How To Boost Your Vegetable Intake

Trying to consume a wide variety of different vegetables is vitally important for boosting your health, and fighting off disease.

Veggies are rich is nutrients like vitamins and minerals, but also contain plant compounds called phytochemicals which are also important for maintaining a healthy body.

Vegetables can be very helpful for weight management as they are low in calories but can also provide lots of fibre to help keep us satiated, and provide the feeling of fullness.

General recommendations for vegetable intake is at 5 portions a day. If you are unsure what 5 portions looks like or what counts as a portion of veg please visit the NHS website for more details.

Trying to consume 5 portions of vegetables a day can be difficult for some people, and it can also be a challenge to come up with ways to prepare them in an appetising way.

In this article I wanted to show your eight different ways in how you can incorporate more vegetables in your diet and at the same time not growing sick of them.

Read on for more details

Start With Breakfast

Adding vegetables to breakfast can be a great way to boost your vegetable intake at the start of the day.

One of my go-to breakfast options is scrambled eggs with avocado on wholemeal toast. Though avocados are technically classed as a fruit they are often used like a vegetable in savoury dishes.

Avocados are a great source of heart healthy monounsaturated fats and contain good amounts of vitamin E and folate. Another good option with this dish is to add spinach to it. Spinach works well with the other foods in this dish and contains good sources of vitamin A, C, and K, calcium, folic acid, and iron.

Another smart option would be in the form of an omelette and loading that with veggies. The classic 2 or 3 egg omelette, depending on how hungry you are in the morning, packed with some vegetables like mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, onions, and some spinach will help boost that vegetable intake, and get you off to a strong veggie start.

Smoothie

My go to breakfast in the morning is the smoothie. Very easy to drink on an early morning and super nutritious depending on what goes inside the smoothie.

Smoothies aren’t just for breakfast and can be used as a mid-afternoon snack, post dinner desert, or pre-bedtime snack.

In my opinion the best veggie options for smoothies would be spinach and kale. Both super nutritious and packed full of vitamins and minerals. They both have soft leaves that blend easily and with a subtle taste that doesn’t overpower the finished smoothie. Tasty.

Make a Soup

Soups are an excellent way to consume different vegetables very easily at once.

I would recommend starting with a base of vegetables to start the process of making the soup which will add more flavour to the finished product. Start by sweating off carrot, onion, and celery and let that cook down and soften. Then add your main component of the soup, for instance if your making tomato soup add a tin of chopped tomatoes. Already that’s four different vegetables included. Then you would add stock, season with salt and pepper, and blend if needed.

There are so many different flavours you can make as well. These are some of my favourites – leek and potato, roasted red pepper and butternut squash and rosemary.

Soups are great in the cold dark winter months helping to keep you warm and very nutritious. They are a great lunch option with a wholemeal roll.

Adding a tin of beans can add more protein and fibre to the finished soup, plus beans can count as one of your 5 a day.

Have a Salad With Your Lunch

Whether you have a sandwich or filled baguette for lunch trying to include a salad within them, or having it separate on the side is a good way to incorporate for vegetables into your daily regime.

The salad you have doesn’t have to be some Michelin start masterpiece. It can be simple with a few ingredients.

If you don’t consume a lot of vegetables generally then just adding one vegetable at lunch as a salad option is a good starting point. I would choose something that you don’t mind eating already. Whether that’s a chopped-up tomato, or a few rings of cucumber, just get into the habit of having some sort of vegetable with your lunch.

Over time start adding a new veg option every week until you are having four to five vegetables at lunch.

My go to salad to have in my wraps is rocket leaves, shredded Chinese leaf, peppers, spring onion, and half an avocado.

Add More Vegetables To Your Meals

This is a great way to add more vegetables to your daily food intake without noticing too much, and this strategy is great for children.

For example, say you are making a beef chilli for dinner, when you fry your onions at the start why not try adding two more vegetables with the onions. This is a technique used in the kitchens in restaurants to get more flavour into the dish at the start. Typically, you would use an onion, carrot, and celery. I would leave celery out and opt instead for a leek as celery could be considered one of the worst tasting vegetables around! Straight away you have gone from one vegetable (onion) to three.

I also like to add some butternut squash to my chilli as it cooks down very nice adding a sweet note to the chilli. Kidney beans can be added as well and also can count to one of your five a day. Your beef chilli now has five vegetables included (onion, carrot, leek, butternut squash, and kidney beans), and excluding garlic which usually goes into a chilli.

Why not give this technique a try when making other dishes and see how your daily vegetable intake grows.

Stir Fry

Another great way to add more veg into your diet is adding a stir fry dish once or twice a week.

Stir frying tends to implement a lot of vegetables with a type of protein, whether that’s chicken, beef, pork, or fish.

Typically, a stir fry might contain mushrooms, peppers, onions, garlic, pak choi and bean sprouts. There are plenty of other veg you could add to a stir fry and should not be exclusive to any vegetables.

Stir frying as well is done quickly keeping the vegetables still a little crunchy preserving all their nutrients and making them taste great. If you’re not a fan of crunchy vegetables when cooked then you can add some water to the pan, put a lid on top, and then steam them a little longer until they soften.

Snack on Vegetables

Snacking on raw vegetables during the day is a great way to incorporate more vegetables into your diet, keep hunger at bay with a healthy snack full of fibre, and to increase nutrient intake.

There are many options with some favourites being carrot sticks and hummus, celery sticks (not mine) and peanut butter, sugar snap peas or slices of pepper with a yoghurt-based dip.

Like I said there are many options out there, and all great for a workplace snack. Simply fill up a Tupperware with your favourite vegetable snack, take a small pot of dip like hummus and have a healthy snack throughout the day.

Frozen Vegetables

Using frozen vegetables in another great way to increase your vegetables intake.

If fresh vegetables aren’t consumed quick enough then eventually they will spoil and need throwing away. This can be quite annoying and also a waste of money. One of the benefits of using frozen vegetables is that this doesn’t happen and they can stay in your freezer for months.

The freezing process helps keep their nutrient value with only some variables amongst the fresh kind, but this is unique to each specific vegetable.

I always have a bag of frozen peas in the freezer which I usually add to a meal when I am heating it through to eat like a chilli.

There are plenty of other vegetables that can be used frozen like peas, and there is also the option of frozen fruits as well.

Final Thoughts

There are multiple ways in how you are more vegetables to your diet and I hope this article has highlighted some new ways for you.

Remember that vegetables are vitally important for our health and aiming for that magic 5 a day is a good recommendation to provide good amounts of fibre, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.

For more help with your diet or nutrition in general please feel free to contact me through my message form on my homepage and I would be happy to discuss in more detail with you.

Until next time.