Eating sustainable every day of the week is possible!

2023-04-27 09:03:02

The new episode of the podcast “Sustainable Food” talks about the keys and tools to eat healthy, rich and sustainable every day of the week.

The lack of time and planning about what we are going to buy and eat is a problem that is present in the lives of many.

Next to Laura González, head of Nutrition, Health and Well-being at Nestlé Spainwe know how to organize our menus to eat sustainably every day and take care of our health.

Tools to plan our meals

Organizing our meals can be easier than we think with tools like Planner Menua weekly menu planner that offers us the keys so that in addition to being planned, our diet is healthy, balanced in nutrients y varied.

Within the platform we talk about the frequency and consumption of food, shopping, nutrition in sports, how to organize our pantry and fridge, the keys to batch cooking, among others.

And to inspire us at dinner time,Cena Planner!, a tool that adapts to what we have eaten at noon and that suggests menus for healthy dinners.

And it is that dinner time can be difficult and tiring, so spending too much time thinking about what to eat is not very appetizing. In this sense, chopping a bit of everything we have in the fridge is frequent, but it is a practice that is not recommended.

“The problem with snacking is that we end up consuming superfluous foodwith little nutritional quality, very energetic and generally rich in less favorable nutrients, such as saturated fats, sugars or salt”, explains the nutritionist.

Organizing food properly in the fridge facilitates its conservation and use EFE/Paco Torrente

By snacking between meals we end up eating without controlling the quantities, many times without the feeling of real hunger and displacing the consumption of foods that should be the protagonists of our diet, such as fruits, vegetables or legumes.

In addition, the fact of not planning our lunches and dinners means that we end up eating a very little varied diet, and all of this contributes to an unfavorable environment for our health that promotes appearance of overweight and which is associated with sedentary lifestyle.

What is emotional hunger?

“It is a sensation that we have all felt more or less frequently. Eating without being hungry is generally due to stress, nerves, lack of routines or habits, and it is what we call emotional hunger“, clarifies the nutrition specialist.

This feeling has a lot to do with the relationship we have with food and our lifestyle. Some signs to identify emotional hunger are:

• When the act of eating creates a guilt feeling.
• When hunger appears suddenly and when eating we calm it down quickly but only satisfies us at that moment.

In this way, if we know what we are going to eat and we have it prepared, we will largely avoid snacking or eating anything and, in addition, we make sure that we cover all the food groups.

Menus accessible to all

The Dinner Planner tool offers different ideas depending on whether we prefer vegetables, salads, soup o purees. Some of them are the vegetable skewers with yogurt sauce and the salmon papillote.

And it has different menus so that more people can find help when it comes to organizing.

“There’s a flexitarian menu for those people who want their health to go hand in hand with that of the planet and other options in which vegetable protein plays a leading role, as well as vegetarian and vegan menus”, points out González.

Sustainable food ideas. EFE / MORELL

The expert also recommends other platforms such as “Nutriplate”, with a recipe book veggie proposals to reduce the consumption of meat and fish protein, designed for children between the ages of three and twelve and their families. Or “Nestlé Cocina”, with a range of local recipes, of season and designed for use all the food.

Organization of menus in athletes

And for those people who practice physical exercise or some type of sport, eating sustainably is essential, both to achieve sporting goals and to do so safely, since it prevents injuries.

• Hydration: before, during and after physical exercise.
• Consumption of fresh plant foods: provide substances that prevent oxidative stress caused by sport.
• Optimum protein intake.
• chronobiology.
• Carbohydrate replenishment after running.

The Nestlé expert advises entering “athlete diet” within the Menu planner platform, since it is a good way to start apply and plan eating habits more in line with our pace of life from a more active and athletic point of view.