How to live a healthy lifestyle has become one of our most asked questions.
Below you will be presented with various lifestyle ideas instead of medications to improve your health.
As a whole, living a healthy lifestyle can prevent chronic conditions or treat them with less medication for better results. Prevention is better than cure for many reasons. Eating well, seeking wholesome foods, moving, and reducing stress are key.
The 17 tips described below receive ample attention from historical and medical perspectives.
And we focus primarily on the most essential conditions for a desired and successful improvement in your health.
Table of Contents
- 1 How to live a healthy lifestyle: Introduction
- 2 Don’t forget to enjoy and party
- 3 Eat a handful of nuts daily
- 4 Eat foods with a low insulin index
- 5 Exercise 2 to 3 times a week
- 6 Eat enough fruit
- 7 Eat foods with a low glycemic load
- 8 Eat foods with essential building blocks (amino acids)
- 9 Provide a healthy living environment
- 10 Eat high-quality, healthy food
- 11 Eat as little sugar and starch as possible
- 12 Table sugar and its effect on our bodies
- 13 Don’t drink soda or fruit juice with sugar
- 14 Drink mostly water, tea, or coffee
- 15 Eat less often or go on an occasional fast
- 16 Eat healthy fats (fat is not the enemy)
- 17 Relax sufficiently and combat stress
- 18 Use extra virgin olive oil (EVOO)
- 19 Eat enough vegetables
- 20 How to live a healthy lifestyle: Conclusion
How to live a healthy lifestyle: Introduction
The lifestyle recommendations below are written primarily for (potential) patients.
In other words, the tips and guidelines below provide information that is important to make informed, self-paced choices about your health and lifestyle.
Lifestyle medicine is rapidly gaining wider acceptance and answers how to live a healthy lifestyle.
Virtually everyone today is aware of the importance of preventing chronic conditions or treating them with less medication for better results.
This, by the way, is also the best way to reverse the growth in healthcare costs and deal with the shortage of staff.
Be sure to read on carefully and take advantage of the tips and advice below for a healthier lifestyle!
Don’t forget to enjoy and party
Living healthily and following steps to eat healthily are important. But every once in a while, having a party is allowed. So let go of everything, let your hair down, and dare to enjoy the moment!
You momentarily breach your healthy lifestyle pattern when you eat cake and all kinds of yummy snacks and treats at a wedding, retirement party, or birthday. And that’s perfectly ok.
This, in fact, keeps us from becoming obsessive. In addition, it also causes your body to have to work pretty hard for a while to digest and work everything out.
So your digestion and metabolism are forced into high gear for a while.
So partying can be done, it can be done, and more to the point, it really is needed once in a while. Even to answer how to live a healthy lifestyle.
The big problem is that for many people, it’s party time (almost) every day in terms of alcohol consumption, snacks, greasy food, oversized portions, desserts, and so on. And that, unfortunately, is too much of a good thing.
A good guideline is the following: After feasting comes fasting, and these 2 things can balance each other well.
Find balance in your life and understand that it can’t always be a party.
Eat a handful of nuts daily
Nuts contain many vitamins, healthy fats, minerals, fiber, and protein.
People who eat nuts regularly live longer on average!
For example, a study was done in Spain on the effect of nuts on our health. This study showed that nuts in a Mediterranean diet reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Nuts also appear to have an excellent effect on our blood sugars and cholesterol ratio. There is also an abundance of fiber in nuts, ideal for our gut bacteria.
Source:
- Prevention of diabetes with Mediterranean diets: a subgroup analysis of a randomized trial, J. Salvadó et al, Annals of Internal Medicine, 2014.
Eat foods with a low insulin index
The insulin index shows how much insulin is released in non-diabetics in response to the various components of a meal.
It’s not just carbohydrates that can cause an insulin spike!
Researchers in Australia, to their great surprise, saw that not only does an insulin spike occur after eating a meal rich in carbohydrates.
They found that an insulin spike also occurs after eating a meal containing protein and, to a lesser extent, fat.
In any case, we don’t want to overly deplete and stress our pancreas.
People with prediabetes type 2 have elevated insulin levels for years before diagnosis (without knowing it themselves).
The insulin index is a way of classifying food according to how it puts pressure on the pancreas to release insulin. So opt for foods with a low insulin index to avoid chronic health problems.
