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When was the last time you had seaweed in your diet? Actually when was the last time you thought of seaweed as a food? Don't worry, seaweed usually isn't the first thing that pops into peoples heads when they think about cooking dinner or even as a healthy part of a diet.

It's also not something you can just go out and find on every shelf in every grocery store either. It may be the opposite. Finding seaweed is tough to do since it is so scarce. And because it is so hard to find it's no wonder our kitchen cupboards are missing this ingredient. Plus there aren't many cookbooks crawling with recipes made of seaweed. Unless you eat sushi, seaweed may sound extremely strange being used as a key ingredient.

You would find it shocking to know that according to statistics the people who live in Japan are healthier and actually live longer than the people in the United States. Seaweed is a staple food of the island country of Japan. This is the key factor in their health and their long-levity. Seaweed contains higher contents of fiber than vegetables, more protein than meat, and more calcium than milk. Seaweed is actually a good ingredient to put into everyone's diet.

If people in the United States would replace the fat of fast food burgers with the fiber of seaweed our health would improve tremendously. It can be simply done by putting a little seaweed extract into the burgers and the burgers wouldn't even taste that different.

The food the we eat now a days is over-processed and grown in depleted soil. However, if you add seaweed to your diet this would not be true. Due to the ocean floor is rich in nutrient material and seaweed is a concentrated source of minerals. If you want to ensure you are receiving the necessary quantities and varieties of minerals and vitamins then adding seaweed to your diet is recommended and proven to help.

There are many types of seaweed. You can find them in health food stores as well as stores that sell Asian food. Look for Agar, Dulse, Hijiki, Irish Moss (which saved thousands of people from starvation during the potato famine of 19th century Ireland), Kelp, Kombu, Laver, Nori, Sloke, and Wakame. Put them together and you have a low calorie sea-vegetable salad! Seaweed can also be used in seasonings, soups, teas, and assorted food recipes.

Using the name seaweed would not be the correct term for a plant with such a high value. The more appropriate terms would be sea plants, sea vegetables, marine flora, or ocean. There have even been studies done by scientists studying the medicinal properties in ocean herbs.

Limu Maui is an exotic name, which translated means brown seaweed. Brown seaweed contains a mineral named fucodian that Japanese researches are claiming to be comparable to a mothers' milk when it comes to the human immune system. PubMed is a service of the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health and is a good place to look-up studies on fucodian, laminarin (also an immune-booster found in brown seaweed), or anything else. It is available at either pubmed.gov or pubmed.org on the world wide web.

If you are the kind of person who does not enjoy vegetables then sea herbs are not right for you and you don't have to eat them. You can still take a supplement that come in tablets, capsules, or liquid extracts form. When done this way you also receive smaller algae forms of seaweed like chlorella or spirulina. Plus beta-carotene, vitamin C, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron, and iodine are some others things you would be adding in by taking these supplements. Again, studies on these can be found at PubMed.

Seaweed is a wholesome food that adds variety to your diet and is good for your health.