Sea Vegetables

Have you ever eaten a sea vegetable? If you’ve had sushi, then you have. The nori wrapper on the outside of the sushi is seaweed; it comes from the sea. Recently, I’ve been working at adding some seaweed into my diet. I bought some Eden© Mekabu, a wakame sea vegetable sporophyll, and every now and then I sprinkle it into soup or rice or noodles. Seaweed takes a while to get used to, but I am beginning to enjoy its distinct flavor.

Because I ask Klara so many questions about macrobiotics, she suggested I subscribe to the Macrobiotic Guide. Here’s how they answered a question of mine:

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Q: Why is it so important to add sea vegetables to one’s diet? Leora

A: Sea vegetables are nutrient-rich, unlike any other food I have discovered. They provide essential vitamins and minerals I cannot find in other foods I choose to incorporate into my diet. I think of them as the nerve center for my body. Without them, I feel lacking. I can fill my belly with volumes of food but without incorporating sea vegetables into my diet, my hunger will continue unabated until I provide it with those essential nutrients found in sea vegetables. (That is the purpose of “hunger.” It is the natural impulse that drives us; when rightly understood, it guides us toward the right foods, in the right quantity, at the right time.)

Without sea vegetables, I grope for foods that fill but do not satisfy. Organic foods are wonderful and vitally important – for many reasons – but even organic foods might be grown in deficient soil, yielding deficient plants.

Denudation is the natural process where minerals are carried off by wind and water from land into the sea. As a result, over millions of years of this geological process, we find a rich depository of nutrients in our oceans. For this reason, sea vegetables have become nutrient-rich unlike all other foods.

This is how sea vegetables affect me personally. This is not to say people cannot live well without them. Historically, traditional diets around the globe have provided healthful foods without the incorporation of sea vegetables. But looking around me today, traditional diets have all but vanished, and soil quality has become impoverished through poor soil/farming practices, making sea vegetables all the more important. There are medicinal values to them as well. Jeffrey Reel

Find out more about sea vegetables at http://macrobiotics.co.uk/seavegetables.htm.

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So, do you think you might try some sea vegetables? More on seaweed soon.