Source:
- Clinical Application of the Food Insulin Index for Mealtime Insulin Dosing in Adults with Type 1 Diabetes: A Randomized Controlled Trial, K. Bell et al., 2016
Exercise 2 to 3 times a week
Active exercise is key to answer how to live a healthy lifestyle but does not compensate for an unhealthy diet or a lot of sitting around.
The ideal scenario is that you exercise daily at least 2-3 times weekly anyway.
Essential to this is paying sufficient attention to muscle building. A good muscle mass ensures that your metabolism remains at a good level and burns your energy well.
Don’t overdo it and build slowly. Do this responsibly.
For example, if you are overweight and want to start exercising more, start slowly and don’t go overboard.
Going from doing nothing at all to exercising fanatically over a very short period encourages injury.
And (chronic) injuries absolutely cannot help you achieve your weight loss and health goals.
Tip: Exercise also brings many other health benefits, check them out in our other article Long-Term Health Benefits of Exercise for Our Body and Brain
Eat enough fruit
There are quite a few misconceptions about fruit because it contains sugars (known as fructose).
Consuming too much fructose increases body fat and is not healthy for the human body. And you don’t get such an overdose of fructose by eating fruit (because it is high in fiber), but you do get it from fruit juice (which is low in fiber).
Actually, it’s almost ridiculous to talk about the health benefits of fruit.
In fact, fruit is such an essential part of a traditional diet that it is like writing about the health effects of drinking water (which we all know too).
Fruit is an essential source of vitamins, fiber, antioxidants, and nutrients. For example, fruit contains the famous vitamin C. Fruit makes you feel satiated, and you can’t eat too much of it in its natural form.
In general, it is healthy to eat 2 to 3 servings of fruit per day. This reduces the risk of developing strokes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.
It can go wrong when you start shaking fruit, pressing it, and making smoothies out of it (that’s how you filter and sift out countless fibers).
Without the natural jacket of fiber, we do get an overdose of sugar and fructose and it doesn’t form part of the answer of how to live a healthy lifestyle
Because the fiber has disappeared from the pressed juice, the absorption of sugar takes place much faster, and fruit juice can therefore contribute to increased sugar levels, diabetes, and obesity.
Put another way, drinking ready-to-eat orange juice or apple juice can provide the same amount of sugar as sugary soft drinks (quite a shocking fact about sugar for most people).
Eating fruit only needs to be limited (temporarily) if you follow the ketogenic diet because you will get above your carbohydrate limit with fruit. Sometimes you can still manage to eat berries that are relatively low in sugars.
Eat foods with a low glycemic load
The glycemic load estimates how quickly blood sugar rises after eating a particular food product. In doing so, it takes into account portion size.
A slow digestion of carbohydrates, for example, gives a more gradual release of glucose to the blood. This will cause blood sugar levels to rise slightly but definitely not spike.
In contrast, rapid digestion of certain carbohydrates will cause blood sugar to spike.
Proteins have much less impact on our blood sugar, and fats have virtually no effect on blood sugar.
This is why many people with type 2 diabetes are eating more and more (healthy) fat. Such food is filling, and it keeps blood sugar levels reasonably constant without too great peaks and valleys and allows how to live a healthy lifestyle.
For your information, sugar, white bread, and soda produce a rapid sugar spike. And it is precisely these large swings in your blood sugar that are not healthy.
Our bodies then produce more hunger hormones, and we continue to crave the next meal. And, of course, such a scenario is more likely to result in overeating.
So what is good to eat? Vegetables, for example (because they contain a lot of fiber), and foods that are unprocessed and pure. These foods have a lower glycemic load and thus a less spiky effect on our blood sugar.
The very healthiest thing is to eat foods that keep our blood sugar levels as stable as possible.
This ensures that the pancreas does not have to constantly work and continuously produce insulin. Our health benefits from not overly depleting our pancreas.
Tip: Our other article goes into more depth on the topic of keeping blood sugar levels stable: How to Keep Blood Sugar Stable? Strategies for Maintaining Stable Blood Glucose Levels
Eat foods with essential building blocks (amino acids)
Amino acids are necessary building blocks that we absolutely must eat because our bodies cannot make them themselves.
