Once you understand the components of a diet that supports your metabolic pathways, designing optimum meals will become much easier. The following are nine components of metabolically healthy meals.
Health: Metabolic health generally refers to how your body transforms the food you eat into energy. Rather than simply maintaining blood sugar levels, healthy meals aim to develop a metabolically healthy body that efficiently creates and utilizes energy.
Once you understand the components of a diet that supports your metabolic pathways, designing optimum meals will become much easier. If you’re eating for metabolic health, you can eat different things every day. On the other hand, a more diversified diet provides more nutrients to support your health and well-being.
Suggested Nine Metabolically Beneficial Diet Components
1. Increase your intake of micronutrients.
Increase your intake of magnesium, zinc, selenium, and B vitamins, which work as cofactors in metabolic health processes such as how the body handles glucose.
2. Consume more fiber
Fibre nourishes the gut microbiota, which benefits metabolic health by increasing glucose and insulin levels. It also reduces stomach inflammation, preserves the gut’s mucus barrier, and inhibits glucose absorption.
3. Increase the number of antioxidants
Antioxidants shield the body from oxidative stress, which has been related to cancer and diabetes. Include more vibrantly colored plants, cruciferous and green vegetables, and cold-water fish.
4. More omega-3 fatty acids
Omega-3 fatty acids play important roles in cell structure, inflammation, and metabolism. They help to keep your arteries flexible. Increase the amount of fatty fish, chia seeds, flax, and walnuts.
5. Promote fermented meals high in probiotics.
A fermented diet (6 servings per day) gradually enhances microbiome diversity while decreasing inflammatory indicators. Kimchi, sauerkraut, low-sugar kombucha, unsweetened yogurts, tempeh, and miso are all good additions.
6. Reduce your intake of processed sugar and carbohydrates.
Concentrating on what we can add to our diets rather than what we can eliminate is critical. However, we now consume 10X the number of carbs as refined sugars and grains than we did 200 years ago.
7. Pay attention to food timing.
Experiment with limiting your eating window to 8-10 hours during the day and fasting the rest of the time. Late-night high-glycemic meals should be avoided. A limited feeding window encourages metabolic flexibility. In addition, our bodies may be more insulin resistant at night.
8. Optimal food combination
Carbohydrates alone are more likely to raise glucose levels than carbs combined with fat and protein. Fiber is also beneficial.
9. When feasible, choose organic.
When possible, choose organic to avoid endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Organic frozen and canned foods can help make organic more affordable.
