If you're trying to eat healthier but are worried about sacrificing taste, you're not alone. Too often healthy nutrition is unfairly associated with a bland and boring diet. Making healthy changes to your diet requires an open-minded attitude, but you can tweak your shopping list and cooking style to boost nutritional oomph while continuing to elicit applause around the family dinner table. Preparing delicious food that's good for you takes a bit of extra effort, but it's worth it.
Goodbye, Bad Fat
Heart disease is the No. 1 killer in America, and the copious quantities of saturated and trans fats prevalent in the Western diet are largely to blame. However, fat-free is neither a healthy nor a gastronomically attractive alternative. You need some fat in your diet. The trick is consuming the right types, in appropriate amounts.
Polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats help fight heart disease and provide you with a healthy source of dietary fat. Saturated fat is already produced by your body, you don't need to consume it in your diet, and doing so increases your total cholesterol levels. In order to decrease your consumption of saturated fat, limit your consumption of meat, poultry with skin and full-fat dairy products. If possible, eliminate trans fats completely. These synthetic vegetable oil derivatives do not exist anywhere in nature, and they don't belong in your body either.
To increase your consumption of healthy unsaturated fats, add avocados, nuts, seeds and canola oil to your cooking regimen.
Get Fresh
Trust nature to give you the best sources of nutrition. By focusing your diet on plant-based foods like nuts, veggies and fruit, supplemented with appropriate portions of low-fat protein like tofu or fish, you'll be flooding your body with vitamins, minerals, plant sterols, omega-3 fatty acids and fiber. These nutrients build strong muscles and bones, boost immunity, reduce inflammation and keep your metabolism humming along.
Processed foods are stripped of nutrients and loaded up with chemicals that artificially enhance flavor, increase shelf-life and tart up your food with fake colors. A simple technique for ridding your life of processed foods is to read the labels on your grocery items. If you can't pronounce an ingredient, or don't know what it is, don't buy it.
Stop the Pop
If you want to eat healthier, stop drinking soda. It's total garbage nutritionally, and its high-fructose corn syrup content is a prime contributor to the rise of obesity in America. According to Princeton researchers, the impact of high-fructose corn syrup is even greater than that of high-fat diets in causing obesity, and the rise of the present obesity epidemic corresponds with the steady rise in the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup that has occurred since the 1970s.
The Harvard School of Public Health states that drinking too many sugar-sweetened soft drinks or even fruit punch may increase your risk of diabetes. Colas may deplete your bones of calcium, and even artificially sweetened sodas may increase your risk of weight gain. Switching to healthier beverages such as herbal tea, sparkling water or homemade fresh fruit coolers can tame your thirst without spiking your blood sugar.
How to Shop
You'll shop healthier if you confine your grocery cart to the perimeter of the store. By ignoring the inner aisles, you'll avoid the mountains of processed food that crowds the interior shelves of the store. By circling the outer edge of the store you'll limit your choices to the produce, dairy and butcher shop areas, where food is less processed. Buying healthier foods could be as simple as refusing to purchase anything with added ingredients that you cannot identify as originating in nature. True, the work required to prepare such foods is more intensive than popping a frozen dinner in the microwave, but good nutrition means better health and longer life, so it all works out in the end.
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