Transcripts

Mike Carruthers:
If you want to eat more healthy...

Jeanine Barone :
You want to eat foods that are colorful.

The more colorful the food is, the more likely it is to have important chemicals that may reduce risk for a lot of chronic diseases like heart disease and cancer. So when I mean colorful foods I mean all kinds of berries, different lettuces, not just the obvious iceberg, carrots, squash. The more the color, the healthier it is.

Studies show, says Jeanine, that if you change to a more healthy diet, your tastes change as well.

If you change the salt intake of a diet, people are very in to pouring salt or eating fast foods that are loaded with salt. And if you gradually wean them from the salt, they don't miss the salt. And when you put the salt back into their diet, they then find, "too salty!" Same thing happens with fat in the diet. You wean them from whole milk to skim milk, when you put them back on the whole milk, it feels too fatty. So people do adapt to changes. We eat a meat diet because that what we've been eating. If we weaned ourselves from it, we would not miss it.

Jeanine says there is nothing wrong with eating meat occasionally...

Bu that's not what Americans are doing. They're eating meat often 3 times a day and the meat they're eating is fatty and huge portion sizes. All we're doing is saying, cut back on that. Try meat once a day, try meat even twice a day in a smaller portion. So they're not banishing it from their diet.

For transcripts and our newsletter, visit our website, somethingyoushouldknow.net. I’m Mike Carruthers and that’s Something You Should Know