I am sure like me you can look back to your early years and hear some adult telling you to eat up your vegetables (in my case it was my Maltese Nana who was shocked at teenage me turning my nose up at her meals loaded in veg. Man I would love to try one of those meals now!). So, it turns out they were right to nag us, eating up your veg really is a great piece of advice. The benefits of eating veg are numerous.
Below is just a snap shot of some of their benefits.
- Boost your immune system
- A diet rich in vegetables and fruits can lower blood pressure, reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke, prevent some types of cancer, lower risk of eye and digestive problems
- Increase our fibre intake
- Help with weight loss/maintenance
- You could live longer- Research from Imperial College concluded that if everyone were to eat 10 servings of fruit and veggies per day (that’s equal to 800 grams or 20 ounces), 7.8 million premature deaths worldwide could be prevented.
So How do you go about getting more vegetables?
- Aim for veg at every meal
- Add salads to everything you can
- Make soups
- Make salads
- Snack on veg between meals
- Substitute chips etc for vegetables when you eat out
Try it for 4 weeks, if you don’t look and feel better I will be very surprised (ok so that is another thing our parents/grandparents were correct about then!)
Oh and last point try and mix up the vegetables that you eat each week as they all have different varieties of awesome stuff in them.
Paul
