JessieMcfarland asked:


We all know that vegetables are greatly beneficial for the body, but yet we do not like to eat them much. The excuse is always in the taste. Eating raw vegetables are difficult for a start. They are hard to chew and taste blank. As the health benefits in eating more vegetables has far outweighed the taste part of it, it is good reason to find ways to make them more palatable and appealing to our taste buds.

# 1. Time the serving

Offer vegetables such as broccoli at the beginning of the meal when you and your family are feeling the hungriest. This way the tendency to eat the vegetables are most likeliest. Have them served in a variety of combinations and color such as boiled peas, potatoes, carrots, beans and corn.

# 2. Vegetables in sauces

Lightly steamed vegetables mixed with some sauces and herbs such as garlic do make a difference. My children do not like to eat them you may say. But with the lightly steamed vegetables mixed with oyster sauces and flaxseed oil, eating them is much more pleasant now. Even if your husband hates

vegetables, do not despair. Think of adding vegetables in some meat or seafood dishes cooked with some sauces in a casserole, he will tend to eat more vegetables than he realizes. Add the vegetables last after the meat is cooked so that the green color of the vegetables is preserved to

make them looked yummy.

# 3. Spaghetti sauce with vegetables

When serving your family favorite food such as spaghetti, remember to add in some vegetables into the sauce. Cook your minced meat first before adding chopped tomatoes, zucchini and broccoli into the sauce along with some garlic and herb.

Mix well the ingredients and your spaghetti dish is ready for serving. Your family will love the nutritious spaghetti dinner which is actually good for them.
# 4. Tasty vegetable soups

Bring to boil a small pot of soup cooked with some chicken bones or pork ribs. Throw in the green vegetables such as spinach and add in a pinch of salt and serve hot when the soup starts to boil again. The vegetable soup is nutritious as the vitamins are contained in the soup. It will make you feel full much faster and you tend to eat less of the other food portions.

# 5. Vegetable noodle snacks

If you are into eating ramen or instant noodles, adding in some cut carrots, cabbage and any green vegetables makes it a nice dish. It is fast to prepare and putting an egg or some meat to it makes this high carb food away from considering it a junk. Some may prefer to have it with raw

sliced cucumbers. You should refrain from adding too much of the unnatural soup based flavors as the sodium content is

high.

# 6. Mixed vegetables

Prepare vegetables in new ways such as stir frying very lightly with some salt or herbs. You can have plate of mixed vegetable fried together along with your favorite food, such as peas in macaroni and cheese or blend soft cooked carrots into mashed potatoes. Steam some sweet potatoes or bake this

high-fiber, vitamin-A rich food with a touch of sugar, cinnamon and cloves.

Eating more vegetables is an integral part of a weight loss program as it will help you to burn more calories and stay trim.

Gray Rollins asked:


The Benefits of Raw Vegetables

We’ve been told since birth to eat our vegetables and yet far too few of us actually do it. Even when we do get around to eating our vegetables it’s only after we’ve cooked out most of the natural nutrients that our body is desperately craving.

Keep in mind, as you proceed, that while all raw vegetables are incredibly beneficial, raw green vegetables actually serve as the basis of nearly all life on this planet. That may sound a bit extreme to you, but stop and consider for a moment that almost every organism on this planet survives by either eating raw green vegetables or by eating an animal that eats raw green vegetables…they really are that important.

I know, you’ve probably eaten most of your vegetables cooked since you can remember. Simply put, just because something has “always” been done a certain way doesn’t mean that it’s the best way to do it. You will get a lot more out of your vegetables if you consume them raw.

I specifically used the word “consume” because, in reality, you get the same benefits from raw green vegetable juice as you do from eating them whole and usually you get it faster. This is because raw vegetable juice takes less internal work to digest and is absorbed into the body almost instantly.

It seems that most people only know that they should eat vegetables because they remember mom telling them to; very few people seem to have a grasp on the amazing nutritional value of vegetables.

Raw vegetables are extremely rich in minerals, vitamins, trace elements, enzymes and natural sugars. All of these are things that your body needs to function properly and the raw veggies will help stabilize and normalize your natural bodily functions. They actually help pretty much ALL of your natural bodily functions operate.

You’ve probably heard about the necessity of vitamins and nutrients to your overall health your entire life, but the concept of enzymes may be new to you. Basically, the enzymes in raw vegetables help your body digest food. This is one of the reasons that green vegetables are sometimes considered “nature’s laxative,” because they get your stomach working properly.

The average American diet is actually comprised of quite a few foods that are incredibly difficult for our bodies to digest properly. When we aren’t digesting properly, the food sits in our stomach longer than it should and we miss out on any nutritional value it did possess.

Okay, so at this point, you may have started to become convinced about the necessity of vegetables…but why raw?

All of our cooking methods have been shown in scientific studies to reduce the amount of vitamins, minerals, and enzymes in vegetables. Of the cooking methods, steaming has been shown to retain the largest amount of vitamin content although it still reduces it.

Vegetables begin losing their valuable nutritional elements as soon as they are plucked, pulled or picked from the ground. For this reason, the additional loss of nutrients during cooking would be a smaller problem if we grew our own vegetables and cooked them the same day we harvested them.

However, most of us don’t live that way. The largest majority of us purchase our vegetables at the grocery store after they’ve been shipped hundreds or thousands of miles. During that time, the nutritional value has been seeping out of them.

Finally, to make matters worse, repeated studies have shown that commercially grown vegetables, right out of the ground, aren’t as rich in nutrients as they were 50 years ago. One large contributing factor to this is that farmers have found so many ways to make their crops grow faster that we aren’t receiving the full benefit of naturally mature vegetables.

It is admittedly extreme, but not that extreme, to state that any vegetable you get from the grocery store and then cook at home probably has the nutritional value of cardboard by the time it hits your stomach.

Start eating (or drinking) raw vegetables as soon as you can. Whenever possible, grow them yourself or purchase them from local farmer’s markets.