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.
