Down with Celery!
Leslie Kollar | Health Musings | August 11, 2011

image by: Jeffery Martin
So if we skip those pesky low nutrition vegetables, which ones should we consume to get the greatest nutritional value?
In an article for Self Magazine, Amy Paturel writes about the 3 Veggies with the Least Nutritional Value. Those veggies include celery, cucumbers and iceberg lettuce. HOORAY!!! I hate celery, and always thought that it was a cheap way to fill up a soup. (I’m not really a fan of cucumbers or iceberg lettuce either).
So if we skip those pesky low nutrition vegetables, which ones should we consume to get the greatest nutritional value? According to the Harvard School of Health, we should aim for nine servings a day of color, dark leafy greens, cooked tomatoes and anything rich in the colors yellow, red or orange.
Well I’m for that! I have recently discovered the joy of kale chips to replace my cravings for potato chips. Stop wrinkling your nose, they’re pretty good if you do them right. Plus at $2 to $3 for two bunches of kale, they’re a lot cheaper than the greasy, salt and fat laden potato variety.
A web site called fruit and veggies more mattershighlights certain vegetables each month with photos, recipes and nutritional values. The fruit and vegetable of the month section is really quite interesting and may even encourage you to try something different or exotic for a change.
The other good news is that you don’t have to eat everything raw. An article published in Scientific American suggests that cooking certain foods such as tomatoes, carrots, spinach, mushrooms and asparagus to name a few, supplies more antioxidants than in their raw form. However by cooking the experts suggest steaming or boiling – not frying (sorry) although roasting vegetables is a great alternative if you don’t use too much oil.
Now the only thing that would make this news even better is if our culinary experts would start leaving celery and cucumbers out of our high priced expensive restaurant salads and start putting in more nutritionally valuable foods like asparagus, raspberries and kale.
Leslie Kollar has over 20 years of experience in the health care field in both the U.S. and Canada. She has worked professionally in medical offices and hospital administration, using her BA in Communications/Public Relations and MBA in Marketing. She has also seen the other side of the health care coin as a 15 year cancer survivor. As a survivor she is passionate that each and every person is and should be responsible for their own health - and with this passion she hopes to inspire, inform and educate through HealthWorldNet.
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