Healthy Foods
Fruits: the first food of good health
Fruit is the easiest good decision in a day. It is quick, it needs no cooking, and it is the one food almost nobody has to be talked into.
Wellness
Healthy Foods
Fruits, cereals, tomato, green vegetables, palak and green recipes - the everyday food that does the most work.
There is no secret here, which is exactly the problem: nobody wants to be told that the answer is vegetables. But the evidence has pointed the same way for fifty years and shows no sign of turning.
What earns its place
Vegetables and fruit, more than you currently eat, and in more colours than you currently buy. Whole grains rather than refined flour. Dal and pulses, the backbone of Indian protein. Nuts and seeds, a handful rather than a bowl. Curd, for the gut. Oil for cooking, not for swimming in.
The habit that beats the shopping list
Most people improve their eating by changing what is within reach rather than by changing what they intend. Fruit on the counter gets eaten; fruit in the drawer rots. Cut vegetables at the front of the fridge get cooked; whole ones at the back get thrown out on Sunday. The decision is made once, at the shop, and then made again by the layout of your kitchen every day afterwards.
Willpower is a poor plan. Arrange the kitchen so the good decision is also the lazy one.
Where the shortcuts fail
A supplement does not replace a diet. Juice is not fruit - the fibre is what slowed the sugar down. And "natural" on a packet is a marketing word with no legal meaning behind it.
Reading
Healthy Foods
Banana: the breakfast that starts the day properly
A banana in the morning, before anything else, is one of the oldest and most reliable pieces of food advice there is.
Healthy Foods
Lemon: the cheapest useful thing in the kitchen
Lemon water in the morning, lemon on the food, lemon after a heavy meal. It costs almost nothing and earns its place daily.
Healthy Foods
Grapes: sugar, blood and a lift in mood
Grapes are a fruit of quick glucose - and one of the few foods people reliably describe as cheering.
Healthy Foods
Tomato: the everyday vegetable that pulls its weight
Tomato is in almost every Indian kitchen every day, which makes what it carries worth knowing.
Healthy Foods
Green vegetables: the habit that decides the most
If you change one thing about how you eat, make it this one. Nothing else in a diet returns as much.
Healthy Foods
Palak and beet: bones, blood and a smooth digestive day
Two vegetables that do specific, useful jobs - and one caution worth knowing about both.
Worth having
Picked to go with what you have just read. We only list ordinary, widely available things.