Colours Increase Nutritional Value

I always get excited about colours! You can make your meals look so much better by adding colour, but did you know that generally the more colourful a meal, the higher it’s nutritional value will be!

Eating a wide variety of fresh fruit and vegetables will ensure that you get all the essential vitamins and minerals that your body requires.

Here is how I include some healthy colour in my meals.

Add chopped strawberries and blueberries to a bowl of muesli in the morning. Berries are high in antioxidants which will help your body fight heart disease and cancer. Blueberries in particular are high in soluble fibre which helps to keep you fuller for longer, and a small handful of raspberries will give you all the vitamin C that you body requires for the day. Eating this for breakfast means you will have already included five out of the ten food groups listed!

Lunch time is also full of colour and I often get comments on how nice my salad looks just based of this! One of my favourite salads to bring to work with me contains the following ingredients: a small tin of tuna, a mixture of baby spinach leaves and rocket, a handful of broccoli florets, some cherry tomatoes and some red onion.

Broccoli contains nearly 90 percent of the vitamin C of fresh orange juice and almost half as much calcium as milk. Researchers have recently found that calcium probably prevents weight gain by increasing the breakdown of body fat and hampering its formation.

I also try to break away from the traditional 3 vegetables that often get served up at dinner time. Rather than serving larger portions of only a few vegetables try to include small portions of as much colour as you can. How about including some beans, peppers, squash, carrot, spinach, sweet potato…in fact as much colour as you can find!

Here’s a challenge - next time you are doing the groceries, take a walk down the fruit and vegetable isle and throw as much colour into your trolley as you can. You don’t need to have big portions of foods that are new to you - just try to have a little of them often! See what combinations you can come up with!!