Do you follow a paleo, primal, low-carb, low-calorie, starch-free, corn-free, or gluten-free diet? Are you looking for a healthy and delicious, low-calorie, starch-free, grain-free, bean-free alternative to pasta? Do you want to add more variety to your diet? Do you want to detoxify heavy metals and alkalinize your blood?
Kelp can help
Kelp, a brown algae used widely in soups, salads, bean, and grain dishes throughout Asia, is making it’s way into shopping carts, refrigerators, and consumer’s mouth’s in a whole new way. Previously sold dried as unexciting dark brown strips (ready to be soaked and cooked) in the Asian-Macrobiotic section of natural foods markets, the sea vegetable has had a makeover that just might take it mainstream.
An enterprising company in San Diego, California, has been turning this sea vegetable into noodles since 2001. The Sea Tangle Noodle Company has taken a food that used to require extensive cooking and transformed it into an easy to eat raw noodle. Kelp isn’t a new food.
A new noodle
Made of only kelp (a sea vegetable with a long history of safe use), sodium alginate (sodium salt extracted from species of brown seaweed aka sea vegetables), and water, Kelp Noodles are fat-free, gluten-free, and very low in carbohydrates and calories.
Photo credit: Rachel Albert © Copyright 2010
The noodles are raw, easy to prepare, and versatile. They have a neutral taste that allow you to add them to a variety of hot or cold dishes. You can toss them with raw or cooked vegetables and seasonings or salad dressings to make a salad, sauté or stir fry them with vegetables or veggies and fish, poultry, or meat, incorporate them into casseroles or soups, or top with you’re your favorite sauce. They don’t require cooking. Just rinse, drain and serve. When raw they have an extraordinary crunch. When briefly boiled, blanched, sautéed or stir fried or added to a hot soup, their texture softens.
A 12-ounce package of Kelp Noodles contains 18 calories, 4 grams of carbohydrate (4 grams of fiber), and 140 milligrams of sodium.
What’s in it for you?
Although sea vegetables are vanishingly low in calories, they make up for that lack in the nutrient department by providing 56 minerals and trace elements in a well-balanced form. By weight they pack 10 to 20 times the minerals found in land vegetables, including potassium, iodine, chlorophyll, B vitamins, and modest amounts of calcium, magnesium, beta-carotene, chromium, niacin, riboflavin, iron, zinc, and naturally occurring sodium. Note: Although some product labels and authors claim that sea vegetables contain vitamin B12, the B-12 found in sea plants is not biologically active for humans. (So don’t rely on this or any other vegetable for vitamin B-12).
Ancient food and medicine
Kelp and other sea vegetables have been a part of the traditional diets of coastal dwelling people for as thousands of years (and possibly eons). Practitioners of Chinese medicine have historically recommended sea vegetables for dispersing congestion, lowering high blood pressure, reducing edema and goiter (enlargement of the thyroid from insufficient dietary iodine), dissolving hard tumors, removing fat, suppressing coughs, and reducing internal heat. They’ve also used it daily servings of miso soup.
Sea vegetables hold several times their weight in water as they pass through your digestive tract, where the alginic acid they contain forms a lubricating gel that increases the bulk of your stool and accelerates transit time. So if you’re not regular, you can be if you include kelp or other sea vegetables in your daily or weekly diet.
Studies in Japan and at the Harvard School of Public Health show that moderate consumption of sea vegetables in the kelp family (consumed as five percent of the diet) may inhibit cancer growth and bring about total remission of active cancerous tumors. Sea vegetables have also been shown to dissolve non-cancerous fatty and cholesterol deposits.
Cleansing, alkalinizing food from the sea
The minerals in sea vegetables can help to alkalinize your blood. The natural Ph of our blood comes close to that of sea water. Healthy blood is slightly salty and rich in minerals. However, most modern diets contain excessive amounts of acidifying foods (highly processed and preserved foods, meat, dairy products, grains, legumes, sugar, artificial sweeteners, etc.) and a deficiency of alkaline foods (vegetables and fruits). In the context of a nourishing, produce- and protein-rich diet, sea vegetables can help bring our blood and bodies back into balance.
Photo credit: Rachel Albert © Copyright 2010
Detoxify heavy metals naturally
According to studies at McGill University in Montreal in the 1970s, a substance called alginic acid, found in sea vegetables, forms a gel in the intestines that safely binds with heavy metals, such as mercury, cadmium, and strontium, and pulls these potentially toxic elements out of the body through a process called chelation.
Back to the noodles
Sea Tangle currently makes and markets three products: Kelp Noodles, Kelp Noodles with Organic Green Tea, and Mixed Sea Vegetables (a blend of nine different sea plants). You can purchase them in the refrigerated cases at Whole Foods Market or order them by the case directly from the Sea Tangle Noodle Company.
Photo credit: Rachel Albert © Copyright 2010
I tried them
I thought they were interesting. They pick up the flavor of whatever you mix them with. They definitely add texture and crunch to meals. I preferred the noodles cooked rather than raw. I added them to a hot and sour miso soup in one of my cooking classes. Next, I blanched some of the noodles and tossed them with curried kale with caramelized onions and cashews and gluten-free chicken sausage. Another time I tossed them with oil, tamari, ginger, fish sauce, scallions. I would try them again.
For recipes provided by the company, click here.
