Tasty Foods can be healthy

​What do I mean by tasty food often people think of food as tasty, separate to what they consider to be healthy and like to categorise food e.g. healthy ,diet or tasty. They consider a fry up for breakfast or a slice of pavlova as tasty, not healthy but if they are eating fruit or vegetables then that is often seen as healthy but not tasty.  If they add any fat to food then it automatically becomes bad for them.  But is that strictly true?  I don’t think so when we start to look at including a wide variety of food and looking at how to make it tastier we are more likely to increase the variety of food that we eat which is a very good thing.  When you fry something rather than boil or grill it, it doesn’t take away from the foods nutritional value but maybe adds a little bit more flavour to it, sometimes adding a little bit of sugar to a bitter fruit makes it more appealing to eat e.g. sugar to rhubarb.
So let’s look at what people see as healthy but not always tasty and see why that might be. Fruit and vegetables often fall into this category. When you want to make a change to being more health conscious which often really means losing weight what do you buy more of, fruit and vegetables. As a Dietitian I have always been used to giving advice on how much and what type of food to eat for health.  With fruit and vegetables, I in the past saw this as one of the positive messages, as it is something I have always encouraged people to eat more of.  But I have come to realise this can backfire and become a message of its good for me and I should eat it.  This then becomes a rule and nobody really likes rules, they are there to be broken.
If we start to think more about  the 3 T’s i.e. tastes, textures and temperatures when we are thinking about what we want to eat and forget about diet or the healthy word then fruit and vegetables can often fit the bill e.g. on a cold day and you want something hot, liquid and savoury then a bowl of vegetable soup can be the ticket or on a really hot day then something cool and crunchy might be something you look for when peckish like an apple or a salad equally you might decide you want something cool and creamy such as an ice cream but the choice is yours you just need to stop and think about what at this time do I want, sometimes it will be one food and other times it will be something else.  So stop thinking healthy and ask yourself questions about the 3 T’s along with your hunger levels and guess what as a by-product of that you are likely to be eating a more varied and therefore healthier diet. If you are at present eating a diet with a limited variety of food then why not try a new food or taste this week. it can be something you think you are not allowed and haven’t eaten for a long time or a totally new food again it could even you something you regularly eat but just change the way it’s cooked the choice is yours.