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Gifts that Give Health: Recommended Healthy and Innovative New Year's Goods
Time flies, and the Spring Festival is less than half a month away. Have you thought about what New Year's goods to prepare for your family? Have you prepared gifts for visiting relatives and friends? Or is it still a big barrel of oil, a pile of health supplements, and a few boxes of snacks? That's a bit outdated now.
Nowadays, the market is incredibly abundant, which can be dazzling. What kind of New Year's goods should you prepare for your family and friends that are practical, healthy, and innovative? How can you truly "give the gift of health"? Today, I'll recommend several categories of New Year's goods related to nutrition and health:
1. Premium Grains
The first principle of the Dietary Guidelines is to combine staple foods with both refined and coarse grains. However, with improving living conditions over the years, people's diets have become more and more refined. While refined grains are soft in texture, they are lower in nutritional value and not beneficial for preventing chronic diseases. Therefore, during our nutritional education, we always advise people to combine refined and coarse grains and consume an appropriate amount of coarse grains. For the New Year, why not replace various "health supplements" with organic or green coarse grains and beans for your family? Choose a wider variety of higher-quality ones, and remind your family to add some when they usually steam rice or cook congee. Improving your diet quality starts with combining refined and coarse grains for your staple foods. Rainbow's blog has many recipes for coarse grains that you can refer to (see the end of this article).
2. High-Quality Nuts:
Gifting high-quality nuts as New Year's goods is a very nutritious, healthy, and fashionable choice. I recommend premium, packaged, and in-shell nuts. Nuts are prone to oxidation and spoilage, and bulk nuts, in particular, oxidize easily due to excessive air exposure. Therefore, it's essential to choose packaged ones, which are also more presentable for gifting. The choice of variety is also important. During the New Year, it's hard to avoid overindulging in rich foods, leading to an excess of energy. Nuts are also high in fat content, so you need to be selective. Choose varieties that are relatively low in fat but still delicious and nutritious. Which nuts are a good choice? I recommend pistachios.
1) Less likely to cause weight gain: Compared to other nuts, pistachios have a relatively low fat content. Eating the same amount means you consume less energy than with other nuts, reducing the risk of weight gain. Moreover, pistachios are in-shell. The slow process of shelling and eating them prevents you from consuming too much at once. Eating slowly allows you to savor the true flavor.
2) Beneficial for health: Pistachios rank among the highest nuts in monounsaturated fatty acid content, reaching 33.8%. Monounsaturated fatty acids, also known as oleic acid, are the beneficial component in olive oil. They can lower blood lipids, are beneficial for preventing cardiovascular diseases, and are very suitable for middle-aged and elderly people who want to prevent chronic diseases. Gifting high-quality pistachios to the elders in your family during the New Year is an excellent choice.
Furthermore, with all the rich food consumed during the New Year, the rich dietary fiber in pistachios provides a good feeling of fullness and aids bowel regularity, offering significant health benefits.
3. Small-Pack, High-Quality Cooking Oil
When preparing New Year's goods for your family, don't just get another big 5-liter bottle of oil. Instead, choose some less common small-pack health oils or nut oils. For example, perilla oil, flaxseed oil, pumpkin seed oil, walnut oil, etc. The raw materials for these oils are rich in nutrients, and they undergo minimal processing, retaining more of their nutritional value and some special health benefits. However, due to low production, they are not very common and are relatively expensive. The elderly at home might be reluctant to buy them. We can give these oils as New Year's gifts to the elderly, which not only provides some extra health benefits but also helps the family control their oil intake and ensures the oil's freshness. Remember, regardless of the type of oil, the total daily intake per person should not exceed 25-30 grams.
4. Health Books
I've always felt that giving a book as a gift is a very elegant thing. In the past, when friends had birthdays, I often gave classic novels as gifts. Now that I work in nutrition, my first choice for gifts is, of course, books related to nutrition and health.
A special recommendation is the "Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents," which I have introduced before. This is the most reliable health book closely related to everyone's life. People often ask how to eat healthily, and I always recommend this book. It provides professional, reliable, and practical guidance on what to eat, how much to eat, and how to plan your diet. It can be said that if you follow the dietary advice in the book and use the "Balanced Dietary Pagoda" to plan your diet and exercise, most health problems can be resolved. Our nutritional education is mostly centered around this book and this dietary pagoda because it is the most scientific, rational, and suitable for Chinese people.
I suggest that friends get a copy for their own homes and can also give it as a gift to family and friends.
5. Small Household Appliances
Medical and health devices: Especially suitable for middle-aged and elderly people, it's best to choose those that are both practical and have relatively simple functions, such as electronic blood pressure monitors, blood glucose meters, massagers, pedometers, body scales, etc. Pedometers are not only suitable for the middle-aged and elderly; young people should also have one to see how many steps they actually take each day and whether they can reach the basic 6,000 steps. A healthy body and a suitable figure both depend on the most crucial element: exercise.
Household items: Food scales, measuring spoons, soy milk makers, juicers, bread makers, noodle makers, etc. A food scale is quite important. Before cooking, you can weigh the rice, noodles, vegetables, and meat according to the recommended amounts in the dietary pagoda, which helps you avoid overeating and maintain a reasonable and appropriate diet. Small measuring spoons are very effective for controlling oil and salt intake, which is greatly beneficial for our healthy lives.
Among these gifts, special attention should be paid to the selection of pistachios. Choose high-quality, packaged products. Good quality pistachios have a light yellowish shell and a green kernel dressed in a beautiful purple skin. The deeper and richer the color, the higher its nutritional value. Be careful when selecting them. Be sure not to buy bleached pistachios. Bleached pistachios not only have reduced nutritional value, but if some unqualified factories use industrial hydrogen peroxide for bleaching, it could also be harmful to health. Pistachios produced in California have always been a symbol of high quality. When selecting good pistachios, don't overlook the "California" label.
Of course, there are many other New Year's goods to choose from. The ones recommended here today are all related to nutrition, health, and diet, and are very practical. They are especially suitable gifts for family, the elderly, and friends. As our lives get better, we will pay more attention to nutrition and health. Healthy and nutritious foods and products, along with reasonable and practical health concepts, are the best New Year's gifts for our family.