Eat Your Veggies!

Thanks to Oregon’s liquid sunshine all of April and May, it is June, and I am just getting my tomatoes planted. While we don’t have a huge garden, I do enjoy fresh home-grown vegetables.

You know that’s the SECOND tenet of OWW HAND Nutrition: Eat your vegetables.

I remember it by noting that when you hold up your index and middle finger to form the number two, it looks like the Roman numeral for five which is a V.

V stands for Vegetables. The first arm of the V represents 5 cups. The second arm of the V represents 5 colors.

I encourage people to eat at least five cups and five different colors of vegetables every day and at least. This is the target, I explain. I can hear my Aunt Mary Ann, and most of my patients, and myself 10 years ago. “Five cups of vegetables!!! That’s an awful lot!!”

I get it. Veggies have not been big part of the standard American diet in the last fifty years, except maybe for iceberg lettuce, hot house tomatoes, pickles, and onion perhaps.

But with a little forethought, 5 cups of veggies are not that difficult to prepare and eat. For example, this morning I spent five minutes prepping my lunch.  I grabbed 2 cups of greens from the spring mix container, grated ½ cup orange carrot, roughly chopped ½ cup of red bell pepper, ½ cup of zucchini, 1 cup of purple cabbage, on top of which I sprinkled ¼ cup walnuts, and drizzled lemon juice and a tablespoon of olive oil. Voila! In no time, I had a beautiful bowl of colorful bounty with 4 ½ cups and 5 colors just for lunch.

Why is eating a rainbow of colorful veggies so important?

Veggies give you a great big bang for your buck. And not only do they have the nutrients our cells need to function well, but they also have the fiber our colon needs to feed healthy gut bacteria, create precursors for neurotransmitters, keep things running smoothly, and actually decrease the number of calories absorbed.

To avoid pesticide residue, I use EWG’s Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen to guide my organic veggie purchasing when I am not able to go to a local farmer’s market or have run out of my home grown produce. Organic tends to be more nutrient rich, too. If the minerals aren’t in the soil, due to industrialized over farming and consequent artificial fertilization, then they cannot get into the plant

EWG’s 2022 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce | Clean Fifteen

If you have insulin resistance you want most of your veggies to come from above the ground. Generally, above ground vegetables have less starch. Less starch lends to less breakdown to glucose, less rise in blood glucose, less release of  insulin, better blood sugar control,  and more digging into energy storage.

One more tidbit about veggies. Eat them first, not last like I did all my growing up years. Eating vegetables not only stimulates the stretch receptors in your stomach but stimulates the nutrient receptors as well, both of which signal your brain that you have the food you need, so you can stop eating.

Some of us don’t like veggies because they were served steamed, mushy, gushy, and basically dead when we were kids. Create a new experience. You don’t have to love all vegetables but determine to find some you like. Experiment with grilling, roasting, sautéing, raw. Toss some herbs and spices and healthy fats on them like walnuts, pumpkin seeds, avocado, olive oil, or grass-fed butter. If you don’t like broccoli, try broccolini. If you don’t like cauliflower, try cauliflower rice. Get creative. Make a goal. Incorporate one new vegetable or vegetable recipe every month.

Five cups. Five colors.  What do you have to lose?