Meet Your New Tasty Best Friend- Jaggery

As I was doing my groceries yesterday at the local Indian store, I was looking for a healthy sweet for my kids as they want dessert after each meal:) I found JAGGERY at one of the shelf!!

I don't know whether you guys know what it is and how does it look like ?

Jaggery is an amorphous form of unrefined and non-distilled sugar prepared from the sap or the juice of plants that contains a considerable amount of sucrose or sugar. This includes things like sugar cane and certain palms like date palm . Sometimes, it is also called country sugar, since it is prepared in rural households of certain countries

Apart from satisfying your sweet tooth needs , it will help you to stick to the NO JUNK JUNE plan laid by Charmaine :) as it has lots of benefits :

-Digestive Agent: This may sound strange, but in India, it is recommended to take a few grams of jaggery after a heavy meal or after eating meat because it facilitates digestion. Jaggery activates the digestive enzymes and itself changes to acetic acid in the stomach, thereby speeding up digestion and making the process go very smooth, reducing strain on the intestines and digestive tract.

-Cleansing Agent: You may not normally connect sweeteners and sugars with “cleansing the body”, but that is actually one of the well-proven benefits of jaggery. Jaggery effectively cleans the respiratory tracts, lungs, food pipe, stomach and intestines.

-Constipation: Jaggery pulls out dust and unwanted particles from the body, while also giving relief from constipation, perhaps due to presence of fiber in it. Reducing constipation and stimulating the movement of the bowels further cleanses the body of the toxins which jaggery just cleaned out and prepared for excretion.

-Source of Minerals: jaggery is rich in minerals, mainly iron with traces of other mineral salts. While most of the iron in jaggery comes through its processing in iron vessels, the other minerals come directly from the sugar cane juice, since the juice does not undergo refinement or bleaching of any kind. Therefore, jaggery is a very good source of minerals for the body.

Sweetening Agent: There are plenty of natural and artificial sweetening agents available on the market, with good old white sugar right at the top. However, almost all of them are just plain sweeteners. How nice would it be if such magnificent sweeteners could add some extra burst of taste as well? The answer to that question can be found by eating jaggery. The first benefit of jaggery is that it is a colorful, taste explosion when consumed, and secondly, it is a sweetener. You can experience the difference yourself. Taste plain sugar and jaggery one after another, and it will be very clear to you. That was only the sugar cane jaggery, a single flavor. Now you should taste the Date Palm Jaggery, Palmyra Jaggery, or one of the other flavors available.

Basically, it’s not too late! You should switch to jaggery today. Add it to your meals for a few days and feel the difference for yourself!