MixMyOwn – A Healthy Vegan Breakfast Menu Tailored To Your Tastes!

Posted by Danielle Bussone on Dec 2, 2013 in Features, Living Plant-Strong! Profiles & Articles | 0 comments

Nothing gives me more pleasure than introducing a new company with a healthy heart. At the heart of MixMyOwn are the quintessential entrepreneurs, Klara Charvatova and her fiancé, David Filipi. From the Czech Republic, the couple felt unfulfilled working for large companies, David in web and internet application development and Klara in marketing. They wanted to make a complete change from corporate culture to a lifestyle that was more satisfying and personally rewarding. Klara and David first looked at what they considered to be most important element in their own lives, which was connecting with people through a healthy lifestyle.

David Filipi and Klara Charvatova

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NutritionFacts.Org Needs Our Help Now!!

Posted by Danielle Bussone on Dec 1, 2013 in Features, Living Plant-Strong! Profiles & Articles | 0 comments

by Danielle Bussone

NutritionFacts.org is hands down the best place I know of to find current reliable research on almost any aspect of nutrition. Dr. Michael Gregor offers this service to the public for FREE. You can subscribe to his site and receive a daily short video on current research on any number of diverse subjects, until now. Some moron reported Gregor’s site as having inappropriate content to YouTube, who promptly removed the hundreds of free videos available to anyone who wants to know more about the foods they are eating and how they affect their bodies. I’m printing the letter I received from NutritionFacts.org in its entirety for VOAA readers and am asking you to please donate to NutritionFacts.org to help them move to another video hosting site and keep this important project alive. Rich and I have already donated and plan to donate again.

Down But Not Out

Dear Danielle, Nearly all of NutritionFacts.org videos are currently down. With your help, though, not only will we be back up and running again soon but stronger than ever!

Yesterday, YouTube terminated our account for supposedly “violating Community Standards.” Unnamed persons flagged one or more NutritionFacts.org videos as inappropriate, something that’s supposed to be reserved for things like graphic violence or hate speech. Evidently whatever mechanism YouTube has in place to prevent misuse of this flagging system failed. By terminating our account, YouTube removed each of the 791 videos on NutritionFacts.org, making them inaccessible to users. We assume that as soon as YouTube realizes their mistake they will reinstate our account, but that could take weeks.In the interim, we’ve started migrating the videos over to another video hosting site called Vimeo. So this past week’s videos are now back up, as well as my two live presentations,Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death and More Than an Apple a Day: Combating Common Diseases. Only 786 to go! Tomorrow’s new video will go up as scheduled and we’re working as hard as we can to get the site back up to its former glory.

If you’d like to express your support for NutritionFacts.org, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the 501c3 nonprofit charity that keeps it going. Switching over the videos to a paid service will only add to our budget shortfall this year. So far, we’ve raised about $12,000 towards our $50,000 year-end goal. With help from enough supporters, we will surely fill up the carrot!What would you miss most about NutritionFacts.org? I have done videos about studies that make the headlines, but I think my most important role is to showcase studies that would otherwise never see the light of day. The reason we don’t see ads on TV for broccoli is the same reason we don’t hear about the vast majority of published research–there’s no profit motive. It may not make anyone money, but what if our lives would profit?NutritionFacts.org was set up as a grand experiment. Can a nutrition website remain independent and not bow to pressure to accept ad revenue or product endorsements or sell some Dr. Greger’s Brand SnakeOilWonderSupplement? :)We set up the website on faith. The generous seed funding from the Jesse and Julie Rasch Foundation that launched NutritionFacts.org ran out this summer. Now it’s completely up toviewers like you to keep the site up and running.Everything on the website is free. There’s no special member area where you pay a fee to get extra life-saving information. That’s not how medicine should work. That’s not how science should work. What membership websites are saying, in essence, is give them money or else they’ll keep something from us that could make our families healthier. That’s unacceptable to me. Advances in nutritional science should be freely available and accessible to all.To make a contribution to NutritionFacts.org you can use a credit card, use a direct Paypal link, or send a check to “NutritionFacts.org” c/o Michael Greger, 700 Professional Dr., Gaithersburg, MD 20879.Join me in sending this message to whoever is responsible for the YouTube sabotage attempt: your efforts to keep people in the dark will just strengthen our resolve to bring the latest research to light.
Michael Greger M.D.

Michael Greger, M.D.
NutritionFacts.org

Planteaters – A Plant-Based App for Navigating a Carnivorous Planet!

Posted by Danielle Bussone on Nov 19, 2013 in Features, Living Plant-Strong! Profiles & Articles | 0 comments

By Danielle Bussone

Planteaters, a newcomer to app scene, directs hungry diners to meals from a variety of veg-friendly, though not necessarily vegan and vegetarian restaurants. It can be downloaded for free from www.getplanteaters.com. Planteaters is the brain child of Dave Hersh from New York City who developed it out of a need to, as he says, “scratch his own itch.” He found since becoming vegan four years ago he usually has to make greater compromises than his meat-eating friends when dining out together, often having to order a salad or abstain from eating altogether.

