Eat yourself Healthy Health Families.com

Some foods help you prevent and treat common, and serious, diseases!

You can eat yourself healthy, literally, without running to a health food store and buying expensive supplements you can actually create a difference for your health by making small dietary adjustments.

Tip: help your kids get used to eating these “good for you” foods by incorporating them into their snacks and meals from an early age

Go Green: Most dark green vegetables help ward off dieases like cancer and heart diseases and slow the aging process (who needs botox if you’ve got romaine lettuce?!). The darker your greens the better they are for you, and some even stop brain deterioration and prevent memory loss often associated with aging.

Bright is good: Phytonutrients cause fruits and veggies to be brightly colored. Some of these phytonutrients are responsible for a whole lot of good-doing in our body. For example, blueberries contain anthocyanin, which is a phytonutrient responsible for its antioxidant and anti-inflamatory powers! Of all fruits and vegetables blueberries have the highest concentration of this antioxidant, so it’s a great tool for cleaning up free radicals. Add fresh blueberries to your yogurt or blend frozen berries to make a smoothie. Free radicals are very damaging and partially responsible for many processes we associate with aging. When free radicals are left to do their thing, they attack cell membranes and DNA. Damaged DNA could lead to cancer.

There is nothing you can really do against getting free radicals, but you can eat foods that remove them from your tissues. Basically to get good results you should consume a cup of blueberries a day. This is quite a bit, but they can be eaten in your morning yogurt, cereal or as a snack or desert. Spreading them out a bit you’ll easily eat (or drink) the amount. However, for most people it is not the amount that is the problem, but rather the cost. Especially when blueberries are not in season they can be quite expensive and even in the summer the cost really ads up. If cost is a concern it is cheaper to buy frozen blueberries and either defrost them in your fridge before eating them or using them in a smoothie.