Food restrictions, but not junk food

The pitfalls of fasting on junk vegan food

Luiza Moldovan, 01.03.2023, 14:00

Lent
has begun, in Romania. Lent is a period of time of special importance, when
the soul and the body prepare for the feast of Our Lord’s Resurrection. Everybody
is familiar with food restrictions, but today we shall tackle a relatively
recent issue – the unprecedented invasion of the poor-quality fasting food. We’re
speaking about the vegan junk food, as nutritionists call it. Junk food dishes have
a delicious taste, yet very few of us question the ingredients of such food, with a potential which is as dangerous as the other type of junk food we’re so familiar
with, the ordinary fast-food. We fast, we have no problem with that, but let us have a closer look at how noxious a ready-made vegan burger can be, which we stir-fry for five
minutes before we eat it. For that, we sat down and spoke to Claudia Buneci, a Functional
Health Coach.

Claudia explained what fasting junk-food is, and why we’d rather
avoid it.

The major flaw of the fasting junk-food is that, in
effect, we do not stand to gain if we fast on that specific sort of food. This vegan junk-food, as I call it,
is made of some food supplies having preservatives, they have all sorts of
dubious ingredients, so those are not ingredients as we understand them, they also
have colouring agents that are in no way healthy, also, they are a source of trans
fats, the most noxious fats for the cardiovascular system, and for our health
in general. Sometimes they have sugar content or very much salt, precisely because
salt or sugar cover they basic taste. So, practically, what these processed
products bring is a lot more inflammation, a lot more strain for our body to
digest them, rather than nutrients, rather than food for our cells.

Nobody
says we need to be too hard on ourselves, in a bid to to comply with culinary restrictions at all costs from this moment
on and until Easter. Nutrition experts value the idea of having a simple meal, which
can be at once nourishing and tasty. Fasting food, or vegan food, if you will,
is simply yummy and also a gift we make to our body. After all, mens sana in
corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body, as they say. Here is Claudia Buneci once
again, this time explaining how our food needs to be thought out so we don’t
starve ourselves and we don’t deprive ourselves of the most relevant nutrients.

Healthy fasting food is also tasty. I want our listeners to bear that in
mind, the fact that we do not have to put ourselves through so much strain and
also, it is important to bear in mind it is plentiful. I should like to emphasize
the fact that each fasting meal should have a source of vegetal protein and at
this point, let me give you some examples: newt, lentils, peas, beans and even
mushrooms, buckwheat, chia. It is important that our meal should be thought out
around a source of vegetal proteins so we can have energy, feed our muscles at
this time of the year, lest we starve ourselves and have appetite for eating every
ninety minutes. It is important for our
meal to be thought out around this healthy vegetal protein. I’m not saying soy
is not a healthy vegetal protein, yet I should most recommend fermented soy,
then secondly, the non-fermented bio soy, while third-placed comes the non-MGO
soy, the traditional soy, if you will, but we need to make sure it was not
genetically modified, it is a form of protein I should not like to recommend it
processed, but as close to its natural state as possible soy beans you should
boil, then there is the all too familiar tofu. Then, of course, I recommend we
eat lots of vegetable. It is not by happenstance that fasting periods occur when
they are set, throughout the year, in the peak period for us to purify our organisms,
when we should support our liver, where very many fresh leaves are available, very
many vegetables, so, if we want to make the most of fasting, at all levels, the
spirit included, a purified body is needed. I recommend we eat lots of
vegetables and fruit, but we should lay emphasis on quinoa. We want to enjoy
our fasting in every respect and we want it to be a period of thoroughgoing
purification of our body. Also, we have the pseudo cereals at our fingertips,
which are extremely valuable, nutrition-wise and which also provide a protein, millet,
quinoa, buckwheat. They have a protein, but they also have a complex, quality
carbohydrate: oat is very precious, but we want it in its integral version, and
not some flakes we eat with a lot of sugar.

Apart
from all that, a handful of nuts, every now and then, provides healthy fats to
our body, rapidly inducing the sensation of satiability.

Functional Health Coach Claudia Buneci:

We should also have nuts,
seeds, yet we should not make them our staple food, we must have them in small
percentages, they need to be quality stuff. And if it were possible to crack
those nuts the very moment we intend to eat them, that would be perfect. I should
like to mention the pumpkin, the chia, the sesame seeds or the linseed, with
the latter three being ground or poached, when we have them, so we can digest
them. We need to have variety and colour on our plates and we should not forget
the fasting meals must be thought out as plentiful meals. We’re in dire need of
protein, of the carbohydrates I’ve mentioned earlier, provided by the pseudo
cereals and the vegetables, such as the potato and the sweet potato, for
instance, then we also need the fats we take from nuts, from seeds, but also from
the quality olive oil, from avocado and linseed oil. We need complex meals with
all their macronutrients and with as many micronutrients as possible. (EN)