Here's why vegetables are your best bet for a healthy life.
- Vegetables are nutrient dense - they pack a lot of nutrition into a minimum of calories. A measly 1/2 cup of vegetables has only 35 calories and is loaded with a variety of vitamins, minerals and lots of flavor.
- Veggies are a dieter's best friend - they are a fat free food and you can have unlimited amounts without adding on calories.
- Veggies are full of fiber - they are rich in fiber so you get fuller faster.
- Veggies are fat-free and cholesterol-free - by definition, vegetables are cholesterol-free and for practical purposes they are fat-free. More than 95 percent of vegetables contain less than 1 gram of fat per serving, and even that is mostly unsaturated fats.
- Variety is the spice of life - The variety of vegetables gives us unlimited choices -- not only in the are there hundreds of kinds of vegetables, but there are hundreds of ways of preparing them. You will never get bored!
- Veggies are a complex carbohydrate - Complex carbs are the ones we should be eating. We digest them slower and they don't cause our blood sugar to have those highs and lows the way that sugars do (the only exception is the sugar in beets and corn which have a high glycemic index and trigger the insulin cycle).
- Veggies contain photochemicals - Our plant based foods, namely vegetables, contain valuable nutrients which have been found through research to be beneficial in fighting some forms of cancer. Recent research is showing that vegetables are nature's best health foods.
To cook and serve vegetables to get the most nutrients is to steam fresh vegetables (rather than frozen - and definitely NOT canned) and use lemon juice, honey, a little olive oil, and your favorite fresh herbs such as dill, basil, parsley, onion, garlic, curry, oregano. Salt and butter are definite NOs.
How do you get your kids to eat these important foods?
Make it a point of making a vegetable at every meal and be enthusiastic about eating it. Don't force it on them, but the more vegetables they see you eat, eventually they will want to eat them too. The old "monkey-see, monkey-do" concept. The best you can do is create a healthy eating attitude and eventually the kids will catch on and join in.
