Food

We are getting further away from our food all the time. As life gets more crazy we have less time to start with real fresh ingredients and end up with a healthy meal.

It certainly is easier to buy a box of frozen something and heat it up but what are we sacrificing?

Real food should have color, texture and (most importantly) taste. Nutrients will most likely be there if your food is fresh and colorful. Tofu has none of those attributes but I have been told it is very nutritious.

Sweet is nice but it is not a true flavor. White corn is sweet but it does not have rich corn flavor. Corn should taste like corn. It should also be nicely colored, yellow at least although there are a lot of varieties of colored corn.

Peppers come in a riot of colors: red, yellow, purple, orange, red and green. They are loaded with flavor and vitamins.

The more I read about nutrition the more I am in favor of brightly colored food. Lycopenes in red tomatoes and watermelons have gotten some press recently. That red stuff is good for you.

Beta carotene is another good-for-you color. Interestingly, it must be ingested in food to have the most benefit. Taking a pill won't help you much. A study of smokers taking a beta carotene supplement showed them to have more lung cancers that smokers not taking a supplement.

So lycopenes and beta carotene are good for us but only if we get them from real foods. Yum, please pass the tomatoes!