With summer time fast approaching, the color green isn’t just what we see in our yard…but rather should be a staple in our every day diet. I was recently told by one of my patients that she drinks pre-made green juices and when she showed me the bottle, the juice in it is a green color but the ingredients were a little more than just sugar water and small amounts of green apple and pear was incorporated in this drink.
My point with this is that just because a drink is green, it doesn’t mean that it’s automatically good for you. So the next time you want some green in your diet, look for ingredients that are in its natural form or blend the juice yourself.
Otherwise, if you choose to buy drinks off the shelf, make sure that you look beyond the color green of the liquid in the bottle. The ingredients may end up showing you that you are in essence buying green colored sugar water. So, make sure you are reading the ingredient labels of your foods and drinks. These companies are going to name their products with healthy names, but don’t let that mislead you into thinking it is truly healthy unless the ingredient label confirms that it is.
However, if you choose to do the juicing yourself, there is no need to stick to just green vegetables…I always recommend eating the colors of the rainbow so that you can take the guess work out of making sure you are getting the full gamut of nutrients that you need.
And if you are not into juicing, you can blend vegetables into soups, steam vegetables, eat them as salads, and even incorporate blended vegetables into your tomato sauce for pasta or your sauces so that your family members who don’t like vegetables will barely know they are in the food…but they will get the nutrients nonetheless.
So for this spring and summer, let’s not just stare at the greenery in your yard, let’s take it onto your dinner table. If your family members don’t like vegetables, slowly introduce them to various options over time. But in the interim, you can hide your greens in your sauces for your meals so that your family members will benefit from those nutrients without you having to hear about their various dislikes of various different vegetables.
