Healthy Eating Tips

July 28, 2012 0 Comments

By Lawrence Reaves

There are many small things that you can do as you are shopping and cooking your meals to make them quite a bit healthier. Despite what you might think, you do not have to spend a lot of money or take a lot of time to eat healthily. Many things can be done without any great fuss at all or additions to your cooking schedule. Read on to discover new healthy cooking tips that can really boost the nutrition of your meals.

First, you can prepare tomatoes to be even heart healthier than normal by cooking them. That is right: If you heat tomatoes, you start a chemical change in them that makes the lycopene in the tomatoes become easier for your body to take in. You can do this by cutting roma tomatoes in half and put them on a baking sheet. Put some olive oil and salt/pepper on them and broil them for about 20 minutes. This will give you a really delicious side dish with your meal that is very healthy for your heart.

When you are cooking with garlic, you should know that this wonderful ingredient is full of enzymes that help to fight cancer and to boost your immune system. However, high cooking temperatures will kill the allinase in the garlic, which is much of what makes garlic so healthy. So, after you chop up your garlic, let it stand for about ten minutes before you cook it in a pan. This will let the herb in the garlic make compounds that will reduce the damage from the heat. Of course, if you don’t have a lot of time, there is nothing wrong at all with eating raw garlic. It is great to put on toast and also top off with chopped tomatoes and onions. This is a simple bruschetta that is inexpensive, easy and very healthy.

If you also are cooking with apples and lemons, in addition to tomatoes, know that if you heat up acidic foods like these in your iron skillet, you can increase by 2000% the amount of iron you can absorb from the food. This happens because some of the iron will actually leach into your food, but the iron particles are so tiny you can’t taste them. It’s totally safe and it actually is healthy! Another way to increase your iron absorption is to pair foods high in iron with foods that have high acid. For example, the iron that you find in red meat is very easily absorbed by your body, but the iron in beans and grains is not. So, combining acidic foods with the harder-to-absorb iron foods can help your body better absorb iron. This can definitely help to keep you healthier over the long haul as iron is so important to our blood health, among other things.

To build your eyes and your bones, you should add olive oil, nuts, avocado and other healthy fat sources to your fruit and vegetables. This will boost the amount of vitamins that are fat soluble. These nutrients will help to increase the health of your eyes, boost immunity and also to keep you from having strokes and osteoporosis. This works because the fats help to transport the vitamins to your body’s cells. This also works great with carotenoids, which is what makes tomatoes and carrots bright in color. If you eat salsa with avocado, your body will absorb as much as 4X more lycopene and 3X more beta carotene. So, you really can improve how well your body will absorb some nutrients if you pair some foods with good fats.

Lawrence Reaves writes for Proctor Silex a kitchen appliance company that offers a selection of afforfable kitchen appliances ranging from slow cookers to coffee makers and blenders. For more inforamtion on these types of product click here.

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