Objective: Identify connections between dietary choices and emotional well-being.

Activity:

• Keep a daily journal of your meals and snacks, noting what you eat and how you feel before and after each meal.
• Include details such as mood, energy levels, and any physical symptoms like bloating or headaches.
• After a week, review your journal entries to identify patterns between food intake and mood changes.
• Reflect on which foods seem to positively or negatively impact your mood and overall well-being.

Objective: Understand the impact of dietary choices on gut health and overall well-being.

Activity:

• Research and list 5 gut-friendly foods, such as yogurt, sauerkraut, and kimchi, and 5 gut-harmful foods, such as processed snacks and sugary beverages.
• Incorporate at least one gut-friendly food into your meals each day for a week and note any changes in digestion, mood, or energy levels.
• Reflect on how these foods make you feel physically and mentally, and consider which foods you would like to continue including in your diet.

Objective: Reduce the consumption of processed foods and improve dietary quality.

Activity:

• Review your current diet and identify the most common processed foods you consume, such as chips, sodas, or packaged snacks.
• Set a goal to replace at least three processed foods with whole food alternatives each week. For example, replace chips with roasted nuts or fresh fruit.
• Create a shopping list of whole foods that you can use as substitutes for the processed foods you identified.
• At the end of the week, reflect on how reducing processed foods has impacted your mood, energy, and overall well-being.

Objective: Practice mindful eating to enhance digestion and reduce stress.

• Designate one meal each day for mindful eating, free from distractions.
• Focus on the sensory experience of eating, including taste, texture, and smell.
• Note any improvements in digestion and emotional well-being.

Objective: Create a weekly meal plan that supports gut health and emotional resilience.

• Include foods rich in probiotics (e.g., yogurt, kimchi) and prebiotics (e.g., garlic, onions).
• Prepare meals with lean proteins, whole grains, and healthy fats.
• Track how the meal plan affects your mood and energy levels over the week.

Whether organic or conventionally grown, fruits and vegetables are critical components of a healthy diet. However, many crops contain potentially harmful pesticides, even after washing, peeling or scrubbing, which the USDA does before testing each item.

Since pesticide contamination varies by crop, it is important to understand which items are most or least contaminated. Additionally, fresh items that are most contaminated, such as spinach, strawberries and other Dirty Dozen fruits and vegetables, still have high levels of pesticides in their frozen forms.

Physical activity is a great way to facilitate better health and reduce stress. While we are spending more time at home, consider these suggestions to alter activities you are likely already doing, to provide more movement in your daily routines.

We have all heard of the term superfoods. But what does it mean? What are these foods that supposedly have numerous health benefits? How much of these foods should we be eating, and are they beneficial?

Let's take a quick peek at probiotics and prebiotics, how they protect your gut microbiome, and why you should add them to your diet.

When you go shopping, you see the organic label on food, but do you really know what the best organic food is and if it is the correct option for you?

There are many great benefits to eating organic, as well as some problems. Keep reading to learn the advantages and disadvantages of organic food.

How aware are you of what's going into your body? Are you eating to live or living to eat? In reality, we all have different nutritional needs, but the standard American diet (SAD) doesn't suit most of them (or most people, for that matter). Your diet might be making you sick, sluggish, and at-risk.

How many times have you jumped on-board the diet train with high hopes of weight loss and improved health, only to discover limited food choices, difficulty staying on-track, and few measurable health benefits? Diet fads come and go, but one - the whole foods, plant-based diet (WFPB)- isn't a fad.