The Plan:
Day 1: Baked lemon butter cod, Apple and golden beet slaw
Day 2: Fried rice with daikon radish, carrots, eggs
Day 3: Homemade pizza
Day 4: Whole roasted chicken, Pesto potatoes
Day 5: Homemade ramen with leftover chicken, carrots, kale, mushrooms, soba noodles and hard boiled eggs
Day 6: Bean and cheese enchiladas
Day 7: Spaghetti squash bowls with homemade pasta sauce and mozzarella
This meal plan was curated using local foods that are in season now or preserved during the peak growing season in the U.S. Midwest. The plan is an exact replica of what our family is eating this week unless we are out of town. Meal plans are developed using whole foods and my meal planning system (click here!) and are meant to be healthy and easy to prepare. Most recipes will take no more than 30 minutes of active cooking time. Occasionally meals may require all day slow cooking, advanced prep, or some oven time. Recipes are provided when available. I sincerely hope this will help with your own meal planning!
Notes: Eat Your Veggies
It is the home stretch of my five week series on the basic dietary principles I follow to eat healthy. Week 1 was all about eating a clean, Whole Foods Diet, week 2 focused on avoiding vegetable and seed oils, and week 3 was about limiting sugar intake. This week it is all about the produce.
The age old parental advice to “eat your vegetables” still rings true today. Humans are historically omnivores. We are hunters and gatherers. While we can get a lot of the protein and fat that we need from meat and dairy, we also need the vitamins and minerals that can only be found in fruits and vegetables. Some would even argue that we can get all the nutrition we need from plants (i.e. a vegan diet) and that this is much better for the environment. While I personally do eat some meat and dairy, I also focus on loading up on produce which typically makes up at least half of my plate.
Produce contains vitamins, fiber, and antioxidants. All of this nutrition is what keeps our muscles moving, our heart pumping, our brain thinking, our gut functioning, and our skin glowing. We also have some evidence that a high vegetable diet can help prevent certain cancers. I would say all of this is pretty important!
Why Not Just Take a Vitamin Pill?
Many of us get our vitamins these days not from foods, but rather from a pill. If your diet does not include a lot of fruits and vegetables or if you are vegan, it is essential to take supplement pills to get all the vitamins your body needs to function properly. But, I believe that the best source of vitamins is from your diet.
There is a LOT that we don’t yet know about nutrition. This is a difficult area to study because it is hard to control exactly what people put in their bodies and it can take years to see the impact of a good or bad diet.
That means that we don’t have all the answers about how the vitamins are interacting with other components of the produce and how that impacts the absorption in our body. We have some evidence that certain forms of vitamins are better absorbed than others and nature seems to know exactly what we need.
Also, there is something else in the produce that you aren’t going to get from a pill – fiber. The bounty of fiber in vegetables and fruits is essential for gut health and feeding the good bacteria in our body (fiber is called a pre-biotic because it feeds the probiotic bacteria). Although you can get some fiber from powder supplements, you will get so much more from produce (and it tastes better too!)
You simply can’t get all the nutrition you need in a pill form. Food is medicine.
Tips to Maximize Nutrition from Produce:
1 – Eat some raw produce: you are more likely to get the antioxidant benefits from raw vegetables than cooked. If you are boiling vegetables, some of the minerals will leach into the water, reducing your intake of this precious nutrition.
2 – Eat some fermented vegetables: kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles. These vegetables have an extra punch of nutrition from the good bacteria that does the fermented. The probiotics in fermented foods keep your gut happy and may even boost your immune system and prevent some infections by keeping the bad bacteria at bay. Additionally, the fermentation process breaks down the cell wall of in some plants which helps to release even more vitamins and make them easier to digest. They also just taste great!
3 – Buy some organic produce: the Environmental Working Group tests produce annually for residual chemicals, then they put together a list of the Dirty Dozen (the foods that you should buy organic) and the Clean Fifteen (the foods that are okay to buy non-organic). Check out the links if you are interested to find out which fruits and veggies made the lists this year. Strawberries have topped the Dirty Dozen list for the past 8 years! This is why I grow my own organic strawberries and also go picking every strawberry season to load up and freeze to use throughout the year. (Psst – prepare for this season with my Guide to Strawberry Picking Season)
4 – Eat the rainbow: this means eating a large variety of produce in different colors. Each fruit and vegetable has different vitamins, fiber content, water content, and minerals. Consuming a variety will ensure you get everything your body needs.
5 – Eat fresh, local produce as much as possible: The farther the produce has traveled to you, the more nutrition it loses on the way. Fresh picked from your garden is the best. You are also likely to find fresh picked food at a farmer’s market or if you get a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) food share from a local small farm. Most grocery store produce has traveled thousands of miles, losing its antioxidant properties on the way. If you can freeze food shortly after harvesting, you can preserve the nutrition as well.
