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What? Eat Seaweed? Why? (Contd)
by Brian Wilson
There are many types of seaweeds. You can find them in health food stores as well as stores that sell Asian food. Look for Agar, Dulse, Hijiki, Irish Moss (which saved thousands of people from starvation during the potato famine of 19th century Ireland), Kelp, Kombu, Laver, Nori, Sloke, and Wakame. Put them together and you have a low calorie sea-vegetable salad! Seaweeds can also be used in seasonings, soups, teas, and assorted food recipes.
Seaweed may not be the name we want to call this food with such value. Sea plants, sea vegetables, marine flora, or ocean herbs may be more appropriate titles. Many scientific studies have been done on the medicinal properties of these ocean herbs.
Limu Maui is an exotic name, which translated means brown seaweed. There is a substance in brown seaweed called fucodian which a Japanese researcher claims to be similar to mothers’ milk in its effect on the human immune system. PubMed is a service of the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health and is a good place to look-up studies on fucodian, laminarin (also an immune-booster found in brown seaweed), or anything else. It is available at either pubmed.gov or pubmed.org on the world wide web.
If you have no inclination to eat vegetables let alone seaweeds, you can still benefit by getting them in easy to take supplement form as in tablets, capsules, or liquid extract. In that way you can also get the smaller algae forms of seaweed like chlorella or spirulina. You would be getting plenty of beta-carotene, vitamin C, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron, and iodine. Again, studies on these can be found at PubMed.
Seaweed is a wholesome food that adds variety to your diet and is good for your health.
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