Hersh saw a need for an app which will direct diners to restaurants which offer plant-based meals as well as meals for their carnivorous companions. It is worth noting there are a number of non-vegan restaurants out there that offer excellent vegan meals. For example, Dave mentions a restaurant near where he works that offers the best vegan burrito he’s ever eaten and the name of the restaurant means “Three Meats!” Planteaters is the only app available which focuses on individual meals as opposed to vegetarian or vegan restaurants per se.

Planteaters iPhone App

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Grow Crowd App Connects Farmers Directly With Their Customers!

Posted by Danielle Bussone on Nov 19, 2013 in Features, Living Plant-Strong! Profiles & Articles | 0 comments

By Danielle Bussone

Grow Crowd App provides a local marketplace for organic food producers to sell fresh, organic products (vegetables, herbs, fruits, nuts, mushrooms, etc.) directly to their local communities. It is essentially a virtual farmers market. Users can browse local farmers and their products to find the freshest food available at the moment of purchase. Customers can order their produce on-line and pre-arrange pickup times and locations.

Grow Crowd, was created by Johan Steneros of Southern Spain. A backyard organic gardener for the past three years, Steneros became aware of the growth of organic farming as well as growing demands of the consumer for organically grown produce. Johan has a background in web design, building applications as well as creative projects. “I am very much involved in the App world and mobile communication, says Steneros. “I did my research and saw there wasn’t very much happening in this area so I thought I’d get it moving.” He began working on the Grow Crowd App a year ago and it was launched October 8, 2013. It is available on iTunes and the Apple AppStore worldwide as a free download.

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Natural Imports of Asheville, NC is the Go To Market for Authentic Japanese Culinary Fare

Posted by Danielle Bussone on Nov 19, 2013 in Asheville, NC, Features, Grocers, I-240, I-26, I-40, Living Plant-Strong! Profiles & Articles, Organic and/or Non-GMO | 0 comments

By Danielle Bussone

Once in a blue moon I’ll discover a truly unique gem of a resource that I simply feel duty bound to share with the world. Natural Imports of Asheville, NC, is one such discovery. Natural Imports is a purveyor of traditional Japanese culinary products of the highest caliber. Great care is taken to assure excellence, offering foods of a medicinal quality, prepared in time honored traditions by skilled Japanese craftsmen. Mass production and quicker, low-quality methods are threatening the livelihoods of these Japanese artisans, who prepare foods using the principal of Ishoku Dogen, “medicine and food have the same source.” You’ll find no mass market food and no arsenic laden Chinese seaweed here, only traditionally crafted products and sea vegetables grown in deep waters of Japan, protected for centuries with organic, sustainable practices.

Natural Imports Interior

Bruce MacDonald, now semi-retired, is the founder of Natural Imports. His daughter, Crystal, has been his partner and business manager since its inception in 1993, since she was 19 years old. Crystal speaks fluent Japanese and is a wealth of information about all aspects of how the seaweed is harvested, the medicinal and nutritional ingredients of every product, the sustainability practices of her suppliers and any glitch that effects the ecosystem and thereby affecting the quality of their products. She is a dynamic powerhouse who stays on top of all issues pertaining to Natural Imports.

Crystal MacDonald

Crystal essentially grew up in the business. Her parents divorced when she was young and she spent summers working at Commodities, a Japanese import store Bruce owned in New York City, where she learned about Japanese food. Bruce had previously worked for Erehwon in Boston, which was the original importer of natural foods in the US and subsequently for Erehwon West in California and later for Bread and Circus, which was sold to become the original Whole Foods Market.

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What To Do If Your Hospital Doesn’t Offer A Plant-Based Menu? Ask For It!

Posted by Danielle Bussone on Sep 19, 2013 in Features, Living Plant-Strong! Profiles & Articles | 4 comments

by Danielle Bussone

Last week I was hospitalized for a recurrent problem created years ago by an inept surgeon who cut the wrong body part. I was hooked up to IV antibiotics and given medication for pain. For me, the big question was, “What am I going to eat?” Hospitals vary in the quality of food offered. One of the most prestigious hospitals in the country where I once had the misfortune to become a resident has offered some of the worst food on the planet. I was not a vegan when I first had surgery but I was nevertheless shocked to see quality of the food served to me at each meal. Eggs and bacon, fatty sausage gravy and biscuits, red meat, fried chicken — foods which are more likely to send someone to the hospital rather than aid in recovery. We do not have to be stuck with these unhealthy food choices while our weakened immune systems are trying to recover.

Green Beans, Grilled Yellow Squash and Cherry Tomatoes Over Rice, Fruit Cup and Whole Grain Roll

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