Vegetables are the ultimate food as medicine. It’s where we get most of our nutrition and the best thing you could eat if you want to lose weight.
Eat Your Vegetables!
Mom said to eat your vegetables and with good reason. They’re filled with tons of good things and can fill you up fast. Ideally, you should aim for 5-7 servings of fruits and vegetables every day, with the majority of that being vegetables.
One serving is about one cup of raw vegetables in about two-thirds of a cup of cooked vegetables. Overall, a nice big salad can give you three cups of vegetables very quickly and is very tasty.
Components Of Vegetables That Make Us Healthy
Fiber
The majority of fiber comes from vegetables, with some fruit. These fibers are long strings of carbohydrates tightly bound together that help move food through our digestive system and bulk up wastes. They help keep us regular and help keep the probiotics within our digestive system healthy and balanced.
Magnesium
This mineral is part of over 300 different processes in the human body.[1] It’s essential for our immune system, memory, energy production, and heart health. Magnesium isn’t something very common in fruits or vegetables, primarily found in green leafy vegetables.
Lower Carb (Mostly)
Most vegetables are low carb. They do not contain a lot of sugars, except for starchy roots like potatoes. A lower carbohydrate diet is linked to just about every positive health outcome, particularly helping you to avoid diabetes.
More Vitamins, Minerals, and Nutrients
The vast majority of our vitamins, minerals and all other phytonutrients come from vegetables. The widest range of nutrients comes from vegetables. It’s incredible that a bowl of salad can contain every vitamin and mineral you need for the day.
Wide Variety of Tastes and Benefits [2]
Starches, like bread, only provide a sweet flavor. Fruits can provide sweet and acidic. What vegetables are where we get all of the other sensations. They can be sweet, sour, salty, bitter, astringent, and even a bit of umami.
All of these unusual flavors provide health benefits. For example, reds, like peppers and beets, typically give us lycopene, a phytonutrient linked to helping reduce cancer risk. Purples, such as cabbage and carrots, come from anthocyanins and help with heart health and weight loss.
Yellows bring us carotenoids, like what’s found in squash and turnips, perfect for eye health. Greens bring us magnesium, but they also provide catechins, which are studied to prevent cancer.
Moving towards a diet rich in fruits and vegetables is your best way to be healthy and happy long-term. Focusing more on vegetables will give you tons of nutrition without the extra weight. 1: Wilhelm Jahnen-Dechent, Markus Ketteler, Magnesium basics, Clinical Kidney Journal, Volume 5, Issue Suppl_1, February 2012, Pages i3–i14, https://doi.org/10.1093/ndtplus/sfr163
2: Gupta, Charu and Prakash, Dhan. “Phytonutrients as therapeutic agents” Journal of Complementary and Integrative Medicine, vol. 11, no. 3, 2014, pp. 151-169. https://doi.org/10.1515/jcim-2013-0021
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