1. Keep it Clean:
If you’ve swapped out fast food and refined foods full of saturated
fat, sugar and salt then you’ve done the bulk of the hard work here,but unfortunately that’s not all you should be mindful of. Many
farming methods these days use pesticides and chemicals to improve the yield of their crops, which can be neurotoxic and carcinogenic to humans. Therefore it’s important to always wash fruit and vegetables thoroughly before eating them. You may even want to try a natural fruit and vegetable wash which helps to remove chemicals and pesticides off their outer layers.
2. Go Organic Where Possible:
Along with thoroughly washing fruit and vegetables you could also opt for organic for some fruits and vegetables, especially for those
which are known to contain particularly high levels of herbicides and pesticides. After many years of people saying that organic food doesn’t make a difference to health, a landmark paper in the British Journal of Nutrition concluded that organically grown produce has significantly higher nutritional quality than non-organic counterparts.
3. The Bitter Sweet Truth:
One could argue that weve evolved to crave sugar in order to store and use it when needed. The problem now is that sugar is more readily available and most of us tend to consume a lot more than we need so we’re never short in supply. If we’re eating more sugar than we use, then it gets stored as fat.
Sugar can come in many different forms, it’s not just the white, refined stuff that we associate with foods like cakes, biscuits and pastries. We need to take into account how many portions of fruit we’re having, dried fruit, sugar found in condiments and sauces and also seemingly healthy products like snack bars and bread.
Always remember to read labels on products and if it contains more than 22.5g of sugar per 100g or if one of the first ingredients
on the ingredient list is sugar (or sugar alternative, i.e. anything ending in -ol), then it’s probably not the best option.
4. Nutrition vs Calories:
Just because a food is lower in calories doesn’t always make it better for your health. We live in a society where we want to count calories but very often that can make people miss the point of whether a food or product is promoting better health or not. Try to weigh up the nutritional content of food in relation to the food’s calories. If it’s mostly made up of sugar and preservatives for example, then it’s unlikely to be nutritious and bursting with vitamins and minerals. A great example is a low calorie snack bar vs a handful of nuts; although the nuts will be higher in calories, they also contain vitamin E, healthy fats and some protein too compared to a snack bar which will be low in calories as well as vitamins and minerals but higher in sugars.
5. Get Personal:
One of the wonderful things about life and us as a human race is that we’re all totally unique! We may all look similar in form but the way in which we’re chemically and metabolically made up can vary so much from one person to another. Therefore just because a friend is following a new fad diet, doesn’t mean it’s right for you. For example, many people are turning to veganism for dietary or ethical reasons but a strict vegan diet can leave other people feeling depleted and drained. Don’t do anyone else, just do what makes you feel good.
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