5 easy ways to be healthy

3. Ditch takeaways for home cooking
‘Eating fresh foods is one of the best ways of getting enough nutrients to keep us healthy. This is particularly important with vegetables: as soon as you cut into, chop, process or cook them, they can start to lose their precious vitamins and antioxidants – so food cooked freshly at home and eaten soon afterwards is the best way of preserving these. Think of a dried-up carrot stick in a ready meal or pre-prepared salad – there’s no way it’s going to have as many nutrients as a carrot that has been freshly cut into!

Cooking at home is also the best way of ensuring that you use the healthiest ingredients and avoid the not-so-healthy ones. Takeaway and pre-prepared foods can often contain unhealthy fats such as vegetable cooking oils, as well as additives and preservatives, and high levels of salt. At home, we can use healthy cooking fats such as coconut oil, control the salt that we use, and avoid nasties such as flavour enhancers and preservatives.

In addition, takeaway and prepared meals often come in plastic containers. This may not seem like a major problem, but when plastic comes into contact with foods – especially hot or fatty foods, as it often does with takeaway or ready meals – it can leach chemicals such as bisphenol-A and phthalates into our food. These chemicals can have hormone-disrupting effects, including mimicking oestrogen, potentially causing havoc with hormone balance in both men and women. Takeaway curry, anyone?