It might be the single best guideline for healthy eating: The less refined a food is, the better.
Although not all processed foods are unhealthy, the great majority of them are. Through added sugars, salts, and fats, processed foods tend to be engineered for overconsumption. During processing, they’re often stripped of their vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Then, to keep them from rotting, they’re pumped full of preservatives, which can disrupt hormones and impair digestion.
Those problems with processed foods are why we opt for whole foods whenever possible. Although we could add sugar and sulfites to our Big Island Pineapple rings, for instance, we prefer to let the healthy snack’s natural flavors shine. We know additional sugars might make them more appealing to some snackers, but we also know artificial sugars can rob healthy snacks of their productivity-boosting benefits. Overindulging in refined sugars results in the infamous “carb crash.”
New Healthy Snack, Same Philosophy
But we don’t just apply our all-natural approach to our office snacks. The newest member of our healthy snack family, CBD chews are made with broad-spectrum hemp extract. Compared to CBD isolate, a more processed preparation used in many CBD products, broad-spectrum hemp extract is a smart choice for four reasons:
1. Additional vitamins
Broad-spectrum hemp extract contains far more than cannabinoids, though. Not only does hemp oil contain vitamins A, C, E, and B, but it also includes non-core vitamins like beta-carotene, which can improve everything from skin health to respiratory function. Although most of those nutrients are present in trace amounts, hemp oil is one of the best dietary sources of vitamin D, which is critical for bone health and immune function.
2. Essential minerals
Broad-spectrum hemp extract’s range of essential minerals is similarly impressive. Although they, too, tend to be present in trace amounts, hemp oil contains magnesium, zinc, potassium, calcium, phosphorous, and iron. Because those minerals are all fat-soluble, however, the body can make better use of them when consumed in hemp extract than many other sources.
3. Healthy fats
As a plant-based oil, broad-spectrum hemp extract is chock-full of healthy fats. It contains the two primary types of essential fatty acids — Omega 6s and Omega 3s — in a 3:1 ratio. Although most Western diets have an Omega 6:Omega 3 ratio of 10:1, hemp oil is unusually close to the idea 4:1 ratio. A study in the journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy found that this ratio is associated with a 70 percent decrease in cardiovascular disease-related mortality.
4. Complete proteins
Believe it or not, hemp protein is one of nature’s only sources of all 20 amino acids, including the eight essential and two semi-essential amino acids that our bodies can’t produce. Hemp is also a key source of edestin, a protein that aids in digestion and DNA synthesis, and albumin, a globulin protein commonly consumed in egg whites.
Sugars Matter, Too
Our broad-spectrum CBD extract has plenty of advantages over CBD isolate, but it’s certainly not the only ingredient in our CBD chews. In place of refined sugar and artificial flavors, we use real fruit purees. While the World Health Organization encourages consumers to make added sugars no more than 10 percent of their daily caloric intake, it places no such limitations on fruit-based sugars. The reason, according to the WHO, is that there’s no reported evidence of adverse effects associated with consuming natural sugars.
Although our CBD chews belong to our wellness sub-brand, their DNA is the same as our other products: whole foods, natural ingredients, and flavors that speak for themselves.
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