What Food Should I Eat To Stay Healthy? Top 10 Healthy Foods For A Balanced Diet
Food is one of the important factors in our health outcomes. A well-balanced diet is a healthy diet your cells need to protect your body against diseases. But it doesn’t mean that you have to go all into vegetables or only eat superfoods. So let’s take a look and see what food you should eat to stay healthy and what are the top 10 foods to eat for a healthy diet.
What Should I Eat To Stay Healthy?
The single biggest thing you can do to eat healthily is to minimise the amount of processed & refined foods that you eat. These foods are loaded with refined sugars, which cause inflammation & also strip the density out of your bones. Many processed & refined foods are anti-nutrients, which means they strip more vitamins & minerals out of your body than they provide. Which then causes a deficiency of the vitamins & minerals required to maintain a healthy chemical & hormonal production within our body.
Because of the above, we should eat lots of vitamin & mineral-rich food products. Almost no one in the developed world is malnourished in macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates, fats) as it’s much easier to intake these. Yet around 98% of us are malnourished of micronutrients (vitamins & minerals).
Macronutrients (also known as macros) are nutrients our body uses in relatively large amounts. The three primary macronutrients are carbohydrates, the body’s fuel source for your brains, cells, and muscles to function. The second is proteins which provide the body with amino acids and help transport oxygen and other nutrients. And last but not least is fat, while many of us try to avoid it in our diet, it is important to know how important it is for our body. Fat provides energy in times of starvation or caloric deprivation. It is also very crucial for protecting our vital organ parts.
On the other hand, micronutrients are vitamins and minerals our body needs in tiny amounts. Their impact on our health is critical and deficiency in any of them can cause severe (even life-threatening) conditions. Unlike macros, micronutrients are much harder to get enough of from eating. In general, fresh fruits & vegetables should make up the mainstay of your healthy diet as they are a great source of micronutrients.
8 tips on what type of food you should eat for a healthier diet
1.
Go for unrefined carbohydrates such as potatoes, brown rice, quinoa, beans, fruits, and uncooked vegetables such as spinach, green beans, brussels sprouts, celery, and tomatoes.
2.
Buy organic and free-range meat options as they are rich in vitamin A & vitamin E and have double the omega-3.
3.
Wild seafood, not farmed. Wild seafood is caught in their natural environments, so their diets are higher quality and more diverse than farmed fish. Most importantly, they are not fed with antibiotics.
4.
Always include raw nuts & seeds in your diet, as they are a good source of healthy fats.
5.
Clean water – the quality of the water you drink has a huge impact on your cellular health. Go for natural mineral waters whenever possible.
6.
Don’t avoid the good fats. Fats are a crucial part of the diet, as they are needed to transport the fat-soluble vitamins, A, D, E, and K. So be sure to include a variety of healthy fats in your diet. Some of these healthy fats include:
- Avocados
- Pure olive oils
- High-grade coconut oil
- Unrefined vegetable oils such as rice brain & rapeseed oils.
7.
Use natural mineral salts such as Himalayan salt rocks or sea salt over man-made iodized salts.
8.
In general, try to eat a wide variety of different coloured foods, and by this, I don’t mean artificial colour food but naturally different colours. This will ensure you get a broad spectrum of vitamins & minerals. There are 6 colours in coloured food:
- Yellow for skin
- Red for the heart
- White for immunity
- Green for cleansing
- Orange for inflammation
- Purple.
What Food Do You Need For Good Health? For a balanced diet, let’s look at the top 10 healthy foods (fruits & vegetables). These are the top must-eat foods for a healthier lifestyle:
1.
Berries
2.
Peppers
3.
Mushrooms
4.
Avocados
5.
Fresh herbs
6.
Sweet potatoes
7.
Kale
8.
Beetroot
9.
Broccoli
10.
Asparagus
*Processed Foods* are those ready-made foods packed in cartons, cans, and packets. Things like canned soups, sweetened juice products, breakfast cereals, and more.
**Refined Foods** are foods that have been processed and stripped of their nutritional values such as flour, white bread, white sugar, pasta, etc.
