Increase Your Fruit and Vegetable Intake

Health and Nutrition experts recommend we eat five to seven servings of fruits and vegetables daily. When planning meals, at least 1/2 of your plate should be vegetables and/or fruit. While this might seem daunting, even the most stubborn fruit and vegetable haters can change their diet to eat more fresh produce.

Easy Access

If you don’t keep fresh produce handy, you won’t eat it. You’ll be even less likely if you keep junk food available. So start by buying your favourite two or three fruits and vegetables, and keep them in sight and easily accessible. Keep a fruit bowl with bananas, apples, and oranges. Cut back on the amount of junk food, and put it out of sight. Prep your fresh produce as soon as you get home, that way it will always be ready to eat.

Look for Opportunities

If you’re not ready to eat full servings of fruits and vegetables by themselves, find ways to add them to the current foods you eat. For example, perk up your salads by adding fruit such as blueberries, sliced strawberries, mandarine oranges, apple slices, and pear slices. Add extra vegetables to your soups. At breakfast, add bananas or berries to your cereal or add veggies to your omelette.

Learn to Cook

One of the most effective ways to increase your fruit and vegetable intake is to eat more meals at home. Fast foods and restaurant foods often contain very little fruits and vegetables. If you’re not sure where to start, search Pinterest or buy a new cookbook for inspiration.

Try a Smoothiesmoothie

If you are running short on time, try a smoothie for your meal. In addition to your favourite fruits, try adding spinach or kale.

Change Your Snacks

Start snacking on fruits such as apples, oranges, bananas, and grapes. They don’t require any preparation, and you can take them with you anywhere. Also, try some vegetables for a snack, such as baby carrots.

veggies and fibers are really important

Recent Changes in Dietary Advice You Might Want to Know

choose my plate govEveryone knows that we should eat a balanced diet, but we come across bumps in the road of life that divert our attention from ourselves and our families, and what we eat, all too often. Once in a great while is to be expected, but missing regular meals, or skipping large portions of them, can lead to a lack of vitamins and minerals over time. You as an adult need these to maintain your body, and your growing children need these nutrients to grow up healthy and strong. Without them, all age groups’ health can suffer.

There’s some newer information that you might want to know about this that will help you relax about your dietary intake.
Nutritionists used to say that every meal had to have all of the basic food groups in it, and for vegetarians and vegans, that a complete protein couldn’t be made unless all components were included in the same meal. Recently, these pieces of advice have changed.

Now, nutritionists explain that this is true for a 24 – 36 hour period of time, not the much smaller window of the past. So if you are on the run between soccer practice, a birthday party, a dentist visit, and the task of paying the utilities in person, you might want to know that your family won’t suffer just because you forgot to include a vegetable with the evening meal, and forgot to pack the kids’ snack bags with a piece of fruit the next day.

eat 5 fruits a day

For vegans and vegetarians, those days of trying to fit all the basic aspects of a complete protein into one meal are gone. Now you can include part here in one meal, another later as a snack, and have a complete protein. There’s no reason to gorge yourself trying to fit it all into one part of the day. You don’t have to create the same meals all the time anymore, either. Your body is smart enough to store these nutrients short-term, in hopes that your body will consume the missing components.