Animal food products containing amino acids
Examples of animal foods that contain all the essential amino acids and thus have a high biological value are the following:
- Sardines
- Liver
- Protein
- Crustaceans and mollusks
- Quark
- Cheese
- Herring
- Ricotta
- Beef
- Chicken
- Wei
- Egg
- Poultry
- Yogurt
- Cottage cheese
Carbohydrate products with amino acids
Examples of carbohydrate products that contain all the essential amino acids are the following:
- Oats
- Buckwheat
- (Brown) rice
- Whole wheat
- Wheat germs
- Rye
- Brewer’s yeast
Nutritional products with amino acids for vegetarians and low-carb diets
Suppose you don’t eat some of the foods listed because you are vegetarian or want to eat low-carb. In that case, you can eat the following foods 1-2 times a week to still get all the essential amino acids:
- Ginseng
- Bananas
- Macadamia
- Bean sprouts
- Pumpkin seeds
- Cashews
- Peas
- Sunflower seeds
- Almonds
- Chickpeas
- Tahin
- Kool
- Lima beans
- Peanuts
- Pecans
- Mushrooms
- Chocolate
- Lentils
- Soybeans
- Sesame seed
- Walnuts
- Avocado
Animal proteins generally have a higher biological value than plant proteins, with breast milk having the highest biological value (no milk powder or porridge can beat this).
Provide a healthy living environment
Numerous environmental factors affect our health and are key on how to live a healthy lifestyle.
Examples include:
- Air pollution (such as from smoking neighbors or passing traffic).
- Noise pollution (trains, airplanes, a church with deafening church bells).
- Light pollution (from streetlights).
Do you already live in a cozy and clean house or apartment? Do you work in a cool building or premises or suffer from occasional sick building syndrome?
Nuisance noise, light, and air pollution are forms of discomfort that can even turn into complaints by making one feel uncomfortable and even experience physical symptoms.
This could be due to poor lighting, unhealthy air, or simply because there is not enough daylight or fresh air.
So focus on adequate ventilation and the incidence of sufficient natural light during the day.
Being exposed to enough daylight every day is essential for our mood, biorhythm, and overall health.
Are you bothered by smoking neighbors who cause a lot of nuisance? If so, consider investing in a generously sized air purifier with sufficient air volume flow and a high-quality filter system.
It is not possible for everyone to quickly leave an apartment and trade it in for a single-family home.
So look for creative solutions to alleviate your problems. It can definitely help boost how to live a healthy lifestyle!
Eat high-quality, healthy food
Do you go to the supermarket to do some shopping? Then think carefully about what foods you will buy and what they contribute to your body and mind.
Take a moment to think about what value the food products in question will add to your body.
Can these foods keep your body healthy? Or are they more likely to throw sand in your engine and sabotage your health?
What is the value of cookies and potato chips to your body? What does sugary soda add in terms of value? Is that greasy burger going to get your body the proper nutrients?
You should not necessarily eat to lose weight. So don’t do your shopping with numbers (calories) in your eyes but look at the food and analyze it.
Does nutrition contribute anything to the complex processes and mechanics of your body?
Does the diet give you valuable vitamins, nutrients, and minerals?
Do this even if you are not currently overweight or have health problems. This will help you minimize the risk of chronic conditions and diseases in the medium to long term.
Eat as little sugar and starch as possible
A guideline from the WHO (World Health Organization) recommends that both adults and children should get less than 10% of their daily energy intake from sugars.
A further reduction to less than 5% per day (that’s about 5 to 6 teaspoons) would provide even more additional health benefits.
However, as Americans, we eat about 5 times more sugar per day than the suggested sugar intake of 5% (which is why sugar is a dangerous addiction of our time).
Direct and indirect harmful effects of sugar
Sugar is both directly and indirectly potentially harmful to health:
- Directly via increasing your blood sugar levels and insulin release.
- Indirectly because sugar has a craving effect on our bodies (eating sugar tastes of more and triggers additional cravings and hunger pangs). We all love that magical sweet substance that used to be quite scarce (it was only in fruit or honey) but is now found in almost everything.
If we could reduce our sugar intake, we could reduce obesity and diabetes with an emphasis on how to live a healthy lifestyle.
Products contain sugar under various and confusing names. It is not only in cakes, candies, and pastries but also in all kinds of unexpected food products.
Even canned vegetables, meat products, soup, and ready-made salad containers contain sugar. This makes them longer lasting and more appealing to eat.
And all of these things keep your appetite and craving for sugar going.
Also, be careful with products that say ‘light’ or ‘low-fat’ because many of these so-called low-fat light products are products from which fat has been removed (which often means there is extra sugar).
