Tips for Adding Fruits and Veggies to Your Diet.

Doctors and our mothers, magazine articles and even television commercials – it seems that everywhere we hear how it important it is to eat our vegetables. It is true, vegetables and fruits are an important part of health nutrition and the best way to ensure that we get all of the nutrients that we need. For many of us, however, it is difficult to eat three meals a day, let alone get in ample quantities of fruits and vegetables and proper health nutrition. While ensuring your health nutrition through fruits and veggies can be challenging, there are four tricks that can make it a bit easier to eat your spinach, broccoli, apples, and other healthy, natural foods of choice.

Keep fruit in plain view.

While the quintessential bowl of fruit might make a nice centerpiece or subject of a painting, it is also a great way to keep this tasty snack alternative in view. When you can see fruit and grab it easily, you are more likely to choose a quick apple instead of cookies or other items more poor in health nutrition. Similarly, clean all of your fruit as soon as you bring it home from the store, ensuring that everything is ready to eat when you need it.

Have some vegetables and fruit with every meal.

Good health nutrition comes naturally when you have some fruit and vegetables with every meal and snack. For breakfast, a glass of veggie juice or even the newly popular fruit and veggie juice mixtures, help add health nutrition to a breakfast. The classic image of a bowl of whole grain cereal, whole wheat toast, low fat milk and fruit or juice is a good way to start your day. For lunch, add fresh veggies to sandwiches or have a crisp garden salad with fruit for dessert. At dinner, try to fill your plate half full of veggies – this is a particularly good tip if you are watching your weight.

Mix it up with variety.

Health nutrition is all about variety in everything we eat, every day. Nature helps us out here by putting different vitamins and minerals in different types of packages. Bananas are great for potassium, and dark leafy greens such as bok choy and spinach have a lot of iron and vitamin C. Unfortunately, most people’s favorite veggies include potatoes and corn, and these are more starchy than nutritious. Try to eat a variety of colors, from red tomatoes to green cucumbers and yellow bananas, and you will guarantee your body the health nutrition it needs.

Add fruits and veggies into meals where you won’t even notice.

In every day cooking and preparing of food there are many ways to add to your health nutrition without even noticing it. For example, when making a lunchmeat sandwich, add lettuce and tomato; try for romaine or darker lettuces, as they have far more nutrients than class iceberg. When making soups, add in extra onion, carrots, peas and more. Try making shish kabob with beef or chicken and 70 percent veggies such as onion, colored sweet peppers, zucchini, broccoli and cauliflower; pineapple adds vitamins and a great sweet taste to shish kabobs as well! Even in baking, you can replace the oil in many recipes with apple sauce, reducing the fat and increasing the nutrition.

With an eye towards health nutrition, adding more nutrients to your diet is as simple as the above four steps. In this way you ensure that you always have fruits and veggies on hands, eat some vegetables with every meal, eat a variety of these foods, and work them into your meals in ways that you won’t even notice, yet improve your health nutrition.