Food and Health Communications

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Eat More Fruits and Vegetables

Here are some great ways to include more fruit and vegetables in your diet. These are designed for people on the go.• Fresh or dried fruit for between meal snacks.• Drink 100% juices between meals. Try to lessen or eliminate your intake of soda.• Make up large amounts of tossed salad with lots of extra veggies cut up in them.• Add fruit to salads like apples, mandarin oranges, dried cranberries or cherries.• Mix fruit with plain yogurt for a snack.• Cut up an assortment of veggies to be readily available for snacks• Add extra vegetables to soup, either homemade or canned.• Decrease or even eliminate the meat and cheese in a sandwich and increase the veggies - extra lettuce, tomato, alfalfa sprouts, pepper strips, avocado.• Buy tabouli already made in the deli section of your grocery store for a quick and easy source of numerous phytochemicals.• Load up with lots of raw veggies at the salad bar.• Make kabobs for the grill with veggies and fruit e.g. zucchini, yellow squash, onion, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, sweet peppers, eggplant, pineapple wedges, peach slices, etc.• Make fruit kabobs for dessert.• Try a new fruit or veggie each week. This can include frozen medleys, a new fruit juice, a different vegetable juice or fresh produce.• Buy small snack-packs of canned fruit to take for lunch.• Put extra veggies into spaghetti sauce. Use frozen for more convenience.• Serve stir-fried veggies once every week. See your grocer’s freezer for delicious stir fry veggie blends.• Make a veggie pizza with lots of broccoli, mushrooms, peppers, onions, dried tomatoes,etc.• Drizzle a small amount of chocolate syrup over frozen cherries, blackberries, or raspberries.Adapted from A Dietitian’s Cancer Story, 5th edition 1999, by Diana Dyer, MS, RD, Swan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.