Wednesday, May 2, 2012

More tips for healthier habits and a bit about fruits

Lets start with the bit about fruits. My world was recently shaken up a bit when I came to the realization cucumbers are fruits, not veggies. Shocker, I know. I was eating my healthful side dish of cucumbers, carrots, and left over pico de gallo (raw tomato and onion salsa) and was thinking about cucumbers being at the top of my fave veggies list. Then I thought, are they a veggie? They have seeds... To Google I went! The verdict: Cucumbers are the fruit of a vine plant, like tomatoes, pumpkins, and squash. So my side dish of veggies was really a side dish of fruit plus a rogue carrot.

With that I promptly went looking for nutrition information about cucumbers because the major fruits I actually think of as fruits are usually high sugar, which equals high carb, albeit the natural version. This brought me to a great link that gives nutrition information on almost anything you can think of. This link brings you right to the cucumber, but type in any food at the top search bar and it will give you a list of options of raw, peeled, cooked, sauteed, canned, etc. It even lets you pick prepackaged versions of foods, such as Campbell's tomato soup when you type "tomato." I definitely spent 10 minutes typing in my favorite "veggies" (read: cucumber, zucchini, tomato, rogue carrots...) right before I started writing this.

I also recently stumbled onto this great page that summarizes more eloquently the points I was trying to make in my previous posts about healthier habits. In addition to reinforcing the idea that healthy living is a lifestyle, not a fad only for bathing suit season, the author talks about the "paleo lifestyle." I'm not sure if you've stumbled on to this in your travels yet, but it is a lifestyle that seeks to imitate how a human would eat and what kind of activities they would partake in if they lived in nature. After all, our bodies evolved in nature. The focus is on free range, naturally grown meats, vegetables, and fruits. And while I don't intend on ever becoming strictly paleo (as evidenced by point #3 on my post about lunch April 30th)... it makes sense and after reading about it I'm starting to more consciously consider what I really want my food lifestyle to be.

So, with that, click here for some food for thought  if you are interested (pun intended :) )


1 comment:

  1. As if it didn't get any crazier, peppers are fruits too! and broccoli is a flower: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_culinary_vegetables

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