2021 Top Health Tips

We’ve looked over our top posts and questions about vegan health and families from 2021 and have mined them for the top tips that will help you make 2022 the best year ever!

The covid influence challenged all of us to find personal motivation and develop new systems for staying fit and healthy. Keeping our immune systems strong and eating healthy at home both became top priorities. Finding new ways to connect as a family when work and school became more device oriented was a challenge many of us faced too. Those who are flexible and embrace a health focused lifestyle will fare better through the next covid variant or new pandemic. Plus, it’s just plain better for the planet to eat a whole food plant-based diet! Every meal you make can cast your vote to stop climate change and environmental degradation.

Let’s look at the ways we surmounted those challenges and take this wisdom into a fabulous 2022. 

The most common health question about a vegan diet is where we get our protein. Plant-based diets took off faster than anyone ever imagined in 2021! Meat replacements saw the biggest growth with adoption down to the fast-food chains level. Packaged and processed vegan foods also took off.  In reality, it became easier than ever to eat an unhealthy vegan diet.

We counsel people and families on how to eat a delicious and nutritious plant-based diet. Being in our 50’s and having 30 years of health consultant experience, we know the effects diet has on your long-term health first-hand. In fact, science shows us that our health habits after 50 have a bigger effect on our quality and quantity of life than our genetics do! On the flip side, children under 12 are being diagnosed with diabetes and heart disease at an alarming rate.

Join now and keep your New Year's goals on track! Starts January 31st. 

Food can be our medicine or poison. Most parents want their families to eat a healthy diet but feel overwhelmed with the mountain of information to sort through to come up with healthy meals that also taste delicious and don’t take all day to make. Even though it’s expensive, falling into fast food or take-out can seem like the best choice on busy nights. 

Here are the concepts we live by that will help you build your immune system, drop that covid weight and provide simple and delicious plant-focused meals for you and your family:

1. Get your family meals organized.
   • Take stock of your family’s favorite flavors and styles of cuisine. Do you like Mexican, Italian, Chinese, Thai, spicy or sour flavors, crunchy or creamy textures, salads, smoothies, soups or casseroles? What are your favorite herbs and spices
   • Collect a list of favorite recipes based on those answers.
   • Make a shopping list, or download ours HERE.
2.  

Now that you have a list, let’s push the edges a little. Science is showing us that eating at least 30 different foods per week is beneficial for our gut biome. And guess what? Your gut biome is the key to health. A diverse and healthy gut biome produces happy hormones, normalizes your weight, strengthens your immune system, and extracts the nutrient building blocks your body needs to stay strong and healthy.

Here are tips to help you exceed those 30 foods. We eat at least 20 per day :-)

1. Use our shopping list. It prompts you to select some foods that may be new to you as well as to shop for a variety of foods that gives you a solid nutrient bank.
2. Eat across a rainbow of fruits and vegetables. Each color has a different nutrient profile. Eating the rainbow over a week helps ensure you’re getting what you need.
3. Plating up with one pile of protein, a vegetable and a starch is a sure way to have kids turn their noses up at foods they think they don’t like. Make what we call “silver bowl meals”. They’re one dish that we pack with a variety of ingredients. Soups, lasagna, polenta pie, lentil dal, samosas, stir-fry, veggie spaghetti sauce, veggie pizza… Add a salad and you have a complete meal.
4. One of our favorite ninja parenting techniques is to chop produce small so that you get some of everything in every bite. It’s hard to pick out foods that way and it helps kids get familiar with foods they might object to if they saw a big pile of them on their plate.
5. Add chopped or blended fruits and veggies to common foods. We pack our spaghetti sauce, lasagna and soups with veggies. Blending vegetables can enable you to add them and no one will ever know!
6. Add fresh fruit to oatmeal, pancakes, or cereal in the morning, or make a side dish of fruit to accompany sweet breakfasts. Or, add a smoothie to breakfast and throw in a couple nutrient dense foods like dark leafy greens, carrots or beets.
7. Trust in the power of sauces. A good sauce can doctor up any meal or transform left-overs! We love to make our own and they’re surprisingly easy! In the Vegan Foodie Social Club we make a Tahini and Teriyaki sauce with you and also have a super Bar-B-Que recipe too. Pesto is another standby that we make almost every week. 

Speaking of nutrient dense foods, don’t forget herbs and spices! Every country’s cuisine has a unique array of herbs and spices. Most of them are immune boosting and support healthy digestion. Each week play with a new herb or spice, or a new style of cuisine. Take a family vote for what to experiment with and get everyone involved if you can! 

Use these tips to make the new year the best one ever! 

If your heart is in it but you still aren’t sure what to do, you can schedule a discovery call with us to explore how we can best help you establish the lifestyle and health you want for you and your family. Click HERE to schedule it!