foodscout blog

One year ago today, we launched foodscout.org. We built the site and collected the data for it as a labor of love after our frustration at not being able to easily find and organize basic information about natural foods, their nutrients, and their health benefits.

Over the last year, we have watched our traffic steadily quadruple! We have received appreciative emails from other health seekers who were looking for a place to start on their health journeys and found it at foodscout.

To all of you who have visited us regularly, passed our link on to your friends and family, and posted our site with an enthusiastic recommendation, we thank you!

We have many ideas and updates in the works that we can’t wait to share with you. Here’s to another year of increasingly good health!

Although over 300 varieties of asparagus are known to exist, only about 20 are considered to be edible. With its origins in the Mediterranean, this vegetable has been used medicinally for about 2000 years.

Asparagus contains purines, which break down to form uric acid, so people prone to kidney stones, gout, or other uric acid-related problems, may want to avoid eating this vegetable. A more harmless side-effect of eating asparagus is the presence, soon after eating it, of a strong odor in the urine caused by the natural formation of various compounds.

Asparagus is especially high in Vitamin K, Folate, Vitamin A, and Iron, making it an excellent food to eat during pregnancy.

Get more information on the Asparagus page on foodscout!

We’ve made a couple of changes to foodscout this week!

Our home page now features a “food of the day.” Each day, one of our many nutritious foods will be featured on foodscout with a picture and summary of its health benefits and abundant nutrients. Our most recent blog posts will also be featured on the home page.

We’re also featuring “books we love” on the food, nutrient, and health benefits pages. A book will only be featured here if we have read it and it has changed our life in a positive way. We will never promote a book simply in order to make a buck. If it’s listed on our site, then we truly believe it will help you to improve your health and happiness. That’s a promise.

We have added one more food recently. Buckwheat, the fruit seed that behaves like a tasty, gluten-free grain, is abundant in too many nutrients to list. Studies have also shown it to be beneficial for lowering blood pressure and cholesterol, stabilizing blood sugar, and helping with weight-loss. Check out the new buckwheat page to find out all that it can do for you!

Since the launch of foodscout, we have added 2 new pages. Dandelion Greens was added to the Foods section, and Blood Pressure was added to the Health Benefits section.

Dandelion has been used for centuries for its healing properties. More and more health food stores are carrying it in their produce departments but most of us can find plenty of it growing right in the back yard. Edible wild foods are almost always more nutrient-dense then commercially grown produce, so take advantage of what nature offers you for free. But be careful not to pick wild foods along roads that are well traveled by cars or dogs.

Much of the information under Blood Pressure was already present on the site, but lumped into the Heart page. We’ve pulled it out into its own page and added a few new helpful facts.

We’ve added a small feature to our website that will help you take foodscout information with you when you need to. Now, when you print a page, our special “print view” page style will automatically eliminate the navigation elements at the top and bottom, allowing more of the important information to fit on the page. The green elements will also be printed in grey or black, so that your printer’s expensive color ink cartridges won’t get used as much.

We started building foodscout.org last July, but in a sense it has been a project in the making for many years, as we’ve explored various diet and health paths and struggled to keep track of so much information.

We intend to use this blog to keep you up to date on all the latest foodscout features and information, as well as to bring you relevant health- and food-related news articles. As we continue down our own path toward health and wellness, we will also share with you whatever new discoveries we make. New foods, nutrients, and health benefits will be added to the site as we continue to gather new data.

If you prefer to receive this information in a convenient email every 2 to 4 weeks, sign up for our email newsletter. Or you can subscribe to an RSS feed of this blog to get the latest news as we post it.

Thanks for visiting foodscout.org. Let us know what you think!