Health Promotion - Winterize your nutrition
March 24, 2022 - Pam Hatton
Healthy eating in the wintertime can be a bit of a luxury. Everything has a price, whether it is the time to make food after a long day or escalating food prices. The pandemic has brought challenges but with a few savvy tweaks, you can optimize your food budget and fill your plate with healthy choices.
Winterizing your nutrition can involve using seasonal vegetables or finding nutritious cooking shortcuts to support health and your wallet. It is tempting to pop a frozen entrée into the microwave and skip the expensive salad. Many habits are born of opportunity, so if your kitchen is stocked with nutritious foods, you are more likely to choose them.
Trim your food bill and support your overall nutritional wellness, including your cardiovascular and immune systems and even your brain health, with these suggestions.
- Add some colour. Red, green, orange and purple vegetables and fruit serve a nutritional purpose of bringing a variety of vitamins and minerals to your plate. When fresh produce prices skyrocket, opt for at-peak-of-ripeness frozen vegetables. Try a stir fry mix to change up the peas and corn. Frozen kale and spinach add Vitamin A, folate, and potassium to soups and stews. Frozen berries and even tropical fruit like mango and pineapple thaw well and are great in smoothies or on top of yogurt.
- Make a lettuce-free salad. Tender greens wilt quickly and are the vegetables thrown out the most. Try hardier vegetables with a longer shelf life like kale, shredded cabbage (white, purple, Savoy, Chinese, or turban), beets, carrots and fennel. Add some texture and flavour with citrus fruit, apples or pears, nuts and seeds, or a bit of dried fruit.
- Where are your roots? Budget-friendly root vegetables like carrots, sweet potatoes, turnip, potatoes, parsnips, onions and garlic are nutritious and abundant in winter months. Roasting root vegetables brings out their delicious flavours by caramelizing their natural sugars.
- Be a bean counter. Dried legumes like chickpeas, beans and lentils pack a lot of plant protein and fibre into pennies per serving. Use a pressure cooker to cut cooking time or opt for canned legumes. Rinse canned legumes to reduce the salt content before eating.
- Sprout it! Grow an indoor micro-green garden by sprouting some lentils or seeds in a jar. They add crunch to salads and sandwiches. It is a nutrition trick and a hobby you can watch grow in the smallest of spaces.
- Soup’s on! Wintertime means homey slow cooked comfort foods. Tougher and less expensive cuts of meat become fork tender from a slow braise in a crock-pot. A big pot of soup is filling and can be an opportunity to use up odd bits of leftover grains, beans and vegetables hiding in the back of the fridge.
- Adventure training. Try unfamiliar seasonal foods like celeriac, Jerusalem artichokes, parsnips, parsley root, rutabaga and kohlrabi and search out recipes online to prepare them. You might find a new favourite or a new way to prepare an old standard.
- Mindful management. Mindful eating is actively paying attention to your food and experiencing aromas, colour, taste and texture in the moment. Bring a focus to these sensations and be guided by your hunger cues. Turn off the TV and your phone and eat undistracted. Stop eating when you’re full. It takes practice to eat more slowly and chew thoroughly. Good thing we get to practise several times a day.
While winter poses extra challenges in maintaining a nutritious diet, a few tricks in choosing and preparing meals can go a long way in optimizing nutrition while minimizing the impact on your budget.
Recipes to try this winter:
- Oven roasted Falafel
- Six easy dinner ideas without recipes
- How to make a healthy soup
- How to sprout lentils
Pam Hatton, CD, RD, MSc is the Nutrition Wellness Specialist in the Directorate of Force Health Protection and provides science-based advice. As a member of the Strengthening the Forces team, she is involved in the promotion of healthy eating and nutritional wellness.