Why colour-code your diet?

Science tells us the way your food looks is almost as important as how it tastes. Fill a plate with a blast of Mother Nature's colours and you're doing a lot more than pleasing your eyes. Fruits and vegetables are rich in vitamins, minerals and fibre as well as naturally occurring compounds that give fruits and vegetables their colour. When you eat fresh produce, colour, flavour and nutrition come together in brilliant harmony.

Goal: Eat a variety of colours daily. Aim to eat two brightly coloured fruits and/or vegetables at both lunch and dinner and at least one for breakfast.

RED:
Tomatoes get their red colour from lycopene, a powerful antioxidant linked to a lower risk of prostate cancer and cardiovascular disease. Lycopene is also found in pink grapefruit and watermelon.

• When tomatoes are heated or processed to produce a tomato sauce or tomato paste, spaghetti sauce or even ketchup, the lycopene becomes more active and beneficial.
• Lycopene is fat-soluble, so add a little olive oil to your pasta sauce.
• Add extra tomato sauce to your pasta, snack on watermelon and have half a pink grapefruit for breakfast.

Strawberries, raspberries and cranberries get their red colour from anthocyanins, antioxidant plant pigments that help work against cancer and heart disease.

• Add chopped cranberries to relishes or pilafs, eat dried cranberries as a snack, serve cranberry sauce with poultry and enjoy a glass of cranberry juice.
• Bought fresh or frozen, berries can be eaten as is, added to a smoothie, sliced over cereal, in yogurt, in salsa or mixed together for dessert.

GREEN:
The green comes from chlorophyll, which researchers suspect becomes a powerful cancer-fighting agent when it's broken down by digestion. All the greens are rich in vitamins, minerals and a variety of disease-fighting plant chemicals. Some of these plant chemicals help prevent macular degeneration, one of the leading causes of blindness in older people. When you pick your greens, the darker the better. Romaine lettuce has six times the vitamin C and eight times the beta-carotene of iceberg lettuce.

• Add spinach leaves instead of iceberg lettuce to your sandwich.
• Serve broccoli, Brussels sprouts, asparagus or rapini as a side dish.
• Kale, also a good source of calcium, adds a robust taste when simmered in soups or stews and makes a nice side dish sautéed with a bit of oil and garlic.
• Experiment with something new: add arugula or dandelion greens to your salad or try beet greens steamed, boiled, sautéed or stir-fried.