Sometimes it’s hard to find the time to cook the kind of meals we’d like to eat every night. When we finally get home, most of us are pretty exhausted and tend to stick with the easiest way to get something relatively tasty inside us; one-pot meals, heated up leftovers from the weekend, or – gasp! – ready meals.
However, it doesn’t have to mean that we lose interest in keeping ourselves healthy. In fact, there’s a wide range of superfoods which we can use along with simple recipes in order to boost our wellbeing. That’s why, today, we’re going to share with you a selection of our favorite superfoods to help keep you healthy (or, at least, healthier!).
Quinoa
Pronounced “keen-wa”, this amazing little rice substitute contains twice as much protein. Not only that, but it’s also just as simple to cook and can be used as a staple food replacement in any dish which would normally require rice.
Quinoa is gluten-free and is also one of the rare foods which can provide your body with all nine essential amino acids. Likewise, it has B-vitamins, iron, potassium, and numerous other amazing nutrients which will make this simple ingredient a much-loved addition to your kitchen cupboards!
Acai
These amazing little super-berries are often marketed for their anti-aging and weight-loss benefits. This is thanks to their unusually high level of anthocyanins, which are used by the body to fight against horrible illnesses like heart disease and cancer.
In fact, among fruits, it’s one of the few that contains oleic acid; this is the same fat found in olive oil, and the chemical which actually makes olive oil so good for your heart. It’s best to seek out some unsweetened, frozen acai which you can then add to recipes; buying pre-blended juice with the berries often means that you’ll be ingesting unnecessary extra sugar.
Chia Seeds
These tiny little seeds are a great way to add some nutrition-packing goodness to any meal. Why? Well, because they just happen to be loaded in Omega 3 fatty acids, fiber, and calcium. In fact, if you’re a vegetarian or vegan, chia seeds can be a great way to reclaim some of the lost nutrients that you’ll not be getting from fish.
Whether you’re putting them in a stir-fry, your morning oatmeal, or just a mid-day smoothie, they taste great and we guarantee they’ll do you some good. However, it’s worth noting that you should make sure you’re buying chia seeds which are specifically intended for human ingestion, and not the kind produced for pets!
Hemp Seeds
Just like chia seeds, hemp seeds are packed in Omega 3s, but they also have a good amount of Omega 6s as well. Derived from the cannabis plant family, this completely non-psychoactive version can be incredibly beneficial to the human body without providing any of the nasty “high” or side-effects.
Not only that, but they also provide significant levels of protein (in fact, most vegan protein supplements use hemp as their primary ingredient), magnesium, and potassium. And, just like chia seeds, they can be introduced to just about any meal—they taste especially good in soups and oatmeal!
While the list of superfoods we can include in our diet is incredibly long, we hope that this small selection can get you on your way to enjoying a healthier diet with the minimum of fuss.
