Choosing what to eat can be overwhelming with countless diet books and opinions available. Amidst all the counting, restricting, and renaming, navigating the health landscape might seem daunting. However, you don’t need extreme diets to live a healthier life. The basic building blocks of health are simple: eating nutritious foods and exercising regularly.
What Makes a Healthy Diet?
A healthy diet focuses on consuming nutritious foods. Unfortunately, many of the foods we eat offer little or negative nutritional value. For instance, excessive sugar and junk food are common in American diets. By cutting back on these, you can significantly improve your health and aid weight loss.
Since sugar is hidden in many products, like salad dressings and sauces, it overwhelms our bodies. Therefore, replacing sugary foods with vegetables and homemade meals can lead to noticeable improvements in just a few months.
Three Essential Additions to Your Diet
- Live Foods
Firstly, live foods are freshly picked produce. Consuming raw vegetables and fruits provides up to one-third more nutrients compared to cooked foods. For instance, you can maximize health benefits by including one raw vegetable or fruit with each meal. This might be as simple as snacking on an orange, adding a salad to lunch, or incorporating raw veggies into your dinner. However, remember not to replace all cooked vegetables with raw produce, as the latter can be harder to digest.
- Omega-3s
Secondly, omega-3 fats offer numerous health benefits. Most Americans consume too many omega-6 fats, found in processed foods, and not enough omega-3s. You can increase your omega-3 intake by eating fatty fish like salmon and sardines or by taking cod liver oil supplements. Omega-3s can reduce cholesterol, combat heart disease, lower diabetes risk, and provide additional health benefits.
- Healthy Fats
Lastly, healthy fats are crucial for well-being. While you should avoid trans fats and vegetable oils, you can include healthy fats like olive oil and nut oils for cold use, and coconut oil or animal fats for cooking. These fats support overall health and contribute to a balanced diet.
By incorporating these three changes into your diet, you can start to see significant health improvements within weeks. You don’t need to make drastic changes to become healthier this year.
