Healthy eating is an important part of a healthy lifestyle. Fruit is essential to our diet as it is high in vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates and fibre, so here is a quick guide on how to add fruit to your diet.
Step 1: Your Health
Eating fruit as part of your daily diet can help you maintain a healthy weight, reduce the risk of heart disease, strokes and some cancers. Also, fruit contains a great variety of vitamins and minerals, carbohydrates and fibre. So eating the right combinations of fruit is particularly good for you. For instance, an apple is high in fibre but low in vitamin C, but if you add an orange and some strawberries, then you will get all the vitamin C you need.
Step 2: 5 A Day
The “5 A Day” programme was launched by the British National Health Service, to encourage everyone to eat at least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Portion sizes vary, depending on the fruit,
A glass of fruit juice does count as one portion, but drinking five glasses will still count as just one portion. If you aim for about a third of your diet to be made up of fruit and vegetables, then you’re well on your way to a healthy diet.
Step 3: Breakfast
Adding sliced banana to your cereal, dried fruit to your porridge, or whipping up a fresh fruit salad are all brilliant ways to brighten up breakfast. Grabbing a handful of blueberries and raspberries can be extremely beneficial, as apart from the usual benefits of fruit, they also contain antioxidants which reduce DNA damage. This includes things like slowing down the skin‘s ageing process, and helping to prevent skin damage from the sun, which is a pretty good start to any day.
Step 4: Snacking
Fruit is the perfect food for on the go and can easily replace biscuits, cakes and chocolate as your snack of choice. These fatty and high sugar snacks are low on essential vitamins and minerals, as well as fibre and can lead to poor digestive health. So keep some fruit in your car, in your bag or on the desk at work to dip into to beat those mid morning, or mid afternoon energy lows.
Step 5: Be aware
Lots of food manufacturers are keen to push the fruit content in their food- to make you think their food is great for you. But be careful, not everything with ‘fruit’ in the title is as it seems. Remember to check the frozen fruit desserts for their fat and sugar contents. Canned fruit in fruit juice is usually fine, but beware of tinned fruit in syrup, as the syrup can be full of sugar.
Try eating 5 a day for a week, and see how good it makes you feel.
weight:normal;text-decoration:none;text-transform:none;color:000000;background-color:ffffff;”>When it comes to nutritional value, berries have a great reputation. Not only are they
packed with antioxidants, called anthocyanins that may help sharpen your memory as you
age, they may be beneficial in inhibiting the growth of cancer cells and are a good
source of fiber, a nutrient important for a healthy digestive system. If that isn’t
enough to make you want to dive in to a bowl of berries, studies suggest that berries
may be also good for your heart and bones.
In a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 72 middle aged
people who consumed just under a cup of mixed berries daily, had increased levels of
“good” HDL cholesterol and lowered blood pressure, two positives when it comes to
heart health.
As we age, estrogen levels decrease in our bodies and bone breakdown outpaces bone
formation resulting in bone loss, a risk factor for osteoporosis. In one study
conducted by scientists at Florida University, rats were fed blueberries every day for
three months. The scientist discovered these rats had significantly increased their bone
density. “We believe that polyphenols in the berries slowed the rate [of bone turnover],
ultimately saving bone,” says Bahram Arjmandi, Ph.D., R.D., the study’s lead author and
professor and chair of the department of nutrition, food and exercise sciences at FSU.
More research is needed to know whether the benefits translate to humans, but the
studies suggest that eating even a small amount of berries each day could be healthy for
your bones.
The bottom line is that there are numerous reasons to add a bowl of berries to your daily
diet. The best way to eat berries is in their raw, natural state, as heating or freezing
can damage the antioxidants.
You can also get several of the health benefits of berries by taking a daily complex. Our Acai Advantage is a highly potent complex which combines the extracts of eleven fruits
and berries.
