Feeling overwhelmed with nutrition tips and advice? Here are four quick tips offered by nutritionists for an optimal diet.
1. Go raw. Incorporate raw vegetables each day along with your usual cooked favourites. Rotate colours (green, red, yellow and even purple) to make sure you hit all of the phytonutrients. Phytonutrients aren’t essential for keeping you alive, unlike the vitamins and minerals that plant foods contain, but when you eat or drink phytonutrients, they may help prevent disease and keep your body working properly. For example, carotenoids are a phytonutrient. They provide yellow, orange, and red colours in vegetables, such as squash, peppers, carrots and pumpkins. Carotenoids act as antioxidants in your body.
2. Make each mouthful matter. Focus on nutrient-dense foods so that each mouthful matters. Such foods include: chia seeds, blueberries, Brussels sprouts, cranberries and eggs.
3. Consider incorporating a daily multivitamin. Support filling in the gaps in your diet with a multivitamin to help get the nutrients that might be missing. Remember, a multivitamin is not the best way to get your necessary vitamin intake. The best way is naturally through the foods you eat. Consider the multivitamin as an added booster to your diet to make sure that all your bases are covered.
4. A handful a day. Nuts, seeds, and beans contain many of the nutrients hard to obtain from fruits and vegetables like zinc, magnesium, and vitamin E.
