Monday, July 25, 2011

Healthy Breakfast Food the Healthy Way

With the many diseases that are caused by unhealthy living, it has become necessary for people to change their lifestyles and this has been extended to eating as well. Breakfast is the first meal of the day and can therefore easily set the trend of the day. It is for this reason that one should only have healthy breakfast food. While it has been established that many people would want to have a healthy meal to start their day, there are a number of factors that make them shy away from this. Among these factors are money, resources and time. There are however a number of ways that people cab counter this problems. The first of these is to find healthy and simple recipes. There are very many sources of recipes that can help one come up with a healthy breakfast. If one combs magazines and the internet intently, they are bound to find very helpful recipes.

With the busy lives that people live today it can be quite difficult to come up with the ideal healthy breakfast food. To counter this, it is advisable to buy food in bulk and then stock it in the house. With this method, preparation of the food becomes easy as well because all a person needs to do is to remove them from the fridge for cooking. Proper storage of food is very important if it is to retain its freshness. Vegetables and fruits are normally forgotten at many breakfast tables, which is very regrettable as they play a key role in preventing diseases. Vegetables and fruits should also be stocked in the kitchen in advance so that they will make it to the breakfast table every morning.

Just as with any other meal, creativity can be really helpful when one is making a healthy breakfast food. One should experiment with different kinds of food as well as techniques. This will most likely lead to interesting variations of the foods that are quickly becoming monotonous in many homes. There are very many benefits that are associated with eating good breakfast foods and one of these is the consumption of fewer calories during the day. In addition to this there is also the stronger desire to engage in exercise, which in turn prevents one from becoming obese or overweight. Although breakfast is very important, it does not mean that one should over indulge. When passing in front of breakfast restaurants people are usually enticed with foods such as sugary muffins, donuts, scrambled eggs and syrup covered pancakes that mostly do much to increase the amount of sugar level in the blood. If refined carbohydrates, added sugars and sugars are not eaten in moderation they could affect one’s energy levels and could hinder a weight loss process. Therefore breakfast can only be great when one has it the healthy way.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Just Realized That a Healthy Diet Needs Healthy Fruit?

Some people just happen to be like Jay Leno. When someone mentions the part that healthy fruit and vegetables play in a wholesome diet, they'll say, "Oh, fruit? I had one once; I seem to remember it was rather good". In case you don't remember how Jay Leno figures in all this, he landed himself in a bit of trouble in 2006 claiming that there was no real need for fruits and vegetables in one's diet - as he hadn't had one of these things since 1969. If you feel out-of-touch with fresh produce, if standing at the produce aisle makes you feel like a vegetarian at a deli counter, here are the tips you will need, making your foray into getting healthy fruits and vegetables into your shopping basket.

Let's start with how you pick out peaches, plums and apricots. Now the three of these are fruits that need to be firm, unbruised and immaculately without blemishes. You also don't want to see any wrinkles. The fruit just need to be taut, plump and quite perfect-looking. Once you bring them home, you can't just eat them right away. Since these fruit happen to get very tender and delicate once they are ripe, supermarkets order them when their kind of unripe. That way, they are tough enough to stand a long haul trip on a truck. Once you get your purchase home, you can place them somewhere nice and safe where they can take their time, usually couple of days, to ripen. When they seem aromatic and tender after a couple of days, you can pop them right into the fridge so that they will keep well.

Raspberries (the fruit that look like miniature bunches of grapes) and blackberries have an inimitable tangy, juicy taste. When you pick these fruit out at the supermarket, look closely to see if there is discoloration or mold growing. You basically want healthy, plump and lustrous-looking fruit. These berries are transported in fully-ripened condition. That means you can begin enjoying them the moment you set foot in your front door coming back from the market. But if you wish to keep them for a couple of days, make sure that you put them in an airy plastic bag. Make sure that you don't wash them before you put them in the fridge.

Picking blueberries, you'll find that the best ones have a rich hue with a white powdery cast on top. What you don't want are fruit that have wrinkles or that are shrunken-looking. Blueberries can keep for a week in the fridge. But you need to protect them with plastic wrap if you don't want them to begin to look shriveled and shrunken like the kind you've learned to avoid at the market.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Who can Afford Organic Food in an Economy like This?

A survey on the popularity of green cleaning products recently done, found that people in today's economic climate decline such a purchase in favor of ordinary supplies for a price difference as small as 50 cents. It can't be that different when it comes to organic food. This, routinely, costs as much as a third more than regular produce. What do families do when they would like to go organic for their health but just don't know how, given how expensive it can be?

Selective green-ness is a popular new way to make the move towards organic food. People just go organic for a few important purchases and head for the supermarket for everything else. They choose to go organic for the foods that they eat the most often. For many families, this can be a way to go organic in large part without making huge changes to the budget.

So how do you make the right strategic choices for your organic food purchases? What you need to do is to read up on the kinds of commercially farmed fruits and vegetables that happen to usually be the most pesticide-impregnated. Spinach, strawberries, grapes and potatoes seem to be the most polluted. With broccoli, onion, asparagus, bananas and oranges, even commercial farming isn't usually able to pollute them very much. So choosing organic only for stuff that doesn't belong in the most polluted group can be a way to save money and still reap the benefits of an organic diet. Let's look at a few more strategic choices you can make.

Milk happens to be a particularly important area where you need to turn organic. The production of milk in such large quantities requires very unhealthy factory farming methods. Cows are injected with massive quantities of antibiotics and hormones, and they live in a pesticide-soaked environment. All commercial milk contains some serious levels of chemicals. Since children drink lots of milk, switching to organic here should make a lot of sense.

Potatoes happen to often supply a full half of our entire vegetable diet. Since potatoes grow buried in the earth, they are completely in contact with heavily polluted soil. Switching to organic potatoes can easily make a huge change in the safety level of your diet. Almost all potatoes in the supermarket happen to be quite polluted. The same goes for anything made with peanuts.

It says a lot about how unhealthy the American diet is, that ketchup happens to be an important source of vegetable in the average American diet. Switch to organic ketchup; tomatoes can be some of the most heavily sprayed vegetables on Earth. And the same goes for apples.