Eat the Rainbow!

Do you remember the last time you saw a rainbow in the sky?  You likely paused and thought about how beautiful it looked.  Personally, I can’t remember ever seeing a rainbow that I didn’t think looked absolutely beautiful.  There’s just something about the blend of colours, along with the sky and clouds that reminds us that there’s so much beauty in the world.  

I’m beyond grateful that that same beauty shows up in our food too!  To say that I love food is an understatement.  Food is fantastic!  Sure there are things I’ll never eat unless they’re ground up so finely that I can’t find them (mushrooms being one of those things), but I’ll try something at least once before making up my mind.  On the flip side, there are a lot of things that I love to eat because I love variety in my food.

The reality is that most of us get into a food groove and generally eat the same things week to week.  They’re familiar and comfortable.  You know what you’re doing and you know what you need to make the recipes work.  You’re running a little on autopilot and there’s nothing wrong with that, if you’re getting everything you need.  However, if you’re craving a little change or something new and/or interesting, it doesn’t have to be hard if you plan for it.  Making a little extra time one night a week is a great place to start.

Let ‘Eating the Rainbow’ each day be the inspiration to start a small change.  Major bonus points if you can get really creative and get it into one meal!  I’ll be sharing ideas on how to do this in a bit, but first a little about digestion.

Why Colour Matters

If you think back to some of your favourite meals (especially restaurant meals), they were likely both tasty and visually appealing.  Colour and variety can help to boost our digestion, along with making meals fun and interesting.  Nothing kills the appetite faster than not wanting to eat the food you’re looking at.  This doesn’t mean that you have to plate every meal like you’d get at a restaurant, but rather that you add elements to make your food more visually interesting - starting with colour.

Here’s one of the little-known facts about digestion - it doesn’t actually start in the stomach, it starts in the brain.  Before we even get food out of the fridge, we can kick-start the digestive process by thinking about what we’re going to eat.  Just by thinking about your food and genuinely looking forward to eating it, you’ll start to salivate.  You may have already started to salivate thinking back to some of your favourite meals.  This is the beginning of digestion.  When we sit down to a meal and what we’re about to eat looks fantastic and smells amazing, this kicks up digestion even further (this can also happen as we’re cooking the meal too).  

Saliva is a key component of digestion because it contains salivary amylase which starts to digest carbohydrates as we chew - this includes all grains, fruits and vegetables.  This is also why chewing is important, it helps to mix the salivary amylase into the food we’re eating along with physically breaking down the food by chewing.  Taking your time to chew your food can really help improve digestion and reduce digestive discomfort after meals.

What does Eat the Rainbow Really Mean?

It’s really quite simple.  It’s a reminder to eat something red, orange/yellow, green, blue/purple/black and white/beige/brown every day.  Major bonus points if you can put all the colours in one meal.  Hint: think stir fry, sheet pan meals, one pot meals…

How to Start Eating the Rainbow

First and foremost, keep it simple!!  I can’t stress this enough.  The moment things get complicated, especially anything new, we as humans are far less likely to keep it up.

Take an inventory of all the food you eat for a couple of days and simply notice if there are any colour groups missing.  Awareness is the first step to making any change.  If there aren’t any colours missing, YAY!!!  That’s fantastic.  If there are, make note of them and start to make some easy changes.  

If you’re looking for the simplest change to add in a colour you don’t eat frequently, start with your favourite food from that colour and intentionally add it into your grocery list and create a plan to eat it.  Generally, fruit is the fastest way to accomplish this (no cooking required!).  

The next step would be to pick a grain or vegetable in that colour and add it to a recipe.  Recipes can also be super simple - these can be one-pot meals or sheet pan meals.  The beauty of these is that there’s little clean up and everything is mixed together.  Eating the Rainbow can also be done by eating tacos, burritos or wraps.

This is where you get to see how creative you can be.

For sheet pan meals, I do recommend grouping like with like.  This means cooking veg that takes a little longer together at the beginning and then part way through adding the veg that takes less time to cook.  An example of this might be to cook potatoes and carrots together at the beginning and add green beans and tomatoes later.  Alternately, this could be choosing veg that has a similar cooking time like red onion, sweet potato, broccoli, purple cabbage and cauliflower together.    

Are you looking for fast and really easy?  Grab a bag of frozen cauliflower, broccoli and carrots, add a bag of mini potatoes (the coloured ones that are red, white and purple) and toss that on a couple of sheet pans with your favourite protein.  Are you wanting something even easier?  Grab that same bag of frozen cauliflower, broccoli and carrots, add a sliced up onion and cook with your favourite protein.  Add some defrosted mixed berries over vanilla ice cream for dessert.  All of these options have all the colours of the rainbow in one meal!  Another fast meal could be mixed bell peppers (red, orange, yellow and green), onion and steak.  All that’s left is adding something that’s blue, purple or black.  This could be purple potatoes, purple cabbage, eggplant, or fruit for dessert (blueberries, blackberries, plums, grapes, etc.).

Celebrate Your Rainbow + Play

Are you excited to add more colour to your plate?  Don’t forget to take a moment to celebrate what you’re already doing and notice your habits.  

Do you always eat one particular colour in vegetable form and another as fruit?  Try swapping them!  If you always eat your orange/yellow foods as fruit, try adding in some orange/yellow vegetables.  If you always eat your green foods as vegetables, try adding in some green fruit.  

Play and have fun with this!

Andrea