5 Things You Should Have In Your Diet (And One Easy Secret to Adding Them All)

I’m going to list 5 foods here — all of them super-nutritious and essential to a balanced diet that will keep you getting further and further in shape.

And then I’m going to tell you the one easy secret to inserting these foods into your diet without a complete overhaul of everything you eat, or without suddenly replacing the tastes, flavors, and satisfaction you enjoy with something grim and tasteless. Nope — I’m all about enjoying your food too, even if it’s some of the world’s most nutritious.

Here we go:

Kale

According to some sources, Kale is the richest food in the world in terms of “nutritional goodness” per calorie. It’s basically a form of cabbage. It’s also super-easy to grow in a home garden, and even the US government encouraged its planting when supplies were short during the war.

It’s absolutely loaded with good stuff — antioxidants, vitamins, calcium, beta carotene, all that good stuff. Don’t even worry about what’s in it, just know that it’s plenty good. The Portugese soup Caldo Verde is made with it — and tastes amazing.

Lentils

You should actively be looking to get less protein from meat sources. Sure, meat is the easiest way to get protein and iron, but it’s not the best idea — in terms of health, the environment, or even just variety — to be constantly loading up on it.

Lentils are one super-common way to get the protein you need, and it doesn’t hurt that they’re also a staple of Indian cuisine. There are so many different ways to prepare lentils that it’s hard to go wrong.

Olive Oil

If you’re going to use a fat, and you always need fat — use extra-virgin olive oil. You’ve probably heard about the countless studies that have proven it to be good for us, that it’s full of omega-3s and all the rest, but here’s the other amazing thing — it just tastes incredible.

There are “oil bars” in some parts of Italy that let you sample particularly unique oils, on their own, with nothing else. And using it instead of butter on bread actually tastes better (at least to a lot of people). It has become such a widely-imported item in the past 10-15 years that you can most likely afford to use it as your main and only source of fat — ditch the butter, definitely ditch the margarine, and treat olive oil as a staple, not a luxury.

Spinach

Loaded with antioxidants and vitamins once more, spinach also has lots of iron and folic acid and god knows what else — it’s just really good for you.

It’s also relatively cheap, and you can easily buy big quantities of frozen spinach, usually in cubes, which are very simply defrosted (directly in a frying pan, if you want) and can be added to tons of other things — pastas, or just eaten on its own with some red pepper flakes and olive oil, or put onto a piece of bread.

Italian Herbs

If you want flavor but you don’t want heavy sauces, too much fat, or too much salt — you need to get acquainted with the main Italian herbs. I’m talking:

- rosemary
- basil
- thyme
- sage
- parsley
- oregano

They’re all extremely good for you and take an average lunch or dinner into that realm of amazing taste, with zero negative nutritional consequences. Rosemary makes a few potatoes into something else, basil turns tomatoes into a flavor bomb, and so on. Combinations are endless.

So What’s the Secret?

If you’re wondering how to add all of this stuff to your diet in an easy way, or wondering where you can get recipes that make this all a lot simpler, there’s one easy solution.

Italian food.

If you mostly associate the Italian cuisine with pizza and pasta, try branching out — pick up a mostly vegetable-based Italian cookbook (not American-Italian but actually Italian) and you’ll be stunned at how often spinach, lentils, kale, and tons of other vegetables and grains are constantly used.

Olive oil and the herbs hold it all together, of course, and meat makes an appearance (sausage and spinach, or sausage and lentils) once in a while, too.

But this is probably the easiest way I’ve discovered (especially with the amount of Italian food shops that exist in basically every medium-sized North American city) to get some of the most nutritious foods in the world into your diet while still getting an unbelievable amount of flavor and enjoyment out of your food.