Healthy foods

Healthy Eating Isn't As Easy As It Sounds

As a health writer and certified health coach, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why so many people are facing this conundrum—and why I struggle with it in my own life. I don’t think the answer is as simple as saying eating healthy is "too difficult," or "too expensive," or "too time-consuming." There are endless convenient options for us these days at grocery stores and restaurants. It’s really quite cheap to load up on bulk produce, beans, and brown rice. And we all have 20 to 30 minutes to whip up a salad or even a pot of soup.

The latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans reinforce some important messages for healthy eating. For example, focus on fresh fruits and vegetables; high-fiber foods; whole grains; legumes, including peas, beans, certain nuts; fish and olive oil.But how do you know where to start? What foods are most beneficial, and which are not? And how can you make sense of reports that say “eat this” one day and “don’t eat that” another?The good news is there are now several healthy eating plans—two of which were specifically outlined in the Dietary Guidelines—that can help. More and more research shows these diets—really more of a way of eating than “diets”—are heart protective and help to promote healthy eating overall, including how we choose to cook and prepare our foods.

The Mediterranean Diet

What it is: Although there isn’t a single Mediterranean diet, this eating plan commonly emphasizes:

• fresh fruits and vegetables
• high-fiber foods, whole grains
• legumes, including peas, beans, certain nuts
• fish
• olive oil

Fats make up a greater proportion of this diet, but they are mostly from unsaturated oils, such as fish oils, olive oil, and certain nut or seed oils (canola, soybean or flaxseed oil), which are thought to have a protective effect on the heart. The Mediterranean diet is also light on dairy and meats.

Benefits: This diet has been linked to weight loss, a lower likelihood of developing diabetes, heart disease, or having a heart attack or second heart attack, improvements in blood pressure and blood cholesterol, and it may even help to slow memory loss.

In fact, a large trial of nearly 7,500 adults showed that following a Mediterranean diet with added olive oil or nuts reduced the number of cardiac events—stroke or heart attack—by nearly one-third among people already at high risk.

I found this book recently which was written by Stephanie Tornatore. This book includes very good recipies and it saves our time lot. If you want to  purchase this book, please click on the link below

Click here to collect this coupon