Simple Tricks To Eat Your Way Healthy

They say the road to being healthy is down to eating healthy, getting regular exercise and sufficient sleep. It’s simple enough trio to wrap your mind around, but with all the pressures and time constraints that come with a busy life, it’s equally as easy to let these good choices fall by the wayside.

There are different ways to try and be more conscious of our food choices, such as making lists and replacing sweet treats with fruit and nuts.

But are there actually ways we can trick ourselves into eating healthy? The good people at the University of Cornell have a few bright ideas.

Sample-sized grocery shopping

Dr Aner Tal and Dr Brian Wansink found that when shoppers ate a healthy snack before shopping – apple slices in the case of the study – they bought a whopping 25 per cent more fruit and vegetables than whose who didn’t snack prior to hitting the shops.

So could nibbling on a celery stick really put us in a better frame of mind for putting good food in Onya’s Reusable Produce bags?

“What this teaches us, is that having a small healthy snack before shopping can put us in a healthier mind set and steer us towards making better food choices,” says Dr Tal.

Even further, a similar study involving online grocery buying and a healthy pre-shopping snack showed similar results – with the twist that participants who were given a cookie instead of an apple to eat before they shopped tended to choose more unhealthy food.

Colour me surprised

Picking out crockery may not seem like a particularly pertinent part of changing your diet for the better, but the colour of your plate may have an effect on our portion sizes.

A study by Dr Brian Wansink and Dr Koert van Ittersum set out to investigate the power of colour on our appetites.

They split up the guests at a party into two groups – one who would help themselves to creamy Alfredo sauce pasta, and the other who would get to eat tomato sauce pasta.Members of both groups were randomly assigned either a red or white plate, and once they’d helped themselves to pasta their plates were secretly weighed.

The result?

Participants whose pasta had low contrast with the colour of the plates – tomato pasta on red plates, and Alfredo pasta on white plates – served themselves 22 per cent more food than those whose plates had more of a contrast with their plates.

In addition, the researchers also found the by reducing the contrast in colour between dinner ware (plates) and the background such as the table, place mat or tablecloth, people can reduce us super-sizing our portions by up to 10 per cent.