Replacing ingredients in meal prep ... good for the MIND!

Healthy eats are as good for the body and brain - as it is the mind.  Changing body, brain and mind can be as simple as "garbage in, garbage out."  Simple does not mean cheap, however.  Often one of the challenges in overall health can be boiled down to costs.  Not just healthcare costs or access to premium services - but food costs can impact illness, inlcuding mental illness.  Fish contains natural ingredients that can improve mood, reducing anxiety and improving depression; it can help with necessary fats and can make the skin and the hair look - well - better.  In preparing fish, skin on can add to the health content - and so can upping the flavor by using health replacers!  For example, replacing butter and fat with olive oil from frying pan to oven baked, replacing the flour based bread crumbs with coffee ground almonds, replacing the salt with a splash of soy sauce, reducing "fishy flavors" (if you must) by adding fresh lemon and canned olives, adding delicacy with fresh basil, sweet red peppers and fresh garlic cloves...move it to the oven on a cookie sheet (covered with a second oiled cookie sheet at about 375) .... you see healthy and delicious can be a thing!  What the fish will do for the body and brain, the prep and concentration on healthy alternatives will do for mind. Plus when body and brain work better, mind (ways of thinking) will adapt better.  Plasticity is enhanced.  Youth is enhanced.  Affirmations build. 

In the US April 15th is tax day.  For many it is the culmination of a years worth of inventory - sorting out gains, losses, expenses, earnings and acquisitions of various kinds.  For the "feds" and its many "partners" it is about algorithms that attempt to accommodate wealth and poverty such that some equitable contribution emerges from "standardized" forms (paper and paperless alike).  The business of tax season is held within agencies of revenue and calculating corporations all working in asset management. For lone individuals "my taxes" may be about a "fair share" or

scarce affordability.  With a 60,000 page tax code trickling down "something" to those who pay, to those who don't, to those who get, and to those who are "sheltered," the math seems insurmountable.  Whatever tax day is, maybe an annuity of some other kind, hopefully it generates for "we the people" what is needed.  Yet trillions in debt, and the many who go without - tells another story of a system for its people.  Homeless folks, uninsured folks, untreated and dying folks, the very old, the very young, and infrastructure too - exemplify how taxes may not suffice. Politics, non-profits and the economics pros - benefactors of certainty in this season - may overlook gaping holes of an under-served citizenry - lost in code that hundreds of millions abide yet nearly none comprehend.  If you paid in or if you were refunded - today is the day!   Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema, on Unsplash