dal – Split and Whole
• White Urad Dal - Split and Whole
• Masoor Dal

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So what are you waiting for? Hit the nearest store to bring some organic protein home and give your body the best overhaul it deserves!