I have a great spaghetti sauce recipe that I got from my mom many years ago.
I make it A LOT! It’s a family favourite.
In fact, it may just have been the first meal that I cooked when I got married.
Fast track a few years from that first meal and I became a nutritionist. And with that I thought, it became incumbent upon me to nutricize everything that we ate. A pinch of chia. A dash of hemp.
Well the team started to revolt. Old favs, like gran’s spaghetti sauce, fell from grace.
And here is the thing. The spaghetti sauce is a simple recipe made up of healthy ingredients.
I learned my lesson quick and hard. Don’t try and fix it if it’s not broken.
One of the seasonings that I use in my spaghetti sauce recipe is Black Pepper, a very common seasoning that I think is under appreciated and quite honestly not given the respect that it deserves.
Heap On Those Seasonings!
Herbs and spices play a big role in the kitchen and flavouring food is only of their amazing skills.
Have a look:
- The strong aromatic flavour of herbs and spices stimulates the palette and the digestive juices
- Each culinary herb plays some role in the GI tract
- Every herb and spice have health promoting phytonutrients
And there is a growing body of evidence to support the notion that culinary herbs and spices have multiple anticancer characteristics including antimicrobial, antioxidant and anti-tumorigenic properties.
Health Benefits Of Black Pepper
So back to that common old everyday spice Black Pepper. Black Pepper is harvested from a flowering vine and cultivated for its fruit, the peppercorn. Usually the peppercorn is dried and used as a seasoning.
Along with its often-partnered pal salt, Black Pepper is used in many, many recipes that we google.
And it truly does bring a lot to the party.
Here are some of the amazing health benefits that Black Pepper has to offer:
√It stimulates the taste buds which signals the stomach to secret Hydrochloric Acid (HCL)
√It helps prevent the formation of gas
√It promotes sweating and urination 
√It is an antioxidant and an antibacterial
√It is an anti-inflammatory
And perhaps its greatest benefit is that it aids in the absorption of other nutrients.
Black Pepper has been shown to enhance the absorption of calcium and selenium as well as beneficial plant compounds such as those found in green tea and turmeric
Black Pepper deserves its spot on the top shelf of our spice rack and is a great example that sometimes, often times, common is just fine!
References
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27529277/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29497610/
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/black-pepper-benefits#710.-Other-benefits
