Food Trends for 2020 Show a SustainabilityFocus
Why Sustainable, Plant-Based Foods Are Gaining Traction:
Move over, meat: More than half (52%) of Americans are eating more plant-based foods, and plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy continue to fly off grocery store shelves. Reasons to jump on the trend abound. Eating a plant-rich diet can reduce your risk of heart disease, cancer, and type II diabetes, and other diseases. Plant-based eating is the most environmentally sustainable way to eat, according to the World Health Organization. And powering your body on plants may help you feel and perform better at work.
Read on to find out how plant-based eating differs from vegetarianism or veganism, what’s driving the trends toward eating more plants, and how plant-based eating at the office may benefit you.
Plant-Based Eating Is Trending:
Diets based on plants aren’t new. Plants formed the basis of most prehistoric people’s diets. Meat was a rare treat for our early ancestors, who mostly subsisted on vegetables, fruits, and nuts, according to most anthropologists.
Voluntarily rejecting meat for health, religious, or cultural reasons isn’t new either. Ancient Egyptians ate little meat or fish even though it was available. And 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras and the Indian religious leaders Buddha and Mahavira advocated for a meatless lifestyle.
But the modern terms vegetarian, vegan, and plant-based are relatively new. The vegetarian movement started in England in 1847 when the first vegetarian society formed to advocate the health benefits of avoiding meat. It was an offshoot of the temperance movement, which promoted avoiding alcohol to keep the body clean. Most early vegetarians ate dairy and eggs.
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Types of Teas and Their Health Benefits
When you think of tea, you may immediately think of brews made from tea leaves, such as green tea or oolong tea. But those aren’t the only types of tea you can enjoy. There’s also an incredible range of herbal teas, which are made by steeping or boiling dried fruits, flowers, spices, and herbs. They may also be called tisanes, herbal infusions, or botanical infusions.
Herbal teas are not only made differently than teas made with the leaves of the camellia Sinensis plant (black, white, green, pu’er, or oolong), but they also offer different benefits. While the teas made from leaves have varying levels of caffeine (with black containing the most at around 40 to 70 milligrams per 8-ounce serving, and white with the least at only 15 to 30 milligrams), herbal teas are naturally caffeine-free. And depending on what’s used to flavor the infusion, you may experience a whole host of other positive effects. Here are a few of the most popular tisanes—along with health benefits that may even give you a leg up at work.
Peppermint
: Peppermint contains menthol in its leaves, which acts as a light muscle relaxer and has anti-inflammatory properties as well. Additionally, this sweet and minty brew—which has just a little spice on the palette—has long been used as a stomach soother. If you experience a bit of GI distress, a warm cup of peppermint tea could be just the ticket.
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Reasons to Love the Mediterranean Diet
With olive oil, nuts, wine, fruits, veggies, whole grains, and fish as staples, you can't beat the Mediterranean diet for fresh, satisfying flavors.
Surprise! No Calorie Counting.
You won't need a calculator for this meal plan. Instead of adding up numbers, you swap out bad fats for heart-healthy ones. Go for olive oil instead of butter. Try fish or poultry rather than red meat. Enjoy fresh fruit and skip sugary, fancy desserts.
Eat your fill of flavorful veggies and beans
. Nuts are good, but stick to a handful a day. You can have whole-grain bread and wine, but in moderate amounts.Keep fruit in sight: Keeping a bowl of fruit on the counter, in sight, makes it easier to choose fruit as a snack instead of less healthy alternatives.
Make a batch of soup each week
. Make one big pot of soup and divide it into single portions. Store the individual containers in the fridge and freezer so that you have healthy grab-and-go food ready when you need it during the week. Soup makes a great lunch at the office or light dinner on busy weeknights.
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Cooking With Your Kids: 5 Reasons You Should Be Doing It
When it comes to raising an adventurous eater, it is not just about coaxing kids to eat their veggies. Bringing up a child who can enjoy a cantaloupe as much as a cupcake takes patience and persistence, but it does not have to feel like a chore.
Kids may need to have frequent joyful experiences involving food to overcome the anxiety they may have around tasting the unfamiliar. Over time, cooking with your children can help build that confidence—and provide rich sensory experiences.
Here are five ways to enjoy cooking with your children while raising an adventurous eater along the way.
Engage other senses.
For a hesitant eater, tasting an unfamiliar food can sometimes be intimidating. You can help your child explore foods when cooking using other senses besides taste. This helps to build positive associations with food. Kneading dough, rinsing vegetables, and tearing lettuce all involve touching food and being comfortable with texture. The complex flavors we experience when eating food come from both taste sensations from the tongue AND smelling with the nose. While cooking with new ingredients, some children may feel too overwhelmed to taste. If this happens, you can try suggesting smelling a food first; this may provide a bridge to tasting in the future.
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Media is Taking Over Our Dinner Table
Families today are finding it more difficult to eat dinner together, and when they come to the table, it's often the TV that's doing the talking. A recent survey conducted by Eckrich, a product of ConAgra Foods, found that 40 percent of American families eat dinner together only three or fewer times a week, with 10 percent never eating dinner together at all. However, 88 percent of families would like to increase the time spent with their family at the dinner table rather than time preparing the meal.
On average 11.4 million tech devices such as smartphones and tablets to laptops and iPods are brought to family meals.Almost a quarter of families who bring tech to the table feel they are prevented from having proper conversations with each other at meal times, seriously impacting on what should be quality time together.
Children and young teenagers are the worst offenders, with a third of 5-to-15-year-olds regularly bringing some form of tech device to family meals.According to the new research, technology is also limiting the amount of time families spend together during meal times. For one in five family’s dinner has become a functional and rushed occasion frequented by regular arguments.
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How to Curb Your Child's Sugar Cravings
Is your child’s sweet tooth raging out of control? Here's how to tame those sugar cravings.
Spot "sneaky" sugar. Many foods marketed as "health foods" can actually have a lot of added sugar. Always check the labels on sports drinks, smoothies, protein and granola bars, and yogurt; some can have as much as 4 to 5 teaspoons of added sugar per serving. Whole fruit makes a great substitute for these items and counts as dessert, too. If your kids balk at first (and they will), melt some dark chocolate and let your kids dip—and what kid doesn't love to dip! Dark chocolate actually contains 70% cocoa and has less than half the sugar of milk chocolate.
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