Table sugar and its effect on our bodies
Table sugar consists of 2 molecules:
- Glucose
- Fructose
In this respect, granulated sugar differs from starch (which consists only of glucose).
Fructose
Fructose is found in fruit and is therefore also called fruit sugar. Fructose does not affect our blood sugar levels.
Good to know: Our bodies can handle the small amounts of fruit sugar in fruit just fine.
But the overdose we take in these days via HFCS (High-Fructose Corn Syrup), a type of sugar from corn and granulated sugar, unfortunately, turns fructose into a toxic substance.
Glucose
On the other hand, glucose does affect our blood sugar levels, and this does not make fructose immediately healthy.
Our bodies can use glucose for fuel (as well as fat).
The point is that we need very little glucose. And more important to realize is that our body can produce this substance through the liver.
We often overload ourselves with glucose in sugar or starch in our Western diet. But our bodies know absolutely nothing about such an overdose, and so that excess glucose is converted into fat.
Be very sparing with starch and even more sparing with granulated sugar (glucose and fructose) and foods containing sugar.
Don’t drink soda or fruit juice with sugar
Liquid sugar or drinks with liquid sugar are a kind of easy slurp calories that give us an overdose of sugars.
Our mechanism to eliminate sugar then becomes overloaded, resulting in obesity and diabetes, for example.
Fruits like an orange or a melon contain fiber for a reason. In fact, these very fibers inhibit the absorption of sugars and provide a feeling of satiety.
However, this effect of the fibers is lost when you mix, juice, and shake (the fibers disappear).
Drink mostly water, tea, or coffee
Many health problems have arisen with the advent of sugary soft drinks and fruit drinks.
For example, in Britain and Mexico, diabetes is experiencing such explosive growth that policymakers have decided to introduce a sugar tax on soft drinks (as there is a relationship between sugar and disease such as diabetes).
Such a sugar tax intends to change consumer behavior, ultimately reducing unhealthy soft drinks.
It has become almost automatic to drink soda or fruit juice. We sometimes even give it to children to take to school or camp.
But unfortunately, these drinks add nothing at all to our health! On the contrary, they cause obesity, tooth decay, and diabetes.
Drink plenty of water, tea, and the occasional cup of coffee for how to live a healthy lifestyle.
Eat less often or go on an occasional fast
We appear to be eating more and more snacks. Sometimes we just eat all day long this way.
But did you know that these snacks are often unhealthy and can cause a disruption in our blood sugar and insulin levels?
Snacking is often justified because it’s to keep our metabolism going. But make no mistake because nothing turns out to be further from the truth.
Did you know that even the time of day or night when you eat impacts your metabolism and sugar levels?
People who eat a lot at night, for example, because of night shifts, are more likely to develop various chronic diseases in the medium term.
New insights into the harmful effects of frequent eating have led to the rediscovery of an ancient wisdom: Fasting is back from the past.
Occasionally, not eating for a few hours or even skipping a meal and drinking only water or tea gives our body a break it desperately needs.
Then, do not eat more than 3 meals a day and avoid snacks.
People with type 2 diabetes, in particular, can benefit immensely by introducing, for example, one day of fasting per week (this, however, in combination with the introduction of carbohydrate restriction because otherwise, it becomes difficult to maintain).
Eat healthy fats (fat is not the enemy)
The American Diabetes Association Consensus Report published in 2019 states the following:
“Whereas dietary cholesterol intake is related to blood levels of cholesterol to a certain (very small) degree, it has no relationship whatsoever to more or less occurrence of cardiovascular disease.”
This seems like a small and trivial phrase in the report, but it is actually incredibly important.
The same consensus report also refers to a study by S. Kodama et al. which states the following:
“Reducing total fat in the diet does not consistently improve blood sugar control or cardiovascular disease risk in people with type 2 diabetes. Any effect comes only from any weight loss and does not come from an eating pattern with low fat intake.”
So for decades, we ate lean and took out all the fat everywhere, and now it turns out it wasn’t necessary…
And also, at a congress of the Nutrition Society and the Royal Society of Medicine in London in 2012, it was said that there is no demonstrable relationship between cholesterol intake and the incidence of heart disease.
This was all pretty confusing because the importance of eating lean and avoiding fat as much as possible was hammered home for decades. And now it turns out that fat is not the devil after all, and we shouldn’t be afraid of fat…
Additional studies by M. Dehghan et al. and R. de Souza et al. further substantiate this. In other words, fat is really not dangerous, and it is even essential for our bodies. Our bodies need fat!
