Cook Better For Better Immunity

The onus of feeding healthy and nutritious food to the whole family falls upon the shoulder of whoever plans or cooks the family’s meals. Your responsibility for feeding your family wholesome and healthy food does not end simply by providing home cooked meals, but also extends towards making better food choices and planning meals that provide complete nutrition. Most people do not relate immunity to diet, but it is absolutely true that a person’s immunity and resistance to diseases and infections is largely dependent upon his or her diet. As the food planner of your family, it is important that you make better food choices in order to increase and fortify your family’s immunity. Some tips on what to do and what not to do in order to prepare and feed immunity strengthening food at home are:

Cut Out Sugar As Much As Possible: The typical American family’s diet contains too much of two things—meat and sugar. Out of these, while red meat and poultry do not contain anything to boost the body’s immunity, sugar helps in reducing it. This is because apart from being loaded with carbohydrates, sugar does not contain any other kind of nutrition. On the other hand, the body needs to use up vitamins and minerals gained from other foods for breaking down and processing white sugar. As a result, you not only gain nothing from sugar, you also end up losing whatever nutrition you gain from healthy food. This way, your body loses immunity boosters and excessive consumption of sugar keeps on eroding your body and its resistance to diseases. While cutting out sugar totally is impossible, you should try to use brown sugar, jaggery or honey as sugar subs wherever possible.

Increase Fruit And Vegetable Consumption: Fruits and vegetables contain a number of essential minerals and vitamins that cannot be found in other food groups. They are also a rich source of anti-oxidants that help in flushing out disease causing toxins from the body. Therefore, portions of fresh fruits and vegetables are necessary if you want to boost your family’s immunity. You should start making salads with green leafy vegetables and legumes and incorporate fruits in desserts and starters in order to balance a meal. In fact, if your children keep falling sick regularly due to viral or bacterial infections, you will see them healthier and more robust within six months of incorporating daily doses of fresh fruits and vegetables in their diet.

Avoid White and Processed Food: A large portion of our diet is made up of food products whipped up using refined or all-purpose flour. White bread, cakes, cookies, noodles and some forms of pasta are made from refined white flour which suppresses your body’s natural immunity. In fact, most processed foods lose a major part of their nutrition due to different processing methods. On top of this, additives, flavoring and preservatives in these foods bring down your body’s immunity because it uses up all its nutritive stores in order to get rid of these chemicals instead of putting them to better use like improving immunity or providing strength.

Incorporate Immunity Friendly Foods Into Your Menu: You will be able to witness a marked decrease in the number of times your family members fall ill due to allergic symptoms or viral infections simply by incorporating some immunity boosting foods in your daily menu. Apart from making fresh fruits and green leafy vegetables a staple, try to feed your family yoghurt, which is a great immunity booster. Other foods to add to your menu are whole grain cereals, legumes, dark colored fruits like berries, citrus fruits and beans etcetera.

Cooking at home from scratch, is a great way to monitor what your family eats. But often we don't feel we have time for this. This is where the crock pot comes to the rescue. By spending only a couple of minutes preparing the crock pot recipe in the morning, you will have an entire family meal cooked by evening. And don't think it is limited to a crock pot beef stew. There are heaps of meals you can cook in your crock pot from meat loaf to macaroni; from lamb shanks to soup. Try this pork crock pot recipe to get a feel for the crock pot and to start your family off on a more healthy diet.