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Submitted by: Paul Yates
Barbecue sauce can’t be healthy can it? Well yes it can. The base ingredients to any barbecue sauce have tremendous health properties so here are my arguments for eating lashings of homemade barbecue sauce.
The base to most your traditional BBQ sauces is tomatoes and dependent on how gastronomic you are you can use fresh tomatoes, tinned tomatoes or just straight ketchup. What I didn’t realize until I started researching this just what a super-food tomatoes actually are.
For a start they contain a natural source of phenylalanine. To be fair this substance gets blamed a lot for hyperactivity in children because it’s used as a preservative in many soft drinks and cordials but in the dose levels that you get in tomatoes, it can be beneficial. Phenylalanine is small doses actually boosts concentration and is claimed to help your memory, so that’s me happy, I can eat barbecue sauce and cut down on my caffeine intake.
Tomatoes also contain a substance called Lycopene (it is this substance that give tomatoes their red color) and this helps boost the immune system and fights chronic fatigue. It is chronic fatigue that can then lead to irritability and depression. I use a lot of tinned tomatoes in my cooking whether it’s making barbecue sauce or pasta sauces or pizza toppings and the one thing that I was surprised to know was that the very act of boiling the sauce and reducing it to a nice thick consistency actually concentrates the amount of Lycopene in the sauce thus making it easier for the body to absorb.
The next most significant ingredient in barbecue sauce is vinegar (the sour constituent) and there’s so much to say about the health properties of vinegar despite it having none. Vinegar has long been touted as a health cure for many ailments but when you actually analyse it, the health properties are actually because it’s an acid and acids help us absorb more of the minerals that our bodies require.
To give you an example. Vinegar has been touted as a tonic for the prevention of osteoporosis and the reason that it is believed that this works is because vinegar aids the uptake of calcium by the body and calcium is that minerals that helps us build strong healthy bones.
It is also reported that vinegar can hinder the enzymes in the body that breakdown complex carbohydrates into sugars so that the rate at which sugar enters the blood is reduced. The logic then follows that vinegar can be an important ingredient in the diet of diabetics.
The third and final big ingredient in a barbecue sauce is sugar and usually brown sugar so is there anything positive to be said about sugar? Sadly not. Let’s not get confused with dietary sugars or saccharides which occur naturally in many of our vegetables, there’s a lot to be said for these sugars and how they help various parts of the body but when it comes to plain simple sucrose (or sugar to you and me) well there’s nothing positive to say.
So is homemade barbecue sauce a healthy option. Well in my book it’s a 2 1 home win and I’m going to continue to enjoy it.
About the Author: Paul Yates has written many
homemade barbecue sauce
recipes including a
sugar free barbecue sauce
recipe and a
Memphis barbecue sauce recipe
to name just two.
Source:
isnare.com
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