fruit Archives - Happy Healthy Wealthy Productive Sustainable

Schalk December 13, 2019

1.3 - Health, 1.3a - Nutrition avocado, diet, fruit, health, nutrition

Making Avocado (and Other Fruits) Part of Your Life

We’ll finish off the week with my personal favorite: the avocado (with a supporting cast of other fruits).

These guys are luckily also one of the easier groups to include in a healthy diet, so this post will be appropriately short for a Friday 🙂

Let’s talk strategy

Avocado and other fruit are very tasty, very practical and quite affordable. Thus, there are no real barriers to making them a bigger part of your culinary life.

But there are still some things we can do to make it even easier and more rewarding.

Learn to properly select and ripen avocados as outlined in the previous post.
Commit to keeping a bowl of varied fruit somewhere where you can easily see it.
Look for some services delivering fruit baskets to companies in your area and petition your boss to use this service to improve team health. This is a win for all involved!

Easy meals

My default dinner is crushed avocado on seed sprinkled dried bread with some Aromat seasoning and smoked salmon on top. To me, this is the ideal combination of health, taste and convenience.

For those who like a little more variety in their lives, there are many other ways to enjoy avocado in things like salads and dips. It’s said that avocado makes salads even healthier by encouraging the absorption of nutrients.

Fruits are even simpler. It’s worth maximizing convenience by buying fruit that does not have to be pealed, seedless grapes and fruit juices. Just make sure you select 100% fruit juice with no added sugar, preferably with some fruit fibers still inside.

As stated in the previous post, it is possible to eat too much fruit. So, don’t go crazy. On average, more than three fruits and one glass of juice per day might introduce some moderate health (and dental) risks.

Schalk November 29, 2019

1.3 - Health, 1.3a - Nutrition avocado, food, fruit, health, nutrients

The World’s Best Foods: Avocado (and Other Fruit)

OK, I might be a bit biased towards this one. Consciously deciding to start eating lots of avocado and taking perhaps too much advantage of the free fruit we get at work were the first steps in my ongoing 4000-day healthy streak.

But avocado has the credentials to back up my somewhat biased boosting. Other fruits are not too shabby either (although they have a little sugar problem). Let’s take a look.

What’s so great about avocado and other fruit?

Avocado is unique among fruits in that it contains the bulk of its calories in the form of healthy monounsaturated fats. Relative to other fruits, avocado has a low level of carbs. It also boasts a range of other nutrients with proven health benefits.

But the main reason why avocado was the first step in my long health journey is that it can form the foundation of a complete meal that is both super tasty and super practical. This soon became my staple dinner, providing great health benefits with zero compromise regarding taste, convenience or budget.

Other fruit generally work best as snack food, promising a similarly impressive nutritional profile combined with great taste and convenience.

The thing that puts other fruit a step behind avocado is that they often contain most of their energy in the form of fructose (which poses some health risks). Avocados, on the other hand, deliver most of their energy in the form of heart-healthy monounsaturated fats.

However, you will have to eat a huge amount of fruit to reach dangerous amounts of fructose. Being a whole food, fruit provides lots of fiber and other nutrients to help the body stay in balance. Processed empty-calorie fructose sources like table sugar and high fructose corn syrup are much more dangerous.

Tips and tricks

One tricky thing about avocados is ensuring that you always have a high quality one at just the right level of ripeness. If avocado is to become a major part of your diet, this is a crucial skill to master.

Make sure that you buy your avocados while they are still rock hard. This ensures that they will not have all those bumps and bruises that cause those awful brown spots on the inside.

These hard avocados should be stored at room temperature until they become soft enough to eat. Once an avocado becomes soft, you have a fairly narrow window before it becomes overly ripe. Luckily, soft avocados can be stored in the fridge for as long as one week.

For all other fruit, simply ensure that you have a good variety lying around where you can easily see them. Enjoying fruit should be as simple as see, grab, eat.

It’s hard to overeat on whole foods like fresh fruit, but if you average more than three per day, it could be smart to exercise a bit of moderation.

In conclusion, avocado and other fruit offer one of those rare and beautiful combos of nutrition, taste and practicality. They certainly deserve a spot on any intelligently constructed meal plan.