6 Types of Colorful Foods for a Healthy Body
Introduction: Foods come in colors, and different colored foods have different nutritional benefits. The six types of colorful foods—white, black, red, yellow, purple, and green—can help you eat your way to a healthy body. Let's take a look at the benefits of these colorful foods and see which color is best for you.
1. White Foods
Although they rank last in overall nutritional value, the "last place淘汰" rule doesn't apply to them because they have their own unique qualities, such as winter melon, muskmelon, bamboo shoots, cauliflower, and lettuce. These foods give a sense of purity and tenderness, and regular consumption can help regulate vision and calm emotions. They are also highly beneficial for patients with hypertension and heart disease.
2. Black Foods
Black foods like seaweed, black rice, and Silkie chickens are popular on Japanese tables, sparking a "black food" craze in the East. The reasons for this are as follows: First, they are natural and contain very few harmful components. Second, they are nutritionally complete, of high quality, and abundant. Third, they can significantly reduce the risk of serious diseases such as arteriosclerosis, coronary heart disease, and stroke. In addition, each has its own unique disease-preventing abilities, such as black fungus preventing urinary tract stones and Silkie chickens regulating women's menstrual cycles. You should not neglect them.
3. Red Foods
If you are born with a weaker constitution and are susceptible to cold viruses, or if you are already suffering from a cold, red foods will give you a helping hand. They naturally have the function of enhancing the activity of macrophages, one of the body's health guardians. Macrophages are "killers" of pathogenic microorganisms like cold viruses. When their activity is enhanced, cold viruses have difficulty establishing a foothold in the body, let alone growing and multiplying.
As for carrots, which are slightly lighter in color than chili peppers, the carotene they contain can be converted into vitamin A in the body, playing a role in protecting the body's epithelial tissues, such as the respiratory mucosa. Regular consumption can also enhance the body's ability to resist colds. In addition to red chili peppers and carrots, amaranth, onions, red dates, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, apples, strawberries, old pumpkins, and red rice also have this effect.
4. Yellow Foods
The advantage of yellow fruits and vegetables, such as carrots, soybeans, peanuts, and apricots, lies in their richness in two vitamins: A and D. Vitamin A can protect the gastrointestinal mucosa and prevent diseases like gastritis and gastric ulcers. Vitamin D also promotes the absorption of calcium and phosphorus, thereby strengthening bones and muscles, and has a certain preventive effect on common diseases such as rickets in children, myopia in adolescents, and osteoporosis in middle-aged and elderly people. Therefore, it is undoubtedly a wise choice for these groups to focus a little more on yellow foods.
5. Purple Foods
Dr. David Saperstein of the United States, through nearly 20 years of dedicated research, found that purple fruits and vegetables contain anthocyanins, which have a powerful effect of preventing hardening of the arteries, thus preventing heart attacks and strokes caused by blood clots. These foods include black strawberries, cherries, eggplants, plums, purple grapes, black pepper, etc. If you suffer from cardiovascular diseases, frequent "close contact" with purple foods will be of great benefit.
6. Green Foods
If you are an expectant mother and want to have a healthy and intelligent child, be sure to get close to green fruits and vegetables. This is because they are rich in folic acid, which has been confirmed by eugenicists in the UK and US as one of the "magic medicines" for preventing fetal neural tube defects (such as anencephaly and spina bifida). At the same time, a large amount of folic acid is also the "nemesis" of homocysteine, a new killer of the heart. It can effectively remove excess homocysteine from the blood and play a protective role for the heart.
In addition, green vegetables are also the best source of calcium, known as the "element of life." The amount of calcium they contain is even more than that of milk, which is considered the "rich mine" of calcium. Therefore, eating "green" is regarded by nutritionists as the best way to supplement calcium.