Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The best choices to eat healthfully on a limited budget

Nowadays, when the world struggles with a great deal of serious problems such as wars, pollution, global warming or various kind of diseases, many of us are looking for better ways to live. A great deal of people try to come up with a solution to make it happen by changing their lifestyle. For many, this is only an unrealistic idea because of the fact that healthy food especially organic or natural foods are very expensive and many of us cannot afford them. With everything that is going on currently such us high un-employment, inflation and other unstable economical situation, it has become difficult for regular citizens to afford the cost. But there are several ways to we make it possible. One of the choices to eat healthfully on a limited budget is an increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables.
Fruits and vegetable contribute to maintain a good health. They are rich source of vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, protein or enzymes which are extremely essential to our life. For instance, they regulate metabolism, lower blood pressure, boost immune system and energy level or promote oral health. People, whose diet is enriched with great amount of fruits and veggies, are likely to have reduced risk of certain chronic diseases from stroke to cancer. In addition, vegetables are very low in calories which promote weight control. There are certain types of vegetable that we can eat and not gain weight.
Secondly, vegetables and fruits are available everywhere. Each supermarket or grocery store offers a variety of produce from all over the world. The best choice is to pick out only organic fruits and vegetables for the reason that they are produce without using pesticides and other dangerous, chemical substances. However, organic food is more expensive due to the nature of it processing, it will not cost you more than regular food or addictive fast food on which people tend to spend a lot of money. You can also visit a local farmer market where you can buy high quality vegetables and fruits for cheaper price. One of the advantages of buying from those market is that, produce are grown locally which means that farmer do not have to use chemicals to make them stay fresh for a long period of time.
Furthermore, fruits and vegetables are best tasting food. You can make plenty of healthy and delicious dishes. One of the easiest, quickest and cheapest dish that you can make by yourself is a simple vegetable soup. These home made soups and foods are more healthy because you can cook them in accordance with your taste and health. In addition to vegetables, fruits juices are also great source of enrich minerals and vitamins. You can also make fruit cocktails which is combinations of many different fruits and can be obtained at affordable price.
At the end, it is safe to say that, to lead a healthy lifestyle, one does not need to spend tremendous amount of money or does not require to change eating habits drastically. Increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables, in addition to the regular food on a daily basis, will assure a good health and tasty dishes everyday.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Food! Delicious, so tasty, finger-licking, palatable, succulent; all these thoughts come in our brain and when we are hungry we just try to eat and make every effort to suffice our hunger. For any living substance food is something that brings joy and happiness. Not only that, food is something the world is fighting for.
There are tremendous amount of food being processed and produced on a daily basis all over the world. Without any statistic, one can tell the food industry has the biggest multi million dollars market out there. But have we ever thought about how these multi million dollars industry can cause trouble in human lives or could even cause a death.
After watching "Food. Inc", I was disgusted to know that everyday we consume food without knowing what's really in it. This movie showed the process of food making, and the unsanitary conditions surrounding this food. I believe that food, especially meat, needs proper care before being sold to the public. However, the movie clearly showed that people who worked there did not care enough about health, sanitary conditions or ethics. As it is shown, there were numbers of immigrants were hired from Mexico who has no proper training so that the cost of processing can be cheaper and the meat can be out on market at cheaper price. It's truly amazing that people are not fully educated on what goes into the food we buy all the time. If we knew where products that we eat come from, probably we would not buy anything from a supermarket. The food that most of us eat may contain very dangerous bacteria and substances that can be extremely harmful to our health or even cause a death. For instance, they use ammonia to sanitzie the machine which process the meat. Ammonia is a strong substance and kill germs but at the same time when the meat enters in the machine to be processed, these chemicals are added to the meat
After the analysis of different scenarios of this perticular movie, we need to come up with better solution to stop food poisioning and deaths. As per the movie, organic food and organic meat would be a better solution. However, organic foods are very expensive due to the nature of processing food and cost associated with not using any dengrous chemicals. This is the safest way to go, so that we no longer have to buy the type of food we saw in the movie.