Ways to Eat More Fruit and Veg
Website Offers Fruit and Vegetable Recipes, Demonstrations
The Galloping Gourmet and the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have created a site to excite your tastes in eating more vegetables and fruit.
We all know we should find room in our diet for more fruit and vegetables. The Australian government recommends five serves of vegetables and two pieces of fruit a day for adults and at least one serve of fruit & two serves of vegetables for children.
But it’s not always that easy to find recipes to make this much green and red and yellow and purple food attractive and delicious.
Now, the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center has opened up its nutrition site to the general public with a range of tasty, easy to make recipes created by television’s Galloping Gourmet and healthy eating advocate Graham Kerr.
Kerr has long been an activist for healthy eating, although his cooking programs as The Galloping Gourmet in the 1970s often featured butter, cream and wine.
Later, he developed his MiniMax style of cooking -- minimising fat and cholesterol, while maximising aroma, colour, texture, and taste. These factors will stand out in the recipes he has created for the free website.
“My life’s work is now entirely focused upon finding effective culinary solutions for those caught up in the chaos of our times,” Kerr says.
Individually Tailored Recipes
The individually tailored website, Recipes Just For You (mcancer.org/recipes) offers healthful and delicious recipes searchable by the ingredients you like. (Logging in to mcancer.org/recipes redirects you to the recipe site.)
It also contains several hundred video and audio clips of Kerr preparing the dishes, so you can follow the recipe step by step.
“Whether you’re looking for options packed with protein to help ward off the side effects of cancer treatment or just hoping to introduce more fruits and vegetables into your diet, the website will help you find what you’re looking for,” says Cancer Center dietitian Joan Daniels.
Rate Foods by How Much You Like Them
To begin, users rate fruits and vegetables on a scale from “will not eat” to “like a lot.” The database then takes these preferences and generates recipes for dishes including only those preferred choices and not others. Additional search options are also available that address dietary needs such as dairy-free, low-fat and vegan so users can find menu choices that truly fit their needs.
Eat More of What You Like
Features aimed at making the site easier to use include a free registration option, which provides users with a log-in that will recall their menu preferences, and a recipe box to save preferred recipes. No information will be collected for research purposes.
“We hope the web site will help to pique curiosity about new fruits and vegetables, or at least help you find ways to eat more of what you like,” Saunders says.
