You’ve probably heard that eating vegetables is good for you. In Australia the recommendation for adults is to eat 5 serves of vegetables per day to reduce the risk of chronic diseases and certain cancers. A serve of vegetables is either 1 cup of raw vegetables (like a salad) or ½ a cup of cooked vegetables (like blanched vegetables or wilted spinach). For children the daily recommended vegetable intake varies according to age, and you can easily check this on the eatforhealth.com website. Sadly, the Australia Health Report 2018 found that a large proportion of Australian adults do not eat enough vegetables.
I have found some easy ways to get veggies into my family’s diet without it being a massive ordeal.
Here are some of the tips I share with my patients:
- Load your meals with veggies. I often share recipes on my Instagram account. Honestly, my meals are nothing special but what they are is veggie packed. I encourage people to ignore recipe norms and to throw whatever you have lying around into your meals. Some meals make for easy vegetable loading – my favourites are lasagne, pasta sauces, frittatas, tuna slice and Mexican burrito fillings. I will add silverbeet, grated zucchini, grated carrot or peas and corns to most meals! You can never, ever, have too many veggies in a meal and my motto is if you cook anything down enough and soften the vegetables it’s always delicious!
- Try sneaking in some veggies into breakfast to get the serves in early. Baked beans are a great way to get some vegetables into the diet in the morning. Wilted spinach with eggs is another way to sneak them in.
- Beans and lentils count in veggie serves – so placing these in your lunch box or dinner is a nice way to increase the vegetable serves. I have cans (and cans) of red beans, chickpeas, lentils in the house always. I often add lentils to lasagne and pasta sauces and will often make Mexican beans. It is an easy (and cost-effective way given a can of beans can cost 80 cents!) way to get some vegetables in.
- Incorporate vegetables into snacks – this is a great way to reach the recommended vegetable serves per day. This is how to I hit the target with my kids – we often eat carrots, cucumber or raw green beans with dip and cucumber, olive, tomato and cheese skewers are also a favourite snack that gets veggies in.
- Prepare meals ahead and pack lunches for work if you can! If you have vegetable loaded meals in the fridge ready to go it’s harder to turn to take out or other options. When you come home from work exhausted with tired, grumpy children it’s easier to warm something up and serve it rather than think about dinner and how you can get veggies in. I do the work when I have time and energy so that getting the vegetables in is easier and less exhausting later.
Getting enough vegetables into your diet can yield a pile of mental and physical health benefits.