We have written many articles about how important it is to eat your vegetables. But not all vegetables are created equally. Some are full of nutrients and some don’t have very many nutrients at all. Here are the vegetables that you should plan your diet around.
The healthiest vegetable to eat is spinach. 30 grams of raw spinach is full of Vitamin A and Vitamin K. It also has two powerful antioxidants in the form of beta-carotene and lutein. Spinach has been linked to lower blood pressure and increased heart health. You should definitely include it in your meals!
Note: all vegetables are best eaten raw. Once you steam or bake spinach it will lose a lot of its nutrients. If you stick it in the microwave, it will lose almost all of its nutrients!
The second healthiest vegetable to eat are carrots. Carrots are full of the antioxidant beta-carotene. Also, one serving of carrots has 428% of the daily recommendation for vitamin A!
Carrots have been linked to a reduction in prostate and lung cancer.
Broccoli are the third healthiest vegetable because they have a compound called sulforaphane, which has been shown to reduce the size of cancer cells. In mice, eating broccoli prevented chronic diseases.
You should also eat garlic because it has been shown to regulate blood sugar and improve heart health. People with diabetes should eat a lot of garlic. The rest of us should eat it because it helps to prevent diabetes!
The other super healthy vegetables to eat are Swiss chard, kale, sweet peas, and brussel sprouts.
The vegetable with the least amount of nutrients are onions. They are all about the flavor but they have really nothing else to offer. Portobello mushrooms are also very low in nutrients as well as cucumbers, eggplant, and beets.
Another note: just because broccoli and carrots and spinach are super high in nutrients and mushrooms and onions aren’t doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat a variety of vegetables. Even the vegetables that are low in nutrients still have fiber and other beneficial things to offer your body.
It is good to keep variety in your diet. This forces your body to produce many different enzymes to extract many different nutrients from the food you eat. If you eat only a few different food items, your body won’t have the enzymes that it needs to fully extract nutrients.
Along with drinking antioxidant-rich ionized water, be sure to focus on highly nutritious vegetables as well. The combination of antioxidant-rich vegetables with antioxidant-rich water will make a huge positive impact on your overall health!
