Most of us already know how good healthy eating is and the role of vegetables in a healthy diet.
In spite of knowing the fact, we sometimes ignore or find it difficult to integrate adequate vegetables into our diet regimen.
Vegetables are natural, healthy and delicious; they contain vitamins, minerals, fiber and carbohydrates; provide essential health-promoting compounds to the body in the form of pigments, phytochemicals and antioxidants–the compounds that demote the onset of health-related problems.
Benefits of including vegetables in your diet!
Regular intake of vegetables helps combat heart disease, heart attack, stroke and certain cancers.
Recent researches states that people who consume vegetable-based diets are less prone to chronic illnesses such as atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, sun cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, obesity, high blood pressure (hypertension) and diabetes.
Moreover, the LDL cholesterol and the serum cholesterol levels remain lower. They are less prone to the development of kidney stones, osteoporosis, and gallstones.
Eating more vegetables also help to maintain healthy body weight, control blood sugar levels, clean arteries, and reduce hospital stay.
According to the nutritionists’ recommendation, adults should incorporate at least five servings of vegetables in the diet each day. However, the recent dietary guidelines have raised the number of vegetable servings from five to nine.
For some, adding just five servings of vegetables into the diet is very tough. Then, increasing the vegetable servings number can make them feel overwhelm. But, adding vegetables to the daily diet is not that hard if you follow some of these guidelines:
Ways to add vegetables to your daily diet!
- Eating vegetables is a great improvement to the health, no matter whether it is fresh, preserved, or frozen.
- Add a wide variety of vegetables to your desired foods — burger, pizza, pasta, noodles, salad, or veg-roles.
- Include different textures of vegetables–soft (cooked) and crunchy (raw)—into your diet.
- For additional flavor, try seasoning vegetables using a little fat oil (olive oil), salt, herbs and spices.
- Take vegetable soup or tomato juice as a beverage, as it also counts into the vegetable servings of the diet.
- Prepare a homemade vegetable soup with all leftover vegetables in the home.
- Change the vegetable servings of your diet from time to time by including a new vegetable or recipe to your diet.
- Stock the freezer with a wide-variety of vegetables. It helps to change the vegetable serving of the diet quickly and easily.
- Take puree of a vegetable and add it in the preparation of a soup. Vegetable puree is a good agent in thickening the soup.
- Use packaged fresh vegetable salad as an instant salad for your diet. It also adds more vegetables to the salad of your diet.
- Include salad tray as a separate dish for your meal or snack.
