Salads are mainly leafy green vegetables served with a dressing, as well as various garnishes such as nuts and sometimes with meat, fish, pasta, cheese, egg or whole grains. Salad is made of various ingredients in a wet or once wet base, served chilled or at a moderate temperature.
Choice Of Salad Green
In choosing salad green, I advise people to always use fresh, crisp-looking green, free from witted or discoloured leaves for salad. We have various salad greens and each green has its own nutritional composition. Some are higher in nutrition, while others are lower. However little the constituents, it still has great roles to play in the body.
Examples of some salad greens we have include lettuce, cabbage, cucumber. The lettuce family has a wider variety, which include Romaine, Iceberb, Kale etc. The lettuce are very rich in various vitamins and nutrients which are of great benefits to the body and mankind.
9 Health Reasons To Eat Salads And Always Include In Your Diet
Having taken a journey through the above table, let us now have more insights on why we should make it a habit to eat salad greens. An important question i will ask is “How often do you eat salad?” or “Do you even make efforts to include salad in your diet at all?” You can either take a decision to imbibe the culture of eating salad greens daily or erase the thought completely after reading this article to the end..
1.Salad Is a Good Source Of Fiber
Do you know that eating salad everyday gives the body a good quantum of fiber. Fiber helps the body to regulate and lower the cholesterol level, and also prevent constipation.
2.Salad Can Help Fight Cancer
Vegetables and fruits generally are good for the body because they are very rich in nutrients. Frequently consuming salad green and vegetables can increase your blood levels, fortified with a host of powerful antioxidants such as Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Folic Acid, Lycopene and Carotene. Antioxidants are substances which help to protect the body from damage caused by harmful molecules.
The risk of cancer of the head and neck can be lowered by consuming much of vegetables. As earlier mentioned, eating salad green gives the body antioxidants which fight against free radicals. Watercress especially, contains phen-ethyl isthiocyanate. This helps disrupts the signals from tumours that cause normal tissues to grow new blood vessels to feed cancer cells.
3.Eat Salad to Manage Diabetes
Diabetes arises from high deficiency of magnesium in the body and insulin development resistance. Be rest assured that 2 cups of spinach contains 16% of magnesium while arugula has 6%.
4.Eating Salad Can Help Protect the Heart from Heart Disease
Two cups of salad (especially the Caesar Salad) contain about 40% of your daily foliate need and 10% fiber. When foliate is high in the body, the risk of having heart attack and stroke will be reduced.
5.Eating Salad Can Help Cut Calories and Maintain Healthy Normal Weight
Too much of calories in the body may result to overweight. You can choose to limit your weight by cutting down on the number of calories in your body system. By eating more of salad, the total calories intake will reduce. Salad consumption of up to 3 cups (1cup = 250ml) in volume may be around 100 calories in total, which is very ideal in maintaining your body weight.
6.Salad Green Can Help Build Your Bones
Vitamin K is a key constituent f greens like spinach, radicchio and watercress. Do you know that a cup of chopped watercress is capable of supplying your body with 100% Vitamin K, radicchio will give you 120% while Spinach will give you 170%? These vitamins are associated with increasing the bone mineral density.
7.Eating Salad Can Help Build Your Muscles
Spinach has a lot of inorganic nitrates. The nitrates when present in the body can rev up muscles using less oxygen.
8.Salad Intake Helps To Improve Your Eyesight
One of the vitamins found in salad green is Vitamin A. Vitamin A is responsible for bright eyes and clear sight. Also found in salad are Lutein and Zeaxanthin which help to improve eyesight. While Vitamin A helps the eye adapt from bright light to darkness, lutein and zeaxanthin help filter out high energy light that may cause damage from the free radicals.
9.Eating Salad Can Help Increase Your Life Span
By including good fat like monounsaturated fats (which are found in olive oil, avocado and nuts) in your vegetables may aid the absorption of protective phytochemicals like lycopene and lutein. Avocado provides the body with eight times more alpha-carotene and thirteen time more beta-carotene which help protect the body against cancer and heart disease, thereby help to increase your life span.
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