Raw Ketchup - (K)

What is in your ketchup? One person once told me, "what do you mean I don't eat veggies at all? How about ketchup? It's made out of tomatoes, right?" Right! It is in fact made out of tomatoes. Heavily processed tomatoes, to be exact.

It also has distilled vinegar, which is very very bad for us. Every single time you eat anything with distilled vinegar (it's pretty much all of vinegar including balsamic and except for Apple Cider) your blood cells become sticky and a lot of them lose the ability to deliver oxygen to your body cells and brain. Apple Cider is a different story. It's fermented apples, which produced a lot of good bacteria, and that's what makes it sour. So basically, Apple Cider Vinegar is a probiotic. It doesn't mean you need to go over board with it. It is still a vinegar and still will make your blood cells sticky, but it's not as bad as distilled vinegar which brings zero goodness to your body.

Store ketchup also has a lot of sugar. If you look at the label you will normally see 4-5 grams of sugar in there and get excited that it's safe to eat. Hold on! Those 4-5 grams are not in the whole bottle. It's only in 1 serving, which is 1 Tbsp. 4-5 grams of sugar is exactly 1 full tsp. Can you imaging putting 1 full tsp of sugar into 1 Tbsp of ketchup? Doesn't sound like too little anymore, right?

In some brands, they go even further and instead of sugar add High Corn Syrup. And that is - Cancer long term...

If you like ketchup, I would like to offer you a very good substitute you can make yourself at home that will last in the refrigerator for 2 weeks. Simply throw all below ingredients into your blender and blend till creamy.

1 cup fresh tomatoes

1 cup sun-dried tomatoes

1 Tbsp minced garlic

2 Tbsp minced ginger

1/4 cup onion

8 fresh large basil leaves

6 large dates pitted

1/4 cup maple syrup

1/4 cup olive oil

1 Tbsp Nama Shoyu (I showed it to you in previous posts.) If you don't have it, you can add regular soy sauce or 1 tsp of salt

Makes about 1 1/2 cup of healthy and safe ketchup. Yum! 😋