Organic spinach is the best green vegetable to eat. Like all green fruits and vegetables, it has essential health benefits.
When I was a child I hated spinach, cabbage, leek, lettuce, and Brussels sprouts the most. Do you see a resemblance in this row of green vegetables? I didn’t! Until I started this article about spinach and other green fruits and vegetables.
No matter what diet or lifestyle we have, it is necessary to get all the nutrients a body needs. Those are called essential nutrients for a reason.
This article is about the essential nutrients to have a balanced diet. And I was curious what kind of diets there are, so it is also about specific diets and lifestyles.
The 6 essential nutrients are water, carbohydrates, protein, fats, vitamins, and minerals.
Some say fibers are the 7th essential nutrient.
For 40+ years I had breakfast with only fruits and a little fruit juice. You might think that is boring, but as the seasons change, the fruit choice changes as well. Because we only eat twice a day since 2019, I wanted to change my breakfast to eat varied enough.
Searching “Healthy breakfast recipes” didn’t at first offer me the kind of breakfasts I was looking for. But determination always pays off as you know, so now I have added 2 breakfasts to the one I had. And I am still looking for variations.
Why is it so hard for me to decide on other breakfasts? Well, as I have described earlier I was raised on bread and sweets. Maybe, if I try really hard, I could eat an American or English breakfast, but at the moment the thought alone gives me the creeps. As I am sure that Anglo Saxons will shiver at the thought of eating just bread. Or fruits. 🙂
We used to only drink bottled water when we were on vacation. As soon as we crossed the Dutch border, my parents urged us, kids, not to drink from the tap, because we would get sick. That is so ingrained that I am still reluctant to drink water from an unknown tap.
Tap water is 30 to 1.300 times better for the environment than bottled water because of the non-polluting production process of the packaging and simpler transport. Although the purification of the water needs energy as well.
It is also 150 to 500 times cheaper than bottled water. For 1 euro, a Dutch person can daily drink 1,5 litres of water for a year.
Water is one of the 6 essential nutrients, next to carbohydrates, protein, fats, vitamins and minerals. We need water for the human body.
We can live without food for 43 to 73 days, depending on the climate. But we can only survive 3 to 6 days without water.
When we age the system that indicates that our body needs water or food can be disturbed. We don’t always feel hunger or thirst signs. That’s why a lot of elderly people end up dehydrated or malnourished.
A question that popped into my head the other day: Can coffee make you smarter? Or does it take a smart person to drink coffee?
A few years ago, coffee was pretty much banned in my environment because it would be bad for us. Nowadays we are obliged to drink it again because it would serve us so well.
My morning coffee is almost sacred. I have a cup of black coffee before 11 am and enjoy that immensely. With or without health benefits. 🙂
The common belief is that high cholesterol is the cause of blockage of the arteries, leading to heart problems, among other things.
And the common solution is to prescribe a cholesterol-lowering drug, statins.
In other words, cholesterol is seen as a problem that needs to be solved.
While it makes more sense to see high cholesterol as a symptom and work on the cause.
When my mother was 87 she broke her first hip, because she fell off her bike. Three years later she fell out of bed and broke the other one. Until her first hip fracture, my mother never used any medication or supplements.
I am not even sure her food was varied enough after my father passed away years earlier. Maybe she had a Calcium deficit, I don’t know.
It made me study the benefits of Calcium thoroughly because the healing process and the aftermath were difficult. And if I can prevent that happening to me, all the better. When you are aging, osteoporosis (bone loss or bone weakening) is a huge risk, especially for women.