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Black Beans and Egg Breakfast Bowl Recipe | Healthy Recipes & Snacks

Breakfast and Black Beans? Check Out This Protein-Packed, High-Fiber and Low-Fat Breakfast Recipe That Takes Less Than Five Minutes To Prepare. 

Unless you’re from Latin America, Mexico or Spain, beans and breakfast aren’t normally two things you associate together.

But maybe you should — especially if your usual breakfast routine is getting is getting stale and could use a kick. 

Beans are one of the most nutritious and inexpensive additions to any healthy pantry.  Filling, low-in-fat, and loaded with soluble fiber, protein, minerals and healthy antioxidants, beans are clean eating powerhouses. And that means not just made into soup or served with rice, but believe it or not, as a breakfast dish.

Black Beans and Eggs? For Breakfast?

This recipe uses canned black beans combined with eggs and traditional Mexican herbs and spices to make a tasty breakfast bowl that you can throw together in less than five minutes from finish to start.

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Chicken Tortilla Soup Recipe | Healthy Recipes and Snacks

This Easy Chicken Tortilla Soup Recipe Has All The Great Flavor of a Traditional Tortilla Soup While Still Managing To Be Good For You!

Mexican food doesn’t have a reputation as a “health food” — but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Take tortilla soup recipes, for example.

While many restaurant tortilla soups are loaded with fat and sodium, it’s possible to make a delicious, authentic tortilla soup recipe at home that will blow the pre-made stuff away and keep you lean and in shape (or help you get there, if you’re just starting out.)

This Chicken Tortilla Soup recipe uses all kinds of whole — but convenient — ingredients to make a bowl of soup that will trigger guilt-free seconds. And if you’re cooking for kids, this Chicken Tortilla Soup recipe will be a real hit, since it duplicates the fuller-fat versions of tortilla soup out there, without actually having all of the fat and sodium. No one will know the difference, trust me.

The best part is you can literally throw this Chicken Tortilla Soup recipe together in about 30 minutes — which makes it uber convenient for harried professionals, busy families who are pressed for time, but still want to eat healthy, and gym rats who want to get in their nightly protein after a great weight training session.

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Herbs and Spices: The Secret Spice To Clean Eating | Fitness Food

Learn how picking the right herbs and spices can make eating clean go from dull to delicious 

Healthy, whole foods get a bad rap when it comes to flavor.

“Eating clean” often gets associated with eating “bland” — especially among fitness buffs, bodybuilders and athletes who think that a good “training diet” consists of meal-after-repetitive-meal of oatmeal, boiled chicken breast, yams, steamed broccoli and green side salads with some kind of fat-free liquid on top that calls itself “dressing.”

The good news is that there is actually a simple solution to making clean eating not just tolerable, but enjoyable — and it’s as close as your grocer’s baking isle: Herbs and spices.

Herbs and Spices: The Key To Making Clean Eating Enjoyable

Any cook worth their salt knows that a recipe or dish isn’t complete until it’s been seasoned.

“Seasoning” could simply mean adding some salt and ground pepper, but more often than not, it includes the use of all kinds of other herbs or spices to either layer additional flavor on top of a food, enhance or complement an existing flavor, or provide a contrast.

While it’s pretty hard to screw up a dish or recipe by adding the wrong herb or spice, it does pay to know your seasonings ahead of time to avoid some funky combinations that might send that brown rice to your dog’s bowl, versus your plate.

Herbs and Spices: Not Just For Flavor, But Also Healthy 

Herbs and spices also have an additional role in healthy, clean eating beyond simply seasoning foods, recipes or dishes.

Nearly all herbs and spices have very high concentrations of healthy phytochemicals and antioxidants. Scientists believe that these naturally-occurring plant compounds work together in the body to protect tissues and cells from damage and may help prevent diseases like cancer and heart disease. 

When you combine herbs and spices with other antioxidant-rich foods like fruits and vegetables, their protective properties may be enhanced even more, similar to The Portfolio Diet approach to cholesterol-reduction observed by researchers like David Jenkins at the University of Toronto.

Just how much antioxidant punch do certain herbs and spice have? Plenty.  

In fact, oregano, that ubiquitous herb found in nearly every batch of pizza or spaghetti sauce is one of nature’s most concentrated sources of antioxidants, having four times more antioxidants than blueberries. Just one tablespoon of dried oregano has the antioxidant content of a large apple.

Herbs and spices can also have beneficial medicinal uses, in addition to simply making your food taste better.

For instance, ginger aids digestion and can calm nausea and even alleviate motion sickness. Fennel and juniper berries can help with fat digestion, and cinnamon has been shown to help reduce cholesterol and increase insulin sensitivity, helping people better digest sugar. It also may lessen the symptoms of certain inflammatory diseases like arthritis.

So herbs and spices don’t just make your food taste better, they’re good for you as well.

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