Different types of fat
However, there are many different types of fat:
- Saturated fats (these come in all sizes, types, and chain lengths)
- Polyunsaturated fats:
- Omega 3 fatty acids
- Omega 6 fatty acids
- Monounsaturated fats
The fats can come from animals or plants. It is important how they are prepared and extracted from a parent product (by a chemical process or by simply pressing by hand).
For example, trans fat is an industrially made fake fat that is not good for our health. Stay away from it (it’s still here and there in cakes, certain margarines, and pre-baked cookies).
A study of the Mediterranean diet shows that the magic is in the ideal combination of different types of fat.
The monounsaturated fat in olive oil
For example, the monounsaturated fat in olive oil is the king of fats for human health. And this good fat is closely followed by omega 3 fatty acids.
For example, olive oil also contains saturated fat. Olive oil may be very close to the magical combination and is often quoted in how to live a healthy lifestyle.
Omega 3 and Omega 6 fatty acids
Omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids are also needed for a good balance. The omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids are the alpha and omega of fat.
They belong to the so-called Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids (PUFA).
They can be a basis of good health in the right proportion, but they are disastrous for our bodies in the wrong proportion.
They are so-called essential fats, which means we really need them. This is because our bodies cannot create them themselves.
In short, the function of these twins is to both promote and inhibit inflammation. The keyword here again is balance.
We need omega 6 to promote inflammation (this is important in the fight against microbes and cancer cells).
But anti-inflammatory action using omega 3 is also important. This protects us from autoimmune disorders, allergies, and chronic degenerative diseases.
Good to know: Omega 3 and Omega 6 both travel the same path after being absorbed from the gut to be converted to the active functional form.
There is plenty of pre-omega 3 (ALA or Alpha-Linolenic Acid) in plant foods such as algae, walnuts, hemp, flaxseed, and chia.
But if you eat too much omega 6, it interferes with the conversion of ALA to active omega 3. Active omega 3 you can also already eat in a ready-to-eat, active form. This is found, for example, in breast milk and oily fish.
Omega 6 is found in vegetable oils such as cooking fats, margarine, and low-fat margarine. However, these oils are often highly industrially processed, and it is best not to eat too much.
Sources:
- Nutrition Therapy for Adults With Diabetes or Prediabetes: A Consensus Report, A. Evert et al, American Diabetes Association, 2019
- Influence of fat and carbohydrate proportions on the metabolic profile in patients with type 2 diabetes: a meta-analysis, S. Kodama et al, Diabetes Care, 2009
- Dietary cholesterol, heart disease risk and cognitive dissonance, D. McNamara, Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 2014
- Associations of fats and carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality in 18 countries from five continents (PURE): a prospective cohort study, M. Dehghan et al, Lancet, 2017
- Intake of saturated and trans unsaturated fatty acids and risk of all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies, R. de Souza et al, BMJ, 2015
- Prevention of diabetes with Mediterranean diets: a subgroup analysis of a randomized trial, J. Salas-Salvadó et al, Annals of Internal Medicine, 2014
Relax sufficiently and combat stress
Stress activates our sympathetic nervous system and puts our body into what is known as fight-or-flight mode. Our bodies channel energy to the muscles and heart so we can run away from the threat or respond with our primal instincts.
But stress is ubiquitous these days. How to live a healthy lifestyle? We are constantly in chronic stress mode, which is proving disastrous for our health.
People with diabetes get dysregulated blood sugars from continuous stress, it’s disastrous for your digestion, and even obesity is stress-related.
It is almost impossible to lose weight or stabilize your sugars if you are constantly under stress and experiencing a lot of stress. In such a scenario, do you want to lose weight? Then addressing that tension and stress is the most important thing.
Fortunately, there is also healthy tension, such as excitement for a performance, an exam, or a sports competition.
And this is just as well because it can make for better performance.
So a healthy balance is the key!
Use extra virgin olive oil (EVOO)
Olive oil is one of the healthiest fats you can consume. Despite the disagreement about fats in the food world, everyone agrees on this.
Widely used in countries around the Mediterranean Sea, it is the basis of what is called the Mediterranean diet.
Olive oil has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease, so it is also very beneficial for people who want to prevent heart disease.
In the case of extra virgin olive oil, olive pressing is done naturally, without the addition of chemicals or processing.
In other words, with extra virgin olive oil, no other ingredients are added. So it is a pure product!
