I've spent a lot of time studying, understanding and experimenting with food, and I don't mean gourmet but food that benefits health, vitality and life expectancy. Here are some of the things I believed were what any individual can easily do to maintain healthy food habits:
- 1. The thumb rule is to eat freshly prepared, home-cooked meals with balanced components that meet your daily recommended nutrition needs. So, no packaged foods, no fast food, no synthetic or processed foods. Tough, but do-able; particularly if you can hire a cook or have a home-maker to take care of it for the family.
- 2. Colourful meals. Yup, but not with the help of food dyes and colorants! Adding the dark greens and reds to your meal (spinach, broccoli, radish, beet, berries, carrots) ensure you cover the various essential and much-needed vitamins and minerals into your meals without actually calculating. So, just checking if there's colour in the plate can be an easy way to good health!
- Cut out the saturated and trans-fats (artificial fats) from your diet completely. While a healthy balance of natural fats is essential to maintain a healthy body and prevent joint troubles, bowel disorders and colon-related complications, we can all do without any LDL (bad) Cholesterol. Fats from virgin oils of olive, coconut, fennel, flax and other seeds are good, while dairy fats should be reduced to skim and low-fat only. Cow's ghee, however, is the only saturated fat that is not harmful and recommended in daily diets to about a tablespoon a day. Fish oils too are very healthy and have anti-oxidation properties along with Omega-3.
- Fad-diets are more harmful than helpful. So going on a no-carb, no-fat, no-grain or high-protein diet is only going to have short-term benefits as your intestines, kidneys and other organs work doubly hard to keep up to such diets and cry back in the long run. So the answer is to balance carbs, proteins, fiber, and fat according to the body's metabolism and daily requirement.
