From
mindbodygreen >>>
How To Eat For Your Best Skin Ever
by Amelia Freer | February 16, 2016
Growing up, we were told to eat our greens, but this was only partly right. While green vegetables are a powerhouse of healthful properties, having the other colors in our diet is just as important.
Brightly colored foods contain naturally occurring phytochemicals, which are responsible for giving food its color — the fire-engine red of tomatoes; the deep purple hue of blueberries — and also play important roles in protecting our health and staving off chronic disease: mopping up inflammation, slowing down premature aging, supporting sight, protecting the brain, and assisting our immune system.
Yet for many of us, the color beige is the mainstay of our plates. Foods like cereal, pasta, rice, pastries, chicken and bread often dominate our meals. These foods, especially when processed or bleached, offer much lower levels and less variety of nutrients than we need to keep healthy.
I’m not saying don’t eat them, but I am saying aim for the rainbow when it comes to your daily food choices.
Research has shown that our diets should be predominantly plant-based, and so ensuring that we include plant foods in each meal is an important habit to embrace. Every cell in our body survives on the nutrients it is fed — plant foods are the richest sources of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and those color-giving phytonutrients, which form their own cool little health-defending gang.
When humans were predominantly hunter-gatherers we ate more than 800 different varieties of plant foods. These days, we have a very limited choice, especially when shopping in supermarkets.
But at farmers markets you’ll find the more unusual forms of our everyday foods, such as purple carrots, golden beets, yellow zucchini, orange tomatoes, and purple broccoli — there really is a wider variety out there to shake us out of our color comfort zone.
Many experts advise us to eat five portions of fruits and vegetables per day, but they don’t stipulate that they need to be in a natural, unprocessed form. And I believe that we really need much, much more. I encourage you to eat three portions of fruit per day, one per meal (a portion being a small handful), and two to three portions of vegetables at each meal, reaching as far and wide in color as possible.
As you go through your day, try to mentally tick off the different colors you are eating. And see where you could possibly add in an extra burst.
For example, a salad doesn’t have to be only lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and a dressing. Throw in some other dark leafy greens like spinach, broccoli, brightly colored peppers, red cabbage, carrots, beets, and creamy green avocado, too. If you’re making oatmeal for breakfast, toss in some fresh berries or make a smoothie with one fruit and three or four different vegetables. It’s easy once you start.
Read more from
mindbodygreen >>>
