As a child, you might remember being told to ‘eat your greens’. Green vegetables were seen as a critical part of a healthy diet and people were encouraged to increase their consumption of all things green. Today, that advice has changed. Nutrition coaches and dieticians recommend that you try to ‘eat the rainbow’, and incorporate healthy fruits and vegetables of all different colours if you want to achieve a balanced diet.
Rainbow foods
Fruits and vegetables come in all different colours. It is important to get plenty of green vegetables down you, but you need a wider variety of colours to get rounded nutritional benefits. For example, red fruits and vegetables contain lycopene, which protects against cancer, while orange and yellow foods contain lutein and beta-carotene, which both promote great eye health.
Don’t neglect the brown, beige and white vegetables either. Potatoes, bananas, mushrooms and garlic may not be bright and colourful, but they are an important part of the rainbow spectrum and should be incorporated into a healthy and balanced rainbow diet.
A rainbow recipe for you to try
The classic rainbow salad is perhaps the easiest way to bring some colour to your plate. Simple to prepare and full of colour, this bold, bright salad will even appeal to young children. It is the ideal summer meal, packed with flavour and nutrition and very easy to make at home.
For the salad, you can mix and match the ingredients to suit your own tastes, but to get the perfect rainbow mix we recommend you use red cabbage, avocado, cucumber, tomatoes, red and yellow peppers, radishes, carrots and cilantro. Chop into rough chunks and combine in a large bowl.
For the dressing, combine olive oil and apple cider vinegar with the juice of an orange, and either a shallot or a piece of ginger as preferred. This sharp, tangy dressing is the perfect finishing touch to a rainbow salad.
So there you have it, a simple and easy rainbow meal that you can try today. There are many others ways to bring the rainbow into your meal planning. Use lots of different fruits and vegetables when you cook and try to combine different colours to bring variety into your meal. For custom nutrition coaching and to get more tasty healthy recipes, contact us today and ask about our online coaching program.
