Make Your Healthy Food Choice Organic

Choose Healthy Nutritious Snack Foods

An organic healthy food choice for you and your family includes healthy breakfast foods, healthy nutritious snack foods and healthy eating for children. Healthy food choices include growing, buying, cooking and eating organic foods.

We live in a fast food society where everything, including our food, often needs to be convenient to a crazy schedule. Instead of eating healthy nutritious snack food, we often grab whatever is expedient. And what's expedient is often preservative- and chemical-laden food that has little to no nutritional value.

It's important for your overall health and well-being (that for your family’s healthy too) to make healthy food choices; and organic food is one of the healthiest choices you can make for yourself, your family and the environment.

The best way to do this is by transforming what you keep in and around your living and working spaces - from healthy organic breakfast foods to organic late night treats - because if you have healthy options available, you're less likely to consume the high-fat, high-sugar stuff full of chemicals.

Start with a Fridge and Cupboard Cleaning and Re-Stocking:

The most important part of this process of getting rid of unhealthy foods, is committing to it and then replacing with organic foods and healthy nutritious snack foods.

Healthy nutritious snack foods taste better and doesn’t leave you craving more sugars and fats.

Take a little time next weekend and look seriously at the snacks you have in your house.

The chips and dip, cookies and candy, pizza and chicken wings are just loaded with fats, sugars, chemicals and other ingredients that drag down your energy and weaken immunity.

So get rid of these items. You’ll find there's far less temptation that way.

Now some people might be hesitant to simply throw away food, but these are truly empty calories with little to no nutritional value. Making a healthy food choice for your children, your family and you is easier than you think; it's about making sure that you have healthy ingredients and foods in your kitchen.

However, if you want to use up what you have and replace one or two items at a time, you can do that too.

Now, with all that new space in your pantry and fridge you can restock with things like:

• Organic nuts (salt free is best)
• Organic nut butter
• Organic whole wheat or whole grain snack crackers
• Yoghurt
• Organic cheese (cut into slices in the evening or morning and wrap up tightly - use with the crackers when you need a quick snack)
• Unbuttered popcorn (try to find organic popcorn) - but spice it up after you've popped it with spices from your cupboard
• Soy products (for example, mango orange soy pudding cups - delicious! Or chocolate soy pudding)
• Organic vegetable sticks (cucumber, carrots, celery, cherry tomatoes, broccoli and cauliflower florets - make a yoghurt and dill dip and have it ready to go in a couple of small containers)
• Fresh organic fruit (wash and dry grapes to be easily ready to eat; peel and cut oranges and keep in a container for easy snacking; and so on)
• Organic salsa - make it yourself in a big batch for the week or buy at your local grocery store - use with organic, low-salt, low-fat nacho chips

By the way, you can make fresh organic salsa at home very easily by mincing tomato, hot peppers, cilantro, onions, and a bit of lime juice (there are a variety of tomato salsa recipes, this is just a quick and easy one). That way you won't be getting any additives or preservatives, and it encourages healthy eating for children too!

Another thing that encourages healthy eating is having snacks prepared so you can just grab it as needed. It doesn’t take long to make a delicious homemade organic granola mix with dried fruits and nuts (and of course, this mix can be used both as a dry snack but also as one of a number of healthy breakfast foods - like organic yoghurt and organic granola). If you think you might miss the sweets - bake your granola with a little organic honey. It staves off that yearning and is a much better alternative than refined sugar.

If you have a teen in the house you may also want to make some quick mini pizzas and wrap them individually for the freezer. Use whole wheat English muffins onto which you can put some organic tomato or pizza sauce, fresh basil, and low-fat mozzarella. Toast the muffins beforehand so they don’t get soggy when defrosted. When you want one, just microwave it for about 45 seconds! Now, that's fast food!

If your kids begin to fuss about not getting chips, make sweet potato or regular potato chips in the oven. The potatoes have to be cut really thin, but at least this eliminates the heavy oil content from commercial brands.

And a healthy food choice for the sweet element? Try whipping up a fruit smoothie and tossing it into a covered cup so your children can take it with them instead of a soda pop. Or before dinner spoon 3 or 4 tablespoons of frozen berries (my favorite are raspberries) into a glass, a light sprinkle of honey, and then about 4 to 6 ounces of plain unsweetened, organic low fat yoghurt. Cover the glasses with wrap and put in the fridge for a couple of hours.

These are a great after dinner dessert; or even a tasty morning breakfast (add a couple of teaspoons of protein powder mix or a couple of spoons of nuts for protein).

Both of the above snacks make good, high-energy snacks for all members of your family, but particularly children, who naturally burn off calories very quickly.

It's not as hard as you might think to begin eating healthy nutritious snack food. It does take a little planning; and shopping differently. Remember to read your labels. Even food items that 'sound' healthy can be loaded with sodium or other ingredients that don't support a healthy lifestyle. Even so-called 'low fat' foods may surprise you with the level of carbohydrates, salt, sugars, etc. Being an informed, observant consumer is one of the most important steps in making a healthy food choice every day.

Additional Reading and Resources:

• Visit Organic Foods - for more on what are organic food products.

• Visit Acai Berry Information, a healthy food choice.

• Visit Acai Side Effects: understand the benefits and the risks of organic Acai.

• Visit Organic Apple Cider Vinegar.

• Visit Organic Avocado Oil.

• Visit Organic Chocolate for more on this delicious treat.

• Visit Organic Raw Apple Cider Vinegar.

• Visit Organic Snacks.

• Visit Pure Organic Coconut Oil.

• Visit Organic Vitamin C.

• Visit Organic Whey Protein.

• Visit What is Quince Fruit?

• Visit What is Quinoa?

• Visit Wholesale Organic Essential Oils.

• Visit Wholesale Organic Herbs.

• Or return from Healthy Food Choice to Organic Food For Everyone Home Page.