Extra virgin olive oil contains many substances we call antioxidants (oleocanthal and oleuropein).
Components of olive oil
Olive oil is made up of several components:
- Vitamin E and K
- A small proportion of saturated fat
- Omega 3 fatty acids
- A minimum proportion of omega 6 fatty acids
- Monounsaturated fat is the largest component we call oleic acid (almost 80%), an essential fat for our body.
In 2017, researchers found a remarkable result that olive oil helps improve blood sugar levels and helps prevent and improve diabetes.
The healthy fats in olive oil even have an inhibiting effect on glucose absorption from carbohydrates.
Hence, the Mediterranean habit of dipping bread in olive oil is brilliant to keep blood sugar from spiking too much because of the bread!
Prevention agent for chronic inflammation
The science, which is still in full development, shows that so-called chronic inflammation very likely plays a significant role in numerous western diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, etc.
Chronic inflammation is a very different inflammation from bacterial inflammation.
You have to compare chronic inflammation to a wound that you keep puncturing. It stays irritated or inflamed.
The antioxidants in olive oil are beneficial because they are anti-inflammatory.
Therefore, people who live and work around the Mediterranean have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease. The lining of the vessel walls appears to be better protected when consuming olive oil.
You also see fewer certain cancers around the Mediterranean. This could also be due to the antioxidants. Olive oil should be heated but not burned to maintain its favorable properties.
What is a good quality olive oil?
For this purpose, several important labels have existed since 1992.
The most important is the D.O.P. (Denominazione di Origine Protetta) label. This guarantees that the oil comprises 100% olives from the mentioned region. The entire production process has also taken place in this region.
The I.G.P. label (Indicazione Geografica Protetta) guarantees that at least one of the production process phases took place in the mentioned region.
In addition, there is olive oil Da Agricoltura Biologica. This organic olive oil is booming in Italy. Only natural means are used to make this olive oil. No chemical or genetically modified ingredients are used, nor is the oil irradiated.
Always buy good olive oil in dark glass, so the oil does not react with light (oxidize) and stays good for longer.
Olive oil is the queen of fats!
Some advantages of olive oil
- It can help with weight loss and decrease body weight
- Increase in HDL cholesterol (this is positive)
- A lower fasting glucose
- Lowering the triglycerides in your body
- Reduced risk of cardiovascular disease
- Better blood sugar levels
- Lowering of blood pressure
Source:
- Impact of different dietary approaches on glycemic control and cardiovascular risk factors in patients with type 2 diabetes: a protocol for a systematic review and network meta-analysis, Systematic Reviews, L. Schwingshackl et al., 2017
Eat enough vegetables
Vegetables are incredibly healthy. The fiber in vegetables is not absorbed by our body but stays in the gut.
They are a delectable feast for the billions of gut bacteria that live there.
Try to eat at least 10.5 ounces of vegetables each day and preferably more. And don’t be afraid to vary, resulting in a more diverse and healthier microbiome.
Components of vegetables
Remember that the different colors in vegetables show us that they all contain various vitamins, phytochemicals, and nutrients.
You don’t always have to look at a nutrient list or know everything by heart. If you just vary in color, you already know you’re getting a little bit of everything.
Good to know: Plants from the wild have a much higher proportion of phytochemicals.
These are compounds that the plants produce to protect them from natural enemies in the wild (which are hardly found in the cultivated species anymore).
These constituents make the plant stronger and make us stronger when we eat these types of plants.
Certain vegetables are sometimes a bit bitter because there are slight toxins (lectins) in them. They use this for their own defenses. Such bitter vegetables also help to activate our own defenses. So just as a vaccination activates your defenses, so do vegetables.
Don’t like vegetables? Scientific studies have shown that if children try it 5 to 10 times, they will eventually come to like a particular vegetable.
The earlier you start tasting and trying, the better (preferably before the child’s second birthday).
Source:
- Learning to Eat Vegetables in Early Life: The Role of Timing, Age and Individual Eating Traits, S. Caton et al, PLoS One, 2014
How to live a healthy lifestyle: Conclusion
Do you wish to improve your lifestyle? Using the above tips and advice, it is definitely possible!
Read the tips carefully and analyze in which areas you can still make improvements. This will only provide health benefits in the medium to long term.
By understanding how to live a healthy lifestyle, you stand a better chance of living longer. It also significantly reduces the risk of chronic diseases.