Now that’s the way I like it!

If your head is in the right place health wise and you’ve decided to add more fruits and vegetables to your diet, please make sure you are getting some nutritional bang for your buck and don’t discard the peelings!

I was amazed to see a girl at work with a bag of peeled cucumber chunks the other day.   I suppose this is better than a bag of chips for her, but only marginally so.  Yes, she has committed to cutting calories with that snack choice, but by wasting the skin she has robbed herself of fully 90% of the benefit of that snack.  The deep rich green colored skin is where all of the vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients are housed, it’s too bad she couldn’t simply leave them on.  And if you get right down to it, it’s even  quicker to prepare the snack that way !

Eating healthy is mostly a matter of habit.  We all know that.  But habits can be created, they are not always negative.  One good tactic is to deliberately condition a liking of foods that are nutritious;  the idea that all that tastes good is bad for you is just a foolish myth.  Does it make sense to say that mother nature installed a liking for unhealthy things?  Why wouldn’t she simply give us a taste for dirt?

One food you really want to condition a habit for is your basic apple.  I formed the habit of an apple a day, just like Ben Franklin said, and he definitely got it right.  Apples are loaded with phytonutrients and they really don’t taste too bad either.  They are a simple way to lower your cholesterol naturally (more on that here) and the skin of the apple contains detoxifyers like D-glucarate, quercetin and a host of polyphenols which can bolster your health and ward off many diseases.  Another poly the apple skin contains is  phloridzin which can suppress the process of glycation, a major hallmark of aging which I discussed earlier in this post:   How Cluttered is Your Body’s Hard Drive?

So try to make this one little change in your diet and you will realize surprizing gains over time.  Have an apple for a daily afternoon snack, and when preparing vegetables, save the peels!

(Well, I guess we’ll pass on this one!)