Diabetic Munchy Mix

The Cast of Characters
(Can you tell that we love Whole Food Market?)

Mixing the "mix"
(I love my huge silver bowl-it is my favorite)

The Final Product
(Don't you just love canning jars? They are so useful!)

Ingredients:

1. Sunflower Seeds (salted or unsalted- your choice) You could use any combination of nuts if you like.
   
2. Cashews (salted or unsalted- your choice)
3. Bag of Puffed Kamut (Check out your local health food store for this) You could use puffed rice if you like.
4. Bag of veggie straws or veggie fries (You could sub these with any low salt version of chips/straws/pretzels, etc) You can find these at health food grocery stores and some chain markets.
   

Well, that is it. The quantities are up to you. If you have nut lovers, put more nuts in. If you have veggie straw lovers, add more of those. This mix is great for diabetics as there are not a lot of bad carbs and oils to run the sugar up. Whole grains and nuts will digest slower and thus no flood of sugar into the bloodstream. Nuts are just plain good for you too.

This mix was the brainchild of my hubby. I give him all of the credit. He loves this stuff. His mother loves this stuff. As a matter of fact, she is getting some for Christmas. (She doesn't know that my blog exists so it's OK that I said that).

Every year, our family gets all of the kids something for Christmas and we adults just watch them quickly tear into all of the paper, sit back snapping photos, and laughing. No one really cares whether they get a gift or not (the adults I mean- the kids would freak out if they didn't get a gift). Well, every year, even though we are not supposed to spend on the adults, we get everyone a little something. One year, they got a coffee cup filled with reindeer poop. This year, well, they are getting munch mix. I still can't think of some cute and funny name to call it that compares to reindeer poop, but there is still time before Christmas. Maybe we'll think of something.


Warning: Home school mom has to throw in educational information:

There are diabetics in my neck of the woods. There are probably diabetics in your neck of the woods too. There are also thousands of diabetics in the world.

According to the Weston A Price Foundation's article by Dr. Tim Cowan, diabetes can be considered a modern day epidemic with more than 20 million people in the United States suffering with the disease. Some families are lucky enough to not have to worry about diabetes but others deal with it daily.

Around my family circles, we are known as "health" nuts. We weren't always what people considered nuts (or at least we didn't think so). Our "health nut" adventure began when we started researching herbs, a healthy diet, and the effects of our modern American diet on our bodies. Have you ever watched the film "Super Size Me" by Morgan Spurlock? It is a good starting point. Just google it and you will find information about it easily.

There are some good books out there too about diabetes. I have read these to begin with: Reversing Diabetes by Dr. Julian Whitaker and How to Prevent and Treat Diabetes with Natural Medicine by Dr. Michael Murray. Both are very eye opening reads in regards to finding out that some diabetics can treat themselves with diet, exercise, vitamins, and herbs (especially the "herb" part). The study of herbs is very close to my heart as I have just begun to try some of nature's miracle medicine on my family.

To further your own adventure, take a trip to a health food store. There are increasingly larger numbers of these types of stores popping up as the rising cost of pharmaceuticals are forcing people to seek more affordable alternatives to what their doctors are prescribing.

I could go on forever talking about natural treatments! My advice to you all is to research things for yourself. You just might be surprised at the information that is out there. While you are looking all of that great information up, snack on some munchy mix.