We consume food because of two basic requirements. Our want and need. The want is because of our hunger and the need is to help our bodies sustain a healthy functional well being while living a vibrant and healthy lifestyle.
Willow Creek has provided our 
recipes for you to fulfill your WANT with incredibly fulfilling and tasty recipes. But even more importantly, we have provided you with these recipes to serve your NEED for nutrition to help you live a vibrant and healthy lifestyle.
We would like to share with you the four major nutritional focuses we feel are important that we have incorporated within all our recipes. You must eat a variety of nutritional foods as there are many more important nutrients such as minerals, vitamins and other nutritional support that you will require daily.
Many of which you can obtain through our Recipes. We would like to mention that there is much more information and factual materials on the nutritional components we share below that you can do more research for yourself. The information below provided is for general basic knowledge. Please consult with your dietitian, your doctor and do your own research in helping yourself understand these and many more important nutritional components to living a healthy lifestyle. Let’s get started.
Fiber
Fiber is of major nutritional importance to the human body. It helps lower cholesterol and cleans your arteries. Fiber helps in weight loss and helps your digestive system function efficiently amongst countless other health benefits that you can research in so many other educational materials. Fiber should be an important part of your daily nutritional consumption. For Adults, approximately 20 to 35 grams of fiber should be consumed daily. This is why we came out with Willow Creek products that are filled with the goodness of fiber. We then integrated them within our recipes. For example, our Beans & Bacon recipe which has 16 grams of fiber contributing to 65% of your daily requirement or our Four Bean Chili with 12 grams of fiber contributing to 47% of your daily requirement. You can try our Four Bean Salad recipe which has 22 grams serving of fiber per serving contributing to 89% of your daily requirement. These are only a few examples of the many recipes filled with Willow Creek products that can assist you in reaching your fiber nutritional daily goals.
Protein
We all need protein to function in our daily lives. It helps repair and build muscle tissue, and helps keep the body healthy by protecting from diseases. Protein provides the body with stamina and energy, and produces enzymes and hormones that the body uses. There are countless other important nutritional benefits protein consumption provides, which we won’t list here but we hope you will investigate more of them on your own. Every cell in our body requires protein to function properly including our muscles, skin, hair and bones. We need to consume protein DAILY. Average daily consumption amounts are dependent upon weight, size, physical fitness and essentially how much protein is used up from our body because of various activities, health issues, physical exercise, etc. Daily consumption of protein for adults can amount to between 35 to 70 grams per day or more. One gram of protein equals four calories.
Our recipes were developed to help you obtain these requirements in a balanced food environment in combination with the other three nutritional components we list here. As well, in consuming our recipes you will find many other vitamins and minerals, with some listed within each recipe nutritional profile we have provided.
Willow Creek’s 4 Bean Chili offers 39 grams of protein per serving. Our 4 Bean Salad offers 28 grams of protein as a vegetarian dish without meat. Our Curried Lentil Soup offers 50 grams of protein per serving. Willow Creek’s recipes are filled with Willow Creek Organic Whole Grain products offering vegetarians and meat eaters alike excellent recipes for tasty, fulfilling meals while providing for your daily protein and energy requirements.
Omega 3
Omega 3’s and Omega 6’s are important nutritional components to our daily healthy lives. However, many consumers already get more than enough of Omega 6’s as they are prevalent in many daily food groups and snacks dependent upon their own eating habits. The challenge is to provide a healthy balance of Omega 3’s to Omega 6’s. Some say that we should seek out a ratio of 1 to 1 which is a level quite difficult to reach in this day and age. However, the key is to try to focus our diets to help bring down this ratio by increasing the Omega 3’s in our diet and decreasing some of those Omega 6’s if we are taking in more than is required daily. Some findings state a ratio of Omega 3’s to Omega 6’s in our present diets are at somewhere around 1 to 15. The challenge and opportunity is to bring this ratio back into line by consuming more Omega 3’s and watching our Omega 6 intake.
Omega 3’s (ALA short for alpha-linolenic acid) are an essential polyunsaturated fatty acid where adults require between 1.1 to 1.6 grams per day. It is a heart healthy fat that reduces cholesterol, thereby helping tackle cardiovascular disease among the many more healthy benefits you will find by further study into this important nutritional component to health.
It has been suggested that approx. 1 tsp. of Organic Flax Oil or 8 grams (1 Tbsp) of milled flax provide enough daily ALA for your nutritional purposes for good daily balance, assuming you are in balance. You can find your ALA in many of our recipes, containing Willow Creek’s Organic Flaxseeds, Organic Milled Flax, and within our Organic Flax Oils, Milled Brown and Golden Flaxseeds. Some of the recipes you will find our Omega 3’s within are our Black Bean Muffin recipe, the Pumpkin Seed Bread, and our Citrus Quinoa Salad or Chick Peas Spread recipes, in addition to many other of our Recipes. The human body is not capable of making these essential fatty acids, thus we need to consume them from sources within our diets. What better way to do so in trying out a few of our tasty nutritional recipes.
Complex Carbohydrates
Sugars and starches. The process of how quickly digestion turns starches into sugar really is the issue with food selection when relation to simple and complex carbohydrates. Starches are long complex chains of simple sugars, thus the complex carbohydrate reference. The key is to avoid eating foods that are overly processed. Essentially the processing of products before consumption is like giving your body a head start in digestion before you even start eating them. The negative issue is that when you eat foods that are easily digestible, you get higher rushes in your sugar levels thus quick energy releases, but then also quick energy depletions. Please be aware these explanations are a bit over simplified, but we do this to only provide some general knowledge and points.
The objective in focusing our recipe and food selection on complex carbohydrate foods is to select foods that will give you a more long lasting and stable energy releases over longer periods of time daily. The difference between consumption of processed products versus whole grain products such as Willow Creek’s Organic Beans, Peas, Lentils, Wild rice etc. is that whole grains are not processed and thus when consumed will take your body longer times to digest them into starches, then sugars thus providing for longer, stable and sustained energy releases. Sort of like mother nature’s internal time release equipment built right in.
Simply put, if whole grain foods take longer to digest, they keep on giving you energy for a longer period of time while your body digests them. We understand that this definition is much simpler than a full description of the complexity of eating complex carbohydrates, and we promote everyone to become more aware of this important nutritional component by reading other materials. But for our purposes here, we would just like to bring it to your attention in a general way in order to expose consumers to eating foods that are as little processed as possible which will help in promoting more sustainable energy throughout the day and better health.
Willow Creek’s Organic Grain Products have been selected with complex carbohydrates in mind and our products are filled with whole grains that are unprocessed, which in turn lends themselves to assisting consumers in living a healthier lifestyle with more sustained energy levels. A saying we have at the Creek is, “The carbohydrates in our products may be complex, but eating them is quite simple”.
