How did it go yesterday? Ash Wednesday is the first day to become CertifiedMeatless? If you had trouble finding food choices, then you did not consult the experts at CM-LO! Take a look today to plan your meals for the next 40 days and beyond!

The Great Lent has begun. It is the time for special abstinece. In the Catholic Church, this means abstaining from landed meats such as pork,beef, poultry, and game meats. CertifiedMeatless continues to provide you information on choices in which you can maintain the special abstinences required by Canon Law. For food choices please consult our links to manufacturers and their CertifiedMeatless food products. Check out our great recipe indexes found in our Links section! Also prepare yourself for the season! Make Lent CertifiedMeatless. Make it a CM-LO day!

Hello, Here is an excerpt from the Harvard Medical Journal. It shows good health habits for a healty hear! Remember today is Ash Wednesday so make your protein choices meatless for meatless Wednesday and a meatless Ash Wednesday! For further information go to http://CM-LO.com

A Heart-Smart Diet
The right diet can help prevent some forms of heart disease. To stay healthy, your body needs the right balance of foods. A “heart-smart” diet means:

Keeping your total calories under control
Eating as much vegetables as you want (at least several servings per day)
Eating more fruits
Replacing butter and margarine with mono-saturated and polyunsaturated oils
Avoiding trans fats and saturated fats
Eating whole grain foods instead of refined carbohydrates and potatoes
Getting your protein from fish, egg whites, legumes, beans, nuts and seeds.
Increasing your physical activity and trying to dedicate time for exercise every day

Hello all, Tomorrow begins the Great Lent. As you may know, for followers of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, Lent is the period of abstinence, piety, charity to others, and prayer. Abstinence is refraining from slaughtered landed meats and their by-products. CertifiedMeatless has a vast catalogue of food products that are void of landed meats and their by-products. Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent for the Occidental Christians, is the ultimate in meatless Wednesday.

It is Friday and it is once again a day of reflection and abstinence. Not only good as a mortification, eating fish,seafood, and vegetables is a way of cleansing the body and allowing the body to obtain useful chemical components. Omega 3’s which are found in seafood has many properties that lead to better health. I am enclosing an excerpt from a study conducted by the National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine published a few days ago. Please read and absorb the information. One note about fish oil and Omega 3 supplements: Many over the counter supplements are encased in geletin which is a meat derivative and therefore non CMLO. Choose carefully and choose supplements encased in dextrose or other CMLO acceptable capsules. More infomation at http://CM-LO.com.
Here is the excerpt and have a Certified Meatless Friday!

About Omega-3 Fatty Acids
Omega-3 fatty acids—also known as n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs)—are important for a number of bodily functions, including the relaxation and contraction of muscles, blood clotting, digestion, fertility, cell division, growth, and movement of calcium and other substances in and out of cells.

The three major types of omega-3 fatty acids are alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). ALA is found in seeds, vegetable oils (canola, flaxseed, and soybean), green leafy vegetables, nuts, and beans. ALA is converted, usually in small amounts, into EPA and DHA, after it is ingested. Fish oil and fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel, herring, and tuna are the primary sources of EPA and DHA. Algae oils are a vegetarian source of DHA. Omega-3s are available as dietary supplements, usually in the form of capsules or oils. Commonly used supplements include fish oil, flaxseed oil, and walnut oil.

Most American diets provide at least 10 times more omega-6 than omega-3 fatty acids. Scientists generally agree that people should consume less omega-6s and more omega-3s for good health; however, the best ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s has not been determined.

Hello all. Today is the First Friday of the month. It is a special day of mortification and prayer. Remember Lent is coming soon so it is good to get into that mode of thinking and action! Today should be a day of abstinence from slaughtered landed meats and their by-products. Choose from hundreds of products listed on our web-site http://CertifiedMeatless.com . Need some ideas? Look at our newly updated recipes link. You will find wonderful vegetarian and seafood recipes from all over the world.

Just when you thought……
We often strive to knock down the calorie count to get into better physical shape. I came across this article from a month ago and was not really surprised. Nonetheless, it just goes to show you that you need to take a common sense approach towards your eating habits. Eat the right foods, but not too much,and balance your diet with a consistent approach to exercise. Below is an article which you may find rather surprising!

By Robert Preidt

THURSDAY, Jan. 7 (HealthDay News) — Many reduced-calorie restaurant and packaged foods in the United States have more calories than indicated on their nutritional labeling, a new study reports.

Tufts University researchers analyzed 29 quick-serve and sit-down restaurant foods and found they contained an average of 18 percent more calories than the stated values. The team also checked 10 frozen meals bought from supermarkets and found they had an average of 8 percent more calories than what was printed on the label.

Three of the supermarket-purchased meals and seven restaurant foods contained up to twice their stated amount of calories.

An added complication was identified with some restaurant meals. Five restaurants provided side dishes at no extra cost, and the average amount of calories in the side dishes was greater than for the entrees they accompanied, the researchers reported.

The study appears in the January issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

“These findings suggest that stated energy contents of reduced energy meals obtained from restaurants and supermarkets are not consistently accurate and, in this study, average more than measured values, especially when free side dishes were taken into account, which on average contained more energy than the entrees alone,” wrote the researchers, led by Susan B. Roberts, director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at Tufts’ Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging.

They noted that a “positive energy balance of only 5 percent per day for an individual requiring 2,000 kcal/day could lead to a 10-pound weight gain in a single year.”

Not only could this hamper people’s attempts to control their weight, the researchers wrote, but it also could “reduce the potential benefit of recent policy initiatives to disseminate information on food energy content at the point of purchase.”

SOURCE: American Dietetic Association, news release, Jan. 5, 2010

Wow! January just flew by under the radar. But now we are starting February 2010 and its starts perfectly on the first day of the week! It is a great day to start up the meatless monday with CertifiedMeatless once again. I know that a lot of you had those new year’s resolutions which went by the way-side. But, everyone can keep trying again. Sometimes the habit is hard to kick start but when you feel the need for the routine, then the magic can start. So lets try and go meatless today. When you are done reading this blog and some of the others, go to http:CM-LO.com for more information on being meatless and CertifiedMeatless! Make it a CM-LO day!

For today’s meatless ideas take a look at yesterday’s posts. I posted a couple of fantastic ideas about the Mediterranen Diet. Great things to think about. A real cause of the day is to make some sort of mortification in honour of the hundreds of millions of babies lost because of the horrible federal decision that was legislated on this day back in 1972. Read and think, fast and pray.

CertifiedMeatless presents to you these important findings. Take a look at the video on the link below!http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/videos/news/fish_012010.html