Make produce an easy snack

How to make healthy food more appealing

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is to make produce an easy snack. If you
make grabbing grapes as easy as grabbing potato chips, you

(00:26):
will probably eat more fruit. Today's tip was inspired by
a New York Times article about how a nutritionist actually eats.
According to the article, nutritionist doctor Maya Vadevalou suggests making
vegetables your lazy snack. In other words, if eating vegetables

(00:48):
doesn't require a lot of effort, you're probably going to
eat more vegetables. She suggested that she was often very
satisfied with a bag of baby carrots on her desk. Now,
there is a caveat here that people who are drawn
to the field of nutrition might be more into healthy

(01:08):
foods than the rest of us. I do not find
baby carrots to be an exciting snack. But the truth
is that making produce as easy to eat as possible
does increase the chances that it can compete with cookies
or doritos or anything else that you might be trying
to minimize. As an example, unwashed whole bell peppers are

(01:34):
no match for a can of chips, but cut up
bell pepper sticks that you can easily dip into hummus
have a fighting chance in that battle. So if you
buy peppers at the grocery store, go ahead and wash
them and remove the seeds and pith and cut them
into snackable sticks. Store them in a storage container in

(01:57):
the fridge that is easily visible. I'm talking maybe even
a single size container with an individual serving size container
of hummus stacked on top. You want the veggies to
be a very easy snack with some produce. You don't
even want to hide it away in the fridge. I

(02:19):
know that grapes keep longer in the produce drawer, but
the goal is not for them to last a long time.
It's for people to eat them quickly. So I try
to buy really enticing looking grapes and then put them
in a bowl on the counter. Likewise, if I cut

(02:39):
up more than enough strawberries for dinner and leave the
extras in a bowl on the counter, people tend to
eat them as they pass through the kitchen at night.
Now we do risk people not eating all of them
and the leftovers turning a little bit on appealing, but
I can tell you that someone hunting for a late

(03:00):
night snack is unlikely to pull a container out of
the fridge, wash everything, cut off the tops, and then
eat them. We want to make this an even fight package.
Snack food has intrinsic appeal, but a lot of the
time we eat traditional snack foods simply because it's the

(03:23):
easiest thing to do. If you make produce an easy
snack as well, then you won't need to rely on
willpower to reach for a banana instead of the cookies.
The banana is right there in front of you in
the fruit bowl, which makes it much more easy to grab.

(03:46):
In the meantime. This is Laura. Thanks for listening, and
here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for
listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback,

(04:07):
you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
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