Cooking with Color!
This year’s National Nutrition Month’s theme is about eating colorful foods for your health. It’s an important message because more than 1/3 of Americans’ total calories come from the white and beige foods otherwise known as sugar and refined grains (aka white flour-based foods). And only 1% of adults meet the recommended serving for produce servings.
That’s why the Standard American Diet is S.A.D.!
The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans tell us to cut back significantly on all the sweeteners in our diet and processed foods and get back to eating more nutritious options like fruits and veggies; whole grains; lean protein sources like seafood, skim and lowfat dairy foods.
One way to naturally improve your diet is to make sure that two meals a day half of your plate or bowl are filled with fruits or veggies. As a general rule, women should try to get five servings or more (2 fruit/3 veg) and men 7 (3 fruit/4 veg) daily. There’s no harm, however, in getting more of these foods in your diet.
Some of the tricks I’ve been using recently to make sure I’m eating more produce includes buying more and having it readily available, doubling up the amount of veggies that my recipes call for, which has not negatively impacted the taste of the recipe whatsoever. I’ve also been eating clementines and dried fruit as recovery after Cross-Fit and running workouts.
Use the food color guide below and get ready to transform your diet from the S.A.D and colorless to happy, healthy and colorful.
After reading this article I found many tips for boosting my intakes of fruits and veggies. I am going to start taking a container of veggies with me to work to nibble on i.e., carrots, celery, brocoli. I take a can of V8 to work every day so that helps too. I also plan on carrying some dried fruits with me. Thanks for the tips. Hopefully I can get closer to the RDA of fruits and veggies and add some more color to my diet.
Thanks for the great article, as a newborn vegetarian this will help me get the nutrients I need to stay healthy.
A color coded health chart. Good stuff! Some meats can be sorted by color too I guess, like salmon (red) but I generally stay with the pale white in that case, ala chicken and turkey. The only color to avoid in meats is black, like they unfortunately show in all those food shows. (Loaded with HCAs, nitrates and other meanies.)
You are what you eat so I guess drab colored food makes you a drab, dull person. Thanx Warren